Nick Griffin and Rape Scaremongering

So... long time, no post. Unfortunately life got in the way a bit (moving flat, job searching and the wee matter of a 15,000 word Masters dissertation), but I've been biding my time waiting for something to make me seethe.

That time is now.

Over the past few months there have been repeated protests in Midlothian about the housing of convicted violent rapist Robert Greens, otherwise known as the Da Vinci rapist because he attacked a Dutch student near Rosslyn Chapel, one of the locations for the book.

After his release from prison, no other local authority in the UK would take him, so Midlothian has been forced to house him. Local people have been up in arms about the matter and have undertaken a number of protests, including marching outside the house and staging a go-slow in the centre of Dalkeith to slow traffic.

Now since this furore began, my main reaction has been one of discomfort. I'm uncomfortable with the fact that the protesters have placed so much media attention on this man, because it distorts the perception of rape. This man is dangerous because he perfectly fits the stereotype of 'real rape'. He attacked a young victim, who was a stranger to him, and used considerable violence. I'm not denigrating the victim's experience - witnesses who found her walking startled along a road thought she had been in a car crash. The crime was repellent. However, by warning about the dangers of this man - who we know is capable of rape and assault - is likely to underplay the dangers of the majority of rapists who are much more subtle in their methods. I respect the locals' right to protest, but I worry about the message they are sending.

Then the BNP heard about the protests and decided to get in on the act. Nick Griffin made the journey North to join in but there was, as it were, a stooshie and the BNP were forced to leave. Commenting on the 'ugly scenes', Griffin said:

I hope the people who are protesting us feel ashamed and if their daughter or granddaughter is raped next - maybe they would change their minds.

Wow. There is so much wrong with this statement that my head feels as if it will implode. This is probably a good time for numbers.

1) This sounds pretty threatening. If Griffin isn't suggesting the BNP might rape these women then he is certainly suggesting that he wouldn't mind if someone else did. 'Cos then obviously we'd all turn to those bastions of morality for protection (even though there have been a number of BNP members and representatives charged with sex offences recently).

2) As my good friend Camilla has pointed out, Griffin is simply using this as a way to positively publicise the BNP rather than show solidarity with those protesting. He knows that his presence is controversial and liable to draw attention away from the matter at hand, but chose to rock up anyway. Given his response, he certainly doesn't seem to care about the welfare of the victim or the locals protesting.

3) Perhaps this sounds pedantic, but rape myths get my back up like nothing else. Only women are raped, and young women at that - and we all need to be protected by big, bad Nick and his BNP cronies. Urgh.

I'm sure there's more that will enrage me about this statement, but for now I have that dissertation to be getting on with...

But for now, needless to say - Nick Griffin has been banished to my own personal hellfire.

The Furies of Hell... As Usual

This week, I came across this intriguing article on Women's Views on News, which references this jaw-dropping article in the Daily Mail. As some may be boycotting the DM, I will quote pertinent paragraphs to save you the trouble (always happy to help!)

The context is as follows: the actor Dennis Waterman has admitted hitting his ex-wife Rula Lenska during his marriage. Carol Sarler thinks he's an idiot, which is grand. I also think he's an idiot.

However, he is "a double idiot for admitting it so may years after their divorce". After all, "Waterman should have known, then, that the Furies of Hell would be unleashed". Wow, surely the inversion of that is to say that if Waterman was to keep this a secret - despite the fact that it would make Lenska's repeated assertions of violence seem like a lie - then that would be preferable, because heaven forfend the Furies of Hell (which, according to the article, include the domestic violence charity Refuge(!))

Sarler's snarky reference to the fact that a high profile domestic violence charity was quick ("First out of the traps, as usual") and 'appalled' is utterly derogatory, regardless of her claim that she agrees with them.

Yet, she only agrees that "[t]here can never be any reasoned excuse for brute force". Evidently there are numerous reasoned excuses for sexual and mental violence in a relationship.

She then claims that, not only is there a difference between 'beaten' and 'hit', but that many couples work this into the framework of their relationships. Wow, you may say, but our good friend Sarler has an anecdotal story to back her up.

Her friend Jean provoked (yep, provoked...) three men to slap her. But it's OK, because Jean told her she wouldn't have put up with "a proper beating", but "with a bit of a slap, at least you know who wears the trousers, don't you?"

