DISCLAIMER: I would like to make it ABSOLUTELY CRYSTAL CLEAR at this point that whilst I wholeheartedly support breastfeeding (and indeed advocate for it) this does not mean that I do not support the right of all Mothers/Parents to make their own infant feeding decision. This article is not intended to shame any woman who does not breast feed.

Jessica Valenti wrote this piece in The Daily recently. I totally agree with her sentiment that mothers shouldn’t be made to feel guilty. Breastfeeding is awesome and leads to much improved health outcomes both long and short term for Mothers and Babies. However, it’s also incredibly hard work and not everyone will be able to access support to breastfeed. Some women,  will have issues that mean they are physically unable to breastfeed. For some women, particularly those with premature babies in NICU’s the act of pumping breast milk can be incredibly stressful, particularly with no baby physically demanding milk to stimulate production. I get that. For these and a whole host of other reasons, which include not being mean, arsey people, we shouldn’t be making any woman feel guilty about how she chooses to feed her baby.

I don’t have a problem with any of that. In fact I salute Valenti for talking honestly and frankly about the fact that breastfeeding is difficult, and requires support which is often lacking, and without that support many women stop breastfeeding which is a why a shockingly low number of women continue to breastfeed following initiation at birth – at 6 months of age in the UK less than 1% o women are still breastfeeding exclusively as per recommendations (Infant Feeding Survey, 2005) and across the world less than 40% of infants are breastfed (WHO Global Strategy).

Yes folks thats right- us evil breastfeeding mamas, the ones who go round, apparently harassing non breastfeeding mamas, make up such a majority that LESS THAN ONE PERCENT OF UK MOTHERS BREASTFEED TO 6 MONTHS.  We aren’t some scary, self righteous majority, we are in fact an underfunded, under represented and socially harassed minority.

Anyway I’m digressing. My issue with Valenti’s piece is this statement :

“Thousands of studies have shown that breastfed babies are healthier on average than formula-fed babies — but no research has shown that it’s the breastfeeding that’s causing the better health. Moms who have the time and support to exclusively breastfeed, for example, may be more likely to support their children’s health in other ways. There simply is no proof that breast milk is the magical elixir so many of us believe it is.

“I never doubted that breastfeeding had myriad health benefits, so I was actually very surprised at what I found in the medical literature,” Wolf told me.

And it’s not just the science around breastfeeding that’s iffy — the social expectations and the dismissal of how hard nursing can be are also affecting women. “

I’m sorry, what? You know what, you can formula feed if you want to. You can claim that there are forces out there that shame you as a formula feeding mother. I’d like to argue that actually those same forces are busy shaming ALL mothers for all and any of their choices. But don’t you DARE to tell women and well, anyone reading for that matter, that the science around breastfeeding is iffy. Because really, it isn’t.

There isn’t some conspiracy where formula is secretly equal to breast milk, and nasty mean breastfeeding mamas (who make up less than 40% of the global mama populace) are lying so that poor formula feeding mamas feel bad. Breast milk is, scientifically speaking,  better for babies health by dint of it being custom made to meet the specific needs of the baby it feeds. The reason breastfed babies are generally speaking healthier is because breast milk contains immunological factors specific to each baby which protect it from disease. Breast milk doesn’t require making up with water which may be unsanitary thus exposing babies to gastreointestinal issues. Breast milk doesn’t require careful making up to ensure it is the correct strength, meaning that many babies every year become ill due to simple human error. And breast milk, unlike formula milk is sterile.

That doesn’t mean that people should always HAVE to breastfeed. People should breastfeed if they are in the privileged position of being supported and able to do so, if they want to and that’s that. I don’t care HOW you feed your baby, I care if you’re supported in doing so. I care if you have full access to ACCURATE and valid information which enable you to make your choice. No one should be shamed for parenting decisions- we do the best we can, with what we have at the time, and perhaps with different circumstances we’d make different decisions.

But, for fucks sake, don’t you dare lie about breast milk (or formula milk for that matter) when you are a publicly visible and respected figure. Don’t you dare. Because you’re contributing directly to a culture which shames women and uses shit science to justify shit social attitudes.

