Charlotte Sometimes

Tag: feminism

  • On 40k Sisters of Battle Sexism

    I was inspired to write a post recently about the sexism in the look of the current range of Games Workshop figures. I wanted to analyse all the female sculpts in one post; but with just the Sisters of Battle I’ve already hit 2600 words, so I figured that I’d do the others in a second post.

    This is an attempt to analyse the range of Games Workshop female figures, simple from images of the models and the small amount of text that accompanies them on the official website (UK version, correct as of December 2016). I’m going to use a fairly standard feminist history of art approach to the sculptures (with more swearing than is acceptable in academic papers), and I will treat them as if they are works of art like any other you might find in a gallery or museum.

    Sisters of Battle Canoness

    Back Sisters of Battle Canoness

    It’s the tit armour. I’m sorry, but it’s hideous. I mean, lets just think a little about reality; if Space Marines are hyper muscular under all that armour (a pretty standard thought about Space Marines) then they most likely wouldn’t have massive tits that needed to be accommodated on the front of their armour with weird globe-like structures. The fitter you get, the more fat you generally lose, and breasts are just made of fat and not really much else.

    I mean, I’ve got pretty large breasts (a DD cup last time I was measured) and I can fit just fine into nominally ‘standard’ plate breastplates made for men (it’s the waist and shoulders that’s actually difficult with the fitting). I know that some women are exceptions to the rule that the more athletic you are the less fatty tissue you have sat on your chest, but the reality is that this armour looks like she’s struggling to contain an extreme set of round breast implants. Why are some of the most elite soldiers in the universe so concerned about how they look that they have breast implants?

    There’s an argument I’ve seen tossed around many times that space marines are actually totally androgynous because the gene seed fucks with their genitals, so like, we already have female space marines. But if that’s the case then why haven’t their secondary sex characteristics disappeared too? If male space marines have no testicles then female space marines would logically have no breasts. However that argument against Games Workshop making female space marines is a load of crap – because if all secondary sex characteristics had disappeared then they wouldn’t have beards either. Sorry Space Wolves. Your mighty Viking manes are just as bullshit as the breasts. Mind you, I almost always use the clean shaved heads on my Marines. Or the ones wearing helmets. Even for my Space Wolves.

    Not to mention that the decoration on the boob armour looks far too much like those trashy fetish club outfits called ‘chastity bras’. You’ll have to Google that for yourself – I’m not posting it here. In fact, don’t bother Googleing it. It’s every bit the dull male power fantasy that you expect from a name like ‘chastity bra’.

    Verdict: Sexist.

    Battle Sister with Heavy Flamer

    Battle Sister with Heavy Flamer

    From this angle she looks pretty good. However, I’m pretty sure that her heavy flamer is hiding the same hideous tit-armour that the Canoness has. I like the cute gas mask she’s wearing though. I should put this model on my wishlist, then carve off her inevitable boob armour if you can see it.

    Verdict: Inconclusive.

    Exorcist Tank

    Exorcist

    I can’t seem to find a good picture of the sprue to see what armour she’s wearing. Can anyone help?

    Verdict: Inconclusive.

    Penitent Engine

    Penitent Engine

    Oh. Lets pause here.

    This model, a bipedal walker, has an almost naked, extremely pert and busty woman on the front of it. I mean I say *almost* naked, she’s not naked in exactly the same way as Milla Jovovich is not naked in Resident Evil. ‘What do you mean she’s naked? She’s not naked! She’s wearing an A4 piece of paper that just about covers up her rude bits!’ Yeah. She’s naked. And so is the woman on the front of the Penitent Engine.

    What does Games Workshop say about the Penitent Engine on their product page?

    ‘Driven by their pilot’s frantic need for forgiveness, they will charge towards the foe heedless of danger, knowing that only in death, theirs or the enemy’s, can forgiveness finally be earned.’

    Delightful.

    So basically what seem to be looking at here is an example of the ‘fallen woman’. The Victorians used the phrase ‘fallen woman’ to describe someone who has been a bit naughty with sex outside of the expected parameters of chaste life until marriage. So that would be hookers, mistresses, and any woman who enjoyed her sexuality more than was acceptable in Victorian times. The meaning has persisted and can still be found even now in some particularly insidious circles.

    I’m kind of unsure where the women on the front of the Penitent Engines come from. Are they Sisters of Battle who have committed some kind of heinous crime? Or are they just women off the street, as it were, who have committed crimes and are expected to atone for their sins with implanted feelings of guilt and pain, and eventually death?

    It doesn’t really matter that much – but ‘fallen women’ drawn from a group of battle nuns who have dedicated themselves to a life of religious vows is kind of unpleasant. The sexualised nudity of the figure in *that* context feeds straight into the Madonna/Whore complex which is pretty much The Worst.

    I mean, I suppose at least she’s wearing a sheet that goes to her ankles.

    I don’t really understand why women have to atone for their sins by being strapped naked to the front of a machine that walks into battle with no fucking clothes on when the men in the universe don’t have to. Is it because the only appropriate punishment for wicked women who have done wrong is sexual humiliation or something? I must have missed the memo. I’m pretty sure I remember from reading some of the books that blokes generally just go to prison.

    Verdict: Sexist.

    Seraphim Squad

    Seraphim Squad

    Mm, there’s that tit armour again. This time, with added corset!

    Battle corsets. I’m not sure who ever thought that was a good idea. I like the visible pipework on the male Space Marine’s power armour – it looks cool! Instead the Sisters of Battle get corsets that look completely inflexible and probably renders them unable to fight particularly well.

    I don’t know if you’ve worn a corset, but I have. In fact I wore corsets quite a bit in my early twenties and still do ocacsionally now. Corsets are very stiff – that’s the point of them. They are designed to force your body to conform to certain shapes that are aesthetically pleasing to other people (mostly men) so that you can then put fashionable dresses over the top of them. They were largely worn historically by women in the upper echelons of society who didn’t really have to do do much for a living. They’re more suitable for standing around in Royal courts than fighting Xenos on the front line.

    To many people corsets are symbolic of the fact that women have historically largely been considered decorative objects rather than people. Women were meant to stand around and look pretty rather than actually do anything useful. So why the fuck have these objects of bodily oppression turned up on an amazing fighting force of kickass women in the future? If I was designing the miniatures I certainly wouldn’t use this kind of symbolism.

    Talking about symbolism – lets talk about the name for a moment. Seraphims. Do you know what a seraph is? It’s an angelic being associated with high levels of purity (Isaiah 6:2-6). Unless you use the other meaning of it which basically means serpents instead (Numbers 21:6–8,Deuteronomy 8:15, Isaiah14:29, Isaiah 30:6). Oh yes. Angelic, pure beings vs serpents. Madonna/Whore complex again anyone? Poor Eve, she’s always being blamed for man’s sins. It’s not a name I would have picked for my cool warrior jetpack women.

    Verdict: Sexist.

    Retributor Squad

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    Corsets and tit armour.

    Verdict: Sexist.

    Battle Sisters Squad

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    More corsets and tit armour.

    *yawn*

    Verdict: Sexist.

    Repentia Squad

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    I can’t help noticing that these scantily clad women have what look like whip marks all over them. I thought I noticed it on the Penitance Engine woman, but I let it slide there because I thought maybe they’re battle scars. I wonder if there’s an explanation in the sales patter on the Games Workshop website…

    ‘they are led to war by a Mistress of Repentance – a harsh warrior who drives her charges onwards with a pair of neural whips.’

    Right. Of course. So here we have scantily clad, gimp mask wearing, women who are forced into combat by a dominant woman with a whip. Basically, it’s a lesbian sex slave party. I mean, the tit armour and corsets on the other minis wasn’t great, but this model type basically just proves that in fact this is *not* an army designed to appease women, it’s absolutely nothing more than a wank fantasy for a submissive man.

    screen-shot-2016-12-28-at-13-04-26Do you think these outfits are where they got inspiration for Milla Jovovich’s other outfit in Resident Evil? I suppose at least the red dress is A3 in size and she’s wearing pants under it.

    Oh and the armour! Why the fuck are their feet and nipples more armoured than anywhere containing vital organs? I suppose I should be grateful for the fact that two of them appear to be wearing armoured thigh high boots which will at least offer some protection against leg wounds when fighting Xenos. Even Space Marine Scouts have more armour than these poor chicks (who will fucking freeze their tits off as soon as they go anywhere below twenty degrees Celsius). Why don’t they even get shoulder pads? Is it because their delicate lady-shoulders can’t take the weight of them?

    Fucks sake.

    screen-shot-2016-12-28-at-13-22-27I also can’t help noticing that the women that make up this squad are really quite young and beautiful compared to the gnarled, ugly faces of the rest of the Sisters of Battle. I always thought that it was just the house style of Games Workshop to make basically everyone in the entire universe really fucking ugly. Turns out that’s not actually the case – Games Workshop will make an exception if you’re a lesbian sex slave who likes a bit of whipping. Apparently their sculptors are capable of sculpting beautiful women – but only if they’re to be used for some sad blokes to bash one out to. I’m also making the assumption here that the designers just thought the idea of an old, ugly woman in these sexy outfits would be just too horrendous to think about. Women who grow old or who are scarred should not get their tits out it seems…

    Verdict: Sexist.

    Dominion Squad

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    More tit armour and corsets. It doesn’t get any better if I say it the opposite way round.

