Notes from a male dominated media industry
In the last two months I’ve been working as a freelance journalist for the first time, and I had an interview at a national newspaper for a job.
Scenario 1: During my group interview for the job, there were around 6 male editors and executives present, and one woman. The people interviewed were evenly divided: 6 men and 6 women.
Scenario 2: Yesterday, I interviewed Ed Balls and John Denham at a video games lab in Liverpool. The Labour representatives organising the event were all male. So was the councillor present. The one woman in the room, Angela Eagle MP, left as I arrived, so there was a local journalist, Ed Balls, John Denham, Liam Byrne, and their special advisers, all male.
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The attack on Child Benefit is an attack on women
George Osborne’s announcement today that from 2013 Child Benefit payments will be axed for any family with a parent earning enough to put them in the 40-50% income tax bracket is neither “fair” nor “right” as some commentators would have us believe: it’s actually an attack on the basic principles of the welfare state, and it’s an attack on women.
Before I get into how and why that is this though I just want to make something clear.
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Contrary to the media, the sex industry doesn’t empower women
contribution by Sian Norris
We live in a society that has very successfully sold the sex industry to us as an empowering ‘lifestyle’ choice where women exploit men’s ‘need’ for sex in order to extract money from them.
We are told that it’s a free choice and feminists who criticise that choice are prudes, anti sex and anti women.
This cultural narrative is a chimera that disguises the real story of the sex industry, a story that involves PTSD, sexual assault, drug abuse and sex trafficking.
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Modern day pre-emptive genocide against women
contribution by Adam Grace
The mass sterilization of women in Uzbekistan, as reported this weekend by the Associated Press, is a shrieking reminder that the battle for the global liberation of women is being lost.
It was reported by Mansur Mirovalev that Uzbek health officials are “threatened with salary cuts, demotion or dismissal if they do not persuade at least two women a month to be sterilized.”
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It was my baby too
contribution by Anonymous
Way before we had a kid, my husband agreed that the kid’s middle name would be my last name.
Then we had the kid, and he pretended he never agreed.
In the hospital, filling out the forms, I’m having this giant argument with the man whose baby I just gave birth to.
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Tory dismissal of rape victims is only the start
contribution by Jaine Doe
This week the leader of Croydon Council, has announced his decision to cut Croydon’s Rape and Sexual Abuse Support Centre budget by £27,000 a year, while awarding themselves a big pay-rise.
Firstly, it’s outrageous and almost unbelievable that Croydon’s RASASC is one of only two in the whole of London, the other being newly established in Ealing, meaning that, for however long, Croydon’s RASASC has been the only one of its kind in the capital.
All the story really serves to do is to foreground an emerging trend that has gathered haste since the election in May.
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A drug to ‘cure’ lesbianism?
contribution by Elly
This week Newsweek reported that a doctor at Florida International University has been experimenting with a drug to treat pregnant women, whose unborn female foetuses show signs of a condition called congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH).
This condition can result in the babies being born intersex.
The drug, Dex, is supposed to reduce the likelihood that the babies will be born with ‘ambiguous’ genitalia.
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The Daily Mail and its constant ‘cry rape’ stories
Alison Clarke is making a plea to the Daily Mail to stop featuring stories about false rape claims.
So, this is a plea to the Mail. Yes, we know that women make up stories about sexual assault. But – and please note this – they are very few and far between.
The fact is that at least 50,000 women are raped every year in the UK, but only a tiny percentage result in convictions of the rapist.
She’s not the only one. A while back I wrote about the way that papers like the Mail report rape cases – nearly every time it will be case where ‘an innocent man’s life has been ruined’ or ‘a woman made sickening claims in a revenge attack on her ex’ or some such tale.
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Complete tits
A nice young man known as @Article_Dan turns up on Twitter today to say that some old bag abused his wife in a Sainsbury’s cafe for breastfeeding her (Article_Dan and his wife’s) baby.
Says Article_Dan:
“My wife – the mother of our five month old daughter and four year old son – just spent the morning shopping in Sainsbury’s with the kids hanging of each arm.”
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Is Cameron backtracking on rape trials anonymity?
I’ve just watched Cameron’s first Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons, where he said, when challenged by Harriet Harman over the proposals to grant anonymity to those accused of rape, that he “believed there was a case for it between arrest and charge.”
While I still don’t agree with the ConDem’s proposal, Cameron’s response appears to be a step back from the original “We will extend anonymity in rape cases to defendants” statement that was made a couple of weeks ago.
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The government is calling victims of rape liars
So the new government has somehow found time in its recession-busting schedule to propose a law that will grant anonymity to men accused of rape, who are of course the most pitiable and urgently un of victims of woman-promoting-marriage-destroying-single-mum-supporting-violence-preventing Broken Britain.
Popular wisdom has it that vast numbers of rape allegations are false, when in fact false accusation is believed to account for only a tiny percentage of reported rapes – no higher than false reports for other crimes.
The Daily Fail have somehow produced both the most table-bitingly offensive assessment of the situation so far – from treacherous misogynist Melanie Phillips, who claims that “after Labour’s reign of extreme man-hating feminism, common sense is reasserting itself” – and the most reasonable discussion of the issues for women, from Susanne Moore.
