Dark Times.
Category: Rants
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#ShirtStorm
A disproportionately high number of my friends work in the STEM subjects. I also have a disproportionately high number of friends who are feminists. My social circle at the moment feels a bit like this. But with WAY MORE OVERLAP (I can’t draw Venn Diagrams). Also – all my friends are awesome. I couldn’t really write “ALL THE FUCKING AMAZING AWESOME RIGHT NOW” in the middle bit without looking a bit childish. #ShirtStorm happened this week.
So my Facebook feed has been full of #ShirtStorm for the past few days. For those of you that don’t know what happened, some awesome chap landed a spaceship on a comet – which was very cool. Except he wore a shirt that lots of people found frustrating for various reasons. Then the cesspit of the internet got upset with these people for finding it frustrating. And spawned memes. And of course the whole thing reinforced Lewis’ Law – The comments on any article about feminism justify feminism.
Lets just take a look at the shirt that he was wearing before we go any further.
As well as wearing this particular shirt to the press conference announcing the landing, when asked about the difficulty of the Rosetta Mission, Matt Taylor replied with “She’s sexy, but I never said she was easy.”
“She’s sexy, but I never said she was easy.”
I’d like to address this before we get onto #ShirtStorm. Because I think it’s important for context. I’m going to let this twitter user start for me:
https://twitter.com/Arlnee/status/535056180981141504
https://twitter.com/Arlnee/status/535056380000874496
https://twitter.com/Arlnee/status/535056511773323264
https://twitter.com/Arlnee/status/535056667386208256
https://twitter.com/Arlnee/status/535058094460399617
You see, there is a background of institutionalised sexism within the STEM fields.[1] The background radiation of sexism (the tweets above are a great example) means that – like it or not – the STEM fields can be a hostile place for women. And it’s not just women who work in the STEM fields either, it’s also young women who are at school and are considering perhaps going to university with a view to working in them and people like myself who are considering moving into them from their current work.
Casually sexist tropes like this all create the general feeling of women being ‘the other’ and that is not helpful to promote an industry that is diverse. And if there’s one thing that we’ve learnt over the years it’s that industries with good diversity do better. Making 50% of the population feel excluded from an industry doesn’t help anybody. Except maybe those who aren’t very good and got their jobs as part of the old boys network – but I digress. Or possibly those straight, white guys who realised that they’re playing life on the lowest difficulty setting available.
You see, this is a common theme for me. I worked in logistics and I like things like cars, planes, boats… you get the idea. In all those hobbies the machines are always referred to as ‘she’. Some days when indulging in my hobbies I feel a little bit like Angeline Jolie in Gone in 60 Seconds. In case you don’t know, all the cars they have to steal are given female codenames so that they can say talk about them over the radio using euphemisms for sex while plotting to nick them and avoiding the police.
Except this is real life, not a film. And we have to put up with everything being given female names, being referred to as a female gendered object, using crass language to talk about objects as women… Sheesh. Why the fuck do we put up with this shit in our hobbies? I remember once when I was a teenager when someone asked me what my bass guitar was called. I told the guy that my electric bass was called James. He said it couldn’t possibly be called James because guitars had female names, because you caress them, play them, finger them and make them sing. ARGH!
This attitude of treating objects of women is just one of those little subtle signals that shows (usually without intention) that this is a male dominated sphere. Cars, boats, bikes, guitars, spaceships… you never see objects being referred to as male… do you? Of course you don’t. Because there’s a powerful link of ownership when you use these words. You’re reinforcing the idea that women are objects to be obtained and owned. It’s not very pleasant.
Altogether comments like this create an atmosphere that’s dismissive to women. And then there’s the shirt…
#ShirtStorm
First off, lets check what we mean by the word ‘offend’.[2]
- Cause to feel upset, annoyed, or resentful
- Be displeasing or cause problems to
Yeah, so I’m offended by this shirt. And I’m a feminist. So I guess that means that his shirt did offend feminists. Or at least some feminists. I’m upset, annoyed, resentful and I feel it’s caused problems. More than anything though, I’m really fucking frustrated. I’ll take a look at ‘why’ in a sec.