Well, quite.

Here she invokes the insight of Waterman once more when he claims that:

"The problem with strong, intelligent women, is they can argue, well. If you're not bright enough to do it with words... I lashed out... It can happen."

Evidently he isn't bright enough to do much, but that's beside the point. Sarler gives us some dodgy sounding wisdom from a psychiatrist who has done research in refuges, where most women had an IQ at least 10 points higher than their partner, ad can therefore win verbal arguments. But (for there must always be a but):

"The trouble is, said the psychiatrist (while admitting that it's not exactly a popular thing to point out), some of them, as with Jean, would prefer not to win." Because winning is unfeminine, and (brace yourself, seriously I winced so hard I was hoping that the wind wouldn't change...) "However much goading it takes, they'd rather be slapped than victorious. When push - quite literally - comes to shove, these women prefer to have a dominant man to whom they might refer as an authority figure."

So, women are manipulating men to beat them, but why? In her best pseudo-intellectual dangerous theorising tone, Sarler informs us that, for these women "the moral high ground is instantly theirs", and further, there are men who seek out these 'aggressive' women because they "love a bit of a tussle". Think of "the highly-charged sex involved in 'making up' afterwards". Well that must be some highly charged sex, or, y'know, frequently rape...

So there you have it, intelligent women feel unfeminine when they win arguments, so deliberately goad their partners into hitting them (but not beating, because we can indulge in a touch of victim blaming, after all "at the first sign of the first raised fist, sensible women do what sensible women have always done: they walk away"). Oh, and once the beating, sorry, hitting, has occurred, women get the moral high ground and some "highly-charged" make-up sex.

Domestic violence: a win-win.

Rape Culture: A Definition

This week, my good friend Camilla (who incidentally has a fantastic blog over here) pointed me towards this article, which got me thinking.

I appreciate the writer's thoughts on the topic, and I absolutely agree that we do need to question our attitude towards rape when it focuses on the victims rather than the perpetrators. However, her argument doesn't quite hit the mark for me - to replace the term 'rape culture' with 'rapist's culture', as she seems to be suggesting, is actually a step in the wrong direction.

To be raped can sometimes seem almost ephemeral, and it is often important to reify the relationship by making the connection that one was raped by x. One doesn't simply become the victim of rape, someone needs to make the decision to rape. This isn't reiterated often enough, and it needs to be. It needs to be, because until we do, society makes the attitude that a victim should feel shame more than a perpetrator, acceptable.

But that brings me to the crux of the definition I propound of 'rape culture': it is about society. Rape culture is the state of society which engages in slut shaming, victim blaming, and propagating rape myths. Rape culture is telling victims that they have to forget that they have been raped. Rape culture is the belittling of rape in jokes. Rape culture is the use of the word 'frape'.

Rape culture is where we let rape happen. We LET rape happen.

The majority of people don't rape, but many of them perpetuate a culture where rape is allowed to happen.

Rape culture is a society which is complicit in the perpetuation of rape.

Why Having a Vagina is a Dangerous Job

I've blogged before about the 'f-word' (which can be found here). A word which sends chills down the spine of young women across Britain, setting teeth on edge and eliciting vehement denials of ever using it themselves. The f word is, of course, feminism.

Tomorrow is International Women's Day, a time where we look back at the successes won for women, and when we look ahead to the long struggles which we face to win others.

There are so, so many areas where we need to focus attention: politics, health inequalities, distribution of resources, lack of education and unfair divisions of labour are just the start. And it all comes down to vaginas.

Having a vagina makes you irrational, incapable of leadership, incompetent in dealing with your own financial affairs and futile to teach. A pretty big ask of any formation of skin, I say.

Having a vagina is dangerous. Having a clitoris may be the basis for the breakdown of society. Seriously. In some countries, the clitoris, as an organ designed purely for pleasure, has to be removed - cut, sliced, torn - and sometimes even more to curb rampant female sexuality. Without these measures, women will indulge in the sex they want to have and endanger patriarchal lineages.

Having a vagina is dangerous. It makes you the bearer of life, often whether you want to be or not. Did you know that 100% of those who had abortions last year had a vagina? If all those baby murderers had vaginas then, y'know, it's OK to stop their access to the contraception which prevents women from putting their lives in danger by going through pregnancy. (Although aspirin between the knees is a win-win situation!)

