So Rupert Murdoch has hinted on Twitter that he may be rethinking his 40 year mission to deliver a daily couple of nipples to the breakfast tables of the nation.
In a reaction on Comment is Free, Rhiannon Lucy Cossett argued that nudity is not the principal problem with Page 3. “The presence of a few designer labels in the crucial areas makes little difference if the poisonous attitude remains the same,” she wrote. I broadly agree. My general take on the issue is that The Sun is a paper which peddles the exploitation, vilification and undisguised hatred of, well, just about everyone. The focus on Page 3 seems to me to miss the broader point, but more precisely, my problem with the tradition is not the nudity, but the way that it uses women as decoration, implying that a woman’s most significant role in the news media is to provide eye candy for a predominantly male market. Related to that, my main problem with the campaign against Page 3 is that by focusing on the nakedness, it veers rather close to an anti-nudity, even anti-sexuality narrative. It seems to say that exploitation is just fine, so long as you keep the boobs covered up.
While I generally agreed with Rhiannon’s main point, there was one paragraph in the article that betrays a profoundly mistaken view of what Page 3 is and does, and how it is viewed by men. It’s an extreme example of an argument that is often made by feminists within this debate.
I remember, as a teenager, how awful it was to be sitting next to a man on the bus leering at Page 3. I remember the embarrassment, the discomfort, at the lascivious drool coming from his chops, and the physical revulsion at his presumed erection from looking at a girl pretty much the same as me
…it’s about the sense of entitlement, the presupposition that an entire page of a national newspaper should be given over to the sexual gratification of men
Of course one can never underestimate the diversity of human personality and sexual behaviour, and I need no convincing that women experience the most rank sexual harassment and intimidation on public transport. I will take it on trust that at some point(s) in her life Rhiannon really did find herself sitting next to some freak who was “leering at Page 3” with “lascivious drool coming from his chops” in such a way that she presumed he had an erection from all the “sexual gratification” on display. I do, however, strongly reject the implication that this is how men typically view Page 3.
Straight men generally find pretty young women attractive. They are drawn towards them. Pretty young women with clothes on are attractive, and pretty young women with fewer clothes on are even more attractive. Boobs are nice to look at. I don’t think I’m sticking my neck out too far in making that assertion.
Murdoch started putting semi-naked women in his newspapers back in 1970 to attract buyers, in exactly the same way that car show exhibitors drape models over the bonnets of their cars. He figured that if men are attracted to women with their tops on, they would be even more attracted to women with their tops off. And he was probably largely correct about that.
However attraction is not the same thing as sexual arousal. If images in The Sun or any other paper were genuinely sexually arousing they would actually lose readers. Murdoch has always wanted The Sun to be something that families could have lying around the breakfast table. That’s why the classic Page 3 look has always been strangely sexless and innocent, all happy cheerful smiles rather than the sultry, seductive pouts of pornography, even softcore porn.
Here is a fundamental truth about men: we hate getting erections at inappropriate moments. It is embarrassing and (literally) uncomfortable. The greatest horror is to get an erection at work or when surrounded by your mates. Men (and teenage boys in particular) develop all kinds of squirming techniques and tactics to try to disguise them. If we thought reading the Sun was likely to produce spontaneous erections at inopportune moments, we wouldn’t buy it, or we would but would keep it hidden under the mattress with the porn mags.
I suspect one of the reasons why Murdoch is now considering covering up the nipples on Page 3 is because he realises that they’re not actually that important a part of the equation. He started using them 40 years ago because he thought he could get away with it and it might add to sales. He now knows he could take them away and it wouldn’t really make any difference, because the nipples really aren’t what it is all about. The likelihood is that Murdoch can grant campaigners their victory, get some good PR, and continue to use women in the same exploitative, sexist, decorative way he always has.
There is a tendency among some feminists to assume the worst of male sexuality. I understand where that has come from, but it can lead debates on topics such as sexualisation, porn and objectification to be conducted rather at cross purposes, and to generate a lot more heat than light. I don’t doubt for a moment that when a woman (especially a very young women) sees a man looking at The Sun, and specifically Page 3, she might be made genuinely uncomfortable by it. She may genuinely believe that the man is awash with lust, drooling with sexual gratification and sheltering a raging boner underneath his newspaper. I would suggest that unless the man has just escaped from decades in a monastery or is about 12 years old, this is almost certainly not the case. Much more probably he is thinking something like “she’s cute, nice tits, what a ridiculous speech bubble they’ve given her. Wonder if United will win tonight.”
Perhaps there was a time when Page 3 was still sufficiently new, daring and shocking to produce a frisson of genuine sexual excitement, but those days had passed long before even I hit puberty – a long, long time ago. When I was 13, round about 1980, we boys were on a perpetual hunt for sexual stimulation of any kind. Copies of Mayfair and Penthouse would be dealt and shared like valuable contraband. Even then Page 3 would barely register. It was what you might wank to if you couldn’t get hold of your mum’s Kay’s Catalogue lingerie section.
This wouldn’t matter too much were it not for one nagging concern. I can’t help thinking that the reason many women suppose that Page 3 is the salient tip of a huge iceberg of slavering male sexual desire is because so many other women have told them that Page 3 is the salient tip of a huge iceberg of slavering male sexual desire. Perhaps it is time to turn the page on that particular myth.
I have no wish to undermine or resist feminist campaigns against Page 3, on the contrary I think it we’d have a slightly better society without it. On the other hand, I’d prefer if we could have that debate and that campaign without the need to further demonize male sexuality. Whatever Page 3 might be about, it is really not about sex.
As usual a brilliant post, perhaps as a woman (urgh how I hate writing that) I am allowed to say that an awful lot of the anti page 3 propaganda seems to come from people who believe sex is wrong, the naked body is wrong and quite frankly are such delicate snow flakes I doubt they can leave the house without melting.
I grew up with page 3, it never upset me, I also grew up with mayfair, razzle and readers wives, and slipping even further into heresy territory roll my eyes daily at some of the RTs of everyday sexism, because among the horrific are simply people looking at the human body and not finding it objectionable.
This is my long standing problem with TERFs and Radfems, and why for so long, after considering myself one, I struggled with being a feminist,
Anyway I did a very brief post on this, agreeing basically that if your problem with The Scum is page 3 you are a middle class self obsessed idiot (Oh and you might be called Kate)
http://itsjustahobby.wordpress.com/2013/02/11/dont-sit-on-uncle-ruperts-knee/
Oh and for the record, girls wanked to Mayfair too, whatever Object might say 😉
“It never did me any harm” is a terrible argument! I’m really surprised to see it here and I also think you’ve made something of a straw person on the anti-sex thing. Yes, it may be true of some supporters, but the contributions I’ve seen to that side of the debate really don’t take that stance. For so many people it isn’t about nudity, it’s about the “news in briefs” speech-bubble comments (never from the woman photographed, sometimes plagiarised, a complete piss-take and great example of how women are denied a platform so often in mainstream media), plus the limited scope of beauty presented (as with advertising in general).
I think Page 3 is as much a symptom as a cause (if not more), and yes it may be pointless to attack the symptom since that won’t help the underlying issues, but sometimes it seems like the only option. Maybe there’s some confirmation bias on my side, since I broadly support the campaign, while I can see its flaws, thanks to Ally, stavvers and others.
Yes, that paragraph should be rewritten. It’s all about the writer’s own assumptions, not the man she was sitting next to. But those assumptions are a huge part of the discourse…
Speaking personally, I wouldn’t look at page three on the bus entirely because someone might (incorrectly) make such assumptions. As it happens I don’t want to look at page three anyway, but I still feel contrained, just by the assumption of a sexuality I don’t actually have. Similarly, when I look at how women are dressed, I try to do it carefully, to avoid the possible assumption that I’m leching over them – when in fact I really am looking at their clothes.
In other words, if I’d been on that bus with her, I might be oppressed by what she might be thinking about me, and she might be oppressed by what she assumed I might be thinking about her. And it would all be imaginary.
Ha. Nicely put.
And I agree, I think the most common thing for men to do when browsing the Sun is to skip past Page 3 just in case anyone sees them looking at it and thinks they might be doing exactly what Rhiannon suggests!
Excellent article.
Although I don’t buy the Sun I will read it if it’s in the cafe or whatever and Page Three simply means that no matter how interesting anything on page 2 or 3 are I won’t be lingering on section beyond quickly reading the headlines.
Thinking back to my teenage years the Sun was often lying around and I’d never have considered having some, ummm, private time with it and frankly I’d have spent time with a cereal packet if it had had a bit cleavage on it.
Last thing, this reminded me of a piece by Martin Robbins in October on a similar theme; http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/media/2012/10/sinister-campaign-against-page-3
This article expresses exactly my discomfort with the “no more page 3” campaign. I have no objection to people looking at pornography, as long as they don’t judge the person portrayed in it entirely by their physical appearance, but try to think of them as a fellow human being. And so long as they don’t then go on to objectify other people. And I agree that page 3 is pretty mild.
Come to that, has anyone established a causal link between looking at pornography and sexual objectification? The only correlation / possible causation associated with porn that anyone has established recently is that it makes you more sexually open-minded and therefore more likely to support marriage equality.
I guess that very much depends upon what you mean by sexual objectification Yvonne, which as I’ve written before, can mean pretty much whatever you want it to mean
True. I mean the act of regarding someone only as an object of lust, and not taking their feelings, thoughts, humanity, and subjectivity into account.
“This article expresses exactly my discomfort with the “no more page 3″ campaign. I have no objection to people looking at pornography, as long as they don’t judge the person portrayed in it entirely by their physical appearance, but try to think of them as a fellow human being. ”
Yvonne, that is a wonderfully humane standard. Come to think of it, that was your whole point anyway, wasn’t it?
If your problem with Page 3 is not the hilarious faux-quotes but the tits, I really think you’re more anti-sex than pro-women.
OK then *rolls up sleeves*. Thank you for re-posting this here, as the CIF system now makes it totally impossible to follow a debate through…
FIRST, just to be utterly clear, I do not support a ‘ban’ on page three, or even a ‘ban’ on pornography (even the extreme, violent and misogynist kind I utterly deplore). Banning things is very rarely effective. I do, however, support a pressure campaign directed at those papers which run page three or its equivalents to grow up and stop it. This is not the same as censorship, it is not prudery or a horror of nudity (I am actually all for nudity, it’s the natural human condition, and I think if there was a lot more of it around IN REAL LIFE we’d all be a lot less hung up on it and on our bodies in general); what it is about is sexism and inequality primarily, and objectification secondly.
I agree that Rhiannon’s paragraph above was a bit hyperbolic; especially the slavering (I mean, who actually slavers when they’re horny?) I agree that it could be seen to be demonising male sexuality, particularly the ‘revulsion’ at hte mere idea of an erection, even one not derived from yourself – I think that’s giving the poor old penis more power than it can reasonably support. I also think there is no particular problem with a man getting horny on the tube – biology, eh, what’s it like? But honestly, there is something quite horrible about a man studying page three, and then looking up and openly appraising you. Say what you like about how you personally behave and what you personally have observed, this does happen. This is a far bigger problem than page three, and the problem of page three is far bigger than this issue. But I do think it is probably easier for you to dismiss it as ‘not a thing’, just because you and every man you know doesn’ do it, than it is for women who have direct experience. It’s like men who think that street harrassment ‘hardly ever happens’. Of course it doesn’t happen all the time TO YOU.
