(Click on the pic to make it bigger)

Honestly, I don’t know what they teach them in schools these days! (But if this is any indication, I wholeheartedly approve )

I know Bidisha’s already covered this, but I couldn’t let the all male line-up for Amnesty’s upcoming 50th anniversary Secret Policeman’s Ball pass without comment, especially in light of today’s report criticising the BBC’s Question Time and Mock the Week “for featuring “token women” on their panels.“

To grudgingly give them their due, at least Question Time and Mock the Week do feature some women, albeit women are grossly under-represented and tokenised on those and other panel shows. Amnesty on the other hand, “an international human rights organisation with more than three million supporters worldwide” (some of whom are no doubt women), doesn’t appear to have invited any women to take part in its “legendary” show.

So far the line up includes: Jon Stewart, Russell Brand, Stephen Colbert, Reggie Watts, Coldplay and Mumford and Sons, with Armstrong and Miller doing the voiceovers for the animated promotional campaign.

According to Andy Hackman of Amnesty International:

“This year’s Secret Policeman’s Ball brings together an incredible representation of the best comedians and musicians in the world. It’s humbling that they have given up their time to join us and champion the fundamental right to opinion and expression – and in doing so helping us connect with a new generation of supporters.

I hope comedy and music fans in the UK will help us in making it a bad night for dictators and a good night for free speech.”

Seriously? This event  “brings together an incredible representation of the best comedians and musicians in the world” and yet there’s not a single woman amongst them? Then I honestly don’t see how it can “bring together an incredible representation of the best comedians and musicians in the world”: well, not unless you think women can’t be funny or make good music that is.

Never mind making it a “bad night for dictators and a good night for free speech”, it seems Amnesty’s intent on making its 50th anniversary Secret Policeman’s Ball another bad night for women and a bloody good night for the boy’s club.

Take the erasure of women from the MSM for example. The way women are ignored or marginalised, treated as though we don’t exist or as though our issues are unimportant in the grand scale of things, that’s also media sexism.

In a piece for the Guardian last December Kira Cochrane posed the question: Why is British public life dominated by men? and she went on to analyse in quite some depth the factors that contribute to this. Cochrane looked at the absence of women in current affairs programmes; she compared the number of male and female bylines in national newspapers over a four week period, and she also logged the gender of reporters and guests on the Today programme. It was an extensive piece of research, and while the results were depressing, they were unfortunately also entirely predictable.

As I’ve written here before, one of the main problems is that men promote men promote men ad infinitum, so if all the editors are men, the producers are all men, and the senior politicians are all men, it becomes this self-perpetuating cycle, and women’s opportunities to break through and to get their voices heard are limited. And as Cochrane says: “The trouble is, the fewer women who appear on these shows, the fewer feel comfortable doing so – and more broadly, and most importantly, the fewer girls and young women are likely to feel confident claiming public space, speaking their minds, believing women are valued for their voice and opinions.“

And talking of which, talking of women being valued for their voice and their opinions, has anyone else noticed the disgraceful lack of coverage of yesterday morning’s Leveson Hearing in the mainstream press?

Okay, so Radio 4′s Woman’s Hour did a piece about it on Tuesday morning; the BBC has covered it online; the wonderful Helen Lewis-Hasteley wrote it up for the New Statesman; the Guardian posted a couple of articles about it, and the Telegraph live blogged it: but that’s about it. Most of the coverage of the women’s testimony from Tuesday morning has been on Twitter and on blogs, not in the mainstream media.

More significantly, and ironically given the Kira Cochrane article I cited earlier, what didn’t happen yesterday, and what’s so glaringly obvious because of its absence, is that yesterday of all days the Guardian chose not to live blog the Leveson proceedings. Or as I pointed out on Twitter this morning:

Soooo, the Guardian's live blogging today's all male #Leveson Inquiry then…….—
  (@CathElliott) January 25, 2012

Which brings us back to media sexism.

Because I’ve done my own bit of research, and my research reveals that in the 30 days of hearings that have taken place since the newspaper groups made their opening statements to Leveson on November 15th 2011, there have been only four days when the Guardian hasn’t live blogged the Inquiry: December 8th, January 17th, January 18th, and yesterday, January 24th.