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Election sexism watch (episode 1)
Introducing a new, month-long series, where I’ll be keeping a watchful eye on the meeja* and picking out some of the sexist-shite coverage of the General Election campaign.
Episode 1
From Andrew Pierce in yesterday’s Daily Mail:
Ugly rumours may cost Cash the cutie dear
Joanne Cash, the Conservative Party Alister, has been tipped for Cabinet office if she wins the marginal seat of Westminster North.
Tatler magazine has named her as one of the ten Tories to watch and Vogue included her as one of the top 50 women of the age.
Small wonder, then, that Ms Cash is pre-eminent among the telegenic Cameron cuties whom the Tories will be hoping to wheel before the cameras in the weeks ahead.
Teenage girls have sex. Get over it.
We recently reported the hilarious, if disturbing, remarks of Tory MP Tim Loughton:
“We need a message that actually it is not a very good idea to become a single mum at 14. [It is] against the law to get pregnant at 14. How many kids get prosecuted for having underage sex? Virtually none. Where are the consequences of breaking the law and having irresponsible underage sex? There aren’t any.”
So, The Guardian asked, should there be prosecutions?
“We need to be tougher. Without sounding horribly judgmental, it is not a good idea to be a mum at 14. You are too young, throwing away your childhood and prospects of developing a career.”
Without sounding horribly judgmental, anybody who thinks that there are no consequences to getting pregnant, and that a criminal record promotes a happy childhood and helps develop a healthy career, is a Platinum Imbecile.
Platinum Imbecility aside, there’s something to note about the bizarre universe Mr Loughton resides in: girls get pregnant by magic. continue reading… »
Nadine’s not a feminist, but….
I found myself in the unenviable position this week of actually agreeing with Nadine Dorries about something. But don’t worry, it was a short lived affair.
Now despite the fact that I appear to be one of the few lefties she hasn’t yet blocked on Twitter, I’m not renowned for holding Dorries in any high esteem (see here for example), so you can imagine my surprise when she tweeted this:
…and I found myself nodding along.
Yes she’s right, the political new media is dominated by men – in fact it’s something I’ve been intending to write about for a while now.
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Joking about rape isn’t funny
I disagreed with a whole heap of stuff in Ellie Levenson’s “The Noughtie Girl’s Guide to Feminism” when it came out last year (see my Mswoman comments under this CiF piece for specific examples).
But apart from her odious assertion that “we do women an injustice when we say that rape is the worst thing that can happen to a woman. It is, after all, just a penis.” top of the list was her claim, repeated in the Independent, that in some contexts so-called rape ‘jokes’ can not only be deemed to be acceptable, but they can also in fact be funny.
Because they’re not. Ever. They never have been and they never will be. They’re not funny when Ricky Gervais tells them, and they’re not funny when a Tory Councillor tells them either.
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A Straight White Men’s Officer at SOAS..?
London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) was established in 1916 as the School of Oriental Studies, with the specific remit of training future colonial administrators in the language and culture of the people they were destined to rule.
Nearly a century later, at this institution founded on racist, patriarchal principles, straight white males account for less than 20 percent of the SOAS student body – a fact that has prompted calls for them to be recognised as a minority group by the students’ union, and granted their own exclusive welfare strategy. On Thursday 19th November, as part of their Diversity Week, SOAS will debate whether or not to appoint a ‘Straight White Men’s Officer’.
University life often comes as a shock to the privileged sons of this country. Higher education is the time in their lives when young men are most likely to experience minority status; white men may dominate the world of work, top-level management, politics, administration, the arts, culture, the military and the media, but as undergraduates they make up only 36 percent of the student population. White males are also less likely to graduate with a first or upper second class degree and find immediate employment than their female classmates, where by contrast, less than thirty years ago, white males appeared to dominate every mixed-gender campus. At university, unlike in other environments, straight, white young men cannot pretend that they represent the standard for normal humanity – instead, they are required to confront their roles as members of a privileged minority on the world stage. Nowhere is this sea-change more evident than at SOAS. continue reading… »
Pants off to impropriety
I’d like to shout out for an unsung hero of improper, joyful, self-actualising women everywhere: Knickers Girl.
When a Sun photographer snapped Knickers Girl – aka 20 year old teaching assistant Sarah Lyons -cavorting in Cardiff centre with a pair of pants around her ankles, she instantly became the face of female reprobation up and down the country. Never mind that she wasn’t exposing any naughty bits; never mind that dancing with a pair of knickers around your ankles is perfectly legal behaviour; never mind that the pants in question weren’t the ones she’d been wearing, but a comedy pair of David Hasselhof knickers a mate had picked up in a bar.
Never mind that poor Ms Lyons was on a course of antibiotics and hence was actually stone-cold sober at the time: the new postergirl of binge-drinking ladettes everywhere has been suspended from her job pending a disciplinary inquiry, for the dubious crime of having fun in public. And they say sexism in the workplace is dead.
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Offensive Language?
Its been yet another one of those in weeks in which the use of ‘offensive’ language has been making headlines in both the press and with at least one prominent blogger.
