In which Sadie Smith complains about being told to check her privilege

Or at least, I think that’s the gist of her article, which rails against “online Mean Girls” who are – apparently – conspiring to bully well-intentioned young women out of the feminist movement. For shame! Be warned – the article will probably make you rage. There’s two parts to the article, which I’ll take down one at a time. I actually contemplated not writing this at all – I usually reserve this blog for media stuff, film reviews etc – but I figure this kind of thing happens so often that I might as well write it up once and have done with it. So here goes.

1. People are abusing the idea of privilege!! Oh noes!! Sometimes I have to check it!

According to Smith, there’s an online mob of women who go around demanding people “check their privilege”. I’m imagining them riding in like Valkyries, spears at the ready, screaming “CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE WHITE WOMEN!!” whilst slashing their way through mainstream feminism. Ah, good times.

“Where “privilege” goes wrong is that it is routinely used for, I’d argue, shutting up women who disagree with the Online Mob. The whole foundation of the argument is flawed anyway; about 35 per cent of the world’s population has access to the internet. Everyone on Twitter is privileged. Everyone. Claiming “unprivileged” underdog status when you are in the top 35 per cent of the entire world makes you sound like the sort of annoying princess who screams that it’s just not fair and she hates you because she only got an iPhone and a pony for Christmas.”

Oh, do you hear that? Asking women to ‘check their privilege’ is MEAN and just used to shut people up. Also, everyone on the internet is privileged just for having the internet, so no other complaints about relative oppression is valid and you are all just whining when you talk about it.

Here’s the thing about the internet and our increasingly-global society: it’s full of people who have vastly different life experiences to our own, and some people have relative privilege over others due to being white, or cis, or straight, or living in a Western country, or being upper-middle-class as opposed to dirt poor. We’re all trying to navigate this as best we can, sometimes we clash, usually we manage to learn from each other. Hey, I’m a white Muslim woman, I know all about intersecting privileges and oppressions – this isn’t straightforward stuff. The key to getting it right and getting feminism right is to listen to other people’s narratives about their own lives and to constantly bear in mind that no one OWNS feminism and that it’s supposed to be a movement for everyone. It can get fraught online. I get that. Sometimes people get annoyed and sweary. It’s almost as if the world is full of women who are navigating more oppressions than you’ll ever have to deal with and they aren’t necessarily inclined to hold your hand and gently correct you whilst you get everything about their life wrong? I dunno, just a gut feeling telling me that has something to do with it.

There’s altogether too many white, straight, cis, Western, middle-class, able-bodied feminists who – due to their hefty dose of privilege – are able to ignore all of this, and ignore the need for feminism to be intersectional and take into account the myriad other oppressions many women face. And being able to ignore it, many of them choose to do just that. These women are frequently the face of ‘mainstream feminism’ – or what Smith calls ‘good honest feminism’ (ugh) – and it seems like every time they’re reminded that, hey, not all women are carting around a bucketload of privileges, some of us are facing a perfect storm of different societal oppressions that we can’t untangle, and we deserve feminism too – they get annoyed. They get defensive. They get angry and start bitterly complaining about how unfair life is.

Remember when someone turned up at Slutwalk with a racist sign and women of colour complained and then white women told them to pipe down and stop being “divisive”? Remember when radfems uninvited trans* women from their conference because hey policing gender, that’s a fun thing to do? Remember all those times white feminists have decided Muslim women need saving from Islam and hijab, completely ignoring what Muslim women actually have to say about those things? FUN TIMES.

This is what happens when feminism isn’t intersectional.

If it feels like there’s a lot of women online pushing and pushing for feminism to be intersectional and inclusive, maybe that’s because they’ve been repeatedly failed by the mainstream feminist movement and all this pushing is in fact not uppity troublemaking but pushing back against a movement that’s sidelined them and marginalised them for far too long. Maybe think about that, huh?

When you tell women to stop saying “check your privilege”; when you bemoan “call out culture” and complain that calling people out for their failings is just about showing off or being a troll, then you’re silencing women. You’re telling them to shut up about racism in the feminist movement; shut up about how the movement excludes them; shut up and sit down and stop talking about things that affect them as women. And when you do that you’re implicitly asking women to throw their weight behind a movement that is repeatedly failing to represent them – and is sometimes overtly harming them. When you parse “raising legitimate concerns about feminism’s failings” or “calling out troublesome behaviour because it’s hurtful” as “attacking other women, boo hoo”, then that’s a move calculated to shut down debate and dissent. Furthermore it casts women who have occasion to call out other women as unreasonable bullies. The conflation between ‘getting called out’ and ‘being bullied by online meanies’ is trotted out on an almost daily basis, but it’s entirely disingenuous. Being told you said something hurtful or are being inconsiderate is not ‘bullying’, and I can’t believe I really need to say that.

But of course, Smith does what so many other privileged feminists do, which is claim that there’s some vast, organised, evil collective of dissenting individuals out there ready to leap on unsuspecting straight white cis women the moment they slip up. The way Smith tells it you’d think Twitter was a-swarm with feminist Valkyries terrorising poor unsuspecting white girls when they try to join the feminist movement. I guess that’s what happens when you think being asked to modify your behaviour so as not to harm others is mean nasty bullying. How very dare anyone ask you to examine how your privilege allows you to frame and control the feminist debate? BULLYING I TELL YOU. MEAN GIRLS.

And yeah, sometimes call-outs get rough. Sometimes there’s… like… swearing and nasty words. Hey, news flash – when people are telling you how your behaviour fits into a pattern of systemic oppression that makes their daily life infinitely more difficult, they might sound harsh! Maybe even a bit rude! It’s almost as if constantly having to deal with multiple oppressions that can’t be disentangled exasperates and frustrates people. And it’s almost as if by ignorantly perpetuating those oppressions you’ve upset or angered someone, and that emotional reaction is entirely a valid and appropriate one, and the anger that’s directed at you is completely understandable and warranted given the circumstances. And, you know, policing other women’s emotional reactions to things that might understandably make them angry or upset is a form of oppression; and dismissing their concerns because they’re angry and that made them sound mean is a form of silencing.

As I said on Twitter, I’m 1000000% DONE with this kind of feminism. Take it away.

2. Cis is a horrible insult!! It hurts my poor fee-fees!

Yeah, no. Just no.

File this under “collecting your folks”, because I’m a white cis woman, Smith is a white cis woman, so let’s do this.

[N.B. This part probably needs a trigger warning, so I've whited-out the bits of it that are particularly distressing. They're about the death of a trans woman, Lucy Meadows.]

So according to Smith, the word ‘cis’ to describe ‘anyone not trans’ is terrible and upsetting:

“A lot of cis women have a problem with the term [cis] in a way they can’t quite fathom. Well, I’ve fathomed it and I’ll tell you: because it’s a name that has, once again, been conferred upon a certain group of women without their consent. It would still matter, although infinitely not as much, if a Twitter search of “cis” demonstrated that the term is mostly used in a sisterly and affectionate manner. Nah, more like “cissexist”, “cisfascist” and, in one case to a certain Laurie Penny of this parish, “f*ck off cis girl.” [...]

So forgive me if I hear “cis” as an insult to the very essence of who I am and then, when I complain, feel aggrieved that I’m not entitled to experience my discomfort because my “privilege” means that my point of view doesn’t matter and my opinions don’t count.

The good news is that cis is a term that can be reclaimed. After all, it is just a word and meanings of words can be rehabilitated. But in its current manifestation, through its misuse, it is laden with pejorative connotations.“

This is beyond ridiculous. BEYOND. Cis is an insult? “Laden with pejorative connotations”? A word to be “reclaimed”?

I really recommend you read this excellent article by Stavvers and Cel West about what’s wrong with this statement – I can’t really add a lot to this exemplary analysis, so this part will be short.

This sort of statement reminds me a lot of white people who get upset when you call them ‘white’ and act like being labeled (entirely correctly) as white is horrible and offensive and HOW VERY DARE YOU. ‘Cis’ is a fairly innocuous word that’s really useful when discussing issues that face trans* individuals; similarly words like ‘cissexism’ or even ‘cisfascism’ or ‘cissupremacy’ are important words that we need to have in order to discuss power structures and privileges. These are not light issues, either – fear and hatred of trans* individuals all-too-often translates into real-world, physical violence.

It’s a grim happenstance that Smith wrote this article the same week that a trans woman named Lucy Meadows died. [Her death is believed to be a suicide, and it was preceded by an extremely nasty hate-piece about her in the Daily Mail, written by Richard Littlejohn. It's not yet known if the media attention led to her taking her own life; but we do know that she and her community were being hounded by 'the press pack' trying to get photos and statements. This predatory attention was probably due to the fact that Miss Meadows was a teacher who was about to return to teaching after making the transition to living openly as a woman, and the Daily Mail line was the usual "think of the children!" drek.]

