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?

Browsing the net tonight I found two articles that caught my eye , over on Feministing ,about a lesbian being chased off and effectively banned from x-box live and the other over on the F-word about female I.T workers quitting their jobs because of the industry’s sexism.

To be honest , at first, I thought the headline `Lesbian banned from X-box live!` was a headline straight out of  The Sun in the `Freddie Starr ate my hamster` mould. It was absolutely ridiculous and laughed until I checked  out the whole article. I started to think about the last x-box game I completed (Fable II ), its a role playing game with fighting,magic and relies on interpersonal responses with the game virtual characters in order to fully assess renown.

Did it matter if I was a male or female character? A main unlock achievement in the game is to get married and was it a problem if I chose a member of the same sex? No .So sexuality equality is creeping into some games these days ,so why does it matter if you express your sexuality or just simply experiment? Its the old chestnut `just think about the children!` panic , in other terms ‘I don’t want to explain why some people have different sexualities , it makes me uncomfortable’.

That comment pointed to me over to the furor over a disabled woman presenting kids TV. A women with one able arm is presenting toddler t.v . So what?  most of the rational thinking population may think,but no, during a Radio 2 talk show a listener rang in and complained that this woman would give his kids nightmares. Well Mr phone man ,my kids are 3 and 4 and they didn’t bat an eyelid or comment on it!

Back to the game…upon completing the game I was shown the credits.  How many female programmers were credited? Two ,that’s right two. Out of thirty five! WTF! Why is that I thought to myself? Maybe I’m being naive here but I thought we lived in 2009 , and that technology and jobs within the tech industry were  about merit and not about gender. I’m wrong according to the excellent article over on The F-word. Sexism is rife in the I.T industry , apparently us ‘girls’ should stick to low paying call center jobs and making the tea at gaming studios.

I have now made a conscious decision to learn programming , I’m kind of into finding out what my p.c can do and regular readers know that I’m an advocate of open source software, and I like messing around with Linux operating system.

I used to work in pubs , I know that most men are socialized in a sexist manner but I thought that on-line we as women could be what we wanted to be , be it androgynous, lesbian, bisexual or a spider plankton from Mars. Who cares as long as you find  liberty and kinship which under pins the whole ethic of the World Wide Web or even the supposed male dominated Hacker world :-

“Hackers should be judged by their hacking , not bogus criteria such as degrees,age,race or position”.(Levy,S.Hackers(1994)Penguin.New York.

A very close friend of mine, recently had some fairly serious thoughts about shaving her hair. In the end, she didn’t do it. But in the course of chatting with her about it I was struck by how much women identify with and are identified by  their hair.

Hair is that great symbol of femininity. Grown the way it ‘should be’, long luscious locks denote fertility, sex appeal and an essential difference between the sexes. Because obviously men have short hair. Obviously. So lust inducing is hair, that various cultures and religious groups have rules about women covering their hair. So it makes sense, with societal notions of how hair ‘should’ be that our hair also provides us with an immediate, reasonably easy and very visible way to be subversive.

Throughout my life, my hair has been an act of rebellion and subversity (I may have made that word up *shrug*). As a young child my step father cut my hair very short, telling me I was ugly and unlovable and didn’t deserve to have long hair like nice girls. Instead I was to be unnatural in his eyes – a girl who looked like a boy, who frequently behaved like a boy and who had to be beaten into something resembling what a woman should be.  As a teen, living away from that environment with my father and step mother I grew my hair long to escape the memories that haunted me and experimented with feminine clothes, make up and some initial, rather sedate trips into the world of hair dye.

Then my late teens hit and with that I came out of my closet, revelled in having a name to describe the funny feelings I got from noticing cute girls as well as cute boys. Away went the cutesy, sloaney feminine clothes and in came combats, big boots, tight tee’s crew cuts, spikes, black hair dye, pillar box red hair dye, vest tops, piercings tattoos and so on. Revelling in my new found and ever evolving identity as a being independent of the parental figures who’d abused me or who hadn’t but who’s guidance I saw as obstructive, I cut my hair every week, experimenting with colour and texture in ways I’d never thought I could. One week I’d have a soft razor cut emover, the next two inch spikes and a shaven neck and scalp. My hair became a way of expressing my turmoil, and my developing identity through my sexuality and exploration of my gender. At the time I didn’t recognize that though. I was just trying to find the look that was ‘me’.

At 18, I married and had children and went from being a hell raising baby punk with a lip ring and a ‘tude to being a hippy earth mother, with velvet skirts and flowy tops. I still wore leather jeans, but only on the back of my husbands motorcycle, I didn’t work and mostly I did as I was told. I grew my hair long again and the pillar box red and angry blue- black shades of dye were replaced with hennas, as I embraced pagan spirituality and a more ‘natural’ approach to life. This docile attitude couldn’t last though and I struggled to embrace this image of female behaviour – I loved having children, but I missed working and being respected for my intellect and fiery temper. I missed being know as a punky girl who was a little bit mad, but hard working, kind hearted, hard partying and fun. In those years I faded into the background, attempting through my hair to either hide myself or demonstrate how grown up I was, even at the tender age of 20.