I still have difficulty with your premise that page three is not meant to be, and is for the majority of men not, arousing/titillating. You (and other posters on CIF) seemed to be trying to suggest that the theoretical male heterosexual Sun reader’s desire to look at young women is because they are ‘attractive’, naked ones ‘more so’. But you then seek to divorce this ‘attractiveness’ completely from sex, which I think is just not realistic, any more than it would be for me to pretend that the irritatingly overwhelming effect that young babies has on me at the moment has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that as a woman in my late twenties I am reaching the end of what biology considers to be my optimum fertility window without having spawned. Doesn’t mean it has to be responded to, but denying the root if the impulse is simple self-delusion. What is more ‘attractive’ about a picture of a pretty young woman with no clothes on than a picture of a vintage Harley Davidson, if not the sexual element? I am quite ready to believe your contention that no man wants to get a raging stiffy whilst reading the morning paper, any more than any woman on the tube wants to leave a damp patch on the seat whilst reading Fifty Shades of Grey; but a touch of sexual frisson is certainly the goal in either case, and to pretend otherwise is a bit pointless really.
I am also troubled by this ‘boobs are nice’ business that is going around. Boobs are not like sweets, or motorbikes, or roses – they are attached inevitably to a person; describing a woman’s breasts as ‘a bit of nice’ as one poster on CIF did is enacting exactly the issue I have with page three – that it is divorcing the body, or parts of it, from the person, turning her ‘bits’ into consumer products. I read a bit in a book once where the new mother asks a dinner guest ‘do you like babies?’ and he replies ‘I like their feet; and hands’. She finds this a bit creepy, I think rightly so. It is objectification in action right there, refusing to acknowledge the inherent totality of the person/people, focussing on elements or traits that serve your purpose.
One thing you said here I found really quite odd. This:
“Murdoch has always wanted The Sun to be something that families could have lying around the breakfast table. That’s why the classic Page 3 look has always been strangely sexless and innocent, all happy cheerful smiles rather than the sultry, seductive pouts of pornography, even softcore porn.”
Perhaps this is where I have come to confusion, because unlike your’ some feminists’, I don’t assume the worst of ‘male sexuality’ – in fact, I tend to assume it is much like my own, based on physical attraction and human connection. Therefore the idea that men would find Page 3 girls ‘sexless’ because they had ‘happy cheerful smiles’ never occurred to me. I like men to be cheerful when we shag; if they weren’t, I’d think I was doing it wrong. Indeed, I always thought page three girls were considered to be the sexual antidote to the ‘porn star’ look, the equivalent to the Victorian gentleman’s ‘fresh country girl’ when he tired of ‘jaded’, knowing (syphilitic?) prostitutes – doesn’t mean that sex wasn’t still part of the equation. But if, as you seem to be telling me, male sexuality has become so pornified that only pantomime pouting trips the ‘sex’ wire anymore, then perhaps this is why I failed to realise that page three is not, for men, about arousal.
Finally, I don’t suppose any women think that page three is ‘the salient tip’ of the iceberg of female opporession. The reason some people choose to devote their campaigning energy to its demise, as opposed to, say campagining against violent porn or removal of funding to rape crisis centres, is because of the iterative effect, the regular every day dailiness of it, and the veneer of normality that gives to the sexist idea it underlines – women’s bodies are permanently available for men’s effortless consumption. Getting rid of it won’t solve the problem of sexism; but it will be a big step in de-normalising that idea, of woman as consumer product. In the same way that getting rid of the car-bonnet lovelies was a step in the right direction. Not the most important step, or the final step – just another step along the long slow trudge to a better, more equal world.
Hi LPT, thanks so much for that strong comment. I’ll try to pick out a couple of key points..
honestly, there is something quite horrible about a man studying page three, and then looking up and openly appraising you. Say what you like about how you personally behave and what you personally have observed, this does happen.
Let’s get this out of the way first – I don’t dispute that this happens, nor do I dispute that it feels horrible when it does. Some men behave horribly, and public transport does seem to bring out the worst! Some men leer at women, some men look at Page 3, and when the two things happen simultaneously I completely get that it would amplify the offence. Although I would argue that the leering is a much bigger (and more frequent) problem than the looking at Page 3.
“I still have difficulty with your premise that page three is not meant to be, and is for the majority of men not, arousing/titillating. You (and other posters on CIF) seemed to be trying to suggest that the theoretical male heterosexual Sun reader’s desire to look at young women is because they are ‘attractive’, naked ones ‘more so’. But you then seek to divorce this ‘attractiveness’ completely from sex”
I don’t think we can divorce it *completely* from sex.There is obviously a biological basis to the fact that straight men like looking at attractive women, with or without bare boobs.
Perhaps a better way to describe it would be that I’m separating attraction from lust. You could argue that there is a continuum between the two, but my sense is that they feel categorically different. I can think someone is attractive without feeling lustful towards them, and (if I’m honest) vice versa. Attraction is more aesthetic, lust is more primal. Page 3 is designed to elicit attraction, not lust. That’s not to say it couldn’t occasionally produce the latter, but that is not the intention or (in most cases) the effect.
I am quite ready to believe your contention that no man wants to get a raging stiffy whilst reading the morning paper, any more than any woman on the tube wants to leave a damp patch on the seat whilst reading Fifty Shades of Grey
There’s a really interesting point here. Speaking as a man (echoing Jemima’s first comment!) I find it really quite bizarre that women will read 50 Shades and the like in public.I think very, very few men would read / look at equivalent material. I once had to review a book called “Confessions of a Romantic Pornographer” (a slightly pretentious literary novel) which had a really explicit cover, I was on a tight deadline, and had no choice but to read it on a train journey. I spent the entire time desperately attempting to disguise it and praying nobody would notice! Male sexuality is a weird combination of being brazen and secret, in different contexts. Considering how much pornographic material is sold to men, it is striking how rarely one sees it being openly viewed/ read in public. I reiterate, if men really thought that people believed they were looking at Page 3 for sexual kicks they really wouldn’t do it in public.
I am also troubled by this ‘boobs are nice’ business that is going around. Boobs are not like sweets, or motorbikes, or roses – they are attached inevitably to a person; describing a woman’s breasts as ‘a bit of nice’ as one poster on CIF did is enacting exactly the issue I have with page three – that it is divorcing the body, or parts of it, from the person, turning her ‘bits’ into consumer products
Yes, and it is the fact that they are attached to a person which makes them nice – if they were just disembodied globes hovering in space they would look really quite weird (although I may just have had an idea for a Turner Prize winning exhibition!)
However the fact that they have a real, living, thinking person attached to them does not alter the fact that a pair of boobs (when attached to a woman) do look nice. As I said above, I don’t dispute that there is a biological/sexual foundation to that, but I’m suggesting that the actual experience of looking at a Page 3 photo is not primarily a sexual one. To be blunt, unlike porn, the male viewer is not actively imagining shagging the woman, and is not really being invited to. Which brings me finally to this:
Therefore the idea that men would find Page 3 girls ‘sexless’ because they had ‘happy cheerful smiles’ never occurred to me. I like men to be cheerful when we shag; if they weren’t, I’d think I was doing it wrong. Indeed, I always thought page three girls were considered to be the sexual antidote to the ‘porn star’ look, the equivalent to the Victorian gentleman’s ‘fresh country girl’
There are smiles and smiles! This is really difficult to deconstruct, but women can smile at a man in ways that are incredibly sexy, or ways that are entirely chaste. We can tell the difference. A lot of it is about cultural signifiers and norms, of course, rather than anything inherent, but Page 3 photographers are very skilled at capturing smiles that signify chaste innocence (not even coquettish sexual playfulness) rather than come-hither seduction. I think the simple fact is that if there was a widespread male desire for the type of “fresh country girl” look you describe, there would be top shelf porn mags full of naked girls smiling like Page 3 girls. To the best of my knowledge, they simply don’t exist. 7
(should add, it is not *just* about the smiles. Page 3 photos are also posed very differently to porn – but I think the facial expressions are the biggest difference)
Anyway, to you and everyone else, have to log off and do some proper work now. Back later, and thanks to everyone for the comments.
Hi LPT. You had a very illuminating comment on CiF: “It’s not a fear of men’s desire; far from it. It’s a fear your lack of desire won’t be noted, won’t be considered relevant, or might even be a turn-on in itself. The objectification of women via page three gives life to that fear, as does prostitution – the idea that in some circumstances, some men simply do not care whether you want it or not – they can still use you for their pleasure. You will probably find this melodramatic; but that is the root of the fear, not a revulsion of male desire.”
As a personal reaction, and a personal fear, this makes a lot of sense. As a source of policy it does not. You seem to be saying that people being interested in just a body reminds you of the possibility of rape. In order to feel safe, you want to live in a world where breasts, genitals, bodies, are all secondary – the only thing that matters for sexual attraction is whether the woman in question sincerely desires you, and without that nothing can happen. Worse, you seem to be saying that with sufficiently strong propaganda you can actually achieve that world. And even that this is the natural order of things, and only the corrupting effect of objectification has brought us away from this ideal state.
Your explanations are confusing things a bit. You say you do not want to ‘ban’ page three or pornography, and you do not want ‘censorship’. But presumably you want your campaign to have some kind of result. If the result of your campaign is that page three and pornography are no longer available to readers, it does not really matter to them what you prefer to call it. Could you say what result you want from your campaigns, so we can discuss on the basis of that?
Others have pointed out the difference between page three girls and pornography. I would criticise the idea of fighting ‘objectification’ as a sensible strategy. Objectification is pretty much built in. The thing is that sex is pleasurable, in itself, even if there is no deep meeting of minds. That is not all there is to it, of course. There is the meeting of minds and souls, a compatible personality, the joy of somebody desiring you and wanting to be with you – and there are complications if that is missing. But part of the attraction is just the bodies. Some nice sex with a consenting girl can still be pretty good, even if she is doing it for money, for your fame, to return a favour, to get revenge on her bastard cheating boyfriend, or because she is into anonymous sex and you happen to have the only stiff prick available. Conditioning men to not want that kind of sex is unlikely to work, any more than men could ever be conditioned to
abhor adultery. It is not limited to men either – it was not a man who invented the ‘zipless fuck’.
When you get into peoples fantasies it gets even worse. Fantasizing about a stranger or a photograph you do not know their souls or personality, and you pretty unavoidably limit your fantasy to whatever you find exciting and can dream up easily. Worse, real people are complicated, unpredictable, and have their own needs and reasons. For a fantasy to work, you want to dream about somebody who is exciting and available, not somebody who is just as likely to be busy, offended, tired, or uninterested. The long and short of it is that looking at people as objects to your sexual needs is part of normal attraction, and pretty much dominant in fantasy, whatever you do.
