Scots men save more than women

A new study has shown that Scots men are more likely to have savings than Scots women- 36% compared to 33%. And that when asked why they did not save, 85% of non-saving women said they could not afford it compared with 73% of non-saving men.

What is not mentioned, of course, is that women are more likely to earn less, live in poverty and be the sole support of dependants than men.

The value of motherhood

Flicking through my free Tesco magazine, I came across an article that calculated how much it would cost to pay professionals to do the work of a mother. They did this by using a survey of average time spent on various childcare tasks by mothers and then taking the average pay of a professional in that particular occupation and multiplying the two. Childcare tasks included driving children places, nursing, preparing food, cleaning (only for children not the household), cooking, helping with homework, laundry, counselling, PR, party planning and more. And, they calculated that to pay professionals to take on these roles would cost £1,425,105 per child.

This is fascinating for many reasons- first, because economists claim that it is impossible to make this calculation as it would be impossible to value such work in any meaningful way (but clearly what is difficult for economists is straightforward for journalists! ;) ). Second, it is valuing the work at quite a high rate, because if we divide this number by 18 years (and the survey took account of the fact that not all childcare tasks would be required throughout a child's life in its calculation) a mother's work is valued at almost £80,000 a year. If we were then to calculate the value of mother's work to the national economy, it would be a fairly significant chunk. Yet, we don't do this, because well it's only women's work...

The Privacy of the Home.

There is a myth that the home is a ‘private’ space that should be free from state intervention or the intrusions of the ‘public’. The importance of this belief has been brought to light most recently in debates over whether B&B owners should be allowed to refuse service to gay people (or any other people) due to their belief system. Is the home a private space where people should feel free to discriminate or is it a public space open to state control? I want to suggest that this division of public and private is a myth- that the home has never been a wholly private space- and that to frame this debate in a discussion of private homeowner rights acts to remove the rights of gay people and other ‘undesirable’ groups.

Far from being a private space, for the last 500 years in Britain, the home has been intrinsically linked to social control. The early modern household (1500-1750) was conceptualised as the state writ small. The ideal early modern home was headed by its married patriarch who exercised control over his wife, children and servants-both ensuring that they behaved in an orderly way and having to personally answer to higher authorities if his household behaved badly. In a time before an extensive state apparatus and police existed to manage social behaviour, this function fell to the head of household. The household was conceptualised as a miniature state and in fact, the relationship between a monarch and his or her kingdom was understood to mirror that of the household. The home provided a model for the operation of the state.

From an alternative perspective, it is also worth considering that the Royal Court- from which the monarch governed the state- was actually part of the private household of the monarch. Separate buildings for ‘public’ or ‘state’ functions were only beginning to be thought of in this period- and most were related to the operation of trade (like Guildhalls). In practice, elite households in particular could double as ‘public’ buildings with their large halls or courtyards being used to hold markets, public meetings and demonstrations.

Furthermore, the home was not conceptualised as a private space. Indeed, openness to the scrutiny of others was essential to social credit and social reputation. The household that had something to hide was clearly up to no good and should be treated with caution. In a world where cash was limited and access to goods depended on reputation, the transparency of the household was vital to its survival. The awareness of prying eyes was meant to enforce good order- both making sure the head of household kept control of his family and ensuring that he did not abuse his authority. It offered a system of checks and balances to the head of household’s power.

At the same time, the household was a fluid entity with a constant stream of changing servants, visitors, lodgers, travellers needing a bed for the night, belying any sense of a contained family unit. Even lower down the social scale where households were smaller, neighbourliness and patronage systems meant that homes were equally open to public scrutiny and to inspection by social superiors. Poor households could be even more socially diverse with lodgers and travellers common means of income and multiple families could live in the same household to save money. Most households also had an economic function meaning that they were not just homes but places of business with all the public functions that entailed.

In the eighteenth century, the concept of ‘privacy’ (which had started to filter through since the 16th century) became increasingly culturally important seen in the separation of servant and family quarters in wealthy homes; the invention of ‘public’ and ‘private’ rooms in family homes; and the eventual removal of the economic functions of the household off into separate buildings. Yet, it should be noted this was a long process that happened to different households at different rates and the importance of home-working today suggests it was never completed. Even in the Victorian period, where it might be argued that the ‘private’ home was in its heyday, it was recognised that the home had both private and public functions- not surprising in an era where visiting relatives for weeks at a time was fashionable.

For eighteenth-century philosophers on this subject, the key distinction between a public and private space was still not whether it was located in or out of the home- but its function. Therefore, public space was economic space- the workplace, rather than places outside the home. Even the world of politics was not initially thought of as ‘public’, although this idea was to arrive quickly when the concept of public became increasingly associated with power. Public space was where people exercised power; private space was without power.

Despite this complexity of meaning, the changing functions of the household did lead to its increased association with the ‘private’ in the early nineteenth century. Yet, this phenomenon did not happen in a vacuum- it was mirrored by the rise of the ‘state’. As the household became more private and the separation of home and work made it more difficult to monitor the behaviour of individuals through household hierarchy, the state was created to ensure social order. The state expanded with an increasingly large and elaborate civil service, a police force, a more formal court system and, by the twentieth century, state controlled welfare systems. This state apparatus was always interested in the workings of the home and the prying eye of the guid neighbour was replaced by the beady eye of the officious state worker.

And from a feminist perspective, it was vital that the state existed. While the functions of the household and social order had changed, the belief in the right for a patriarch to manage and discipline his household had not. Yet, without the prying eyes of the guid neighbour, who was to act as a check and balance of that power? Many of the initial debates and court cases that defined the rights of the state to interfere in home life were brought by women trying to protect themselves and their children from violent or controlling patriarchs. In a sense then, not only was the rise of the state a response to the changing functions and increased privacy of the household, but the invitation to the state to interfere in the operations of the household was both a demand of feminists and required for good social order.

The home then has never been a private space, exempt from the rules of social behaviour or the requirements of society. It is not and has never been the last stronghold against state interference. On the contrary, its ‘private’ nature is predicated on the existence of the state and the right for the state to interfere in its operation. The two cannot exist separately. In this sense, the privacy of the home is an illusion- if one held dear to us. This is particularly the case when you use your home in public ways- such as when you run a business from your home. Because at that stage (whether you realise it or not), any sense of your home as private is removed and its public functions (always present) are once more made explicit.

To argue then that your private rights to discriminate are founded on the privacy of the household is to misunderstand the place and role of the household and the state in society. The question then becomes whether your right to discriminate is greater than the right of other people not to be discriminated against. While discrimination actively hurts people- and so damages society- you being asked to curtail your discrimination does not hurt you. Given that the protection of its members is the first duty of the state, that the law finds in favour of the right not to be discriminated against is lawful, logical and good for everybody.

Interesting Fact of the Day.

As you may have noticed, I like facts- especially facts that undermine arguments that promote bigotry and discrimination. And, usually I like to save said facts until a topical news story comes up, and then show how people, usually politicians, are talking nonsense. But, I found this one and I thought it was too good not to share (plus it is something that I and probably most of you have long suspected).

There are more British living abroad than foreigners living in the UK.

In fact, 1 in 10 Brits live all or part of the year abroad.

So, next time somebody complains about immigrants taking our jobs, why not ask whether they'd prefer that all the British come home (which surely is only fair?) And for that matter, next time the BNP suggest that all coloured people should be 'repatriated' -do you remember when they used to make those demands- ask them whether we really want our diaspora (you know the Australians, the Americans, New Zealanders, Canadians, South Africans etc etc) to be repatriated too?

Life Courses

In wake of the ‘OMG’ teenagers have children; oh wait, they’re having less, no, they’re not, yes they are debate, I thought it might be a good point to think about life-courses (or life-cycles as they were known before historians decided a cyclical model was too simplistic). A life-course is the experiences that a person goes through in the course of her or his life. For historians and social scientists generally, life-courses are interesting for studying group behaviour, so we like to compare what age people get married at, or what age they have kids, whether they leave school at 15 or 18 and whether they retire at 60 or not at all. As people in the same society often experience changes in the life-course at a similar age to their contemporaries, we can chart a ‘typical’ life-course experience for particular societies or sub-groups within those societies.