    Verdict: Sexist.

    Sororitas Command Squad
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    screen-shot-2016-12-28-at-13-44-08Tit armour, corsets, and a blow job face.

    No, I don’t fucking know either. At least the woman with the blow job face is wearing robes without tit armour.

    Verdict: Sexist.

    Immolator

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    Again, hard to find pictures of the figure.

    Verdict: Inconclusive.

    Battle Sister Squad Upgrade

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    I love the way that their breasts seem to sit on the top of the gun as if it’s a shelf.

    No wait, I really don’t. Guns should never be used to hold tits up, a bra is a far more appropriate garment. Probably a sports bra if you’re a kickass soldier of the Imperium.

    Verdict: Sexist.

    Canoness Veridyan

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    I understand that this is a figure based on artwork by John Blanche that was on the cover of the original Sisters of Battle codex. No, it doesn’t really make it any better. Games Workshop themselves mentioned it in a post recently on their blog.

    Lets make it clear that this is an new model that has been released in December 2016. Quite frankly I’m surprised that Games Workshop would bring out such an appallingly sexist model with such celebration.

    I mean, she’s wearing high heels. HIGH HEELS. I know that fantasy wargaming isn’t based on the real world, but I’d really like the design team, the marketing team, and the top tier of management at Games Workshop to wear thigh high boots for a day with at least a six inch stiletto heel and see just how goddamn impractical these things really are.

    Ridiculous, long, black, stiletto boots really are the preserve of fantasy dominatrixes (with few exceptions). The whole point of them in that particular fantasy setting is that they are difficult to walk around and do things in, meaning that the man (who worships the woman, of course) has to do things for her while she is pretty much helpless. She is reduced to mere object. Decoration. Diminished to living a languorous lifestyle. SO WHAT THE FUCK ARE THEY DOING ON A MILITARY HERO? If high heeled thigh boots are so effective for combat why aren’t the Ultramarines wearing them? Actually, I’d quite like to see an Ultramarine soldier wearing a high heeled thigh boot – but lets not examine that thought too closely.

    Other than that – lets see. Skulls for breasts? That’s a bit… peculiar. I’m sure that can be traced back to Freud again. In fact I don’t even know what to make of it really, I feel like it deserves a whole post just to itself.

    And that corset. We’ve already established that corsets are just wank on fighters. But this one appears to have a metal ring sitting just above her pubic area. What’s the significance there? My mind goes straight to some kind of chastity signifier. A woman who can be controlled. That’s why you put rings into bulls noses, isn’t it? Either that or it’s reminiscent of a door knocker… something something knock for entry? Not sure which one is worse really.

    At least she has shoulder armour. And a cool sword.

    And I really like her little surcote with the fleur de lis on it and the nice design around the split sleeve. I think I need that surcote for my LARP character.

    Verdict: Extremely Fucking Sexist.

    Battle Sister with Multi-Melta

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    I thought this model was awesome, then I noticed the tit armour poking out behind her gun.

    Verdict: Sexist.

    Battle Sister with Heavy Bolter

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    Shelf-tits.

    Verdict: Sexist.

    Battle Sister with Simulacrum Imperialis

    99060108090_battlesistersimulacrumimperialisnew01

    Alright, I’ll level with you. I think this one is kind of cool. Her hands and robes are in the way (mostly) of her tit armour so you can’t really see it. And it doesn’t seem to have weird chastity or skull decoration. I’d buy this model. She also has a really cool surcote. I mean it’s still sexist really, but it’s literally the least sexist mini so far.

    Verdict: Inconclusive.

    Sisters of Battle Superior with Bolter

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    Cute surcote, but tit armour and corsets. Again.

    Verdict: Sexist.

    Battle Sister with Meltagun 2

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    This one is getting an ‘inconclusive’ rating just because I think if the gun wasn’t so big then they would have made the tit armour mode visible.

    Verdict: Inconclusive.

    Battle Sister with Flamer 2

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    Tit armour.

    Verdict: Sexist.

    Battle Sister with Storm Bolter 2

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    For some reason Games Workshop have photographed this one at a different angle to just about every other model. But this allows us to see exactly how much of a tit shelf they are using their weapons as. URGH.

    Verdict: Sexist.

    SPECIAL MENTION

    Uriah Jacobus, Protector of the Faith

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    What a surprise that the only male figure in the Sisters of Battle collection (with the exception of the alternative withered figure for the front of the Penitence Engine) is a leader who the Sisters of Battle follow faithfully into war. Fuck off.

    Fuck. Off.

    Verdict: Sexist.

    Sisters of Battle Facebook Header

  • Photography, Drow, Losing Jobs, Looking Stupid, and Being Cool

    First off – I’m not going to illustrate this post with any of my photographs. I don’t think it’s fair to do that for many of the things I’m discussing.

    Secondly – this is me speaking from my own experience and thoughts. Not as a representative of anyone I photograph or write for.

    When I first joined the LARP community, a few people gave me some helpful tips. Several of these revolved around the way that LARP is interpreted by the outside world. This advice was generally along the lines of:

    • The rest of the world thinks that LARP is stupid. It would be good if you tried to make LARP look cool, so that the rest of the world knows that we do is cool and not stupid.
    • LARP can cause people to worry about losing their jobs/friends because outsiders don’t understand what LARP is. If you could be sensitive to those people with your photographs then that would be cool.
    • Sometimes people outside of LARP misinterpret what we do. It would be cool if you could try to present an image to the rest of the world that shows we’re not just treading all over other peoples cultures.

    So lets get these points broken down.

    The rest of the world thinks that LARP is stupid.

    I tried to make LARP look cool. I think I managed. I often get told that my photographs feel cinematic and I hope that most people feel that way. I aim to make my photographs feel like a still from a film. It’s a different approach from most other photographers shooting LARP, but I feel like it works for me. It’s not to everyone’s taste, but I certainly feel like I make the hobby look cool. Even MattP said it:

    LRPs is developing in so many ways and there are many great games that don’t focus on the visual spectacle. But many of us are used to thinking of our hobby as something to be hidden away from ridicule – and in the 90s much of what we did looked pretty ridiculous. Mum’s old curtains, trainers, jeans, gaffa weapons and people shouting fireball. It was cool in our head, but we were painfully aware that to anyone watching it, it was as cool as two twenty-five year olds playing Mary and Joseph in the infant’s school nativity play.

    But LRP has come of age. It’s as fun as it ever was – but now it’s fucking cool.

    I get alot of people looking at my photographs who aren’t LARPers. I guess it’s because I write for photography magazines so people look me up on Facebook and they find my pictures. I guess I get on average two enquiries a week about what LARP is all about and how someone might go about playing. I don’t know what my conversion rate is, but I guess I’m actually quite high up in the rankings for the amount of people that stumble across LARP accidentally and enquire about it.

    You see, LARP does look cool. Even my Dad thinks that LARP looks cool and fancies a go at playing it. Actually he’s just amazed that you can get a whole weekend’s worth of entertainment – including potentially food and drink via bartering – for about £70 per person. But you know, whatever floats your boat.

    So when shown images of LARP that are good quality, people are interested in LARP. And they don’t think it’s stupid. They’re interested. Especially because of all the fantasy films that have come out in the last decade or two. LARP looks cool. Mostly.

    LARP can cause people to worry about losing their jobs/friends because outsiders don’t understand what LARP is.

    I generally don’t really think that this is a valid concern in most cases, however that’s because I’m quite happy to stand up for myself at work and tell my employer that they’re incorrect (I did that when it came to my poly relationship when I was called into HR once, they soon backed off). I would rather lose a job than work for a company that is narrow minded or even bigoted. However I understand that not everybody has that choice and sometimes people just have to toe the line at work, not discuss their personal life and hope that their employers don’t find out what they get up to at the weekends.

    The fact that people are concerned is enough for me. I might hold the opinion that your employer is a dickbag and you should look for another job, but I understand that you are frightened about being found out. Your concern is enough for me to also be concerned about the damage that my photographs can do to your life. Sure it irritates me when I have to take down a photo for these reasons – but my irritation isn’t at you, it’s at your dickbag employer.

    I learned very early on that takedown policies are really important to many LARPers. It’s important for many people to be able to say “Hey, I don’t like that photo for X, Y, or Z reason. Can you take it down please?” and I always oblige. I’m really proud of the fact that I’ve only been asked twice to remove pictures because someone thought they looked stupid. Twice in seventeen events. I’ve had a couple more for work related takedowns, but less than I can count on one hand. But anyway, that’s beside the point.

    Sometimes people outside of LARP misinterpret what we do.

    One of the problems with photographs of LARP is that they lack the context of the game. So when outsiders view my photographs – which they do, the stats on my pages clearly demonstrate this – they don’t understand the roleplay that is happening. Nor can they see your carefully crafted character background. An awful lot of the time they don’t even come from a background where they’ve ever read one of the fantasy novels that LARP has often grown out of. Come to think of it, nor have I.

    This means people looking at my photographs will be overlaying their own cultural context and making assumptions about what’s going on based on their own lived experiences. I can’t control who looks at my photographs, they’re accessible by anyone in the world who has an internet connection and access to Facebook or my website.

    Peoples lived experiences can really affect the way that they view certain classic LARP images. Like – dare I say it – Drow. If you’re in any way plugged in to the LARP community in the UK, you’ll have seen the fall-out on Facebook about the Drow/racism debate.