So, fighting objectification is fighting windmills. It is trying to repress an unavoidable part of sexual desire, and therefore inseparable from repressing desire as such. That does not mean that nothing can be done. The incidence of rape is different in different countries, and AllyF says it is clearly falling in the US and likely here. Sexual harassment differs vastly in different places. Fighting objectification is just the wrong way to go about it. What you have to work with is peoples morality, norms for behaviour, social control. You cannot stop people dreaming about girls with nice tits available for their pleasure, and there is no point in trying to make them feel bad about it. You can train people to stop leering in public, and to make sure they ask nicely first.
Hi Gjenganger. That quote was specifically in response to someone who thought Rhiannon’s anecdote exhibited a disgust for male desire; I could see why they might think that from the language she used, and I was trying to put it into context to demonstrate what I thought to be the true reason for her revulsion in the anecdote. It is not, at base, the reason I want to see an end to page three.
you want to live in a world where breasts, genitals, bodies, are all secondary – the only thing that matters for sexual attraction is whether the woman in question sincerely desires you, and without that nothing can happen.
I don’t want bodies to be secondary and consent to be primary; I want the false dichotomy of these two things to be dissolved. I want people to acknowledge the fact that where there is a body, there is a mind, and that these two are not dissoluble – if you want one, you’re going to have to acknowledge the other. And yes, I believe if we promote that in our cultural environment (propaganda is a bit of a loaded way of putting it, given the effect is not negative) then we can achieve that world. After all, we have pretty much managed to get across the idea that black people are not biologically inferior to white people with the use of cultural (and in some cases legislative) “propaganda”. It is possible, and desirable, to positively work to shape a better society. It’s not automatically fascism to want to change how people think about things.
Your explanations are confusing things a bit. You say you do not want to ‘ban’ page three or pornography, and you do not want ‘censorship’. But presumably you want your campaign to have some kind of result.
The result I want to see in terms of page three is for the campaign to pick up enough supporters and change enough minds (male and female) that eventually the purveyors of page three remove the feature of their own accord, in the same way they might stop running the horoscope if enough people complained that it was daft and dated. It doesn’t require legislation, just people power and purchasing power. And yes, there would be some people who could no longer get to see page three in the newspaper. But there are lots of things I don’t get to see in the newspaper because other people don’t want it / aren’t interested; doesn’t mean my likes and dislikes are being censored, just that not enough people want to see them to make it worth the paper’s while to distribute them. If I want knitting patterns, e.g., I’ll have to go to a specialist knitting publication.
Which brings us on to porn. Again, banning it is not the answer. My strategy is to continually draw attention to how dehumanising, violent, misogynist and just plain ugly a lot of the more extreme pornography is, to demonstrate the bad effects it can have on gender relations, especially when started young, and to press forward in my ‘propaganda’ about the indisolvability of the body and the person, in the hope that as our sexual culture becomes more humane, the market for the uglier types of porn will diminish. Porn, like alcohol, is recreation. Like alcohol, there is good stuff and bad stuff. Like alcohol, there are appropriate and inappropriate times/places/ages for it. Like alcohol, it is best enjoyed in moderation. The global porn culture is becoming too much like the British drink culture – extreme, damaging, addictive. I don’t want to ban booze; but I do advocate for a healthier drinking culture.
And even that this is the natural order of things, and only the corrupting effect of objectification has brought us away from this ideal state.
I’m pretty sure I bloody didn’t, and if I did I certainly didn’t mean it that way. I make a point of never saying something is ‘natural’ as if that makes it good. Lots of things that occur in nature are fucking diabolical; lots of artificial human things are wonderful and improve our society and lives no end. What this other sexual culture I am after is not about nature; it is very highly constructed consciousness, like mindfulness – it is an art, to see other people as fully as human as ourself, all the time. it does not come naturally, not to everyone, and never all the time. God knows, when I am on the tube journey home, I am not appreciating the full humanity of the people around me – they often become in my mind no more than irritant sacks of meat creating obstacles between me and my destination. When you’re driving on the motorway, do you think of every car as containing at least one totally unique human consciousness? Of course not. It takes effort and concentration. But in sexual interaction, it is essential. It is not about living some idealised ‘natural’ life; it is about living an authentic life, and recognising the authenticity of others.
The thing is that sex is pleasurable, in itself, even if there is no deep meeting of minds.
Lol, you do not have to tell me that! A deep meeting of minds is not what I am demanding as the base minimum for sexual encounters – if I was, I truly would be in lala land. But there has to be the acknowledgment of the other person’s personhood. Not deep intimate knowledge of their soul; just the acknowledgment that they are a human being whose desires and rights must be taken into account. No-one, in any context (unless they are clinically brain dead – mmm, sexy), is just a body. So sex can never be about ‘just the body’. I believe even paid for sex with a prostitute CAN be good sex – although the transactional basis of the act makes it less likely. All that is required is an acknowledgment of personhood and a respect of what that personhood entails in a sex act. Projecting one’s own desires or fantasies onto another person without acknowledging who they are, treating them effectively as a blank cavas, effacing their identity, is not OK to me, is not healthy, and we’d be a better society if it never happened.
As to your last point, that activism should stay out of people’s minds and focus on their outward actions – to an extent, you have a point. But longer term, changes to culture will affect the underlying ideas. This happens all the time. The majority of educated, middle class white people aren’t just ‘pretending’ not to be racist because that is the accepted social norm – they really ARE NOT racist anymore, because they have been brought up in a culture where that is not considered to be acceptable, sensible or ok. It takes time, but it is the end game. Of course there will always be Easton Ellis’s ‘psychos’, or more prosaically Camus’ les etrangers, for whom society’s norms will have no influence, who will ride against even those strong subconscious cultural influences; but if the dominant culture says that the body and mind are inseparable, if media, education etc works on the basis of this inherent personhood, most people raised in that environment will not just submit to bhaving as if it were true; they will know it is true. The fact that cultural learning is so powerful is precisely why it cannot ultimately be enforced by bans, censorship, legislation. Like public order, it can only be achieved by consent. But that consent can be influenced by persuasion, which is precisely what a campaign advocating for the end of page three is.
Wooh, rant! ‘Scuse me! Hope it makes my position a bit clearer though.
Thanks, LPT, it does make it clearer. It does not convince me, though.
One thing is that ‘acknowledging’ and ‘respecting’ peoples personhood are rather weasel words. At one end of the spectrum this is obvious, and nothing in prostitution or page 3 offends against it. As AllyF points out breasts are only nice because they belong to a person – a cut-off pair hanging in space would be a turn-off. Even the most violent and criminal fantasies depend on interacting with a person – there would be no fun in dreaming of dismembering a foam-rubber doll. In more normal terms, a friendly and understanding athmosphere is surely a plus even in prostitution, and some apparent enjoyment on the ladies part is even better, whether the punter is paying to be sucked off, dressed up, or whipped. But I doubt that this is enough for you. At the opposite end you would want people to be focused on the personhood at least as much as on the body, making the physical aspects insufficient, if not actually secondary. Since you make such a big deal of page three girls and pornography, I have to conclude either that you think personhood should be centre stage even in solitary masturbation fantasies, or that the demands of proper political attitude override peoples right to daydreaming.
As for the anti-porn campaign, if you really wanted page three and porn to die out from lack of customers, you would have to focus on the customers, convince people that they do not, personally, want to watch this. That is not the main focus of the campaign, likely because it would not work. Harping on how misogynist porn is and how bad it is for the young does not make the customers want it less. It works by making people ashamed of their own desires, and even more by an active minority applying social pressure to the distributors – which is just banning by another name.
It is true that people’s ideas have changed remarkably under political pressures and changing living conditions. But when you are trying to change what turns people on, I really think you are biting off more than even cultural learning can chew. For most of history people have been brought up in a culture where pretty much any non-vanilla sexual activity was “not considered to be acceptable, sensible or ok”. Historically there was adultery, purely recreational sex, oral or anal intercourse, homosexuality. More recently few would start out thinking that cross-dressing, fetichism, SM, ‘water sports’, exhibitionism, wearing your favourite football teams jersey for sex, or many other weird personal fantasies were sensible or acceptable. And yet people have kept dreaming about and doing these things, sometimes in the face of great social risk. Having personhood always part of the equation may be a wonderful goal, well worth striving for if you have that mindset. But insisting it always be a central focus for everybody (like “Lenin is always with us!”) is more likely to have people repress their desires than change them.
In the main, your reply ignores what I’ve actually said and assumed what you think I actually meant. Saying that you ‘doubt that [a friendly and understanding athmosphere … and some apparent enjoyment on the ladies part is even better, whether the punter is paying to be sucked off, dressed up, or whipped] would be enough’ for me, when I have said nothing of the kind and in fact hinted at the opposite above, leads me to believe you aren’t actually interested in what I have to say, only in what you want to project on me as a ‘Censorious, Sex-repressing Feminist TM’. This makes it a bit pointless me expending huge care and effort and masses of words to try and explain it to you.
But to quickly address your point about “well there’s always been sexual repression and, to paraphrase Jurassic Park, ‘lust found a way'” – what I am talking about is something quite different, because it is not imposed from without or as a threat (this is bad because God / Lenin / the State says so; if you do x/y/z you’ll go to hell / go to prison / go to a re-education camp). What I am proposing is something both completely new and as old as the hills – the recognition that other people are people, and that their needs and desires matter as much as your own. It is as much an act of self-respect as respect to respect other people, because the smallest twist of fate would have made you them and them you. The idea of it being some kind of internalised mantra of oppression and repression (‘Lenin is always with us!’) is totally spurious – it is about awakening people to a reality – their own particular humanity and the consequent particular humanity of everyone else, not saying “you better just do what you’re told, or else!”
Also, saying applying group pressure to distributors to change their practices is just ‘banning by another name’ is rubbish. It’s a way of silencing people, telling them they have no right to ask for change. Of course any succesful campaign against porn and page three must speak to and seek to persuade consumers AS WELL. But it is not ‘de facto banning’ to ask the people who will ultimately make this decision (the providers) to hear your point of view. Pretending it is is redefining the word ‘ban’ out of it’s right sense, and is obviously done with a desire to shut down the argument.
Well, LPT I am trying to make sense of your position. I just find it very difficult to see what your quite reasonable words of ‘respecting peoples personhood’ mean in practice. More precisely I wonder if I am just not getting the point, or if you are actually trying to have your cake and eat it.
If you think that prostitution is actually OK, provided there is a ‘friendly understanding athmosphere etc.’ between the two participants that is great. I just cannot see how that leaves any reason to be against prostitution as such. And you are against prostitution, no? it would seem you could get better results by leaving prostitution alone and educating the customers to be ‘nice punters’ – you might even be working together with the sex worlers then, instead of against them. If people already see the page three tits as a (particularly interesting) part of a person, why campaign against page three?
As for the banning, well, trying to change consumer tastes is one thing. But if you try to bring about a situation where peoples tastes are the same, but they can no longer read the material they like because supply has been cut off, well if it walks like a ban and quacks like a ban, what is it? There is not necessarily anything wrong with bans. I want to ban quite a few things myself, from torture to euthanasia to abortion. But if you want to bring something about, you should as a minimum face up to the unpleasant cosequences. If your politics do not allow you to ban things, you can not solve your dilemma by just pretending it is called something else.