*Please see the WHO Report “Global Strategy for Infant and Young Child Feeding” for more details.

The recent ruling of the employment tribunal in the case of former Countryfile presenter Miriam O’Reilly is a double cause for celebration: not only does it send out a welcome message that the law will support older women who feel they have been thrown on the scrap heap for no good reason, but, at first sight, it also seems to have been a landmark case in terms of wider social attitudes. It has been interesting and gratifying to note that many socially conservative media outlets which usually dismiss campaigns for women’s rights as “political correctness gone mad” have backed O’Reilly to the hilt on this.

O’Reilly is, of course, not the first older female presenter to gain public sympathy and support after being ditched or passed over for promotion by the BBC: the dropping of Arlene Phillips as a judge on Strictly Come Dancing, the end of Moira Stewart’s career as a television newsreader and the decision to hire Toby Buckland as the main presenter of Gardener’s World rather than promote Carol Klein after Monty Don’s decision to take time out after

 a stroke all caused widespread public disquiet. In the case of Gardener’s World, viewing figures dropped alarmingly after the BBC’s decision to “refresh” the show by marginalising its older female presenter, so if the BBC really does believe that the public wants its factual programming to be anchored exclusively by young, sexy presenters, then it seems to be mistaken. Nonetheless, the media kerfuffle over the Countryfile case seems to have taken the public indignation at the treatment of older women on screen to a new level.

I’m not sure, though, that the widespread public goodwill to O’Reilly necessarily indicates a new dawn of woman-friendly attitudes in society. Many of the normally reactionary, normally anti-feminist voices who have spoken out in O’Reilly’s favour are doing so because they perceive this primarily as an issue of ageism, not one of sexism (a view apparently shared by the employment tribunal itself, which, while upholding her claim for age discrimination, rejected her accusations of sex discrimination – rather puzzlingly, since they themselves acknowledged that women are more vulnerable to this kind of age discrimination than men). I suspect that, in many cases, the powerful tugs of middle-class and middle-age tribalism have merely temporarily overcome a deeper distrust of the feminist agenda.

Moreover, in many of these cases of age discrimination which have captured the public imagination, it is younger women in the media industry who have been cast as the villain. In the Strictly Come Dancing row, for instance, Alesha Dixon bore the brunt of the public backlash, not the TV executives who chose to hire her or her male co-presenters. It seemed that both her supporters and Phillips’s accepted unquestioningly that there was room for only one token woman on a panel of four judges – they merely disgreed on what type of woman it should be. That perhaps there was a place for both Phillips and Dixon on the judging panel didn’t seem to cross anybody’s mind.

It seems that, increasingly, any woman in factual programming or TV journalism who happens to be under 45 and passably attractive is dismissed as an “autocutie” who can’t possibly have a brain or any relevant experience for the job she is doing. Fiona Bruce, Emily Maitlis and Katie Derham all have Oxbridge degrees, but you wouldn’t know it, from the constant sniping about “sexing up and dumbing down” that female newsreaders face.

The Madonna/Whore dichotomy appears to be alive and well in broadcasting, with audiences apparently believing that a woman can be a young hottie or an authoritative expert, but not both. While the BBC management seems to think that women exist only as eye candy and should be banished from the screen as soon as they fail to set heterosexual men’s pulses racing (and even then they fail to recognise that older women can be “hot”, too), that a woman who is not young and sexy has no right to be on TV, large sections of the audience and media who oppose the BBC’s attitude seem to fall into the opposite error, of believing that a woman who is young and sexy has no right to be on TV.

Why can’t women be treated as people, as subjects, whose sexiness or lack of is purely an incidental factor, as it is for men, rather than a defining feature of their worth?

Nonetheless, I still feel that, as a society, we are making progress, slow though it may be. I remember when Angela Rippon and Anna Ford began their careers as newsreaders in the 70s there was much comment in the press to the effect that no woman could ever have enough “gravitas” to be an appropriate person to present the national news. I don’t think many people would seriously argue that today. And voices like those of Nick Ross (who has commented that O’Reilly’s sacking was justified, because it is “natural” for people to be attracted to older men but younger women) and Cristina Odone (who has brought up that old chestnut about this legal ruling harming women’s employment chances, as it will make media employers more wary of hiring female presenters in the first place if they know they won’t be able to sack them on a whim) seem to be being treated with the ridicule that they deserve.

