More than a shirt

I don't often talk hot-button topics on here (I prefer safe topics, like books. In the whole of human history, I can’t recall one instance where books have ever caused trouble), but something happened this week which stuck in my craw (yes, I have a craw, it's where I store all my repressed rage).

Dr Matt Taylor, part of the Rosetta mission team, was interviewed wearing a shirt that depicted numerous women wearing decidedly un-numerous clothing. This sparked condemnation of the 'sexist' shirt, followed by a predictable counterlash defending Dr Taylor and his choice of shirt and lamenting the 'oversensitive nature' of (variously): social justice warriors, feminists, offence-seekers, and the brigade of political correctionist fun-ruiners.

I have seen three main points of complaint against shirt-based criticism:

1) The backlash and its effect on Taylor (he later apologised in tears) was excessive and overly harsh

2) The shirt is not a big deal—there are more important things to focus on

3) The shirt is not sexist

1) Was the backlash too harsh?

Probably. This big scary beast we call the 'internet' is capable of many beautiful and terrifying things; it speaks with many voices, which sometimes resolve to the buzzing of a thousand angry flies. I don't like the ‘net mob mentality, but the discussion does not end with the condemnation how the criticism was presented. We can condemn his treatment without dismissing the issues raised. This is no longer about Matt Taylor, nor his shirt.

2) ‘The shirt is not a big deal’

This comment is stupid. Whatever the topic, it always appears. 

'Why are people wasting time talking about the shirt? We just landed a robot on a frickin' asteroid.'

'Why are we wasting money landing on a stupid asteroid? We should spending that money to build robots with famine-blasting lasers.' 

'Why are we wasting money on lasers that can only solve world hunger? We should be trying to stop the thing that really matters—the inevitable heat-death of the universe? Why does no-one care about that?'

It’s an inherently pointless argument that gets thrown up all the time (literally regurgitated like the indigestible garbage that it is). It's reductive. If you concede to that logic, you can dismiss anything on the grounds that there's always a bigger fish in need of frying.

Most of all, it bothers me that people think there are a finite amount of fucks we can give, so we better spend them wisely. If that were true (spoiler warning: it isn't), I’d suggest not wasting any listening to people who offer that opinion (incidentally, the same applies for anyone who unironically uses the term 'social justice warrior' or 'feminazi'). We can hold many discordant ideas about many different things at once. It's one of my favourite things about people. Our concern is not zero-sum.

3) ‘The shirt isn't sexist’

This is the roiling meat at the centre of the issue. Much of the commentary on the topic (particularly in the mainstream media) made little attempt to characterise why the shirt is sexist. Even those taking the stance that it is largely focussed on the implications and wider impact—for example, on women in STEM fields. To be clear: that's really bloody important and relevant, but it’s not what this post is about. For me, that narrative skipped a step, which left some people behind.

The shirt is not sexist because it is sexualised. Sexualised imagery is not inherently sexist (though there are many ways in which it can take a flying leap into 'sexist bullshit' territory). The key factor is context, both in terms of placement and the wider social context.

I have no problem with sexualised imagery in and of itself, but I do take issue with people wearing clothing emblazoned with it. That's not a repressed, prudish, 'seeing sexy things in a public place makes me uncomfortable', prurient reservation; it's because putting sexualised imagery into the position of a slogan or decoration is a reduction. It's turning someone (and that someone is usually a woman) into a talisman, a banner.

Even that I do not see as inherently sexist in an abstract sense. Wearing a t-shirt depicting a favourite actor, singer, politician (male or female) is still a reduction of that person by the same definition, but wouldn’t be called sexist. However, when the focus is placed squarely on a woman’s body above all else, it takes on a different character. 

If we lived in a society with more mature attitudes towards sex and gender—one not so rife with sexism (and many other ‘-isms’) on every level (and it really, really is)—if we were healthier in our attitude towards women's bodies in particular, the act of wearing clothing like this wouldn’t be loaded with such a momentously-fucking-heavy context. But we don't, and it is. Women go through life with their worth constantly evaluated in terms of their appearance. That makes all the difference for how we interpret this. It plays into a wider narrative of sexism.

