Laurie Penny | ukwatch.net

Tories in queer hypocrisy shocker!

Ellie Keen — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 20:29:54 +0000

So now the Tories are courting the pink vote. Big surprise. But the notion, promoted even by the BBC, that gays might have a ‘duty’ to vote Conservative is baffling.

They’ve wheeled out Margot James, PPC for Stourbridge and noted deep-blue dyke, to tell us all why we need to vote Tory. This is the same Margot James who did not stand as a gay candidate at the last election, and who has been heard saying that she hoped her partner’s name, Jay, would be mistaken for that of a man by reporters. Ms James’ parroting of the party-line at the Stonewall event yesterday goes something like this:

“Gay people are net contributors to public services through their taxes, because very few of them have children.

“I think gay people have got more angst on this issue than anybody else because gay people are paying in, through their taxes and actually using far less of the NHS because they tend not to have families, less of the education system for the same reason and all the more reason to be angry with this government for the waste of their taxes.”

Translation: “Everyone knows you faggots hate kids! So vote for us – we hate kids, too!’

The suggestion that homosexuals do not have ‘families’ is both degrading and manifestly false. I happen to live in a massive multi-sexual household of six. None of us are related by blood, but we consider ourselves family. All of us, furthermore, have mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters and all of us feel that – despite our sexuality – we are just as invested in other humans as anybody else. Me and my big queer family are appalled by this throwaway rhetoric, at a Stonewall event, no less.

The logic of the tory tax argument also falls down when the ageing society is brought into play. Sure, homosexuals may, on average, raise fewer sproglets than their het friends, but this makes it all the more important for us that we live in a society that invests properly in healthcare, elderly care and the pensions system. Without the dubious surity of grown-up kids to wipe our octogenarian posteriors, we are going to need a government that invests in our care – a government that values the contribution we make as members of society enough to make public spending a priority.

The main tory line, however, remains that you and I should vote Conservative because, well, there are quite a lot of gay conservatives. Newsflash: there have always been gay tories; there have been gay tories before the word was even invented. What there have never been are tories promoting a gay agenda. In recent years, tory MPs have, for the most part, had an appalling voting record on queer issues in parliament – vital issues like civil partnerships and the age of consent. The tories are quite happy for us to carry on shuffling in the dark. If they’re gay, too, they certainly haven’t traditionally wanted the world to know about it. The tory closet door remains firmly shut. And no wonder, this being the party that introduced and tried desperately to save Section 28 of the Local Government Act, 1988.

Just a reminder: the amendment stated that a local authority “shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality” or “promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship”. Ian Duncan Smith and a great deal of the tory party faithful spent 2003 trying to save this disgustingly homophobic piece of legislation. Nobody has apologised for that, and the silence of top conservatives over their shocking record at the Stonewall event stunk of hypocrisy.

I am not suggesting that just because you like a bit of same-sex action you absolutely must be a political radical. Not at all. Not one jot. In fact, I’m grudgingly of the opinion that one thing the 1990s were good for was freeing gay men and women of the grinding obligation not to also be bigoted fuckwits if they so chose. But bigotry and a forward-thinking queer agenda have never gone hand in hand, and if one is queer – not just gay, which is a statement of fact, but politically queer – you do have a duty to vote for anyone else apart from the tory party and far right.

Queer politics involve more than a private penchant for cock and a public rhetoric of tax breaks for straight, married couples. Queer politics are politics which make it easier for the millions of men and women who choose to live and love outside of the heteronormative box to do so without cultural, practical or financial discrimination. Queer politics are inherently radical, and not everyone working towards them is gay, and not everyone gay has queer politics. Let’s not mistake gay – which is what the Conservative party has always secretly been – for queer, which it never will be.

Stripping the Tories

Ellie Keen — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 23:24:23 +0000

Luckily enough for the Tory party, quite a few international markets went boom on the day that this story broke. Strip club vouchers offering discounts for Tory delegates, in with the brochure for the upcoming Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham.

Let’s not wallow around in anyone’s gloopy moral residue. Sex work isn’t nice work, but it isn’t immoral, and a visit to a strip club is simply a statement that you are happy to cash in on the privileges of your wealth and gender in the most sickly self-indulgent of ways, and that you are comfortable enough in that privilege that you don’t mind buying other people’s bodies for your personal sexual gratification in a room full of your colleagues. Hey, there’s a big market for that sort of thing, and markets, as we’ve all been reminded this week, are amoral, not necessarily immoral. Markets merely allow the flow of wealth and power to seep a little more smoothly towards the top. And hey, since it’s the annual Tory piss-up and we’re all very pleased with ourselves, why not flaunt that philosophy, especially if, in the words of Ian Taylor of Marketing Birmingham, the vouchers were ‘produced to help maximise the economic impact for local businesses’.

What angers me about this sordid little story isn’t the fact that Tory MPs might enjoy visiting strip clubs. Statistics suggest that well-paid, powerful white men will number most patrons of these newly-licensed ‘entertainment establishments‘ (A legal loophole means that since the introduction of the Licensing Act 2003 lap dancing clubs currently only require a Premises Licence for the sale of alcohol to operate, despite being part of the commercial sex industry. The number of lap dancing clubs across the UK is estimated to have doubled since 2004). There is always, always going to be a market for the more culturally and fiscally powerful to buy sex. What adds insult to time-worn injury, however, is the fact that it’s a buyer’s market. This was not an advertisement, but a voucher: a voucher offering conservative delegates a 66% reduction in entry price to Birmingham’s Rocket Club.

Now, these are bloody hard-working girls. The women who staff strip-clubs and brothels don’t do it for kicks, whatever the makers of Secret Diary of A Call Girl may say. They do it for the money, and they earn every penny of that money by laying the most intimate parts of their personhood on the line and risking their physical and mental health every day within a profession that earns them ostracization from friends and family. These women deserve better than to be offered up as discounted goods. These women deserve to be treated with respect.

In the vast majority of cases, women don’t become sex workers – prostitutes, lap-dancers, streetwalkers, strippers or porn stars – for the kicks. No, they do it for the money. They do it because there is simply no other way to earn that scale of living wage as a woman under 30 in the current UK job-market. In the Guardian today, most commenters seemed to miss the point of a heart-rending article by a prostitute and single mother. Her point was that she became a prostitute because her former job as an office PA was not paying her enough to support herself and her two children and was, at the same time, taking up so much time and energy that she barely got to see them. Her decision to go into full-time sex work was, as it is for many women in her situation, entirely an economic one.