I know that it is true that the media is a rarefied world and that O’Reilly’s victory does not necessarily improve the lot of ordinary women outside that charmed circle, but O’Reilly winning this verdict is still, in my view, a lot better than O’Reilly not winning that verdict.

I live in the Bristol area, where the local media has been abuzz lately with the brutal murder of Joanna Yeates. Before that, the murder in South Africa of Anni Dewani, whose husband is a Bristol businessman, also garnered several column inches in the local press. Several things about the coverage of these two women’s deaths in both the national and the local media have disturbed me.

Firstly, the salacious reporting of both cases seems to have been tailored to cater for the armchair Poirots amongst us. It is easy to forget, when surrounded by news reports which focus in lingering detail on clues and suspects and gossipy details of the dramatis personae’s lives, that the women who died and their family members and/or acquaintances who are now falling under both police and public suspicion are real people, not characters in a novel or a TV series. These women’s violent deaths seem to be being heartlessly plundered to provide the nation with a series of dramatic watercooler moments. I must admit, as a whodunnit junkie myself, I have found myself getting caught up in the lurid speculation, too, and am instantly repelled by my own crassness. It’s hard, though, when every news report seems to frame these women’s deaths in terms more suited to the Reverend Green in the Library with the Lead Piping.

Is it just my imagination or is it particularly the violent murder of young women that gets this voyeuristic treatment? I don’t recall the deaths of young men or older people being reported in this way. It seems part of a general public perception that the abduction, torture and/or murder of young women is somehow exciting, glamorous and sexy, a perception which is fuelled by crime fiction which seems to increasingly focus on the “sexy” female torture victim or dead body with unnecessarily titillating detail.

This fetishisation of female victims of violence is not only objectifying and insulting to women, it can also have negative effects on male victims of crime, whose suffering is often ignored by the media and the public – they’re apparently just not sexy enough. For example, thousands of children go missing every year, but it’s usually only photogenic white girls whose absence triggers a media frenzy, with not only the seedy, quasi-paedophiliac voyeurism that brings, but also the publicity that could potentially be helpful in finding them.

Also, I’ve noticed that, in both media descriptions of Dewani and Yeates and tributes from friends and families, the women’s beauty has been stressed above all else. Why is it that people persist in thinking that the most valuable asset a woman has, the most important thing to stress about her, the most tragic waste if her life is violently cut short, is her beauty? When a young man is tragically killed, it is rarely said about him “It’s such a waste – he was so handsome!” “He had his whole life ahead of him” – yes. “He was so talented, doing so well in his studies or career” – yes. “He planned to marry and have children” – yes, sometimes. All these things are said about female murder victims, too, and yet the kneejerk response when a woman under the age of 35 meets an untimely end is to stress the loss of her good looks first, as if it’s somehow disrespectful to the dead woman to think that any of her talents or achievements are more important than that.

Finally, I find the Avon and Somerset Police’s suggestion that local women should avoid going out alone at night until Yeates’s killer is caught staggering. Statistically, young men are far more likely to die as a result of violent crime than women, and yet I have never heard the police issue a statement suggesting that men submit themselves to a voluntary curfew. It seems unthinkable to subject men to any curtailment of their freedom to travel and socialise as much as they want, no matter how much danger they may be in. And yet if a woman is killed, especially a young, attractive woman, even if there is no evidence whatsoever that she was killed because she was a woman, the motive is immediately assumed to be sexual and all women in the area are held to be at risk and expected to make themselves prisoners in their own homes, or it will somehow be considered to be their fault if they are subsequently attacked.

I’ve just come away from a Guardian website discussion about Julian Assange feeling disgusted and baffled by the general assumption that seems to prevail on the left that liberal men who are seen to be doing a good job for the cause of free speech, civil rights, socialism, political correctness, whatever, somehow deserve a Get Out Of Jail Free card on charges of rape and sexual assault.