    The fact is, we can’t control who sees our photographs and how they interpret them. We also can’t control who comes to a LARP event smaller than a little local system, and you can’t control how they will react to various situations that they didn’t expect to see. It’s all well and good to expect military violence at a LARP – if you are a soldier suffering PTSD then perhaps an Airsoft LARP isn’t for you, for example – but why would you expect racism to be part of a fantasy LARP?

    I mean this is fantasy. This is supposed to be escapism from every day life. We went through all this when the UK LARP scene debated sexism in fantasy game settings. Lots of people (mostly white men, I’ll note) argued that they have to be ‘politically correct’ in their Monday-Friday lives, so why should they have to bother to be so during their escapism at the weekend? The answer was, quite clearly, because women want escapism from real life too. Including the sexism we have to endure frequently. Sorry bro, you don’t get to have your escapism if I don’t get to have mine too.

    To me, racism falls into the same camp. Lots of people find casual racism funny – plenty of people were admitting that openly on the UK LARP Facebook group. “Wait, are you saying we can’t make racist jokes anymore even if we’re not *actually* racist?” The answer to that question is, of course, No. And also you’re a dickweed. Bro. Because to be honest if you’re making racist jokes, you’re probably racist. You just don’t want to be called racist because that’s like, some kind of insult or something. In fact I’m going to post a quote here from an EverydayFeminism blog about political correctness that I really like:

    If you feel that you have to walk on eggshells to avoid being labeled a bigot, you might be in the habit of saying things that are bigoted.

     

    I mean, given that even KKK groups deny being racist, it’s entirely possible to do and say clearly oppressive things without seeing that they’re oppressive.

     

    So I’ll just say this: If the worst thing you could be called is sexist, racist, homophobic, a bigot, ableist, or the like, you have it pretty good.

    I’d like to write a few words specifically about this Drow business. I find this very difficult because I’m writing from a privileged position of being a white person, who grew up in a very white area, went to a predominantly white school, who has generally worked in quite white/European environments, and who is studying a very white course. I am loaded up on privilege here. But I’m trying not to be a dickweed about it. Mea culpa, I’m doing my best. Since part of my dissertation is discussing black theory in art history I’ve started to read up on it, but I’m not entirely there yet.

    I am ultra rational. I try to run everything through my logic filter and I try to view all situations the same way that I would those that I’ve actually experienced. I’ve never experienced racism. But I have experienced sexism and queer/homophobia, so I try my best to extrapolate those experiences onto racism issues and attempt to find some empathy with the affected groups.

    A few months ago I was reminded by a particular photograph (not one of mine) of a player at Empire who was wearing what appeared to be matte black makeup across their face. Nothing else done with it, just matte black, rubbed off around his lips where he’d clearly been wearing it a while (perhaps eating) and not covering the inside of the skin on his eyes just behind his eyelashes (you can run some eyeliner around that bit to stop it looking pink). I commented to my partner that for me it was uncomfortably close to historical blackface. He told me that it was just Drow inspired makeup and it’s very common in LARP to wear black makeup. I looked into the history of the Drow and the historical myths and legends that inspired them and it did little to put my mind at rest. This bothered me. Then I looked through my photographs and realised I’d never published any photographs of this person even though I’d taken a few decent ones. It had apparently always made me uncomfortable.

    A couple of weeks ago I started to sit down and try to articulate to myself why. The answer was that many Drow at LARP look really quite close to historical blackface makeup – especially once they’ve been wearing the makeup for a few hours at an event.

    Institutional white favouritism harms us all. And silence and complicity in the status quo is as bad as being openly racist. Just as with sexism, if you do not speak up about injustices then you are part of the problem. Simply not being aware of how your hobbies actions could be interpreted by outsiders can also be part of the problem.

    There’s a cost/benefit discussion to be had about black makeup to represent Drow. The benefit to black makeup in LARP seems to step from the fact that some Dungeons & Dragons literature portrayed Drow as having ‘inky’ black skin (you know, that black skinned race from a different (underground) part of the world who are all inherently evil… *sigh*). Go back to the faerietales that the Drow seem to be drawn from though and there don’t seem to be much races. So I don’t really consider it much of a benefit to be slavishly sticking to a look promoted by an author somewhere in the mid-70s. The cost is that many outsiders (and insiders) find it to be quite similar to the very racist blackface.

    What’s the solution though? The obvious solution to me seems to be for future games (and perhaps current games too) to encourage players to use a different colour makeup to represent evil races from unknown parts of the world. Perhaps purple would be cool, for example. It doesn’t seem like much of a change to buy a set of purple elf ears and a pot of purple makeup. Less than £30 in all. I spent than on a pair of LARP trousers the other week and my trousers weren’t problematic for anyone at all.

     

    I’ve had quite a few discussions over the past 24 hours with persons of colour (POC) and many said that they personally found blackface to be quite triggering – reminding them of past racism directed at them. You have to remember that although Britain is painted as a multicultural society, in most places it isn’t as multicultural as we might like to think. I think that in my year at school – 160 girls – there was only one or two POC. I didn’t grow up in a town where POC were an everyday part of my life. It wasn’t until I started working in London (Camden, in fact) when I was about 25 that I even really got to known any POC. I did have some profound experiences though as an outdoor pursuits instructor when I was 21 – we primarily taught school groups from inner city London schools (predominantly made up of children who were POC) and youth offenders who also had a high percentage of POC. Talking to these young people was sobering and changed my outlook on the battles that many of them were having to fight on a daily basis – and it made me profoundly consider my life as a very lucky white person – way before I’d even heard the term ‘privilege’. I enjoyed that job. I suspect that I learned as much from the people I taught as they learned from me.

    There’s one thing that bothered me though during the discussions on UK LARP. As a white woman, I’ve always been told to let POC speak up on their own issues. It’s a sentiment I completely agree with. However what do you do when you believe that someone with lived experiences are not the correct way forward? It’s very difficult to negotiate that path.

    The topic of colour-blindness came up. The idea that we shouldn’t be bothered by black drow makeup because we now live in a society that should be striving to be colour-blind. (I.e. we should pretend that someones race does not exist and treat everyone identically.) I’m not actually ok with that approach. If we pretend that someone isn’t a POC then we ignore their lived experience. Many POC will have a different world view to me due to the fact that they have endured challenges that I have not and many of those challenges will be directly related to the colour of their skin. To pretend that someone doesn’t have different colour skin is to say that we have all had the same experience in life. We have not.

    For that reason I don’t agree with aiming for gender-blind society either at this point in time. I have lived my life as a woman. If you ignore the fact that I am a woman and you treat me like everyone else (or more likely – you treat me as societies default which is most likely ‘white male’) then you are ignoring my struggle and my experiences as a woman. And boy, there have been some struggles. Gender still matters. Race still matters. Sexuality still matters. Because we have all lived our life differently due to those things that make us different from each other.

    Can’t we just all get along?

    Well yes, that is the goal. I assume it’s the goal for most LARPers anyway. But in order to all get along we have to acknowledge what makes us different. That could be checking in on someones personal pronoun, that could be deciding not to play a misogynistic character, that could be not making rape jokes in the bar, it could even be deciding that your Drow is going to be dark purple instead of black. These things might feel like tokenistic gestures sometimes, but they’re part of saying to new people and outsiders ‘I want you to feel welcome in my hobby’.

    Because like it or not, LARP is still dominated by straight, white dudes who are into science-stuff. The rest of us really still are a minority at most games here in the UK. If we want new people to come into the hobby – who don’t come at it from a strict fantasy/D&D point of view – then we need to consider how our actions might be interpreted by people both inside and outside of the hobby. And most of these people will be going on visual clues to form their initial opinions – like photographs.

    And there’s only so much I can do with a photograph of you wearing what appears to be blackface. It’s very hard to make you not seem like a racist dickbag. I can’t post your character background next to each shot.

  • Is Feminist Methodology still relevant in History of Art today?

    Since I’ve now had my results back from my second year at university, I can post the final essay for my Culture, Gender and Sexuality module. I got 80% overall in this module – 70% is required for achieving a 1st.

    Enjoy!

     

     

    Is Feminist Methodology still relevant in History of Art today?

     

    There is little doubt that the New Art Histories revolutionised the way that many art historians saw the world and participated in art historical academia in the 1970s (Rees and Borzello, 1986a, p. 3). The term ‘The New Art Histories’ came into use because of the book of the same name which tried to summarise emerging methodologies in the late 1970s and early 1980s (Rees and Borzello, 1986b). Other authors interpreted the term as an umbrella phrase for critical theory (Jõekalda, 2013, p. 2) and most would agree that the term the New Art Histories cover political, feminist, psychoanalytical and theoretical approaches (Fernie, 1995, p. 19). This poststructuralist approach marked an important shift away from art as objects and focussed instead on social context rather than concepts such as connoisseurship and biography. In this essay I will focus on how feminist art history methodologies do not address queer artists and artworks adequately, however it should also be considered that non-Caucasian, non-Western, and disabled people are also not addressed by mainstream feminist theory either – amongst other personhood statuses. The word queer itself is complex but for the purpose of this essay I will be using it to represent non-default gender, sex and sexuality.