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Sometimes, reactions can be overzealous or overbearing, but that does not mean that people are simply looking for low-hanging offence fruit so they can feast on its delicious flesh because that's how they feed and grow and incubate their fun-sucking spawn.

We don’t have to condone the way something is expressed to accept the truth behind it. We can totally disagree with the torrent of abuse while accepting that there is a point somewhere in there. We can reach that conclusion on our own, in spite of all the shouting on both sides.

This one thing is not earth-shattering. It’s sadly sidelined a great achievement, but the fact that it has does not magically make the issue cease to exist. It’s not just about the shirt. The shirt is not single-sleevedly widening the gender pay gap or shutting women out of science. It shouldn’t have merited the attention it received, but the tectonic plates of opinion grinding against each other were sufficient to raise an earthquake.

A shirt can’t do that on its own—it’s a thread in a much bigger tapestry.

It’s not just about the shirt.

(Bank)notes for women!

You may have followed the Women on Banknotes campaign earlier this year (led by Caroline Criado-Perez - who received a lot of abuse on Twitter for her successful campaign). She started a petition (which garnered 35,000 signatures) to appeal the decision to replace the only representation of a woman on British banknotes currently in circulation (Elizabeth Fry, prison reformer) with yet another man (Winston Churchill). The campaign was successful, in that old WC (£5) will still be replacing Lizzie F (in 2016), but in, turn, Charles Darwin (£10) will be replaced (in 2017) by a new female person, Jane Austen.

So why am I complaining? There’s still going to be a woman on a banknote!

The thing is, including those two new, yet-to-be-released notes, there have been seventeen people on British banknotes, since the introduction of putting people on ’em, in 1970. Three of whom have been or will be women (Florence Nightingale did a long stint on the tenner 1975-1994; Elizabeth Fry rocked up on the fiver in 2002 and is still in circulation). That means that, overall, between 1970 and 2017, 17% of people on banknotes were female. Now, that is a totally stupid and useless statistic, I’ll admit. As any able-minded person can work out, from the information here given, for eight years there wasn’t a single woman on a bank note!

So I say: let’s have eight years where it’s only women on ’em!

(And then another four decades where seventy-five percent of the folk represented are women.)  After all, it’s only fair. Speaking of being fair, let’s try to steer clear of stereotypically acceptably-feminine professions such as nursing and writing Romance novels. I’ve stuck to British (obviously) and deceased as well, as, somehow, putting someone who’s still alive on a banknote feels a bit too ‘Cult of Personality’ for me.

Here are my suggestions:

The one to ease us in:

James Miranda Stuart Barry (c. 1789-1799 – 25 July 1865): after graduating from University of Edinburgh Medical School, James Barry had a fantastic career which spanned five decades as a military surgeon. When he died, the year after he retired, it transpired that he was actually a woman. Margaret Ann Bulkley had disguised herself as a man in order to get into medical school, so that she could fund her family, who had fallen on hard times. She managed to keep up the charade for her entire life. (She even snuck off to Mauritius to have a baby at one point!)  No woman before her had graduated as a doctor.

The intersectional one:

Mary Jane Seacole (1805 – 14 May 1881): the child of a Scot and a Creole, Mary Seacole, basically did what Florence Nightingale did, whilst simultaneously battling the prejudices of her peers (including Florrie N), which were aroused due to the fact that Mary was not entirely white. The British War Office refused her offer of assistance when the Crimean War broke out, so she took herself out to Balaclava and set up her own hospital (“hotel”) independently. (Okay, I said I’d steer clear of nurses, but she was awesome, and she also would be a useful play in terms of recognising that not everyone who did good stuff for Britain was an upper- or middle-class white dude or dudette.)  