I don’t deny that Wikileaks has made public a lot of information that was in the public interest and Assange deserves commendation for that. I don’t deny that I’m appalled by the US’s sledgehammer-to-crush-a-nut tactics in attempting to shut down Wikileaks and arraign Assange on espionage charges. I would oppose any attempt to extradite him to the States on those, quite frankly, preposterous charges. And I must admit that the timing of Sweden’s issuing of an arrest warrant for him on rape and sexual molestation charges is suspicious, as is the fact that they are acting now after previously ruling he had no case to answer, and it may be that they are, as his supporters claim, plotting an extradition deal with the US once they’ve got him off British soil, which would be quite wrong.

But the idea that the charges on which he is wanted in Sweden are “trivial” and “trumped up” is a misogynist fallacy that I cannot believe is going unchallenged time and time again on left-wing messageboards.

I can’t believe that comments like “This shows the danger of going down the Swedish route of making it easier to convict in rape cases” and “This is another example of why women who make rape accusations shouldn’t have a right to anonymity” are getting more than 700 recommendations in the Guardian’s comment section on the Assange case.

I have no idea whether he really committed the crimes of which he is accused. It may be, as some media outlets allege, that the story of the complainants does not add up. But the way to find out is by having him face those charges in court. No woman who accuses a powerful, charismatic or brilliant man of sexual assault should be denied justice simply because he is so “important” or “doing such a great job”. No accusation of rape is a “small matter” that doesn’t really need to be pursued.

And nor do I buy the arguments that what he is accused of in Sweden “wouldn’t be considered rape in any civilised country”. I think Sweden’s feminist rape laws are a cause for celebration, not denigration.

It’s not that I believe that any man accused of rape must automatically be guilty. Nor do I believe that, even if he is guilty, that necessarily obliterates every good deed he has ever done in his life or that proper legal processes don’t need to be followed or that extenuating circumstances that would be considered in any other crime should be ignored when it comes to rape. When Polanski found himself under house arrest last year, while I agreed he should be extradited to face charges, I found myself almost as irritated by those who, seemingly slipping straight into Daily Mail-reader hanging and flogging mode, didn’t think whether the correct procedures were followed or not in his original trial mattered and by those who felt his real-life actions automatically made his films “misogynist” works that any “real” feminist would boycott as I was by those who argued that he shouldn’t face trial because “He’s such a great artist!”

Let’s separate the alleged rapist from the man’s professional role. If a “great man” is accused of a sexual crime, I don’t believe that means we should ignore or dismiss any great work he has achieved in other areas of his life. But nor, obviously, does it mean that the crimes of which he is accused aren’t serious and shouldn’t be investigated.

And if it’s true, as Assange’s supporters claim, that the Swedish authorities would never have bothered applying for extradition on something as “trivial” as sex crime charges if he hadn’t upset the US government, then in my opinion that’s a sad indictment of how trivially the international justice system treats rape.

I’ve been interested recently to read some media reports by a local branch of the Fawcett Society on the representation of women in the media. They can be found here and here.

By counting the numbers of pictures/mentions of men and women in various media genres and analysing whether they are included because of what they look like or because of their achievements, they provide a snapshot of the very different ways in which the two genders are represented in books, magazines, newspapers and on TV.

Their findings on children’s TV and literature make particularly stark reading, because the culture children are exposed to will help shape their attitudes to themselves and to others as they grow up. The researchers found that, on the sample day, on the CBeebies channel, 100% of story narrators were male, as were a whopping 70% of characters shown. What message does that send out to girls about their importance in society and their right to have their voices heard?

The ratio of female to male characters in both adults’ and children’s TV and literature is something I tend to get very hot under the collar about, particularly the ratio between male and female central or authoritative characters.

I very often get into debates with people about this and am accused of “playing a futile numbers game”. The usual arguments I hear (and I’m sure many of you will be used to hearing these same cracked records, too) are:

(a) Shouldn’t we be focusing on serious problems, like genital mutilation, forced marriage, domestic violence, female infanticide? Isn’t how many female characters there are in a children’s book too trivial to worry about?

