Disabled Dinosaurs

If you're looking for a quick and easy way to explain the social model of disability, I have come to tell you that the resource you need is:

T-Rex Failing At Life.

The social model of disability states that individuals are not disabled by their bodies' defective nature (ie. T-Rex's arm being too short to reach his mouth) but by society's refusal to make appliances, buildings, furniture, streets (and so on ad infinitum) that can be used by people with all sorts of bodies. In this instance, there's a nice simple solution: longer lollipop sticks. Or for a more widely applicable solution, something akin to those grabber devices favoured by litter pickers and old ladies who don't bend as much as they used to.

Going back to humans for a minute, the social model says that someone who uses a wheelchair to move around is disabled not by the fact that they can't walk, or by the illness or accident that caused this inability. They are disabled by the fact that so many doorways are not wide enough to let wheelchairs through. By the fact that so many buildings have steps up to the entrance. By the fact that so few tube stations have lifts, let alone full step-free access from street to platform. By the fact that the vast majority of cash machines are set at eye-level for a person who's standing up. It is the decisions made by the people who design our built environment - the priorities of society as a whole - that rob wheelchair users of their ability to participate fully in society, not the fact that they can't walk.

T-Rex trying to turn off a ceiling fan, use a buffet with sneeze guard, or use a water fountain all illustrate this same principle. His arms are not the problem: the design of the equipment is the problem.

And just for kicks, this series also shows how we automatically assume that a creature is male unless we're told otherwise: women are constructed as Other, different, a variation on the norm. Note how all of the T-Rexes are simply labelled 'T-Rex' - except this one:

Male T-Rex = normal; the 'male' is implicitly assumed by the creator of the image and by us, its viewers

Female T-Rex = Other.

Also in my mind all T-Rexes are French. "All Ah want to do ees brush ma teeef, Ahm so peessed oeuf weez zees tiny toofbrush. Wanquere!"

Very Simple Concepts Day: Don't Get Raped!

Welcome to Very Simple Concepts Day at the old jaw jaw: perhaps a recurring event! In this series, I retread well-covered ground, in the hopes that repeating observations that many have made before me will somehow help the forces of goodness reach critical mass and triumph over evil.

Today we will be discussing why my Facebook feed being filled up with people telling me not to get raped makes me want to pluck out my surgically-enhanced eyeballs and throw them at people who are idiots!

(That last comment is why I still get out of bed in the morning.)

You know what? Fuck this. I am too tired to explain rape culture, to explain that strangers jumping out of bushes are extremely far down the list of people you need to protect yourself from, especially when the entire feminist blogosphere has done such a good job of articulating this already.

Instead, I propose that every time someone reminds you that it is your job to avoid being raped, you come back with one of the following:

LADIES: don't risk spending any time alone with your boyfriend, as he is statistically more likely to rape you than anyone else is! 

FELLAS: don't risk getting drunk, as you are statistically more likely to rape someone while you're under the influence of alcohol!

I'm sure we can come up with hundreds of these.

For people who don't spend a significant portion of their free time thinking about rape culture (it is true, these people exist!), I do understand that sharing this sort of thing feels like a moral obligation - offering information about how women can protect themselves. Because the popular conception of rape is the Stranger Jumping Out Of The Bushes model, because the general public isn't aware that the rapist has a prior acquaintance with his victim in circa 80% of cases - and because of the Just World Hypothesis, whereby bad things don't happen to good people - we can convince ourselves that figuring out the rules will protect us from harm.

Even if they are in the minority, stranger rapes do occur; you could argue that sharing information like this, about a specific threat, is worth it if it saves even one person from being attacked.

But on a society-wide level, you have to balance the possible good of such warnings against the definite harm inflicted on women as a whole by being constantly lectured on keeping themselves safe, circumscribing their behaviour, tailoring their whole lives around avoiding sexual assault - all of which carries the unavoidable implication that, should you be raped, and if you failed to follow each and every one of these rules, you will be responsible for the crime committed against you.

