Dear Small Government,

I do not care that 170 civil servants get paid more than the prime minister, because I believe that the work of public servants is valuable and its remuneration should reflect that. I believe that if we want to live in a capitalist system and if we want good people to manage public services (which presumably we do if you want to keep the costs down) then you need to pay a price comparable with that in the private sector for such work. I think that the work of public sector employees helps make Britain a safer, fairer, healthier, and better managed country and to talk about their wages as something that should be ‘held down’ or to ask the public to get angry at paying YOUR employees a fair wage is deeply disturbing. It tells your employees that their work does not matter- or perhaps it does, but it should be done out of the goodness of their hearts? Presumably putting up with all the bullshit (and trust me, there is a lot) that comes with working in the public service industry and rarely earning anything comparable to what your skills would make on the open market is worth it for the knowledge that you make Britain a better place?

The manner in which public service employees are being discussed- as if asking for a fair wage is greedy or unreasonable- as if complaining about their increased workloads as their colleagues lose their jobs around them makes them selfish- as if questioning cuts that are unthoughtful, expensive to implement, and potentially hugely damaging to the economy makes them disloyal- effectively creates a hostile work environment. You have and are showing no respect for those people who have worked hard for this country, implying that they should be fortunate to have jobs in the first place and should just shut up and take it.

This is even more hypocritical when the very anger that you hope to rile in the public is based on their low wages that comes from the exploitation of big business, which pays its fat cats huge wages. It is hypocritical to complain about high wages in the public sector when they are driven by high wages in the private sector, which you not only do not restrict, but actively promote. (I mean if you seriously believe that PM is the most important job in the country, surely NOBODY should earn more?) You talk about this as if this is driven by necessity- but this is nothing more than political spin as you pursue a strategy of small state, big business that does everything for a small number of rich elites and nothing for the population whose labour makes that wealth. What is worse you then have the cheek to criticise that labourforce when they complain about the untenable burden that you place upon them to keep a few rich people happy. To quote the TUC general secretary, ‘These are not temporary cuts, but a permanent rollback of public services and the welfare state. Not so much an economic necessity as a political project driven by an ideological clamour for a minimal state [...] Cut services, put jobs in peril and increase inequality, that's the way to make Britain a darker, brutish, more frightening place’.

This is not a country that I want to live in.

Sirs, I am angry.
Feminist Avatar.

Feminist Veggie to the DEATH Wars

Growing your own veg; the new feminist activism. Because if Twisty can do it, so can I.


Okay, it's only a baby- but I went away on a research trip and came back to this- so proud!

Broccolli too- when do I get to harvest them?

Growing tomatoes outside in Scotland- they might never go red, but they ain't dead!

This is almost as satisfying as blaming the patriarchy, but is good for your stress levels.

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...

Thinking about Body and Mind in the 21st Century

In the seventeenth century, John Locke suggested that a child’s mind was ‘tabula rasa’- a blank slate, and that children needed to be socialised and educated into their social role. This replaced the early modern model where social position was determined by God, the self was marked by original sin, and that child-rearing was a process of disciplining body and soul to restrain that sin and make a person useful to society. The ‘blank slate’ model of the mind transformed how we thought about self, leading to an emphasis on education as the basis for social order and in the creation of identity. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau commented ‘if the timidity, chasteness and modesty which are proper to [women] are social inventions, it is in society’s interest that women acquire these qualities; they must be cultivated in women.’

So, what determined social position if the mind was an open potential, able to be shaped to be anything at all? Increasingly in the eighteenth century, the body became the determining factor in social position. Sexual difference, race, and physical features became the outward markers that determined the appropriate education that should be given to the mind that the body housed. If it was important that women played a particular social role and so received a particular education, then we could decide who ‘women’ were based on their genitals. In this sense, the mind was shaped to the body- and the mind who didn’t realise it was female just needed more discipline or education.

This theory developed in two, not necessarily compatible ways, in the nineteenth century. First, there was the rise of psychology where people’s whose minds did not behave appropriately to their allocated social role could be studied, and ideally re-educated to match their biological characteristics and social expectation. Therefore, for example, someone who felt that their allocated gender did not match their sense of identity, or who was attracted to someone of the same sex, could be labelled ‘mentally ill’, and retrained. And, if the mind was a blank slate- an open potential, then why not? (This model continues into the present, although increasingly we put limits on when the mind stops being adaptable (age, 2, 3 ,7, 26 never).)

Second, the emphasis on the body as determining factor in shaping identity meant that physical characteristics became increasingly seen to determine a person’s potential. This led to the rise in pseudo-sciences like phrenology, where the shape of a person’s head could be used to determine their personality- or physical profiling, where criminality and deviance could be determined by measuring the body or the distance between the eyes. Far from opening up potential then, the move to the biological began to root social characteristics in the body, limiting the potential of the mind to be educated in particular ways. Women's bodies then could be endangered by too much education, with university education leading to an inability to conceive children.

And, in many ways, the legacy between these two competing ways of thinking about self remain with us today. As feminists, we (mostly) reject biological determinism and argue that gender is about education and the social construction of identity. Yet, this leads to the niggling problem of sexuality- how did you end up gay if you weren’t socialised into it? Was it just bad parenting?! Similarly, those who suffer body dysmorphic disorder- which is currently mainly associated with transgendered people, but includes a variety of people, from those who suffer from anorexia to people who feel a need to correct their body with cosmetic surgery- rightly resist the implication that this is simply a case of poor mental health.