To which I would respond, well, no, actually. Men who feel they have the right to subject women to violence and coercion do so because they believe that merely having a Y chromosome makes them intrinsically more valuable and powerful than people without one. They weren’t born with this world view. I’m not suggesting that reading children’s books with a male: female character ration of 3:1 is, on its own, going to make someone abusive to women. But it’s one of the many things that cumulatively teach children to believe that men are “naturally” more important than women.

(b) Surely having one powerful or strong female character in a book is enough? It gives girls a role model and shows that women can achieve?

If it were the 1950s, when real-life female leaders were thin on the ground and school careers advisers counseled girls not to aim for any job more authoritative than a secretary, I might be able to buy that argument. But we are no longer in a position where girls are starved of any role models and anything is better than nothing.

Indeed, literature and TV often lags woefully behind real life in its portrayal of authority figures. For example, one of the clichés of detective stories, in novels and on TV, that most does my head in is the male-female authority sandwich. The female second-in-command, the female sergeant seems to be everywhere in detective series these days, from DS Reid in Taggart, through DS Havers in Inspector Lynley, to DS Clarke in Rebus (and, although they’re not police officers and none of them has a formal rank, arguably Harry-Hermione-Ron in Harry Potter is the ultimate example of the male-female authority sandwich). And what a depressing example of faux feminism that is! I always feel that the female sergeant is being held up as an example of how right-on the author is and how far on society has moved, that we are supposed to be grateful that’s she’s made it to the dizzy heights of the rank of sergeant and isn’t still languishing as a lowly Constable. Shock! Horror! She even has male constables working under her!

But, of course, none of this mitigates the fact that the woman is always stuck in second-in-command, that the inspector whose name is the title of the series is male, that he is the one whose maverick but flawed genius is central to the franchise and that, while she might be allowed to be bright and resourceful and sometimes even hand him the crucial clue without which the case wouldn’t be cracked, his is the central consciousness with which we are invited to identify, to the extent that even his failings and weaknesses are fetishised.

Where fictional female police officers are allowed to reach the rank of inspector or higher (e.g. in the Prime Suspect and The Commander series), the focus is usually on how hard it is being a woman in a man’s world, with her gender being presented as a rarity and a problem.

The fact is, though, that in real life it is nowadays far from unusual to see a woman in the higher echelons of the police service. There are female superintendents, commanders, commissioners and chief constables. Why can’t we see more police inspectors in fiction, as in real life, who just happen to be women?

So, no, I don’t think having one female character in a position of authority or a position of importance in the plot is enough: while it might demonstrate that women can be important, the fact that they are in a minority still reinforces the sense that it is far more likely and normal for men to be leaders, often suggesting that this is less likely and normal than is actually the case in real life.

However, I don’t think it’s always wise to get too hung up on rank and positions of authority. It is not, in my opinion, a good idea to start criticising female characters for “only” being a stay-at-home housewife or for “not being strong enough”. That would reinforce patriarchal notions about paid work outside the home being the only work of importance and set standards of “feistiness” and “strength” that female characters are expected to meet that are higher than those expected of males. Male heroes aren’t always expected to be “strong” – indeed, when they show vulnerability, we often love them even more.

For me, the most important thing is to have more female characters in central roles, more female characters who are presented as the subjects of the stories. I’d love the female sergeant if it were her name in the show title, if the stories were about her problems and concerns and her role in the investigation. She doesn’t have to have a promotion – she just needs to be shown to be important.

(c) But the author didn’t intend the text to say anything about gender or to imply that one sex is superior to the other! That’s just how the characters happened to appear in their head. It would be unjustifiably interfering with their creative control of their work and lead to political correctness gone mad if we insisted that all books/TV shows had to have exactly 50% male and exactly 50% female characters.

I will concede that, in practical terms, it would be impossible to insist, for example, legally, that books and series had to have an even gender split of characters and might make plots and characters seem formulaic and sterile.

