How did 100,000,000 women disappear?

Saturday 06 June 2009

by: Nicole Baute | Visit article original @ The Toronto Star

Researchers are attempting to account for women in the developing world who have died as a result of violence, discrimination and neglect.

Two researchers crunching population statistics have confirmed an unsettling reality. Siwan Anderson and Debraj Ray noticed the ratio of women to men in developing regions and in some cultures is suspiciously below the norm.

In India, China and sub-Saharan Africa, millions upon millions of women are missing. They are not lost, but dead: victims of violence, discrimination and neglect.

A University of British Columbia economist is amongst those trying to find them - not the women themselves, who are long gone, but their numbers and ages, which paint a sad and startling picture of gender discrimination in the developing world.

The term "missing women" was coined in 1990, when Indian economist Amartya Sen calculated a shocking figure. In parts of Asia and Africa, he wrote in The New York Review of Books, 100 million women who should be alive are not, because of unequal access to medical care, food and social services. These are excess deaths: women "missing" above and beyond natural mortality rates, compared to their male counterparts.

Women who are dead because their lives were undervalued.

Around the world boys outnumber girls at birth, but in countries where women and men receive equal care, women have proved hardier and more resistant to disease, and thus live longer. In most of Asia and North Africa, however, Sen found that women die with startlingly higher frequency.

His research began a flutter of activity in academic circles and by 2005, the United Nations produced a much higher estimate for how many women could be "missing": 200 million.

From her office at the University of British Columbia, economics professor Siwan Anderson has been crunching numbers to try and understand why so many women are dying. "If you're interested in gender discrimination, it's really one of the starkest measures of discrimination, because it's women who should be alive, but aren't," she says.

The 40-year-old researcher recently co-authored a paper with New York University's Debraj Ray, focusing on figures from China, India and sub-Saharan Africa for the year 2000. What they discovered flew in the face of existing literature and commonly held beliefs about the missing women phenomenon.

"Previously, people had thought that they (the missing women) were all at the very early stages of life, prenatal or just after, so before four years old," Anderson says. "But what we found is that the majority are actually later." Female infanticide has been endemic in India and China for some time, which she says led researchers to assume that it was the source of all the missing women. But the truth is much more complicated.

Once she and Ray broke down the numbers by age group, they found that the majority of excess female deaths came later in life: 66 per cent in India, 55 per cent in China and 83 per cent in sub-Saharan Africa.

One of their colleagues in the economics department at the University of British Columbia says this finding is striking, and points the way for future research and advocacy.

"Why would there be excess mortality of, let's say, 45-year-old women versus 45-year-old men?" asks economics professor Kevin Milligan. "And what they find is ... they have the same set of diseases, they just seem to die more frequently. The explanation that seems most consistent with that is differential access to health care. And so that's a really striking finding."

Anderson says that lack of health care is likely a big part of the problem, but that there are numerous cultural and social factors at play that can be difficult to pinpoint.

In their "elementary accounting exercise" published this February, Anderson and Ray began to plot the causes of excess death in 2000 by age group, and produced some interesting figures.

In sub-Saharan Africa, the dominant source of missing women was HIV and AIDS, the cause of more than 600,000 excess female deaths each year.
In China, Anderson says, most of the 141,000 excess female deaths by injury were suicides, making China the only place in the world where women are more likely than men to kill themselves, often by eating pesticides used for crops.

And in India, a category called "injuries" yielded ominously high figures: 86,000 excess deaths in the age group 15-29 in 2000 alone. Anderson has done extensive research in India, and says the numbers beg the question of exactly how many deaths were so-called "kitchen fires" - often used to mask dowry-related killings, the result of a new bride being tortured by her new family until her parents pay their debts.

Contrary to what you might expect, Anderson says, dowry prices have not dropped off with improvements in education in India. Instead, they have gotten worse, with educated brides and their families willing to pay even more for high-quality grooms.

Anderson says dowry payments can be six times a family's annual wealth - an excruciating price, especially for poor villagers. The implications of this hefty sum trickle down to the first moments of a child's life. While conducting recent field work in India, Anderson asked villagers about selective abortions and found them open about the fact that they use ultrasound to determine the baby's gender and help them decide whether or not to keep it.
"They see no other options," she says. "They really cannot afford to have a daughter."

Future research will delve deeper, seeking answers to questions such as: How often are men given mosquito nets to protect themselves from malaria, but not women? How many women die because they are not taken to the hospital when they are sick?