This is how serious and damaging hatred of trans* individuals can get. I don’t claim by any means to be an expert on these matters, but I’ve seen the kind of things that happen to trans* folks and it’s deeply worrying and disquieting. We NEED to be discussing such things and we NEED to make feminism open and welcoming to trans women. Feminism should be a tool we use to address such problems, and for that to happen we need to use words like ‘cis’ and ‘cissexism’ and so on. And if your one take away from these discussions is that you don’t like the way ‘cis’ sounds and it’s making you uncomfortable? Well, screw you. Because that is a terrible, vile, selfish position to take. What you’re saying is harassment and mistreatment of trans women is less important than your hurt feelings about being labeled with a word you ‘didn’t choose’, and that’s outright disgusting.

“A lot of cis women have a problem with the word!” Smith cries, purposefully obfuscating exactly who she’s speaking for here. Well, Sadie Smith doesn’t speak for me. I’m completely a-okay with words like ‘cis’ and ‘cissexism’. I want to see them used more often. Let’s have the debates we need to have.

I’ve got no time for the type of ‘feminism’ that privileges the hurt feelings of straight white cis women over actual, real, serious problems facing the less privileged. And if that makes me a part of the ‘Mean Girls club’, then so be it.

“For your own good”: controlling every aspect of a woman’s life

Recently I picked up Supernatural again because, you know, boredom. This is a show about two brothers and their epic adventures in which women… don’t seem to feature very highly, so set your bars at the lowest setting because there’s really no point trying to spin Supernatural as progressive.

At the end of season 6 something specific happens that got me thinking, because it happens quite a lot in SF/F stories. Dean Winchester (Jensen Ackles) asks the angel Castiel (Misha Collins) to erase his ex-girlfriend’s memory of him; essentially, to use his magical angel powers to erase himself from her life “for her own good”.

I really dislike this trope on a number of levels.

First of all, some background: Dean has an on-again, off-again relationship this woman, whose name is Lisa Braeden (Cindy Sampson). Lisa essentially functions as Dean’s prized possession, the thing he wants to have but can’t because he’s a HUNTER oh the manpain. He occasionally turns up in her life but it can never work because HUNTER the PAIN etc. Between season 5 and season 6 Dean spends a year living a normal life with Lisa and her son Ben (Nicholas Elia) and it’s all super-happiness and rainbows and normal domesticity and then Sam Winchester (Jared Padaleki) returns and ruins everything. Boo.

I’m already giving the epic side-eye to the way Lisa is treated in the narrative. Whenever Dean wants her, there she is, as if all she does is wait around in her house for the day Dean Winchester shows up on her doorstep. She never moves house, or gets another boyfriend, or gets married; she’s always conveniently single and available. This lasts until the end of season 6, when she finally decides to ‘move on’ (after about ten years of this) and dates someone else – and even this is not a plot about her, as a character, or her emotional needs – it’s about Dean once again. She moves on because that will allow Dean to have some teary-eyed manpain in the Impala.

At the end of season 6 Lisa gets very-nearly-fridged in order to provide Dean with yet more manpain and some hero moments. She gets kidnapped by the demon Crowley (Mark Sheppard) and possessed by a demon – all to draw Dean out and distract him from Crowley’s other plans. The demon stabs Lisa before Dean expels it, prompting a frantic dash to the hospital, a bedside Lisa-is-going-to-die scene and a last-minute intervention by Castiel.

At this point Dean decides he is Too Dangerous to be around. He is Risking Lisa’s Life. So he asks Castiel to go one step further and erase Lisa’s (and Ben’s) memory of him. Lisa wakes up and has no idea who Dean is, and after wishing her well as a ‘concerned stranger’ he proceeds to have a little cry in the hospital hallway before telling Sam never to mention Lisa or Ben again.

This act cements Lisa as nothing more than a token, at least in the eyes of the plot. Lisa isn’t a whole person; I don’t even know what Lisa does for a living, or what she likes or wants out of life. She’s an object that’s representative of something – namely, the life that Dean wants (normal, domestic, sans demons) but can never have because of his Hunter legacy. Within the narrative she isn’t actually a person; she’s alternately a symbol and a possession, something Dean can strive for, toy with, possess for a little while before regretfully putting it down and walking away. The Lisa-and-Dean arc isn’t about Dean’s need for emotional intimacy, or Dean loving someone enough to try and leave the Hunter life; it’s about the incompatibility of Hunting with normality. And it isn’t about Lisa at all.

That’s why the arc culminates in the symbolic act of erasure and removal. Dean doesn’t get Castiel to erase his own memories of Lisa – he needs to keep those as a reminder of the life he can never have; of the burden of being a Hunter and what he’s denied because of it. When Dean erases Lisa he erases the possibility of having normality and family and simple domesticity; he closes a door that’s served as an escape route for him in previous years. She no longer remembers him and will no longer welcome him into her life; that avenue of escape and release is no longer available to him. It’s all symbolic and it all denies Lisa’s personhood.

This is hardly surprising: Supernatural is, first and foremost, a narrative about men, and in such a narrative it’s common for women to be not-truly-people.

But let’s talk about Lisa’s agency – and the agency of all the other women in SF/F who have this done to them, because ‘erase her memories’ and/or ‘leave for her own good’ is something that seems to crop up a lot in the genre. It seems that walking away from a woman who loves you is part of what makes a man a hero. This trope is never about women, despite ostensibly being about what’s ‘best’ for the woman involved – it’s about men making Heroic Sacrifices to prove how noble/honorable/decent they are.

In SF/F the ‘we can’t be together, I’m leaving for your own good’ is usually because the guy in question is a monster of sorts. Think Edward McSparklepants in Twilight. This also happens to Elena Gilbert in The Vampire Diaries – Stefan Salvatore (a vampire) pulls this very early on, and later Damon Salvatore (another vampire) uses his magic-vampire-compulsion to make Elena forget that he’s in love with her, again, for her own good. I seem to recall Harry Potter doing this to Ginny Weasley at one point too. There’s probably other examples.

Even on a mundane, among-humans level this idea of leaving someone for their own good has dubious implications for the other person’s agency. It’s possible to do this – to decide to extract oneself from someone’s life because you’re hurting them – and have pure, altruistic reasons and motivations. But it still cuts that person out of the decision making process. In fiction it seems to occur mostly to women, who are left ‘for their own good’ by heroic men who feel their presence is bringing a world of harm to her previously-mundane life. The woman in question doesn’t get to decide whether or not she wants to be left. Maybe she likes dating a guy who’s a bit dangerous? Maybe Lisa wants to be a Hunter too and is just waiting for Dean to take her out on the road? Maybe Ginny feels she’d be a lot safer sticking as close to Harry as possible, where he can potentially protect her, rather than just being abandoned to her own devices?

Well, who cares. Certainly not the narrative and certainly not the heroes, who take it upon themselves to make this decision on behalf of the helpless, weak-minded women in their lives. What are you going to do, trust a woman to make that decision herself? Pfft don’t be silly.

SF/F manages to add another level of grossness to this trope in the form of ‘erase her memories’. In genre work there’s usually something available to the hero that can wipe memories from the mind of the woman he’s heroically leaving – angels, compulsion, magic spells etc all come into play. This goes one step beyond just leaving. The act of leaving a person for their ‘own good’ is an act of extracting oneself from their life – and in the process, ignoring their right to decide whether or not they want you in their life in the first place. The act of erasing memories of yourself is an act of extracting yourself even further – not just your physical presence, but the memory of you, the mental footprint you would otherwise leave in that person’s life.

On Twitter last night I described it like this:

“This trope is often about men claiming the right not just to control women’s lives, actions and bodies – but their minds too… Men exerting complete control over every aspect of a woman’s inner and outer life.”

Because this is what it’s about. The assumption underlying this trope is that men have a right to control the lives of women – who they are with, what they do, how they spend their time. It’s done benevolently – “for her own good” – but it’s still an act of control that takes away women’s agency and denies them the right to make decisions about their own lives and bodies. When you add the memory-erasing aspect, it goes beyond simply exerting control over the physical aspects of a woman’s life – a man reaches into a woman’s mind and alters her very memories. Our memories form part of who we are; they are an integral aspect of our lives, our experience and hence our personalities – why does anyone have the right to interfere in those? The answer is they don’t – but in SF/F, the moral implications of this kind of memory meddling are rarely deeply examined.

When Dean has Lisa’s memory of him wiped clean, we’re supposed to feel for him in his moment of pain. It’s supposed to be upsetting and emotional because she was so important to him and now he’s just a stranger in her eyes. It’s supposed to show Dean as a heroic character, doing the ‘right thing’ in order to protect Lisa. But in actual fact it just comes across as creepy. What if Lisa wants to remember him? What if she has wonderful, amazing memories of their time together that she wants to preserve – even though there were bad memories along with them? How does wiping her memory clean even help her? Surely it just makes her more vulnerable to demon attack, because now she doesn’t know what a demon is AND doesn’t know who to call about demon-related problems.

The fact is that this act isn’t supposed to make sense – it’s just supposed to make manpain. It’s a gesture to demonstrate Dean’s heroism. It has nothing to do with Lisa’s safety at all.

This trope usually functions the same way whenever it crops up. Whether or not the guy in question actually leaves or just makes a lot of noise about going, it still boils down to a dramatic show of heroism rather than a well-thought-out plan that will actually make the woman in question safer. When Stefan declares his intent to leave Elena ‘for her own good’ in The Vampire Diaries, it’s a ploy to make Stefan look noble and honorable. When Damon tells Elena he loves her and then compels her to forget, it’s not about Elena – it’s a plot point designed to make Damon appear sympathetic and deep.