Privilege, illustrated

1. A few years back I ended up in A&E with an extremely exciting heart rhythm (250 beats per minute, not that I'm bragging). I got propped up in bed with about twenty electrodes superglued all over my body, hooked up to some mightily terrifying machines monitoring every facet of my heart's function, before being taught a very simple method of halting a supraventricular tachycardia (basically, make a hamster face and pretend you're really constipated). Five hours later I was deemed fit as a fiddle and sent home.

I was working for a deeply evil company at this point, which gloried in paying me as close to nothing as legally possible - so despite my weakened and freaked out condition, a taxi was not an option, and I took the tube home alone.

It was only when I looked in my bathroom mirror on my return that I realised I still had every single electrode still attached, with several wires snaking over my torso. One can literally be shot in the face on the Victoria line for less. Lucky for me, I am white, and thus remain unshot in the face!

2. I appreciate that this might make me sound a bit odd, but I actually quite enjoy going to the crotch rot clinic. I'm not particularly self-conscious about strangers peering up my hoo-ha; I get a silly-but-enjoyable Strong Independent Lady Taking Charge Of Her Sexuality And Reading Cosmo vibe from the whole thing; and it's always nice to get a text message informing you that you don't have chlamydia, gonorrhoea, syphilis, herpes, or HIV. Plus: free condoms!

Now: some things leave my handbag after only a short stay, some pop in and out on a regular basis, but the net flow is of things going into my handbag and never seeing the light of day again. Current contents include:
 - a map of Walthamstow (last used November 2013)
 - three lipsticks (last worn August 2013)
 - an unopened pack of razor blades (bought in a weak moment in January 2014)
 - six or seven knitting patterns (various)
 - two sizeable envelopes stuffed with free condoms.

It's conceivable I'll transfer said prophylactics to their allotted home at some point or other, but until then, I will be prepared for al fresco fucking wherever I go.

Lucky for me, I am cis and white, unlikely to be profiled by the police as a sex worker, and so don't have to worry that possession of condoms will be used as proof of intent to commit heinous crimes!

StJamesInfirmary.org - they are awesome, support them.

This is your daily reminder that, while the world is rubbish, it is more rubbish to some people than it is to others. Which is rubbish.

Let me invite you to my baby-burning: RSVP!

The Telegraph's abortion coverage continues to bemuse. On the one hand, they have OMG SEX-SELECTIVE ABORTION IS TOTALLY HAPPENING RIGHT HERE BECAUSE FOREIGNERS stories. On the other, they have OMG CRISIS PREGNANCY CENTRES TELL LIES AND BULLY PREGNANT PEOPLE investigations.

And today, we have OMG HOSPITALS ARE BURNING BABIES THIS IS A CULTURE OF DEATHHHHHH.

For real.

So let's start with the obvious: it is an oft-observed fact that all abortion articles must, by law, probably, be accompanied by a picture of a spectacularly pregnant woman: like, full-term pregnant, holy-crap-she's-swallowed-a-spacehopper pregnant, foetus-sending-a-Christmas-letter-to-Santa-out-of-the-womb pregnant. Oh look, this is such a truism that there is even a tumblr devoted to it.

According to The Guttmacher institute, 90% of all abortions occur in the first trimester. According to WebMD, a 12-week old fetus is 2.5 inches long and the typical woman will have gained three to five pounds. Most of these women’s pregnancies are essentially undetectable to an observer. ~ "Mis-illustrating Abortion" at Sociological Images

The Telegraph has, in this instance, gone one stage further: it has illustrated its article about the evils of abortion - which, just to clarify, ends a pregnancy, does not kill an infant which has already been born - with a picture of a teeny weeny baby hand holding onto an adult-sized finger.

Awwwwwww

Which echoes the emotive and inaccurate language in the headline - "Aborted babies are being used to heat UK hospitals". Conflating blastocysts, zygotes, embryos, foetuses and babies is classic anti technique, because apparently their case is so blatantly, inarguably, self-evidently strong that it needs sneakily-heartstring-tugging bullshit and flat-out lies to convince people.