And for those who haven’t been following Leveson that closely, Wednesday January 18th was the day that Lisa Byrne, the editor of OK, Lucy Cave, the editor of Heat, and Rosie Nixon, the joint editor of Hello, gave their evidence.

Oh dear, is there a pattern beginning to emerge? Or is there something about a group of women testifying at Leveson that sends Guardian reporters running for the hills?

As I said right at the start: “the way women are ignored or marginalised, treated as though we don’t exist or as though our issues are unimportant in the grand scale of things, that’s also media sexism.” Sadly it seems, the Guardian isn’t immune from engaging in it either.

And here’s my Storify of some of the tweeting that went on during it: Women at Leveson

In other news, I did the interview about lap dancing clubs on BBC Radio Norfolk’s breakfast show that I mentioned in my previous post  – you can listen to the full thing here. And yes I know, I said Camden when I should have said Hackney, but never mind.

Anyway, here’s the money quote from that interview: I’m still ridiculously chuffed that I managed to get that line in. Hey Norfolk, have some radical feminist theory with your cornflakes…….

In between all that, and working, and tweeting, and watching my beloved soaps (more on those in a future post), and getting hooked on BBC 4′s Borgen; like a lot of people with far too much time on their hands I’ve also been following the Leveson inquiry.

Now a ton of ‘stuff’ has already been written about Leveson, so I’m not going to bore on about it too much here, however, I couldn’t let Ian Hislop’s testimony pass without comment.

Because towards the end of Hislop’s evidence session this morning he was asked about the blogosphere and, surprisingly, he didn’t seem to have anything positive to say about it. Unfortunately I can’t find the exact quotes, as Hislop’s opinion on blogging is not what the MSM is focusing on – probably because a lot of similarly old-school print journalists agree with him – but what he effectively said was that blogging has no real value until and unless the issues bloggers are writing about find their way into the dead tree press. Up until that magical point when a blogger’s work gets picked up by a ‘real journalist’, according to Hislop the extensive research that a lot of us do, and the articles that we write, are nothing more than just “stuff” on the Internet.

He also said, and this is a direct quote, that there isn’t a lot of Private Eye content available online because he doesn’t see “why journalism, which at its best is a noble craft, should be given away.“

I suppose I’ve been around long enough now to know that this ridiculous and arbitrary divide still exists for some between so-called “professional” journalists and those of us who just write “stuff” for the Internet, but that doesn’t mean I’m not surprised when I hear it articulated, or that I’m not disappointed by it. I am, and especially when the editor of an allegedly anti-establishment, pro let’s-expose-all-the-bullshit-and-shenanigans organ like Private Eye engages in it. You’d think someone like Hislop would be grateful for citizen journalism and the way it’s helped expose wrongdoing and hold those in power more to account,  but no, instead he appears to be utterly contempuous of it.

Maybe the attitudes he expressed this morning go some way to explaining why when his publication does get “stuff” from blogs he’s so loathe to give the original sources due credit….

Incidentally, it’s not just Hislop who’s got a downer on bloggers this week. According to our esteemed justice secretary Ken Clarke, a large proportion of bloggers are “nuts and extremists.” Still, we can at least console ourselves with the knowledge that if two such eminent personalities hate bloggers so much, some of us must be doing it right.

So anyway yes, it’s a new year and I’ve got a new job. In fact I started my new job a couple of weeks ago, but it’s all been so hectic what with Christmas and everything I’ve not really had much of a chance to blog about it.

The long and the short of it is, I’m not working in the public sector anymore: I’m now working in the women’s voluntary sector. In fact I’m now working for a Rape Crisis Centre, doing the kind of work that (apart from writing) I’ve always wanted to do.

It’s a part time post, so it shouldn’t have any effect on my blogging output. Truth be told, as the job involves me commuting to Ipswich several times a week on the notoriously unreliable National Express East Anglia rail service, it’ll probably mean I’ll be updating this blog more frequently. I”ll no doubt be spending hours of my life now stuck on immobile trains in the middle of nowhere, or sitting around at stations waiting for delayed trains to turn up, so I don’t think finding the time to write is going to be a problem.