Come 22, and my husband and I ended things and in the midst of trying to recover from the break up – a messy time of experiences that looking back on it,  were rather damaging, but at the time seemed as if I was having ‘fun’, I finally did something I had always wished I had, had the guts to do and dyed my hair Pink. I don’t mean a bit pink I mean PINK. This was a strong angry colour that said ‘Yeah, I’m here, I’m me and I’m fierce. I have pink hair!’. In a lot of ways that was me breaking free – once again my identity was evolving and I chose to show that visibly with the colour of my hair – a strong fierce colour I had always wanted to dye my hair but always been to afraid to do. Part of that time was built around having the courage to move away from the shit that had happened to me and to realise who I actually was and not to be afraid any more. It was around the same time I began to consciously and publicly identify as a feminist, and I attended my university interview with bright pink hair, in head to toe black with purple doc martins on.

University has again changed me – In the last 18 months I’ve solidified my feminist identity, although constructing an image and blueprint of my gender identity is still progressing – I gone from being a very skinny bulimic size ten, turning up to Uni in short skirts, fishnets and new rocks with pig tails, to an obese (but healthier, non- purging, non smoking) me hiding behind men’s t shirts, sports bras and baggy jeans, to dressing in head to toe Monsoon in order to look professional. In this time I’ve had black hair, dark blond hair (my natural colour, believe it or not), red-brown hair and currently bright red hair. I started uni with long hair, have chopped it all off and gone back to the shaved back emovers of my youth and grown that all out into a slightly messy chin length bob, that if I’m honest, needs a damn good cutting.

My point with this long and somewhat reflexive post is to demonstrate how much hair is wrapped up in our identity. It’s not just stuff that grows out of our heads – through our hair we can demonstrate sub cultural affiliation, cultural or religious beliefs, personal identity, gender identity, subvert gender identity – the list goes on. Hair is important, precisely because it is part of us and how we present ourselves. I invite every one of you to look back through your hair history. How many hair cuts or changes have you had because a relationship broke down, because a parent or authority figure said you shouldn’t, because you wanted to demonstrate belonging or project a professional image?? I invite you to share your stories of how you have shown your identity, and your life through your hair, because I think that whilst it seems insignificant, hair and the things we do or don’t do to it can, show us an awful lot about ourselves, each other and the world in which we live.

And names are just downright mean, immature and divisive.

I’ve always had issues with body image and fat. Not other peoples necessarily, just my own. Mother with a weird obsession with your waistline and calorie intake and ten years of bulimia and yo-yo dieting in an attempt to be as attractive as well other people who are thin and attractive will do that to you. But these issues have always been my own, and in a self centred way, been about me. When I first started to realise there was a name for that pissed off feeling I got when people treated me like shit due to my genitalia and more the point, that other women got that pissed off feeling too, and some wrote books about it I was relieved. Women like Susie Orbach who wrote ‘Fat is a Feminist Issue’ said stuff that made sense to me about how I perceived my body, how other people perceived my body and why it was just a big ‘Fuck You’ to those people who instantly deem those of us who are too fat/too thin/too short/too hairy etc to be non people.

So when I see stuff like this it really pisses me off. Yes, debate and discussion about pornography, stripping, sex work, burlesque and its place in feminism and feminist thought is important. But a straight up blanket dismissal of women who ARE ‘empowered’ and who do feel good about their bodies doing what they want to do with them? I’m sorry but I can’t agree with that sort of thing.

I have mixed feelings on porn. I’m mostly pro porn, but I can see the point of the argument that says that over sexualisation of women, and the notion that women’s bodies are the property of men, and any body not owned by a man is therefore available, and subject too constant public interrogation, attention and so forth. I get that, I really do.

I just don’t think that banning porn and sex work and effectively demonizing sex and sexuality is the way forward. I think it’s important to remember that actually there are lots of sex workers who aren’t trafficked and didn’t have horrific lives of abuse leading to their sex work, and aren’t drug users and are there because they want to be, because they choose to be, whilst also working to help those who are there and don’t want to be. I think it is important to remember to that these are people that we oh so sanctimoniously blog about. These are women, and men, cis and transgendered living their lives the way they choose. And who the fuck am I or you to come along, tell them they are wrong, remove their humanity by using terms like ‘funfeminist’ in a derogatory fashion.

Yes trafficking is a problem, rape is huge problem, sex workers who are there because they feel they have no other choice is a problem, over sexualisation is a problem. These are issues that as a feminist movement we need to work on, and I don’t want to trivialise any of them. Slut shaming people who are there through their own decisions, who are not in those vulnerable positions however is not the way to do it. Policing the sexuality and sexual behaviour of women who are using their agency to act is not the way to do it, condemning women on the grounds of their conventional attractiveness is not the way to damn well do it.

This behaviour, this condemnation of women who are happy to be seen in a convetionally attractive light, who are happy with their sexuality, their sexual behaviour, their pro porn positions is not Feminism. It is a repeat of the Blondes are Bimbos, Redheads are sluts and all women are mens shag toys  way of thinking. It is not liberating or empowering to condemn the sexual behaviour of other women, just as it is not liberating or empowering to condemn and criticise the bodies and looks of other women, or their personal grooming habits. It’s just plain bitchy.

I don’t have a solution to rape, or VAW, or over sexualisation. I do think that gender dialogue is important, and I do think and truly, truly believe that until we stop tearing each other apart over how we look, or how we have sex, or how we choose to express our sexuality that Feminism as a movement will be stuck in a    rut chasing in circles.