     

    Women were often left out of the traditional art historical canon and the New Art Histories enabled feminist art historians to rethink the past. Initially there was a push to rediscover women artists and attempt to place them within the traditional canon. This was primarily achieved by questioning assumptions about the difference between art and craft – many feminist art historians at this time believed that these definitions of art and craft were one of the primary reasons for women’s art being seen as inferior (Fernie, 1995, p. 20). However this approach relied on traditional canonical and biographical methodologies and the late 1970s saw a move by feminist theorists to challenging the discipline of History of Art itself. Academics began to suggest that merely inserting women into history was not the same as writing women’s history (Fox-Genovese, 1982, p. 6) and Griselda Pollock put forward the idea that women’s studies were not about women but rather the social systems that allow and maintain the dominance of men over women (Pollock, 1988, p. 1). One of the formative essays for feminist art history was Linda Nochlin’s ‘Why have there been no great women artists?’ (Nochlin, 1978) which warned against the idea of simply trying to name women artists who might be considered ‘good’ and insert them into the traditional male-dominated canon.

     

    Feminist methodologies, especially when combined with Marxist theories, gave academics a powerful and alternative way of looking at both history and the present, yet feminist methodologies as applied to the history of art have remained reasonably static in their approach. While feminism as a political movement has moved on with successive waves of ideologies, feminist methodology for history art often still works from the same seminal texts (such as Nochlin’s) that broke the original ground.

     

    In many respects feminist methodologies fit neatly into hegemonic, patriarchal culture – as much as their practitioners would like to suggest that they now champion intersectionality (McCall, 2005, p. 1771). They support the notion of a bigender society and specifically exclude those who exist outside of the gender paradigm that society currently uses to view the world and write history. Feminist art historical methodologies may well be the fight against the male dominated view of the history of art, but when viewing the history of art as a queer participant these methodologies only serve to reinforce the patriarchal structure and act as another hegemonic barrier that needs to be removed before a queer history can be composed. Traditional and New art histories combined act as a complete patriarchal version of the histories of art, a history that could potentially be rewritten by a new queer methodology.

     

    Introducing queer methodologies to the history of art is unlikely to be as simple as just viewing the world from a queer point of view. Queer methodology must be counterhegemonic in its nature, allowing new paradigms to be enacted. It is not simply a case of rewriting the history of art from a gay or lesbian perspective, or even a transgender perspective. In order to create a truly queered history of art the bigender paradigm should not be used and another must be found; otherwise queer methodologies will become just another pillar that supports the dominant patriarchal norm by acting in support of male masculinities and female femininities (Halberstam, 1998, pp. 3–4). Stephen Bann’s suggestion that a new cultural critique can gain strength from the fact that old positions have already run their course is as relevant now as it was when he discussed the idea almost thirty years ago (Bann, 1986, p. 19) and so queer theory must learn from the limitations faced today by feminist theory. As McCall discuses in a paper on intersectionality, feminist researches are already very aware of the limitations of using gender as an analytical category (McCall, 2005, p. 1772).

     

    ‘Feminine success is always measured by male standards’ claims Halberstam (2011, p. 4), and so by acting outside of the expected standards we can relieve ourselves of the pressure to conform. Some ‘renegade’ feminists, Jack Halberstam argues, have addressed that failing might be better than success while in pursuit of the counterhegemonies and this is a lesson that could potentially be learned by any new approach to the history of art. For instance lesbians do not conform to the expected heterosexual framework so they therefore fall outside of patriarchal societies and could redefine what gender means to them (Halberstam, 2011, p. 4). This way of thinking allows us to begin to construct a different gender narrative for the viewing of the history of art, by enabling those outside of the patriarchal hegemony to apply their own definitions of gender and sexuality. However most feminist history of art is largely unconcerned with sexuality or gender-fluidity and therefore this is not a tool that would be used by most feminist art historians. In most feminist art history the assumption is that the artist is heterosexual, white and often middle-class; there is no discourse available for the kind of alternative femininities and masculinities that Halberstam addresses in their text on female masculinity (Halberstam, 1998).

     

    Some feminist academics have begun to offer a kind of queer methodology – although still under the banner of feminism. The idea of introducing sex, gender and sexuality to feminist approaches is proposed by Mimi Marinucci (Marinucci, 2010, p. 105) and can be seen as part of the wider movement of mainstream feminism towards an intersectional approach. In some ways this approach works very well – there is real solidarity between the experiences of many women and those who are LGBT* (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex) due to the basic understanding of what it is like to be born into a state of patriarchal oppression. However there is also tension between the feminist and queer movements and as Marinucci points out there has been a history of feminist studies showing bias against lesbian women, gay men, minority sexualities and transgender people (Marinucci, 2010, p. 106).

     

    It could be suggested that art history is now in a state of post-feminism; where equality has begun to be achieved in academic writing and galleries. Certainly the large art institutions in the United Kingdom, such as the Tate, have no problems with showing large retrospectives dedicated to twentieth-century women artists. Marlene Dumas (Marlene Dumas: The Image as Burden, no date) and Sonia Delaunay (The EY Exhibition: Sonia Delaunay, no date) are currently showing major retrospectives at the Tate Modern in London, Cathy Wilkes is showing at the Tate Liverpool (Cathy Wilkes, no date) and the Tate Britain has hosted retrospectives of well known women artists such as Susan Hiller (Susan Hiller, no date) and has a Barbara Hepworth exhibition opening in June 2015 (Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World, no date). I am aware that naming the exhibitions being held of women artists pushes me precariously close to being guilty of what Nochlin warned against, however it does certainly appear that women artists now have a roughly equal number of major exhibitions as artists who are men when considering twentieth and twenty-first century art. Most feminist art historians can be categorised as using one of the other approaches to art history (such as connoisseurship, biography or iconography to name just a few) so it could be suggested that feminist art historians should just continue to work under those banners rather than identifying as feminists since the feminist art historian label seems to be no longer required.

     

    Marunucci presents the idea that queer feminism provides a new direction for feminism as a critical perspective. Introducing questions of sexuality into feminist art history would greatly increase the scope of the methodology. According to the label on the front of the book Art & Queer Culture it is ‘the first book to focus on the criticism and theory regarding queer visual art’ (Lord and Meyer, 2013). If this statement is indeed true it means that no feminist (or any other) art historian has been addressing the criticism and theory of queer art. This raises the question – if feminism was truly interested in any sexuality, sex or gender other than heterosexual women who were identified as women at birth, wouldn’t this book have been written years or perhaps even decades ago?

     

    Even if feminist art historians use approaches borrowed from gay and lesbian studies, this does not go far enough. A relatively recent biography of photographer Claude Cahun (Doy, 2007) is a good example of why feminist approaches are often inadequate even when combined with gay and lesbian studies. Cahun was a photographer who lived from 1894 to 1954. Originally identified as female at birth, Cahun had romantic relationships with women and in 1915-1916 began using the gender-ambiguous name Claude Cahun instead of the assigned birth name of Lucy Schwob (Claude Cahun – Chronology, no date). Most of Cahun’s body of photographic work is self-portraiture and Cahun presents as outwardly male in a large portion of the images. Where Cahun presents as a woman in images it is often an exaggerated and drag version of femininity. The biography by Gen Doy deals extensively with Cahun’s theoretical interests in sex and sexuality and also recounts her preference of living with a woman multiple times, however the assumption is always made that Cahun is a lesbian woman. Not once is the idea entertained that Cahun could possibly be transgender (and therefore potentially heterosexual) or genderqueer and Cahun is referred to as ‘she’ and ‘lesbian’ throughout the text without any explanation. Both feminist and gay and lesbian studies have failed as approaches when it comes to artists such as Claude Cahun since they refuse to engage with major political and personal aspects of the artist’s life and work. A queer approach may well have shed more light on this popular photographer from the early twentieth-century.

     

    According to government surveys only 93.9% of the adult population in the UK identified as heterosexual in April 2011 to March 2012 (Woodsford, 2012). Estimating the amount of transpeople in the UK is problematic due to the difficulty defining transgender status within current gender paradigms (do we consider self-identification as with sexuality or is medical intervention the standard for defining a transperson?), but a 2008 European study suggests that there could be as many as 1 in 20 transgender individuals within the male population alone using the most wide definitions – and this number is increasing exponentially (‘Transgender EuroStudy’, no date). Going forward feminist approaches do not offer enough scope to record and analyse these important aspects of an artists work and personal life.

     

    Feminist approaches to art history are still an excellent methodology for looking at artworks in the past and for discussing women’s status in society. However the fact that feminist methodologies rely heavily on a bigender paradigm, as demonstrated by the earlier discussed assumption that women’s studies are about the dominance of men over women (Pollock, 1988, p. 1), means that they are not so well-placed to look at artists today and in the future. In a society that is slowly but steadily rejecting the idea of a clear-cut ‘male’ and ‘female’ status (Hird, 2000, p. 348) we need methodologies that can produce a discourse on this new approach to working practices. Feminism is still relevant to the discipline of history of art while examining the past, but it becomes less relevant as we move into the future when those writing about art will need to talk authoritatively on a wider range of gender, sex and sexuality than feminist methodologies currently routinely discuss.

     

     

    Bibliography

    Bann, S. (1986) ‘How Revolutionary is the New Art History?’, in Rees, A. L. and Borzello, F. (eds) The New Art History. London, England: Camden Press.

    Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World (no date). Available at: http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/barbara-hepworth-sculpture-modern-world (Accessed: 6 May 2015).

    Cathy Wilkes (no date). Available at: http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-liverpool/exhibition/cathy-wilkes (Accessed: 6 May 2015).