Talking of endangered lives - having a vagina is dangerous. Every minute a woman dies in childbirth. Women across the globe have little or no access to contraception, which means that births are not spaced out. The complications which can arise from your body having gone through numerous pregnancies and births in a very short space of time can be fatal. Add to this the fact that obstetrics and gynaecology are often ignored medical specialisms, after all, women are MADE FOR CHILDBIRTH, and it is unsurprising that women are dying.

Having a vagina is dangerous. The vast majority of rape victims are women, subjected to intimate violence in an attempt to desecrate their bodies. As a demonstration of power over a woman's body, vaginal rape takes on a particular character when considered in the context of war: the possibility that women will be forced to carry a child borne of violence has led to women being urged to commit suicide rather than bring further dishonour on her (male) relatives.

Having a vagina is dangerous. Violence against women causes more deaths and disabilities for women aged 15-44 across the world than cancer, malaria, car crashes and war. Whilst some of the aspects I've talked about have particular significance in (usually) foreign lands, this is one of the most consistent areas of danger for women. Developed or developing, women in all countries are subject to this.

Having a vagina is a dangerous job, and that is why I continue to call myself a feminist and will continue to do so until there is no need to fight for our rights anymore.

Why I am a Terrible Person...

Over the past week or so, I've come to realise I'm a terrible person. I give you this as a way of cleansing the soul.

Last week, I was feeling a bit ill but decided to power on through and go into the lab anyway. An hour later and I realised that actually this was a really bad idea and I should curl up on the sofa with a cup of tea. So, feeling a bit rubbish, I embarked on my walk home. And that is where it started...

As I passed the main library, my mood dropped as I realised I'd need to run the gauntlet of charity baking stands.

I don't mind a charity baking stand.

I begin to get a bit snarked off with two.

Three is beyond the pail.

Four - FOUR - makes my fists clench as I need to dodge numerous false smiles and iffily decorated cupcakes in order to get past.

That day, my friends, was a four stall day. So it was already looking bad. But even worse, there were numerous people accompanying said stands. This upsets me as a walk past which would normally take about 30 steps becomes 380 million steps past people not looking where they are going but still moving around. [An aside - who does that?! Your head faces the general direction in which you are going when moving about in a populated area, it's generally accepted etiquette. Hmph.]

But the cakes are for charity, so being the charitable kind of lass I am, I began the side-stepping without grumbling [audibly, anyway].

Which is very nice. Until the person you are dodging decides to jump in front of you.

WHY?! Why would you do that?! Yes, I wear glasses. But that doesn't mean that my peripheral vision doesn't stretch two whole feet to the stands of cakes groaning under the weight of poorly decorated cakes which I'm pretty sure have a higher than average incidence of salmonella. (Firstly, student kitchens aren't universally renowned for cleanliness. Secondly, your cakes are outside. In Scotland. In February. For hours. Eww.)

If I wanted a salmonella cake, I would have taken a moment to stop at one of the numerous cake-offering stalls surrounding me. I can see them. I know if I want to buy a cake, I go and ask someone manning the stall if I can buy a cake. Simple economic practice. What I don't need is for someone to leap in front of me on a cheeriness scale of 11 to point this out.

What I want to do is gouge your eyes out with a rusty spoon. Then feed them to you.

Or we could live happily if you get out of my way and let me home to rest for a cup of tea.

Oh charity baker, this time I managed to keep this soliloquy of venom internal. Let us both hope there is no next time.

[On another note, the word 'scrobble' really annoys me. Gah, another word on the list of things that make me irrationally angry.]

The Willful Ignorance of Underfunding RE

[This may be a bit befuddled - I'm a wee bit ill!]

Have you ever felt the need to roll your eyes and utter such joyous phrases as "you're an ignorant muppet hell-bent on proselytising about how you don't want to be proselytised to" or "how long did it take you to come up with that clever little sarcastic comment demonstrating how free thinking you are (which is suspiciously similar to every other comment)"?

I do.

And when times like these strike, there is only one place where such solace can be found - the Guardian Faith Section. It is a bastion of idiocy in which one can delight in rolling one's eyes right to the back of their head and then for a few more spins. Ahhh.