Now, that sounds all very academic, but what’s the point? The argument is that people who behave in the most ‘typical’ fashion are generally the most socially stable, or at least, are unlikely to receive criticism for their behaviour. People who do things at the wrong time or in the wrong order- such as having a child as a teenager, when this is socially unacceptable, or having a child before marriage in a society where this is unusual- are likely to face social consequences that limit their life choices. This is because society is set up to respond to people who follow a particular life-course. If you fail to do this, the support mechanisms offered to other people aren’t there for you. This in turn can affect the ‘non-typical’ ever becoming ‘socially stable’ or achieving the normal goals of their contemporaries, leading to life-long poverty, social ostracism, poor education and/or unemployment. Conversely, sometimes doing something in the wrong order can have unexpected benefits, perhaps bringing new opportunities or forcing people to make unexpected decisions with good pay-offs (perhaps emigration in the past or setting up a successful home business to fit around child-care arrangements). The interesting issue at stake here is not that there is an ideal life-course for everyone in all times and places, but that each society has its own ‘typical’ life-course which it uses as a standard to judge the behaviour of others.

Historically in Britain, people’s experience of the life-course was a lot more diverse than today. The advent of national education, where children start school at five and leave at 16 or 18, then perhaps go to university or some sort of apprenticeship system, before starting work, where they are often forced or at least encouraged to retire at a set age, has made the life-course significantly more regimented that in the past. Previously, parents may have sent their children to school (if at all) anywhere between the ages of 3 and 8, the number of years spent in schooling reflected a combination of social class, the need for childcare and the availability of work for children (the average for the poor was about 2 years in the late 18th century). Only a very few went to university and depending on the century, they may have went at any time between the ages of 14 and 20. If you weren’t very rich, you may have only done a year at university, which would have made you applicable for a number of professional and clerical jobs without breaking the bank. Others went into apprenticeship (usually for five or seven years) or service (ie working as servants in households and farms) until you earned enough to set up on your own.

Depending on the region, the availability of housing and land, and alternative employment opportunities, this meant most people didn’t get married and start having families until their mid to late twenties (a phenomenon that changes dramatically after WW2). But, perhaps more interestingly, is the diversity of ages that people married at. In the 1970s, not only would 95% of women in Britain marry, 80% of them would marry between the ages of 17 and 25, a distribution of only seven years. In contrast, in 1851, the age of marriage was much more widely distributed with a range of 20 years for the central 80% of women. Furthermore, up to a third of women and men wouldn’t marry at all. The typical life-course in the past then was much more varied than today.

So what is the relevance of this for teen pregnancy? The problem with teen parents is not really that teenagers have children, but that having children as a teenager is increasingly socially unacceptable (whereas previously the focus was on marital status, rather than age). In fact, the number of women having children under 20 in Scotland has halved since the 1960s and 70s and similar numbers of babies are born to teen mums today as in the 1940s, without accounting for population increase. So, this is definitely a problem of perception as much as numbers. If we want to deal with the ‘problems’ of teen pregnancy, we also need to deal with the fact that it is our perspective that made it a problem in the first place. It is because these girls and women are failing to be ‘typical’ that is the social problem. And, perhaps a healthier and more inclusive response to this ‘problem’ is not to condemn girls and women who have children at a young age or worry about the pregnancies, but worry about our responses. If girls and young women end up socially ostracised and living in poverty due to having children, then that’s because our society isn’t set up to deal with them- perhaps we should be. Because the real question is why does being ‘typical’ mean that you are right or your choices are more valid?

And the Victorians are back...

So it turns out family values and 'shoring up the family' are the hot topics for the election, with lots of spouting about how supporting the family and encouraging marriage are good for the economy, good for society and particularly promote 'stability'. At no point, has anybody in these debates shown how marriage is good for the economy. Whether it is good for society is presumably a question of what you think society should look like (although it seems to be used to mean stopping crime and drugs), and while we're at it what on earth does 'stability' mean? As part of this discussion, the Tories have announced tax breaks for married couples- part of their policy to promote marriage- because we all know all those evil cohabitees and singles just live like that because they want to break up with their partners willy-nilly and really are a bit unstable (and clearly tying such people into marriages is the healthy and safe option). It is also not clear whether 'married' couples include civil partners- presumably the existence of gay people is just indicative of the breakdown of society.*

David Cameron has said that this policy says 'if you take responsibility, you will be rewarded- if you don't you won't'. Because, again, people who cohabit or live by themselves are not taking responsibility... how exactly? Does taking responsibility mean being tied into a institution which holds no meaning to you? I thought we called that hypocrisy? Ah perhaps, taking responsibility means if you do choose to split up you are forced to pay for a divorce- well, that may contribute to the economy!

To make matters worse, the response from the other parties has been, err, enlightening. Lib Dem's Nick Clegg's criticism was: "It is immensely unfair. What does is mean for the poor woman who has been left by some philandering husband who goes on to another marriage and gets the tax break and she doesn't?" Yes, because we still live in the nineteenth century, where the 'poor woman' suckered by the 'evil man' should be the terms in which we see family life. This was the exact argument used to bring in divorce legislation in 19th Century Britain as well as to expand the penalties for domestic violence- and while it had a time and (very important) place, do we still want family policy to be determined by protectionism towards women? Protectionism, by definition, implied that women were not equal to men and so needed someone to look after them- and in default of their husbands, it was the state. Now I am sure men leave their wives and remarry, but women also leave their husbands! And, while it may only be a slip of the tongue, I do not want the terms that family life is negotiated to implicitly or explicitly see women as less than equal. Because while society continues to discriminate against women- in the family as in other walks of life- government policy that builds on this presumption continues to reinforce it.**

So what do the facts tell us anyway? Is marriage the solution to society's ill? Well, surprisingly, not really or at least the effect is extremely complex. Some studies suggest that getting married is better for you than cohabiting. Getting married or cohabiting reduces casual drug use and being married/ cohabiting gives a higher rate of success for recovering addicts; the effect is more pronounced if you are married, rather than cohabit, IF YOU ARE A MAN (for women the quality of the relationship is more important). Some studies suggest that you are more likely to see your income rise when you marry, IF YOU ARE A RICH MAN. And, that seems to be the net benefit of marriage over cohabitation. People who cohabit are more likely to earn less and come from poorer socio-economic backgrounds and neighbourhoods, than those that marry- but this seems to be an explanation for why people don't marry, rather than the other way round. So, of course, if married people seem 'more stable' (ie more middle class), it is because they are more likely to be middle class.

Now, what is not being said here is that what really makes society unstable is divorce. For children, if you're parents get divorced, it might fuck you up in a myriad of ways (emotional problems, depression, early sexual experiences, suicide, teen drunkenness, more likely to be overweight), but you may be no more likely to take drugs (depending on the study). On the plus side, if you manage to stabilise (read: not become a junkie or emotional wreck) by the time you're in your mid-late twenties, you'll generally be ok, but you have a higher chance of being an alcoholic. If you become a junkie, chances are you'll also be a life-long criminal (but remember your parents getting divorced may not have influenced that!). To make matters more complicated, other studies have shown that parental divorce decreases your chances of childhood delinquency, while being in a single parent household makes no difference to delinquency. The most consistent predictors of crime are, no surprises for guessing, living in poor neighbourhoods, childhood poverty, and poor education. These are ALSO the predictors of divorce, but so are male unemployment, having a first-born female child (if you are a woman), living together before marriage, and being white (ethnically).***

So, if divorce is the problem, why do we care about whether people MARRY, and the reason is that people who cohabit are more likely to split up than people who marry. But, what is not being said is that today most people live together before they get married, and cohabiting people who see themselves marrying their partner have the same probability of splitting up as married people. In essence, because most people cohabit before they marry, those relationships which weren't going to work were weeded out before marriage. So, the only way that promoting marriage through tax breaks will stop divorce is by making miserable people stay together for financial reasons. And guess what- miserable parents create miserable criminal, junkie children- don't you love statistics.

So what should the government do to help make happy relationships (if we don't want to go down the radical line of getting rid of families altogether)? Well, it turns out that couples who earn similar amounts to each other- so have resource equality- and share resources in the household, who have shared interests and contribute equally to household chores have the highest levels of marital satisfaction and the most stable marriages (which is why feminists have lower divorce rates). Furthermore, the higher a level of a woman's education, the better for the stability of marriage. So pay equality between men and women in the workplace is good for marriage. Education is good for marriage. Gender equality is good for marriage. The other big predictor is poverty and coming from poor neighbourhoods, so how about promoting stability through wealth distribution, rather than cutting welfare further and criminalising the poor?