    Claude Cahun – Chronology (no date) Claude Cahun Home Page. Available at: http://www.connectotel.com/cahun/cahunchr.html.

    Doy, G. (2007) Claude Cahun: A Sensual Politics of Photography. London: I.B. Tauris. Available at: http://site.ebrary.com/id/10333422 (Accessed: 6 May 2015).

    Fernie, E. (1995) Art History and Its Methods: A Critical Anthology. United Kingdom: Phaidon Press, Incorporated.

    Fox-Genovese, E. (1982) ‘Placing Women’s History in History’, New Left Review, (133), pp. 5–29.

    Halberstam, J. (1998) Female Masculinity. Durham: Duke University Press.

    Halberstam, J. (2011) The Queer Art of Failure. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

    Hird, M. J. (2000) ‘Gender’s nature: Intersexuality, transsexualism and the “sex”/’gender’ binary’, Feminist Theory, 1(3), pp. 347–364. doi: 10.1177/146470010000100305.

    Jõekalda, K. (2013) ‘What has become of the New Art History?’, Journal of Art Historiography, (9).

    Lord, C. and Meyer, R. (2013) Art and Queer Culture. London: Phaidon Press.

    Marinucci, M. (2010) Feminism Is Queer: The intimate connection between queer and feminist theory. London: Zed.

    Marlene Dumas: The Image as Burden (no date). Available at: http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/marlene-dumas-image-burden (Accessed: 6 May 2015).

    McCall, L. (2005) ‘The Complexity of Intersectionality’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 30(3), pp. 1771–1800. doi: 10.1086/426800.

    Nochlin, L. (1978) Art and sexual politics; women’s liberation, women artists, and art history. 4. print. Edited by T. B. Hess. New York: Collier Books (Collier books).

    Pollock, G. (1988) Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and Histories of Art (Routledge Classics). United Kingdom: London ; Routledge.

    Rees, A. L. and Borzello, F. (eds) (1986a) ‘Introduction’, in The New Art History. London, England: Camden Press.

    Rees, A. L. and Borzello, F. (eds) (1986b) The New Art History. London, England: Camden Press.

    Susan Hiller (no date). Available at: http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/susan-hiller (Accessed: 6 May 2015).

    The EY Exhibition: Sonia Delaunay (no date). Available at: http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/ey-exhibition-sonia-delaunay (Accessed: 6 May 2015).

    ‘Transgender EuroStudy’ (no date) TGEU. Available at: http://tgeu.org/eurostudy/ (Accessed: 7 May 2015).

    Woodsford, S. (2012) Integrated Household Survey April 2011 to March 2012: Experimental Statistics. Available at: http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/integrated-household-survey/integrated-household-survey/april-2011-to-march-2012/stb-integrated-household-survey-april-2011-to-march-2012.html#tab-Sexual-identity (Accessed: 7 May 2015).

  • Why critising Page 3 is not just about stopping men looking at tits

    TW: Rape

    In the wake of the news(!) that Page 3 will now show women in bras instead of half naked, I’d like to address some concerns that I have seen posted on my social media feed, amongst other places.

    Here we go…

    Last week you were all “Je suis Charlié” in defence of freedom of speech/expression. Now you’re advocating censorship coz boobs?

    It might seem like semantics, but nobody is calling for the censorship of boobs. Or not that I’ve seen anyway. What the people who are criticising Page 3 are largely saying is ‘Hey, we don’t think that some mass media outlets treat women with the same respect as men. We’d really like it if you did. Could you think about doing that please?’

    It’s not just women objectified by the sun. How come every guy athlete is photographed in shorts and stripped to the waist?

    I’d like to say that this is a fair point, but it’s not. When guy athletes strip to the waist they do it because they’re hot and they want to take their shirt off to cool down. The editors of the paper don’t put these images in because their readership find them sexy and arousing, they put them in because that is considered the normal behaviour of a sportsman. Well, a footballer. You don’t see many skiers stripping to the waist after having a good run. Not to mention that shorts are the standard uniform of most land sports. You think the photographers are going to run onto the pitch as a striker kicks the ball at a goal and asking him to put some joggers on? Didn’t think so.

    Instead of asking why guy athletes are photographed in shorts and no shirts, perhaps we could instead why women never make it into the sports pages of Red Top newspapers? Or newspapers in general really, unless there’s an Olympic Games on. The fact that women’s sports are not considered good enough to report on in the newspapers (i.e. women’s sports are not news) is a symptom of the problem that goes hand in hand with the glamour models on Page 3 and the paparazzi reporting. All reinforce the idea that if a woman wants to get into the newspaper she needs to look great and show some skin. There’s no point in her being brilliant and successful in any other way.

    Don’t like it, don’t buy it.

    You know what? I totally agree with you. But I’d also like to make you aware that you can be exposed to the sexist attitudes that it helps to reinforce even if you don’t buy it. Lucy-Anny Holmes covered this much better than I could in her piece for the Huffington Post. I’d like to highlight a few points though:

    The school girl, who wrote to the Everyday Sexism project saying that the boys in her school hold up Page Three in the corridor and mark the girls out of 10 as they walk past, doesn’t buy it.

    The woman who sits in a staff room everyday while a male colleague shows Page Three to all the men with the words ‘would you do that?’ doesn’t buy it.

    The father who felt outraged that a man was looking at Page Three while his three-and-a-half year-old daughter was having a hair cut, didn’t buy it.

    When Clare Short stood up in the 80s and spoke out about these pictures being in the paper, she received 1000s of letters of support. Twelve were from women who had Page Three mentioned to them while they were being raped. These women didn’t buy it.

    The boobs in page 3 are there soley for viewing pleasure and no model who poses for page 3 is under any other illusions.

    No, you’re quite right. But if we’re going to play the ‘these women are up for it’ card, then perhaps at least we could briefly pause to consider how now all glamour models actually want to work as glamour models. Some are forced into it because it can be hard for young women to find work in our society (caused by sexist notions that are reinforced by this kind of imbalanced journalism). Some are forced into it as part of being in the sex trade. Some are forced into it as being part of a trafficked sex slave. Some are forced into it because education has failed them.

    It’s true that many glamour models are brilliant, bright, intelligent women who are aware of the cultural arguments surrounding their choice to be a model – I was not one of those women. I worked as a glamour model to try and somehow get approval for my body. I felt I was liberated, but I actually really wasn’t. And that’s why lots of former Page 3 models speak out about Page 3. Because at 18 (or younger) how can we expect a young woman to make such huge decisions concerning her future? I’m not saying that 18 year old women aren’t capable of making good decisions, but certainly I think it’s very young to have enough relevant life experience in our sexist society to understand the full implication of their choices. The industry systematically takes advantage of the naivety of many of these women, and that’s not very pleasant at all.

    To suggest page 3 breeds acceptance of objectification is the same as suggesting video games normalises gratuitous violence in teenagers & kids.

    Except video games are fiction. The systematic sexist treatment of women in some mass media is real. You can’t compare real life with fiction.

    I appreciate that video games also have a high degree of misogyny in many titles, but this is something that many of us are also working towards. If you disagree that this kind of behaviour should be normalised I’d love to have you on board with our work.

    Your right to be offended should never trump my right to be offensive.

    No, but perhaps the right of 51% of the population to not be treated disrespectfully trumps the ‘right’ of a few guys to look at porn with their cornflakes? Or on the bus? Or in the staff room? Or at the hairdressers?

    I don’t buy this “I’m offended because women are objectified” argument. If people truly feel that way, campaign against makeup, fashion designers who make tight fitting clothing, shoe companies who make high heels.

    I feel like this is somewhat of a spurious argument, but I’m going to do my best. I’m not against men or women wearing makeup or tight fitting clothing. What I’m against is the fact that some mass media outlets perpetuate and promote the idea that women are only worth anything if they conform to a particular stereotype and take their clothes off. If people want to wear things that make them feel great, then I’m all for that. But that’s not the same as presenting a half-naked, primped women as ‘news’.

    The human race objectifies people hundreds of times an hour as we walk down the street, whether it’s turning your head for a second look or crossing the road to avoid.

    Objectification: treating a person as a thing.

    I don’t know about you, but I don’t treat people as things if I can help it at all. Crossing the road to avoid someone because you perceive a negative stereotype isn’t objectification. Having a second look at someone because they’re hot might be objectification due to cultural context.

    But the important thing is how you act on that. If you objectify people inside your own brain and you don’t make any external actions, then I guess that’s ok. It’s your call how you work your grey matter. However systematic objectification of women throughout a newspaper in a way that affects many, many people is not ok. I think there is a pretty big difference between those things.

    For if you censor then where does it stop? Transgendered people using a bathroom they were not born to? Muslims being offended at the cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed? Women sunbathing topless on family beaches?

    1. Once again, there’s no call for censorship. There is a call for mass media outlets to treat women with the same respect as men.

    2. Transgender people use whichever bathroom is relevant to their status. I’m trying to think of a polite way to put this, but their ‘birth sex’ is none of your fucking business.

    3. Everyone has a right to be offended. That’s ok. To be offended means resentful or annoyed due to a perceived insult. It’s natural human reaction to being insulted. I think the Pope made a fair point on this the other day – if you talk trash about my mother, that’s going to make me pissed. It’s how you act on those impulses that sets you apart as a person.