But occasionally, these comments appear elsewhere. A bit like when you find that tenner you'd forgotten about at the bottom of your handbag, in amongst the 20 million receipts. And today's post is brought to you from such a time...

As I was innocently reading the Guardian website this evening, I stumbled across this article. It details the struggle of a former RE teacher to fund the basics in her subject, and provides an interesting insight into how RE is viewed by those in charge of the purse strings. In summary, it was worth less than £1 per pupil per year in her school.

Yet this sum is decried as "£1 too much". Evidently apart from the commenter's horrific spelling in the rest of his/her post, s/he has no grasp of numbers since the article explicitly states that it is less than £1 which is spent. But pointing that out would be facetious of me.

Other comments claim it is a pity that there are any RE teachers left, and an assertion that the money would be better spent in science. I've already touched on the science vs humanities debate on the blog, but in short, such an argument is reductive at best.

Yet it all comes down to how worthwhile we consider RE (and various permutations) to be. It is hardly surprising, that as a Religious Studies graduate I believe RE to be invaluable. Indeed, I genuinely can't understand how anyone could argue otherwise.

We live in a world shaped by religion, even if we live in the secular bubble of those denizens of the Faith comment threads. They may argue until they are blue in the face that religion does not and should not have any place in their lives, but they encounter the influence of religions and beliefs daily (and I'm not even getting into the 'atheism as religion' debate here). By seeking to ridicule and belittle religion, these people engage with belief on a fundamental level: choosing whether, and how, to believe. For many kids, the only place they will gain the tools to embark on this debate is in RE. This is especially true as the number of families who can be described as 'non-religious' or 'secular' (particularly those who don't really choose any position but ignore the present of religion) increase. It is easy to ignore religion in Britain, if you are willing to ignore debates on faith schools, atheist bus campaigns, Qur'an burning, abortion limits, hijabs, continuing campaigns on LGBT rights, equality of women, religious festivals, multiculturalism, stem cell research, religious symbols in public places, and the justifications of wars, to name but a few particularly pertinent topics.

But to ignore religion on a world stage is willful ignorance.

To 'educate' a generation of pupils at less than a pound each is to bring up our next generations of politicians, generals, businesspeople, teacher, holidaymakers etc without vital knowledge.

And worst of all, we will have no-one with enough knowledge to troll the Guardian faith pages.

2011: Resolutions and Reads

Happy new year! As is traditional, if unoriginal, one should recap on the previous year, so here goes...

In terms of resolutions, I tend to set challenges. For 2011 I wanted to:

1) Swim a mile in under half an hour

I did it! I was very, very pleased with myself afterwards. And tired. Really rather tired.

2) Not wear trousers to work for an entire year

A bit of a strange one, but I was sick of the trauma of trying to find trousers long enough/belts/hitching them up/trousers that were not the horrific black of school trousers so I wondered if I could go one year without trousers, whatever the weather. Turns out I am a convert. They are eminently more practical and just generally nicer.

3) The big one - read 40 books in a year

This target changed a few times. From 40 it became 52, then 60, then 65. Final total was 68. I had a wee look at some statistics on Shelfari yesterday, and found that I had read 20,210 pages during the year. Ratings wise, the list is as follows:

1) Dante's Inferno - Dante Alighieri (5/5)
2) A History of God - Karen Armstrong (3/5)
3) The Book of Certainty: The Sufi Doctrine of Faith, Vision and Gnosis - Abu Bakr Siraj al-Din (4/5)
4) A Good Hanging - Ian Rankin (3/5)
5) Islam: A Short History - Karen Armstrong (4/5)
6) Lady Chatterley's Lover - D.H. Lawrence (5/5)
7) The Falls - Ian Rankin (3/5)
8) Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert (4/5)
9) The Communist Manifesto - Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (4/5)
10) The Book of Mrs Noah - Michele Roberts (5/5)
11) The Plumed Serpent - D.H. Lawerence (4/5)
12) Case Histories - Kate Atkinson (3/5)
13) Sexual Ethics and Islam: Feminist Reflections on Qur'an, Hadith and Jurisprudence - Kecia Ali (5/5)
14) The Wise Virgin: The Missing Link Between Men and Women - Annie Wilson (1/5)
15) A Dangerous Delight: Women and Power in the Church - Monica Furlong (1/5)
16) Women in Love - D.H. Lawrence (4/5)
17) One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (5/5)
18) Kidnapped - Robert Louis Stevenson (3/5)
19) Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law - Catharine A. McKinnon (5/5)
20) Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S. Thompson (4/5)
21) Mrs Dalloway - Virginia Woolf (4/5)
22) Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah - Olivier Roy (4/5)
23) The Virgin and the Gipsy - D.H. Lawrence (4/5)
24) Metamorphosis and Other Stories - Franz Kafka (5/5)
25) Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (5/5)
26) The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy (5/5)
27) A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini (5/5)
28) The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini (5/5)
29) The Reluctant Fundamentalist - Mohsin Hamid (3/5)
30) Tortilla Flat - John Steinbeck (4/5)
31) Sons and Lovers - D.H. Lawrence (3/5)
32) Lanark: A Life in 4 Books - Alasdair Gray (5/5)
33) The Yellow Wall-Paper, Herland, and Selected Writings - Charlotte Perkins Gilman (5/5)
34) BUtterfield 8 - John O'Hara (5/5)
35) Jamaica Inn - Daphne du Maurier (4/5)
36) Because I am a Girl - Tim Butcher, Xiaolu Guo, Joanne Harris, Kathy Lette, Deborah Moggach, Marie Phillips, Subhadra Belbase & Irvine Welsh (5/5)
37) Crome Yellow - Aldous Huxley (3/5)
38) Three Short Novels: Heart of Darkness/Youth/Typhoon - Joseph Conrad (2/5)
39) The Castle - Franz Kafka (3/5)
40) The Nice and the Good - Iris Murdoch (4/5)
41) One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey (5/5)
42) Hungry Hill - Daphne du Maurier (3/5)
43) Finding Dad - Daniel Lee (5/5)
44) The Rainbow - D.H. Lawrence (3/5)
45) Hotel World - Ali Smith (5/5)
46) The Accidental - Ali Smith (5/5)
47) On the Road - Jack Kerouac (2/5)
48) Sexing the Cherry - Jeanette Winterson (5/5)
49) Girls of Riyadh - Rajaa Alsanea(3/5)
50) Women of Algiers in their Apartment - Assia Djebar (5/5)
51) Feminist Theory and the Body - A Reader - Ed. Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick (5/5)
52) Take a Girl Like You - Kingsley Amis (1/5)
53) Marriage and Sexuality in Islam: A Translation of al-Ghazali's Book on the Etiquette of Marriage fro the Ihya - al-Ghazali, translated by Madelain Farah (3/5)
54) The Rape of Lucrece - William Shakespeare (3/5)
55) A Passage to India - E.M. Forster (3/5)
56) Bodies That Matter - Judith Butler (4/5
57) Gender Trouble - Judith Butler (5/5)
58) The History of Sexuality (Volume 1): An Introduction - Michel Foucault (5/5)
59) Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud - Thomas Laqueur (3/5)
60) Foucault: A Very Short Introduction - Gary Gutting(3/5)
61) Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction - Catherine Belsey (3/5)
62) The History of Sexuality (Volume 2): The Use of Pleasure - Michel Foucault (3/5)
63) Honor - Frank Henderson Stewart (4/5)
64) My Antonia - Willa Cather (3/5)
65) Persopolis - Marjane Satrapi (5/5)
66) My Cousin Rachel - Daphne du Maurier (4/5)
67) Dracula - Bram Stoker (4/5)
68) Oedipus Trilogy - Sophocles (4/5)

Favourites were Sexing the Cherry, Persepolis, A Thousand Splendid Suns, Lanark and Lolita.

Least favourite was Take A Girl Like You because of the ending.

*spoiler alert*

The basic plotline - a girl who was unsure as to whether she wished to lose her virginity or not, wasn't brilliant, but the fact that the ending, in which she awakes in a drunken stupor to find her boyfriend having sex with her and her reaction is 'oh well, at least that's it done with', and no-one seems to see that it is rape, makes my blood boil.

*and done*

For 2012, I am going to keep a 40 book target, with an added caveat of at least 5 books published this millennium, and a 50/50 split between fiction and non-fiction.

Also, I want to swim an iron man distance (2.4 miles) in a single session.

Check back in 2013 (hopefully) for the results.

Anyway - happy New Year to you and yours!