Anderson is using data gathered primarily from the World Bank, the United Nations and the World Health Organization, but admits that getting the figures can be a huge challenge. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, many deaths go undocumented, and in India, it is virtually impossible to know how many "unintentional" deaths are actually dowry killings, because they are not accurately reported to the authorities.

It is also difficult to separate direct gender discrimination from biological, social, environmental, behavioural and economic factors. That will be part of the task as Anderson works on calculating missing women by region in India, and isolating gender discrimination from other factors that might contribute to uneven male-to-female ratios.

When asked what can be done to combat such deep-seated inequality, Anderson pauses. Even when governments outlaw root causes, such as the Indian dowry system, violence persists, she says. "It's too embedded in the system in their world."

Who was really cheated in Iran's vote? Women.

By the Christain Science Monitor's Editorial Board Mon Jun 15, 5:00 am ET

What is striking about the Iranians protesting fraud in the June 10 "election" is the number of women on the front lines. Among all those cheated at the polls, they may feel the most denied.

For the first time in one of the Islamic Republic's controlled presidential campaigns, the women's movement was able to raise its demands clearly and independently – even though the unelected, 12-member, all-male Guardian Council did not allow any female candidates to run.

The movement's courage to confront the patriarchal theocracy (in which "morality police" still roam the streets looking for women with make-up) may have been a big reason why the regime rigged the vote count – and why supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was forced to make a show of ordering a probe of the fraud.

Iranian women do enjoy privileges that women in many Arab countries do not. But Iran's powerful clerics know that democracy's advance and the liberation of women go hand in hand. They've seen women recently elected in Kuwait and in Iraq's new democracy, while their proxy group in Lebanon, Hezbollah, lost an election. So they are trying to stop both the women's movement and open democracy in Iran in order to maintain their Shiite "revolution" and their own rule.

Yet the ballot fraud was done with such audacity and clumsiness that the "landslide winner," President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, will likely find it difficult to rule. And the West should hesitate before cozying up to a regime with fading legitimacy and which so openly suppresses half its population and sees women as a security threat. What country would have faith in signing a deal with a regime that cheats its own people, especially women, at the ballot box?

During the campaign, Iran's feminists found a voice in the popular opposition candidate, Mir Hossein Mousavi, a former prime minister. He promised to disband the morality police, reform the many laws that treat women unequally, and appoint women to high posts. He campaigned with his wife, Zahra Rahnavard, a prominent academic and author of 15 books. The two appear to be a loving couple, displaying a modern equality to Iranian women. But he "lost" the vote – even in his hometown, which was yet another sign that the fix was in.

Mr. Ahmadinejad, on the other hand, has a strong record against women. He changed the name of the government's "Center for Women's Participation" to the "Center for Women and Family Affairs." He limited women's access to higher education and proposed laws that would allow men to divorce their wives without informing them and not to pay alimony.

Most of all, the regime has jailed dozens of women involved in the One Million Signatures Campaign, a grass-roots movement that began in 2006 to reform the legal system and to end gender discrimination. The group has been harassed in their homes and branded as illegal.

It is of little surprise, then, to see images of women, only slightly veiled, confronting the regime in postelection protests. While Ahmadinejad's false victory may have toughened the clerics' foreign posture with the West, they've only exposed their weakness at home.

Eventually, Iran's women will not be denied.

How conflict divides gender

I receive mails from a world-wide network of activists, and I've been meaning to post an email I received from one member of the group for some time. This is it... Better late than never:

A personal commentary by a life-long women's advocate and activist.

Kathy Sloan
West Hartford, Connecticut
USA


Each new day seems to bring with it another unthinkable atrocity against the women and girls of Afghanistan. The roster of infamy reads like something out of the Nazi terror: a law passed and signed by the president sanctioning marital rape, acid thrown in the faces of girls walking to school, women forced to make themselves invisible with suffocating head to toe covering that puts the yellow stars of David Jews were forced to wear to shame. Never has misogyny been so blatant or so blatantly repellent.



This year is the 60th anniversary of the UN Declaration on Universal Human Rights. When ever-growing numbers of women in Afghanistan are literally setting themselves on fire due to the utter degradation of their very personhood while the international community allows this to go on, the Declaration is mocked and proven hollow. During the “Burning Times” of the 1400s through 1700s in Europe and the United States, when thousands of women were burned at the stake for “witchcraft,” agonizing immolation was administered by the state. In the 21st century in Afghanistan, patriarchal misogyny has regressed to the point where the state no longer needs to carry out femicide; ubiquitous and relentless terror, abuse and destruction of female lives accomplish the same goal through suicide.