Why not- instead of falling back on Victorian conservatism- we look to creating policies which will actually make a difference?

* I would assume that it would have to or it would fall short of equality legislation (but if we're so happy to call civil partners 'married' as shorthand, what is the fuss about having two different 'marriage' registration systems? Another question for another day.)

** When protective legislation is put in place, it must be done with clear and explicit recognition of what it is and be designed to combat a particular social wrong, with the aim of creating equality.

*** So, from this perspective, immigration can only be a good thing! Should I tell Mr Cameron?

A rather wordy history of childbirth.

This post is dedicated to Patricia Crawford (1941-2009), feminist, historian of women, and author of 'Attitudes to Menstruation in Seventeenth-Century England', Past and Present.

*******

Recently at the F-Word, there has been a discussion of childbirth practice, which at times has become rather heated as questions of hospital v. homebirth, vaginal birth v. caesarean, pain relief v. none, have been debated. The issue of pregnancy and childbirth is clearly important to woman, but this alone does not explain why so many women are so defensive of their personal choices. And I think that at times, a lot of us are not sure WHY we are protective of our personal choices in childbirth- we understand that this is a controversial and political issue without understanding what created that context. So, it seems to me that some historical context is necessary.

First of all, childbirth choices are part of wider discussion on the control of woman’s bodies. A woman’s right to own and make decisions over her own body is a long and on-going fight for feminists, perhaps mostly clearly seen in the debate over abortion, but certainly not limited to this. Every day women’s bodies are splashed over the media as magazines argue over whether celebrities are too fat or too thin, whether their breasts are the right size, whether they have cellulite, and whether their dress conforms to whatever arbitrary standard is ‘in’ that week. This discussion is not new. Fashion columns, discussions of women’s clothes and who is wearing them well have been part of newspapers since the 18th Century, while the link between clothing and modesty- a central part of woman’s identity for centuries- dates to earlier than the medieval period.

Until very recently, it was not just society that acted to constrain and control women’s bodies. Women were understood as property. When a woman was ‘seduced’, it was her father or husband who demanded compensation from her lover- both seduction and criminal conversation (where a husband sued his wife’s lover) cases operated on the basis that a woman’s body belonged to a man who must be compensated for its use by another. Seduction legislation was still in force in 20th Century England (and I am not sure it has ever been abolished); while criminal conversation was still available to husbands in Canada in the 1980s. The control of women’s bodies has long been a contested issue. The politics of childbirth therefore was created in a context that was about women’s bodily autonomy and the rights to their own body, and therefore was never understood as just about individual choice.

Childbirth, of course, has always been a part of human history, but in Western Europe from the 17th century, a process, often referred to as the ‘medicalisation of childbirth’ occurred. From the 17th century, and closely linked to other medical developments, pregnancy and the gestation of the child became of medical interest. Scientists began charting the steps of pregnancy, performing autopsies on dead women at various stages of pregnancy to see how foetuses developed, and exploring how pregnancy ‘worked’. Yet, these studies were still very detached from the experience of childbirth, where birthing remained a woman’s problem and where the birthing room was a place for women. Midwives and knowledgeable women both held the skills and the knowledge of how to help women birth, how to relieve pain, and what to do when things went wrong. A skilled midwife could cost a considerable sum of money and women understood the importance of having them at the birth. Indeed, some cruelty suits, where women sued their husbands for separation for cruelty, list a husband’s unwillingness to fetch a midwife as a form of cruelty and even as evidence of his desire to kill her.

Over the 17th and 18th centuries, as male doctors become an increasingly important part of medical care more generally, they also start to play a role in childbirth. Initially, childbirth was still a woman’s job, but doctors would be called in to deal with post-natal illness and infection, or to aid sick babies. Then as the eighteenth century progressed, and as medical care became regulated, with male doctors having to be trained and qualified through universities (rather than the traditional apprenticeship system), the unregulated and ‘untrained’ [aka not university educated] midwives became a medical problem. Doctors demanded that midwives be removed entirely from the birthing room, and childbirth became the forum of male doctors. Yet, initially male doctors, with their general medical educations, were not particularly knowledgeable about childbirth, so their success rates were often worse and certainly no better than the women they replaced. Over time, male doctors specialised in gynaecological care and so made headways in understanding what’s going on in pregnancy and how to aid childbirth, and so the success rates increased. But, it should be noted, it was not until nutrition improved and anti-biotics are invented to deal with post-birth infection (what is thought to be the biggest killer of women after childbirth) that we see meaningful improvement in childbirth mortality for mother and child.

This first step in the ‘medicalisation’ of childbirth did not come without a fight from midwives, who in some places demanded to be recognised and given qualifications to allow them to do their jobs (and are more or less successful depending on the region). And, this whole debate went on with almost no input from mothers. Male doctors demanded that female midwives be pushed out of medical care and male politicians and leaders said yes. There were no women voters or mothers with a political voice to speak for what was best for women. And, in many ways, the problem was that there still was no ‘best’ for the mother, whether you had a male doctor or a female midwife, your survival chances were usually down to a woman’s general standard of health and whether any complications arose during or shortly after delivery.

As should be a surprise to no one, male doctors won in the fight for women’s bodies in the 18th century and their control over women’s bodies was to increase with Enlightenment science. Enlightenment ideology, created in a highly religious world, strongly equated science with truth and incorporated a strong belief that there was ONE answer to every problem. Medical doctors as the holders of this TRUTH, became like gods whose opinion and advice could not be questioned (although there is some great work being done just now which highlights that many people did question standard medical advice in this period and often in idiosyncratic ways). People did what their doctor told them as he held the ANSWER. And women were particularly vulnerable under this system as their opinions, experiences and voices were worthless in a male-dominated world.

One of the effects of the domination of medical science by men was the adoption of the male body as normal and of the female body as aberrant and less perfect. The female body was always contrasted with the perfect male body and the things that women’s bodies did differently were understood as being not ‘normal’ or not ‘right’. As a result, everything that women did differently was understood as illness. The female body became pathologically unwell (and there is some really interesting work on the way that Victorian women use illness as a means opting out of social normativity- like the being too constitutionally ill to ever marry and so justifying their life of singleness). Pregnancy in particular was understood as an illness and if you read Victorian newspapers, court cases or even literature you frequently come across references to women’s illness, like she was in bed unwell, or she was by the fire ill, and what they mean is she was pregnant, or occasionally in the period shortly after childbirth. As an illness, pregnancy became the domain of doctors (much like woman’s bodies more generally) and woman’s experiences or desires became less relevant as they were not the experts on illness. In this sense, women became completely detached from their pregnancy, which was no longer seen as a natural part of life for many women, but an aberration.

In the Victorian period, unless you were very poor, you gave birth at home. This was because hospitals were where people went to die and where infection was rife, making it a place where only the poor and desperate went. However, with greater knowledge of infection and germs, and the importance of cleanliness, as well as general improvements in medical treatments, hospitals became much safer places. As a result and in line with a very medical mindset that doctors should be in control of every aspect of health and recovery, in the 1930s, childbirth moved from home to hospital. Again, a lot of the motivation for this move was still motivated by the belief that childbirth was an illness and the appropriate place for ill people was a hospital. However, it also brought benefits such a broader range of pain relief and for many women (who also understood pregnancy as illness) it made them feel safer and more in control. However, despite the fact by the 1930s nurses were a central part of nursing and midwives were once more a central part of childbirth practice, birthing mothers had very little control or say over what happened to them while they were in hospital.

The mantra of ‘doctor knows best’ informed women’s experience of childbirth and increasingly childbirth became more and more of a medical procedure, with women receiving increasingly identical and regimented ‘treatment’ for pregnancy, and having little control over what happened. By the 1950s, women going into hospital to give birth could find themselves having their personal belongings removed and put into hospital gowns, having their pubic hair shaved off in preparation for birth, keeping fathers and family members out of the maternity room, and having their children removed immediately after birth. Pain medications were heavily used and many women couldn’t remember the birth, and they were encouraged to bottle feed for ‘hygiene’ reasons. Women’s bodies during childbirth were considered to be an open access area. They were not offered options on procedures and consent was not asked when doctors decided things were not going to their liking and chose to intervene. The mother’s opinion was of little relevance, because after all this was a medical procedure, and what did she know about medicine. And there is some work that suggests that women’s inability to connect with the experience of childbirth had repercussions in the form of postnatal depression and an inability to bond with children [although neither of these phenomenon were new or unique to women at this historical moment].

