feminish

The U.S. Army is, it seems, issuing families of soldiers serving overseas with life-size cardboard cut-outs of their loved ones.

I was struck by the words of Kay Judkins (quoted in the Boston Globe) whose husband, Jim, is a minesweeper mechanic in Afghanistan, talking about the place the cut-out has in her family:

“He sits at the head of the table. Yes, he does.”

I immediately had visions of comparable female-soldier households, with the 2-D Flat Mommy serving the real-life-daddy his dinner as he continued to sit patiently at the head of the table… while in reality the soldier wife was out shooting bullets and ducking grenades in Iraq.

And I noticed the NY Times’ revealing choice of title for their article When Soldiers Go to War, Flat Daddies Hold Their Place at Home, and wondered precisely why the headline wouldn’t quite work as “Flat Mommies Hold Their Place at Home”.

But I immediately realised that it’s not funny at all, and I felt quite sad. On the one hand there are men and women risking life and limb so they can suppress, kill, maim or capture other people (or whatever it is they do); on the other there’s a life-size cardboard photo that a child puts next to him on a swing. It seems very odd.

Admittedly, the whole business did begin fairly simply: a wife wanted a real-size photo of her husband so her young infant could more easily make the connection between the two-dimensional photo and the nice man called ‘Daddy’ who, every now and again, showed up and stayed for a while. But for those like Kay Judkins who are putting him at the head of the table, the practice seems to have been taken to a whole other level. It’s no longer just about teaching a child to recognise an image; it’s quite a deep denial of the costs and losses and pains of War.

If you’d like your day to be lightened up with a giggle or two, check out Rhetorically Speaking, where you can read Bookdrunk’s ticklish deconstruction of Melanie Phillips’s tirades in the Daily Mail against watering cans and Alan Johnson, the UK’s latest Education Secretary lambaster of marriage, parenthood, childhood, romance, responsibility, freedom, Christianity, morality, common sense, and - what an outrage! - ‘frilly pinnies’.

The Daily Mail claims 5.5m readers per day.

I’m not quite sure how I missed this Daily Mail corker from a fornight ago:

“We’re in the middle of a Menaissance… Years of feminism, which insists on the absolute interchangeability of the traditional roles of man and woman, are giving way to a reassertion of the male attribute of machismo… The metrosexual, that urbanised, sensitive, emotionally and physically androgynous model of 21st-century manhood, is dead.

And there’s more - U.S. feminists are (apparently) “bearing torches and pitchforks” hunting down Yale’s Harvey Mansfield; meanwhile Brits (God Help Them) are worshipping “cry-baby Beck-ham, hairless, smothered in costly unguents, neurotically self-aware”; and the U.K. taxation and redistributive structures have (I kid you not) “served to stamp out that key element of manliness - self-betterment and provision for those they are responsible for”.

The article epitomises everything that’s wonky with the Mail’s gender cosmology…

Go read: A question of manliness | the Daily Mail

Or, if you’d like to stay calm and happy this morning, try the Observer, or the Washington Post. And Bookdrunk over at Rhetorically Speaking has a great analysis of the whole article.

Or, if you want to feel good about being a feminist and feel confident that the whole Menaissance thing is twaddle, read Martha Nussbaum’s fantastic review of Harvey Mansfield’s book Manliness, which kicked this whole thing off. (Thanks to Alas, a blog for the link.)

This is from today’s Times of London. [Thanks for the pointer, Sasha]

A SENIOR lawyer stunned a courtroom [in Wellington, New Zealand] when he walked in wearing a woman’s skirt, patterned blouse, lace stockings and carrying a handbag. He asked the judge to call him Ms Alice.

Bob Moodie, 67, a 6ft 4in former police officer and law lecturer — and once a noted rugby player — told the High Court in Wellington that he had decided to wear women’s clothing because he no longer wished to be a part of what he called the male ethos in New Zealand, including that existing in the judiciary.

Great, I thought. A bit of boundary-breaking in dusty corners of the establishment can only ever be a good thing. But what a shame the (male) journalist is playing this article for laughs - I hope this lawyer is straight.

…He said that he was heterosexual but had always had a strong female gender bias and preferred women’s clothes….

Awesome - his message is directed at heterosexual masculinity. Why did the journalist feel the need to say ‘he was heterosexual but…’ Agh! The power of the heterosexual challenge is undercut. But the fact he’s straight explains why the journalist is front-loading the comedy, deflecting Moodie’s challenge and instead laying it on thick with descriptions of him as ‘balding, mustachioed’ - the kind of body/hair/clothing analysis that court journalists normally only reserve for women.