It’s never about the woman. It’s never about her safety. It’s about men, and their right to exert complete, comprehensive control over women’s lives. It’s about performative heroism. It’s there to provide manpain. “For her own good” is never really for her own good – it’s always for the benefit of men.

Hansel and Gretel: plot coherence is for amateurs

Note: this review contains spoilers.

I went to see Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters with friends, one of whom was hugely disappointed in the film and railed against its many failings. I was not disappointed, because my expectations of this movie were extremely low. It’s about leather-clad witch hunters with anachronistic guns. This was never going to be high art.

So let’s take a tour through the Vaguely European Town Hansel and Gretel is supposedly set in.

We all know the story of the two orphans left in the woods, captured by the witch, blah blah house made of sweets blah oven etc. According to this movie, after that initial incident Hansel and Gretel got a taste for witch-burning and set out on a long, profitable career as witch hunters. Witches in this world are of course real and not just women who know what to do with herbs. And witches steal children.

Hansel (Jeremy Renner) and Gretel (Gemma Arterton) pitch up to the Bavarian town of Augsburg, where a recent spate of child kidnappings have left the locals jittery and suspicious of everyone. No one in Augsburg has a German accent, or speaks German, and the film never quite establishes what century this story takes place in, presumably because actual history or realism would make it too difficult to hand-wave all the ridiculous weapons. Augsburg looks like what American film execs think European towns looked like back in whatever days this film takes place in; apparently cities weren’t invented back then so the ‘town’ is one small square and an inn. Either that or the set-building budget was slashed to give more money to the CGI witches.

You know what else got left out of this movie? Brown people. I am not exaggerating when I say that every single character in this film is White. Remember, this is the Hollywood Fantasy Version of Europe, a place so geographically remote it’s impossible for Black people or Asians to travel here. What do you mean Europe is only separated from North Africa by a few hundred miles of easily-navigable sea? Wait, what’s the Silk Road? Pfft, who cares? Throw in more ridiculous guns!

She alone possess the arcane knowledge of dyeing clothes.

When our witch hunting orphans arrive in town, the good folks of Augsburg are preparing to burn a ‘witch’ at the stake. This woman is called Mina (Pihla Viitala), and you can tell she’s a plot-relevant character because unlike all the rest of the Generic Nameless Peasants she wears clothes with colours! Hansel inspects Mina’s ears, face and teeth before boldly declaring that this woman is not a witch. SPOILER ALERT: this woman turns out to be a witch.

That’s the problem with Hansel and Gretel: it’s utterly predictable. It suffers from a bad case of generia: everything is generic. The characters are generic, the settings are generic, and the plot is the same generic recycled plot from every fantasy action movie ever. Some good guys fight some bad guys. There’s evil magic. There’s ~surprise plot twists~ that aren’t surprising anymore because every movie like this has a plot twist. When Hansel gruffly tells Mina that he’s never met a witch he didn’t want to kill, you just know that the ~shock twist~ will be finding out some witches are good! And there are witches he doesn’t want to kill!

For now Mina gets off scott-free, and Hansel and Gretel head out to the woods to investigate a creepy cabin wherein awaits an evil witch. Black magic literally transforms evil witches into hideous crones, making them pretty easy to spot and also leading to an epidemic of Bizarre Make-Up Decisions. All the witches are women, which on the one hand is kinda cool because yay powerful ladies! But on the other hand it does mean that this is a movie where Jeremy Renner beats up and gruesomely kills a bunch of women. Also, we have the tired and familiar trope of power corrupting women and making them hideous. The Good Witches don’t have this problem – they’re also a lot less powerful. So too much power corrupts women. Also ugly = evil. Yup, this film goes there, the place that every fantasy film ever seems to go. SIGH.

Our intrepid heroes capture a witch in the woods who turns out to be a dead end because she doesn’t know anything about the missing children. Except apparently she’s not a dead end. She knows all about the witchy plans and the kidnapped kiddies. She’s so not a dead end that she helpfully explains the entire plot to Gretel. Plot coherence, what’s that? You mean the script should make internal sense? Pfft! Amateurs! Throw in more guns!

She didn’t really think this plan through.

It turns out the evilest of all evil witches, Muriel (Famke Janssen), is planning a big witchy shindig at the ‘blood moon’ to sacrifice a bunch of kids and make the witches impervious to fiery death. Since fiery death is apparently a major occupational hazard for evil witches, the guest list for this witchapalooza is pretty long. Muriel likes to make life easy for our heroes, though, so she conveniently kidnaps all the children she needs for the sacrifice from this one small town of Augsburg, because that won’t raise suspicions or anything. Surely witches who can fly at great speeds could take their sacrificial kiddies from numerous different villages, thus allaying suspicion and throwing hunters off the scent? Pfft! Stop this nonsense plot talk! THROW IN MORE GUNS!

Muriel comes back to Augsburg to pick up her final child and coincidentally rescue the captive not-really-useful-except-totally-she-is witch from the cell where Hansel and Gretel have been torturing her. A bunch of people die gruesome bloody deaths at the hands of Muriel and her witch pack; Muriel herself throws Gretel out of a window, whilst Hansel grabs onto a witch’s broom (SMART, HANSEL, REAL SMART) and ends up lost in the woods.

Let’s talk about Gretel – who up to this point had been pretty competent and no-nonsense. When she arrives in town, Gretel’s first action is to drop an F-bomb then headbutt a guy in the face. Awesome! She also appears to be nominally in charge, bossing Hansel around a fair bit and taking the lead on the duo’s actions. When they go out into the woods to capture the witch, Gretel handles herself pretty damn well and is eventually the one who strings the witch up. For about the first half hour of the movie I loved Gretel. Then she became inexplicably powerless so that she could be KO’ed by Muriel and rescued by her teenage fanboy Benjamin (Thomas Mann). Later on she gets beaten up by a bunch of the sheriff’s goons, even though earlier she took on a powerful witch? Because reasons? Thirty minutes in and suddenly Gretel needs to be rescued all the time. Why can’t she just kick ass for the whole movie? Why does she need to get rescued but Hansel doesn’t? The answer is that Gretel is a woman, and Western storytelling has a strong aversion to powerful women who are not in some way undermined or brought down to size.

There’s a particularly gross thing that happens next: Gretel, having been thrown out the window by Muriel, is carted off to Benjamin’s house where he takes it upon himself to ‘clean her up’ by mopping her brow with a damp cloth. This is all well and good until he decides she won’t be properly de-grimed unless he also mops her half-exposed chest. Gretel thus awakes to find him groping her boobs without her consent, and PSA for all the dudes out there: this is totally sexual harassment, no really, it absolutely is. In the film it’s played for laughs, because LOL TEENAGE FANBOY ha ha look he wants to touch her boobies, SO HILARIOUS. Gretel wakes up and to my immense and lasting surprise does not proceed to throw Benjamin out of a window herself. She just sorta smirks and gives him the disapproving, “oh you” look and then eats porridge with him whilst checking out his creepy obsessive documenting of her life.

This level of awesomeness only lasted for about half an hour. Boo.

Here’s a thing that often happens in movies or on TV: a man will do something incredibly sexist, gross, violating or misogynistic, and the women to whom or in front of whom it is done will react either by laughing, shrugging it off or with an expression of long-suffering patience. They don’t object. They don’t turn around and punch the guy. They just take it in stride because it’s just a joke, right? It’s just good fun? It’s not serious. No one means anything by it. This non-reaction is repeated so often in fiction that it serves to normalise the idea that women should not react strongly or vehemently to sexism, misogyny or violations of their bodily integrity. Women are supposed to take it in their stride, so in real life when women do want to speak out strongly against such behaviour they’re accused of ‘making a fuss’ or a ‘big deal’ out of it. Why can’t they be like those fictional women, who get the joke and don’t ‘overreact’? Gretel is the kind of character who I wouldn’t expect to let something slide like that; but she does, because she’s a woman in a culture that normalises these kind of sexist aggressions. In this story, the ‘joke’ of the handsy teenage fanboy coping a cheeky feel is more important than Gretel’s feelings about waking up to an unexpected groping. As usual, a woman’s right to control what happens to her own body is waaaaay down on the list of priorities, because THERE’S A BOOB JOKE TO BE MADE HERE, WOO!

So what’s Hansel up to whilst this casual molestation is going on? He’s out in the woods with the single other Good Woman who features in this story: Mina. Mina finds Hansel stuck up a tree and takes him to a ‘healing spring’ to ‘bathe his wounds’ IF YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN. This part of the movie features a completely gratuitous nude shot of Mina – I guess because Gretel got to beat some people up earlier in the movie and that awesomeness needs to be balanced out by some shameless objectifying, lest the film become too ‘feminist’ with all its powerful women and the like. Can’t have that, can we ladies? Quick, throw in a topless scene! Hansel and Mina apparently spend all day in the healing spring because Mina doesn’t have a job or anything to do apart from this, and Hansel is happy to spend the day with no idea whether or not his sister is even alive because LOL NAKED BOOBS.