A friend of mine wrote this on his Facebook recently. He’s a senior teacher at a mixed gender secondary school.
Right. There is an issue with encouraging girls into science. There is a reported issue of institutionalised sexism in science professions . These are big issues that need fixing for us to have a decent society.
Landing a satellite on a comet is fucking awesome and should be used to encourage/inspire people into science.
Was awesome scientist any less awesome at science because he fucked up and wore the wrong shirt. No.. Still an awesome scientist.
Does the fact that (until it hit social media) noone saw this as a problem, highlight the endemic problem in the profession. Yes. Only would have taken one person to say.. dude, do you think that shirt’s appropriate…Put on a work one before you’re interviewed.
People need to stop confusing the two. This is an awesome achievement and the team of scientists were ace scientists.
There is an issue in the profession that we should deal with this. Internally or externally.I want to show this to 16 year old girls and say science and maths is great… You should consider this for a profession.
I do have an issue doing this due to his dress sense.It’s still an awesome achievement though
Too many people are Missing The Fucking Point. No one (I promise you) is deriding this guys achievements in the world of science. I can’t think of anyone who thinks that landing a spaceship on a comet is anything less than absolutely fucking incredible. I mean the guy is brilliant and his achievement is something that should be celebrated.
Now, many people will know that I’m a reluctant participant in geek culture. I move in circles of geek culture and have lots of geek friends. I photograph geek culture, I write about geek culture, and I build databases for fun. (For the love of fucking God, I build databases for fun. Someone save me from myself.) I’m even dating a couple of geeks. Geek is my life. Well, not exclusively my life. Actually, it’s pretty much my life.
Within geek culture there is undoubtedly a higher proportion of people who for various reasons are not quite as socially trained or aware as the majority of the rest of the population. If they are drawn to geek culture, if they are a product of geek culture or if they – in part – caused geek culture is debatable, but either way geek culture does act as a certain kind of safe haven for people who lack some social awareness. I’d like to argue that in some cases it actively attracts people without social awareness too, but that’s really for another blog post. Social awareness of gender issues in geek culture is also something that I’m studying at university, so I write from that point of view to an extent.
Like the the points made above, this shirt conveys a message of ‘this is a male environment, women are welcome if they look sexy or shut up’. This issue of pornographic images at work (because yes, these are sexually titivating images and I’m going to label them pornographic) is one that many British feminists in particular are familiar with due to the No More Page 3 campaign. They wrote a good article on their site about how porngraphic images at work constitute sexual harassment. It’s actually against the law to force people to view this kind of sexual imagery.
The Equality Act 2010 says that the following constitutes harassment in the workplace:
When unwanted conduct related to sex has the purpose or effect of violating an individual’s dignity or creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment for that individual.
Wearing a shirt with highly sexualised images of ‘perfect’ women in skimpy fetishistic outfits who are brandishing guns while in the workplace is something that adds to an intimidating, degrading, humiliating and offensive environment for many women. It is not acceptable in the vast majority of workplaces. Indeed in the UK, I would be confident to complain about this to an employer and take it to a tribunal if required. (For the record I understand that a female friend made it for him. It’s irrelevant. It’s also irrelevant that some women are not offended by it. Again it’s saying that women are valuable in this environment for their sexuality rather than their brains.)
How can you show a video of this press conference to a 15 year old GCSE student and tell her with a straight face that if she goes into science that her body will be valued more than her brain when one of the leading space scientists in the world is wearing a shirt covered in flawless pneumatic tits? What kind of a message does this give her, let alone the guys female colleagues.
I don’t think that Matt Taylor was malicious. I don’t believe he’s misogynistic. I believe that he’s a misguided geek who aimed for ‘cool’ but landed on ‘unprofessional’. Recently in the news there was an article about how the education secratary believes that STEM subjects are far more important than arts subjects, but to me this is a perfect example of why both paths work together in harmony. This guy can launch a rocket and put it on a comet, but he doesn’t have the first clue about behaving in a way that doesn’t intimidate a large portion of the world. This is why we need social sciences, arts and humanities. It brings the humane side to the science
ShitStorm
And then of course there’s the shitstorm that happened. Like I said right at the start – the comments on any article on feminism justify feminism. So many people are complaining at feminists and their allies for ‘making a fuss’ about the shirt and suggesting that their fuss is overshadowing the achievements of the team of scientists that landed a probe on a comet (including women scientists, I should add).