The trouble is that it’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation: while male characters being in the majority is the predominant practice, most authors will subconsciously follow this practice when characters “just happen to appear in their head”, because they are heavily influenced by prior literature. Until we start seeing more books and TV series with as many or more female characters than male in the centre of the action, authors and screenwriters are far more likely to see a male face in their head when they think of the words “hero” and “villain” and a female face when they think of “assistant” or “love interest”. In my opinion, it would be good if writers voluntarily started operating positive discrimination and didn’t just go with the clichéd idea that first pops into their head. And if publishers and commissioning editors didn’t lean on them to follow the status quo.

A call for papers comes via the Filament magazine FB page, Feminst Porn Studies is looking for papers between 3000 and 7000 words from both sex industry workers and academic writers.

Oxford University’s Left Review is looking for submissions for Issue Three, which gives you two weeks to submit if you have any sociological, radical politics or economics papers.

When it comes to Filament magazine, I’m still in two minds about it. Yes, I like looking at sexy men and yes Ii think women should be able to access porn if they want to.  What I can’t actually bridge is the gap between the following-  when did I start thinking it was OK to view men as sex objects when most feminist thought dictates that women must not be seen purely as sex objects? Surely as a result,  neither should men.  What is this female gaze discussion all about?

The female gaze can be seen as  binary to the male gaze, but how do we truly know what the female gaze is?  If it is the  opposite to the male gaze then where is the space for Lesbians and Trans men? I know that all men do not not desire the slim blonde identikit archetype offered by the media, and all women do not desire the chiseled  jaw six pack ‘hunk’ also offered by the mainstream.  Nor are all women ‘secret bisexuals’, so why are the main images in this magazine oiled up and laid out for the ladies pleasure?

As a critic of post-feminism, I could simply say that this is  a new and improved way to control women’s sexuality, to mould us as sexually subservient to men. Don’t be fooled by embracing the so-called power of what I truly think the female gaze is . The male gaze is digested in the consciousness of women, who then internalise and invert this gaze because ultimately  men have power. To seize this power you must be seen as this veracious, ironic being who sees women as the media do- as a consumable product . Ariel Levy in her excellent investigation ‘ Female Chauvinist Pigs’ explores this notion within both heterosexual and homosexual culture and illustrates this perfectly.

As a woman in the ‘real’ world, having been socially conditioned to what is ‘hot’ and what is not (lets not be naive here), maybe Filament is a good  thing. I enjoy reading the feeds on FB  asking for what kind of image the readers would like to see ( I can’t help but think that it may sink into a readers boyfriends/husbands expo).  Most of the articles are pretty good and I don’t think I’d ever put it under my bed to avoid detection. That said, can any sexual objectification ever be justified?

As an avid Spotify user, I am currently being subjected to the Dell Mini 10 Notebook advert several times a day and with every listen I am increasingly awestruck by how many crass stereotypes they manage to conflate into one short audio ad.

For those of you fortunate enough not to have heard it, it’s promoting a new mini-computer (I think) which comes in a range of pretty colours. And that’s the main angle they’re putting on it – the colour choice. So far, so inoffensive. Doesn’t seem much of a USP for a piece of technical kit, but that’s up to them. To demonstrate the different colours, they play the same song in various styles. Black is a male singer fronting a metal band. Blue is a laidback, male blues singer. Pink is…and I’m sure you guessed this… synthetic-sounding girl-fronted bubble-gum pop.

To give them their credit, it is a resourceful attempt to solve the difficult problem of how to convey colours in an audio ad.

BUT, they’ve confronted us with a whole ganglion of simplistic equations. Pink = female = in the minority = cheesy bubblegum pop = fluffy = not serious…

Maybe I read too much into this. After all, it’s just one tiny drop in the ocean of patronising gender stereotypes that constitutes modern advertising. And, in any case, I almost prefer totally blatantly sexist ads to the kind of faux feminism of adverts like that one they had on before Christmas (I completely forget what was being advertised, but I’ve a feeling it could have been a supermarket? or perhaps a stock cube?), where the man was left flummoxed, faced with the arduous task of serving dinner to his children one evening, while his partner went out to a party/evening class/some other social event, calling “You’re babysitting!” with a cheeky wink as she sashayed out of the front door. Fortunately, help was at hand, as here’s one she had prepared earlier – said partner had put a shepherd’s pie/casserole/whatsoever in the oven before she went. But the hapless chap’s troubles with assertive women aren’t over, as, when he tries to pass the dinner off as the work of his own fair hands, his primary-age daughter rolls her eyes and looks at him patronisingly. “Wow!” We’re obviously supposed to think. “Girl power! Feisty mother and kick-ass daughter shoved it to him good and proper!”