It turns out Gretel is in a bit of trouble – she marches out to the woods to find Hansel, and rather than finding him naked and getting it on in a natural forest hottub (aaawwwwkward) she runs into the Sheriff’s men. The Sheriff doesn’t like Gretel because she broke his nose and also Reasons that don’t make sense, so his goons beat her up. Gretel apparently left her secret power ring at home again and even though yesterday she was happily taking down witches, today she’s getting worked over by angry villagers. YET AGAIN Gretel needs to be saved, this time by a troll named Edward. Edward strongly hints that Gretel might be a witch (or of witchy blood) but she has apparently been struck down by plot-related cluelessness and doesn’t think to question Edward about what he means. Edward the Friendly Troll then wanders off and leaves her in the woods on her own, because now that he’s saved her he doesn’t care anymore? Because reasons? LOL THROW IN SOME MORE GUNS!

Eventually after much woodland wandering Hansel and Gretel meet up once again in an abandoned forest cabin that is, yes, the cabin they grew up in. The siblings are very pleased to see each other. VERY PLEASED. Face-pressy, cheek-touchy pleased. Hansel notices Gretel’s split lip and gets all “WHO DID THIS TO YOU WHO GRETEL TELL ME I WILL KILL THEM ALL.” Some films manage to make the brother/sister dynamic work onscreen without implying anything incestalicious. Hansel and Gretel is not one of those films. It is the opposite of one of those films. Aaaaaawwwkward.

NOTHING WEIRDLY CO-DEPENDENT ABOUT THIS RELATIONSHIP, NO SIR!

Their extremely affectionate reunion is interrupted by Muriel, who comes to the cabin to infodump Hansel and Gretel’s back story to them. Surprise twist! Their mother was a witch! A good witch! Yes, the shock reveal of this movie is “not everyone in a minority group is evil and violent, sometimes they’re good too” which uh… yeah. I’m not going there. Anyway it turns out Muriel wanted to use Mamma Witch’s heart for her anti-inflammatory-sacrifice, but instead she’s going to use Gretel’s because reasons? The main reason being, this film will not be content until Gretel has been beaten up and victimised a bajillion times by a bunch of different people. THAT’S WHAT YOU GET, LADIES if you go around breaking guys’ noses and being awesome! Kidnapped. You get kidnapped.

Remember what I said about powerful women needing to be undermined? Muriel gets undermined by ultimately dying (SHOCK TWIST: good defeats evil!) and Gretel gets undermined by being proved powerless. Her power is a facade. All that swearing and bravado? Just a front. When push comes to shove she needs to be rescued and tended to by various males: Benjamin, Edward the Troll and finally Hansel. It’s cool that I watched Anita Sarkeesian’s first Tropes vs. Women in Video Games video this week, because it gave me a new word for what happens to Gretel: she gets damseled. She goes from kick-ass action heroine to damsel in distress seemingly overnight.

Even this guy got to save Gretel, I MEAN REALLY.

This is a common problem for powerful, strong women in Western fiction: their power and strength is not seen as enduring – not in the way that a man’s is. Hansel and Gretel is great in this regard because you can directly compare the two siblings. They’re supposedly on equal parity, a daring witch-hunting duo; and yet it’s Gretel who gets constantly kidnapped, Gretel who gets beaten up, Gretel who needs saving and Gretel who displays an emotional, vulnerable side. In the day they spend apart, Gretel gets saved by a fanboy, casually groped, pours out her secret emotional pain, gets beaten up by goons and then gets rescued again by Edward the Troll. Meanwhile, Hansel has sex with a hot witch babe. Then Gretel gets whisked away by Muriel and chained to a rock, which conveniently allows Hansel to Go It Alone in true action-hero style.

Here’s something that Requires Hate said about strong female characters and their secret, defenseless selves:

There’s a running theme here, and it is that women don’t get to be powerful. Not for long. Not inherently and completely. She must have some weakness, some moment of vulnerability or breakdown, or experience some sort of trauma–preferably the sexual kind. She must be quickly demoted, usually to make room for the male protagonist or his male cohorts. Usually this weakness is passed off as depth, as a thing that “rounds her out” and which makes her more “relatable.”

What it actually does, though, is perpetuate the idea that strength in a woman is temporary and illusory.

Gretel hits pretty much all of these points. Hansel, on the other hand, is stoic and unemotional. And Gretel gets unceremoniously pushed aside to make room in the narrative for Hansel to save the day, kill the bad witch and rescue the kidnapped children. Gretel’s ‘strength’ is fragile, evaporating almost as soon as it’s established; Hansel remains strong throughout.

This becomes even more glaring when we get to the final boss battle. Mina reveals herself as a witch and puts a protection spell on all of Hansel’s cool weapons so he can shoot the witches. Then Hansel, Mina and Benjamin the grope-tastic fanboy head up to the ridiculous mountaintop venue for the Witchapalooza. There’s a bunch of witches meeting up here, ready to get their anti-inflammatory protection spell thingy whatever, and I’m really not sure who designed all these witches but it looks like Wonderland crashed into an M.C. Escher painting. Muriel and her nameless witch sidekicks are there, and Gretel is chained to a rock in true Damsel in Distress style.

The fight scene that follows is pretty generic, because ‘generic’ should’ve been this film’s subtitle instead of ‘Witch Hunters’. Hansel does most of the hard work. Mina fires a Gatling gun. Edward the Troll remembers that he was sorta friends with Gretel for about ten minutes back there, and decides to help her instead of standing by and letting her heart get ripped out. The witches die gruesome bloody deaths. Murial grabs her broomstick and flies off into the forest.

Now of course Gretel is free by this point, so you might imagine a woman such as she is hot on the trail of revenge and wants to take down Muriel personally just to get her back for the heart-ripping-out thing. Nope! Gretel’s first concern is poor dear Edward the Troll, who went over the cliff during the fighting. “I have to help Edward!” cries Gretel, and runs off to do just that. Perhaps you’re wondering why she cares so much about a troll she barely knows and who was sorta complicit in putting her in a cage before he had a change of heart? Well, she cares because she’s a WOMAN. Naturally, being a WOMAN, she’s got her care-feels on and has formed an emotional attachment to Edward and now feels compelled to run down and save him. Ah, women, eh? And their irrational emotional attachments? Up until this point there’s nothing to indicate that Gretel as a person is particularly prone to caring about random strangers or forming attachments, so it’s literally just the fact that she’s a woman, therefore she must CARE.

It’s left to Hansel to chase down Muriel (she goes to their old cabin in the woods, because Emotional Resonance) and when he confronts her (Mina in tow) Mina decides to be a witch and try and do magical battle with Muriel. Muriel kills her pretty quickly, allowing Hansel to have a Touching Moment where Mina dies in his arms. Yes, Mina is only in this film to get naked, sleep with Hansel and then die to facilitate Hansel’s heartwrenching emotional journey. And to think the first twenty minutes of this movie were so promising. Nope nope n o p e.

Where would an action movie be without some good ol’ manpain?

Eventually Gretel, having saved her troll buddy, catches up with Hansel in the cabin in time for the final boss fight with Muriel. Quite why she bothered is a mystery, because this fight is clearly between Hansel and Muriel. Gretel gets conveniently knocked out early on and spends most of the action lying semi-conscious on the fringes. Hansel must take revenge for the death of that woman he only just met and casually slept with! STEP ASIDE ACTION HEROINE!

Gretel does get to help a little, though. Hansel has diabetes (because of Plot Reasons Blah Blah) and at the crucial moment in the fight it comes time for him to take his insulin shot. This is Fantasy Diabetes, so not taking his insulin Right Now causes him to collapse and go into spasms because Reasons. But fear not! Gretel is here! Does she rise up, take down the witch single-handed, deliver a snappy one-liner then haul her brother out of there and carry him to safety? Pfft don’t be silly. She gives Hansel his insulin shot. Then he gets up and defeats the witch. But he lets her help him chop the witches head off, so it’s almost like they did it together EXCEPT IT’S TOTALLY NOT.

And so we come to the end of the adventures of Hansel and Gretel. The plucky orphans head off into the sunset, taking Benjamin the Creepy Fanboy and Edward the Troll with them on their ongoing adventures. For a film that is supposedly about two roughly-equal, kick-ass siblings, it sure focused a lot on Hansel. The ease with which Gretel was brushed aside and de-powered to make way for Hansel’s masculinity joyride makes me think the film’s writers resent her presence in this narrative. This was supposed to be Hansel’s All Guy Adventure and he got lumped with Girly Gretel? Boo! Good job she got kidnapped and let him do all the cool stuff! It’s indicative of how Strong Female Characters are treated in Western fiction as a whole: not taken seriously, not allowed to be the centre of their own narrative, and not allowed to have strength or power that endures.

All of this might give you the impression that I didn’t enjoy Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters. In fact I did. I enjoyed it immensely, despite all these problems, despite my bitter complaints about Gretel and the way the narrative treats her. Something about the film’s glorious, unrepentant silliness drew me in. Gretel was so awesome at the beginning that I’ve decided on an alternative reading of the entire film: the events depicted never happened. Hansel got knocked out in the first witchy fight, and this film represents his feverish dreams; in reality, Gretel and Mina teamed up to take down Muriel on their own whilst Hansel slept off a killer headache. There. Much better.

