It's my affair: a feminist rant.

I was listening to Woman’s Hour this morning and heard a really interesting debate. It was about the sexualisation of young girls and its effects on girls’ attitudes to sex generally as they grown up. The panellists were Valerie Walkerdine, a professor of social science at Cardiff University, Gigi Durham, the author of a book called The Lolita Effect, and Eleanor James, a member of the feminist campaign group Mind the Gap. It was a great discussion – very intelligent and impassioned. Lots of good points were made about the objectification of women. Pole dancing classes and university beauty pageants were linked to the increasing marketisation of female sexuality. Durham pointed out that these things establish for women an unhealthy link between sex and sex work. I felt encouraged listening to James, a former student activist, who talked eloquently and intelligently about the issues at stake.

There was one moment in the debate, however, which depressed me – actually it made me sad. James was explaining what lead her to her critical feminist perspective on these issues. She told us that she had been ‘a chubby teenager’ and as a result of pressure from magazines, TV programmes, etc, had suffered from a number of eating disorders. Her reference to these eating disorders was almost casually dropped in to her account. There were no gasps of shock or other reactions of surprise from the other panellists; what she was describing was not particularly out of the ordinary. And that’s what made me feel sad – that in our culture we know, we expect, that many teenage girls will hate their bodies so much that they will resort to extreme ways of physically punishing themselves – they will starve themselves until they are weak and unable to function, or gorge on food and punch their stomachs until they throw up. What madness is this?

It made me think of a couple of seemingly unrelated experiences from the last week. On Saturday I went to a rally in support of the indefinite strike action at Tower Hamlets College by UCU members in response to the massive cuts the new principal is imposing. There was a long procession of speeches from various local activists, ranging from brief messages of support from other local unions to tub-thumping calls for revolution. The highlight of the speeches, however, undoubtedly came from 2 former students of the college – 2 young Bengali women from the area – one wearing hijab, one not and one of whom is running the Facebook group in support of the strikes. It was a simple speech - they expressed their outrage at what the principal is proposing, talked about how important further education is in the Tower Hamlets community and made an impassioned plea to everyone to support the striking lecturers in whatever way they could.

As I thought about these inspirational women afterwards I was reminded of the infuriating argument that springs up in the media from time to time that we should ban Muslim women from wearing headscarves. The argument goes that these garments are a symbol of a refusal to integrate and to embrace citizenship and western values. Now, I am no fan of women being forced to wear anything, but I am also no fan of women being forced to take anything off. And what greater symbol of integration, of citizenship, of participation in society, could there be than speaking at a rally in defence of a local public service, or organising an Internet group in support of the strike. Hijab or no hijab, give me that over pole dancing classes any day.

The second thing I thought about was a moronic debate that has been had in the media this week about a motion being tabled by the Society of Chiropodists and Podiatrists at the TUC Conference. The motion puts forward that employers should not have the right to force women to wear high heels as part of a work dress code, in recognition of the various health implications wearing heels can have, especially if women are having to stand up for long periods of time. Fairly uncontroversial, I would have thought – women should not be forced to wear uncomfortable footwear if they don’t want to. But no, this has been seized upon by newspapers from the Daily Mail to the Guardian and been portrayed as union busybodies wanting to BAN HIGH HEELS. Why all the interest in what, to me, is an uncontroversial and fairly minor motion being tabled at the conference? It seems to me that people are interested because – as in the debate about headscarves - society is always interested in what women wear and what they look like; we are public property and everyone wants to have their say. Would there be the same kind of response in the media if this was about male footwear? I think not.

Maybe these links are tenuous. It does strike me, however, that if the idea were to take hold that it is up to women what they wear and doesn't matter that much anyway, then teenage girls might hate themselves less.

Mad men (and women): some hurried thoughts on US advertising

Sunday evening prime-time. 6 September 2009. Labor Day weekend and I'm in New York . The medical TV show House is on Channel 9. I'm quite inured to commercial breaks every 7 minutes. I've almost built them into my viewing experience so that I surf the web or check blackberry messages when the ads are on. The programme is not that good anyway. It clearly doesn't demand attention – it invites distraction: that's US TV. It took me less than the time it takes to watch an NBC comedy special to realise that there really is no point comparing US and British television. They have only a passing resemblance to each other. And as we increasingly get our content chunks through more diverse and mobile media their fundamental differences become clearer and clearer. The television itself after all is only really an exhibition mechanism – it's the systems behind: of creation, distribution, ownership, that really define what it is we watch. Not to pretend that there is no link between medium and message but what we consume our messages on is less significant than how those messages get made, by whom, for whom and to what overall purpose. And I guess that in gener,l I'm in favour of the kinds of purposes that favour some idea of the common good rather than enriching the Murdoch family. (which raises an interesting question that I'm sure those policy gurus at the BBC have been mulling for some time – if no one watches their “tv” on 'tv” any more, how do you collect the licence fee?)...Anyway, I digress, I don't want to go into the more than 20 easy reasons why public service broadcasting is a good idea.

Of course commercials exaggerate, embellish and maybe even sometimes lie but this wasn't what struck me. What really came across was their insanity – a quality of quite extreme illogic and irrationality.