I can see what you are after, when you talk about seeing the full humanity of other people, all the time. You are right that it is a high art, and very difficult and demanding. And you are right that it is beautiful and enriching and worthwhile. What I find surprising and suspicious is that you say so little about promoting what you are for, and so much about nobbling the competition to leave you with a clear field. You could promote your approachto the punters by saying that it gives them fuller, happier lives, more love ,and better sex to boot. You could say that it made them better lovers and more sought after. And it would all be true. Instead you use your energy to campaign against pornography. Why?
If someone believes passionately in high quality home cooking, the obvious way forward is to teach people how to cook, and how to enjoy good food. Your approach is more like making all the alternatives unavailable, from fast food through ready meals to restaurants, so as to leave people no choice but to do it your way. The results are entirely predictable, People will not start spending hours each evening to cook five-star meals. Instead they will replace their lost ready meals with baked beans on toast.
Ok, I am aware this is probably a waste of time, but what the heck…
If you think that prostitution is actually OK, provided there is a ‘friendly understanding athmosphere etc.’ between the two participants that is great. I just cannot see how that leaves any reason to be against prostitution as such. And you are against prostitution, no?
I am against prostitution because I consider it to be one of the more egregious manifestations of the excessive commodifcation of every aspect of human existence that is engendered by capitalism. It takes an act that should be delightful and free and plural, boxes it up, puts a price on it, delimits it to particular acts (anal, oral, threesome, etc) and sets particular values of money to those acts, which are then performed to order for a fee. It’s crass, commercial and joyless. And I believe it is harmful to our social concept of sex (or at very least is holding it back from becoming something more whole and healthy and happy).
While you may say that sex for money need bear no relation to sex for free, the mesage that sex can be so rationalised, and so priced, seeps into the sexual culture, and encourages the idea that for sex to happen, it is enough for one person to desire it, if they can overcome the other party’s disinclination (with their capitalist advantage, their physical advantage, whatever).
I am decidedly not against prostitutes. I utterly support their full right to earn their living in their trade without harrassment and with equal rights before the law. Nor am I categorically against their clients, whose sexuality suffers as much as anyone’s from this crass commodification. You may call this tokenism, or wanting to ‘have my cake and eat it’; I think it is an important distinction. We will probably never agree on that. Likewise, your unwillingness to see the difference between calling for something to be voluntarily ended and banning it means we are unlikely to see eye to eye there either. It is fundamentally different. It requires consent and consensus. If the providers heed the REQUEST of the compaign and remove page three, those who desperately want it back are more than welcome to set up a campaign of their own REQUESTING its return. And the provider can heed them too. It is categorically not the same as imposing a ban.
Your last two paragraphs actually make a lot of sense. And to be honest, I don’t spend as much time as I would like developing a positive campaign to achieve my larger goals, because I am still in the process of hammering them out in my own head (and living up to them myself). I tend to fall in behin activism I think would contribute to those larger goals, rather than take the lead myself. It is a weakness; but I don’t think it is a waste of time. I always get annoyed when CIF articles decrying this or that evil get met with a barrage of ‘so what do YOU think we ought to do about it then???’ posts, as if in order to criticise the way things are you have to have a fully finalised manifesto of the way things ought to be. It’s all steps on the path.
I’m going to leave this now, because both of us are too verbose and too opposed to make much progress without entirely taking over Ally’s blog. But I appreciate your challenge for positivism rather than protest; the occasional kick up the arse does me good.
Bugger, forgot to say:
In spite of being against prostitution in principle, I think that with the right people and the right context, good sex can still be had within in it – by more by serendipity than design. Most prostitutes don’t have the luxury of being highly selective about their clients, hours and mode of work.
how wonderful to speak so knowledgeably on a subject you clearly know nothing about. So since I struggle with String theory could you make wild inaccurate statements about that, in a condescending tone?
@jemima101 – I’m sorry you find my tone condescending. And I completely acknowledge that my opinion is limited by by my own experiences and assessments of sex and of the sexual culture I live in. I am not a sex worker and have never used the services of a sex worker. If you would please explain to me why my ideas are wrong. I’m sure your comments would be enlightening and I would very much appreciate your critique; however, just telling me my opinion is ill-informed without attempting to inform me is not very productive.
http://lalibertinesalon.wordpress.com/2012/11/08/sex-worker-allies-and-education/
All that link says to me is that for the purposes of this debate on this forum, you can’t be bothered to back up your criticism of my argument with facts or argument of your own. Which really just makes it a bit pointless.
Nice piece, Ally. I think you’re spot on: page 3 isn’t, and never was supposed to be, erotic. This angle is a complete irrelevance.
What amazed me reading through the reams of silliness that was that thread was people missed what for me seemed an obvious point – the Johann Hari-style anecdote about the guy on a bus worked primarily because it was set ON A BUS.
I think people are quite incorrect to say that the anecdote revealed a general disgust with male sexuality. It’s not men in general ‘objectifying’ women that people find objectionable; it’s the wrong men. Men on buses. Men who are such ‘losers’ they can’t afford a nice little Audi to drive to work. The setting of the anecdote played a vital role in that it gave an unconscious cue to the audience such that they’d find the anecdote ‘skeevy’. It wouldn’t work nearly as well on the tube, for instance (although I ought to note Jessica Reed did claim it would), because we wouldn’t automatically assume that the man was a ‘loser’.
I’m writing nothing particularly revelatory here. If people haven’t already checked out Girl Writes What?’s video on the nice guy stooshie (haha! I’m using this word too now!), it’s well worth watching. It’s an immensely courageous and honest video. Essentially, her argument is that what’s happened is that, in bourgeois feminism, certain women have found a vehicle for rationalising spontaneous intuitions of contempt concerning lower-status males acting as if they were in the same league as the woman.
That isn’t an argument against feminism, or a reason to dislike women (although it is perhaps a reason to feel a little dislike for individual women who aren’t terribly willing to be self-critical). Much as (het) men have to come to terms with the fact that, much as they’d love nothing better than to find attractive a woman who is physically unappealing but awesome in every single other way, (het) women have to come to terms with the fact that, whilst their higher brain might be telling them that they ought to find attractive the nice guy who lacks ambition and competitive drive, they just don’t find them attractive.
Oh this is such tosh. This desperate attempt to paint being anti-page three as being anti-working class is just insulting to working-class men, and is as transparent an attempt to discredit an argument by smearing it as Julie Burchill’s recent “no-one would have minded Suzanne Moore’s disgusting transphobic rant if she wasn’t working class! Did I mention I am too? So if you don’t like my disgusting transphobia, it’s because you hate the working class!”
You notice Rhiannon was on the bus too, right? Does that make her ‘lower status’? Everyone gets the bus to work in London because you’d be a bloody fool to attempt to drive; mostly you get the bus, then the tube, or the tube, then a bus, or somesuch combination – the incident Rhiannon describes just happens to occur on a bus. Her anecdote, while overblown, is not a veiled class issue. It just ISN’T. Any more than complaints about being catcalled from building sites is a class issue.
Also, anyone who actually BUYS the Sun (or any paper) is already a financial cut above everyone else on the bus/tube, reading the free Metro (which has hilarious pictures of animals, but no tits – I guess you get what you pay for).
I didn’t say ‘class’. I talked about status. They aren’t the same thing at all. David Beckham is working class but high status. I can’t give an example of an upper class person with low status, because by definition if you’d heard of them, they’re not low status. But I assume you have no difficulty with accepting that there will be terribly ra people out there who’ve not achieved any sort of social status.
She talks about getting the bus to school. It may be she went to school in London, but there’s no particular reason to think she’s talking about London. I think most people would assume she grew up in a leafy suburb, wouldn’t you? I mean, if you had to guess, that would be the salient response. So whilst I accept your point about buses in London not necessarily giving off the same signals concerning status, I don’t think it’s terribly relevant.
Finally, please can you not describe my thoughts as ‘tosh’? I found that to be a little rude and I don’t think I deserved that. Even if I’m wrong, my thoughts are not tosh.
NMP3 is anti the working class women who have careers in glamour work though (even if it claims not to be) The basic idea is women should get nice, middle class feminist approved jobs which never involve making money from their body.
Unsurprisingly the same people who oppose sex work oppose page 3, on pretty much the same grounds, I don’t like it, it makes me uncomfortable, what about the effect on men.
@Jemima101 – I don’t know about the group you mention in particular, but I certainly am not against glamour models, or sex workers. It is possible to object ot an industry whilst supporting the right of the people in it to recieve good treatment, respect as human beings, fair remuneration and employment rights. I dissaprove of the effect Tesco has on the national and global food economy, but I 100% support the rights of its workers; I’m anti-war, not anti-soldier. I think it is possible to question the validity and impact on society and culture of, for example, the sex trade, without seeking to disenfranchise those who currently work in it any further than they already are – indeed, I support legalisation and thus proper regulation of the sex trade, despite my personal longing for a day when the idea of buying sex will be as bizarre as the idea of paying someone to laugh at your jokes.
But if you wish to end someones work, you are not supporting them, you are simply saying you don;t object to how others feed themselves and their families, which is terribly nice of you, but not support.
I see what you’re saying, and yes, I suppose the natural upshot of wanting a particular aspect of society to be brought to a close (page 3, the sex trade, arms dealing, private schools) then you will perforce also be collaterally ‘ending someone’s work’ (glamour models, sex workers, factory workers, private school teachers).
I’m afraid there’s not much I can do about that. Except to say that my beliefs about these things also operate within a wider network of basically socialist goals, aiming at a societal shift in which ‘work’ would take on an entirely different connotation, one which is less to do with the need to make enough money to support yourself and your family and more to do with personal fulfilment and service to society. But I appreciate we are entering the realm of ‘in an ideal world’ here, and that may not be a comfort to the people who would be disenfranchised if my smaller goals were realised.
While we live in that less than ideal world, I will advocate for policies which allow all people to be able to work at whatever their occupation as safely and profitably as possible, whilst still not necessarily supporting the industry they are part of. It’s sort of like saying I believe women soldiers should be allowed on the front line, despite my personal preference that there not BE a front line. Not ‘terribly nice’ of me at all, just basic human rights. I apologize if that offends some people, and I accept that it is far from perfect, but we all have to make our ideological way in the world as best we can.
I love the analogy with women working on the front line, as a pacifist feminist I struggled for a long time with the fact some women wanted to be soldiers. I may steal that idea if I may 🙂
Help yourself 🙂
Also, you have just won the prize for ‘first person this week to provoke the long slow howl of despair I do when someone asserts that all women, no matter how they try and be right-thinking, are really only attracted to money and power’ canard. It just… argh.
Just to be clear, the canard I was talking about was this one:
“Much as (het) men have to come to terms with the fact that, much as they’d love nothing better than to find attractive a woman who is physically unappealing but awesome in every single other way, (het) women have to come to terms with the fact that, whilst their higher brain might be telling them that they ought to find attractive the nice guy who lacks ambition and competitive drive, they just don’t find them attractive.”