Conan the Barbarian: Jason Momoa performs masculinity in a skirt

Since I now no longer have a job and am regularly plagued by bouts of ill-health, I’ve been spending a lot of time recently sitting around watching TV and films whilst recuperating from various illnesses. So I figured, why not blog about them? Let’s start with Conan the Barbarian (2011), which is by far the silliest movie I have ever seen.

Conan movies have already been done, of course, but Hollywood has apparently run dry the well of original ideas and is instead stuck in an endless loop of remakes and “reimaginings”. Why write something new when you can just rip off an established formula? The 2011 Conan remake stars Jason Momoa, Jason Momoa’s pecs, Ron Perlman (for about half an hour), Nonso Anozie, Stephen Lang, Rachel Nichols and Rose McGowan with her eyebrows shaved off, because Weird Villains always shave off their eyebrows (see also: Grima Wormtongue, LOTR).

I have a bit of a soft spot for Jason Momoa, because I liked him in Stargate: Atlantis, where he played the character Ronan Dex. He was also in Game of Thrones as Khal Drogo at around the same time he did Conan, so let’s hope he doesn’t get typecast as Scary Barbarian Dude forever:

Let’s start at the beginning of Conan the Barbarian, with Conan’s Dead Mum. Plenty of fictional mums are Dead Mums, obviously. Some die during the hero’s childhood, but some Dead Mums go further in their deadness and die in childbirth. Hardcore! Conan’s mum, however, is not content to do Dead Mom-hood by halves and actually manages to die before Conan is born. For some inexplicable reason she goes onto a battlefield heavily pregnant and gets stabbed in the uterus, at which point Conan’s dad (Ron Perlman) performs an emergency C-section with a dagger and lo! Conan is dragged into the world and placed in his dying mother’s arms. Now that’s how you do Dead Mum!

He actually just came to deliver Conan’s motivation for this movie.

Next we see some of Conan’s childhood, presumably to show how kickass Conan is even as a child and also to pad out the part of the movie where Ron Perlman is still alive. Tragedy strikes when Khalar Zym (Stephen Lang) invades Conan’s village and kills everyone. Conan and his father say a touching goodbye in a burning building because in fantasy land there’s no such thing as smoke inhalation. This is a movie about men and manliness, so naturally this father-son bonding is super-important, since it’s the only emotional depth men are allowed to display. Then Conan’s dad pours molten steel onto himself and dies.

Half an hour into the movie and we finally get to see Jason Momoa in his manly skirt and very little else, because

THIS GUY PLAYED KING LEAR, PEOPLE

barbarians don’t wear clothes. Conan by this point has acquired a Black Best Friend, Artus (Nonso Anozie) who I think is supposed to be a pirate or something. Anozie was born in Lincoln and in real life has a rather posh British accent, but for this movie he does a Nigerian accent. I’m assuming this is to emphasise how ~Foreign~ and ~Exotic~ Artus is. Yes, it’s that kind of movie.

Now we get a scene where Conan and Artus (two POC) save a group of mostly-White slaves from some Offensive Arab Caricature slave-traders. But wait! They’re just white actors dressed to look like Offensive Arab Caricatures, so it’s totally not racist! It’s like a bizarre hybrid love-child of cultural appropriation and racism, like those gross stereotypical hallowe’en costumes. STAY CLASSY, HOLLYWOOD!

Conan and Artus rescue the slaves, including a cage full of topless women. Yes, this is a real thing that happens in the movie. In case you ever doubted that this entire movie is one extended male fantasy, this scene will put those doubts to rest forever. The topless women are overcome with desire at the mere sight of Conan’s manly prowess, and afterwards beg him to take them all out to a bar. None of them seem to have names and none of them put any clothes on. Of course in real life there are some cultures where women don’t habitually cover their chests, usually because of the local climate, so is this a loving, thoughtful homage to such cultures? Or an attempt to demystify the female form? HAHAHAHAHAHA don’t be silly. These slim, White, conventionally attractive women are topless because that’s the kind of nerdy-White-guy fantasy this film caters to. STAY CLASSY, HOLLYW–ppffft, forget it.

CUT TO Tamara (Rachel Nichols), the film’s female lead, who lives in Shaipur Monastery, a place that looks like some clueless White people helped themselves to everything in sight at the cultural appropriation buffet. The monastery itself is clearly based on Buddhist monks and monasteries, but the architecture inside looks vaguely Greco-Roman and the aging White dude who’s apparently in charge of the place is smoking a sheesha pipe. Khalar Zym attacks the monastery to kidnap Tamara, because she is the last “pureblood” descendant of an ancient family of necromancers and her blood will reactivate Zym’s necromancer helmet McGuffin. Or something. At first it seems like there’s no Asian people in this ripped-off-from-Buddhism monastery, but then Zym’s forces attack and a bunch of POC Buddhist monks appear out of nowhere so that Tamara the pretty White woman pureblood can escape. All the POC die horribly in the attack, and Tamara continues to be referred to as “the pureblood” throughout the movie because no one involved in writing this script had an ounce of self-awareness.

BRB, crying for the future of feminism

Tamara flees in a coach with her little knife (so spunky!) and Conan attacks the coach because PLOT. Zym’s forces also attack her, and we get a ridiculous fight/chase sequence designed to show that Tamara is not a weak, helpless woman. She stabs some guys and jumps on a horse and stuff like that, so she’s not weak, okay everyone? She’s practically feminist!

The problem here is that whilst Tamara is fighting off all these men, she does so in a way that constantly re-emphasises her femininity. She’s wearing a white dress the whole time, and frequently screams and looks scared and makes little “oh, I am a lady in pain!” noises. This is a common trap for a certain type of reluctant, every-woman action heroines, who must act terrified and traumatised throughout whatever fight they get into to remind the audience that they are delicate ladies not suited to violence, but they are bravely doing what they must despite being scared and overwhelmed. Tamara isn’t a warrior woman, ergo she is not allowed to be vicious or brutal. She can’t abandon all pretense of performative femininity for the ten minutes it takes to ruthlessly stab a few guys in the face and run away.

Tamara is the kind of female character who fits comfortably into ideas about how women “should” look and behave, and that carries with it certain restrictions and expectations surrounding how she handles herself in active situations. Whenever she exhibits strength, forcefulness, power or violence she must do so in a way that makes it clear that she’s just barely overcoming her own innate feminine weakness. She is not allowed to comfortably occupy a role of strength and agency. In this and many, many other fictional contexts, femininity is viewed like some sort of terrible, crippling disadvantage that women must exert a supreme effort to overcome. The things Tamara does in the movie aren’t really that awesome or amazing compared to what Conan and the rest of the menfolk get up to, but we are supposed to cheer her on anyway – not because she’s achieved anything objectively great, but because she managed to overcome her womanly deficiencies long enough to make herself useful. We’re supposed to applaud her victory over her innate feminine weaknesses.

In this case the victory doesn’t last long, and Tamara ends up under Conan’s protection because PLOT. Some goon with really bad fake teeth shows up to “take the pureblood”, at which point Conan calls Tamara “his possession” (yes, really). After he beats up Bad Teeth Dude he ties Tamara up to stop her running away, because leverage blah blah revenge something PLOT. Then he uses her as bait to lure out Khalar Zym and exact his manly revenge. None of this makes Tamara dislike Conan, or distrust him, or reject his ‘help’. She just sort of goes along with it because that’s what a good woman does, I guess – follow her man around and not ask questions, even questions like “why the hell are you ‘my man’ now? I don’t remember agreeing to this”.

IT DOESN’T EVEN FIT WELL

Conan’s showdown with Khalar Zym features Zym’s daughter, Marique (Rose McGowan sans eyebrows) who is a super-powerful witch who rarely uses her witchy powers, because that makes sense, no really. This is one of the few times in the movie she actually does something magical – she makes some sand guys attack Conan and Tamara, and it’s pretty awesome, but then she never does anything like that ever again. Incidentally, Marique wins the closely-contested award for Most Ridiculous Costumes; her outfits all have a bad case of Female Armour Syndrome and despite travelling the world with her dad in a ship carried by elephants (yes, that’s a thing) she still has time to do elaborate hairstyles everyday. For… reasons. Her mother is also dead, by the way. There’s a lot of that going around in this film.

Conan fights Zym (with a bit of help from the ladies) and it goes badly blah blah, anyway the upshot is Tamara vaguely helps Conan away from the battlefield and over a conveniently placed cliff to Artus’s pirate ship. This noble act is enough for Conan to decide maybe she’s not completely useless, so cue the celebrations! Fireworks! THROW A PARTY! The mighty, manly Conan has deemed this lowly woman worthy of notice, how flattered she must be! Artus generously tells her that by “saving Conan’s life” she has earned Conan’s respect and his own, which is just a fancy way of saying that they’ll actually treat her decently now rather than carting her around like unwanted luggage.