Commercial No:1: An attractive young woman is frantically trying to clean her show-house living room which – horror of horrors – seems to have actually accumulated a little dirt on the carpet. It's the kind of thing that happens when people live in a house and use it. But this poor woman is in pieces. Cut away to a mean looking old woman in the passenger seat of a car speeding towards the house. “My mother-in-law will be arriving any moment and I haven't got the time to do a steam clean!” But then a reassuring man in a red t-shirt proudly bearing the slogan RESOLVE appears at her doorway. Don't worry he tells her. Buy this product and everything will be fine. He sprinkles this magic potion on her carpet and heh presto, shiny immaculate floor. The mother-in-law arrives and the first words out of her mouth are compliments to her daughter-in-law on how lovely her house is. The woman is saved: thank God – approval, my mother in law loves me! On what level is this a healthy, functional, desirable relationship? It's not even the casual sexism of it which is pretty obvious and every day (women, if you don't keep to the highest standards of hygiene you are a failure), it's the total conditionality of the relationship presented between two – one would assume – quite intimate people. The commercial in its bland, mass market way presents the idea that obstacles or conflicts in any relationship can be mediated through consumption.

Commercial No. 2. A reassuring voice speaks over intimate family photographs of a couple mountain biking together. “Ever feel like you don't want to do anything, that you can't enjoy anything?” As the photo montage progresses to ever more blissful pictures of intimate family relationships, the voice-over continues to tell us that the answer to some of these nagging feelings of sadness and inadequacy is a product called Cymbalta. Cymbalta is an anti-depressant that you should talk to your doctor about if maybe you don't enjoy time with your husband, family or friends. It could really sort you out... and yet, federal regulations demand that this nice, cosy voice remind us that Cymbalta should not be taken in a whole host of situations and can lead to – among other things - liver failure. Oh yes and the common side effects include nausea, dry mouth and constipation (if you weren't depressed already).
Seeing these two adverts back to back I couldn't help but wonder that presenting anxiety about what your mother in law thinks of you if you have a little dirt on your carpet might in itself as a NORMAL response could in itself be a factor in depression. Buying product one leads you to product two. Or to put it another way, if the first and the most encouraged response to feelings of anxiety or discomfort – particularly around how we relate to “difficult” or “challenging” people that inevitably all of us have to deal with if we aren't living on our own in a cave – is to buy something, then alienation must surely follow. And this is what made me think that these commercials are truly quite mad.

Postscript: Commercial No 3 was for a new “miracle” Revlon foundation that magically matches your own skin tones and makes you look young and flawless. So much healthier - just common or garden lies.

Twenty years since the end of history

“What we are witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution.”
Francis Fukyama, 1989

“Imagine a war which everyone won, permanent holiday in endless sun. Peace without wisdom, one steals to achieve, relentlessly pretending to believe”
DJ Culture, the Pet Shop Boys, 1991

1990 – Iraqi troops invade Kuwait
1991 – UN authorize operation Desert Storm in response to Iraq's action in Kuwait; dissolution of the USSR; coup in Haiti removing democratically elected president
1992 – break up of Yugoslavia; signing of NAFTA; Zapatista uprising in Mexico
1993 – China tests nuclear weapons
1994 – siege of Sarajevo; genocide in Rwanda; Russia launches attack on Chechnya
1995 – continuation of Yugoslav wars; France carry out nuclear test in the Pacific
1996 – Taliban take over Afghanistan
1997 – financial crisis in emerging economies of Asia
1998 – violence between Serbs and ethnic Albanians in Kosovo; US air strikes on Iraq
1999 – war in Kosovo - NATO air strikes against Serbia; massacres in East Timor after referendum approves independence from Indonesia, intensified fighting between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, military coup in Pakistan
2000 – election of far-right party in Austria under Jorge Haider, second intifada in Palestine, contested election of George Bush in the USA
2001 – 9/11 attacks on the world trade centre, USA and UK launch campaign in Afghanistan against the Taliban
2002 – unsuccessful US-supported coup in Venezuela against elected president Hugo Chavez, Bali bomb killing 202 people, North Korea announce that it's developing nuclear weapons
2003 – US-led invasion of Iraq without the backing of the UN, NATO take over ongoing military operations in Afghanistan
2004 – bomb attacks in Madrid killing 191
2005 – assassination of Rafik Hariri in Lebanon, France and the Netherlands vote against EU constitution, bombings in London, election of Mahmoud Ahmedinejad in Iran
2006 – Hamas win election in the Palestinian authority, elections described as "extremely professional, in line with international standards, free, transparent and without violence". Hamas government not recognized by the USA and EU and aid suspended; escalation of violence in Iraq; both India and North Korea test-fire nuclear weapons, Iran announces that it has enriched uranium
2007 – Israel launches military attack in Southern Lebanon
2008 – near collapse of the world financial system - bank bail outs and nationalization, Georgian troops in South Ossetia, Russian troops in Georgia
2009 – $3 trillion US budget including range of government intervention to prop up the economy; part-nationalization of the auto industry in the USA, ousting of elected President of Honduras