One of the things that really gets my goat is people saying things like ‘feminists should pick their battles’ or ‘there are more important issues in the world to worry about than a little sexism’.
Because quite frankly…- This is actually quite a big battle in the grand scheme of things that will actually eventually change lives for the better.
- I’m more than capable of worrying about more than one issue at once. Being a feminist doesn’t prevent me from caring about issues like the environment or whatever the latest hot-topic cause is.
- Sexism is something that affects more than 50% of the population. It affects almost all women and an awful lot of men. That’s a bit bigger than ‘a little’. I’d say it’s one of the most important issues in the world today, actually.
But the problem with the people who complain about the feminist response is that they’re perpetuating the message: women are welcome in Science, as long as they shut up and don’t cause a fuss about the institutionally sexist barriers that they might face. And that male scientists should be given a free rein to do what they want, even if it upsets female colleagues and commenters, or prevents just one young woman from choosing science as her career.
There was more I was going to write, but I’ve been writing this on and off all day. And now I’m tired. And female scientists have had death threads for saying that they’re not happy with the image that this guy presented to the world. *le sigh*.
References
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STEM_fields ↩
- http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/offend ↩
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The Patriarchy and the War Wounded
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 -
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…).1999: gamers demand we stop blaming school shootings on videogames. 2014: gamers threaten a school shooting because videogames.
– Dead Cousin Squinky (@TheSquink) October 15, 2014
Multiple specific threats made stating intent to kill me & feminists at USU. For the record one threat did claim affiliation with #gamergate
– Feminist Frequency (@femfreq) October 15, 2014
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.
Sadly, 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.
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Choosing a photographer to study with
Very early on in my photographic career I discovered that my talent was most certainly not for taking photographs (although I’m not too bad at that either) but rather for looking at other peoples photographs. I worked out that with all the business acumen in the world I would never progress above the level of a-bit-better-than-average and I’d have to be happy on a lower end, modest salary for the rest of my life. Anyone that knows me will recognise that I’m not the kind of person to settle, so I took a long time working out what part of photography I am good at.
I’m really good at looking at pictures. I can pull portfolio images together with ease that other people don’t seem to have. I can see flaws in images and identify how things could be better. More to the point I actually enjoy doings things like this far more than taking pictures. Talking about and looking at photos is what I’m good at so I decided to go to university to do a degree in History of Art. And I’m doing very well at it, getting a first at the end of my first year.
But what does this have to do with choosing a photographer to study with?
Lots of photographers claim to be able to offer an awful lot to new photographers. The reality is that they don’t. Only today I saw a wedding photographer on Facebook who was offering the ‘opportunity’ to assist him on two weddings this weekend. He said it was a great chance for someone looking to make a career as a photographer. He also said you had to provide all your own gear (a minimum of a basic digital camera and an 18-55mm lens along with a flash gun) as well as your own transport too and from the venues. Graciously he said you’d be able to take and use any pictures you like – I hope his clients are happy with that!
The big, fat cynic in me started to creep out and ask questions and provide answers along these lines:
- He stated he was shooting three weddings this weekend. Three weddings in a weekend? Fuck my life that’s alot. Quantity is certainly a viable business model but remember that you can’t have quantity, quality and low cost. One of those things has to give. He wasn’t a very expensive photographer.
- The gear he wanted the assistant to provide. Top photographers will often have gear for their assistants. That way they know it’s all maintained, insured and in great working order. However often assistants do provide their own kit, so that’s not totally unusual. It was the mention of the 18-55mm kit lens that did it for me. You cannot shoot a wedding on an 18-55mm kit lens. It doesn’t let enough light in for the ceremony or the evening celebrations. It’s not long enough to shoot much of the ceremony from where an assistant is likely to stand. It’s not good quality enough to produce a high quality result. The kit lenses are generally soft and hard to get good results from – certainly in the hands of someone inexperienced. There’s no way in a million years I’d consider using a 18-55mm kit lens for a wedding I cared about producing good results for – there’s a reason you can pick them up for less than £20 on eBay. I’m not a gear snob at all, quite the opposite in fact. But if you’re shooting someones wedding, this isn’t a time for shooting with entry level kit most of the time.