We need to start respecting women’s work, whether or not they have made the difficult decision to enter the gloomy world of sex-work. If Tory MPs such as Anne Widdecombe really feel that the inclusion of the voucher in the brochure represents the party ‘throwing every value out of the window,’ if they don’t want to face the escalating realities of sex work for women of every class and background in the economic real world of contemporary Britain, then maybe they should start to analyse why women make these choices.

Eighty three per-cent of sex workers, according to recent studies by Object and Fawcett, want to leave the profession; but thousands of women every year make that career choice, and they make it because the country in which we live is currently fostering a gruelling long-hours culture in which women make up the bulk of lower-paid, exploited workers. Women are still paid 17% less than men in full time work and 33% less in part-time work, and when they get home they are still expected to perform the bulk of domestic chores, especially if they are single parents, as many sex workers are.

But the Tory delegates who have been so warmly invited to enjoy the bodies of the low-paid women of Birmingham at a discount price do not think this is a priority. In fact, a key part of current Tory policy proposes an end to equal pay audits, insisting that ‘only those firms which lose sex discrimination cases will be subject’ to them. Until the Tories get serious about offering low-paid workers decent living wages, then any paltry statement blaming the City of Birmingham for putting entirely appropriate adverts in the back of their brochures will be crass hypocrisy. Until that day, they may as well schedule complementary sessions with hookers into the official programme and stuff a few fivers into Lady Thatcher’s pearly g-string whilst they’re at it. Any less is pure hypocrisy.

Size Matters

Ellie Keen — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 22:08:17 +0000

There have recently been some fantastic investigative features in the print and electric press on the touchy subject of female surgical circumcision, also called cosmetic labiaplasty. One of the best, curiously enough, appeared in this month’s DIVA. This is a topic that needs airing and re-airing, but I’m going to take this space to tentatively suggest that there is also room in the feminist movement for a discussion of that curiously taboo subject: male genital mutilation.

In a culture of commodified testosterone, growing numbers of boys and men, some as young as three or four, some as old as eighty, are turning to genital mutilation as a form of self-harm. This in itself is not a new phenomenon, but as the culture of shame, anger and idolisation around the male sexual organ continues to increase, the phenomenon of boys and men damaging their own genitals, sometimes with extreme violence, is gathering pace. There are myriad individual reasons for this phenomenon, many of which are exacerbated by mental illnesses such as depression and paranoid schizophrenia, but the baseline reasons are fairly simple to grasp: a lot of boys have no frame of reference for what their penis should look like. Men are taught to see the appendage as a source of unimaginable sexual shame and embarrassment, or as a symbol of a sick, overzealous , hypermasculised culture in which they did not ask to be included, or, more frequently, both.

It’s not only the mentally ill who mutilate their genitals in private: you can pay a surgeon to inflict far more radical damage, a snip (literally) at £3-12,000. I’m talking, of course, about the booming industry of surgical penis ‘enlargement’, the nearest male equivalent to labiaplasty. We’ve all had versions of those relentless spam emails, offering in poor English to furnish us with a magnificent schlong for the price of a university education. Well, they keep coming because some people keep clicking – millions of anxious men and boys, in fact, all over the world, every day.

Yes, it’s fucking political. Male sexual neurosis is massively damaging, to feminism, to society, and to men themselves. This is not male apologism, or backsliding, it’s one feminist’s request for more discussion of a damaging socio-sexual taboo, in the context of a blog post in which I get to shout ‘COCK!’ a lot.

There, I’m glad I got that out of my system.

Gruesome butchery as labiaplasty undoubtedly is, the butchery involved boils down to a fairly straightforward amputation. Not so with penis ‘extension‘: I’ll spare you details of just what can go wrong, because Penny Red is a welcoming family blog, but suffice it to say: lots. And often. If you enjoy Bizarre magazine, you may click here now.

Thanks to the stalwart work of feminist writers and bloggers, there are now a lot of good, informative sites out there setting the record straight on what real female genitals look like. Sites that reassure women of all ages that they, too, are far less abnormal than they might have feared. Sisters working tirelessly and for free to undo the visceral harm done by the iconography of pornography and the language of fiction, erotica and women’s magazines in persuading girls that their vulvae should present as neat, hairless, odourless, tight pink slits with the sole purpose of funnelling equally tight, odourless, virginal vaginas, where all sexual sensation occurs. This is an ugly and damaging lie.

So where is the equivalent iconoclasm working to tear down the damaging fictions that young men internalise about their gender and physical sex?

The rhetoric of dickhood is entirely misleading, with emphasis on stiffness, straightness, rigidity, awesomeness, bestiality and hard, raging, pole-like qualities. The myriad of slang terms for the appendage range from the sublime – schlong, manhood, prick, dick – to the ridiculous – one-eyed trouser snake, luncheon meat truncheon! In fact, as most people are secretly aware, even the most impressive penis is no fearsome beast. They are extremely fragile things, normally soft, squishable and defenceless, generally flaccid, delicate , painful when struck, sensitive to touch and temperature. Freud was wrong. It’s not women who ‘envy’ the fiction of the perpetually hard, straining, bestial cartoon-penis – it’s other men,. That envy can largely be blamed on the shocking lie culturally perpetrated to convince young boys that their genitals are supposed to symbolise their masculinity and accordingly be other than the sweet, small, defenceless things they are.

If you’re laughing, stop. Now. I don’t believe it’s possible to call oneself a progressive feminist whilst taking the piss out of the sexual organs of just under one half of the human race. When it comes down to it, everyone’s genitals are ridiculous: messy, demanding, confusing and difficult to manage, with no instruction booklet and contents that generally differ wildly from the serving suggestion on the box. This does not mean that they are abnormal, inadequate or worthy of the childlike awe, tentative mockery, anger and aggrandisement that by turns characterise the treatment of the human prick in contemporary culture.

It is not surprising, then, that so many men and boys turn to surgery to change what they see as defective or abnormal, or to self-harm when they see a part of themselves as shameful and socially loaded in ways they reject. We just do not know how many men go through these experiences, how many operations are botched or how many wounds inflicted in private, because the subject matter is so sensitive that there simply isn’t enough data, and no comprehensive study has yet been done. All that we know is that it’s happening, and that it’s happening more and more.