From the late 50s onwards, the role of doctors in society came under increased scrutiny (not least when in the 1960s it was discovered that British doctors were performing experiments on patients without their consent that were more than a little similar to Nazi experiments in WW2, under a rubric of ‘doctor knows best’). The National Childcare Trust as well as many (other) feminist organisations began to challenge the necessity of the increased intervention of doctors in childbirth. They began to promote ‘natural’ childbirth- that is an understanding of childbirth that saw it as a natural part of the female experience and one that did not need to be co-opted by men or treated as an illness. These campaigns were founded on a need to give women control over their own bodies. Over time, hospitals responded to these demands and now (at least in theory) woman should be treated as individuals with individual pregnancies. They should be given information on what options they have (ie home birth or not, pain meds or not) and what is best for their peculiar needs and desires. Yet, as you can imagination, the fight for these rights was not easy or painless. Men had no desire to give up their control over women’s bodies and it was a long, hard-fought campaign.

Today, when we discuss our childbirth options, we discuss it in the context of what was a long-fight for the control over women’s bodies. That is why it is such a heated issue. The choice to have an elective caesarean brings back memories of a time when such medical intervention wasn’t a woman’s choice; while for other women, the right to have a vaginal birth at home is founded on a battle to give women that right. More recently, there is a debate over whether choosing not to have pain medication is a form of 'martyrdom' that is patriarchal in its own way- which at least in part comes from uncertainty over what the relationship between women's bodies and the medical profession should be. It becomes very easy to see one action as ‘feminist’ and another as ‘betrayal’ and yet, this is not what our foremothers fought for. They fought for our right to choose and our right to be in control of our own bodies. It was never meant to be that one way of birthing was more ‘right’ than another, but rather that these are our bodies, ourselves.

Who was she anyway?

This article from the BBC, which I have quoted in full, annoyed me. It discussed the murder of Kinga Legg by her boyfriend, but throughout the article, her boyfriend is discussed as a businessman, while she is his girlfriend. We learn about his businesses, his houses, where he lives, and his bankruptcy in 2006. In the last sentence, it is noted that she too is a successful businesswoman, and owns a tomato growing company with sites in the UK and Poland. But while he is the focus of the article, she is reduced to the bloody body in the bed. The effect is to make her ancillary to her murderer throughout, reducing her to his partner and a victim, rather than a human being.

Porsche recovered in murder hunt

Police in Cheshire have found a sports car thought to belong to a businessman whose girlfriend was found beaten to death in a Paris hotel room. Ian Griffin, 39, is at the centre of an international manhunt after Kinga Legg's body was found at the l'Hotel Bristol on Tuesday. Cheshire Police recovered a Porsche 911 they were looking for during searches of properties connected to Mr Griffin. Surrey Police have also been searching a property as part of the inquiry. Ms Legg, 36, from Poland, checked into the £1,000-a-night hotel on Monday. Mr Griffin arrived later.

Company owner

Her body was found by a hotel cleaner the following day. French police said she had died from "internal bleeding caused by multiple blows". Mr Griffin, originally from Warrington, previously lived in Knutsford and had several businesses listed in Cheshire. In 2006 he was declared bankrupt at Warrington County Court. Two plain-clothes officers from Cheshire Police had been standing outside his parents' home in Delph Lane, Winwick, on Friday. Ms Legg owned international company Vegex, which supplied Tesco and other supermarkets with tomatoes. The company has a site in Oxshott, Surrey and Opatówek, Poland.

The alternative, in case you were wondering, could be something like this:

Police in Cheshire have found a sports car in the murder investigation of businesswoman Kinga Legg, found beaten to death in a Paris hotel room. Legg's partner, Ian Griffin, 39, is at the centre of an international manhunt after her body was found at the l'Hotel Bristol on Tuesday. Cheshire Police recovered a Porsche 911 they were looking for during searches of properties connected to Mr Griffin. Surrey Police have also been searching a property as part of the inquiry. Ms Legg, 36, from Poland, checked into the £1,000-a-night hotel on Monday. Mr Griffin arrived later. Ms Legg's body was found by a hotel cleaner the following day. French police said she had died from "internal bleeding caused by multiple blows".

Kinga Legg owned international company Vegex, which supplied Tesco and other supermarkets with tomatoes. The company has a site in Oxshott, Surrey and Opatówek, Poland. Mr Griffin, originally from Warrington, previously lived in Knutsford and had several businesses listed in Cheshire. In 2006 he was declared bankrupt at Warrington County Court. Two plain-clothes officers from Cheshire Police had been standing outside his parents' home in Delph Lane, Winwick, on Friday.

It's not just the reordering of Ms Legg's person via that of her partner, but the use of her name throughout the article, instead of 'she', that makes her a central part of the text; a central part of the story- which after all is about her. To be honest, it would also be nice to get the words domestic violence in there and the 'found beaten to death' does disembody the crime from the murderer. But, equally, at this stage in the investigation it may be problematic to accuse a particular suspect of the crime.

Transwars, Part 67458.

[This is a post that I have been reluctant to write because I am not trans* and don’t feel that I can talk for trans*people’s experience. But, the latest round of transphobia that has manifested in the latest Carnival of Feminists has made me want to say something. So, I apologise in advance to trans*people if I get it wrong and I direct non-trans* readers to here and here to talk to people who actually know something about it.]

Once upon a time, many, many moons ago, a famous philosopher said, ‘I think, therefore I am’ (only he wrote it in Latin). Descartes’ words are often flung about, but the larger point he was making at the time was to have significant repercussions for centuries to come. Descartes posited that there was a distinction between mind and body. The body was fallible and the senses flawed, but the mind was capable of deduction and so able to transcend the limitations of the physical. His model of mind and body led people to distinguish between the inner and outer body. The mind, or soul, was the person, where the humanity lay; the body was a mere vehicle for the mind and of little real significance other than as a means of communication. This differentiation led to a medical science that deals with the body and psychiatry/ psychology that deals with the mind. All that was important and real came from within; physical acts and behaviours were either inconvenient biological necessities or forms of communication controlled by the inner being.

‘Twas not always this way. Once a long time ago, and still today in some distant lands, the body and mind were not seen as separate, but the human operated as one, her mind and body in sync. Indeed, even in times and places where a Cartesian model was in place, not all people could free themselves from their bodies. Only the rational, the superior, the male, could truly rise above their physical beings. Women, with their hormones and menses and wombs and too much water and small brains, found it very difficult to make the separation between mind and body. They were never truly rational, never completely separate from nature, never fully human.

Then one day, feminism came along and women were allowed to be rational, our minds fully separated from our bodies. We ignored our menstrual cramps and swollen breasts and embraced Cartesianism. We determined that the body was a static model on which we placed meaning. Gender was a construction of the inner, not the outer (and sometimes the outer was constructed too). And as feminists, we built theories and more theories and some theories, and a bit of activism, and some more theories, but, all the while, the easy distinction between body and mind wasn’t all that easy.

We knew that gender was a construction, but we couldn’t quite figure out why our bodies continued to bug us. They niggled and wobbled and we ran and we ran, but still they followed. And then in twenty-first century came The Transpeople™*. They said our inners don’t match our outers and we want it fixed! And, the feminists cried, but your inner is constructed, so if it doesn’t match your outer, then you change it, not your genitals! And, they said, but my outer looks wrong. And the feminists cried, but gender isn’t real, so your genitals shouldn’t matter.**

But still the genitals mattered. And the Cartesian model allowed no in-between.

So we need to rethink the link between mind and body. My body is me. It is not just a vehicle that carries me. I love my body in all its lumpy, imperfect perfection. When I look in the mirror, it is what I expect to see and I expect people to react to me in particular ways because I have this body. I know that having this body led me to be raised to behave in particular ways and that as a result of this body, people respond to me differently from how they respond to other people. But, ultimately, I would not change this body. It is me.