I hope not anyway. I’m conscious that I haven’t written much in recent months, which is why my only New Year’s resolution this year is to write more and to update this blog a bit more regularly than I have been doing.

In the meantime, thanks to regular readers here for sticking with me for so long, a big warm welcome to any new readers I’ve picked up recently, and a Happy New Year to all of you. Oh, and if anyone’s got any advice on how to go about the whole self-hosting malarkey, your comments in the comments would be most welcome.

Truth be told I regretted that piece within days. Not because I didn’t agree with the message in the rap, but because I didn’t know at the time of writing that UNISON was behind the video. And even after my CiF piece had been published, no one from UNISON had the decency to tell me they’d funded the whole thing, which considering I’m a UNISON activist as well as a writer, left me (I felt) looking like a bit of a UNISON stooge. And that’s not a position I’m very comfortable with. At all.

So there you go: I’ve (finally) said my piece. All that’s left is to hope that someone from UNISON will now issue a statement disassociating the union from MC NxtGen and his vile misogyny…..

I wrote a while back about my (now ex) friend who gained her ex status when she suddenly expressed a belief that civil partnerships in churches were wrong after coincidentally hanging around with a bunch of evangelical Christian homophobes, who were coincidentally black Africans, and who then, in one of the only genuine instances I’ve ever come across of political correctness gone mad, further proposed that there must be something  in homophobia if black Africans were expressing it because it was obviously some sort of ethnic characteristic,  thereby being simultaneously homophobic AND racist.  She is doing a PhD in ethnography, which might explain it. That and the prodigious quantity of illegal drugs she gets through.

She was of course at pains to protest her non homophobia, and just before being chucked as a friend, said that I must know she’s not homophobic, it’s just that she didn’t agree with every bit of my “political agenda”, and couldn’t I respect her view, the way she “respected” mine. My response was that unfortunately I couldn’t respect her view, because it was homophobic. Well she did ask. And I wasn’t prepared to facilitate a delusion that she couldn’t be homophobic because hey – some of her best friends are lesbians.

I was reminded of the whole sorry affair by this Guardian editorial – Civil partnerships: questions for the church – which is peculiar even by their standards.

My personal view on marriage as a legal phenomenon is simple. I think it should be abolished. If I had my way, no legal marriages or civil partnerships would take place anywhere.

However as it is, we have religion, and we have legal marriage and we have civil partnerships. And some religious institutions want to  host civil partnership ceremonies, and some same sex couples are religious, and want to plight their troth in a place of worship. And amazingly, it took the ConDems  to decide it was a good idea for this to be allowed. I hate it when that happens. But a pantomime villain lurked in the wings in the shape of Baroness O’Cathain. So what do the graun think of her motivation?

“As ever in such debates on equality, though, a much bigger issue of principle lurks not far below the surface of this lawyerish dispute – in which, it should be added, legal opinion is divided and not all on Baroness O’Cathain’s side. That issue of principle is homosexual equality. This newspaper supports such equality and believes that opposition to it will soften over time. It nevertheless believes that the opposition is there, is sincerely held, and should not be legislated away.”

This raises a number of questions. Does the graun believe that the view should be legislated away if it was frivolously held? Are there insincere bigots out there? If someone  sincerely expresses some other kind of prejudice, e.g. racism does that make it better? Will the next grauniad editorial express sympathy for e.g. the crusades on the basis that our genocidal medieval friends truly believed they were doing god’s will?

And the answers presumably are a)yes b)who knows c)of course not and d)quite possibly. There may well be people who are bigots for a laugh, just for a joke, a ha ha ha, but it isn’t nearly as funny as the idea that our dear Baroness is motivated by anything other than the fact that she just doesn’t like non heterosexual people much..

There are various positions you could take on the current law. Personally I think it’s a grubby little compromise, that is slightly less homophobic than the previous grubby little compromise. I can see why they did it the way they did, and I have to admire (oh this really hurts*) Scameron’s  willingness to at least partially upset the Fail, the Torygraph and numerous backbench bigots for a principle, when Bliar wouldn’t have known a principle unless it turned up with a cheque for a trillion billion pounds.