Where are we as a global community when the biological existence of female identity becomes synonymous with “evil,” an essence so threatening, so repellent that it justifies exploitation, commodification, violence and the ultimate “punishment” – murder?



Nations go to war over possession of natural resources, rivalries and greed. “Wars” are declared on “terror” and “drugs” but where is the “war” on violence, abuse and degradation of women? Every country on the planet engages in human trafficking of women and girls for use as sex slaves – where is the “war” on this lethal trafficking? From the sexual commodification of females in Western culture to its ultimate expression as blatant loathing of females in Afghanistan, where is the outrage, where is the call to war? Where is the soul of humanity that demands we not allow, condone, participate in, or passively accept the abuse of females every day, every hour, every minute? The despairing women of Afghanistan demand an answer.

Another Week That Was

This was surprisingly accurate too:

The Week That Was

Last week's calendar pic:



I couldn't have put it better myself!

the baby bust

It’s about time I wrote something. Otherwise my blog is going to go mouldy…

…So I’ve dragged this article out of a remote bookmark file and dusted it off…

…It’s all about the rapidly declining birth-rate in Western Europe – how and why women are not having babies. It’s a decline so vertiginous that new terminology has had to be invented to describe it. What was previously referred to as ‘very low level’ fertility, a rate set at 1.3 children per family and which used to be the lowest recorded fertility rate, has been undermined by some places in Europe, so that now there is ‘lowest-low’ level fertility applied to places where the birth-rate has, for the first time, dropped below 1.3.

I like this article. It basically dismisses the conservative/religious “told you so” attacks on the availability of contraception, the ease of abortion and our apparently shallow, selfish, secular lifestyles and suggests instead that it is, to a large extent, conservatism that is in fact responsible for suppressing the baby numbers.

Research has revealed that within Europe there is another divide between birth-rates: a South/North divide. Apparently records reveal that more babies are being born in the north of Western Europe than in the south of Western Europe. Superficially, this shouldn’t make sense. In the southern countries of Italy, Greece and Spain, traditional family structures still endure. Despite levels of education comparing equitably with their northern sisters, women still tend to forgo careers for housewifery, while their husbands go out to work. Generally, you’d predict then that it would be in these traditional family frameworks that the most babies were being born. However, the opposite is true: far fewer babies are being born in Italy, Spain and Greece than in northern Western European countries.



In contrast, in the north, in Germany, Holland, Denmark and Sweden, the average couple both work fulltime jobs, and yet, somehow, women are finding the time to have more babies than in the south.

Social and cultural surveys have revealed that in traditional family frameworks, in Italy and Greece for example, men who work while their wives and girlfriends stay at home, are much less likely to help with the housework or assist with the practical elements of raising their children. This has had a tendency to put women off having more children once they’ve had one and then subsequently discovered they have to do everything themselves. What a surprise. This isn’t rocket science, is it!

So you can probably guess, without reading the rest of the article, why women seem keener to have babies in Denmark and Sweden where – guess what? – men are much more likely to help their wives and girlfriends, who are also holding down fulltime jobs, with domestic chores and childcare. It would seem raising a family, as a collaborative and equal partnership between two people, is a much more appealing prospect for a woman than effectively running a household and family alone.



What interests me though, and what isn’t really questioned in the article or anywhere else it seems, is what else can be read into this beyond the logistics? I’m glad that the article lays to rest the usual religious hysteria about modern attitudes to life with very practical answers to the question of our diminishing European demographic. But it doesn’t ask if there is anything else besides the practicalities. We are socialised to believe that women have a maternal instinct that kicks in at some point in life to induce the drive to reproduce. If this drive is as inherent and instinctive, as we have been socialised to believe, then logistics and practicalities should not, alone, be able to have such a widespread and devastating affect upon it.

Logistics involves processes of rationalising: the situation is evaluated and deemed unsuitable for reproduction and child-rearing. But the maternal instinct is not a rationalising negotiation… it’s an instinct… that’s the point! It’s supposed to be integral to being human. It’s supposed to be an essentially defining characteristic of being a female human. It’s this drive that’s supposed to undermine reasoning in order to ensure the survival of the species, no matter what – no matter what the economic situation, or the cultural climate, or whether your husband is helping out around the house or not – isn’t it?