The cultural markers of femininity are worn like a cloak and meticulously judged – from breasts to width of the waist and hips to degree of ‘curviness’ to hairstyle to set of the face and features. For men, only one specific part of the body is sexualised, and it’s kept under wraps, endlessly mythologised and certainly not featured in any fashion spreads. Feminists might argue that because women’s whole bodies are inevitably sexualised, men have it easier. Those feminists are right: men do have it easier. But that doesn’t mean that men don’t get a raw deal too – where little girls grow up seeing examples of perfect sexual bodies plastered everywhere they look, little boys experience the opposite – the cock is spoken of in hushed tones and never revealed, fictionalised, aggrandised, reduced to a few furtive glances in locker-rooms and arcane priapic symbols scrawled on playground walls and toilet cubicles.

In a perfect world, school PHSE lessons would include mandatory classes on sex and gender, in which children would be shown lots of photographs – not crude and misleading technicolour ink-drawings – of what real genitals look like. During these ideal lessons there would be open discussion of gender roles, physical sex, sexuality, feminism and gender egalitarianism. It won’t happen on these prudish little islands any day soon, not here where so recently we had laws banning the discussion of homosexuality in schools, but it’s nice to dream. Some girls dream of ponies. Today I’m dreaming of full-frontal PHSE photography with explanatory notes. It’s a vision thing.

The movement to reclaim the female body as a self-defined space is still a vitally important one, and it is perhaps just as vital to complement that discussion by extending its rhetoric to the male form. Talking about the realities of the female body in its many forms is a starting point for massive amounts of crucial feminist discussion of physical femaleness, of personal femininity, and of the difference and interaction between the two and the socio-political realities they produce. Talking about the male body in a similar way, and specifically about the cock – unlike for women, the only explicitly sexualised part of a man’s body – might just promote similar much-needed debate about physical maleness, personal masculinity and the difference between the two. Or at very least, it might make a few more people hesitate before doing inadvisable violence to the most sensitive parts of their body and paying for the privilege

Welfare Reform: what's the deal now?

Ellie Keen — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Ooh, James Purnell. Those kindly eyes, that roguish smile, that cheeky little pro-war voting record. He can call me any time, but meanwhile, guys and gals, let’s satisfy our post-adolescent political lust by calling the Secretary on welfare reform.

The national drive towards reform of the benefits system has been gathering momentum over the past 18 months, with the pace stepping up from January when the Conservative party released ‘Work for Welfare’, a short proposal for some pretty draconian reforms to the current welfare state where all ‘able bodied’ men and women would be expected to work (the fact that one in four claimants of incapacity benefit are severely mentally ill clearly does not register with tory stiff-upper-lippers). Hot on the heels of this report came Purnell’s green paper, the rather more progressively titled ‘No One Written Off: Reforming Welfare to Reward Responsibility.’ Cue a tiresome little inter-party squabble with a lot of bitchy back-handing to the BBC over just whose idea it was to bring the British welfare system into the 21st century.

On first reading, both reports advocate a greater emphasis on individuals taking responsibility for and ‘earning’ their own benefits; both want to encourage more people into work and provide better checks to do so; both want a clearer distinction between the genuinely needy and those relatively able to work, those whom a medieval government might have called ‘sturdy beggars’. The net effect of the reforms is that in October 2008 a new Employment and Support Allowance will be introduced for new claimants of Incapacity Benefit and other benefits before being rolled out to all recipients.

There, the similarity between the proposals ends. It must be made absolutely clear that Purnell’s green paper treads an extremely fine line between positive reforms that empower people to work and victimisation and further isolation of already poor and vulnerable sections of society. For now, in the months pre-instigation, the proposals come through relatively successfully, with welcome additions such as a long-overdue simplification of the benefits claiming system, making it easier for genuinely needy claimants to access vital support. Until you’ve sat up with a severely physically and emotionally disable friend and watched them crying in frustration as they try to fill out the forms, you may not understand quite how vital this particular change is. The old system was designed to be complex in order to discourage fraudsters from bothering; the new system will build in more proactive checks. And about bloody time too.

The tory proposals, on the other hand, are replete with the rhetoric of disdain for the poor and needy. In the conservative worldview, people need to be stopped at all costs from ‘playing the system’; the government has a ‘moral right’ to ‘protect families’, the practical upshot of which is tax benefits for married couples, as if a silver ring ever solved anything. Quite apart from the fact that Labour’s report is massively longer and more in-depth, quite apart from the fact that it answers the conservative challenge with the diligence of a progressive government purposefully handling the difficulties of practical power, we cannot – simply cannot – have tory hardliners like Chris Grayling in charge of this delicate transitional period in the benefits system.

This welfare reform package is one that can only be successfully implemented by a socially aware, self-policing socialist party of the type that, at its best, Labour tries to be. Conservatives such as Grayling have claimed that Purnell’s proposals are a ‘straight lift’ from tory plans; they are not. If anything, the latest proposals represent a visionary re-working of a policy which, under the Tories, would further criminalise the working classes and drive hundreds of thousands into poverty, debt, addiction and despair.

Because the tories have far less idea even than the incumbent government of what real poverty really means. You can’t say ‘credit crunch’ with out baring your teeth into a snarl, and it’s going for the throat of benefit recipients trying to live on £40 per week. MPs demonstrating ‘belt-tightening’ by not demanding increases on their sixty grand salaries live in an entirely different world from people on JSA and Incapacity Benefit. The welfare state was never designed, as the tories claim, to allow ‘a young man to grow up’ knowing that ‘the state will support him’ whatever choices he makes: if you live on benefits, you are poor. Very poor, and you’ll stay poor unless your circumstances change. A life lived on benefits is a life on the breadline, a life replete with stress and starved of reward and acheivement, a life in many respects half-lived. The vast majority of people on state benefits are keen to return to work – the problem, is that many face tremendous obstacles in obtaining and retaining employment.

The conservatives’ mantra of small government, of decreasing state support in every arena in favour of ‘the family,’ will be massively detrimental to the real good that has been done in moving millions of people off benefits and over the poverty line in the past decade. David Cameron believes that:

‘The primary institution in our lives is the family. It looks after the sick, cares for children and the elderly, supports working people and the unemployed’ –

Woah there. Reading between the lines, doesn’t that mean that families should be doing the work of the state, just like they did in the pre-industrial era? Well, presumably they’re planning to reward domestic work financially, then, aren’t they, and take massive social steps to encourage social cohesiveness within all family structures, and provide equal benefits for civilly-partnered homosexual couples and married straight couples alike? No? Or, just for instance here, could it be another strategy to shove vital care structures such as ‘caring for children and the elderly, supporting working people and the unemployed’ out into the streets in order to save money? We’ve heard this one before. It was called ‘Care in the Community.’