You see, how women get treated depends entirely on how men view them. Women aren’t treated like human beings because that’s the right thing to do; they have to first earn that treatment by making themselves useful in some way. This is a film about masculinity, remember, so a lot of the messages apply in a general sense. And generally speaking, this sort of conditional treatment of women is a recurring feature of masculinity and pop culture ideas about manliness. Certain women are worth elevating to the status of “real people”, by virtue of performing some desirable function; most are still subhuman objects who deserve only to be ignored, ridiculed or abused.

This change of attitude is inexplicably endearing to Tamara, and after she helps the crew fight off some pirates (or something, I kinda missed what those guys were) she discovers that maybe she likes this barbarian lifestyle. Or maybe she just likes Jason Momoa’s pecs. Anyway the ship docks and Tamara follows Conan ashore to seduce him, and we are right in the heart of the masculinity fantasy now.

This is what this brand of masculine performance is all about; this is the male fantasy at play here. It’s the fantasy where you can live out your ‘manliness’ – not caring about the feelings of others, being aggressive and violent, treating women badly – and if you perform that type of hyper-masculinity well enough the women you treat badly will still want to sleep with you. Conan is the guy who just the day before tied Tamara up and used her as bait. But women in this film are irresistibly drawn to Conan because of his incredible manliness. Women are supposed to find this kind of hyper-masculine display attractive, so in the movie they do; so Tamara, instead of being put off by Conan’s ill-treatment of her instead finds it compelling and desirable.

After they get it on in a convenient abandoned cottage (seriously, why was that there?) Tamara gets herself captured because PLOT. The film – which up until this point had admittedly been incredibly silly – now crosses the line into the utterly ridiculous. There’s a tentacle monster. A cave in the shape of a skull. Tamara gets tied to a giant wheel. It’s so ridiculous.

Conan wants to save Tamara, so he goes to a Vaguely Arab City to find some thief guy he met earlier because blah blah PLOT. The film, unsurprisingly, is thick on the cultural appropriation, because if you’re going to populate your *barbarian* fantasy world with ~exotic fantasy cultures~, you obviously can’t base them on White European cultures. Those are far too civilised. Better to shamelessly rip-off a bunch of non-Western cultures instead. Yes, according to this film all non-Western cultures are barbaric. STAY CLASSY HOLLYW– you know what, why do I even bother? *sigh*

Out of nowhere this film then passes the Bechdel Test when Marique tells Tamara about her Dead Mum, but all this really proves is that passing the Bechdel Test doesn’t automatically mean a movie is feminist. Because Tamara then gets tied to a wheel, literally fought over by Khalar and Conan, and gets into a fight with Marique because where would this movie be without a hot girl-on-girl showdown? Marique doesn’t use any of her magic powers in this fight, which should make it pretty even, but despite her earlier ability to fight off fully-grown men with nothing but her tiny knife Tamara now struggles to take down a woman of her own size and weight. Logic clearly wasn’t even allowed in the same room as this movie script, lest some of it rub off and make the entire edifice crumble.

In the ~emotionally resonant climax~ Conan finds himself clinging to a chain to keep Tamara alive, which is just like with his dad you guys OMGOSH emotional depth so deep and meaningful. For a minute there it looks like she might get fridged, but Conan manages to throw Khalar off the bridge into the lava instead (she’s hanging off the bridge by the chain, or something, honestly I didn’t follow that closely). Conan then rides Tamara back to the ruins of her monastery which is presumably still full of the dead bodies of her friends and also kinda burned and destroyed, and then he leaves her there. So she doesn’t get fridged but she does get unceremoniously dumped. This is all part of the fantasy – Tamara is a Good Woman, sexually willing but not too clingy, disregarding the worst of Conan’s behaviour and then allowing him to ride off into the sunset without any emotional display. The male fantasy is complete.

That’s all this movie is really; one long masculinity fantasy dialed all the way up to 11. It’s an hour and a half of Jason Momoa acting out a bunch of male fantasies. The only reasons I can see to watch this movie are:

1. To laugh at the ridiculousness of it all;

2. To get a whistle-stop tour of every male fantasy currently doing the rounds; or

3. To see Jason Momoa’s butt, because you do get to see it once.

Apart from that, you might as well avoid it.

Feminism: only one of you is doing it right

This week, I read two different things about feminist initiatives. One was the website of ‘One Billion Rising‘, a global “day of action” in protest at violence against women. The other was Laurie Penny’s article for the Guardian about vigilante feminists. The juxtaposition of these two narratives provides a very interesting perspective on feminist activism and how it’s carried out. Let’s review, shall we? (Note: bolding emphasis is mine throughout)

One Billion Rising has lofty aims:

“ONE BILLION RISING will move the earth, activating women and men across every country. V-Day wants the world to see our collective strength, our numbers, our solidarity across borders.

What does ONE BILLION look like? On 14 February 2013, it will look like a REVOLUTION.”

Yes! Woo! Global feminist revolution has arrived! No more violence against women! I will get myself a gun and join you on the barricades!

“On February 14th, 2013, V-Day’s 15th Anniversary, we are inviting one billion women and those who love them to walk out, DANCE, RISE UP, AND DEMAND an end to this violence [against women]. One Billion Rising is a promise that we will rise up with women and men worldwide to say, “Enough! The violence ends now.”" {source}

…wait, what? We’re dancing? What about the revolution?

You see, One Billion Rising is a call to end the terrible violence experienced by women all over the world, and clearly this can best be achieved by having a worldwide dance-off on Valentine’s Day. Why dancing, I hear you ask?

“When One Billion bodies rise and dance on 14 February 2013, we will join in solidarity, purpose and energy and shake the world into a new consciousness. Dancing insists we take up space. It has no set direction but we go there together. It’s dangerous, joyous, sexual, holy, disruptive. It breaks the rules. It can happen anywhere at anytime with anyone and everyone. It’s free. No corporation can control it. It joins us and pushes us to go further. It’s contagious and it spreads quickly. It’s of the body. It’s transcendent.” {source}

‘It’s a series of positive-sounding buzzwords that were carefully tested on focus groups!’

The One Billion Rising initiative has great PR. Their website is smooth and sleek, with nice colour co-ordination and some wonderful ‘monologues’ by Eve Ensler (the whole thing was her idea, apparently). Participants don’t organise a local protest, they ‘stage a rising’. You can ‘experience’ these global ‘risings’ via livestreaming and YouTube videos. The text is full of meaningless buzzwords about ‘discovering solidarity’ and how we will ‘come to see what is possible’. Dance will achieve all these things, apparently. Seriously? What does “shake the world into a new consciousness” even mean? In practical, tangible terms? The answer is it doesn’t mean anything. These are just words carefully selected because they feel good and positive and active. Dance! Feel transcendent! Connect in solidarity! Don’t question whether this actually serves a purpose!

Meanwhile, in Egypt:

Photo: AFP/Getty

Yeah.

Women in Egypt protested against rising sexual harassment and violence against women whilst brandishing knives and clubs. Laurie Penny reports:

“I interviewed a rape survivor in her early twenties who told me that if anyone tried to hurt her or her friends again, with no rule of law protecting women, she was prepared to inflict pain.”

Yikes.

I read Penny’s article a few days before I checked out One Billion Rising, and putting them both next to each other shows just how stark the difference is between the sleek, co-ordinated dance campaign and the angry, grassroots protests in Egypt. From where I’m sitting, it reads a bit like this:

Western feminists: “Let’s dance to show solidarity, shake the world into a new consciousness and protest violence against women! Let’s feel the strength and connection! Let’s make everyone feel good about fighting back! Mother earth! Women power!”

Egyptian women: “LET’S STAB A RAPIST IN THE FACE.”

Follow-up question: what’s more ‘dangerous’ and ‘disruptive’, and has more potential to change attitudes – a global dance-party, or women brandishing knives and threatening bloody retribution on rapists?

Here’s the problem with One Billion Rising: it’s ultimately toothless. Apparently it’s a “refusal to accept violence against women and girls as a given”, but without any concrete steps by which this ‘refusal’ can be achieved. It’s ultimately a feel-good exercise. Natalie Gyte at Huffington Post calls it a ‘facade’, and goes further by exposing the White hegemonic undercurrents of such a campaign:

“Many campaigns have come before which, by way of seeking to be inclusive of men, refuse to name the causes of gender based violence. However, where One Billion Rising goes one step further is in its world domination international influence. One of the main hubs for the campaign is in the Democratic Republic of Congo…

“I recently listened to a Congolese woman talk in a speak-easy setting of radical grassroots feminists. She was radiantly and beautifully powerful in her unfiltered anger towards the One Billion Rising movement, as she used the words “insulting” and “neo-colonial”.”

Gyte spoke to an Iranian women with a similar viewpoint:

“Another woman at the same event, an Iranian woman who had demonstrated in the 70′s and seen female comrades beaten, raped, doused in acid, set alight, imprisoned and murdered, also used the word “insulting”. “Who is someone else to come to my country and claim to ‘help’ me by telling me to ‘rise’ above the experiences I have had?!” She went on to recount the numerous occasions when she’d been patronised by white, middle class, educated feminists who assumed that as an Iranian woman she lacked education and had lived a sheltered and oppressed life (only to be left open-mouthed by her exceptional education, theoretical knowledge and sharp gendered analysis).”

So much for that ‘global solidarity’.