If women are evaluating, reasoning, rationalising the decision to have babies or not, what has happened to the so-called maternal instinct? Is there one? Has it gone?... Did it ever really exist??

My 50p’s-worth is this: when the social, economic, cultural climate is right, or when there is no choice – when contraception is unavailable (or illegal) or cultural expectations heap value onto childbirth – then the “maternal instinct” suddenly blooms into being, masquerading as innate, internal ‘nature’. But without these expectations and pressures, without the cultural or religious pressures, when the social climate is wrong (e.g. when the father of your children chooses the pub over bedtime stories), or in an environment where there is so much else going on for women (and men) – where there is the freedom of a life that is not dependent upon supposed biological functions – then the “maternal instinct” mysteriously disappears.



I cannot believe that the maternal instinct is inherent at birth. I can only believe that it is socialised into existence – that it comes from outside and is then absorbed, and not the other way around – with the presence of certain social and cultural factors. The human drive to reproduce is less biological, more manmade. And I would argue that the survival of the species has its conditions – that perhaps it discerns between quality and quantity… The smatterings of only children playing by themselves in playgrounds will have plenty of time and space to reflect upon this…



Technorati Tags:
baby bust, baby boom, new york times, happy families, gender, demographic crisis, europe

the bishops' tale

It amazed me how three men – one presenter, one liberal pro-female-bishops (Dean of Southwark) and one conservative anti-female-bishops (Bishop of Fulham) – could sit in the BBC Radio 4 studio (on Monday morning) and discuss the legitimacy of ordaining women as bishops and never once observe that they were discussing the lives and future prospects of a particular demographic of women, without any representative from that demographic, or indeed any woman, present at all!

In fact, the Bishop of Fulham did at one point accuse the Dean of Southwark of attempting to silence and repress the voice of the conservative traditionalists. Well what about the voices of the people this whole debate actually centres on? Where were they? If anyone is being silenced, it’s the women who want to become bishops. You can hear their debate (and not hear the prospective female bishops debate!) here, if you scroll down to 0810. (Actually, at 0709, there is a 4-minute piece from a woman dean ((as opposed to the 11 minutes given to the male bishop and dean an hour later!)))

Not that any of this surprises me. Various parties of men sit around and discuss the rights and freedoms of women all the time: in parliament, in justice systems, in brothels… in any structured social system where the hierarchy is male dominated. For the church, of course, especially the Catholic Church, this is one of their favourite pastimes!

John Bell on the radio today said something like: ‘the church has been concerned with playing catch-up with the rest of society… but if it only understood the role women play in community and society, it wouldn’t be having to catch up with society; it would be leading it’. You can hear it properly here.

I don’t want the church, or any other organised religion, leading society, but it’s staggering that any large body of people, especially in the West, can really, genuinely, still be arguing – eight years into the so-called New Millenia – that there is any doubt surrounding the equal legitimacy of women to do any humanly-constructed activity if they so want to. It’s absolutely amazing. And it was reassuring to hear at least one Christian voice of reason.

And what is equally amazing is how little notice the rest of secular society takes of the church’s internal bickering. We pass them off as obsolete, inoffensive and non-threatening. They have their own (not so) little world that they operate in and they leave the rest of us alone. Except they don’t. And they are not inoffensive. Aside from its religious significance, a Bishop position is professional, paid employment. Sexual discrimination is supposed to be illegal in this country… and yet, the Church still finds immunity.

And they are not obsolete. How do you think the 24-week abortion act suddenly got pushed into the public, and parliamentary, arena once again? Guess who the advocates for the changing of the law to a lower limit were… Catholic cabinet ministers who’d been requisitioned by conservative Christian activists with parliamentary connections.

Considering the demise of organised Christianity in this country, what remains is a fairly hardcore conservative force to be reckoned with! Fortunately, reason prevailed in both the abortion act and the Synod’s decision to ordain women bishops. It just amazes me that either should need debating in the first place.



Technorati Tags:
john bell, bbc radio 4, women bishops, female bishops, abortion act, conservative christianity, gender, sexual discrimination, church, synod, brothel, parliament, rook takes bishop checkmate

my house-moving tsunami...

Apologies for how woefully neglected my blog is at the moment - especially considering the sudden, unexpected (and very welcome!) surge in visitors to it!! How typical - just when I can't capitalize on it!