Except, hang on a minute…since when has LOOKING AFTER YOUR OWN CHILDREN constituted “babysitting”? The advert seems to posit as some kind of glorious, amusing victory for womankind the fact that they can cajole/manipulate/order their menfolk into taking on domestic responsibilities once in every blue moon. And once again, in an apparent compliment to women’s capabilities, male uselessness at domestic tasks is constructed as a basic fact of biology – flattering women into believing that unpaid domestic work will inevitably always be their job, because they possess a shepherd’s pie gene which men sadly lack.

Still, for me, the nadir of bone-headed advertising has to be the Christmas 2008 campaign for an allegedly low-calorie (=small) chocolate bar under the charming tagline “Goodwill to all women”. Right, Because ALL women are always permanently on a diet and NO men ever are? And ALL women adore chocolate? Tossers.

I’m passionate about music and waste away far too much of my time surfing internet music sites and I’m wondering if I’m the only one who regularly seethes at the way that female musicians and fans are often marginalised and humiliated in the fan community?

One expression that’s doing my head in at the moment is “girls’ band”, which seems to be routinely hurled as an insult by male fans of one group at a rival group. The principle seeming to be that if too many girls like a band, that automatically proves that it’s a rubbish band with no credibility, as girls don’t understand music and have no taste.

All too often, on music message boards and forums there appears to be a widespread assumption that if a woman keenly follows a male musician, it can’t possibly be because she understands or appreciates his music, it must be because she fancies him.

This is strange, given that most of the time women get told that only men are visually stimulated and that (if we’re heterosexual) it’s natural for us to choose a partner for his nice personality, not his looks, otherwise we’re “superficial” and “mean”. And yet, when it comes to pop musicians, we apparently become raging balls of hormones who fork out oodles of money for CDs and concert tickets, regardless of the musical content, merely because we can’t resist being swayed by a pretty face. Even if the musician concerned is the wrong side of 50 and looks like Mr Potato Head.

Of course, I’m exaggerating a bit, here. I have also interacted with male music fans on the internet who have been courteous, friendly and genuinely interested in what I and other female fans had to say. But all too often, as elsewhere on the internet, anything posted by a user with an obviously female-sounding user name gets ignored, while exactly the same point made by a male fan a few posts later gets rapturously applauded and fawned over for its wisdom and perceptiveness.

And it’s not just female fans that get patronised or ignored, it’s female artists, too. One male artist I particularly like recently collaborated with a female singer/songwriter. I wasn’t at that point familiar with her work, but I knew she was respected in the industry for her technical proficiency (she was classically trained) and had gained critical acclaim for her debut album, which had been considered daring and innovative. Which of these aspects of her work might have drawn my favourite musician to work with her? Intrigued, I logged onto a fan forum devoted to him, to see what other fans thought.

“Do you think he’s fucking her?” was one of the first suggestions posted by male fans pondering this question, followed by a lengthy discussion of her physical attributes and a debate about whether other male fans would do her, as well, had they the chance. That a male musician might wish to work with a female musician because he was genuinely excited about her work or looked up to her as a songwriter or instrumentalist apparently didn’t even occur to them.

You would think that female artists might at least be safe from sexism from their own fans. You know, fans? People that allegedly like the artist? Alas, no.

While visiting a blog devoted to a little-known, long-deleted female indie singer, I was surprised to see that one male fan had confidently, but completely wrongly, attributed the writing of all three of the artist’s (self-penned) albums to her male accompanist. The most worrying thing is that he seemed a pleasant chappy who was obviously devoted to the artist in question and clearly hadn’t meant it offensively – when corrected on his assumption by another fan, he apologised, explaining “I read somewhere that he played the keyboards on her albums and I was led to the wrong conclusion that he had written her songs”. Well, yes, easy mistake to make, he had a Y chromosome, he was somewhere on the record…a far more “obvious” conclusion, apparently, than that the woman with her name on the front of the sleeve might be capable of a little creative autonomy.

