Face off (Muslim women on the burka ban)

'All religions cast women as sinners and temptresses.'

'Like a half-naked woman, a veiled female to me represents an affront to female dignity, autonomy and potential. Both are marionettes, and have internalised messages about femaleness.'

'The claim that veils protect women from lasciviousness and disrespect carries an element of self-deception.'

'The Koran enjoins all Muslims – whether male or female – to dress modestly... Beyond this general instruction, the holy book... contains no mention of the burka...the hijab, or veil.'

'I am not assuming that the coverings all represent simple oppression. What I am saying is that many women who take up the veil, in any of its forms, do so without delving fully into its implications, significance or history.'

'When the Taliban captured Kabul and seized power over most of Afghanistan in 1996, they made it compulsory for all women to wear the burka.'

'All religions cast women as sinners and temptresses. Conservative Islam has revived the slander for our times. Women have to be sequestered or contained lest they raise male lust and cause public disorder.'

I have taken these quotes from a variety of Muslim women expressing their views on the recent debates about banning the burka and burkini. I think these women should be leading the debate which has taken some bizarre and unhelpful turns of late.

As a feminist who has studied and fought against the oppression of women in all its complicated, yet often, all too simple and predictable forms, I think the attention given to this issue is progress in itself, unless it makes light of the issues or makes them about something other than the worldwide feminist fight for the rights of girls and women to freedom, dignity and equality.

Being told by law or custom what to wear, or what not to wear, beyond basic decency, is, in my view, a violation of these core rights. And as it currently stands, as well as throughout history around the world, many more women are told to cover up, be modest, hide yourself, don't speak, leave the public sphere to men, etc., than to undress and wear less.

Thus, my sympathies are with the women trying to fight for their right not to have to cover up and be ashamed of their faces or bodies, much less to dress modestly for the sake of preserving men's freedom or 'honouring' some ancient mythical male figure of worship.

However, I do think that the pressure that is on women in western societies to dress in a overtly sexual (busty, slim, youthful, pretty and pouting) way, especially those hoping to make a career as an actress or entertainer, are also inconsistent with the pursuit of gender freedom and equality.

Western women who are fighting against this pressure are fighting the same fight that Muslim women are fighting in resisting the pressure to cover up. It is the same fight against the same age-old, male-imposed double standard that sees females controlled and restricted for the sake of male power and freedom.

I am a man

I'm writing about America at the moment and came across this image today during some research into the civil rights movement, which I couldn't leave behind. I hadn't seen it before.

The sharpness of those bayonets - because a bullet is not weapon enough - got to me, as did the steady hand and focus of the men pointing them at close range at the men merely walking past, with their simple protest: I am a man hanging from their necks, but otherwise unarmed. Indeed it's the guys with the guns who are wearing the protective head gear. And let's not mention the Tienanmen Square-like tanks. 

All this in the so called heart of the free world, and in the 1960s, when black American men were fighting and dying for the US in their thousands in Vietnam.

The white guy doesn't need the sign; the world knows he is a man. That is pointed too. He looks at the soldiers, a casual, even smiling challenge on his face, while his black comrades look away, defiant and a little afraid. 

They're all men, yes, but in this picture it is clear that only the men wearing the signs really know what that means.  

The I am a man protest goes back as far as the 1780s in Britain and America, but in America, the most recent police shootings of unarmed black men, and ongoing imprisonment of black men at a much higher rate than white men, suggest that that country still hasn't worked out what it is to be a man.

To be man, surely, is not to kill or threaten to kill, bearing a weapon against unarmed people, but to fight with words and courage for the right to live freely. 

That's what this picture says to me. Lest we forget.

Spring begins

As if a spring
on timer set
has been uncoiled
to win the bet
that Spring should come
on day one
of this southern
month of September.

And to behold
the colour burst
on bare branch first
then buds of all description,
on the day
the planners made
for the very purpose,
seems exactly that.

A canny bet
was won it seems
as if with nature
we can agree
to get things right
to reach for the light
and end the chill of winter.

House of No Trumps

Now I don't know if you're bridge players or not, but appreciation of my cunning play on words here relies on knowing that 'no trumps' is a suit in the card game called bridge -- odd name for a card game, but never mind. It also relies on knowledge of the last name of the current Republican candidate for president of the US (he who shall not be named), as well as the name of the 2013 Netflix TV series 'House of Cards' .

To explain why I bothered with this tortured play on words, I will say that having come to 'House of Cards' late and just finished season two in which Kevin Spacey becomes president, a season that aired in early 2014, I have decided that what with the timing being about right and the candidate who shall not be named having a penchant for TV -- and a profound lack of his own ideas -- it is more than likely that he got the idea to run for president himself from Kevin Spacey. Stranger things have happened, especially in America.

It makes perfect sense, really. Hollywood seems to have a much better grasp on reality than what passes for the 'real world' of American life and politics. So why wouldn't Americans take their cues about how to act from Hollywood? I know I do.

Kevin Spacey has a lot to answer for

Still, I would recommend 'House of Cards', if only to get an insight into what the 'real' world Republican candidate, who shall not be named, is going to do next.

Not having finished all four seasons, and I believe there is a fifth in the making due out in 2017, after the 'real' world election, I can't tell you what ultimately happens to Spacey. But if the producers are paying attention, and, like many Americans, DON'T want that candidate who shall not be named to win, they will bring the release date of the fifth season forward to before the election and ensure that Spacey comes to fitting end. Perhaps he could throw himself off of a tall building with his name on it. Or, he could get stuck climbing a very high wall, crying out: 'I'm stuck! I'm stuck!', with no one, on either side, willing to rescue him.

No trumps is a hard suit to play, but played right, there are the most points to be gained.    