Oh, yes. And tucked away in the pages of ‘Work for Welfare’ are some really juicy howlers, such as:

‘Equal pay audits will apply only to those firms which lose pay discrimination cases’.

Which is a logical and VITAL part of making the welfare state work for everyone, clearly. Only a progressive socialist government has the tenacity and social responsibility to make welfare reform work: we must work now to avoid handing a fledgling system based on ‘rights and responsibilities’ over to the tories, who will never understand in our lifetimes what it really means to be poor, sick and desperate.

Lesbian Mums and the End of Patriarchy

Ellie Keen — Sun, 25 May 2008 08:52:18 +0000

Medical technology is an awesome thing. It can save lives, cure terrible diseases, rebuild bodies. It can prolong and improve the lives of the chronically ill and disabled beyond the wildest dreams of sufferers even fifty years ago. It can reattach limbs, restore sight, cure depression, return the manic to health and sanity. But can it be used to give women control over whether and when they have children? Only if male doctors and MPs say so.

Whoever your parents are, they’re going to fuck you up to some extent. I make no apologies for assuming that gay women and single women are just as likely to make good parents as anyone else, if not more so, as children conceived via the arduous process of IVF are slightly more likely to be wanted and treasured infants. For the purposes of this post we shall assume that one’s sexual orientation has no bearing on one’s likelihood of raising an unfucked-up child, nor on one’s right to attempt to do so. With that one out the way, let’s tuck in to a tasty breakfast of radical feminism with a gin chaser.

Throughout the wholesale technological reworking of the cultural landscape in the 20th and 21st centuries, laws remained in place to prevent new medical technologies and increased understanding liberating women’s reproductive choices. Even now, a woman must gain the permission of two doctors and undergo stringent ‘checks’ before she can access safe medical abortion. Until recently, women seeking IVF needed to declare a father and use a named man’s sperm despite the existence of plausible alternatives. But this week, in an impressive feat of anti-Luddism, MPs voted to allow single female parents and lesbian couples the right to reproductive self-determination: the right to have children, if they choose, without mandatory male interference.

‘Fathers are no longer needed!’ screamed the headlines as the Human Embryology and Fertilisation Bill passed through the commons on Tuesday. Well, we could have told you that. Millions of us grew up without fathers at home, without fathers at all. Millions more of us have loving and productive relationships with our fathers, but it is categorically not the case that any father at all is better than no father. The work of pregnancy, labour and the majority of childrearing still falls upon women, and it is inhumane to insist that that work be anything other than a sphere of self-determination. Men do not go through the physical trauma of conception, pregnancy and labour; men can have no right, as such, to insist upon any control over the process. It might be hard for individual men to swallow, but until medical technology enables them to conceive, incubate and bear children themselves, fatherhood will remain a privilege to be earned, rather than a right to be insisted on.

Reproductive rights campaigning goes far deeper than individual instances of choice. It’s a powerful cultural fascination, an issue that is woven into the very fabric of the stories that make us modern. From the rape of the Sabine women to Europa, ancient myth and precedent is obsessed by violent male control of feminine reproductive potential. From Brave New World to 1984 to the Culture, fables and fictions of the future are replete with paranoid speculation over the reorganisation of reproductive control.

The power to continue – or not to continue – the human race is quite simply the biggest social loaded gun on the planet. Since the dawn of patriarchy, male control over reproductive rights has been essential to the furtherance of patriarchal power, just as the ancient matriarchies ended when men’s involvement in human reproduction was realised.

This is why the rights of women to have children without ‘declaring the father’, to terminate pregnancy and to raise children alone, are such emotive and important legal sticking points. Women’s right to decide whether and when and how they have children is the ultimate threat to the rule of men, the ultimate insult to the divine supremacy of the father, and this week’s Commons vote is a milestone in the erosion of political patriarchy whose significance we will be debating for years to come.

Conservative MPs such as Ian Duncan Smith have made “impassioned pleas that the Government plan would “drive another nail into the coffin of the traditional family”“ (DailyHate, 21.05.08). The assumption of the Tories is that the vacuous notion of the ‘traditional family’ ever had any relevance. The organisation of human love has little to do with how children are raised and everything to do with the maintenance of the bourgeois state - and excuse me for coughing communism onto this keyboard, I’ve got this little marxist tickle that just won’t quit.

The Embryology Bill marks a turning point in the history of patriarchy, and all of us -men and women and transpeople, feminists and libertarians and trade unionists – can congratulate ourselves on beating back the tide of fundamentalist reactionism at extremely short notice. But, since this is a fight we’re going to be called to again and again, we will have to spend the meantime coming to terms with the radical systemic social change that must be the end-point of our ideology. The rights of women to biological self-determination, the rights of mothers to bear or not to bear children without mandatory male interference, must remain fixed points on the agenda of the British left. Men have a right to stand alongside women, a right to care for their children, a right to take up the responsibilities of fatherhood once that privilege has been granted them. Fathers have their place. But that place is no longer at the head of the table.

Student Debt: Selling Out the Next Generation

eddie — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 21:35:49 +0000

With student debt spiralling and higher education being reduced to a commodity, Laurie Penny calls for a change of course

University used to be about getting yourself educated. Now, if you’re lucky, it’s about getting in, grabbing the biggest, most career-oriented degree you can lay hands on, and getting out again – hopefully with your sanity intact and a few weeks’ holiday before you don a suit and start paying back your loan. Macro-capitalism has sold us out, turning education into a consumable – a privilege to be bought rather than a right to be aspired to.

Discussion of macro-capitalist policy making has to involve a considered look at where the money is and where it’s going, so let’s start there. Gordon Brown’s cabinet has recently, amid much public fanfare, pledged an extra £14 billion to be spent on primary and secondary education over the next three years, bringing the total education budget to £74 billion by 2010. This represents an annual increase of 2.5 per cent in real terms, compared with 4.4 per cent in recent years. Yes, that’s right – despite all the fuss, the rate of increased spending on education is actually slowing.

Moreover, it must be understood that £14 billion over three years, while it might sound like incredible riches, is in fact a paltry sum. Compare it to, say, the arbitrary figure of £28 billion conjured out of thin air to float Northern Rock last November. Next to this, or to the £128 billion (US$255 billion) made annually in legal tax evasion by the world’s super-rich, £14 billion is peanuts. And yet, how is this paltry sum being afforded?