I hate this idea, basically a sophistication of the ‘girls don’t like boys girls like cars and money’ belief. It is simply not true, and incredibly harmful to gender relations. It ignores the myriad factors that go into the forming of attraction for both men and women, not to mention the fact that who we are drawn to is also, to a degree, a matter of conscious choice (which is why, for example, people with a history of abusive relationships can, with effort, break the deep seated patterns, often formed in childhood, which draw the to this kind of relationship, and instead form a healthy attraction to a respectful partner).
The inevitable implication of tying this idea to the idea that Rhiannon’s revulsion (and the reader’s) was subconsciously linked to the presumed low status of the man involved is that ‘she wouldn’t have minded if he’d been rich / famous / ambitious / competitive enough’. It’s like saying to a woman who complains that she was beeped at by a white van man on her way home ‘bet you wouldn’t have been so bothered if it had been a BMW’. It basically implies that all women have their ‘price’ – if not direct financial price, then a threshold of ‘status’ above which sexual harrassment will perforce become welcome sexual advance.
You say you did not imply this at all – that the additional factor of implied status in the anecdote was an aggravating rather than definitive factor. But what you actually said was, “It’s not men in general ‘objectifying’ women that people find objectionable; it’s the wrong men.” I think that is pretty explicit – that if it had been one of the ‘right’ men (rich, high status) leching over page three next to Rhiannon (say in the waiting room of an expensive private dentist’s) then she’d not have found it objectionable.
Yeah, you do have my total agreement on the man on the bus thing though.
Apologies for the tosh. I have been hearing this described as a class/status battle over at the Guardian, and I roared at you unwontedly, you’re right.
On the other hand, I don’t quite buy that you intended ‘status’ unrelated to ‘class’, because you were obviously referencing money (‘can’t afford a nice little Audi’) so it wasn’t about the chap being low on social skills, but about him not being a ‘professional’ – basically about money, which is a pretty good correlate with the rather decayed and uncertain remnants of what used to be the English class system. Your ‘terribly ra people without social status’ (I’m thinking JP from Fresh Meat types?) will still tend to have wodges of cash, which was what you were inferring this bus-riding Sun-reader did not have, which was what you thought Rhiannon (and women like her) scorned about him. You also referenced such women as ‘bourgeois’, thereby signposting clearly that you perceived this to be a question of class.
Re Rhiannon’s experience as reported, I think probably we are both making assumptions based on our respective experiences. As a Londoner, I don’t ascribe class/status to people based on their use of public transport, as it is a necessary part of almost everybody’s lives. As someone who apparently is not, this is more of a factor for you and you therefore detect an unspoken contempt for the man’s assumed ‘low status’ rather than his supposed sexual behaviour. Neither of us know where she attended school or whether transport choice was therefore an indicator of social status, and whether this was a factor in her ‘revulsion’. But I think it is a reach for you to assume it, unless you have access to more information about her home town than I do. And to then pass that assumption over to the whole anti-page-three movement, and paint it as a thinly-veiled attack by privileged women specifically on low-status men, is DEFINITELY a reach.
OK. Cheers for taking back the tosh thing. I think, however, we’re still somewhat at cross-purposes here.
The relevant assumption here concerns what sort of picture it is likely the reader would have formed in their heads as they read it. I’m making no assumptions whatsoever about her; I’m making assumptions about the kinds of picture the reader would likely build up in their minds as they read the article.
First of all, she’s white. She’s fairly obviously (probably upper-) middle-class (her name alone signifies that). What picture does everyone have when they imagine white, middle-class children? Leafy suburbs. That’s the stereotype. That’s what would go through your average reader’s head as they imagined it.
I don’t think these are bad assumptions to make about what the reader would see in their mind’s eye as they read the anecdote.
I’ll leave your comments about status to the side, if I may, otherwise we’ve got too many balls in play.
As for your last sentence, I don’t accept that this is close to what I was saying. I’d just ask that you stop attributing views to me without at least attempting to justify that attribution.
First of all, she’s white. She’s fairly obviously (probably upper-) middle-class (her name alone signifies that). What picture does everyone have when they imagine white, middle-class children? Leafy suburbs. That’s the stereotype. That’s what would go through your average reader’s head as they imagined it.
I don’t think it is particularly obvious Rhiannon is white, from her Guardian picture. I haven’t seen any other picture of her, however, perhaps you have.
Nor do I think her name makes it fairly obvious she would be upper-middle-class. Welsh, maybe. Or with parents who like Fleetwood Mac. My given name is remarkably weird, and my boyfriend’s working-class parents formed a first-generation double-barrel when they married simply because the female party was the last of her family name and didn’t want to lose it, so I don’t tend to put a lot of stock in names as indicative of class. The fact she writes for the Graun is a clearer indication of her class than anything, but even with that you’d be assuming a LOT, as the paper is at pains to feature an acceptable minimum of non-posh feature writers, especially if they have done the paper the favour of establishing their reputation on the blogosphere off their own backs beforehand (as Rhiannon has done).
I think possibly you are projecting your own assumptions onto the theoretical ‘average reader’ to excuse yourself for playing the man and not the ball.
Re the last sentence, I said:
to then pass that assumption over to the whole anti-page-three movement, and paint it as a thinly-veiled attack by privileged women specifically on low-status men, is DEFINITELY a reach.
I based this on the fact that you said:
I’m writing nothing particularly revelatory here. If people haven’t already checked out Girl Writes What?’s video on the nice guy stooshie (haha! I’m using this word too now!), it’s well worth watching. It’s an immensely courageous and honest video. Essentially, her argument is that what’s happened is that, in bourgeois feminism, certain women have found a vehicle for rationalising spontaneous intuitions of contempt concerning lower-status males acting as if they were in the same league as the woman.
i.e., you were equating your assessment of Rhiannon’s anecdote (that it, and by inferrence her opposition to page three, expressed the contempt of bourgeois/middle class women for the sexual desires of lower status men) with Gir Writes What?’s assessment of the Nice Guy furore, and ‘bourgeois feminism’ more widely, as being a vehicle by which middle class/bourgeois women could express their contemp for the sexual desires of lower status males. This was my interpretation, and thus my attribution to you of the opinion that opposition to page three was about higher status women pouring scorn on the desires of lower status men.
However, if you are unwilling to discuss what you intended by ‘status’, we aren’t likely to get very far.
Have to say I’m with Lela here, Jamie.
I think the idea that women are fine with being leered at or otherwise harassed providing the man is attractive / rich / high status enough is indeed tosh. This is a canard that serves to minimise or dismiss the cruelty of various forms of sexual harassment, it has the effect of saying there is no such thing as sexual harassment, only unwanted sexual attention.
It’s simply not true. I’ve often heard women who talk about being harassed, leered at, groped etc in public places say that some of the worst offenders can be (supposedly) high status, confident young professionals – the “city boys” of stereotype.
I didn’t see anything in Rhiannon’s words that made me think her problem was with the status or appearance of the man/ men she was talking about. It was all about the behaviour and (presumed) motivations.
Right, really do have to leave you all now! .
Hang on. You’re attributing to me claims I didn’t make. I wrote that “It wouldn’t work nearly as well on the tube, for instance.” I’m making a comparative claim, not an absolute claim. I’m not claiming that the anecdote wouldn’t work AT ALL if it was with a high-status male; I’m claiming that it wouldn’t work AS WELL. I’m saying that the setting on the bus played a vital role in the anecdote, helping elicit stronger feelings of disgust by playing on unconscious thought-processes.
Just to be crystal clear, I do not remotely believe that ” women are fine with being leered at or otherwise harassed providing the man is attractive / rich / high status enough”. This is probably why I didn’t say anything remotely resembling that claim!
I’m not sure anyone can define all the ways people may approach Page 3, but my experience of sitting down a lot and being somewhat invisible in public places always lead me to believe that Page 3 was about what some folk call “homosocial” activity.
So the chaps stop for their tea break, and someone has a copy of the Sun. There’s a bit of a discussion about the front page news. Then there is an appraisal of the Page 3 girl; one bloke asserts that she is lovely, whilst another says she is a bit skinny for him, another comments on how she has a nice face but her bosoms look fake. And in this way, the men bond over their sexual attraction to women. It is never enough to simply say, “Phwoah!!!” because you need to act like you have an opinion – however slight – just as you need to have an opinion about how the England squad would be better managed. Nobody is supposed to get aroused during these conversations.
So I always assumed the Sun was (at least sometimes) bought in the same way some women might buy a paper (maybe even the Sun) or a gossip magazine to provide some starlet’s new look to chat about at break and bond over. And while it seems to me very sad that some folks – men and women – effectively socialise over accessing the physical appearance of women, Page 3 doesn’t seem an absolutely central issue to how we might tackle this, just a symptom.
This is a great point. Love the concept of homosocial activity, and I think this is a very strong description of what all this is about.
Yes a very good point. Currently my workplace kitchen/lunch room has a regular supply of Heat, Chat, and so on. And one can often disturb a good discussion of Beckham, Kate Middleton Katie Price and Pete and his abs plus a whole load of women and some men I know nothing more about. A much younger me worked in warehouses and portering and yes, exactly the discussions were had as described of the content in the Sun and Star. I hadn’t thought to make a connection but really it’s so clear!
Except I have almost never had a woman come up to me and draw a ring round my toes and invited her girlfriends to comment on them.
On more than one occasion I have had men comment on my breasts or ask to have a go on them.
Working in a hospital you may. “Fit” young male physios appear to be considered particularly fair game. Junior Doctors generally just commented on.
There have of course been a series of legal and tribunal cases of males being sexually harassed. I guess this shows that being in a majority may fool one into behaving in ways one may not otherwise. Or possibly it’s to do with institutions. Or maybe just the health service, lifetimes working with people in extremis tends to give a more earthy tone to conversation.
I don’t think there’s an issue of status there at all.
I think there is more than a little issue of age, though – I can’t help but wonder how much of this reaction derives from the notion of EWWWW OLD MAN ERECTION.
And props to whoever mentioned reading 50 Shades of Grey on the bus – I’m sure if people tried to ban that because they felt uncomfortable sitting next to a woman reading that we’d never hear the end of it.
“There is a tendency among some feminists to assume the worst of male sexuality. I understand where that has come from,”
It comes from traditonalism. It is Victorian and traditionalist as hell. The fact thta it is so central to so much feminist analysis makes it an almost fatal flaw.
Ginkgo . I do so agree. The debate on page 3 , itself good publicity, has remained much the same from it’s first appearance. Essentially that it’s rude and panders to male animal instincts. Of course there is a lot of assumption about what those instincts are. As always with this debate no one asks the readers, in particular the males what the page means to them. I suppose simple anatomy means male sexual response would be very public without clothes. And for some reason this transparent expression is so scary that men soon find ways to conceal it. Just as Marxism continued the millennial strand of Christian thought so it’s heresy feminism neatly slides along Chritian transcendence of “the flesh”. We remain continually at war with the idea we may just be a naked ape battling to be saints. I suspect the debate about page three reveals more about the debators than the thing itself. I’m comfortable with campaigns based on peoples feelings so long as they own them rather than imputing thoughts and feelings to others. The man on the bus may simply had a cold. On a general note it is really surprising how little actual research is done on what men think or feel by actually asking them. Does anyone know of any asking readers of the Sun what they think about the assertions made in all the decades of this debate?