The story that captured the media’s attention was, of course, Pierre Lellouche’s description of the Conservative Party’s attitude towards the European Union:
“They have one line and they just repeat one line. It is a very bizarre sense of autism,”
Curiously that comment failed to generate any real sense of outrage in the one place you might have expected it to – the Daily Mail seems to have been far too preoccupied with laying into Cameron for backing away from a referendum on Europe to indulge in the usual round of sneering at the ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’ leaving the field open, for once, to someone with a genuine reason for taking offence, Charlotte Moore, to frame the debate in terms of whether its acceptable to use the term ‘autism’ as a casual insult.
Elsewhere, the Press Complaints Commission decided that its okay to refer Iain Dale as an ‘overtly gay Tory blogger’ in a ruling that leaves me wondering whether Iain’s mistake might have been to complain under clause 12 of the PCC’ Code (discrimination) rather than under clause 1 (accuracy). While Iain makes no secret of his sexual orientation I wouldn’t have said that he was ‘overtly gay’, not in the commonly understood sense of the term, which implies that someone is camping it up to the point that their sexual orientation is blatantly obvious. ‘Honestly’ is, strictly speaking, a synonym of ‘overtly’ but colloquially the two words carry very different connotations in the same way that acknowledging that homosexuality is part of the normal spectrum of human sexual behaviour is a very different thing to promoting homosexuality, despite some people having a marked propensity for conflating the two.
Iain also points the way to another interesting article on language, offence and disability, by Ian Birrell, in which the bone of contention is the use of ‘retard’ and ‘retarded’ as casual insults. That article is, again, written from the perspective of the parent of a child/children with a disability and carries all the more weight for it. continue reading… »
Late term abortions ruling could be alarming
The Information Commissioner’s ruling on Friday to release statistics on late term abortions carried out because of disability has alarming implications.
The figures were requested under FOI by the ProLife Alliance, and the case has already led to an op-ed in the Telegraph calling for “an open debate on the merits of late term abortion” once the numbers are out.
It’s clear that the potential for this information to be misused to promote an anti-choice agenda and to restrict women’s reproductive freedom is strong. The Telegraph state within their editorial that concerns over the identification of women and their doctors are “spurious”. They suggest that when the statistics were previously available, up until 2002, no one was harmed.
However, they fail to acknowledge the Jepson case, where a legal challenge was mounted against doctors who performed a late term abortion for a fetus with a cleft palate, and the area and hospital in which the doctors were working were identified by police and local papers.
The “deeply worrying” issue of identification of doctors who perform late term abortions as a result of the information being public was raised in a joint statement by Brook and the Family Planning Association.
There’s clearly a tension here between the public’s right to access information and the potential for statistics to be misused to promote a harmful agenda. If the Department of Health do not challenge the ruling in the High Court, and the information becomes public, there are clear ways to respond and mount a defence.
Instead of accepting a narrative of late-term abortions being carried out to “ensure that ‘designer babies’ are being born” (thank you, The Telegraph, for that excellent turn of phrase) we need to deconstruct these claims.
Rather than abortions being carried out for ‘cleft palates’ a facial disability which can be corrected by surgery, we can point out the huge number of disabilities and birth defects associated with clefting, which may only be part of the story.
We can also support medical professionals who perform abortions at late stages, and voice our support for women in the UK to have full access to reproductive freedom.
Whose Tory meritocracy is it anyway?
291 women and 4559 men have been elected to the House of Commons since women were enfranchised in 1918. So those shouting “not in my name” and “meritocracy” to argue against the possible means of all women shortlists do have a prima facie case to answer.
David Cameron’s claims that his party gets it enough to continue if he fell under a bus is rather challenged by the ferocity of the response from the Tory netroots. Aspiring candidate Iain Dale declares not in my name while the Isaby/Montgomerie co-premiership at ConservativeHome seems to think the sky might fall in. (Tory ppc Joanne Cash has offered a rare pro-leadership view).
By definition, meritocrats must share the goal of “fair chances and no unfair barriers”.
The simple question: what is the cause of the scale of under-representation? And what is the solution to deliver fair chances and equal representation?
2001 was the last General Election in which no party used an all women shortlist measure. How did we do on gender equity? Most noticed a small drop from 120 to 118 women in the Commons. The real story was missed. Just 9 out of 92 MPs elected in mainland Britain were women. Not quite 10%. The Conservative class of 2001 – 38 white men and 1 women (2.5%)- was well below the post-1918 historic Commons average.
So whose meritocracy is it anyway?
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» What happens in Wisconsin matters world-wide
» How the upcoming welfare cuts will hit blind and disabled people
» Why Cameron can’t rely on the market to provide public services
» Why direct action to prevent global warming still matters
» We need to stop the government privatising blood donations #bloodmoney
» Notes from a male dominated media industry
» Spending cuts across London councils hit Labour hardest: a comparison
» Osborne claims international opinion is with him; this chart disagrees
» I’m the fourth NUS candidate: why you should vote for me
» Lessons from the council budget controversy in Hackney last night
» The white-washing of Labour’s defeat must be challenged
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