Now, what if, one day, I looked in the mirror and I didn’t recognise the person looking back at me? It would fundamentally change who I am, both because I would be a different person, and because the world would react to me differently. Now, imagine that for as long as I could remember the person looking back at me didn’t feel right, for whatever reason, and then wonder what I might try to do to get my body to feel right. Women do this every day. They put on make-up to cover up the blemishes and wrinkles that aren’t them. They lose weight, and more weight, and get implants and surgery to try and make their bodies match who they are. And for many, the feeling of being right never comes.

Other people’s bodies are not sexed in the way they feel they should be. And sometimes they do things to try and make their bodies more like they believe they should be, whether dressing differently, taking hormones or having surgery. Indeed, if it was not because our genitals are what are used to separate us into two different genders, having genital reassignment surgery would only be more radical than breast implants in the degree to which it is a more complex surgery.

As it is however, the powers that be have determined that certain sexual organs come with certain behaviours. So when people choose to change their genitals, we assume it is because they are buying into the belief that gender exists and so reinforcing this binary. And, perhaps, sometimes this is true. Perhaps (and this is where I am a bit uncomfortable talking about experiences that are not my own), for some people, trained from birth that certain sex organs come with certain behaviours, when you change genitals, you also need to take on the traits of that sex- the two things come together. After all, it is only natural; it’s what we’ve been taught our whole lives. Certainly, this seems to be the line the medical profession takes. Want genital reassignment surgery, then you better act like a man/women (delete as appropriate). Lisa Harney in a comment over at Questioning Transphobia describes her experience thus:

In order to be diagnosed in the first place, I had to disavow any attraction I had to women, and state that I was attracted to men. In order to be prescribed hormones, the psychiatrist wanted to see me in a dress or skirt. The therapist I was seeing for voice work (and she was an awful voice therapist) insisted that I always wear dresses and skirts to her office. Even years later when I needed to see her about something, she insisted I wear a dress for the appointment, and not show up in my preferred (at the time) jeans.

And this wasn’t just something I experienced. Psychiatrists involved in the early days of gender clinics talked about assessing whether trans women would be attractive enough as women after they transitioned, and required a specific narrative to diagnose trans women that emphasized femininity. Since trans women are just diverse as cis women, a lot of us had to misrepresent ourselves as more feminine than we would have preferred just to get the treatment that would help encourage us to not kill ourselves, or at least not live out our lives in depression.

Some trans*women were forced to become feminine to justify their desire for surgery, whether or not that was how they personally wanted to behave (and of course the reverse is true for trans*men). Because genitals were never just genitals, they were the basis on which gender construction lies. If you want the outer characteristics, you damn well better have the inner ones too. And the thing is because gender is constructed and not natural, it becomes very difficult to decide what behaviours are natural/normal, and it all becomes very confusing. How much more so for people whose bodies do not feel right? As ciswomen, we spend so much time worrying about whether our behaviour/dress/bodyshape is feminine or too feminine or, better yet, is it feminist?

The thing is all behaviour is taught. There is not hidden or innate you (or me) waiting to emerge once we get rid of gender, like a heavy blanket holding us down. If we want to get rid of gender, we need to start normalising a much wider range of behaviours and questioning why certain behaviours are tied to certain biological characteristics- we effectively need to increase choice. This will not make behaviour ‘natural’, but will hopefully allow people more freedom in their identity. As feminists, we also need to challenge why power comes with certain traits or behaviours and why others are oppressed because of their characteristics. We also need to rethink the place of the body within identity. It is more than weight around our neck, pulling us down and restricting us.

Trans*women are like other women, except their situation is more complicated. They know that they are women whose bodies don’t fit with their expectations, and they have the same problem as the rest of us, trying to figure out what the hell it means to be a women, to dress like a women, to be a feminist women. Because, just like the rest of us, they have a very limited choice in what it means to be a woman (and because sometimes that choice is further constrained by the medical profession) they endorse models of femininity that are problematic. They are just doing exactly the same thing as every other woman, every other day.

*Please note that this is hyperbole. Gender non-conformity of all sorts has a very long history.

** Please also note that I realise that people who are transgendered are not all about the genitals and that not all transgendered people can or want to have genital reassignment surgery. The genitals here is a shorthand for a much wider range of behaviours.

Housework, part 2.

I received a number of great comments to my post on housework and some raised a number of issues I thought would be better addressed at length, rather than in the confines of a comments box.

The first major issue raised was that house-cleaning is not just seen as demeaning because it is associated with women, but because it is also associated with women of colour and poor women. In Scotland, cleaners are not usually women of colour (because we are a VERY white country- though that’s slowly changing), but they are almost always poor and frequently poorly educated. In a more global context, cleaners are frequently women of colour. This association arises from housework’s poor social status. As it is seen as having little social value, it falls to the people ranked lowest in the social order to do it (women/ poor women/ women of colour). As it has little social value, the people who clean homes are open to abuse of all natures. As it has little social value, the people who clean homes are seen as suspicious, dishonest, impure.

Yet, housework is absolutely vital to the survival of the human race. It is not just a frivolous, social desire to have a well-functioning house. Historically, until very recently, if no one performed the functions of the household, the people that lived within it would have starved and/or died from disease. Today, as we have outsourced considerable parts of the household economy (such as food preparation) and because we have technological conveniences (such as central heating, washing machines and cleaning fluids), the role of the housewife/ cleaner appears considerably less significant. But, this disguises how vital it is to our health, mental well-being and economic productivity that we live in clean, safe environments. It only takes a quick glance over to the average life expectancy of the poor in nineteenth century tenements to get a sense of the importance of decent living conditions to our health. (I distinguish between clean and tidy houses- it is unsafe to live amongst mould and rotting food, rubbish or bodily matter- dust isn’t likely to kill you).

Even economists recognise that housework is vital part of the economy. One study in Canada estimated unpaid housework and childcare to be worth $275 billion to the Canadian economy. Non-employed single mothers put in an average of 50 hours a week, worth $24,000 a year to the Canadian economy ‘at current market rates’. If anything, these numbers are low, due to the low value placed on these occupations. If housework had a higher social value, it would be worth more to the economy and the women, who worked in housework and childcare industries, would have higher social status, more money and more power. One of my commenters suggested that housework does not have the power to affect many lives. This is not true. Through allowing people to live healthy lives and have roles in society and economy, cleaners affect the lives of everybody. Furthermore, as a feminist, I would be worried about promoting a system that saw value as associated with how much power a person could exercise over others.

One response to this is that ‘anyone can do housework’, so that it will never be seen as valuable, or that it’s ‘grunt work’. But housework is a learned skill, like any job; it’s just one that most people are taught from childhood. And there are plenty of jobs that are well- paid or respectable that ‘most people’ could do with some training. Farming, rearing animals, dairy-work, food preparation, and cooking are all reasonably well-paid jobs that have been historically performed by women of various social classes, with little formal training (but, like housework, lots of informal training). Jobs in construction and plumbing, which are very well-paid, require only short apprenticeships and can be learned by people with a variety of educational levels and social backgrounds. But, even if housecleaning is easy or can be performed by ‘anybody’, it doesn’t mean it should be of lesser value than any other occupation. Let’s face it, the average prime minister could not function if his basic needs were not being met. Jobs, which are ‘low-skill’, are not less important; they just have less social value. Furthermore, there is an implication in this discussion that certain types of people are worth less than others and that is hugely problematic. People have different skills and some find certain tasks easier than others (and this is without reflecting on how poverty and social class impact on education, etc), but this should NOT reflect on their social value. Their value lies in their humanity.

Finally, the question of privilege inevitably enters into any discussion of housework. Only the privileged can afford to pay someone else to clean their house (although in the past almost every household at all social levels had servants). And this raises some really complicated issues. As raised by one commenter, being able to hire people to clean your home and look after your children, allows many women to enter the world of work, which would not be possible otherwise. For some women, working is necessary to survive and the extra income they earn can pay someone else to reduce their burden. This is more complicated than a simple exercise of privilege. This is about coping and surviving. Yet, there is also the question of who cleans the house of the cleaner, another working woman?

What about rich women with leisure time who would like to pay someone to clean their house, not to free them for work, but for pleasure? Is this an exercise of privilege too far? Is there something fundamentally different about employing someone to clean your house when it is acceptable to buy prepared food and ready-made clothes? In fact, could you argue that because you pay your cleaner directly (not through the middlemen of factory owners, product buyers and the shop), they get a fairer, less exploitative wage than many people under the capitalist system?