(Oh well, I've never been particularly good with 'capital' anyway...!)

The problem is, my life, once again, looks a lot like this:



As soon as it doesn't look like this anymore, I will get back to my blog properly... and probably find there's no one left here waiting...

The beginning of an end to maternal essentialism? I sincerely hope so...

Thomas Beatie is a pregnant trans-gender man from Oregon. There's been a fair bit of media coverage: most of it skeptical, some of it downright prejudiced and inflammatory.



The Guardian remarks on how the "common reaction is to wonder how someone can identify themselves as male and yet embrace pregnancy" and suggests that this is in fact "like saying you can't be a woman and have a career". There has indeed always been this widespread social assumption that equality has only to do with women attaining the same opportunities and privileges as men, and never about men attaining the same opportunities as women. When it happens, society balks!

As the F-Word puts it so well:

"Of course, the reason that the story has gotten so much attention is because Beatie doubly upsets the expectations of a society that is still quite rigid about gender conformity. If transitioning from male to female, or female to male, is still hard for some to accept, then folks who fall somewhere in between, or, as seems to be the case here, are not threatened by forays across the gender divide, totally confound. The concept that Beatie doesn’t feel like being pregnant threatens his identity as a man seems to be difficult to understand for those who are still not entirely comfortable even with those who break down gender roles, such as a female boss, a stay at home dad, etc, let alone challenge the concept of gender as a simple binary divided by an impenetrable wall".



In any socially collective way, we rarely get beyond the quite scandalously over-simplified gender binary that exists between us. Due to its apparently intrinsic and unshakable hold on society, most ground covered on issues of equality works with this divide rather than making any attempt to subvert or transgress it.

Pregnant men do subvert and transgress it, and it's a rare and beautiful thing.

When pressed for reasons why such an occurrence is so offensive, even professionals were struggling for articulate, sensible reasons. Most medical concerns centre around the testosterone treatment taken by Beatie to become male. According to Lisa Masterson, a Los Angeles obstetrician, excessive testosterone "can cause male-type characteristics in the female baby." But this can happen anyway, quite naturally, in more 'regular' births.

And most social concerns centre around the bullying the child might face at school having been born to its father. Bullying is always a favourite tool utilised by conservatives against any moves towards more unconventional parenting: it's been used against everything from single parenting, to adoptive parenting, to gay/lesbian parenting, and even to home schooling and special needs. It is not an argument - it is a non-argument - because the sad fact of the matter is, children get bullied for everything and anything and nothing - from being overweight to wearing the wrong kind of footwear. There's no logic in bullying, and it cannot be preempted. It's just a convenient, authoritative-sounding tool that is always effective in turning public opinion in support of conservative values. Kerrick Lucker, a gay activist at the University of California, gets much closer to the point when he says that "the only unusual challenges these kids face come from members of the public who see gender ambiguity as a great wrong". The bullying, this suggests, is traceable to a very adult public.



Anything that ever suggests a transgression of the old, tired gender binaries inevitably sees a creaky wheeling-out of those hideously reductive and inherently prejudiced arguments about what is considered 'Natural'.



For some reason, regardless of their moral behaviour or lifestyles, any normatively male and female couple have more right to have a baby than a gay/lesbian/trans gender couple who have had to fight everything from social and legal convention to intrusive state surveillance, and often hefty financial pay-outs, to conceive a child or adopt one. Yet reason must surely suggest, as Lucker goes on to point out, that "generally speaking, a man whose desire for a child is strong enough to overcome the obstacles that transgender men must face in bearing one is likely to be an extremely caring father".

As Beatie so eloquently puts it himself: "Wanting to have a biological child is neither a male nor female desire, but a human desire". How long is it going to take us to realise that we are human before we are gendered?

Technorati Tags:
thomas beatie, trans gender, gender, gender roles, gender normativity, pregnant men, being male and female is not an automatic right to parenthood, nature is a social convention not an unquestionable fact, biology is fluid, anatomy is changeable

Amnesty Appeal:

Tomorrow is the next phase in our battle to stop the UK government undermining basic human rights in this country and we’re hoping to get bloggers like you to help spread our message.

Tuesday 1 April sees the second reading of the Counter-Terrorism Bill. The government wants to allow police to lock people up for six weeks without even charging them with an offence – a proposal that would undermine civil liberties, damage community relations and have a seriously damaging effect on any individuals who were affected.

