This, too, is a feminist act

(Content notes for rape and rape culture, gendered violence, all sorts of fun examples of patriarchy at its worst. Yeah, sorry. Hopefully I’ll have a lighter, fluffier post soon, but first allow me to talk about why the light-and-fluffy posts matter…)

“What happened to your blog?” my mother asks me. “I used to enjoy reading it.”
“Really?” I say. “I thought it would be too feminist for your tastes.”
“I didn’t think it was feminist,” she replies. “Well, I suppose there was that one post about that woman in Texas….

For the record, “that woman in Texas” would be gubernatorial candidate and filibustering hero Wendy Davis. She definitely qualifies for the title “Feminist Icon”, and the post I wrote about her centred around the need for safe, legal, accessible abortion. This is, to state the blindingly obvious, something of a major feminist issue. We’re talking about a situation where women’s lives hang in the balance.

But you know what? Something doesn’t have to be a literal manner of life or death before it becomes a feminist issue. It just has to involve a situation wherein some people have more unearned privilege than others. When we’re talking about issues that can cause death and debilitation – things like unsafe abortions, or domestic violence, or FGM – that privilege disparity is not only vital to address, it also tends to be a lot simpler to spot. It’s easy to find someone who agrees that these things are terrible and should be stopped. It’s somewhat harder to find this agreement when talking about the context in which these things occur.

Because these horrors do not exist in a vacuum. Nor is there a dichotomy between the “real” feminist issues like these, and “distractions” like examining gender sterotyping in videogames, or picking apart the problematic messages in a well-known book series, or pointing out how rape jokes permeate our culture, because these things are not distractions at all. They’re important parts of the picture.* The jokes which are the tip of the rape culture iceberg, normalising an act of horrendous brutality and twisting our perceptions of it until it’s seen as just a bit of fun, a crime so easily dismissed with boys-will-be-boys and she-wanted-it-really arguments. Easy even to erase the victim entirely, her pain irrelevant in comparison with the perpetrator’s gratification: take the ex-coworker of mine whose response to news of a potential rape was not “was she okay?” but “was she hot?” The games that reinforce the idea of women as trophies to be won. The character design choices that present “female” as a complete personality, as though that’s all there is to a woman. As though we’re all interchangeable – an attitude I’ve sadly encountered in real life, where the flaws of Stereotypical Woman are assumed to be flaws shared by all womankind. All women are bossy, so their requests should be treated as onerous.** Women never say what they mean, so when she tells you to stop, she really wants you to carry on.*** Women are irrational and need a nice logical man (or several) to make their decisions for them. Like a room full of men voting on a woman’s right to bodily autonomy. Like a woman’s male partner demanding that he be allowed to control her finances, her clothing, how and with whom she spends her time… and be allowed to dole out punishment if she disobeys.

I’m not saying that any one sexist comment, or story, or game, directly causes rape or violence against women or anything like that. But they are both symptoms and reinforcers of the culture in which these things occur. Even if they seem harmless in isolation: the reality is that nothing exists in isolation, and we need to look at the bigger picture. No single drop of water causes the devastating flood, but they all play a part.

So when I talk about pink covers with headless girls on them, I’m talking about one example of a much wider system that pressurises people of all genders to stay within their rigidly-defined Gender Boxes. When I talk about hunting for protagonists outside the “straight white male” demographic, I’m talking about one example of a culture in which the experiences of straight white men are seen as more worthy of attention and accolades. When I talk about the team behind Doctor Who casting yet another white man as their title character, I’m talking about one example of a world that affords fewer opportunities to women and people of colour. All of these add up to the necessary-and-sufficient condition for “feminist issue” which I mentioned above: an imbalance of unearned privilege.**** And when I point out this imbalance, or go up to publishing industry professionals and question the segregation of “girl books”, or make sure my brother has access to stories of people less privileged than him, those are feminist acts.

So let me be entirely clear on what I’m doing here. I’m talking about matters of disparity. I’m talking about action taken to redress these matters. These things might not always be of the same magnitude as the obvious “big feminist issues”, but that doesn’t change the fact that they exist on the same spectrum. So yes, this blog is feminist. And I’m proud of that fact.

 

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* And the content creators I just linked to all have my deepest respect. If I can grow up to be half as awesome as these women, I’ll be very satisfied.

** Happened to me several times. The example that most sticks out in my memory was probably a work situation in which a male co-worker asked me to make him some tea, then accused me of being “bossy” when I pointed out that I was in the middle of an important task and he was capable of making it himself.

*** Also happened to me, although it could have been much worse. He listened to “stop” the second time (and expressed surprise when I realised I actually meant it). I’m aware there are men out there who don’t. I was lucky.

**** You may note that I don’t say anything about this imbalance necessarily aligning with gender, and that several of my examples include race as a factor, while the posts I’ve linked to also touch on weight, disability status and sexuality, to name a few. Once again, examining the wider picture is important here: the disadvantages affecting women do not exist in isolation from those affecting other groups, a fact which becomes particularly obvious when you consider that these other groups also contain women. Therefore, now and always, My Feminism Will Be Intersectional Or It Will Be Bullshit.

Giving the gift of worlds

After my last blog post, I got talking with my mother about the gendering of books and the pressures on boys to avoid “girl things”. See, I have a little brother. Well, actually I have multiple little brothers, so we’ll call this one Brother 3. Brother 3’s in his first year of secondary school at the moment – 11 years old. He used to proudly read books branded as girly, because he enjoyed them. He proudly did all sorts of stereotypically-feminine things, like being the only boy in his school’s dance club, and I was glad to see him choosing his interests on the basis of what made him happy, rather than on the basis of what society told him boys should be interested in.