The mathematician:

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852): the only legitimate child of Lord Byron, Ada Lovelace worked with Charles Babbage on his Analytical Engine. Originally charged with translating someone else’s work, she ended up developing it as well. She wrote the first algorithm intended to be read by a machine - she was the first computer programmer.

The early proponent for racial equality, AKA the one who, as she said herself, was definitely not a feminist:

Mary Henrietta Kingsley (13 October 1862 – 3 June 1900): an ethnographer who, at a time when the only women visiting Africa were the wives of missionaries, set out to explore Africa on her own, producing two works - Travels in West Africa (1897) and West African Studies (1899). She worked to raise the notion that there should be no hierarchies based on skin colour, and she died whilst volunteering as a nurse during the Second Boer War.

The Wild(ing) card:

Emily Wilding Davison (11 October 1872 – 8 June 1913): a militant activist for women’s suffrage , Emily Davison died due to injuries incurred by being trampled by King George V’s horse at the Epsom Derby, whilst attempting to promote votes for women. Once, whilst serving time in Holloway Prison (for arson - though Suffragette arson was responsible, in that they took pains only ever to damage property, not people), she threw herself down a ten-metre iron staircase in an attempt to divert the guards who were force-feeding her and her hunger-striking sisters. She also, in 1911, hid in a cupboard in the Palace of Westminster, so that she could legitimately claim, on the census of that year, to live in the House of Commons.

The jitsuka:

Edith Margaret Garrud (1872–1971): trained the Bodyguard - a thirty-woman-strong group of suffragettes charged with protecting high-profile members of the Women’s Social and Political Union once the Cat and Mouse Act had been passed. Mary was one of the first, Western, female instructors of martial arts, and practised a form of (my own, much-loved) Jiu Jitsu. She was introduced to it by Edward William Barton-Wright (founder of Bartitsu), and she, with her husband, co-ran Sadakazu Uyenishi’s jujutsu school in Soho, teaching the women’s and children’s classes, once he had returned to Japan.

The musician:

Alexandra Elene Maclean "Sandy" Denny (6 January 1947 – 21 April 1978): Sandy Denny, after a brief stint in nursing, started out performing folk songs (and accompanying herself), including appearances on the BBC. She joined the folk band Fairport Convention to stretch her vocal talent and to write her own songs, including “Who knows where the time goes”. She, later, formed her own band, Fotheringay. Sandy sadly died young, as a result of substance abuse, so perhaps is not a perfect candidate if we’re looking for a role model, but since that isn’t necessarily the case (I wouldn’t suggest anyone follow Emily Davison’s example either), I thought I’d put her on the list. I was going to add Evelyn Glennie (the profoundly deaf, virtuoso percussionist) but, happily, she’s still alive.

So, those are some of my choices, but we’re certainly not going to populate banknotes for the next forty years with only seven options; who would you like to see on our paper currency? I’d love to know of some more recent women who should be celebrated! Go on! Have a think, and let me know!

Masculine, Feminine, or Neuter?

It would have been helpful to point out when first posting that this is another guest post from Georgia. It was in the post tags, but not in the body text...

Recently I’ve been pondering some possible sexism. Those of you who know me will be aware that I do this a lot. You’ll also be aware that often little things irritate me, which, on their own seem to be insignificant. My argument is always that those little things either contribute or attest to a wider problem.

My latest irritation is just how often, linguistically, masculine is placed before feminine. I know, I know, no biggie. That’s just the way it is. I’ll get onto that in a bit, (though, historically speaking, "That’s just the way it is", can be a bad excuse for continuing to do something bad).  But first, let me illustrate my point.

It made sense to write “Dear Sir or Madam” when we lived in a time where few women worked - but why do we still always list the masculine first. ‘Ah-hah!’ I hear you say, ‘what about “Ladies and Gentlemen”, eh?’ To which, my response is, the laydeez wouldn’t come first if there were any lords around, it’s just that lords are pretty rare at the moment.