- If you’re looking for assistants who want a break in the industry you’re mostly going to be looking at young people. People who have just finished degrees or who have just finished school. Makes you a bit of an arsehole to say that you won’t drop someone too and from a train station or similar. Young people often don’t have their own transport and since they’re doing you a favour here as much as you’re supposedly helping them out, the least you can do is offer to pick them up from the station.
- He also mentioned that he couldn’t pay because he had to pay for insurance for the assistant. Warning bells, he’s not charging enough money. Why can’t he charge enough money to pay for an assistant? Must be because his photos aren’t very good or he’s a terrible business person – do you really think you can learn skills about the industry from a person who is either of those things?
- Lastly I looked at his pictures. My suspicions were correct, they were terrible.
There is so much emphasis put on taking photographs. At first glance that sounds like a silly thing to say. Of course if you want to be a photographer you have to take lots of photographs, right? Well yeah, of course you do. But you also need to look at photographs and learn what good photographs look like.
This is where you go ‘But Char! Art is subjective!’ yes well… no. But yes. It is, different people can have different aesthetic tastes, but quality is not subjective when it comes to traditional commercial photography. (I’m going to insert a disclaimer here that some people make ‘poor quality’ their style, I’m not discussing that).
Before you even think about assisting someone for experience (i.e. without getting paid) or apprenticing someone you need to take some time out to educate yourself as to what a quality photographer means. Learning to recognise bad photoshopping or things like, oh you know, the whole fucking image being out of focus are crucial skills for an assistant. I mean we all think stuff like the following shot is really funny, but the reality is that lots of photographers skills are no better. And why would you want to work with someone like that?
As an assistant your job is attention to detail. Attention to what the photographer is doing, attention to what s/he wants, attention to the brides dress and to the grooms suit. Attention to detail is one of the more relevant skills that either a photographer or an assistant can have and you need it before you even do your first job.
Learning this skill requires looking at images and learning why they work and why they don’t. My attitude to photography hasn’t always gone down well in the LRP world – I simply refuse to put pictures online that do not meet my standard. That means they must be in focus, they must be sharp, they must be well composed and they must have a good background – I’d say they are fairly minimal requirements for any photographer who wants to be half decent. You should not assist or try to learn from any photographer that doesn’t have those skills.
Here’s a good example. A few weeks ago I shot some stuff for Evenlode. I was feeling kind of under the weather, it was hot, we were doing things in a hurry and I didn’t pay enough attention. This is a photo I love. You know what I don’t love? The fact that the belt isn’t centred with the rest of the armour.
If a photographer is kicking out work with constant mistakes like this, you shouldn’t be studying from them. And you need to teach yourself to spot mistakes. That could be brides dresses being messed up, or it could be bad photoshopping or inability to focus, but before you even start to work with another photographer with the intent of learning you need to understand and recognise these things.Working with just any photographer won’t help you. You need to be picky and as an apprentice it’s your prerogative to do so. Don’t just take every opportunity that comes along, hunt people out. You’ll learn more and you’re learn quickly. And you’ll be better.
Learning about images is just as important as learning to shoot images. Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.
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Sometimes we’re just not educated
You know, sometimes it’s not that we’re trying to be horrible people. Or that we do something deliberately offensive. Or that we’re trying to just be a cunt. Sometimes it’s accidental. And the way to combat that isn’t to SHOUT VERY LOUDLY AND SLAG THE PERSON OFF but with education.
Saw this on my Facebook feed this morning. Reminded me of stuff.
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#NotAllPhotographers and Prison Rape
So Sean Peacock / Shaun Colclough has been convicted of Sexual Assault and banned from ever taking a picture of a female model again without someone accompanying who knows of his convictions.