He doesn’t read so much any more. Some of this may be down to having other distractions (computers, game consoles, a phone), but some of it may be down to the fact that as he gets older, he’s feeling more pressure to conform to expectations of what boys “should” be like. Mum claims that he’s now “worried that he’ll be laughed at for reading certain books”, something which wouldn’t have bothered him a few years ago. Essentially this is yet another example of how gendered books are bad for everyone: they pigeonhole girls while shutting boys out.

So, what would happen if other people couldn’t see the covers? Obviously this wouldn’t fix all the problems with the gendered-books phenomenon: part of the issue is that people really are unwilling to buy books that are marketed as Not For Them. But I suspect another part is simply unwillingness to be seen with a book marked as not for your group: there can be pretty serious social consequences to non-conformity, and a decent read isn’t necessarily worth these consequences.

This, I think, is one of the great things about the rise of ebooks in recent years. Using an e-reader removes others’ ability to see and judge what you’re reading. It might give you the freedom to read something that you’d otherwise avoid out of social unacceptability. Of course, this doesn’t just apply if you’re a boy who wants to read female-authored books: it also improves freedom of reading for LGBT folk who aren’t yet out of the closet, or kids in certain religious environments who want to learn about evolution, or those in anti-religious environments who want to learn about religion, or anyone who’s ever been made to feel ashamed for their interests or identity.

And freedom of reading doesn’t just give you a better choice of entertainment media. It opens up worlds. Non-fiction opens up the world we live in, teaching us more about our surroundings. Fiction opens countless others. It lets you climb inside the head of somebody else and see the universe through their eyes for a while. If the character in question resembles you, it can make you feel less isolated. If they don’t, you gain understanding and empathy for people whose experiences of life are entirely different from your own.

I want my brother to have access to those worlds; as many of them as he possibly can. So, for his 12^th birthday, I’m buying him a Kindle. I’m removing one of the social barriers to experiencing those worlds by making it harder for others to judge his books – and, ultimately, him – by their covers. But that’s not all I’m going to do. Before I give him the Kindle, I’m going to load it up with as many books as my present-buying budget will stretch to. I’m going to give the worlds to him.

Credit where credit is due: this idea is not my own. It comes from the brilliant Ana Mardoll, whose stealth-support approach to her niece’s coming out was to give said niece ebooks with incidental gay characters for Christmas. However, my reasons are slightly different from Ana’s. For one thing, Brother 3 hasn’t come out. Balance of probability says that he’s straight. He’s also male and white. It is not exactly hard to find fictional characters who share these attributes; they make up the vast majority of protagonists. So he doesn’t really need me to give him worlds that resemble his own: he’s got access to plenty of those already.

But you see the bit a couple of paragraphs up about characters that don’t resemble you, and how they can teach empathy? I think that’s a very important function of fiction. It’s part of the reason why boys should be reading books with female protagonists; why white people should be reading with protagonists of colour; why able-bodied people should be reading books with disabled protagonists; and so on. We should all be reading protagonists who differ from us in some of the many ways society treats as significant, but this particularly applies to people like Brother 3. He’s a straight white guy (to the best of my knowledge): the lowest difficulty setting there is. He’s also able-bodied, intelligent, and comes from a well-off family who love and support him. In other words, he’s hugely privileged in his life circumstances. And when life is set up to be that easy for you, a lot of the time, you don’t even notice.* Which can lead to you being kind of an ass – or something much worse – towards people whose lives aren’t set up so favourably, because you simply don’t understand the ways in which the world is different for them.

An excellent way to combat this phenomenon is to enter the worlds of the less privileged: read their stories and listen to their voices. But so many of the stories out there don’t let you do that. They focus on the straight white guys, endlessly propagating the myth that this uniquely privileged position is somehow the “normal” way to be, or at least the way that all heroes are. When was the last time you read a book with a non-white protagonist? A non-straight protagonist? Or, when did you last find such a protagonist in a story focused around something other than their skin colour/sexuality? Because so often, if a book does have a “minority” protagonist, it’s an Issue Book that’s almost entirely about the character’s minority status. And while having some Issue Books is a good thing, because the issues represented therein are real and affect real people, it’s massively problematic when these books become the only representation of minorities. When you find minority characters only in Issue Books, it makes it look as though simply being a hero isn’t available to Those People. Read enough books where all the complex, interesting people are straight white guys and you might just start to believe that real life works the same way.

So that’s what I want to counteract with my brother. I want to give him stories where the protagonists are dissimilar to him in some way. I want him to come to love and respect those protagonists. I know that he’s already started to do this: for example, he recently read and enjoyed the Hunger Games (which is, incidentally, an excellent example of a non-Issue Book with a minority protagonist: Katniss Everdeen is a great female character, but the story isn’t about her gender, it’s about a hero who just happens to be a woman). But I also know that one series isn’t enough, particularly in a world that’s so diverse. Yet it can be hard to find decent fiction with protagonists who don’t fit the standard privileged mould. And it does need to be decent, engaging fiction, or the whole point of the exercise fails: the reader gives up, possibly taking away the assumption that minority protagonists don’t have interesting stories.

So I’m going to end this post with a plea for recommendations. I’m looking for books that (a) have minority protagonists**, and (b) will appeal to a soon-to-be 12 year old boy who enjoys large helpings of action and/or comedy in his fiction. Whose worlds should I show him first?

 

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* And yes, I am aware that this applies to me as well as to Brother 3.

** For the purposes of this statement, I’m counting “female” as a minority despite the fact that we make up roughly 50% of the world’s population. We’re still a numerical minority from a protagonist standpoint, and in the real world, sexism means that we’re often (mis)treated in ways similar to those experienced by numerical minorities.