    4. Where did women sunbathing on a beach come into it? Oh, I see. You think that those of us who think that women should be treated respectfully in the newspapers believe that tits are bad? I’ll tell my girlfriend. I’m sure she’ll find it hilarious.

    The women in the pictures are very well paid models who know what they are doing, I’d have thought a feminist or a male apologist would be campaigning for the right for them to show naked breasts, not cover them up.

    Just to set the record straight, posing for Page 3 isn’t generally that well paid. Not considering the amount of work that goes into it and the fact it basically devastates your ability to do many careers in the future. Your average (non famous) glamour model is probably doing well if they’re making £15k a year. I mean, they’re probably doing really well. Not so great really, is it? You could get paid more stacking shelves in supermarkets.

    You say male apologist like it’s a bad thing for men to support equality for women.

    However I absolutely campaign for the right for women to show naked breasts. I mean, I was there a few years ago handing out leaflets on a demonstration that said women should have equal rights of men to take their shirts off in the street. And I think that absolutely we should be able to model nude if we choose to. I think that the nude body is a wonderful thing and it’s great to use it to make art (or porn, I like porn too). What I don’t like is the fact that some media outlets choose to treat women with less respect than men. (I feel like a broken record now.)

    And lastly when you say it’s about access, show me someone under the age of 18 who actually buys a newspaper.

    Actually I’d like to suggest that lots of young people – mostly young teenage boys – probably buy newspapers like this to see the soft porn. Certainly they did when I was at school, and that wasn’t actually that long ago. Because if you’re underage you might not be able to get round the porn filters on your smartphone, without an adult putting their credit card details over the phone, or without you going into a phone shop and convincing them that you’re an adult.

    But you know, Tesco didn’t just put some tabloid papers behind screens for no reason. They felt it was right right thing to do. To stop young people seeing overtly sexualised pictures of models (and celebrities) at eye level. I can’t see why anyone would think it is a good idea to instil in young peoples minds that overt sexualisation of women is natural, normal or a good thing. Perhaps we can encourage this generation to grow up with a far more egalitarian outlook if we stop ramming the message that women should be sexualised down their throats.

    This “I don’t want boobs in my news” is ridiculous because I’m betting that no-one who is for the removal of page 3 actually buys and reads The Sun.

    I don’t see how this is a relevant argument. I don’t buy battery farmed eggs and yet I still campaign for the removal of battery hen farms.

    So it’s about censorship and removing some else’s access to something.

    As was previously pointed out, it’s not about censorship it’s about calling for respect. And any adult who wants to look at soft porn can do so any time they wish on their mobile phone. There is no reason for it to be in a newspaper.

    I think this is also a great place to leave this video. Again.

     

  • Men’s Rights Campaigning

    So there’s been lots of discussion on domestic violence and shelters this week and last.

    I see so many comments comparing women and men’s domenstic violence and by extension the amount of beds available men and women in refuges. The fact is that there are very, very few beds available to men who are not gay.

    And then the vitriol starts – against feminists as usual. Guys questioning why feminists are not doing more to ensure that there are more mens beds in refuges. Questioning why we aren’t as concerned with men’s rights as we are with womens. Questioning why we aren’t fundraising specifically for men’s refuge charities. Always with the guilty questioning.

    I’ve searched and searched and searched inside my soul for an answer and the only one I’m ever able to give is a shit one. Feminism – the clue is in the name – focusses primarily on making things better for women. Yes, sometimes there is intersectionality with various men’s rights campaigns, but they are generally supported because it moves the cause of women forward.

    But these guys, they seem to expect feminism to now work for them directly. It always feels like a bit of a kick in the teeth to be honest. ‘The women have organised to help themselves – now lets make them help us because they are a powerful group’. It feels slightly controlling to me actually, like we’re being guilted for helping other women. I’m entirely sure these guys don’t mean it that way, or maybe they do.

    I’d love to be an ally here. I’d love to support movements that further the rights of men in situations like this. That form campaign groups and splinter groups. But where are they? Why are there no men standing up and banding together to look at things like domestic violence refuges for men? Where are the genuine campaign groups that are looking to solve these problems, so that we – as feminists – can ally alongside them? Why are they not shouting loudly? Why are they not telling the media about these problems, raising awareness, forming groups and getting organised?

    Why do so many guys seem to want women to solve all their problems? We have so many problems of our own still to solve. We need help on this one guys, we need you to start the ball rolling so that we can help you gather speed.

  • The Patriarchy and the War Wounded

    Private Jaco Van Gass, injured in Afghanistan, aged 23 - Photography by Bryan Adams
    Private Jaco Van Gass, injured in Afghanistan, aged 23 – Photography by Bryan Adams

    They’re genuinely beautiful portraits (and, I really love that natural light) but as well as the inevitable sadness in me from what they’ve had to suffer through, I can’t help but feel a frustration that these pictures are all of men.

    Not a frustration directed towards Brian Adams (he clearly would have had a limited number of war wounded to photograph) or towards the subjects of the portraits (they have no choice in who they are fighting alongside), but a frustration that we – as a society – still don’t consider it appropriate for women to be taking these kinds of front line jobs in our military.

    That says two things to me:

    1. We don’t think that women are good enough to be on the front line.

    But more importantly:

    2. We don’t think that men are capable of having women on the front line and in positions of danger.

    Patriarchy is the state that reinforces that men are mindless and uncontrollable neanderthals who are unable to think for themselves or have intelligent options. Fuck the patriarchy.

    Marine Joe Townsend, injured in Afghanistan, aged 19 - Photography by Bryan Adams
    Marine Joe Townsend, injured in Afghanistan, aged 19 – Photography by Bryan Adams
  • Misogyny : Not in my (gaming) industry

    Misogyny : Not in my (gaming) industry

    Facebook can be amazing. Over the past year or two I’ve steadily curated my Facebook friends lists to provide me with utter joy on a minute-by-minute basis. I can log on and be in touch from people around the world at any hour of the day and my main feed reflects the absolutely wonderful fuckers that I call my friends.

    However the downside to Facebook means that occasionally you see a comment from a friend of a friend that isn’t something you would want on your daily feed of happy.

    Recently #GamerGate has been in the news and since I have an awful lot of friends working in tech and gaming it’s getting commented on. Alot. Which is great because almost every post that I see on my feed is largely positive about the whole debacle.

    But occasionally you get someone, a friend of a friend, who loudly protests that this isn’t what they see in their industry. By saying that they don’t see it, they’re basically silencing the voices of those who do. They’re saying ‘your point is invalid because I don’t see it in my day to day life’.

    I’m not seeing the vast quantities of sexism I’m supposed to be seeing. Maybe it just doesn’t affect the company I work for, or the community built around our game.

    Yesterday I pointed out that of course the chap in question hadn’t seen anything like the degree of sexism that us women experience because he is a man. Do you know how he responded to that? He told me that now he had experienced sexism because of my comment to him. My comment to him was apparently sexist because I pointed out that the fact he was male means he doesn’t experience systematic gender-related oppression. The problem is that there’s no answer to this. I can’t counter his claims that I was sexist to him because it’s a personal thing. I feel sorry for him if he believes that genuinely is sexism because he will never understand the pain and hurt that so many of us go through on a regular basis, but I can’t help him with that.

    The thing is, I’m a gamer. There, I said it. Something that I don’t often admit. Do you know why I don’t admit it very often? Because people go ‘oh, that’s cute’ and then either assume that I play computer games because of some fictional boyfriend that I may or may not have, or that I play ‘girl games’. I confess, I’m actually a Warcraft addict. But it all started way back when I used to play games on my Atari ST and mess around with programming. Then came Tomb Raider for the Playstation and my Dad and I used to sit in my bedroom on the floor for hours playing it together. I’m also a God Sim addict and haven’t found one that can defeat me yet. Oh, and I like to write databases for fun. So no, I’m not a fucking ‘healer girlfriend’.

    Where were we. Yes. I’m a gamer. Warcrack. I have experienced the fear of not using microphones in raids because you just don’t know if you’re going to get some misogynistic prick who thinks that women shouldn’t play computer games. In fact I joined my awesome guild because they were a mature guild who didn’t let children – or bad behaviour – be a part of it all. For the last five years I’ve played with an awesome group of ScaNorwegianDogs where we treat each other like humans. But that doesn’t mean that every now and again I don’t dip into the public chats and raids for some reason. Even on a roleplaying server – which are generally more mature in nature – within a few minutes of being in the city chat channels I can experience homophobia or misogyny. Is this why people tend to use the best gaming vpn they can find to find better server locales to play games? But, isn’t misogyny everywhere?

    And really all this is pretty amazing considering that around 48% of gamers are now women.

    48% of gamers are women. WOW I hear you say, that’s some motherfuckingawesome equality RIGHT THERE.

    Well yes it is. And no. Because #GamerGate continues.

    Female game developers, journalists and critics are under mass fire right now. I’m even writing this blog tentatively because I know it’ll eventually get picked up on searches. Already a while ago there was an attempted hack on my twitter account because during the #ZoeQuinn business I dared to question the men’s rights activists who were so active during that mess. And I’m just a small fish in a massive pond. Imagine that those big fish feel like.

    No wait, we don’t need to imagine. This week the University of Utah has been threatened because Anita Sarkeesian is speaking there tonight. And I don’t just mean a little threat, I mean some pretty fucking graphic shit has been written to them.