Read the rest of this entry »

A 21st century re-write of Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas:

Four Fivers

A donation to Stop the War - in Lebanon, Palestine, Afghanistan or Iraq, you ask of me: “every little helps”.

A fiver, you say, would do the trick, ‘make a difference’ even, to help your campaign against the bombs and death, the devastation, rape and torture.

Here’s a fiver, spend it freely, however you will, I reply - But I’ll first be giving out another three:

The first I’ll be giving to fund women’s studies at universities, so 21st Century lasses can learn about wars and politics and international relations - not only the war-messes that have been made and continue to be made by men, against women, but about different answers to the problems those war-messes set out to solve.

[Seventy years ago Woolf gave her First Guinea to prevent war to women’s colleges]

The second can fund campaigns to get more women into politics, banks, industry and the army. We now know women debate differently about war and peace on the floor of the Commons; they act against cultures of sexualised aggression in banks, they’re more effective and level-headed as CEO’s, and - I warrant - they rape the war enemy less.

[That’ll change the ‘odour - or shall we call it ‘atmosphere’?-” of public life, as Woolf said when she laid down her Second Guinea for the advancement of women in ‘the professions’]

The third fiver can go to fund feminist activists and writers, online and in print. We’ll discover that we’re not all Melanie Phillipses or Ann Coulters. How many leader-writers on British papers are women? How many political editors? Or regular, run-of-the-mill news journalists, for that matter? That’s a fiver for the f-word, for feministing and for Women in Black.

Not because Woolf was wrong to give her Third Guinea to the anti-war campaign which asked her for one in the first place, but because she was right to say women should make use of “Typewriters and duplicators … these cheap and so far unforbidden instruments” and so “rid yourself of the pressure of boards, policies and editors.” Then it’s possible to “speak your own mind, in your own words, at your own time, at your own length, at your own bidding.”

“Since we [women] are different,” she said, “our help must be different… we can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods.”

That’s why I’m giving a third fiver for feminist bloggers - before my fourth for Stop The War.

[Photos courtesy of ebr1 on Flickr]

Three Guineas is Virginia Woolf’s most controversial and polemical feminist work, written in 1936/7, to the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War and the muscle-flexing of fascists in Italy and Germany. It takes the form of a letter replying to a request (from a grey-haired old English barrister) for a guinea (21 shillings - about £1.05 in new money) towards a Society for the Justice, Equality and Liberty of all men and women. A donation, he claims, would help to prevent war.

By all means take your guinea, says Woolf (delighting in the fact it’s one she’s earned herself). But first she will give one guinea for women’s colleges and a second for the advancement of women in ‘the professions’, her comprehensive, elaborate and well-defended argument over 190 pages being that the more women there are in positions of power (in politics, science, culture or the church) the less warmongering society will be.

For a full lowdown on Three Guineas (including synopsis, key quotes and a bibliography), see the feminish » Three Guineas Redux: all a girl needs to know

The cover pictured was designed by her sister, the artist Vanessa Bell

Maria Schneider, Marlon Brando’s 19-year-old sex companion/sex object in Last Tango in Paris (1972), gave an interview with the Daily Telegraph recently.

“The humiliation was very strong. Marlon said he felt raped and manipulated by it and he was 48. And he was Marlon Brando!”

The infamous scene in which Brando sodomises her character with the help of some butter was not in the original script. “Marlon had the idea. When they told me, I had a burst of anger. Woo! I threw everything. And nobody can force someone to do something not in the script. But I didn’t know that. I was too young. So I did the scene and I cried. I cried real tears during that scene. I was feeling humiliation.”

Her words have really stuck in my mind. It matters to me that she suffered in making the film; and that the butter scene was genuinely horrible for her. I watched Last Tango in Paris on the telly two years ago. I was alone, and the film seized all my attention - I felt consumed by it, and confused; confused because it was overwhelming and it was sexy and I was outraged by it. I knew that it was an important film and I wanted to experience it. But I remember explicitly shaking-myself out of its compelling grip in the butter scene - it was taking me somewhere I didn’t want to go. This is just acting, I had to tell myself, You can step back and see that. You can disagree, you can object, but you don’t need to upset yourself with your own outrage - just watch and be aware.