It’s being afforded at the expense of a higher education system that is now almost entirely funded by its students, via top-up fees and, most recently, by Brown’s auction of the student loans book. That’s right, £6 billion – one third of the total owed by students and graduates – is to be sold to private investors. The NUS has been assured that the sale of the loans ’should not affect’ the low interest rate currently set on graduate repayments; however, the government has provided no details of what subsidies it has planned to counter commercial rates of interest. Students have every reason to worry.

As such, not only do all but the very poorest have to personally finance their higher education but the ’effectively interest-free’ loans that brought this about are now in jeopardy. All so that Brown can move some money around the already under-funded education budget rather than actually implementing any radical changes in public spending. And let’s not forget: students starting university this year are set to graduate with an average of over £15,000 worth of debt, and in some cases much more – not all of which is borrowed from the Student Loans company. To finance the increasing costs of higher education, students are becoming beholden to parents, banks and private loan providers, and working themselves into the ground outside of university hours merely to stay afloat. The net effect of this is that education has now become a commodity, and students have been transformed into consumers, entrenching social division and negating aspiration.

Recent efforts to redress the balance have been too little, too late.

’Stagnation, stagnation, stagnation’

Blair’s much-hyped goal of ‘50 per cent in higher education’ is now near to realisation. It has consistently been mistaken for a step towards higher aspirations for all; in fact, the way it has been managed makes it precisely the opposite, entrenching the stagnation of social mobility since 1970, as was recently reported by the Sutton Tust. Quite simply, the socio-economic goalposts have been moved for a generation of young people entering the workplace.

Over the past 15 years, a higher degree has become more than just a useful qualification. In the words of that noted socio-political analyst, Joe Strummer, one can no longer expect even to make tea at the BBC without a BA. A degree is increasingly a necessary entrance ticket to a certain level of employment and fiscal stability, effectively extending the mandatory education period for a large and specifically privileged social demographic: the middle classes.

After 10 years of Labour government, there is still only a 20 per cent likelihood of bright children from the poorest quarter of families going to university, a figure that rises to 80 per cent among the middle and upper-middle classes. Recent efforts to redress the balance have fallen pitifully short. According to the Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS), the new initiative to provide limited grants of up to £2,800 per year to the very poorest students will benefit very few of those actually in need. Only the very poorest are eligible, and for those that do make it to university from households with an income under £17,500, the money is usually insufficient.

In what was billed as an effort to increase social mobility, New Labour has in fact managed to entrench the social stagnation of the Thatcher years by creating a system of mandatory, effectively self-funded higher education as an entry requirement for the middle classes. Well-meant fob-off politics – such as this year’s limited grant-scheme – have been too little, too late.

Education as a consumable

Perhaps the most damaging aspect of the escalating loans system of financing higher education is the fact that university education is seen as something that should, first and foremost, provide ’value for money’. As Albert Einstein noted in his 1949 treatise ‘On Education’, an erosion of personhood and negation of rounded education occurs when ‘an exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career. There is only one way to eliminate these grave evils … namely, a socially-funded educational system which would be oriented toward social goals.’

Students are now aware, from the moment they enter university, that they will have to earn money to pay back their borrowings for the very education that will finance those borrowings. As such, education becomes judged purely in terms of the monetary rewards it will eventually deliver. Even official press releases and loans company documents refer to a student’s degree as little more than an exciting form of ISA – an investment purely in one’s financial future, rather than in one’s personal or social future.

This, in fact, is the root of the problem. Education is not a product. It’s a process. You can pay people to teach you, yes, but you cannot pop down to your local high street and buy yourself an education. Fifty years ago, Einstein recognised that an acquisitional, fiscally-minded higher education system was a contributing factor to ‘the crippling of individuals, [which] I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil’. Students in the 21st century are increasingly treated as consumers, buying on credit their ticket into a system that will, if they’re lucky, squeeze them out the other end as products themselves, boxed up with identical gleaming CVs and desperate smiles: tagged, bagged and shipped out from the warehouse onto the screeching shop-floor of life.

Sold out by student politicians?

What’s worrying is that our own official representatives are more interested in playing the system than in challenging it. The NUS, a deeply divided but influential union, has allowed the government cumulatively to chip away at the rights of students for one reason only – namely, that the union has, for the past decade, been run by Labour-affiliated students with one eye constantly on their own futures in government. As such, the main NUS delegates have been reluctant to make waves to secure the educational rights of the next generation of British citizens. The 2006 NUS conference, for example, responding to the controversial introduction of top-up-fees, concluded that a small increase in means-tested grants would solve the problem – but this has already proven to be vastly insufficient.

There remains, however, a dedicated radical faction amongst student representatives who have continued to contest the increasing shift of higher education towards the status of an unequal service industry. One such sub-group is the student organisation Education Not for Sale (ENS).
ENS, like many on the student left, has come to the conclusion that a fully subsidised higher education system, with living grants available to all, is the only way to turn around the social stagnation brought about by the financial and schematic management of the UK university system. Sophie Buckland, ENS women’s officer and a spokesperson for the organisation, tells us: ’[Our organisation] fights for a grant high enough to live on for all students in post-16 education as part of a fully free education system – at least £120 a week. Even a minimal increase in taxation of the rich and of business would create enough funds to make this possible.’

Radical change is needed

Brown’s government has an opportunity to make university a plane of true social levelling and real educational and personal endeavour. But only if the prime minister has the courage to radically re-think his policy on education spending right across the board. Robbing University Peter to pay Primary Paul is a pitiful attempt at instigating the sort of systemic change needed.

Brown could provide the kind of higher education every young person has a right to quite easily, but only by rolling back the tax windfalls Labour has given the rich will enough public funds be generated to do so. He must invest not only in the country’s financial future, but in the social and educational legacies his government will leave to the next generation. Only radical, systemic change of the UK’s attitude towards education spending will give my young sisters’ generation the choices, in learning and in life, that every youth facing an uncertain 21st-century future deserves.

Babes Without Spice

Tim Holmes — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 20:19:40 +0000

On 27 June 2007, I opened the papers, hardly able to contain my excitement. I couldn’t wait to read the inevitable watery roundups of the Blair premiership that had been on the files of every broadsheet since Tony announced that he was finally stepping down. Instead, to my surprise, the inside pages were splashed with gaudy images of five very familiar popstrels, wearing matching outfits and strained smiles. In a giddy blast from the past, the Spice Girls had announced their reunion tour.