At which point you may be thinking, come on, Han, you're dancing round the edges of this article, mocking its outer trappings because you're too chicken shit to address the fact that HOSPITALS ARE BURNING BABIES. So, because apparently I can't resist an imaginary dare, to the meat of the article itself:

The bodies of thousands of aborted and miscarried babies were incinerated as clinical waste, with some even used to heat hospitals, an investigation has found. Ten NHS trusts have admitted burning foetal remains alongside other rubbish while two others used the bodies in ‘waste-to-energy’ plants which generate power for heat.

Now: I get this. I really do.* For a lot of people, the incineration of foetuses just feels gross. Somehow, the fact that this incineration is serving a practical purpose - that of heating the hospital - makes it feel more gross, in a dystopian Soylent Green sort of way. So I can ask you some logical questions - like, how would you like foetuses to be disposed of after abortions? Would a mass grave make you feel better? Should each of them be given an individual coffin and a headstone?** If you are okay with incineration, why is it better that this process is only serving one purpose (destroying medical waste) rather than two (heating the hospital)? With early medical abortion, the pregnancy will typically be shed outside of a hospital setting, so the remains will end up down the loo or in a landfill site wrapped in a maxi pad: is that, too, tantamount to "the demise of human dignity"?

But that wouldn't change your mind, would it? These are logical questions, and we're in the domain of illogical queasiness. I'm not dismissing people's discomfort with this practice by calling it 'illogical': feelings are often illogical, and feelings are valid anyway.

But feelings make crappy legislators. We can't build law or medical guidelines on whether or not something makes us feel gross. That icky feeling is a signpost - a hint from your body or your subconscious that you need to look into the issue further to figure out why it makes you feel the way it does. It is not a cast iron guarantee that the object of that icky feeling is Morally Wrong.

For example, I find the idea of scraping my septum unimaginably disgusting. No idea why, but even typing that has made me cringe and pinch my nostrils shut until the thought goes away. This does not mean that I spend my days advocating for nose-picking to be made illegal.

So the fact that incinerating embryos and foetuses strikes you as unimaginably disgusting, similarly, does not mean that this procedure should be banned, even if your feeling is shared with millions of others, including some dickhead journalist in the Telegraph.


* I've never been super comfortable with "it's just a bunch of cells" / "abortion is just like getting an ingrown toenail removed" rhetoric, not because I think it's blase or unfeeling - some people do feel like this about their abortions, and all power to them. You are allowed to feel however you want to feel about your abortion, and you are allowed to express those feelings in public. But on a wider, 'movement' level, I don't think it's the best way of promoting a pro-choice message. I'd rather side-step the "bunch of cells" vs "heartbreaking but sometimes necessary" dichotomy and focus instead on bodily autonomy arguments: people's reasons for having abortions, and the moral code which lies behind those reasons, are just not the point. The point is that no one should be forced to be pregnant against their will.

** Trying really hard not to err on the side of overly snarky here, because some people who have abortions do choose to keep the foetal remains and have a burial/cremation; these cases tend to be second/third trimester abortions of wanted pregnancies with fatal foetal anomalies. The last thing I want to do is to take the piss out of their pain.

Veronica Mars: somebody puts hookers in a corner

Words cannot express quite how giddily excited I am about the Veronica Mars movie coming out. I may have mentioned my love of the show before? I donated to the Kickstarter; I've been on a marathon rewatch to get my gentleman friend up to speed; I have tickets for Saturday night, and I have been trying desperately to fill up my Friday with lots of activities - including a trip to the GUM clinic, of all things - so I'm not tempted to download it and spoil my big screen experience.

And yet, following a mind-bendingly amazing talk by the Sex Worker Open University at the Wowzers Festival (on which more later!), I feel like the whorephobic remarks which pepper the script are jumping out of my tv and dancing around on my living room floor going "la la la, sex workers, they are preposterous and hilarious, AMIRITE?? Boo boo de boop, sex!"

Artist's representation

2.7, Nobody Puts Baby In A Corner
Madison: "Pretty Woman is still my favourite movie. Vivien is like my hero."
Veronica: "She's a hooker."
Gia: "Yeah, but only cos she had to be!"
Veronica: "She's a hooker."