We’re asking people to sign the “Not a day longer” e-petition calling on the government to abandon plans to extend the time for which police can hold terrorism suspects without charge.

The petition is on the No.10 website.

Those of us opposed to extending pre-charge detention have also mobilised in a Facebook group.

The Independent is running a story on this today and Sunny Hurndal’s Liberal Conspiracy site has spearheaded the campaign against 42 days. We’ve got a press release out on the issue too – you can find it here.

The list of people standing up against these plans is growing longer every day. Please sign up, write to your MP and do all you can to spread the word.

And look out for our new report on China and the Olympics, which comes out on Tuesday night/Wednesday morning!

Until next time,

Steve
Amnesty’s Project Blog Team

a sticky web

The New York Times asks why, if so few women work in the computer technology industry, do so many more teenage girls use the internet than teenage boys? They ask the question but are tentative in offering any answers. The reason for that is, as they say, because...

"Teasing out why girls are prolific Web content creators usually leads to speculation and generalization. Although girls have outperformed boys in reading and writing for years, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, this does not automatically translate into a collective yen to blog or sign up for a MySpace page".



There have always been generalisations down sex and gender lines on this topic, because girls' prevalence online has been long noted, even back in the days before the giant social networking sites like Facebook, Myspace and Beebo: more girls had 'homepages' than boys, and a big deal was made about the name, 'homepage', and how girls' apparent 'nesting' inclinations have translated into digital homemaking. It is possible, I suppose, as female children are, generally-speaking, brought up on a diet of dolls-houses and Fisher Price kitchen sets, and so extending domestic idealisation into a digital home would be a natural extension of childhood practices. But if this is true, then it's quite disturbing.




Internet enthusiasts and propaganda espousing the possibilities of the internet have always emphasised its 'freeing' potential:- promising a place of escape, from 'reality', from routine daily life, and from virtually all conventional societal roles; including, of course, gender roles. But if what the 16-year-old website contributer interviewed in the article says about why girls are more active online is true, and “girls like to help with other people’s problems or questions, [in order to be] kind of, like, motherly, to everybody" then this vision is in trouble.

If her view is shared, then not only are all female babies born instant mothers (in other words, destined always, inevitably, without question, for motherhood, and never allowed to be anything other, even in childhood), but all online social networking does, or is for, is to perpetuate gender roles and stereotypes. We are all still men and women online - men and mothers - men and sex objects - and we have not deviated from any of the normalised models of gender. The web is a trap... its net is tightening...



I would like to believe this isn't the case. I have never believed it before. Perhaps I have what is now an old fashioned 90s view of what forms of liberation the internet could offer society: I believed identities could shift and merge and transform in cyberspace. But when I was looking for images for this post and, inspired by the title the New York Times had given its article's subjects, I googled 'cyber girl', all I was presented with was page upon page of porn. According to the majority of web content creators, 'cyber girls' are not girls who blog, or network, or write content, or create web pages, 'cyber girls' are sexualised images of women you can access digitally. And that's all. So much for gender liberation in cyberspace!


(I picked a tame one!)

Apart from the small image taken from the New York Times article itself, these are the only non-pornographic 'cyber girl' images I found:





Technorati Tags:
fisher price freedom, myspace, beebo, facebook, cyber girls, new york times, sticky web, phishing net, gender, online identities, RIP my so high hopes for gender equality in cyberspace

when pop princesses pop

With the return of Britney’s father to ‘take legal control of her life’, the Guardian raises this question:

"Is it likely that a father would have dared proceed in the same way with an adult son and received such ready acquiescence from the courts and a good part of the media? No fathers have appeared to take legal charge of the countless male pill-popping pop stars whose language and behaviour are less than clean and who live out some of the wildest dreams of the adult children we all sometimes are. But women, it seems, like their Victorian great-grandmothers, still need to be taken in hand and charged with madness".

So her father has been officially and legally promoted to Custodian, Controller, Creator, oh sorry, I mean, ‘Conservator’. Britney has been without a patriarch. Clearly that has been the problem all along! Her descent into madness, the loss of her children, and the journey into wilderness, all happened because she has been deprived the solid guidance of strong man – apparently her disparate catalogue of boyfriends/husbands were not man enough… perhaps because they took her away from the father. He, it would seem, has already been forgiven for whatever part he played in pushing his offspring towards the stardom that ensured the possibility of her demise. That doesn’t matter now, because it has been decided by the Law of the State that she needs him once more. We can all breathe a sigh of relief now because the Father has Returned to take his daughter in hand (along with her assets – the financial ones, that is – well… we’d hope!).