Instantly, I was transported back a decade. I was nine years old, on the school bus, listening to the Spice Girls’ hit ‘Wannabe’ for the very first time. From its opening beats, my young world was changed forever. Not only had I discovered, with a delicious thrill, that there was more to popular music than ‘The Smurfs Go Pop’, but here were strong, outrageously hyper-personified young women with individual styles and identities, brazenly declaring what they wanted, what they really, really wanted. They emphasised the importance of being yourself and of strong female friendship. That all they really wanted was to ‘zigazig-hah’ did not register on my prepubescent consciousness. I was hooked.

Now the glossy sheen on the Girl Power industry has tarnished somewhat. Since their split, the girls have racked up between them two serious eating disorders, innumerable flopped solo singles, countless rumoured drink and drug problems and a run of much-publicised catfights – both with each other and with the fathers of the six curiously-named Spice babies that have been born since 2000.

Girl power

Since the reunion tour was announced, the fashion and women’s media have gone to town on the paper-thin reality of the ‘friends forever’ mantra that was so central to the Girl Power ethos, with headlines like ‘Spice Girls at WAR!’ and ‘Posh and Ginger compete to be Skinny Spice.’ And once tour preparations began, nearly all of the girls’ focus seems to have been on their diet plans, exercise regimes and wardrobe proposals. For example, Victoria Beckham’s suggestion that ultra-miniskirts be included in the group’s outfits, the better to show off her fantastically emaciated legs, has apparently met with rage and tantrums from other band members.

All of this is jaw-achingly depressing for someone who was a teenager in their glory days. Is this, in the end, all that Girl Power has come to?

It seems that it is. For while the Spice Girls’ original incarnation may have been refreshing, they fundamentally represented a little boy’s wet dream of feminism (Simon Fuller’s, to be precise): raunchy, lipsticked, pert-breasted and up for it. Girl Power, on its own, didn’t stand for much. After all, it was always going to be unlikely that ‘zigazig-hah!’ was Spice shorthand for ‘subvert the dominant paradigm!’ ‘Being who you wanna’ was permissible only if what you wanted to be was hyperbolically and accommodatingly heterosexualised. As the girls themselves said in 1997: ‘Girl Power is … when you reply to wolf whistles by shouting “Get your arse out!”’

Blair’s babes

It wasn’t long after the Spice Girls exploded onto the UK pop scene that Blair swept into power, riding the women’s vote. The 1997 Labour landslide was buoyed up by the furious hype around Blair’s Babes: those teeth-grittingly power-suited young things who accompanied the PM-to-be to endless photoshoots. They seemed to promise greater political representation for women and – by implication, although it was never implicitly stated – greater attention to the key socio-political concerns affecting women’s lives.

On the first count, at least, there was immediate and exciting progress: the number of female MPs doubled to 120 in 1997, 101 of whom were Labour. This meant more photo opportunities, more strained smiles, more horrendous tailoring and excruciating Hillary Clinton knock-off hairdos. As politics went pop, both the music and the political digests of the day seemed to be giving the same message to the young: Girl Power was an active political fact. We were about to inherit a world where girls and women would have more power.

But – as with Posh, Sporty, Scary, Baby and Ginger – it is tricky to pin down exactly what Blair’s Babes stood for, beyond the revival of shoulder pads and uncomplicated yea-saying. At 18 per cent, they had never formed a critical mass in the House of Commons in the first place, and continued to represent a largely compliant minority: the rebel Labour backbenchers who so blighted Blair’s second and third terms were predominantly male. And even where issues most affecting women were concerned, the new intake of women MPs remained curiously accommodating. Of the 90 MPs who voted against Labour’s cuts to lone parent benefits in 1998, only eight were female.

Girl Power – like the increased female political clout that ‘girls’ were promised in 1997 – was only going to be common currency for as long as it remained young, sexy and marketable. As Yvonne Abraham commented in her 1997 article ‘Lipstick Liberation’, ‘Sexy feminism certainly works as a marketing approach. They [the Spice Girls] take feminism’s shell, and fill it up with lip-gloss, ribbed condoms and girls-on-top innuendo. Take away the sexual freedom and the guiltless push-up bras and you’re not left with much.’

As our teenage years progressed, my female classmates and I came gradually to the realisation that nothing had changed. The power we had been promised was a fallacy. In order to do well socially, financially and professionally as we matured out of training bras, it was becoming more, not less, important that we remain flawlessly beautiful, compliantly heteronormative and enthusiastically sexual. We discovered that Girl Power was about performance – sexual and aesthetic performativity – and that, like the Spice Girls, like the influx of women into politics in 1997, once the cameras stopped flashing, the illusion of power began to disintegrate. Girl Power had betrayed us.

Even more than our mothers’ generation before us, our power was now going to depend on how well we were able to perform. And perform we did, breaking our young bodies and minds into the shallow dance of establishment-sanctified, hypersexed femininity. We found ourselves more than equal to the task. As the Spice Girls publicly crumbled, many of us went down with eating disorders, began to self harm, and abused drugs, alcohol and sex. Most of us suffered crises of self-confidence and self-esteem, frightened by our maturing bodies and bewildered by what was expected of us sexually.

Posh, what went wrong?

Posh Spice – aka Victoria Adams, as she was in her pre-Beckham years – was my favourite, no question about it. Her slick, coffee-coloured bob vaguely resembled my junior-school hairdo. Plus, she was achingly cool, with sparkling black eyes scowling out of a strange, pixie-pretty face, luscious curves poured into an array of tasteful black cocktail dresses, and – most thrillingly – a little diamond stud in her fingernail.

Never mind that she couldn’t really sing – that wasn’t what Posh was about. While the social machinations of 10-year-old girls meant that I was always obliged to be Sporty Spice in playground games, in my head I was Posh Spice, the mature, elegant, half-haughty face of Girl Power, the Real Laydee of dubious lyrical fame.

In 2007, Victoria Beckham’s scrawny, spray-tanned frame now resembles the last piece of Kentucky Fried Chicken at the bottom of the barrel. But what’s really scary is her face: the self-possessed pout of her Spicier days ceded to an out-of-it expression that suggests she’s been doped with ketamine.

Over the course of a decade she has become every glossy rag’s favourite Disaster Dolly. Her every outfit, every food choice, every pound lost, every relationship crisis, every heartbreak and every instance of increasingly disturbed behaviour has been gleefully catalogued. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that this woman – or, rather, this half-woman girl-child trapped in a body worn thin by the unrelenting glare of media attention – is the woman Blair proposed for national commendation in his resignation honours list.