In a 21st century context, the static nature of the mind starts to loom larger in the nurture/ nature debate, and increasingly, instead of ‘fixing’ the mind when we experience problems with our bodily appearance or identity, we shape the body. If we sense that our genitals look wrong, our breasts are too small, our stomach too lumpy, many of us no longer sit through hours of therapy trying to come to accept our bodies, but instead go the gym, on a diet or under the knife. We encourage this approach in our increasing obsession with obesity, body sculpting, and fitness, and also how we think about food. Whereas dieting used to be about training your mind, we now think about hormones, sugar levels, foods that release energy all day and keep you feeling full. We think about ways to satiate the body while remaining healthy. It is no longer the recalcitrant mind, but the recalcitrant body that must be re-educated and kept well. We make significantly more links between mind and body, so that poor mental health, like depression, is about hormones, not (just) emotions.

In a sense then, rather than the mind being a tabula rasa, it is the body (at least as much as the mind) which is the empty canvass in the modern world, waiting to be educated or trained into shape. Yet at the same time, we retain a sense of 'biological determinism', but one that focuses on the centrality of the mind, rather than body, to self. And, what are the implications of these new ways of thinking for modern feminism? What happens to the traditional critique of cosmetic surgery- where ‘big boobs’ were viewed as conformity to patriarchal standards- when cosmetic surgery is also what gives people a sense of unity between mind and body? When we become less sure about adapting the mind (where we would have traditionally suggested retraining women to love their small breasts), and give more emphasis to ‘fixing’ the body to meet mental expectations of self. Where is the line between acceptable and unacceptable bodily adaptations, between poor mental health and the recalcitrant body? Where is the place of disability and race politics in this discussion- where bodily perfection has a dangerous tendency to lean towards conformity to particular forms of beauty and body shape, towards sameness and not diversity? And, what does it mean that technology can allow some people to adapt their bodies, but not others?

Blogging against Disablism.

Having run out of time to blog against disablism- I recommend this post, which rocks.

brief interviews with hideous men- some thoughts

So the other night my other half brought me in the 2009 film 'brief interviews with hideous men', told me it was my kind of thing, got bored after 20 minutes and left me to watch the rest. In what is probably going to humiliatingly reveal my complete cultural ignorance, before he brought it home, I had been completely unaware of this film and the book it is based on. [potential spoilers ahead- although I reckon you could watch this film knowing what is going to happen without it being a major issue]

So, the film begins with various men sitting behind a desk, giving narratives about their personal- and frequently sex- lives (have fun identifying the men out of all your favourite US tv shows! Is that Jim from the US Office; Stabler from SVU; dude from Leverage!- what do you mean I watch too much tv?). There is a tape recorder on the desk, but you do not see the interviewer or know the question. As the sequence of interviews continues, the interviewer (the new woman out of law and order: criminal intent) is seen and eventually the interviews are interspersed with sequences of conversations between her and other men in her life. She is a grad-student interviewing men for her studies. You never hear the questions she asks her interviewees and her conversation with other men in her life (ex-boyfriend, other grad-students, her u/grad students, professor) is very much dominated by their speaking; she is limited to brief responses and questions. The very few other women in this film have almost no dialogue- perhaps one sentence throughout.

Yet, this film is all about women. All these men, except perhaps one, are discussing their relationships with women. The women in these narratives are not human; they are objects for sexual gratification; they are wives discussed for their looks, not their minds; they are absent as much as they are present (like the interviewer). The men's narratives are relentlessly shallow, frequently misogynistic- they are truly hideous men. Yet sometimes complex questions are suggested in these narratives- one man describing his past concern that his wife may get ugly as she aged (she didn't) comments on how shallow it sounds, but asks if it could sound otherwise? One (physically beautiful) man in repeated sections that build on each other (and act as a rhetorical attack on the interviewer in their increased aggression) suggests that rape is not the worst thing that could happen to a woman- they can move on, become better because of it- but then ends his narrative by suggesting he was talking about his own rape. In one of the last narratives, the ex-boyfriend who cheated relates how his cheating began with an intention to use a women that he knew he could manipulate easily into bed and leave with no regret (he had no intent to end his primary relationship); but the woman he cheats with relates a narrative of her life and she becomes so fully human to him that he cannot leave her (and so dumps the girlfriend). Yet, in this act (and the narrative structure sets it up this way), he dehumanises the girlfriend he left behind- for one woman to become human another must be dehumanised. And then it is the end with no resolution, just hideous, shallow men and the woman who wants interview them.

Yet, the (this) viewer can't help but question all of these narratives. Yes, they fulfil every stereotype of masculinity presented in the media- they are the 'bad guys' that are popularly represented to haunt feminist narratives. These are how feminists are seen to conceive of men. Yet, the viewer knows that they are not men; they are empty shells as unhuman as they woman they describe. The question that these hideous men raise is not where are the 'good' men- but where are the 'real' men- the 3-dimensional men; those who are good and bad and ugly at the same time. In this sense, this is not a feminist narrative- it undermines the feminist (the interviewer) by suggesting that this is not masculinity- and if it is not masculinity, then what are feminists fighting against? Because if real men are not hideous, then what is feminism all about? In essence, the film both creates a false masculinity and a false construction of what feminism is in order to undermine feminism.

What is perhaps the more complex question, is what is the film's ultimate intent? Is it to undermine feminism- or are you meant to recognise that this is the intent of the narrative, because if you do, it then raises the question, if this is not feminism- what is?

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.