However the fact is religious institutions are still allowed to discriminate in ways nobody else is, and this is excused on the basis apparently that such discrimination  is “sincere” and based on the bible/other religious text as appropriate (though the meeja’s a lot less sympathetic when muslims complain about gays for some reason, even gay penguins).

Can we please, please drop the idea that there are genuinely non homophobic people who just have to do everything their imaginary sky pixie friend tells them, even though it really hurts them more than it hurts us because they’d really like to live in a big rainbow hippy world but the ISPF won’t allow it? And that this somehow makes them superior to common or garden bigots?

Because a)if you did everything the bible tells you you’d find life pretty difficult  – let’s just hope for her sake that Detta O’Cathain has no poly cotton about her person, or even worse some kind of viscose/cotton/angora blend. And b)muslims do it, Christians do it, even educated fruit flies do it. Be honest,  admit you’re a bigot, and stop hiding behind obscure bits of Leviticus to justify it. Because things that you’re liable to read in the bible, ain’t necessarily so.

*not nearly as bad as having to shop at Tesco to annoy Christians though…..  But I suppose they are cheap and convenient…

A few months back I was sat in the hairdressers and noticed a simply enormous frown line. Fuck, I thought, that looks really terrible. So passing one of those cosmetic surgery lite places I went in to inquire about Botox. Having beaten them down to match the price of somewhere cheaper, I went for a consultation with a somewhat slimy doctor who put me off the whole idea, by telling me how much more ‘confident’ it would make me and basically implying that having 150 quids worth of poison injected into my face would transform my life. I was insulted by this,  mainly the suggestion that I wasn’t already full of myself as it was, not to mention his patronising manner, and decided to sack the whole thing off. That and on reflection I didn’t really fancy the syringe full of botulinum/paralysed face scenario.

Yes I am vain, and bothered by  “the visible signs of ageing”, mostly because I’m afraid I’ll have to start acting  my age if I look it. But hey, everyone thinks I look fifteen years younger than I am anyway, so I’ll do for now. I’m vain but I’m not daft. So my mid youth crisis was resolved by a simple note to self to think beautiful thoughts to avoid me frowning (admittedly hard under the current administration, but I manage by imagining Gideon being forced, Sisyphus like, to fellate Jeremy Clarkson for all eternity. Though Jezza would probably enjoy it.).

Nevertheless, having got hold of my address, the cosmeticians continue to stalk me with special offers. So I can kind of see the point of the muff march. But only slightly.

I decided by myself to have Botox, and then decided by myself not to have it. I am no doubt influenced by cultural considerations, but we all are to an extent. I have for instance several crowns and a bridge, having lost a front tooth. My cosmetic dentistry is partly functional but I don’t want to look like Shane McGowan either – or at least how he looked before he had dental implants. We nearly all modify our bodies to some extent even if it’s just cleaning your teeth and washing.

There’s no way on earth I’d have a facelift though. Or any kind of non medically necessary surgery. Which is why the idea of slicing up even more sensitive bits of your body makes me wince. I can’t imagine who on earth would have that done, and can’t help suspecting that in most cases it stems more from deep-seated personal issues than any kind of outside pressure. Women with obsessions with having a ‘perfect’ body may then take their cue from cultural images to fixate on the appearance of their labia, but I suspect that if they weren’t doing that they’d fixate on something else.

The organisers of the march seem to be conflating several different issues. Voluntary labiaplasty is not the same as female genital mutilation or construction of an artificial hymen to meet demands for ‘virginity’. The second is an out-and-out human rights abuse, and the third is a situation where women are under extreme pressure – usually from immediate family and their close social circle.

But although a large number of women may feel under pressure to remove pubic hair (which I acknowledge) and a very small minority may feel that they have to have labiaplasty (and have the several thousand pounds it costs), I don’t feel that anything is accomplished by portraying these as ‘demands’. Because  they aren’t. Any more than there is a ‘demand’ to be size 8.

Cultural influence is not the same as a demand. And all women are not passive dupes, which is where I part company with the muff marchers. Because it really is as simple as just saying ‘no’.