This widespread tendency of fans and journalists to underestimate the creative input of female artists to their own work has been remarked on by many well-known musicians, including Sharleen Spiteri:

“No one ever wants to give the credit. There has to be a man up there pulling the strings.”

and Bjork (thanks to my friend Yoana for pointing this quotation out to me):

“I have had this experience many, many times that the work I do on the computer gets credited to whatever male was in 10 meter radius during the job. People seem to accept that women can sing and play whatever instrument they are seen playing, but they cannot program, arrange, produce, edit or write electronic music.”

Still, if even the god-like genius that is Bjork gets subjected to this kind of crap, perhaps it’s some small comfort to the rest of us, next time our opinions and ideas are belittled because of our gender, to know we’re in such exalted company.

Friends sometimes tell me it’s pointless getting worked up over something so trivial, that there are bigger battles to be fought, that in the scheme of things it doesn’t really matter that much whether my opinion on electropop gets listened to or not. But, for me, this is symptomatic of attitudes elsewhere – just another part of the everyday process whereby women’s experience is marginalised and women’s intellect, expertise and creativity doubted in our so-called “post-feminist”, “gender-neutral” society. And that’s what makes me seethe.

Reading this article today, I sometimes find it hard to believe I live in the 21st century. Yet again, it’s an example of the commodification of sex, in the boundaries of a sexual relationship. This time as a ‘gift’,  rather than a bargaining chip orrevenge tactic .

“Hmm, what can I get my partner for their birthday?  Oh!  I know-  sex everyday for the next year !” When sex is gift wrapped, it is implied that it is paid for, made attractive and, ultimately,  only for the enjoyment of the recipient. Any comparisons between prostitution and the gift of sex is obvious. We all know that sex is important, but it is in fact,  a physical and emotional exchange between consenting adults and not something on a ‘to do’  list.

We all lead busy lives- there’s work , mundane day to day stuff to do and so on.  Should sex be seen as a item on a list to tick off ? I say no. On hearing experinces of couples trying to concieve they often say having sex to order, made sex just an act, a means to an end. Men and women often say they’d like more sex,  but is it because that is what the media portrays to us ?  If we aren’t having great sex and lots of it we are obvious inadequate and unattractive.  Is this why this woman decided to give her husband the gift of sex?

I recently saw this photo- it’s from a friend of a friend of a friend, from a face book account. This photo made me mad, made me think, made me analyse what else the photo does represent to me. Ok, its not a picture of the moon landing, the first image of earth from the moon or the mushroom cloud of Hiroshima, but I feel it’s just as important.

At first we can clearly see that it is taken at a protest . You, dear reader, may have even been there. You may even be one of the individuals in the photo. Even if you are not, in another time and place, it could be you. Your fellow protesters all around you clashing and being penned in by the police, you look forward and a police officer grabs you by the throat in order to restrain you! What have you done ? Exercised your civil and human right to protest? Or, have you identified yourself as a threat to national security, because you have chosen to exercise that precise right?

The image  speaks volumes to me about civil liberties, feminism and class struggle. It conveys to me that there are individuals that will come together in order to stand up for a cause. It also tells me that no matter how big the group is, how just the cause is, the authorities (or oppressors) will always be there to grab the idealists by the neck in order to suppress them. That said it doesn’t make me want to give up protesting , blogging , and airing my views. It makes me feel mad that protests have to be approved by the authorities, and that the same authorities, then use illegal and unjustifiable actions in the form of “kettling” and violence in order to restrain the very protest they approved.

According to Noam Chomsky, “power is illegitimate unless proof of legitimacy can be found”. In the case of the photo, the police are an institution of the state. That fact gives this institution the right to  police citizens of the state legitimately, but how far should the police be able to go in enforcing the laws of the land?  When did violence and the containment of citizens exercising their legitimate rights,   become acceptable actions the state could take against its own citizens? Pictures like this make clear that the authorities should always be questioned and observed, just as much as the authorities question and observe us.

This is my life changing photo , whats yours?