    If you do not cancel her talk, a Montreal Massacre style attach will be carried out against the attendees, as well as students and staff at the nearby Women’s Centre. I have at my disposal a semi-automatic rifle, multiple pistols, and a collection of pipe bombs. This will be the deadliest school shooting in American history and I’m giving you a chance to stop it.

    You have 24 hours to cancel Sarkeesian’s talk. You might be foolish enough to just beef up security at the event, but that won’t save you. Even if they’re able to stop me, there are plenty of feminists on campus who won’t be able to defend themselves. One way or another, I’m going to make sure they die.

    […]

    Anita Sarkeesian is everything wrong with the feminist woman, and she is going to die screaming like the craven little whole that she is if you let her come to USU. I will write my manifesto in her spilled blood, and you will all bear witness to what feminist lies and poison have done to the men of America.

    […]

    Feminists have ruined my life and I will have my revenge, for my sake and the sake of all the others they’ve wronged.

    This is the rage that is incited by Sarkeesian. Do you know what Sarkeesian does? She critiques video games from a feminist perspective, pointing out that they’re rather hateful and misogynistic an awful lot of the time. (Wow, that was pretty polite of me…).

    Let me remind you again. 48% of gamers are women.

    But this isn’t the first time that Sarkeesian has been targeted for her work. Here’s the TED Talk from 2012, shortly after she kickstarted her Tropes vs Women project (which I should point out, funded at almost $160k for making a feminist video game series for YouTube).

    I’m going to use a trigger warning here. I hate them. But this video does contain depictions of actual online violence against Sarkeesian.

    You’ll notice something very telling on the YouTube video page.

    Screen Shot 2014-10-15 at 08.29.22Sadly, not an uncommon sight on anything involving feminism on YouTube. It seems that men’s rights activists and anti-feminists can’t actually be trusted to engage rationally. How often do you see comments disabled on a MRA video because the feminists are threatening sexual violence against the MRA? Yeah. Quite.

     

    Anyway, I’m not sure where I’m going with this now. I think that the big frustration for me is that people still say ‘I don’t recognise this industry, this isn’t the industry that I work in’. Guys, we need you. We need you as allies. We need you to educate yourself so that you can see this batshit crazy behaviour and help us call it out. Because sadly much of society still gives more weight to the voices of men.

    We need you to actively look for this behaviour in your friendship circles, your workplaces and your industries and we need you to call it out.

    Because this weekend more than one female game developer has had to flee her home due to threats of sexual violence and violence being made against her and her family and this isn’t acceptable in the gaming and tech industries. Or any industry. Or just generally in the world. At all.

  • Laura Bates: Everyday Sexism

    Laura Bates: Everyday Sexism

    I love TED Talks. I love Laura Bates. I love The Everyday Sexism Project..

    In this talk she lists some pretty convincing reasons as to why women have not yet found equality.

    “Women are equal now, more or less.” Apparently. So I am often told when I’m told that we don’t need feminism. When I’m told that I’m making a fuss about nothing.

  • Female participation in e-sports

    Female participation in e-sports

    I want to talk about the recent decision that the IeSF made to remove the ‘male only’ qualifier from their ‘world championship’ type tournaments. And hey look, I’m going to be good and I’m not even going to discuss the fact I’m faced with Jaina’s great big sexy almost-bare tits every time I log on to play my Mage in Hearthstone! Although on an unrelated note, I just tweeted this:

    https://twitter.com/Charlotte_Moss/statuses/485740905270611968

    Anyway, back to the topic at hand.

    Apparently some guys have got pissy that there is still a female-only competition, while there is no longer a male-only competition. Basically it’s unisex for the big prize and a secondary female tournament without quite as much status. Women can compete either with the men on equal terms or with just their own gender.

    I’ve said before that I find much positive discrimination uncomfortable, I don’t agree with it being the best way to sort out that whole inconvenient patriarchy thing. However sometimes you just have to make a temporary exception – where temporary is at least a few years.

    The IeSF aren’t holding a separate female tournament because they’re misandrist, no matter what a load of these whingy geeks might think. I was going to quote some of the bile from the comments of the article I linked above, but to be honest I think you get the idea. Generally it sounds like ‘waaa waaa waaaaaaa, I don’t want to be forced to play with girls’. Or they’re playing the ‘reverse sexism’ line, and saying that it’s sexist towards men to exclude them from the female-only tournament.

    Here’s why it’s not sexist.

    The IeSF aren’t doing this because female gamers are in a minority. In fact, a massive 48% of gamers are female. Didn’t expect that, huh? There’s lots of people saying that female gamers are in the minority and they’re simply not. However female gamers are underrepresented in the ‘top tier’ of gaming – even down to the leading raid groups on my warcraft server which appear to be male dominated.

    I’ll say now, I’m a Warcraft player. I love raiding with my Paladin. I love doing pickup raids from OpenRaid, but the raids with voice communication are out of the question to me. Why? Because there’s always the chance that you’re going to get a group of guys who feel that women shouldn’t be there. Unfortunately this isn’t an unusual occurrence, it happens more often than not.

    The comments range from sexist comments (usually something clever about getting back in the kitchen) to something that basically amounts of sexual harassment (the guys seem to enjoy telling you about how they’re rubbing their massive cock over the thought of you). All this happens in front of everyone else in the room and no one ever stops it. Homophobic comments are common place too (“Why did you wipe us? You fucking gay fag…”).

    So by having a tournament that only women can enter it encourages a safe place for women. Hopefully this will also encourage women-safe places to play too. Perhaps women’s only guilds. Or even guilds that women run, where men have to be vetted in. But this is all just a short term (and slightly uncomfortable) solution.

    The longer term solution is to educate male gamers that sexist (and homophobic) abuse is wrong and that even if they’re not the ones doing the abusing, everyone has to speak out when they hear it to get it to stop. But that’s the longer term solution in wider society and we’re not doing so well there either. But in the short term we need to get more women comfortable playing in this kind of environment, and creating their own spaces where they have the confidence to speak up to abuse.

    At the same time the women-only tournament will create role-models for other female gamers. Someone to look up to and to aspire to be like. And eventually the standard of female gaming will raise because women are allowed an environment that is both safe and also full of great role-models.

    Then, and not before then, we can start to encourage more cross-over. To migrate the women over to the mainstream tournament. This has to be a multi-sided attack and it has to be done in conjunction with stamping out sexism and homophobia in gaming. And guys, you need to be a part of this as much as the women. We need you on our side, not whinging about the fact that women get their own tournament.

  • Positive discrimination in photos

    Positive discrimination in photos

    OR: IS IT REALLY ANY OF MY BUSINESS?

    So I have this problem. I don’t believe in positive discrimination.

    I don’t think that positively discriminating in most situations is the correct way to promote tolerance, understanding and ultimately equality. In feminism in particular I do not believe that the way to force equality to happen is by doing things like setting quotas for the number of employees, for example. It just breeds resentment and prevents the best people from getting the job, if the best person happens to be male. This is a little besides the point, but I’d like to set out my stall as to where I’m coming from. I don’t believe that positive discrimination is a good thing. If I got a job due to positive discrimination, for example, I’d never feel comfortable in my role and I’d feel pretty uncomfortable as a person.

    Dove-Real-Beauty-CampaignHere’s a great example of an utterly bizarre form of positive discrimination by Dove as part of their Real Beauty campaign. The campaign said that ‘all’ women are beautiful. And yet the campaign only shows a certain type of woman in their underwear. Yes, they seem to have hit the ‘racial discrimination’ quota, but ALL of the women appear to be something around a size 12, with a tummy and a decent pair of norks. None of the women appear to be underweight, overweight, muscular, disabled or transgender. In addition they all have shoulder length hair and perfect teeth. Did you notice that?

    As someone who is short, on the muscular side, size 6-8 with a bald head and bad teeth, I’m starting to feel pretty worthless about now. Because ALL women can be beautiful, as long as they fit what Dove tells us is beautiful.

    That’s the problem with positive discrimination, you start to leave people out. You can talk about how we should be completely egalitarian, inclusive and diverse, but where do you stop when you’re fundamentally talking about creating an image with only so many pixels to use?

    I come from a weird place with my photography, a place where standards of beauty and what’s ‘right’ gets twisted. In a previous iteration I was a full time fashion photographer, working in studios with some of the top commercial models in the country. This picture below, the girl at the far end in the white jeans? That was my stylist. And I’m standing next to her in the grey leggings. I can pick out at least five or six models from this line up who we regularly had in the studio.

    Hollister and Gilly Hicks pre-opening promotional event 4In fact this guy below, we regularly had him in the studio. (He was such a sweetie.)

    4360351805_aeba370978_bSo why am I posting these picture of hot guys? Because I want you to understand where I come from with my photography. This was my world, until I gave it up. Judging people against impossibly high standards of beauty was what I did. I’m not saying this was nice, or that looking back I particularly enjoyed it, but it’s part of what shaped me and my photography and it’s where I come from.

    What is it that they say? You cannot change your past but you can change your future.

    However.

    Recently I became aware of something interesting. When I meet a person socially I don’t make judgements against them. I don’t think in my head ‘this person is black’ or ‘this person can’t walk properly’ or ‘this person is overweight’.