You make some good points here in wondering whether the display of Page 3 women is sexual or simply aesthetic. I suppose women in general see them as sexual because they find a dressed up woman more aesthetical. You need to be a male to honestly find boobs beautiful… a straight woman would prefer them in a nice bra.
This makes me wonder whether scantily dressed women (especially young and pretty ones) consider themselves sexual / aesthetic objects. I’m not sure whether I have right to criticize Page 3, because I too wore less when I was young and pretty, and sure enjoyed the male attention.
Great piece, Ally, v. thought provoking as always. Have no strong feelings about Page 3, but I do think that Ms Cossett & Co. would have a stronger case if they condemned all inappropriate material across the board, rather than just the kind men might indulge in, otherwise it just looks like a power grab as opposed to a principled moral stance.
I mean, for instance, there’s an article here in Cosmo encouraging women to give their partner a hand-job in the middle of a crowded restaurant:
http://www.cosmopolitan.co.uk/love-sex/tips/15-ways-to-get-him-hard-2#fbIndex2
Jesus! Did it not occur to the editors that some people might want to eat their sushi or whatever, without that sort of activity going on?! Makes Lucy’s scenario sound pretty innocent in comparison.
Well, it’s not like feminists don’t often complain about Cosmo and with good reason, but I don’t see any of them proposing the Ban This Sick Filth Now approach with that particular publication’s work.
Good article. It may be relevant to remind everyone that the photographer for Page 3 is female. She deliberately photographs the models not to appear to be terribly provocative.
I think some women might be surprised with quite how sophisticated the male response can be. Why do they all seem to assume men immediately perve “Cor, I’d love to shag that” at what is now a pretty tame photo of a pair of breasts? We are not all slaves to are darkest desires, you know.
I’ve bought the Sun in the past, mainly for Templegate’s horse racing tips and the footie, (the coverage of which sports are actually very good indeed). But I always avoided opening Page 3 on public transport. It embarrassed me to be seen looking at it in public.
[…] Ally Fogg Defends Murdoch’s Page 3 […]
.Actually I suppose perhaps another dimension to all this is how it ties in with the whole Gok Wan ‘be amazingly confident naked’ phenomenon.
Charlie Brooker once wrote quite a funny piece on this, in which he described this philosophy as the outlook that, no matter how many terrible things people had experienced during the course of their lives, they could easily get over these and put them aside, if only they could just summon up the courage to parade around with their clothes off (preferably with it being recorded in some form for the media). So maybe viewed from this perspective, the problem is less a gender one, than a culture in which everyone is reduced to their physical attributes, rather than being judged on more meaningful aspects to their lives.
To me this is all incredibly straight forward.
Sex is okay, sexual interest is okay, fun with sex is okay, sexism isn’t okay, sexist sex isn’t okay.
Race is okay, racial interest is okay, fun with race is okay, racism isn’t okay.
Singing and dancing is okay. Racist caricatures singing and dancing for white entertainment isn’t okay. The black and white minstrels aren’t okay. Men in music hall drag aren’t okay. Freak shows of disfigurement aren’t okay. Colonial anthropology isn’t okay.
Porn is okay. Sexist porn isn’t okay. Misogynist porn isn’t okay. Porn that incites hatred isn’t okay. Porn that incites crime isn’t okay.
Breasts are okay. Distended caricatures of breasts aren’t okay. Breasts displayed all the time in a way that saturates the cultural milleaux and affects other women isn’t okay. Showing other people’s breasts for commercial gain isn’t okay. Accompanying said breasts with the ironic implication that you are too stupid to have a political opinion is not okay.
Reason being: sexism, racism, and so on isn’t okay. Not okay if you consent to it. Not okay to encourage. Not okay to incite. Not okay to inflict on other people.
ohhh how wonderful it must be to be so sure of where the lines lie. I will make sure you never see my distended breasts. and berate my children for feeding from them. Clearly size 36 e is obscene and something should be done.
Showing my breasts for commercial gain, how dare I , it might offend your sensibilities, and them OMG you might have to confront your prejudice and really serious problems with the human form.
I suggest everyone just ask Suki what she thinks the acceptable way to be is, about everything, and then the world will be a pretty fascistic, but at least puritan place.
Oh and in case you hadn’t noticed, your comment is so full of bigotry and hatred snark is the only way I could cope.
I didn’t say distended breasts, I said distended caricatures of breasts. You’re never going to get as good at me at recognising the lines between what’s okay and what isn’t if you don’t pay proper attention to things.
I think when you make it that “straightforward” Suki, you end up boiling it down to “things I think are OK are OK and things I think are not OK are not OK.”
Which is fair enough, but I’m not sure where it takes us beyond a subjective moral judgement.
Yes, I’d hope we can all agree that sexism, racism and so on are not OK. It’s not always quite so straightforward what is and is not sexism, racism etc.
It also leaves begging the question of what we do when something, in your mind, my mind or anyone else’s mind, is deemed to be not OK.
When you or I turn round and say “I think that is sexist therefore it is not OK” and someone else says “I don’t think that is sexist therefore it is OK” – what then?
I’d also suggest things are more complicated than you suggest, because I think there are some other things that are not OK. I think exploiting the relative economic vulnerability of the working class to entrap them into toil for the capitalist system in which the surplus value of their labour is appropriated by the ruling class is not OK, but until we’ve smashed capitalism and replaced it with something nicer, I have to accept that people will do what they need to do to get by. To quote the blogger Stavvers, the problems I have with sex work are mostly the problems I have with work. .
I’d suggest that at that point we need to debate and discuss what sexism (or whatever) actually is, and on what grounds we actively take steps to prevent other people doing what they want to do.
Anyway, I think your comment boils down to saying “I think Page 3 is not OK.” Fair enough, I tend to agree, although perhaps for very slightly different reasons.
I think it is a bit reductive to pretend it is straightforward though.
“I think when you make it that “straightforward” Suki, you end up boiling it down to “things I think are OK are OK and things I think are not OK are not OK.”
Which is fair enough, but I’m not sure where it takes us beyond a subjective moral judgement.”
I don’t agree. Contravening laws on hate, propaganda, incitement etc are tested in the courts, not by me. But this can only happen if the law exists.
Currently a page 3 used to display racist, homophobic, disablist, religious physical and intellectual stereotypes for entertainment and commercial purposes would be tested by the courts, not so sexist ones. So page 3 with supposedly thick naked women is seen as a bit of fun, a similar page with supposedly thick naked black woman wouldn’t be. And what if it wasn’t breast shape that was the entertaining factor in question but some other physical characteristic such as lips or hair or nose shape? Stops looking like something that would go under the legal radar.
“Yes, I’d hope we can all agree that sexism, racism and so on are not OK. It’s not always quite so straightforward what is and is not sexism, racism etc.”
I think we’re much clearer on what constitutes racism. In fact we have become highly attuned to it. A cartoon with a racial stereotype, we know it’s racism. A cartoon with a female stereotype, ubiquitous and unnoticed.
When male tramps were paid to degrade themselves on film by fighting or drinking urine, there was widespread social revulsion and recognition of discrimination, exploitation, unethical entertainment. Pay disabled people to display their disabilities for exploitative entertainment, people are clear. Make the tramp or disabled person a woman, coax her out of her clothes first, now it’s got complicated?
1) Some other things that according to UK society aren’t okay despite the providers giving consent to the, and the consumers deriving a benefit from them:
Live/commercialised organ donation
Commercialised egg and sperm donation and surrogacy
Televised/paid for suicide
Televised/paid for executions
Slavery
Freak shows
Dwarf throwing competitions
Blackface music hall shows
Racist sitcoms
Homophobic sitcoms
Bum War YouTube videos where tramps are paid to fight or drink urine or otherwise demean themselves
Racist, anti-Semitic, Islamaphobic, anti-disability, homophobic negative propaganda encouraging stereotyping, distrust, fear, violence, persecution.
2) Some other things that according to UK society aren’t okay despite the consumer deriving a benefit from them, but not entirely because the provider did not consenting to them:
Animals in circuses
Animals in zoos
Child pornography
Displaying the dead bodies of enemy combatants
Displaying the dead bodies of colonised people in museums or circuses
Displaying the dead bodies of Chinese prisoners in body shock shows
Reason being society derives a disbenefit even if it cannot always be established that the direct victim does and because they are unethical.
3) Some things that UK society is undecided on the ethical position of:
Animated child porn
Drug taking
Black and white minstrel shows
Reason being because there is a disconnect between the object of potential harm and the performer.
4) Some things that should be in section 1 but aren’t:
Sexist sitcoms, and other forms of tv and radio entertainment (Chris Moyles)
Sexist or misogynist pornography (Page 3)
Sexist or misogynist YouTube videos where women are paid to parade, fight or drink ursine to demean themselves
Sexist or misogynist propaganda (slut shaming)
5) Some things that should be in section 3 but aren’t:
Sexist cartoons
Men dressing up as caricatures of women in pantomimes, on stag dos, etc.
Reason being that UK society is scitzophrenic about sexism and other forms of discrimination, mainly because sex is not included in the anti-hate legislation while race, disability, sexuality, age, religion are.
You make a good point that UK society has a number of rules that reflect its particular morality, and can not be defended only consent/benefit grounds. So far so good, all societies have those. Your rules still reflect your own morality though – UK society is perfectly happy with animals in zoos and circuses, for instance, with the exception of a few campaigners.
There are a couple of problems. First, restrictions on pornography, hate speech, misogynist propaganda, is political censorship. It is trying to enforce which views are acceptable and which are banned. There is no difference in principle whether you are insisting on respect for womankind, the working class, islam, or the aryan race. Again, fine, all societies have those rules. I do not want racism or antisemitism to have free rein either (even if the current hate speech rules are over the top for my taste). But it would be more honest to admit openly that you want respect for womankind to be enforced in public debate because you want your political position to be dominant and privileged, rather than pretending that those who think differently to you are objectively bad.
Another point is the distinction between public and private space. It makes sense to have rules for what can be shown in public, and what people will or will not have to put up with seeing. Hard pornography and naked-girl calendars are not acceptable for instance, and it might not be a disaster if page three was banished to top shelf mags, to protect peoples sensibilities from excessive public nudity. But if page three is really ‘Sexist or misogynist pornography’ (sic), is it enough to get it off the mass-circulation papers and boradcats TV? Or must it also be banned from more private settings to avoid exposing males to its corrupting influence?
The point is that we do draw legal lines on what is acceptable entertainment or political comment and what is not because it constitutes propaganda, hate speech, incitement to crime.
We’ve already done the moral exercise of deciding propaganda, hate speech and incitement are dangerous, damaging and socially unacceptable. We’ve already figured out how to figure out what falls into those categories: we use the law and the courts, not my personal tastes, not yours, not Ally Fogg’s.