 

Louie and Me

Technically, he's Louis C.K., but Louis doesn't rhyme with 'me' and his sitcom is called Louie, so never mind. I'll call him Louie. I think that's how the cool people pronounce - and spell - his name, anyway.

I have to confess I am yet to see Louie, but my kids have seen it and assure me it is fantastic, that the guy is a comic genius and an all-round fabulous person. And these are clearly sentiments shared by many people around the world.

And I agree -- to a degree. Comedian/Masturbator is funny, especially as 'masturbator' is not even a word, at least according to my spellchecker. It should be. Next to it you could write: Louis (or Louie) C.K.

But last night, Moose and I tuned in to watch Louie's 2015 stand-up that has just come on Netflix and I have to say, it wasn't altogether fabulous and funny.

Warning: Feminist analysis incoming...

But first, give the comedian/masturbator his due. His joke about how, being middle-aged, he now makes the sound when he pees that he used to make when he was climaxing, and visa versa, told with a convincing and entertaining demonstration, had us both in fits of laughter, though perhaps particularly Moose, who can identify. He does the same.

His joke about not caring how unfit he gets just so long as when he dies people still ask what he died of and don't just take it for granted that he died because he was overweight and unfit, was similarly very funny.

The best humour, no doubt, is when we make fun of ourselves and our 'kind', as these jokes do so well.

But... and it's a big but, his extended skit, with detailed and drawn-out demonstration, on how to make a 'girl rat' come by lying her on her back, tickling, blowing, licking his finger, spitting, etc, with the obvious point of mocking the female orgasm, was not so funny. If he'd made fun of how he failed to make a girl rat come, now that could have been funny. But he chose instead to make fun of the very idea of female orgasm.

Really? Does the clitoris have to be such a joke to men still? Couldn't some of them, those as smart as Louie with a platform to move us beyond clitoris humour and hate, give women a break and recognise that some things done to women by men, not least the amputation of the clitoris performed on millions of young African girls, is the extension of this kind of male mockery that reflects the general distaste of female sexuality by so many men who clearly don't want to have to think about giving women pleasure; and some, who don't want women to have pleasure?

I'd like to think they could.

No need for the whole hyena

But perhaps not Louie. Because in this same show he went on to pronounce sexism and racism 'fundamentally different.' Racism is bad, no argument, we must do better, he says. But 'sexism', that's just women and men giving each other a hard time, as it has ever been and always will be.

Hopefully he eventually figures out how wrong he is. He has two daughters, after all.

To help, I recommend he studies hyenas, the species with the proportionally largest clitoris of all the mammals and the species that is the most successful of all the species in the jungle. Amongst hyenas, males pleasure females, lower females pleasure higher females, but females never pleasure males and males never pleasure males. Males don't get any pleasuring at all, in short, apart from sex itself. I'm not sure about rats.

I don't think we need to go the whole hyena and flip the gendered hierarchy in terms of human sexual pleasuring that far the other way. But I would like Louie, and all the other men who doubt the importance of the clitoris to know, and to think hard about, the fact that there is a reason female humans have a clitoris, for their own sake, as much as for ours. Because those men who figure out what that reason is, will be, ultimately, the most successful men in the jungle. Masturbation is all very well.


 

Martians and me

Okay. So this is not an exact likeness of Matt Damon as 'The Martian' but it's close enough. You get the general idea of a dude stranded alone on a planet of orange aura and none too happy about it, the essence of Damon's martian. This dude seems perhaps a little more prepared for life on Mars than Damon was, though Damon did quite well to survive for many hundreds of days (I lost count) considering he would die instantly if exposed to the atmosphere. This guy's skin seems a little thicker. 

But my problem with the film is not that Damon's character is not a realistic martian. He is not meant to be. He is meant to be a realistic man stranded on a planet where nothing grows, for hundreds of days, because the commander of his spaceship, a woman, left him for dead, having been ordered to do so by another woman back on planet Earth. This is my problem. 

This gender distribution of labour is neither realistic nor progressive, though it appears to be trying, which somehow makes it worse. In 2015-16 we are trying to improve the representation of men and women in film and other art forms, or so we say, but we are not succeeding and if anything, are making matters worse. 

The Martian is a classic example. It is so obvious that the female characters are added as a clunky affirmative action afterthought, with roles that are not only secondary but stupid and, of course, sexual. Meanwhile, there is an endless list of male characters, from Damon down, strutting their stuff, being heroes against all odds, wielding real power and generally saving the day, to make up for the original mistake made by the female characters. 

I think we should, and could have done better. Never mind that the film is based on a book with a male lead. Many films are and end up looking nothing like the book. It can be done, the author still gets paid. And The Martian, though an okay film in other respects about a fairly neat concept of a human left behind on the orange planet, could have been a great film if 'the martian' had been a woman left behind by a male commander to fend for herself, a truer to life scenario after all. Men leave women to clean up the shit way more than women leave men. And women are pretty good at dealing with the shit they're left with -- they've had a LOT of practice -- as well as being keen gardeners.  

Ridley Scott of all directors should have known better. Ripley made Ridley and gave us all hope of cinema to come that doesn't assume, as all religions and cultures do, that men are primary and women are secondary, stupid and sexual, if not sinful. The Martian reverts, despite it's apparent efforts, to pre-Alien gender stereotypes and perhaps that's what this alien here is so pissed off about. Perhaps this alien is a She. Now there's a concept for a film. 

Extreme vetting?

So, what is "extreme vetting" --

a) A good name for a band?

b) The lengths certain particularly committed animal-care workers will go to to ensure the animals in their charge are comfortable and well?

c) The latest attempt by a desperate and deranged man to get elected president of the United States?

d) All of the above.

Strangely, and a little sadly, it is d: all of the above.

But don't worry, I don't think it'll work for all. My money's on the band.