At some point, we have to accept that as a society we rely on each other for survival. Households in the past needed servants because two adults could not do everything that needed to be done to survive. This is true today, but, instead of work being done by servants within our homes, we purchase ready-made food and clothes and rely on new technologies to allow us to cope. Because so much of that labour is invisible, we forget that humanity is a giant organism. Increasingly, we are trying to make housework invisible too. We give it little or no social value; we refuse to recognise its vital function to survival; we resist paying people to do it as it highlights its existence- it highlights that our survival depends on others. When we do pay people to clean, we demean them and trivialise their role.

Under the current capitalist/ patriarchal system, employing people to clean your home is an exercise of privilege. So is being able to buy your meat, pre-slaughtered and butchered, your vegetables grown, cleaned and even diced! We would like to forget that. We like to imagine that our successes and failures came through our own merit and hardwork. This is not true. We got here together. Now, we need to recognise that and give credit where credit is due. Perhaps, when we do, the social/ class/ gender/race distinctions that permeate our society will be harder to sustain.

Tired Today; So Something to Inspire.

Via the Fword.

bell hooks: All about Love

I have been meaning to review bell hooks All About Love: New Visions for a few weeks now, but got distracted by my tangent into postmodern feminism. But, by coincidence, I was teaching a class on Second Wave feminism last week and the topic of romantic love came up and it reminded me of her work. I brought up the topic of alternative forms of family life as a goal of some feminists during the Second Wave and my class, of first year u/grads, were discussing the idea of communal living. They really hated the idea as they thought that children wouldn’t be loved by anybody except their biological parents, and it struck me that they had failed to realise that many conceptions of communal living not only got rid of the concept of the nuclear family, but of the couple. So, I suggested that they try to think of the family as something where the romantic couple didn’t exist; where loving relationships could take a different form. And they could not get past the romantic couple. They were happy that the couple could be gay, but they insisted that there was something unique and special about the romantic couple that could not be got rid of. It surprised me that a younger generation could be so conservative that they could not even consider alternative ways of loving. hooks work is about thinking about new ways of loving, and it ties in with another interest of mine, thinking about how the feminist movement is going to move forward. All About Love is an attempt to provide a vision for a more loving, equal feminist movement, and through it, a more loving society.

hooks argues that we, as a society, do not know how to love, because we have never been taught how to love. She talks of how, perhaps unlike the ‘all we need is love’ ethos of the 1960s, young people today are uncomfortable about talking about love within social movements. Love is increasingly restricted to an act between two individuals and as such is viewed with scepticism and discomfort when explored as something that society and social movement should engage in. She argues that love is about hope and equality. It is about allowing people to be recognised as full human beings, able to recognise their full potential in a supportive environment. Love is about community.

All About Love highlights how society is confused about love. We combine love with authority so unthinkingly that we cannot see that to truly love, we need to love without power. She gives the example of childhood, where love and authority are complexly intertwined. Parents hold authority over their children, but call that authority love. Children are punished, even abused, in the name of love. She argues that many people grow confusing violence with love; while others, who receive no discipline, grow up to believe love means always having your desires fulfilled. She argues that to create a more loving society, we need to value our children more, to respect them as human beings, to offer them loving guidance, empowering them to make decisions over their own lives. She recognises that children are often too young to make responsible decisions, but that shouldn’t mean not allowing them to be involved in the process. It also doesn’t mean making children do things that are not in their own interests, because it makes our lives easier or because we can. It means giving them the necessary guidance and boundaries to be able to make responsible decisions over their own lives. It also involves teaching children that adults are human too, deserving of respect (not because they hold authority, because they are human) and consideration. It involves rethinking the power hierarchies we think arise naturally within relationships between parents and children.

hooks has lots to say on other loving relationships, including friendships and intimate partnerships. One her most interesting observations was her remark that we are increasingly taught that nobody will love you, unless you first love yourself, but that this is nonsense. hooks points out that having people who love you in your life is vital to your self-esteem and your ability to function well. It is impossible to love yourself, when you have no support network. She also highlights that we repeat the power hierarchies of childhood in our adult, loving relationships so that we repeat the same abuses and hurts as adults that we experienced as children. There is lots of great stuff here and some real, practical advice on how to move forward. It even involves an interesting section on ‘divine’ love or the role of spirituality or faith in our lives, which I thought was a brave and important discussion given the tensions that exist between feminism and religion.

One of the most important contributions, I think this book is making for the feminist movement, is its discussion of love in community. hooks argues that we have been brought up to place the romantic partnership as THE central relationship in our lives. When people ‘couple up’, they often throw all other friendships and relationships out of the window in their pursuit of the romantic dream. hooks argues that this is damaging for people and for society. She suggests that for many women, the focus on the importance of the marital unit has left them open to a myriad of abuses as they seek to shore up their relationship at any cost. The focus on the couple has destroyed our sense of community, so that we now live in a state of war with our neighbours, rather than in friendship. She argues for loving beyond the family, because it will help reduce the inequalities of power and abuses that exist when the family is the only place where we can have our needs fulfilled. Fellowship in the community reduces our sense of being along; it gives us a broader support network; it allows us greater empathy and awareness of the needs of our fellow man; and with it brings respect and friendship across society. Love in the community is about healing the tensions and challenging power inequalities that exist when we refuse to acknowledge each other.

I wonder what my first year u/grads would make of All About Love. I sense that romantic love, and the power hierarchies that it frequently reinforces, are so deeply entrenched that we may be uncomfortable with the idea of loving beyond the family. Yet, I also think that her message is one that should be well-received within the feminist movement. Rethinking the natural order of life has always been part of our tradition; perhaps romantic love is just the next shibboleth that we need to tear down.

Why Post-modernism Is, and Is Not, Dangerous for Feminism, Part 4.

The most common criticism made of post-modernism is that it destroys the category ‘women’ and as a result there is no political basis for the feminist movement. From what subject position do we fight if woman is a construction. This was the concern that Michelle over at Lonergrrl raised that inspired this set of posts. It is argued that postmodernism is paralysing for feminism as it destabilises the categories, such as women and oppression, upon which feminism is based. If ‘woman’ is not universal she cannot have any political agency and indeed by utilising constructions such as ‘woman’ feminists keep alive this discourse thus continuing their own oppression. Yet, what this argument misses is that while post-modernism argues that gender and patriarchy are constructions, it recognises that they are constructions that are integral to people’s lives and identities. It shows that it is through these constructions that people make sense of their experiences and their understanding of the world. It argues that these constructions are powerful. ‘Woman’ may be a historically contingent, unstable category but she is integral to identity. This relationship gives feminism political legitimacy.

Linda Alcoff points out that,

[w]hen the concept 'woman' is defined not by a particular set of attributes but by a particular position, the internal characteristics of the person thus identified are not denoted so much as the external context within which that person is situated [among a network of relations]....If it is possible to identify women by their position within this network...then it becomes possible to ground a feminist argument for women, not on a claim that their innate capacities are being stunted, but that their position within the network lacks power and mobility and requires radical change.*

That constructions are lived, political categories allows feminists to challenge and reconstruct them.

Furthermore, because what it means to be a woman is constructed, you have the opportunity to change society. If women were innately stupid, incapable and weak, there would be nothing you could do about it. It is only because post-modernism gave you the tools to deconstruct the categories that shaped how you view the world that you were able to envision a new future.

A second threat that has been blamed on post-modernism is the focus on identity politics within the feminist movement. It is, of course, natural that in the same way we realised that gender was constructed that the other facets of people’s identities, including race, class, sexuality, able-bodiedness and numerous other categories, came under the spotlight. And furthermore it was essential to the feminist movement that this was the case, because the experience of a black woman cannot be divided into her experiences as a woman and her experiences as a black person. Her experiences interact in complex ways and can only be understood in conjunction with each other. The idea that there are experiences that all women have in common as women is actually controversial. What we share as women is social inequality. How we experience that inequality is much more varied. Identity politics is often pointed to as the destroyer of the feminist movement as it fragmented experience. But identity politics are not just in people’s imagination. A black woman’s experience of being a woman is different from mine. We can’t just ignore that, especially when ignoring it tends to favour those with privilege. Now, I absolutely agree that choosing to do nothing about women’s oppression, because it seems complicated is entirely useless and helps no one. But blaming this on identity politics, and as a result postmodernism, is not the way to go. This was not postmodernism’s fault. It was a lack of imagination amongst feminists. A vision for a feminist future has to find away to incorporate difference, not pretend it’s not there. (A good discussion of ways to do this can be found here). Because who does ignoring it actually benefit? In fact, what sort of feminism do you want that does ignore identity politics? If we pretend that postmodernism doesn’t exist, what would that feminism look like? (And don’t say the second wave, because postmodern and identity politics were the inevitable conclusion to second wave debates.)