A quick summary of the background. In 1996, aged 22, he raped an 84 year old woman. During his sex offenders rehabilitation he was taught photography and discovered he was pretty good at it. He was very good at it actually, I certainly admired his work when I was starting. He began to intimidate models with sexual discussion, exposing himself to them and assaulting them. The actual details are elsewhere on the web, it’s kind of beside the point for this blog. The judge argued that his behaviour was an escalation because he had gone from a drunken rape to systematically planning to sexually assault these female models. Right on sister, etc.
I have nothing but the deepest respect for those women who have gone through the process of being a witness at court, leading to his conviction. Truly, that must have been a terrible experience. It can be hard for models to be taken seriously in instances like this because you know, they’re getting almost naked for strangers. It’s a bit like ‘She was wearing a short skirt m’lud’.
But that’s not what I want to discuss here. I want to discuss the community reaction.
Violence. That was the initial reaction.
I keep my eye on lots of the amateur photography websites due to my job (hey, I write about photography professionally, in case you didn’t know). Even the websites I’ve been banned from for upsetting the managerial staff, I still keep an eye on those for what’s happening in the community. So when I saw last night that Roswell Ivory had posted about the conviction of Peacock / Colclough I had to stay up late for an extra couple of hours to keep an eye on the reaction.
Violence and rape. The first responses I saw. Some lovely photographers actually wrote down that they hoped he went to prison and got raped by other men. Male on male rape is a serious crime and if you know anyone who’d ever been affected by it then you’ll know that it’s one of the hardest things in the world to deal with. Why would we wish someone to be raped in return for committing any crime? That’s a horrific thing to say.
From PurplePort.com. Hilarious. (Highlighting not my own – I just scrubbed out the usernames and avatars.)
These photographers are potentially a danger to any model that they work with. Why? Because they consider violence and rape to be a casual, trivial thing. Let’s hope that a model never upsets them and they decide that they deserve to be raped for their misdemeanour, because clearly they believe it’s a worthy punishment for some crimes. Which crimes do they think it’s a worthy punishment for? Who knows.
Discussing prison rape isn’t funny. Male on male rape isn’t funny. You know who else believes that rape is a suitable punishment for comes committed? Illegal kangaroo courts in rural India. Then even in this country there’s the violent drug dealers who think that rape is a suitable punishment.
So when these photographers joke about how they hope Peacock / Colclough gets raped in prison as a punishment for sexually assaulting female models, they’re associating their views with these people. I’m sure that they’re the first people to say that they didn’t mean in in that way, but honestly, is there really a good way to say that someone should be raped? Is there ever a time that saying someone should be raped is funny? Is male on male rape funny while male on female rape is serious? Are the men that made these comments a bunch of fucking homophobic bell ends? (The answer is yes, btw. They probably are.)
Male on male rape victims are considered weak and unmanly, which is why it’s considered a fitting punishment for criminals. Well, you know what? Male rape victims are anything but weak and unmanly and it’s about time we just stopped perpetuating this disgusting myth. Men get raped by other men. It’s every bit as awful as a woman getting raped. And we’d never say that a woman was weak for being raped, so why do we make that insinuation about men?
I was going to rant more. But it was about to get personal. Read this instead. Especially the bit about unfortunate consequences.
#NotAllPhotographers
Then there’s the reaction of it being good to have that guy locked up because real photographers don’t do those things.
From an early blog post about Peacock / Colclough. I’ve seen several instances across the web this morning, but this one seemed to sum it up best. Also some of the others I’ve seen have been on private Facebook pages and I’m not quite comfortable sharing those on my blog. Although this one was public:
From Facebook. Well, sorry guys. Peacock / Colclough was a real photographer. A bloody good one at that. Let’s face it, he took better pictures than most amateurs (and many professionals) could manage. This term ‘real photographer’. I’ve seen it bandied about in the past. It seems to be used by guys who want to give naive young models a
falsesense of security about working with them. Me? A cynic? No, you’ve got the wrong person there.And it’s not a shame he called himself a photographer. He was a bloody excellent photographer. What else should he have called himself? A man who owns a camera and take pictures of people?