     I’m going to stop here for a moment and say something. My interest is in feminist academia. I campaign and write about other -isms when they intersect with feminism. I have limited knowledge in this field so I’m probably going to express myself wrongly here. I also have lots of friends who call themselves by nicknames related to their skin colour, sexuality or disabilities and so sometimes I genuinely have not realised that a word was ‘wrong’ to use, because my friends use it to describe themselves. In fact I think the word disability is probably wrong, but I don’t know the right word to use. So mea culpa – I beg forgiveness before I start.

    If you asked me how many black friends I had, I’d struggle to know. Same with gay friends or disabled friends. I just have friends and to be honest their backgrounds, ethnicities, sexualities or not-quite-working-right-bits are all as interesting to me as any other friend. Each person has their own story to tell, which they tell on it’s merits rather than because they are a certain type of minority.

    I just see people as people. I’m not particularly interested in their gender, ethnicity or health status (that might be because I’m a misanthrope and not that interested in people in general an awful lot of the time – at least I’m honest). But apparently most people don’t think this way. Apparently most people do notice these things right off the bat. And apparently most people judge.

    Well lets be honest, I know most people judge, as someone who generally presents as female I experience this all the time. And because I have experienced this judgement in my life, I try not to apply that to other people.

    I’ve got to the point in the blog post where I realise I’m wandering off track and I say ‘where am I going with this?’

    So where am I going with this.

    I suppose what I’m trying to talk about is the fact that when you take a photograph as a creative exercise rather than a purely documentary work, you’re making aesthetic decisions. In fact I’d go one step further in that in pure documentary photography you’re also making aesthetic decisions – it’s just that they might be governed by a slightly different set of ideals.

    Creative photography is almost exclusively about aesthetics. Ultimately you select images on if you think they look good to your eye or that they tell the story that you, as a photographer, are trying to tell. Every photographer has different things that they look for in a creative image and indeed those things can change from client to client and job to job.

    So LRP photography for me is governed by a particular set of creative ideas. Now, it would be presumptuous to talk about the motivations of photographers who aren’t me and I know that my photography comrades from Empire – Ollie and Tom – both have wildly different ideas about what makes a great LRP photograph both to myself and to each other. But I think that’s what makes us a good team, you know? Because we’re actively looking for different things in our work and therefore you get three very different takes on the same subject.

    So I will admit that what I do, considering my background in photography and my journey so far, is that I judge people on the way that they look when I’m including them in my photographs. HOWEVER. And this is a massive HOWEVER. I do not judge someone based on how ‘beautiful’ society thinks they are, their ethnicity, their sexuality, their gender status or their bodies ability to function.

    What I judge someone on when I photograph them either as a model or at a LRP event is how appropriate they look in the settings. So for example when it comes to LRP I particularly love the look of the old, weathered Marches who look like they’ve seen dozens of harvests on their farms. Sure, I’m judging them as beautiful, but beautiful relative to the situation and the setting. I hope he’ll forgive me for saying I think he looks weathered, but this is one of my favourite shots so far from Empire:

    _MG_4656web

    Why is it a favourite shot? Because the whole thing just comes together. A senior member of a Marches family fighting to defend the Empire in worn, old costume that looks like it’s seen a hundred fights – it’s perfect!

    So when I say I’m judging based on aesthetics, this is what I mean. I’m not judging on what society believes is attractive, I’m judging based on what I believe looks good in a particular setting.

    And yeah, it’s what I believe looks good. Because I’m the one behind the camera. And because I’m the one putting in extensive amounts of work to make this happen, so that I can produce a portfolio that I adore looking at.

    You see, I do photography to make me happy. I don’t do photography to make other people happy. Of course it is always flattering to find out that people love my photographs or that they’ve given people self confidence or that they just enjoy having them as a record of a place that they have been, but fundamentally I take photographs because I love taking photographs. In fact I quit my job working in fashion because taking photographs for other people was no longer fun.

    Working with Matt and PD on events was an interesting challenge to me. It was a chance to attempt to make photography fun for me again, because I hadn’t picked up my camera in almost a year. I felt I had skills that I had learnt in the commercial world that I could apply to PD and I also though it was a great opportunity to use it almost like a sandbox for trying out new techniques and approaches. In that way it’s worked extraordinarily well, I think. Certainly from my end I’ve had loads of opportunities to try out new processing methods, new looks, new retouching techniques, all sorts of things.

    But something that’s really important to remember about all the crew at a LRP event, is that they’re doing it for fun and they’re doing it because they enjoy it. If it starts to stop being fun then they’re under absolutely no obligation to continue doing it. I suspect at some point in my future LRP photography will stop being fun, however if that’s six weeks away or two decades away – who knows. An awful of my ‘fun’ that is generated at events comes from the people I surround myself rather than the actual taking of photographs. I have wonderful friends and I enjoy the fact that my photography hobby allows me to spend time with them in this way.

     

    So there’s a point in here somewhere. I suspect as usual it will happen at around the 2000 word mark.

    There have been mutterings recently that perhaps the ‘official’ photographer for a LRP event should be held to certain standards of inclusivity and diversity and I’d like to give my thoughts on this topic pertaining to my own photography. Before we go any further together I want to say that I am not an official mouthpiece for any publications or organisations that I am associated with. ‘Official’ statements will always be given out through official channels. This blog is not an official channel.

    I’m not interested in knowing where strangers are from, their backgrounds, their gender status, their visible disabilities or any invisible illnesses that they might have.

    I’m interested in those things in my friends. And actually, I’m a nosy bitch and I am interested in those things in strangers. (Once again mea culpa – I take after my grandmother who was so nosey she once fell backwards off a chair in a bar in Mexico because she was leaning so far back to hear the conversation of two strangers behind her. She might have had gin.) But I feel it’s not my place to know those things about strangers, because I wouldn’t be happy with random strangers who happen to own a camera knowing such personal things about me.

    But say I was happy to try and implement a ruling about hitting quotas of images to use in my portfolio, the advertising for the system and the wiki. The first problem is that I have no clue how many people on the field are a minority of some kind. So we’d have to make them fill out a survey or something which is invasive and is never going to be considered a good thing. I remember when I was studying with the Open University and they sent out a survey asking our ethnicities, sexualities and disabilities so that they could ensure that they were meeting government set targets – absolute outrage ensued. People don’t like being asked this when they perceive it’s not for a good reason. So that’s the first hurdle.

    Then there is of course the issue of matching those surveys to people on the field. Unless you’re in my close social group at events, I don’t know your name. You might have messaged me on Facebook but I still almost certainly won’t know what you look like. It’s unlikely I will have put name and picture together, unless you’re using one of my pictures as your Facebook avatar. And even then, I still am unlikely to remember who you are when you come up and talk to me in a field. I just seem to have been born lacking this skill of recognition. Of course what I’m not going to do is before I photograph someone check who they are and then check against my database. When it comes up ‘white, cis, British, middle-class male with no illness or disabilities’ should I not photograph him? Should I actively leave him out of my photographs even though he’s doing something that looks amazingly cool? If you start visually marking people with what minority they are, you’re getting into very uncomfortable areas with anti-Semitic providence. Which can never be a good thing.

    But this does bring up a very serious problem when you’re talking about diversity and equality in pictures. In a photograph you simply don’t know if someone is disabled, for example, unless they’re displaying disabled markers to the camera. So you can photograph someone in a wheelchair and say ‘I have photographed a person who looks disabled in my photograph’ (even though they might not actually be disabled, but just sitting in a wheelchair for some reason) but how do you know you’ve photographed someone with debilitating depression?

    And then to take that further with the transgender thing, should I be looking at people and saying ‘that man looks like a woman who is dressing as a man, I must photograph them’? Because actually for personal reasons, I’m not ok with that. I’m not ok with photographing people because of the fact that they were born in the wrong gender. Sure, I try to make sure that ‘women’ and ‘men’ are represented approximately equally in my photographs, but I don’t want to make judgement calls on if I think that woman used to be a man. Because actually, that’s really fucking out of order and unkind.

    By extension, what do I do if I realise that I have not captured enough of one particular minority during an event? We get to a point a bit like what the NHS do when they find that a hospital isn’t quite meeting waiting times for A&E – they create a separate emergency ward so that they can ‘admit’ people and therefore remove the problem from A&E. Do I spend a few hours chasing down that one Chinese woman who attended to ensure that I photograph her? I’m sure she’d feel great that I was hassling her purely because she has Chinese parents. What a compliment! The same with disabled people. Should I chase down the guy with ME just because he has ME and I’ve got to up my inclusion rate for invisible illnesses? I’m sure he’d be thrilled.

    This might all seem very extreme but honestly when you start to think about it, it’s really not. If you set quotas or targets then you have to meet quotas and targets otherwise they’re just worthless and you might as well not have bothered in the first place. Making policies for the sake of making policies is a waste of everyones time. And actually in the relentless pursual of an inclusive and diverse policy when it comes to taking photographs, quite frankly you’re going to deeply offend far more people than you make happy. Suddenly I would become the villain – again.

    So positive discrimination in photographs at a LRP event. Well, to be honest, I just don’t think I can go there for the reasons explained above. It’s not my job to offensively try to work out who I should take a photograph of and who I have taken too many of. I just want to take cool pictures of cool people doing cool things. And I just want to shoot to make myself happy.

    And I want to leave you with something that a friend just said to me during a conversation:

    I always like the thought that no one knows what your problems are from a picture. Its a place to hide and be ‘normal’ .

    My beautiful friend has severe M.E. And she doesn’t want to be singled out because of that in photographs.