So, what are the dangers of postmodernism? To my mind, the major danger of postmodernism is its focus on the individual. It is not true that post-modernism denies subject positions (in fact see tomorrow on pomo and the subject), but in fact that it creates as many subject positions as they are people. I think this is problematic as I like the idea of community and I am suspicious that individuality tends towards a very Western conception of the self, that perhaps would not fit with conceptions of the self based within the family or cultural group. This form of individualism is in danger of pushing for an individual rights based politics that tends to homogenise experience into a peculiarly westernised view of the self. In other words, we needed to be careful about what we mean by the individual and the self when we think about politics. But to be honest, I think a sensitivity to this problem can be incorporated into any difference-based feminist movement, and as such, it is not immobilising.

It is often said that deconstruction does not give the building blocks to move forward, but, in many ways, that it not the point of post-structuralism. Post-structuralism is not feminism. It is a tool for understanding how the world works. What we want the world to be or to look like is up to us. Post-structuralism is like an artist’s handbook. It shows us how to put paint (words) on a canvas (the world which we construct through language), using various techniques (discourse). We can’t blame the handbook if we fail to make a masterpiece. How we as feminists move forward is to educate and demand that the world recognise that as women we are disadvantaged (in a myriad of ways) and it is time to change. We have to educate people to questions their preconceptions every time they encounter a woman and, for that matter, a man. To ask themselves would I treat this person in this way if they were male, female, black, white, gay, straight, disabled, able-bodied etc etc, until people can be seen as something other than the labels we place on them; until the labels have so little meaning that they fall into desuetude.

* Linda Alcoff, ‘Cultural feminism versus post-structuralism: the identity crisis in feminist theory’, Signs, 13, (1988), pp.433-434.

Postmodernism 101, Part 3.

The major criticism of post-structuralism is that it does not appear to allow for change. What do you mean, you cry. Well, if how we view the world is shaped by how we are trained to see it, how do ideas change? How can we have a shift from the medieval to the modern to the postmodern view of the world? The answer to this lies in the gap between the sign and experience. As discussed yesterday, language can never fully capture human experience and, because of this, language is never stable. The word women can mean so many things and, yet due to the huge number of people and experiences it encompasses, it can mean almost nothing at all. The flexibility of a single word allows for new experiences to be adopted under its label, like transwomen under women for example. With each new experience, the word 'woman’ expands and is altered at the same time. And the word ‘woman’ is now different, so when it encounters a new experience how it adapts will be different from if it had never encountered transwomen. Language constantly adapts to account for change.

Yet, this still leads to a problem. If a sign, such as ‘woman’ just keeps expanding its definition, how do we result in real change? How do we destroy the concept of ‘woman’ and with it the patriarchal system that places women in a subordinate position to men, if the system just keeps finding new ways to oppress more people? And this is a great question. And there is not a single answer to it.

One solution may be that presented by thinkers, such as Thomas Kuhn, is the paradigm shift, where one way of understanding the world is dramatically dismissed and replaced by another. From a post-structuralist perspective, a paradigm shift would involve a sudden realisation that a particular construction of the world does not adequately explain the experience it encounters. Perhaps in the context of gender, we suddenly have to throw the concept of biological sex out of the window in light of evidence that penises and vaginas are actually the same thing and so gender is a totally ridiculous way of defining the population (just an imaginary scenario). As a result, we have to rethink how we categorise people. Now, even with paradigm shifts, the new solution is not pulled out of the ether. A new solution will be based on alternative knowledges or concepts that exist in society, which will be adapted for the new experience- but ultimately something ‘big’ (like the move from medieval to modern) will be recognised as having happened.

An alternative is a more gradual process. Language will adapt to new experience and eventually words that have no real significance shall fall into desuetude. So, eventually the experiences of women shall become so diverse that woman is no longer a useful explanatory category. Or, perhaps, in a more cheerful sense, we can now imagine a world where gender does not mean inequality, so we work very hard to change people’s minds and the language that they use, so that they no longer view ‘women’ in the same way.

The paradigm shift seems more exciting, but it may be the latter that defeats patriarchy in the end. Tomorrow, why post-modernism is and is not dangerous for feminism.

Postmodernism 101, Part 2.

So, as I discussed yesterday in incredibly simplistic terms, the modern condition took language at its word. In fact, more than this, it believed in concepts such as a single ‘truth’ that could be discovered through empirical science, which relied on the truth of observation. In other words, as humans, we could view the world and, through reason, figure out what we saw before us. There was a direct relationship between the object before us and how we understood or made sense of it. In turn, language could represent that object fully through carefully constructed sentences or descriptions. As long as we understood the language, we could understand the world.

Yet, the niggling thought at the back of the minds of humanity was that this was just a bit too easy. Even amongst the most literate people, miscommunication constantly occurred. New scientific developments, such as the discovery of the atom, highlighted that what we saw with our eyes wasn’t necessarily what was happening at all. And the labels that we placed upon things chafed as they didn’t quite fit. And in this moment of doubt came the post-structuralists.*

Post-structuralism argues that language does not fully encompass human experience. There is a gap between the word and the experience or object that it describes. The word ‘woman’ describes you, but what does it mean to be a woman? Women are people with the female biological sex. But what is female biological sex? Well, it’s having a vagina and breasts. But not all women have breasts. Some women don’t have vaginas. Some women don’t menstruate or have babies. How can this word capture what it means to be a woman? Women can mean so many things and yet this multiplicity of experiences is captured by one word. What use is the word ‘woman’ when no two ‘women’ have the same experiences? For post-structuralists, language can never entirely capture experience.

More importantly is the concept of categorisation. Why do we group all people with vaginas and breasts together under the label ‘women’? Perhaps, we could destroy the concept of ‘women’ altogether and label people with different terms. So now people are no longer divided into men and women, but blondes, brunettes, and redheads, regardless of whether they have penises or vaginas. How would getting rid of the concept of ‘women’ alter how we understood the world? Now take this idea and multiply it for every word in every language. Why are those four shades of blue all categorised as blue? Why are Fords, Peugeots and Nissans all grouped together as cars, but that we distinguish cars from vans? Perhaps grouping things together based on colour or age or distance from the ground is a more useful way of organising the world?

Now at first glance this idea does not seem too revolutionary, but the implications are huge. If how we categorise things gives them meaning, then language constructs experience. This is not to say that experiences aren’t real. An earthquake or eating your dinner doesn’t just exist in your imagination. But, how you understand what you did or what happened around you is entirely decided by how you understand the world, which in turn is shaped by language. You just painted your living room red. This physical event happened. But, the name of the colour you painted it was constructed. The signification of that colour- is it warm or cold, peaceful or angry, does make the room feel smaller or larger- is entirely constructed. Was painting your room about making the house more homely, about being more sellable? Any meaning that the event had was a function of the cultural language system in which you live.

Furthermore, the physical is also to a large extent constructed by language. You just painted a ‘room’. What is a room? Where does it stop? Does it stop at a doorway? Why? Why is that a ‘natural’ stopping point? Why not see all houses as a single room, as an indivisible space, or perhaps rooms are about function- all bedrooms should be the same colour? What about the body? Why does the arm go from your wrist to your shoulder? Why not get rid of the concept of arm and instead thinking of things in smaller chunks (hand, wrist, forearm, top-arm, shoulder) or bigger chunks (you have one arm that goes from right hand to left)? Perhaps the hand should include the wrist and so the order would go hand to forearm. Why is the mind separate from the body? If we see mental health as part of the physical body would we treat it differently? Would we treat the physical body differently if we could imagine that it worked in the same way as the mind? The physical, therefore, is not a static, observable object waiting to force its meaning on the world. The very act of observation relies on how we have been trained to categorise and view the world.