There are stages towards a societal diagnosis of madness: the first is to slip from a squeaky clean, squeaky cute, virginal mouseketeer...



...into a slightly slutty young woman.



The second is to become a mother and then seem to have no clue what to do with the babies once you have them. How dare any woman – especially one in the public eye – defile the iconic Sanctity of Motherhood – the Sacred Mother cannot also be seen to be a slut.



She must be in control of herself, in control of her body, in control of her hetero-monogamous relationship with one, controlled, male, and in control of her role as mother of her children. Britney is in a wilderness created by an utter lack of control. When a much-(and intensively)-watched female celebrity breaks all the rules, we, her spectators and judges, feel righteously vilified in reaching our verdicts, making our diagnoses, and then documenting them in Heat magazine: our reliable weekly archive of female-celebrity malaise, demise and maladies… Ever attentive to the first signs of so-called madness… Lying in wait for the ones who clearly need reigning in… It’s a public service! I’m sure Amy Winehouse would think so…



Technorati Tags:
pop princess, britney spears, amy winehouse, why doesn't pete doherty's dad come to collect him, men must be having a good time, women must be mad, boys will be boys, girls will be insane, the woman in white is back to black, the return of the father, custodian, conservatorship

equal representation, not sexual division

David Cameron has pledged to give a third of jobs in his first government to women. Positive discrimination has never been particularly popular. It's sometimes been deemed anti-, not pro-, equality. The Tory MP for Shipley, said: 'If you believe in true equality, which I do, then it should be irrelevant what somebody's gender should be'.

Yes, indeed, it should be irrelevant what somebody's gender is... But if gender is an irrelevant factor of employment, why then are there so few women in parliament?? (I read somewhere last year that there are more people called David in the Tory Party than women!) Clearly gender is not irrelevant.



There is this hysteria surrounding positive discrimination that always follows this argument: positive discrimination will result in people gaining positions they are not qualified for; while those more qualified miss out. It is just another demonstration of prejudice to assume that any women applying for parliamentary places are less qualified than their male contemporaries and less deserving of the post. The point of raising the issue of unbalanced gender representation in parliament and other areas of politics is to expose how discrimination has prevented equally qualified women from gaining the same recognition and prestige as men. They have missed out not because they are less qualified, but because they are women. Cameron is intending to try to counter this by employing them because they are women.

But some of his logic is worrying: he wants more female politicians so that they can 'influence decisions affecting women's lives', devising policies 'that matter to female voters.' Women do not necessarily support female politicians, and to hand over policies deemed as 'women's issues' to women parliamentarians could effectively exclude them from authority on other subjects. If male politicians are dis-involved in so-called 'women's issues', then female politicians may be dis-involved from non-women's-issues.

Separating politics in this way can orchestrate the separation of society into male and female: women have their 'women's issues' which are dealt with by female politicians. Men have their issues dealt with by male politicians. I will not be haremised in this way. Of course there must be equal representation of men and women in parliament (if there has to be a government at all, which is perhaps the real question), but not so as they can preside over a divided society. They must co-operate equally, so that we can be a society of humans, and not forever, dis-unitedly , gendered.

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david cameron, tory party, power is the problem, and government isn't the answer, equal representation, women in parliament

Fashion Fascism

Recently the fashion catwalks have been walked by markedly skinnier men. If I was writing about female models, this wouldn’t be news! The apparent need for emaciated women in modelling has long been documented.



But traditionally, throughout the history of modelling, men have been allowed to keep their recognisably masculine form. In contrast, women are expected to be over average in height, under average in weight and more or less devoid of any notable breasts, buttocks, and hips:- the 3 usual signifiers of the female human form. Yes, male models have to look good – fit, healthy, more muscular etc. – and they definitely cannot be overweight. But they’ve never been required to be underweight.



In a New York Times article about the new skinny male models, one such model said that fashion designers “are looking for some kind of androgyne”. But what kind? For me, this poses 5 main questions:



1. Why is androgynous synonymous with skinny?
2. Why is fashion insistent upon skinniness, and somehow in conversation with the androgyne?
3. Why (with a few notable exceptions, such as David Bowie, for example) has it been mostly up to women, until now, to provide the androgyne model, and not men?
4. How has it been, that in the heteronormative set up or performance of modelling and fashion (especially on adverts) there is, instead of a model of Man and Woman, the model of Man and Androgyne?
5. Why has all that changed now and man has been merged into the expanded boundaries of the androgyne?