For Victoria Beckham epitomises the betrayal of female empowerment that has occurred in the Blair era. What we were promised was power. What we have been delivered is a circumscribed power that’s young, desperately sexual, fragile and paranoid, and contingent upon its wielders remaining so. It is a neutered power obsessed with youth and a constructed image of hypersexed girlhood that does not fully own its own sexuality. A girlhood that performs, prances and pleads with its masculinised audience for every scrap of attention. It is, in short, Girl Power that has not been allowed to grow up into real, honest and fully realised woman power.

Woman power

Girl Power sells even as the vultures gather to pick at the bones of the haunted, emaciated, disturbed-looking women who used to encapsulate it. Woman power, admittedly, does not sell half so well.

Ten years on from the hype of 1997, however, we must finally accept that Girl Power is not enough. Real, tangible woman power is possible. But in order to access that power we cannot allow ourselves to be sold a cheap, tacky, snapshot-friendly imitation. We have to seize it for ourselves. At the inception of Brown’s premiership, the question of whether political woman power is possible remains open.

The number of female ministers in the cabinet has decreased, and those in power, including Britain’s first female home secretary, Jacqui Smith, seem worryingly ambivalent over women’s agendas. At the same time, politicians such as Dawn Primarolo, the public health minister, have been standing firm on important issues of female self-determination. Primarolo, for example, defended the upper time limit of legal abortion against reduction in a speech to the Commons on 24 October 2007. There is room for real progress if we, the next generation of voters, workers, mothers, writer, dreamers, politicians, are brave enough to take it.

I have seen my generation of young women have their self-confidence destroyed, their potential circumscribed and their worth devalued in the cold, cruel currency exchange of capitalist raunch and beauty culture. We are all grown up now, though. The young girls who bought the Spice Girls’ original singles are entering the workplace, graduating from university and coming into our political and personal inheritance.

We’ve gained some lines, a few scars, and a fair amount of wisdom along the way, and we will not be bought off any more with flashy images of circumscribed, limited power. The Girl Power generation has grown up seeing their simplest ideals betrayed and their role models reduced to emaciated, stage-grinning shells of formerly self-determining women. But watch this space: we will not be fooled so easily the next time. So, ladies: take a long, hard look at the Spice Girls reunion tour. Take a look, and decide whether or not this, truly, is still who you wannabe.

The Spice Girls will perform in London and Manchester from 15 December. Laurie Penny writes a regular blog for Red Pepper. You can find her and the rest of the Red Pepper blogosphere at www.blog.redpepper.org.uk

Hypertext Heroines

Tim Holmes — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 10:12:53 +0000

In my first year at university, on one of those Thursday nights given over entirely to black coffee and dwindling minutes of pre-deadline grace time all uplit by the flickering glow of an LCD screen, I stumbled across a website called www.feministing.com. It was my first contact with the feminist web sphere, and I was blown away.

Growing up in the 1990s, I spent my youth being told by dour adults that feminism was dead, and since my only contact had been through reading the dusty tomes of big-name 1970s sisters like Andrea Dworkin and Germaine Greer, I was beginning to worry that they might be right. But here, in front of me, was a website full of up-to-the-minute, hard-hitting debate, with a plethora of articulate contributors and a sidebar of links to hundreds more blogs, webzines and forums. Here was evidence that I wasn’t alone. I had discovered that contemporary feminism is alive, and it’s online.

Feminism today is what we make it. Throughout human history, the scope of what we can make – whether from a block of wood or a raw political concept – has expanded with the tools we are given. The internet is the most powerful addition to the cave-socialist’s political toolbox since the printing press, and its possibilities have yet to be fully realised. It is those who have been dispossessed by mainstream media who stand to gain most from – and who are at the forefront of – this communications revolution, which is so revolutionising the grassroots approach to feminist ideology. To paraphrase Marshal McLuhan, it is the media that is, once again, reworking the message for a new and organised generation.

The F Word

Clearly, the internet has huge potential as a mobilising force. Enterprising young feminists such as Jess McCabe, 25, general editor of British feminist magazine The F Word, have been quick to recognise the potential of the internet.

’Anyone can find feminist groups to join in their area, and if there isn’t a group, they can set one up easier than ever before,’ says McCabe. ’In addition to its usefulness as a simple campaigning tool, the internet provides a space to meet other feminists, talk about feminism, debate feminist issues and so on. So many people write into The F Word to say that they’ve just stumbled upon the site – and finally found something that reflects their views. I think that’s a really powerful thing.’

With 66,000 visitors per month, The F Word is one of the UK’s most visited feminist sites, and exists, in the words of its founder, Catherine Redfern, to ‘encourage a new sense of community among UK feminists, and to show the doubters that feminism still exists … and is as relevant to the lives of the younger generation as it was to those in the 1960s and 1970s.’

It is this energy and collaboration that defines the national and global feminist web sphere. From individual blogs such as Girl With a Pen and I Blame the Patriarchy to the ubiquitous www.feministing.com, feminist sites are hugely supportive of one another, and it is common practice to provide a hotlinks bar to other sites on the main interface. Most importantly, this overwhelming sense of community, perhaps for the first time in the history of the modern women’s movement, knows no ideological boundaries.

In the feminist web sphere, coherence of politics or of priorities is not the point. As Catherine Redfern explains, ’Contributors to the site may have opposing views on certain issues, and that’s fine. It simply demonstrates that feminism is a diverse, living and healthy ideology, which is confident enough to question itself. There is no “party line” in feminism; there is no “feminist rule-book”. Feminism today is whatever we make it.’

The issues that define modern feminism are not, for the most part, new ones: debates over abortion legislation and availability, rape conviction rates, childcare provision and the pay gap remain as relevant today as they were 20 years ago. If the issues remain constant, however, the way they are handled, through inclusive, collaborative online organisation and an interactive culture, is radically different from anything that has gone before. The mode of expression is what is new and innovative about this movement: a sea-change is underway, which is churning up the settled bed of feminist thinking all over the world and taking the hearts and minds of contemporary thinkers and young women with it.

Communication style

Jessie, 23, a student and feminist academic from London, comments that: ’There is a style of communication, commonly perceived as masculine, which comes from being able to assume that your worldview will be universally understood. This style of communication tends to be direct, confrontational and certain. It is used by people who have spent most of their lives being privileged in comparison to those around them – frequently, although not exclusively, straight white men. There is another style of communication, which tends to be identified as “feminine” ... It’s characterised as insecure, it tends to be supportive, it tends to take more time over understanding and being understood.’