That training, or language that we use to interpret experience, is called discourse. Discourses are the bigger stories that link together different words, or signs, and give them meaning in relation to each other. In fact, in many ways, discourse precedes the sign as the sign is meaningless without the discourse. For example, the significance of a banana can only be seen when we have an understanding of the category ‘fruit’. What it means to be woman can only be understood when contrasted with what it means to be a man. Like pieces of a jigsaw, when words are removed from their context they become meaningless. In the context of patriarchal society, what woman is can only be understood as part of a larger discussion about power and authority and what types of authority women are entitled to hold. The word ‘woman’ does not just mean someone who has a vagina; it situates someone with that label into a much larger and complex construction of the world. Knowing that women should have vaginas actually tells you almost nothing about being a woman. Just like meeting a woman and being told that she is a woman tells you almost nothing about her life, and yet tells you everything. (In this sense, the sign can be both empty and full at the same time).

Ok, I think this is enough for today. Tomorrow we will discuss the implications of this theory for how change happens in post-structuralist thought. Class dismissed.

*Post-structuralism is a way of understanding language that is at the basis of post-modern thought- post-modernism however is bigger that post-structuralism

The Follow-Up to Anti-Sex: Rape.

There has been some discussion recently about definitions of rape and whether it is possible for women to realise that they have been raped days or years after the actual event. In modern society, rape is often envisioned as a violent, physical act where a woman is forced, usually by a stranger, to have a penis inserted into a bodily orifice (most acceptably the vagina or anus, but at a push people might allow the mouth) against her will, despite her physical and vocal protests. This cultural narrative is so strong that people have even suggested that rape is practically impossible as long as the woman continues to struggle, which is often subtly reinforced by an expectation that women take ‘self-defence classes’. At a push, we will allow that some women, notably the very drunk, disabled, or unconscious, may not be able to physically fight off their attackers, but these women are so socially despised that rape is usually considered a worthy punishment for their vulnerability. Yet, there is little discussion of why this understanding of rape dominates the social imagination.

How we understand rape is informed by societies conception of sex. As detailed in my last post, contemporary understandings of sex are based on a model of gender that sees men as active and women as passive. This model sees violence as ingrained into the male psyche or body. Men are often seen as ‘protectors’ of women to justify the expectation that they can and will resort to violence, even if that violence is only approved of in particular circumstances. Violence became part of male ‘nature’. Women are meant to be passive under this model, and with passivity came vulnerability. This means that violent women are ‘unnatural’ and other women are in need of protection. As they were passive, women could not exercise agency or choice or consent. They were reduced to appendages of men, designed to reflect and embody male desire.

Closely related to violence is male sexuality. The act of sex was reduced to interaction between penises and vaginas, where penises were active and vaginas passive. Penises were violent and vaginas vulnerable (the penis is a sword, vagina a sheaf; penis is a weapon; vagina’s are cities to be scaled and sacked and won and marked on bed-heads as conquered). The act of sex was an act of domination and thus an act of violence. As women were passive receptacles, they had no sexuality of their own. The feminist movement has challenged this understanding of gender and has tried to give women choice and agency and the ability to consent. They have fought hard to have women recognised as active. Yet, while they have made gains, this cultural understanding of gender still influences how we understand the world.

Women who show active behaviours, such as displaying their sexuality through dress or behaviour, drinking too much (i.e. in a masculine way), being seen or walking in public, interacting with men as equals, remove their passivity and thus no longer need protection from men. Because they are no longer passive, they become active and equal to men. By being active and equal to men, they are placed in a state of war with men. (All men are in a state of war; the state regulates that state of war by offering securities and protections to encourage men to behave.) Yet, unlike men, active women are not entitled to protection by the state as they have broken with the social contract that demands that women are passive. Men rape active women to punish them for their activity and to remind them of what they are missing when they are under male protection. For women not to be raped, they need to learn to fight. And thus, we have the creation of the dominant narrative of rape.

The irony of this situation is that this cultural narrative does not reflect the reality of rape. Most women are raped by their friends, family and people they trust. Coercion is the cause of a huge number of rapes, so that most rapes do not look like the dominant narrative. The combination of these factors means that many women do not realise that they have been raped, because to most people rape involves a physical fight with a stranger. The conflict between how rape is envisioned in the public imagination and many women’s experiences is often blamed for low conviction rates and the concept of ‘gray rape’.

If we want higher conviction rates for rape, we need to change how we imagine gender. We need to remove the active/passive dichotomy. We need to destroy an understanding of gender that expects one half of the human race to be violent and the other to be always vulnerable. This is not an impossible dream. As I outlined in my last post, this understanding of gender is relatively new. We learned to behave this way. Now we need to unlearn it.

Anti-Sex?

There has been a lot of discussion on various blogs recently about the relationship between sex and feminism, and especially whether to be a feminist you need to be anti-porn. There seems to be considerable difficulty reconciling the place of sex in modern society. Foucault argued that sex became pathology in the nineteenth century, moving from a physical act that had little more social relevance than defecating to a defining part of our persons. As Twisty has recently very aptly put it:

Until you factor in patriarchy and its wacko concepts of property and gender, sex is just a thing, like eating a couple of Cheez-Its, or going to the movies.

More recently historians challenged Foucault’s timeline, arguing that sex had was a central part of people’s identities at various points in history for as far back as there is historical record. Yet, what most historians recognise is that what sex meant and how it related to people’s identities is very historically specific and there is no over-arching or ‘natural’ role for sex in people’s lives. At various points in history, women have been the sexually-aggressive sex; the chaste and pure sex; the frigid sex and the embodiment of sex. Men have not always sought after sex, but often rather reluctantly fulfilled the demands of their insatiable wives. They have also been the insatiable sex, whose ‘natural’ drives have been used to explain away a myriad of sins. The moral of the story is that sex takes its meaning from its social context, not the other way around.

In Western culture today, the place of sex and its relationship with identity is a product of eighteenth century enlightenment ideals, the discovery of the two-sex model of the body (where men and women are understood as different sexes rather than variations of a single sex), and Christian heritage. In the eighteenth century, there was a cultural shift where women moved from being sexually aggressive to passive and chaste, while men became associated with strength, power and virility. This was supported by natural philosophers, such as Thomas Hobbes, medical minds and the Church. During this shift, the act of sex was transformed into a symbol of male possession of women. Man’s ability to enact sex on women signified their social characteristics of power and authority, while women became little more than passive receptors of the male penis. Men became inherently brutal, while women became vulnerable. This understanding of sex and gender became naturalised in the nineteenth century as Darwin’s ‘natural selection’ idealised physical strength as the basis of power and Freud created theories of the psyche to explain why sex meant what it did.

In the late twentieth century, feminists, recognising that sex was the symbolic manifestation of male power and realising that there was absolutely nothing natural about this model of the body, attempted to challenge this through ‘liberating’ sex. They wanted to create a new model of sex that allowed women to break out of a mould that depicted them as passive receptors and glorified the ideal of male sexual virility. They understood that this understanding of sex was inherently problematic and stifling to women and men. Yet, while they managed to remove some of the restrictions on having sex, they failed to achieve a major reinterpretation of the body and gender that underpinned this model of sex. The result is that feminists today have conflicting legacies on the meaning of sex and this has led to a divide between anti-porn and pro-porn feminists. Yet, this division is inherently problematic. As Dr Crazy comments:

In part, I think my difficulty with the [sex-positive] label stems from the fact that it preserves a virgin/whore binary. Either one is anti-porn or one is sex-positive. How is that any different from being a prude or being a slut?

As long as we live in patriarchal culture, all sexual relationships, whether paid or unpaid, on or off-camera, consensual or otherwise, are given meaning by a world-view where sex is the symbolic manifestation of male power. Being pro or anti-porn does not make you a better feminist, because, as long as sex holds the connotations that it currently does, there is no feminist-friendly sex. (And that applies to the lesbian-separatists too, because, under patriarchy, all forms of sex are given meaning by their relationship with ‘normal’, hetero-sex).

The challenge to feminists is to change the meaning of sex. To change the meaning of sex, we need to change what it means to be male and female. The first step in that change is recognising that what it means to be male and female is historically and culturally specific and that sex and sexual urges are NOT natural.