What we do not do is apply that knowledge, that ethical decision, those legal differentiations to the type of propaganda, hate speech and incitement that affects women. Wile we do for every kind that affects men. Why? I’ve got my own cynical theories on that one.
My main cynical theory is that the primary delivery method of sexism against women is sex, and men have no motivation to censor sex.
The law, legal ethics, enforcement isn’t being brought to bear on sexist media. No leadership is being given on what constitutes sexist media. So the public are in a quagmire of indecision about sexism. So are we surprised that nobody knows where the lines fall? I’m not surprised, are you surprised?
They are much much clearer on racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, etc. because the law has made it clearer.
It really is as simple as that, in my view.
@Nigel
I am very familiar with the writings of the early church fathers, their ascetic philosophy, their denigration of the body, their association of it with the female, their hatred of women, their teaching that Eve brought original sin into the world and that this could only be broken by a silent, obedient virgin mother who all women had to aspire to emulate.
I’ve read of the early women’s religious groups that were purged as heretical, the eary female church leaders forced out of their positions, their writings burned, the killings that followed.
I blame them for Page 3.
Ah. Then Suki you’ll know they hated. Sex and venerated virginity for both sexes. Hence the centuries of debate as this pedestal for virginity does have an obvious flaw for the continuation of the religion. Of course this wasn’t so much of an issue for the very early church as they expected the end of the corrupt world within decades of Jesus’ death. Seem to have moved that goal post.
Those who think that most men salivate with an erect penis every time they look at page 3 tend to be those who also believe that the average man is nothing more than a lumpen mass of testosterone which is prone to rape and pillage at the drop of a hat.
The problem for women is that they have to somehow negotiate the tightrope between behaving like every man could be a potential rapist while not expecting him to be or treating him like he is, or ever letting on that you think he might be.
If a woman gets raped she is judged over whether she has been sufficiently cautious around men. If a woman lets on that she is being cautious around men then she is judged for being paranoid or a misadrist.
So long as it’s not possible to tell who is and who isn’t a lumpen mass of testosterone prone to rape and pillage, women have to, indeed are expected to, play safe and assume everyone might be.
Men cannot have it both ways, either they get their house in order or they put up with people’s guessing games.
Funny, that is exactly the line racists take when they try to defend thier racist reactions to the presence of black men.
And yet 1.1% of women are raped per year and 1.1% of men are raped per year, and guess what? Men don’t have their every-waking moment being told to fear rape. Even less that it’s “for their own good”.
And that’s true even if most people don’t think men can not-consent to heterosexual sex! Imagine. He doesn’t need to watch his drink, or check how he’s dressed, he would need to not-be-male. Try that.
So Suki essentially original sin. Of course the law is a blunt instrument. But it is under pinned by moral positions. Policing male and female sexual behaviour has long been a primary concern of Christian society. Hence the celibate priesthood for instance. Or the idea sex is sacred and special in the list of human behaviours. I really wish people would read early religious texts in the development of the Christian church. In them they will find the same debates and moral panics played out . The result was considerable policing of the sexual behaviour of men and women. Of course all the laws didn’t mean that the church was successful in creating the desired society of saints. But it does leave us with a series of moral panics about lascivious men and promiscuous women in a society that also regards sex as a healthy recreation! Not surprising the result is a confusion. Not that I have a clue on the solution but it simply isn’t true that male sexuality hasn’t been heavily policed,. It is and was on the basis it must be inherently sinful. Same for women too.
@Ginkgo
The difference being that if somebody is attacked by a black male, nobody runs them through the “what precautions did you take around him?”, “That was a bit silly trusting him like that”, “maybe you gave him the wrong idea” routine.
@Ginkgo
Actually I think your premise is false.
Racists as you call them don’t tend to stereotype all black males ubiquitously as potential attackers. They are discriminating. And this is because they don’t need to. Most risks, including criminal risks have a fairly reliable profile and we all use them to stay out of danger. Obviously some profiles are cruder than others and the better we understand something, the more discriminating we can be, until in well known groups of people we can predict the behaviour of individual members quite accurately.
Not so rapists, there is literally no way to recognise a potential attacker except the very crude heading of male. We know this because rapists can be rich or poor, married or single, ugly or handsome, scary or charming, heads of industry, champions of sport, or sweet teenage boys. Women have been attacked by men they know well and have placed great trust in, such as their husband.
Men want women to trust good men and avoid the rapists, and women would really like this ability, but they have no way of discriminating between the two groups.
So what should women do? They can use crude methods of discrimination ( he seems creepy, he’s reading the Sun next to a school girl). Or they can use a blanket approach of being optimistic and trusting or pessimistic and suspicious. Men get angry and hurt when women are suspicious of them. Women get blamed and judged and sometimes hurt if they are optimistic and trusting of men.
So how would you like women to avoid attack instead of being mistrustful? Is it via the kind of suspicious and avoidant action that seriously inconveniences women, but which men don’t notice or get bothered by?
I’ll say it again, half rapes yearly involve male victims. A tiny proportion of which are even reported to authorities.
Your delusion that rape is a tool of male oppression of women is your problem, not reality.
Scala
Well
firstly you’ll have to post some evidence to back up your claim that half the victims of rape are male.
Secondly, you’ll have to clarify if you mean they are being attacked by other men or by women.
Because unless it’s by women, it doesn’t alter my point at all.
The CDC report for 2011 is the one, 1.1% of women are victims of rape, and 1.1% of men are “made to penetrate” (not counted as rape, though it obviously is), by women, or raped (penetrated) by mostly men.
80% of perpetrators of rape on men are women, if we count made to penetrate. If we only count what they did as rape (meaning being penetrated) then 93% of perpetrators are male for male victims.
Men are 2.5-3 times at more risk of being murdered, in Canada (statistic Canada murder rate by sex for 2007 to 2011 by year). The overwhelming amount of murderers (at least those that get charged with it) might be male however. Which changes nothing at all with risk of walking around in the street.
Men are also more likely to be victims of muggings, simple assault, aggravated (with a weapon) assault, and are disproportionately likely to be a victim of violence from someone they don’t know at all (while most violence against women is from people known to her). As such, walking around in the street, going to a bar, etc, is way way more risky for a man. Yet no one is teaching them to carry mace or have self-defense classes, or have “take back the night” marches.
Also DV is pretty much 50/50, though women are injured a bit more often (about twice as often as men). A study said men use weapons 25% of the time, while women use weapons 86% of the time, making up for any real or imagined physical strength difference. The problem being that male victims of DV often can’t even report it (not believed, she’s not arrested, he can’t have the kids, no shelter for him, no protective order easy-to-get against her when she’s abusive) and that feminism have made it so much of “violence against women” that the societal perception is that male victims don’t exist.
A similar perception existed for trans people, people estimated them at 1/30000 for trans women and 1/100000 for trans men, while it’s more along 1/250 to 1/500 for both. Victims of DV don’t represent such a high % of yearly crimes in % of population vs victims, it’s something close to 1% maybe. So it’s easy to say that half of that 1% (the male victims) don’t exist. They’re a tiny fraction per year (and we don’t report crimes of 12+ years ago, especially given no physical evidence besides testimony).
And the big bad patriarchy votes VAWA, makes it fund only shelters for female victims, and turns a blind eye to the very existence of male victims. That’s favoring men for you.
@Schala
Taking your stats as accurate, how does this alter any of my points?
Ps. I suspect the figures for assaults on women would be higher if women didn’t take as much avoidant action as they do.
“Ps. I suspect the figures for assaults on women would be higher if women didn’t take as much avoidant action as they do.”
Possibly, though there is always the notion of “don’t hit women” inculcated in boys and men at a young age, so chances are physical assaults rate would be pretty low anyway, given most reported assaults have a male perpetrator (female perps would probably have no issue with hitting other women). It’s also why female-on-male DV has male victims not react (just take it) often. They’re likely to be seen as the aggressor if they do react, even without using disproportionate force, and no one cares or reacts when a woman hits a man in public. “He probably deserved it” and “You go girl!” are common responses.
As for sexual assault, most rapes are from people the person knows (except in prison). Taking precautions that avoid the “stranger from the bush” rapist is likely to be doing nothing at all to your overall risk of rape. Though I guess avoiding going out late at night in unlit places alone reduces your rate of mugging and being drunken-beaten for no reason. Checking your drinks is basic precaution everyone should take, not just women. You never know what intentions strangers can have, it’s a good idea to be generally cautious against all strangers when accepting drinks or being unable to check your drink.
Clothing precautions probably don’t do much. It might attract someone who would have ignored you otherwise, but it won’t make zir violent or rapist because of it. Only make zir notice you. Guys who don’t follow dress codes will get very negative attention, lest they’re part of a subculture or large group of friends who don’t care/mind their eccentrism (because not being extremely clothing-normative as a male, means you’re open season for violent beatings – I bet many a cross-dresser can testify to that). If you’re a man and it’s not Halloween or a costume party, your options are so limited that you have two settings on clothing: Formal/work and boring, and there’s overlap, because formal/work is ALSO boring. It HAS to be bland, or it’s too feminine, and a reason to “beat the gay” out of him, regardless of actual orientation. Only women are allowed to have more clothing taste.
“Racists as you call them don’t tend to stereotype all black males ubiquitously as potential attackers. They are discriminating. ”
Suki, you are pulling this one out of the air. You seem unfamiliar with the actual history of racism, in the form of Jim Crow for instance. Generalized fear of black men was foundational to that system and as it happens that fear took the form of anxiety over the safety of white women. The campaigns of lynchings based on fear of black men raping white women were the preferred form of terrorism used to maintain white dominance.
As it happens there is a historical record of what happens when rape hysteris gets entrenched in a culture..
@schala
Other avoidant action women take are things like not living in ground floor flats, not leaving their window open, installing security devices, not driving long distances alone, particularly if it will involve nighttime driving, being a member of car breakdown services, not getting out of their car and standing on the grass verge if they do breakdown, not walking in remote places, not buying a dog if they are single, not doing overtime if parking isn’t secure, not using public transport at certain times in retain places, sitting in certain train and tube carriages, not using public toilets in big institutional buildings or dodgy locations when they are deserted or using the one closest to the exit, not meeting strangers eyes, not being too friendly, not being too unfriendly, not publishing personal information online, being x-directory, self-censoring the types of opinions they express, vetting their dates, traveling in groups, watching men closely for signs of risky behaviour, endlessly rehearsing the risks in their minds, taking self-defence classes, carrying illegal self-defence sprays or weapons, texting their friends to let them know they are home safely, scanning places for CCTV, not traveling abroad to certain places, particularly alone, arranging deliveries or workmen at certain times of day, not letting them know you live alone.
We’re putting in alot of work on our side, it’s expected that we will do so or we risk being called irresponsible or silly if we let our guard down and something happens. So it seems a bit churlish when men complain they feel mistrusted. What work are they putting in to make themselves trustworthy?
“Suki, you are pulling this one out of the air.”