The level of derision and disgust that drips from Veronica's voice at the idea of respecting sex workers as autonomous human beings is hard to capture in words. Man alive, a hooker as a hero? Ridiculous! Obviously, she is defined, always and forever, as someone who makes a living by having sex with dudes for money, has no other characteristics that could possibly be valuable, and is utterly beyond contempt.

1.22, Leave It To Beaver
"I can't risk my career on the testimony of, all due respect, a hooker."

2.16, The Rapes of Graff
Veronica opens the door to a blonde lady in a red dress and fur coat. She turns to Keith and says - as if their visitor isn't there, or can't hear her, or isn't an actual human person -

"Dad. Your hooker's here."

This storyline gets progressively more fun - turns out Cliff's one night stand was in fact a hooker, paid double by some mystery man to seduce Cliff and steal his briefcase. Because sex workers, even more than the rest of womankind, are two-faced, duplicitous bitches. We know this to be true.

It's been a while since I've seen 3.11, Poughkeepsie, Tramps and Thieves, so I can't give much in the way of analysis here, but the general message of "once a whore, always a whore" sticks with me.

It's one of those things that grates all the more because of the sensitive, inclusive way the show treats the stories of people from other marginalised communities. People of colour, LGB folks, people with disabilities, rape survivors - all get episodes devoted to exploring their experiences as people, beyond the difference that would define them in other shows. But apparently dipping even one toe into the sex industry instantly dissolves any other history, character, ability, story that a person has, leaving them uninteresting except as plot devices and punchlines. It's sad. The show has proven, over and again, that it could do better, if it wanted to. I hope the movie wants to.

Very Simple Concepts Day: Wifebeating is hilarious

Today is Very Simple Concepts Day, here at oldjawjaw towers. Today we are going to be discussing the concept of The Wifebeater.

You see, we call it a wifebeater because it is associated with men from the working classes, like domestic violence is! It's okay to call it that because we're being ironic, duh, and also because we don't think domestic violence is important or that survivors deserve respect. LOL!

Similarly, we call this The Old Wifebeater, because it is associated with men from the working classes, like domestic violence is - but with a fun new twist: not only is domestic violence inherently hilarious, but it is probably caused by booze, AKA the "beer made me do it, m'lud" defence.

Fun fact: I myself have drunk several pints of Stella in my time! I have worn many vests! I have even done both of these things at the same time - while not being rich, at that. And yet I have never beaten anyone's wife, nor committed violent assault on anyone I happened to be dating.

It's almost like being poor and drinking lager bear no relationship to one's propensity to perpetrate intimate partner violence whatsoever.

STRIPPING IS BAD FOR WOMEN: FEMINISM CAN STOP NOW.

Good news, feminism! Remember the whole Feminist Sex Wars thing? When Dworkin, MacKinnon et al were all, "under the patriarchy, women are defined as the Sex Class, and therefore cannot give meaningful consent to intercourse; porn depicts and actually is violence against women; BDSM fetishizes power differentials and sex work is collusion with the patriarchy"? (Paraphrasing.)

And then other feminists were like, "Okay, porn is often sexist, because lots of media produced in a sexist society is sexist, and putting all the responsibility for patriarchy on porn seems to miss the point a bit; BDSM actually features a hell of a lot more negotiation and work around consent than vanilla sex; queer and feminist porn can and does exist; finding a feminist and non-oppressive way to inhabit our sexualities seems a valid way of resisting the patriarchy; sex work is only degrading in that all work under capitalism is degrading, and is demonising sex workers - you know, who include some of the most vulnerable women in society - really the best way to achieve a lovely feminist utopia?"

Again, paraphrasing. Turns out summarising one of the most contentious and complex debates over the last forty years of feminism and attempting to do justice to both 'sides' in two short paragraphs is actually pretty difficult!

Anyway: whatever your take on the matter, don't worry about it, because some random dude in The Times has SOLVED THE FEMINIST SEX WARS. Forever.

In response to a Leeds University study showing that nearly a third of all UK strippers are middle-class students, Kevin Maher has some opinions to share.