1) This is by no means a comprehensive response! This is only what I think! Briefly, the Human Body model—the figure of the human that you’ll see in medical/biology books, history books about Primitive “Man” and evolution—the human figure that you’ll see on traffic lights and road signs—is a male body. This is the normative body—the normalised body—the body without a distinctive sex. Any alterations to that body—the addition of breasts and hips especially—change that normalised, standardised, sexless body into a female body. It’s the addition of extra flesh that changes the body from an indistinct (male) body into a sexed (female) body. Therefore, in order to achieve sexlessness—something closer to the androgynous body—flesh (and as much of it as possible) must be removed (or a degree of recognisable ‘maleness’ added to female bodies, and vice versa).



2) Quite honestly—I don’t know! Answers on a postcard (or in the comments box) please! Just to surmise that fashion hates women, or fashion hates the body, isn’t enough. Why does it hate them? Doesn’t it depend upon them? And if fashion is art—or a form of—shouldn’t it be celebrating the diversity, the endless possibilities, presented by the human physical form? Instead of constantly wheeling out exactly the same figure on a perpetual catwalk-conveyor-belt? Perhaps it’s arguable that because fashion must fight for its right to be considered serious art, in an effort to present itself—to clearly project itself into social visibility and awareness—it must be able to, literally, stand alone: in effect, standing out and away from the human body presenting (and enabling) the art. So then the human must be invisible (or maybe indecipherable)—the art must be all that is seen—the human, almost non-existent. If the body is to be this skinny, then it was surely inevitable that it would turn to the androgyne for the modelling of its clothes.



3) If the androgynous body has always been closer to the male human’s than the female’s, wouldn’t it have made more sense for the man to provide it when needed, rather than fashion insisting upon an inexhaustible supply of androgynous-looking women? Like all these questions, answering this properly really requires lengthy analysis and research. This particular question especially needs a thorough look at the history of fashion and the point at which focus on women’s fashion overtook the focus on men’s (when both had been originally equal—especially during the Regency period), and how this has combined with the obsession with the androgynous body (briefly explained above) to form an industry reliant upon a relentless factory-line of dressed up (or dressed down!) androgynous female (living) mannequins.



Equation: contemporary fashion is more excited by women’s fashion than men’s + for fashion to be an art, the enabler must be seen to be unseen = female androgynes.



4) In other words, why have men been allowed to be men, while women are not allowed to be women—and what affect has this had on heteronormative performance when the man’s partner on the catwalk (or the advert or photo shoot) is a female-ish androgyne and not an actual woman? An answer to the first: the man, in the absence of breasts, large buttocks and hips, is closer to the androgynous body in his “natural” male form than the woman, and is therefore allowed to keep his extra flesh, as it doesn’t deviate from the androgynous form as much as the woman’s extra flesh does. An answer to the second: In my opinion: clearly defining the male body, while under-defining (undermining) and diminishing the female body serves to exert, underline, project and visibly bolster the male body. So his product (fashion, hair products, aftershave etc.) appeals to men because the model’s masculinity is established—its exaggerated certainty stamped on the picture—in comparison with the fading, diminished female. So his product, or her product, appeals to women because the model’s faded, diminished presence creates a space onto which women can project their own bodies, in order to get close to the ideal(ised) male body and, if not become the object of his attention and gaze, then become the foil to his sexuality that affirms her own: she is positively female against his positively male!



5) Now the big question: why has all this apparently changed? It could be this: our society has turned its attention once more to male fashion, perhaps for the first time in decades: it now takes an equal interest in the fashions and other aesthetics of men as it has of women; thus requiring the diminishment of the male body in order for male fashion to stand alone in art form. The intensified focus on men’s fashion, its exaggeration and exploration, and the layering of clothing onto the juxtaposition of a diminishing figure, is shaving off the flesh of men as it has shaved off the flesh of women.



I’d like to think it was for this reason: the female-ised androgyne has been so long alone, so long required to take sexual fulfilment from a body that is wrong in shape and form for her, so mismatched and unequal in relations, a body that is more than her, that her mating call of romantic longing has been answered; and a sexual partner been made-to-measure—prêt-à-porter—and is ready to wear!



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fashion hates bodies, fashionism, fashion fascism, skinny male models, the products of the body, androgynous, the art of skin and bones