I don’t think I am. I think I’m basing it on my impression of the type or no lack males people fear: young, inner city, dressed in a certain way, hanging out in groups, looking hostile. They don’t fear professional, middle-class black men, or Rastafarians, or family men or older men or polite teenagers. It may not be perfect, i don’t know how reliale it is, but it’s how people gauge risk based on the risk profiles they build up via the media.
“You seem unfamiliar with the actual history of racism, in the form of Jim Crow for instance. Generalized fear of black men was foundational to that system and as it happens that fear took the form of anxiety over the safety of white women. The campaigns of lynchings based on fear of black men raping white women were the preferred form of terrorism used to maintain white dominance.”
Of course, but this is the UK in 2013, not the US in the 19th and mod 20th century. I don’t think there is an automatic correlation.
“As it happens there is a historical record of what happens when rape hysteris gets entrenched in a culture.”
Sure, hysteria isn’t a good thing. But what do you suggest we do about that? I gt the impression that you’re expecting women to be less fearful, but I don’t see you giving them any reason to be or any tools to be. What possible motive would a woman in today’s Britain have for trusting men more than she currently does? She will be crucified by the public and the media if she gets it wrong and gets attacked. Not many months ago men were applauding a convicted rapist in a football stadium and calling his victim all kinds of names and publishing her address on social media because she made the mistake of trusting him.
Hi Suki, I really loved your list of female avoidance techniques… so much in fact, that – if you don’t mind – I like to post it on our blog at theselfishgender.com. Would you prefer with or without reference to you?
Unless your precautions make sense (not buying a dog, seriously??), it’s all paranoia. And you can NEVER please everyone, so there will always be people who will victim-blame you WHATEVER YOU DID. Wether you’re male, or female.
Take precautions that actually make sense, forget the nonsensical stuff. And live your life with less fear that way.
And I’m saying that as someone who has a pretty low threshold for social anxiety (outside alone is enough already). I’ll look like a deer in headlights sometimes, just because I see someone. I’ll walk fast possibly, and might look as if I have avoidant behavior, but it’s typically all unfounded fear. And at least I can recognize it in me.
Can you recognize it in most women?
Oh and, as a trans woman, my risks of assault, rape, murder, mugging, etc are dozens of times higher than non-trans people. I still don’t think my fear is warranted.
That level of fear was instilled in me from beatings in elementary and high school, form which I was never shielded, told I provoked, and basically left to develop my own defense mechanism since no one cared. And also most social situations being very-meh (neither positive or negative) or disastrous (all negative), with no positive reinforcement in sight.
Suki,
“Sure, hysteria isn’t a good thing. But what do you suggest we do about that? I gt the impression that you’re expecting women to be less fearful, but I don’t see you giving them any reason to be or any tools to be. ”
Ths goes right to the point. This is the real issue. I think two things have to happen:
First, girls have to be raised the same way boys are, to expect everyione else to expect them to take responsibility for their own safety, just the same as boys are. This means interrogating traditional femininity and the way it is constructed to rest in part on victimhood and frailty. This was a big part of the project of 2nd wave feminism. It will be touchy because this goes way beyond gender roles, but it’s just the price of real empowerment.
The second and equally importnat part of this is giving girls and therefore eventually women the actual tools they need, once they have their attitudes towards their own safety qured away. The first thing is situatinla awareness and threat analysis – who is an actual threat, and if a threat, what are their strengths and weaknesses, and how can they be dealt with. The second is self-defense skills, starting with a realistic sense of thier physical limitations, and moving on to appropriate skills.
On which black men get tagged as threats, Your point is valid with reservations – even well-dressed middel-aged balck men can come in for special attention: http://foreigndispatches.typepad.com/dispatches/2011/08/on-the-tottenham-riots.html#more
But I didn’t mean to derail on race, since all the scariest people in Britain are white and always have been.
Anyway, the issue of realistically and accurately identifying risk on the street and responding effectually is not a purely femlae problem, and actually women have quite a lot to learn form men in this area.
@schala
“Unless the precautions make sense it’s all paranoia”
No, it’s guess work. How should I know if the precautions make sense? There’s no Guild of Rapists or Rapists’ Charter. I have to do my best based on the information I have (media, people I speak to).
So i just avoid situations where I am a) vulnerable to attack and b) vulnerable to being disbelieved or villified if I am attacked. The dog thing makes perfect sense, you come home after dark, you have to take that dog for a walk in the park or in my case, in the woods, often via a repetitive route. No thanks. I’d like a dog, but I’ve seen too many films and tv programmes and news reports (mostly produced by men) that glorify in reminding me that it’s taking your life in your hands.
And I’m far from the only one; spend a bit of time examining the behaviour of women you know and you will find these types of behaviours are pretty generic. Women might be reluctant to admit them, especially to men as they also fear being labelled hysterical and paranoid or with an inflated sense of their own desirability as a victim. But dig a little deeper, you’ll find a great majority of us are in a perpetual state of paranoia, or as I prefer to see it a perpetual state of heightened alert to predators with only avoidance and people-pleasing skills to fend them off.
“So i just avoid situations where I am a) vulnerable to attack and b) vulnerable to being disbelieved or villified if I am attacked.”
You take precautions to avoid the worse possibilities of A (if you avoid all of them, better stay in a nuclear bunker), as Ginkgo said above. Reasonable situational awareness.
And, you don’t care about B. Every situation that possibly exists, will have some people blame you for stuff that happens to them. It’s a defense mechanism of the “this can’t happen to me” variety.
Most people I know are used to being blamed for being poor, ugly, unsuccessful in dating, fat, too non-neurotypical, too nice, too transsexual, too weird, too eccentric, too geeky/nerdy, too you-name-it, with the resultant that most of them eventually take a “screw you, I’m me” attitude, or fall into a very very deep depression. The middle attitude of begging-to-have-permission-to-live is untenable (see Leonard and most geeks in Big Bang Theory, even if some is self-parody, their self-esteem is shit – Sheldon is a counter-example, his huge ego makes him immune to this).
You would do well to take less caution about “what will they think/say”, as it’s generally unhealthy and especially: unattainable and unsolvable. You can’t please them all. Only those you care about. Hopefully your loved ones wouldn’t blame you for bad stuff happening to you. At worst they might warn you if they see danger ahead (ie think your life partner is violent by his observed demeanor, or has been too-aggressive verbally with them).
“The dog thing makes perfect sense, you come home after dark, you have to take that dog for a walk in the park or in my case, in the woods, often via a repetitive route. No thanks. I’d like a dog, but I’ve seen too many films and tv programmes and news reports (mostly produced by men) that glorify in reminding me that it’s taking your life in your hands. ”
Don’t get a dog without having a lawn (yours or shared) to leave it walk/run on. Open the door, leave the dog be on the lawn, it’ll do its business, and then ask to come back in, or simply come back in if you let the door open. You only go for walks on your terms, possibly on weekends, during daylight, because you want to. Doing their business can easily be done 10 feet away from your front door (though don’t forget to pick it up).
“And I’m far from the only one; spend a bit of time examining the behaviour of women you know and you will find these types of behaviours are pretty generic.”
They sure seem rather extreme. I personally don’t take even a quarter of the precautions you take, and I’m a woman. I wasn’t raised to fear everything though. I wasn’t exactly raised to be masculine (pretty neutral toys, and no division by sex of stuff), but I was raised with male expectations (take care of yourself, man up, it’s your own damn fault). I transitioned at 24, so it’s not like I have an entire lifetime of being army-drilled to not-fear stuff. I’ve just not been drilled to do-fear stuff.
“But dig a little deeper, you’ll find a great majority of us are in a perpetual state of paranoia, or as I prefer to see it a perpetual state of heightened alert to predators with only avoidance and people-pleasing skills to fend them off.”
You just said that women have a generalized social anxiety disorder…that happens to ignore female predators (because it seems you and many others will profile for maleness, not for predation itself).
That’s the jackpot for female pedophiles, thieves and murderers. No one will ever suspect them. Not the chivalry-induced white knight men, not the women who have social anxiety. We’re left with people who are considered fringe of society and not given a voice to catch or be wary of the female predators. That’s gonna happen tomorrow I’m sure.
The study of pedophilia didn’t even include women at all until pretty recently. It was considered a uniquely male phenomenon. Induced by penis-maleness-testosterone or something (why we want to castrate them). And they’ll still avoid the radar for decades to come if what you say is true.
Schala, I just want to comment on the dog issue. Most dogs need a decent walk every day – they have lots of energy and if they don’t exercise it’s not good for them. Mine needs at least 40 minutes a day – that’s absolute minimum. If you get a very small dog then you don’t have quite that situation, but these things need to be considered carefully (plus you need to consider how long you need to leave them for).
I don’t walk my dog in the dark, twilight is the darkest – partly because he’s dark brown so he’s hard to see and I like to let him off the lead to run around, which I can’t do if I can’t see him.
Interestingly I’ve always been under the impression that you’re safer if you’ve got a dog with you (maybe because I’m thinking of fairly large dogs) because dogs are unpredictable and potential attackers probably don’t want to take the risk. But this is coming from someone who takes a relaxed approach to street safety (it’s probably helps that I wear jeans and hoodies all the time) – my only real effort is I try to avoid eye contact, but that’s because I used to do it all the time unintentionally and I thought it might be a bit odd for other people.
Oh, isn’t THIS interesting? *read utterly nauseating* I suppose this bears out the idea that page three itself is not the problem, more the general culture of dehumanisation of women that the Sun fosters altogether. A half-page picture of the alleged murder victim in her underwear, and not one mention of her name.
So angry forgot to post a link: http://www.channel24.co.za/News/Local/UK-tabloid-leads-with-gratuitous-Reeva-pic-20130215
Or as Marina Hyde says of the Sun in today’s Guardian:
I wonder if that same circulation department were rubbing their hands, or their trousers, or whatever it is they rub, when they saw that the paper would be splashing on Friday with a huge picture of Reeva Steenkamp pulling down the zip of a bikini top, even as her corpse was lying in a Pretoria morgue awaiting a postmortem. The killing has yet to be described as a tragedy for women, probably because in the continual clustertragedy that constitutes female representation in the media, Steenkamp is just another casualty, who obligingly happened to be hot.That the story leading the news for the entire day of the One Billion Rising global action opposing violence against women concerned a woman being allegedly murdered by her partner was unfortunate. That the death was covered in the way it has been begins to look like something else. But nothing new, obviously.
[…] Fogg (Heteronormative Patriarchy for Men) — What do men see when they see Page 3? Page 3 of the UK Sun tabloid classically features an attractive, topless […]
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[…] Where do we start with this? The Freudian would say the most interesting thing is her sexual response to her mother breastfeeding, combined with her envy of the sibling who had displaced her. This is of course a normal reaction, although uncovering why surprise mingled with disgust at seeing a topless woman in a newspaper with her father is also worth a few weeks on the couch. Was this the moment she realised she would never have Daddy the way Mummy did? Did she project her desire onto the unknown man? (What the hell is a highly sexualized image anyway and how should she see it and the man looking at it? Was he holding the newspaper outwards? In which case he was reading page 7 not page 3. There is a good take down here of what men looking at page 3 are probably thinking, but I digress) […]
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