It’s dangerous to start labelling people in these terms. If there is one thing for certain though, it’s often the people who use the term ‘real photographers’ that aren’t actually very good. So what makes a real photographer if it isn’t about taking good picture? To be honest, I have no idea, and I don’t really care. I’m sure I don’t fall into their definition of a ‘real’ photographer because I’m not politely taking pictures of T&A, but there you go.
So this… #NotAllPhotographers thing. Of course, I’ve not seen that term used but there are parallels to be drawn with the whole #NotAllMen thing that happened earlier this year.
Saying that not all photographers act this way is a slightly weird and extraordinarily infuriating defence. We know that not all photographers act this way. Those of us who work towards attempting to eradicate this sort of behaviour from our beloved industry and hobby aren’t stupid. Cases like this don’t need a devil’s advocate. They don’t need someone saying ‘he wasn’t a real photographer, real photographers don’t do this’. At worst it redirects the discussion away from the topic at hand and back to the fact that most photographers are well behaved. We don’t need to talk about how great lots of photographers are, we need to talk about how fucking awful a minority of them are.
People who complain about these guys not being ‘real photographers’ aren’t engaging with the subject at hand. They’re derailing the discussion and doing a bit of white-knighting in the process. Yes, they were real photographers. Lets not ignore the fact that they were photographers.
These people are not predators who own a camera, they are predators who are also photographers. Sometimes they do use photography to get what they want, but guess what, they’re still photographers. Removing these people from the community by basically saying ‘they’re not one of us’ is a problem. It means that we can’t deal with them. We can’t come up with strategies to root them out and figure out how to attempt to prevent this kind of thing happening in the future.
At it’s very worst, if these guys aren’t photographers… then why are young women going to their houses/studios and taking their clothes off for them? If these guys aren’t photographers, then the models that are assaulted by them are just strippers and suddenly you’ve made it a whole lot worse for the models to do something about it. Because if you think that the authorities don’t take models seriously, then strippers and escorts have a whole extra layer of difficulty.
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GPA Frustrations
So I just had a sneaky little look at my results from my first year at uni again to revel in my success for a bit (hey, I’m allowed to celebrate…) and noticed my GPA had gone online (it wasn’t last time I looked).
My GPA is 3.88. Oh Noes.
You see, I really want a 4.0. I wondered why I didn’t have an average of a 4.0 though, as that’s how I’d worked it out on my calculator the other week. Then I read again how the averages were worked out and was sad.
Here’s the deal.
The GPA or Grade Point Average is an American measurement of success at university. It roughly equates to our own 1st/2nd/3rd system here in the UK. A GPA 4.0 is a 1st. A 3.5 is an upper 2nd classification, and so on. You can be awarded a GPA of between 0.0 and 4.5.
Here are my results from this year:
As you can see, I kind of sucked at the subjects that were not History of Art (Arts of Japan and Rise of the Modern World). However, that’s not the point.
When I added those marks up and averaged them out, I got 70.37%. GREAT! I thought. That puts me tentatively into a 4.0. Exactly what I wanted to get. A 4.0 opens the doors to lots of top American and International universities, giving me plenty of options if I want to take them.
So why did I get a 3.88 in my official result?
Well you see they’re sneaky and they average it in a different way. Instead of going the way I went about it, they instead go:
Give each module GPA score -> Average GPA scores.
So basically above I got 3.5, 3.5, 3.5, 3.5, 4.5, 4.5, 4.5. When averaged that means I got just 3.88. That unfortunately doesn’t take into account my extraordinarily high 80%, or the fact that I got a 69, narrowly missing out on a 4.0 for that one. It defaults to the lower end of the category – i.e. no point in working harder than 65% if you’re not actually going to get a 70. This to me encourages the wrong attitude.
But I’ll suck up my GPA 3.88 (which isn’t a GPA 4.0) and see if I can work ultra hard to get a few more 4.5’s next year to bring up the average. That’s going to be very hard. Because just getting 4.0’s will not bring the average up enough.
Bad system. It should take account of your total average mark, not allocate individual modules a GPA score. It effectively downgrades each of your individual grades up to 4%. And when you’re working at the top, those grades are hard-earned. And 4% at the top is much harder than 4% at the bottom.