One Billion Rising, the reaction to it, and the contrast it makes with knife-wielding Egyptian women all serve to illustrate a common weakness of Western feminism: too willing to appease and include, too shy to take any firm or forceful action. One Billion Rising falls short of excluding men, or blaming masculinity and patriarchy for violence against women; it doesn’t incorporate actual protest, either, preferring happy-touchy-feely-dancing instead.

This is hardly surprising: Western culture socialises women (especially White women) to smooth things over, appease and unite in every social context, not rock the boat or upset anyone too much, and to avoid confrontation. Hence One Billion Rising won’t blame men for all the violence inflicted on women, and will instead frame it as a ‘human rights issue’ and dodge any mention of gender. Western women (again, White women especially) are also socialised not to use violence, because men are violent and women are passive (although this socialisation is also mediated by things like class, race, social status etc.) Hence One Billion Rising dismisses shows of actual force in favour of metaphorical strength, resistance and power: dancing. Apparently Egyptian women didn’t get this particular gender-roles memo, which is why they pitched up to a protest with knives.

Why didn’t One Billion Rising call for rowdy protests outside police stations, courthouses and government buildings? Why didn’t Eve Ensler encourage women to arm themselves and literally fight back against sexual violence, in large groups? Is this the face of Western feminism now? Feel-good metaphors for protest in place of actually protesting?

The fact is that Egyptian women protest against sexual violence by wielding knives and threatening violence of their own against any man who dares assault them. In India, the Government had to intervene to prevent widespread rioting after a woman was gang-raped on a bus. When was the last time you saw White Western feminists threaten to riot over sexual violence?  Don’t hold your breath waiting – they’re all too busy dancing.

Allies Redux: follow-up on ally-hood

A little while ago I wrote about being and having allies (okay, it was more than a little while ago, but real life ate me again and I didn’t have time to blog I AM SORRY). I always wanted to follow up on that post, partly because the comments I got on it raised some really important points; and also because when I wrote it I was still thinking through ally-being-and-having and what that meant to me. So now seems as good a time as any to pick up on that, because the issue of allies never really goes away.

I said two things in that original blog post, which I’ve thought about a lot since. One was this:

As someone who considers herself an ally…

And the other was this:

And here’s what it comes down to for me: I didn’t ask you to be my ally. I didn’t ask you to pick up my banner and champion my cause; you are doing that off your own initiative.

Yes, those two things are contradictory. The more I think about it, the more contradictory it becomes.

In the weeks since I wrote that original post, I’ve seen people express a leery, jaded view of ‘activists’ or ‘social justice warriors’ who loudly proclaim themselves to be Allies – because usually such people are the first to throw a tantrum when called out on some kind of failtastic, offensive BS. Small wonder people are suspicious of self-professed allies. The more I think about the issue, the more I consider it inappropriate to name yourself an ally of this group or that group. Nowadays I’m thinking it’s wiser to wait for others to pin that label on you if they feel you’ve adequately stepped up to the mark.

I no longer call myself an ally because I feel it’s over-stepping. That’s a personal thing – but I can’t very well rail at folks that appoint themselves my ally and take on my cause, and then do the exact same thing by other people. That doesn’t mean I don’t care. It just means I’ve stepped back a bit.

One commentator on the original piece had this to say:

I am unsure however about the suggestion that allies always ask a member of the group they are trying to be allies of, whether or not something is offensive. thinking of folk who try to be an ally to me, i would like them to think hard for themselves, to read stuff, and to analyse for themselves sometimes without always needing me to tell them what to think/what is offensive. i get tired of constantly being asked, constantly having to educate/do their work for them, and also it can be triggering/upsetting when i’m having a happy moment and suddenly we are talking about my oppression yet again.

This is another really good point that I didn’t cover much in the first post. I don’t advocate constantly pestering your friends or acquaintances for information about what it’s like to face racism/homophobia/sexism/etc etc for the reasons the poster above mentioned. No one wants to be your walking cheat sheet for activism. But I still maintain that it’s possible to ‘check-in’ with whatever group you purport to be vigorously defending, without actually having to bother someone with a string of questions. Because if you want to know – say – if blackface is racist (SPOILER ALERT: blackface is still racist) then you don’t actually have to go and ask a POC “Hey, is blackface racist?” The reason being, if you type the phrase “Is blackface racist?” into Google, you will get approximately a bajillion hits informing you that, yes, blackface IS racist, thank you for asking.

One of the reasons why people get so frustrated about having to constantly educate well-meaning social justice activists about the actual workings of the oppression they are so fiercely crusading against is because it’s all right there on the internet. You can read plenty of blog posts and articles about Feminism 101, Racism 101, Intersectionality 101 etc. Interested in campaigning for LGBTQ rights? Follow relevant blogs and community activists on twitter. Want to get involved in anti-racism? Plenty of POC are voluntarily giving their time to write about contemporary race issues and post it all online for your reading pleasure. It all comes back to listening. The voices are out there and people are doing plenty of talking. If a new issue arises, you can be sure that a blogger somewhere has tackled it head on. You can ‘check-in’ just by listening to what’s already being said; that’s the beauty of communication in the internet age. No need to start pestering people with questions they’ve probably answered 100 times. Use your Google-Fu.

One of the things that benefited me most – and that still benefits me on a daily basis – is following a lot of different people on Twitter and paying attention to the issues they care about. Getting a lot of different perspectives on feminist issues is an education in itself. A feminist initiative that might be widely supported by White, Western feminists doesn’t necessarily go down the same way with non-Westerners or WOC, for example. When you start to see that, you start to challenge your own assumptions.

That’s really all I had to say on the subject (I think). I have a whooooole bunch of things I wanted to write on the blog – let’s see if I get round to doing it!

What we expect from allies, and the view from both sides of that fence

Following Offbeat Empires little hissy fit about “Liberal Bullying” (which got reprinted in the Guardian, of all places), I’ve seen a couple of people take on the issue of allies and what we expect from them. This is in part because Offbeat Empire’s article is about marginalised folks “privilege-checking” self-appointed allies, and why this is Very Bad Form; and partly because of the line right here:

Is this person an ally? How can I best communicate with them to ensure they stay that way?

You know, the implication that people living with oppression, stereotyping, maybe even outright discrimination up to and including physical violence, should make sure they try their hardest to keep any potential allies sweet.

After I read this I started thinking seriously for the first time about what I expect from allies. I have allies, now. Being a Muslim woman who wears hijab I’m now in a position to claim allies for myself and to have people want to be my allies for whatever reason. But what do I want from these potential allies? In fact, do I want allies at all?

On Both Being and Having Allies

As a White Muslim woman my relationship with privilege and oppression is not clear cut (is it ever for anyone? Don’t answer that). Let me be clear: I grew up with White privilege and didn’t even know what it was. I became a Muslim and started wearing the hijab when I was 23 years old. I’ve always looked slightly foreign-esque, in an unidentifiable way, and throughout my life people have asked me where I’m from “originally” and asked me if I’m Spanish or whatever. Some White women put on hijab and still look quite clearly White and European – this was not the case for me. I am now quite literally the opposite of ‘white passing’. The vast majority of people who meet me assume that I am not English, not European and not Western. The revelation that I am English and White comes as a great surprise.

This places me at a strange, intersectional limbo. I am not a person of colour (POC). I’m not a racial or ethnic minority. I just look like one. I can’t claim membership of any of those groups, but such membership is constantly ascribed to me by people who meet me, see me or encounter me online and in real life.

I am fine with this, by the way – this isn’t some thinly-veiled plea to be granted an honorary-POC card or even a bid for sympathy. It’s just a description of my lived reality. And because of this, I consider myself to be – still – an ally to POC even as I face collateral racism from people who think I am one.

(Again, not sympathy-fishing. Just telling it like it is.)

So on the one hand, I am firmly in ally-territory when it comes to racism (and things like homophobia etc). On the other hand, I qualify to claim allies of my own on the basis of being a Muslim. Further complicate that by considering that Islamophobia is frequently racialised, and is often simply racism in disguise, and you see why I refer to my position as intersectional limbo.

Feminist Ire makes the point that

many of our allies also come from marginalised groups

and so we should maybe go easy on them when it comes to calling out privilege and so on. I’m looking at this fact and drawing a different conclusion. As someone who considers herself an ally who belongs to a marginalised group, I think that makes it easier, not harder, to act as an ally. Want to know how to be a good ally? Imagine if the situation were reversed. What would you want from your allies?

Giving out cookies – or not

Offbeat Empire asks marginalised folks who might be tempted to call people out on their privilege, or their use of problematic terms, to stop and think about “motivations” and “ultimate goals”, and asks if they are “living their values” when they rudely ask privileged White people to maybe stop using that really offensive term. Incidentally, their policy on responding to those complaints seems to be to ignore them:

Ultimately, when these complaints come up (which has slowly gone from “monthly” to “weekly” to “almost daily”), my editors respond with comments like, “I understand what you’re saying, and share your concern — but I disagree that this usage is problematic.” Alternately, sometimes we just say, “I agree that this usage is problematic, but I’m going to leave it.” I want to make sure that folks know readers’ concerns are heard, but that it doesn’t always guarantee that we’ll make changes.