You may be wondering why Kevin Maher, who is neither a stripper or a student, feels that the world will not be able to rest easy until his very important opinions on the question of the place of sex work in society are known, but hold your horses: he has read some SCIENCE. Which proves, incontrovertibly, that stripping is

"bad for women. It's that simple."

Pictured: THE PATRIARCHY

Wowza. Thanks, Kevin! All this hoo-ha, and you had the answer all along! Thanks for bringing us to the light.

How does he know this? He knows this because

I simply look to the data in the groundbreaking 2003 Lilith report, which found that the number of rapes near lap-dancing clubs were three times the national average, or that in the years after the opening of a lap-dancing club in Tottenham Court Road, London, reports of female rape in the borough increased by 50 per cent.

Oh, Kevin. Kevin, Kevin, Kevin. Here I was, thinking that you had some amazing new data for me; a beautifully designed, value-neutral, empirically robust study which could settle this whole kerfuffle once and for all. But instead you just have... really bad science. Which you clearly read a press release on, rather than parsing the reports themselves. Which you clearly did not google before including them in your world-shakingly revelatory column, because, had you done so, you would have discovered this study does not show what you think it does.

So, the Lilith Report claimed that Camden, which had seven licensed strip clubs at the time, recorded three times the national average number of rapes between 1999 and 2002. It also claimed that the number of rapes increased by 50% between 1999 and 2002.

Which would be fairly solid proof that stripping IS BAD FOR WOMEN, except that

1. Correlation does not equal causation: just because a number of strip clubs opened in a particular area, and that area saw an increase in the number of rapes, does not mean that strip clubs cause rape.

2. The numbers literally do not add up. There were 72 rapes in Camden in 1999, and 96 in 2002. Do you have a calculator? Then you can work out that there was a 33% increase in thenumber of rapes in Camden between 1999 and 2002. Not 50%.

3. Raw numbers are an incredibly misleading way of presenting change in crime stats. (Man, I feel like I'm in The Wire right now, being leaned on by Mayor Carcetti, who in my mind is still Stuart in Queer as Folk doing his funny walk down Canal Street.) For this reasons, crime figures are presented as incidents per 100,000. Chasmal explains this really well in her takedown of the Lilith Report on Stripping the Illusion. This means that presenting a percentage change in raw numbers tells you basically nothing: what you need to know is the change in the rate of incidence - the number of rapes which occurred in Camden per 100,000 residents. In 1999, this was 36.8; in 2002, 43.4: a 17.9% increase.
4. When you're dealing with such (thankfully) small numbers, it's really easy to perceive a trend where there is in fact just random fluctuation. The rate of incidence actually went down from 2002 to 2003, and again in 2004, before going up again in 2005, down again in 2006... you see what I'm saying? A very small number of incidents produces a seemingly dramatic change if you present it as a percentage.
5. The overall trend over the last ten years actually shows a decrease in the incidence of rape in Camden. Funnily enough, no one is suggesting this is because Camden issued an all-nude license to the Spearmint Rhino in the late 90s.
6. You know what a study needs in order to demonstrate causality? A control group: in this case, an area with no strip clubs, which presumably would have no rape whatsoever. Unfortunately, this study's control groups were Islington and Westminster. Both boroughs also contained strip clubs and were therefore useless as comparisons. A better choice might have been Lambeth, which had no strip clubs during this period - and, um, had a higher incidence of rape.

I COULD GO ON. But this has been covered, a lot, by smarter people than I - Brooke Magnanti's chapter on it in The Sex Myth is brilliant. You can also check out her paper on the topic. What you will find is that the Lilith report tells us absolutely nothing about the effect of strip clubs on the incidence of rape - and all too much about its author's opinions on sex work.

See, on one level this is a story about men barging into feminist conversations, totally ignorant of the history and theory and debate that has gone before, and announcing that they have fixed feminism for us - and being surprised that we're not falling over ourselves in gratitude.

But on another level this is a story about how journalists in national newspapers need to check their fucking sources before making such claims as fact.