But having read this interview I’m sad for Maria Schneider and I’m even sad for Brando (though can he really have meant he felt raped and manipulated?). And I’m sad you can’t put a bright red sticker on the plastic front of every DVD case, or have a BBC Queen’s English voice before it’s ever shown on TV, announcing: During the making of this film, the actor and actress felt they were raped, humiliated and manipulated. We’d like to remind viewers that that is what you see, what you experience, what you participate in when you view the film.

My heart was lightened when I found feminist film theorist E. Ann Kaplan’s 1974 review. We can’t possibly take the butter scene seriously, she insists - it’s ridiculous, comic. Bertolucci has made a failure of a film, she maintains, not because of silly butter but because so long as Jeanne [Schreiner] is just a sex object and does not take a central role, the film cannot work, even on its own terms.

Bertolucci could have explored the drastic changes that have taken place in sexual relations in films over the past twenty years. Jeanne and Paul [Brando] are both getting something out of returning to clearly defined roles that our era has called in question. Both postwar U.S. and New Wave ideas about sex are ultimately shown to be inadequate. Jeanne and Paul do not manage to create a new place, free from their unsatisfactory lives. Paul uses Jeanne to act out a hostility that he brings with him from his painful world. He cannot let go of his suffering, be free with her, receive from her. His pain rather sours their world, making it harsh and ugly.

[…] Only through Jeanne’s consciousness could we come to see how Paul is holding on to an outdated macho concept in a world where women no longer willingly play a submissive role.
[…] The ending of the film [Jeanne’s murder of Paul] resolves nothing and seems contrived because Jeanne has been inadequately developed. Had we really known her motivations, we would have had the key to the main ideas in the film.

I just happened across this pure genius from Matt@DailyTelegraph.

Like I said last week, perhaps Zidane’s Mum can take care of herself.

feminish » Zidane: “Je ne regrette rien…. I am a Man”
feminish » Her honour for your Cup

… and if you still think the Zidane/mother/insult/headbutt thing is interesting, Stuart Jeffries has written about it for the Guardian: The mother of all insults: Why is it that the worst insults in the world are always about your mum?

At Paris Gare du Nord yesterday, I saw in The Times that Zidane’s broken his silence: Materazzi slandered his Mum and his Sister. I thought, Phew! last Sunday’s post wasn’t way off the mark. But it was when I read Zidane’s exact words explaining the headbut that I leapt up and down in the tabac, fluttering the paper at whoever would hear me (a drunk young man who needed some cash):

“The words he said concerned my mother and sister. I heard them once, then twice, and the third time I couldn’t control myself. I am a man and some words are harder to hear than actions. I would have rather been knocked down than hear that.”

“I am a Man”. Soon the French will forget how close they were to winning the World Cup - and they will remember their suave and chiselled captain on Canal+ defining his manhood, guarding his status as hero. “I am a Man”. Not only was Zidane saying that he wasn’t an idiot to have lost control, but that his headbutt somehow proved his masculinity, his heroic, manly power to defend ‘his’ women’s honour: any decent man would have done the same.

It’d be nice to think that had his Mum gathered what was going on with the headbutt, she’d have been back at home watching the telly and thinking ‘Yeah, give him one in my name.’ But I wonder if she wouldn’t just think: ‘I can take care of myself thank you very much Zizou; Materazzi should just wash out his mouth with soap. Don’t worry about me, just get on with it and win the darn Cup.’

Muhajababes is great. A young woman took it upon herself to wrangle time off work and spend money she didn’t have to dive alone into the heart of six Middle Eastern countries to meet the young women and men affected by her pro-Iraq-war politics. Awesome. And then - what’s even more nails - Allegra Stratton chiselled three months of investigative adventuring into a book not only vividly heaving with everyone she met, but lit up with expedient shards of political history, and drenched in the very 21st century youth culture she’s checking out - with allusions, I’m embarrassed to confess, I didn’t always get. It’s not often you find a politics/current-affairs book whose chapter-headings read like album tracks: “Requiem for Zen”, “Wasta“, “Gezzing”, “Fulla Pink”…..

I recommend anyone to read Muhajababes because I guarantee you’ll feel, in addition to being knackered and over-inputted (not more than after a crazy fun weekend with friends), absolute relief. The young lads and lasses Muhajababes introduces us to are just very human and very real - as confused and independent-minded and soaked in telly, media, music and politics as us lot in Europe. They’re not, as the Daily Mail would have us believe, a culturally-alien gulf apart - and I even mean that of the teenage ‘martyr’ who let Allegra touch his Hamas card. Instead, as the strapline would have it - the young ‘uns of the Middle East are ‘cool, sexy and devout‘ - a thoroughly modern and reassuringly liberal combo.