There is little point in whining ‘stop oppressing me’, and expecting  21^st century capitalism to take notice, it won’t. The problem with the muff march is that it starts from the position that 21^st century western females are powerless in the face of porn and Harley street surgeons and the only possible course of action is demanding they  cease their lucrative activities. Of course they’re not and of course they won’t. All it’s doing is just giving the impression they think women are weak and powerless.

The answer to this stuff is to point out what a bunch of extreme bollox (pardon the non pun) it is, or what was called “consciousness raising” back in the seventies. I’m afraid Alison the interior designer may never get the message, but some people are just beyond help. She is unlikely to suddenly get a socially useful job, or stop being  an apparently humourless  woman with more money than sense, let’s face it. (Ooh I’m in trouble now, the interior designers will be after me.)

It may seem uncharitable but I personally find it pretty difficult to see affluent  middle aged women who are obsessed  with having ‘perfect’ bodies as victims. I feel, frankly, like telling them to get a grip. I understand that eating disorders are a genuine mental illness, but simply banning pictures of skinny models won’t stop them, because that isn’t what causes them. There’s an issue with young children and advertising images, but that applies to all advertising images, not just images of women. I am, however, not sure that the increasing take up of cosmetic surgery doesn’t have as much to do with the over availability of credit, coupled with social trends towards individualism and narcissism  as anything else. In other words, I blame Thatcher.

Women are not helpless infants devoid of critical thinking. Feminists – and the grauniad – need to stop pretending they are and start celebrating strength. How about a piece on the thousands of women who’ve recently  joined unions for example? You don’t have to take this crap. You don’t have to sit back and relax. You can actually try changing things.

Sixteen days of awareness raising and speaking out isn’t enough, not when you consider that at any point, day or night, somewhere in this world, a woman or girl is being subjected to rape, or domestic violence, or FGM, forced marriage, forced pregnancy, forced abortion, or a so-called ‘honour-crime’. Sixteen days of blogging, tweeting, marching, chanting, shouting about this isn’t enough when at any moment you care to pick a woman or girl is being prostituted, or trafficked for sexual exploitation, or is enduring any one of a number of other gender hate crimes.

Andrea Dworkin once famously said that she wanted a 24 hour truce in the war against women: “I speak for many feminists, not only myself” she said, “when I tell you that I am tired of what I know and sad beyond any words I have about what has already been done to women up to this point, now, up to 2:24pm on this day, here in this place.

 And I want one day of respite, one day off, one day in which no new bodies are piled up, one day in which no new agony is added to the old, and I am asking you to give it to me. And how could I ask you for less–it is so little. And how could you offer me less: it is so little. Even in wars, there are days of truce. Go and organize a truce. Stop your side for one day. I want a twenty-four-hour truce during which there is no rape….

….And on that day, that day of truce, that day when not one woman is raped, we will begin the real practice of equality, because we can’t begin it before that day. Before that day it means nothing because it is nothing: it is not real; it is not true. But on that day it becomes real. And then, instead of rape we will for the first time in our lives–both men and women–begin to experience freedom.

If you have a conception of freedom that includes the existence of rape, you are wrong. You cannot change what you say you want to change. For myself, I want to experience just one day of real freedom before I die.”

But I say, one day of freedom isn’t enough.

Sometimes I read stories of absolute horror, like the one I tweeted earlier today – ‘101 people knew what he was doing‘ – I read about how an Irish health board knew, as far back as 2000, what this man was doing to his daughters, and about how they did nothing about it and thus allowed the rapes and the sadistic violence to go on for another 10 fucking years, and I know, a 24 hour truce would have done nothing to help those girls. A 24 hour truce would have been meaningless to the living hell those girls and young women were forced to endure. No, a 24 hour truce isn’t enough, just as a 16 day campaign isn’t enough.

So, I refuse to set my sights so low. I refuse to simply settle for crumbs from the table, to be grateful for any tiny concession, any slight tweak of the law or bullshit lip service pronouncement that has no substantive impact on the lives of 50% of the world’s population. I refuse to settle for a break of 24 hours, or for 16 days: I refuse to settle for anything less than an end to it. Because I want the rape and the violence to stop. Not for 24 hours. Not for 16 days. But for good.