Hmm. Okay then… (bolding is mine, btw)

Pyromaniac Harlot has a few suggestions on how to treat your allies as well:

-I will do my best to educate my allies. These arn’t random people off the street – they’re people who are taking a lot of time to learn about specific things that affect me. And then they go off and do awesome things, like support me and stand up for me. So, no, I don’t think it’s their job to educate themselves. I think it’s my job to train them. Seems only fair.

-I will give my allies cookies. Seriously – I don’t like the whole “bah, you’re just doing the right thing, you shouldn’t get cookies for it”. Yes oppression is wrong. That doesn’t mean it’s my friend’s job to learn everything they can about my particular corner of oppression, the issues that come with it, and to try and do things to change it. Doing that isn’t the base level – doing it makes them *awesome*.

-I will accept that nobody gets things right 100% of the time. They’re still learning. I’m still learning. It’s ok to talk. It’s ok to get things wrong. They’re my allies – I believe that they’re not doing it maliciously. It’s not ok to hurt me, but I will flag things when they arise, and I trust them to respect my feelings. It’s also ok to ask things, because that’s how people learn about this stuff.

What all of this comes down to is – how should we treat our allies? Here we are, dealing with our ‘corner of oppression’ – how do we interact with people who appoint themselves as our helpers?

And here’s what it comes down to for me: I didn’t ask you to be my ally. I didn’t ask you to pick up my banner and champion my cause; you are doing that off your own initiative. So ask yourself: why are you doing it? Is it because you like the idea of swooping in and saving people? Is it a White Knight Complex? Are you doing it because you want Muslims to give you cookies and awards for being nice to them, so you can feel better about Islamophobia? Or is it because you genuinely, deeply feel that the way Muslims are treated is wrong and appalling, and you really genuinely do want to help out and try to correct that wrong?

If the answer is anything but that last one, your ally-hood is for your own benefit, not mine. It’s not actually helping me much. It’s just serving to make you feel better about yourself, without actually bringing me any benefit or comfort.

The same applies to anything. Why are you an anti-racist ally? Why are you a feminist ally? Are you putting kindness coins in the proverbial slot machine, expecting a big payout? This stuff really isn’t about you, and if you expect it to be then yes, you are going to be disappointed. You are going to be annoyed and frustrated at all these pesky marginalised folks telling you what words to use or asking you to check your privilege. Because I’m sorry to tell you this, but activist work doesn’t exist for the benefit of making privileged people feel better about themselves. A shocking revelation, I know.

How to be the ally people need, not the one you want to be right now

I don’t consider that I need allies. I’m fairly tough, I’ve got a lot of White privilege in the psychological bank (as it were) and my general approach is to extricate myself from harmful situations, pick my battles, and employ the ‘block’ function on a liberal basis. But even though I don’t strictly speaking need allies, it sure is nice to have them around.

So here’s a few things that I want from my allies:

1. Listen to what I have to say – Muslim women’s voices are so often silenced that it’s really important for us to be able to speak up. We need the space to tell our own stories and we need those stories to be listened to. Pay attention. Take notes.
2. Trust my words over those of outsiders – everyone and his dog has an opinion about Muslim women these days. They’re oppressed! Brainwashed! Quickly, rush in and save them! Meanwhile, Muslim women are trying to patiently explain how they don’t need rescuing from hijab or Islam, and these words are dismissed in favour of the outsider narratives pushed by everyone from right-wing conservatives to liberal feminists. Please pay attention to our version of events. See point 1. above.
3. Call out blatant Islamophobia when you see it – some people call this “collecting your folks”, and it means that if you see White people or Westerners peddling blatant bigotry and hatred about Islam and/or Muslims and/or hijab-wearing women, please tell them to stop. This is the hard part about being an ally. You are going to have to speak up in the face of hatred, lest your silence be taken as complicity and approval. Do this when I’m not there. Do this in the spaces where there are no Muslims to witness your words and pour out their thanks for your kindness.
4. But don’t get all “outraged on their behalf!!” about it – first of all, find out what stereotypes, tropes, terms etc Muslims find offensive. Then, when you see those being used, say “I think you’ll find that’s very offensive to Muslims.” This stuff doesn’t offend you, and even if it does nobody cares. It’s the fact that we find it offensive that’s important. Here, I’ll start you off: the Oppressed Muslim Woman stereotype is deeply offensive, and – bonus points! – it’s actively damaging to Muslim women. The perpetuation of this trope prevents us being taken seriously, stops us getting jobs, leads to discrimination in many spheres. So now I’ve told you this, the next time you see someone use it, you can tell them it’s both offensive and harmful. There. It’s easy.
5. Learn and think before you act - this is really the combination of 3. and 4. above. First, learn what’s hurting people and what needs speaking up against. Then, speak up against those things. In this way you serve the folks you are allied to, in the way we need you to serve us. I need you to speak out against Islamophobia when you see it (for all sorts of reasons), and speaking out against bigotry and hatred is generally considered a noble thing to do, but first of all please take some time to research and learn about our struggles. Researching and listening is how I learned how offensive blackface is, so now I’m in a position to say “Blackface is still considered really offensive to a lot of people, cease and desist.”
6. Remember that you don’t get to decide what’s offensive – it’s not up to you. If you think something is offensive, check first. Ask a Muslim “Yo, is this offensive to you? Could you take a minute to explain why?” A symptom of bad-ally-hood is arbitrarily deciding random things are SUPER OFFENSIVE1!!1! whilst simultaneously ignoring things that actually are offensive to the people you claim to be allied to. Don’t be this person. Remember point 5.
7. Don’t make it about you – no one cares how disgusting you think blackface is. It’s not about you. Likewise attention seeking behaviour is just tiresome. If you want your ego nurtured, call your mother. This is why I mainly need my allies to speak up when I’m not around - as a privileged person your voice is most useful in spaces where no minority voices are heard. When you speak over the voices of marginalised people, you’re actually asking for those people to recognise you as the wonderful saviour and ally you want to be. When you speak up in privileged spaces, you probably won’t get thanks and accolades. Actually you’ll probably get grief for it. But this is the space I need you to be speaking in. Again, if you’re in this for the applause and cookies you’ve come to the wrong place.
8. Be quiet – sometimes, you just need to have a seat. If Muslims are talking about their experiences, be quiet. If Muslims are discussing the discrimination they face, you’re welcome to listen, but mainly – be quiet. We need room for our voices to be heard, and they can’t be heard if privileged Westerners are constantly butting in with their own *amazing insights*. Protip: they’re not that amazing. No one cares.
9. Give us space – sometimes, yeah, we just want you to go away. It’s not personal. There are spaces where we don’t want outsiders; conversations which we want to have in private. The more privileged you are, the harder it will be for you to accept that some things just don’t revolve around you, and there are spaces where you just aren’t welcome, but this is the reality and you have to live with it. If you’re going to get huffy about it, I suggest you re-read point 7.

Really, this is all I want from allies. Room to breathe, room to speak. To be listened to and have my voice heard. I want you to collect your folks occasionally (especially you, White people. Sorry to say but you’re the worst offenders).

I am probably not the perfect ally even by my own standards. Some of these things I don’t do perfectly myself, and I’m sure there’s times when people have wanted me to butt out of their conversations. But I try and I hope folks will tell me when I over-step, because that’s important.

As someone who lived for 23 years in the warm, luxurious seas of White privilege, I know that this can be challenging. Being an ally isn’t easy. Often, it’s a difficult, thankless task, which is why you need to do it because you genuinely want to promote change, not because you want cookies and medals. Because, honestly – I do not give cookies to allies.

Here’s the thing – I know that it’s hard. I know that it’s tough and it seems like a lot, but if you really care about the issues you’ll do the work whether I thank you for it or not. And if you need to be thanked and applauded, then you’re not in this for me, you’re in it for you. If you’re in a position of privilege, you’re benefiting – however indirectly – from the ongoing oppression and marginalisation of those who don’t have privilege. When I miss out on a job offer because I’m Muslim and wear hijab, that job goes to someone more privileged than I am. If you’re White it is highly likely that at some point in your life, you got offered a job even though a POC interviewed better than you, because you are White and they are not. The least you can do in these circumstances is call people out for using the n-word.

I consider calling out racism, hatred and bigotry to be part and parcel of being a decent human being. It’s not some extraordinary act of valour – you’re not running into a burning building, here. I also consider ‘listening to people when they talk and taking their concerns seriously’ to be a basic component of treating other human beings with respect.

So I’m not going to give you cookies and medals, I’m not going to shout your name to the rooftops as a wonderful saviour. Don’t expect that from me. I’ll probably say thank you at some point, and I mean it, and I’m genuinely grateful, but I’m not here to make you feel good about yourself. This struggle is not about you getting praise for being a wonderful person – it is about correcting very serious, damaging oppressions that I have to navigate on a daily basis. This isn’t playtime. And if this attitude alienates you, well, you probably didn’t have the grit to do what needs to be done anyway.

What I want from an ally is highly personal. I’m fairly sure other people will disagree and weigh in – hell, I may even change my mind about some of this as time goes on. So if you have some thoughts on what you want from allies, post them in the comments. This isn’t a complete list. I’m still learning.