And if the Muhajababes aren’t sure whether to veil, it’s not so very different from me not being sure whether to wear make-up. Mascara, lipstick, eyeliner - they’re a big question for me that I’m continuously re-answering: it’s about gender and it’s about independence and it’s also about other-people’s-views-of-women. And it’s not at all clear which is more empowering, wearing make-up or not wearing make-up; veiling or not-veiling. I’m glad that the lasses of the Middle East are negotiating their own naughty/nice (gender conservative/gender radical) route through 21st century culture. (There was I thinking I was radical wearing a trouser suit to the Westminster newsroom one day and flip flops and a tomato-red felt skirt the next…) The appeal of down-to-earth 21st century-style Islamic teachers who offer -moderate- spiritual relief from culture-consumption-overload, their teachings simultaneously translated into half a dozen European languages, even rang a few Immanent Grove bells…

I’m relieved because reading Muhajababes I really saw the dynamic impermanence of mainstream culture in the Middle East. Things are changing weekly, monthly, and people are constructing - negotiating- their own path through the soup. I’m uncomfortable with conservatism, unbreakable mores and cultural fear-of-change. And I think, at some level, I’d thought it was there in the daily-lived Islam of the Middle East. But the people Allegra met were not like that. In so far as they were, for example, religious, they were so freely and pro-actively, appropriating the teachings for themselves in a critical way (using the gems of modernity while they’re at it - bit of texting here, webbing there, bluetooth for him, DNA test for her). If millions of under-25’s across the Middle East are following the ’sheikh of chic’ Amr Khaled (and changing their lives as a result) it’s not because he’s just another old important imam they have to respect (he isn’t), but because he’s got straight-talking wisdom (of a sort) about the things that matter: masturbation, porn, or growing flowers in your tower-block…

The picture of the young Middle East I got in Muhajababes was relieving - but it’s the story of the old liberalism/communitarianism chestnut. You can have limitless choice in a liberal set-up: go to whatever churches or mosques you like, drive a car, die your hair purple or cover it in silk, and from that liberalism opt into whatever sets of communitarian rules you like (for example, opting into rules that say go to this particular mosque, don’t drive a car, and only cover your hair in, say, blue nylon that doesn’t go with your eyes). But what happens when everyone hops from liberalism’s choices onto the same restrictive communitarian bandwagon? What becomes of freedom-of-choice then when, for example, 85% of women in your country have veiled? Who’s protecting the right-to-choice of the other 15%?

Maybe it’s hard to be a feminish/feminist and oppose international actions to protect this liberalism (which was, at one level, what the Iraq war was all about). I s’pose I just think that armed interventions are different from peaceful ones.

France, 10-something p.m….

I’d begun to think the World Cup, with all its macho aggressive drinking prostituting big-money big-ego competitiveness, was a bit tedious from a feminish point of view, when (while enjoying tonight’s game)…

“Quoi? Qu’est ce qu’il se passe? Quoi? Quoi? … ”
“Pas ca!”
“Oh non! oh non! oh non!”
“Qu’est ce que ta fait, Zizou? Qu’est ce que ta fait?”

Quelle horreur!

Devastation in just another room in just another village in France tonight. The shock was galling (pun ’scused). How he, how that? As the commentators kept saying - the whole point is what happened before the head-butt? What on earth could have warranted that? Words - and probably about his mother, I idly half-jokingly mused.

In fact it seems (at least for the moment) that I wasn’t wrong. The word on the French street (which hasn’t yet made it onto the Wires) is that Marco Materazzi slandered Zidane’s mother and, in his last match of a stunning career, in the World Cup Final, with his team a hair’s breadth from victory, with hundreds of millions world-over watching his every tango with the ball, the cool-as-cool hero of La France lost his presence of mind and unleashed his fury - with unfathomably huge consequences.

The immense force to revenge his Mum’s honour overwhelmed Zizou’s guard, and That, as they say, was That.

Thing is, Bet he wouldn’t've done it if Materazzi slandered his Dad.

Why not? Why did Materazzi’s bear baiting hit the spot? Why was it this that unspun the king of cool? What is the whole Mother’s Honour thing, anyway - and can it be a good thing? …. For me there’s a bit of a whiff of the Oath of the Horatii about it (what with us being in France and all that): men swearing to sacrifice everything (even their lives) for the honour and protection of a feminised ideal (La France, La Libertie), for women, and almost over them.