Sue O’Sullivan, who has been involved in feminist, lesbian and socialist politics since 1969, including work on Red Rag and Spare Rib, says: ’My experience as an old feminist is that some women as well as men are attracted to the certainties and one-sided rhetoric which is often identified as masculine. The influence of fundamentalisms across the world is witness to this. And within the embers of the women’s movement, one dampener was the insistent voices of feminists who did want to impose rules and regulations, especially around sexuality and sexual expression.’

This rigid ’masculine’ rhetoric cannot work in the same way online. Most obviously, the level of personal anonymity and – in many online contexts – ambiguity of gender means that the speaker cannot assume the automatic understanding that underpins ’masculine’ rhetoric. In cyberspace, the issue of whether or not to identify yourself with a gender is very much one of personal choice. Many blogging forums, for example, make use of ambiguously-denoted ’handles’ to distinguish individuals; for example, on one site, ’andustar5’ and ’deathbyshinies’ are female’; ’pozorvlak’ is male, but so is ’glamwhorebunni’, whereas ’kai_nimura’ identifies as androgynous.

In this space, no one can assume that they will be understood – or dismissed – on the basis of their gender, race, age, sexuality, or social background. Most importantly, no one can assume that the power basis of any debate is solid, because this online fluidity of identity challenges the very nature of hierarchical power. In other words, in societies where a sharp distinction between male and female is one of the cornerstones of the dominant culture, spaces such as the internet, where gender is fluid, are very threatening.

Moreover, the internet is a collaborative phenomenon, as linguists and cultural phenomenologists have noted – a radically new communications style that integrates many of the most dynamic and useful features of both speech and writing. For the first time, cyberspace provides a mass media platform ideally suited to a style of communication that rejects belligerent and one-sided rhetoric, a platform suited to a style of communication that makes progress through listening as well as persuasion.

This communications revolution is prompting a new paradigm in the politics of subaltern groups such as feminists – a paradigm shift that is beginning to spread to the mainstream, with the cyber-feminists and political bloggers leading the way. This communications revolution demands a new way of talking about gender and about politics generally – a new way of speaking and listening and thinking. This communications revolution is so new that it needs a whole new name: hypertextuality.

Hypertextuality

It is hypertextuality, the phenomenon of two-way recorded debate, of collaborative rhetoric, that is revolutionising contemporary feminism. As Catherine Redfern comments, ’Feminists today are generally open to listening to each other and allowing for differences of opinion within feminist groups. I know many feminists who have very different opinions on issues that in the past have caused divisions, such as the sex industry.’ Hypertextual media are allowing young feminists to see that they are more alike than unalike – and to get organised about it.

Two-way recorded debate is not in itself a new idea; however, the crucial change brought about by the internet is a vast reduction in the cost of entry to that debate. In previous generations, entry to this most important feminist debate seemed after an initial period of enthusiasm and participation, open only to well known superstar journalists and academics. Now, however, access to two-way recorded feminist debate requires only a web connection and basic literacy, and branches from that platform into three-dimensional activism.

With the main debate suddenly becoming accessible, girls are getting organised again. The annual Reclaim the Night marches have been resurrected in London, Edinburgh and Manchester, the first attended by 1,500 women in 2006. Protests are taking place from Ipswich, where a march of solidarity was held following the recent string of murders, to Leicester, where a protest against lads’ mags was held outside a branch of W H Smith in April 2007. The expanding London Feminist Network is asking women who have been sexually harassed to send them the clothes they were wearing at the time with ‘I did not ask for it’ sewn, pinned or written on them for a ‘laundry-line’ protest. The Fawcett Society, which has found a new generation of online supporters, encourages its members publicly to demonstrate their politics and challenge tired stereotypes by wearing one of their ’This is What A Feminist Looks Like’ t-shirts.

Catherine Redfern says that ’there are a growing number of young people willing to identify as feminists, and the internet has played a massive part in bringing many of them together. I do think that people finding each other on the internet has been a catalyst for the development of real life groups, organisations and actions.’ This includes increasing numbers of young men. It is not far fetched to suggest that organisations such as the commendably self-explanatory www.mencanstoprape.org would not have come into being without this technology.

Harassment

Of course, the web is not an entirely safe space for women: harassment occurs here as well, and many feminist bloggers have been the victims of hate campaigns the ferocity of which would be shocking in three-dimensional reality. Even Jessica Valenti, general editor of www.feministing.com, has been subject to serious harassment as part of the AutoAdmit scandal, which involved a US message board on which female law students were mercilessly and publicly demeaned on the grounds of their looks and sexuality, leading to several complaints of stalking. However, although the web is yet another space in which women are forced to defend themselves, we are able to do so on our own terms and in our own words: sites such as Take Back the Tech (www.takebackthetech.net) are active examples of women rallying together to resist online harassment.

Sue O’Sullivan shares our enthusiasm: ’I would absolutely love to see a new feminist movement spread outward from the internet. It makes me nervous but I’m prepared to go into unknown territory when that happens. I may be more comfortable with my ideas of collectivity, grassroots action, socialist feminist and lesbian politics, than I am with new ways, but I’m not stupid. I know that for feminism to ignite again and to meet the challenges of the day, new formations of feminism are needed.’

’Feminism’ is no longer a dirty word: it’s alive, online, and here to stay. All over the world, thanks to the mobilising and creative power of the web, women and men are beginning to challenge gender oppression in new and exciting ways, and to re-think the forms of speech and debate that have been used against us in recent decades. All over the world, women and their supporters are infiltrating systems, hijacking the airwaves and quietly hanging their standards over the virtual face of a culture that still regrets the day they left home. Hypertextuality allows women to question not only who wields power, but the nature of that power itself.

Laurie Penny writes Pennyred, a regular blog on contemporary feminism for the Red Pepper website

Useful websites

www.thefword.org.uk

www.feministing.com

www.dollymix.tv A lively and useful media resource

www.bitingbeaver.blogspot.com A hugely inspiring blog by a survivor of rape and sexual oppression

www.feministcarnival.blogspot.com Links to the monthly ’carnival of feminists’, a collaborative project bringing together the best of online feminism

www.philobiblion.co.uk Women’s history, feminism and activism, plus more links to the ’carnival’

www.mencanstoprape.org

www.takebackthetech.net Reclaiming the web as a safe space for women