What about the fact that male people just get to be Mr (or ‘Master’, if you’re splitting hairs, but that is (a) increasingly falling out of use and (b) a purely age-based differentiator), but female people spend their lives making people feel uncomfortable as they try to guess whether they are Miss, Mrs, or Ms. (I forgot: Dr!)

Does anybody ever write “Mrs and Mr So-and-So” when addressing envelopes or joint emails?  In fact, as a female person, you never, ever get to be first on any tick-box list or survey. ‘Mr’ is always the default setting. As a young, female person you only get to be third (Miss), as opposed to your brothers and male friends who are first for all their lives. As you get older, you have the option of marrying someone and changing your name to move up to second place or (as I did, aged seventeen) decide your marital status ain’t nobody’s business and become a Ms for life (editor’s note: ‘Ms fo’ life, yo’). Or, you could spend years studying for a PhD; then you could be fourth!

“Mother and Father” is the only exception I can think of, but the sceptic in me feels that that order is probably due to women being traditionally (i.e. in terms of centuries/millenia) more involved in parenting than men. Plus, pater is still listed regularly in Latin grammar books - mater doesn’t feature at all!  In fact, looking at Kennedy’s Primer, masculine noun examples which are human beings include: judge, king, soldier, chieftain, consul and father. Feminine nouns: virgin. That’s it.

Let’s get down to linguistic brass tacks. What about “je suis, tu es, il est, elle est”. Or, for my own personal irritation, and a much more deeply discussed example, read on:

[Skip this ‘Ancient Languages 101’ section if you already know some Latin/Greek.]

In Latin and Greek, the function of a word in a sentence (subject, object etc.) is marked by the endings of the word. For example, with nouns, -m often shows the object:

puella feminam amat            The girl loves the woman

puellam femina amat   The woman loves the girl

This is great because it means you can put your words in *any* order you want - so useful for exciting prose or poetry! It also means that there are a bunch of different words with a bunch of different endings and to make it easy to learn/recognise these, words are sorted into different groups.

[Hey Skippy! Here’s where you start reading again.]

The first declension (set of nouns grouped by endings) is overwhelmingly populated by feminine nouns. Not sure why, but it is. The second declension consists of masculine and neuter nouns - whose endings are largely the same (masculine endings differ from neuter in only two cases). So why is it, when any word which can be masculine, feminine or neuter is listed, it is always listed in that order? Why, when the feminine formation is the first declension, and the masculine and neuter are so similar, do we insist on putting them in such an order? This happens with adjectives, pronouns, participles, the definite article (in Greek), it happens in German, there’s no neuter in modern Romance languages but masculine still comes before feminine… In the Latin GCSE defined vocabularies, instead of giving the fourth principal part as the supine (a formation which looks neuter) they give it as masculine (because pupils learn perfect participles but not the supine, and the first version of a perfect participle is masculine - then feminine, then neuter).

Whhhhhyyyyyy??? Is language inherently prejudiced in favour of the masculine? Does the masculine always come first? Whhhhhhyyy?

It’s easy to say that these things have always been done in that order, but does that mean we still have to keep it that way? Does the fact that, in languages, the masculine comes before the feminine, have a subconscious effect on men and women, boys and girls (ooh, look, there it goes again!)?

For example, is the phenomenon of young female students being far more reticent to volunteer than young male students (widely noted anecdotally by teachers) influenced by young women learning that they come second (third!) from a young age?  Am I the only woman who gets frustrated *waiting* for all the men to get out of the Jitsu circle so that I can get in to attack? Is there a deeper reason why George wrote his name on the lease first (even though I am older than him and have a slightly better degree, not to mention bigger ears)? Who knows! Maybe it’s something to think about though. Especially since I (a self-confessed, active feminist) had to actively think about putting “young female students” first in that first sentence and call myself a “woman” rather than a “girl” in the second one...and it felt *weird* doing so.

I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts and examples that support or contradict the theory that language privileges the masculine over the feminine. So, ladies, lords and gentlemen, girls and boys: what do you think?