This isn't just any casual sexism....

Christmas gift buying can be hard. Accepted. And not just because the entire nation is simultaneously trying to plunder the entire high street, but because, suddenly, you find yourself having to define your relationship to someone in the form of a purchaseable, physical object.* You are faced with the challenge of finding something personal, that demonstrates that you have the faintest idea who that person is, what they like, what is important to them. For some people, this comes very naturally, but for others, it’s a real struggle.

So in steps the Christmas Gift Guide. The idea behind this handy shopping aid is that it will categorise items into what would make a good gift for different groups of people, thus narrowing down your search a little, and allowing some ideas you may not have considered to be presented to you. So far, so incredibly helpful. The problem is, though, categorised as it so often is into ‘for him’ and ‘for her’, the Christmas Gift Guide is also a festive bastion of casual sexism.

Take Marks and Spencers for example. Now, M&S is a shop I usually get along famously with. They do good, quality clothes for a wide variety of women and, unlike, say, Topshop, they have no pretensions that putting an outfit together should be a competitive bloodsport. If you go into their stores, you’ll probably also find that their Christmas section is pretty good. Their online gift guide, however, is dire.

It, like so many others, is based on the ‘for him’ ‘for her’ premise. Chose ‘for her’, and the site then takes you to a ‘for her’ site that offers three categories of ‘Lingerie’, ‘Beauty’ and ‘Cashmere’. The ‘for him’ section will take you to an equally bland section that also recommends ‘Cashmere’ alongside ‘Leather’ and ‘Boys Toys’. The Boys Toys section features the best - all the non-gender specific things, that aren’t specifically feminine, and so must be for the boys. Stuff for the car, for example (which i’m classifying as gender neutral as a SHIT TONNE of women drive, it’s not just something men do for fun), desktop games, lamps, notebooks, trivia cards. Y’know, the good stuff. The fun stuff.

However, worst bit is probably the ‘Gift Finder’. This asks you to define your intended recipient by gender, relationship (are they your mum, brother, friend, etc), age and then one of 5 personality types. The personality types for men are as follows:
Dapper Dresser (so, basically, likes clothes and is under 50)
Perfect Gent (likes clothes and is over 50)
Big Kid (likes toys/gadgets)
Gastronomic Gourmet (likes food)
Great Explorer (likes travel)

The 5 categories for women are:
Fashionista (likes clothes)
Glamour Puss (likes clothes)
Accessory Addict (likes things that go with clothes)
Lingerie Lover (likes things that go under clothes)
Domestic Goddess (likes things for the home)

The problem with this is so glaringly, ‘let’s-point-and-laugh’ stereotypically sexist that I can’t really be bothered to dissect it too. It’s the whole ‘women like shiny things/fashion’, ‘women want to look nice’, ‘women don’t want anything that’s not expressly related to being a woman’ etc etc etc - it’s all standard stuff and if you feel a bit left behind at this point I suggest you go and read ALL of The Vagenda.

No, casual sexism is only one problem. The other problem is that it is deeply, deeply unhelpful. Because it offers to give you help finding that perfect gift for your loved one, but then effectively only provides two categories (home and clothes) for women, and leaves everything else to the guys in a generic ‘boys toys’ category that doesn’t help you search for anything else. There’s a bizarre paradox that we should be presenting personal gifts that express the fact that we know, and have thought, about a person, but in order to do it we have to forget everything we know about that person except what gender they belong to. ‘Oh, your mum is it, here, how about a Great British Bake Off cake tin?’.

Last year, I got nearly all my present ideas from The Independent’s online gift guide. And d’you know why? Because it was categorised by interest. Gifts for gardeners, gifts for book lovers, gifts for foodies, etc. The fact is, our gender is only one tiny slice of our identities. I’m a woman, but I’m also a runner, a reader, a writer, an eater, a baker, a traveller (kind of), a stationery geek and a person who is getting increasingly fascinated by the first manned space missions. My boyfriend is a man, but he’s also a cook, a musician, a reader, a gamer, a runner, a drinks connoisseur and a person who appreciates good kitchenware.

But when large marketing campaigns such as Christmas sales appear, this fact is forgotten, because it is much easier to try and pretend that the population can be split into two camps and then you don’t need to design a marketing strategy that address too many different groups of people. It’s easier. John Lewis has made a better go of it by dividing into gender but then dividing into interest, so, sports, home, clothes, travel, books etc (maybe because the range they sell is much wider and this approach wouldn’t really work for M&S who pretty much just sell clothes and food). So, Dear Department Stores and anyone else who cares to tell us what to buy this Christmas - please get to know your customers, please get to know your target market. Please acknowledge that people are a bit more diverse than 'the ones with and without the tits' (I'd probably fall into the latter), and, please, Please, don't try to take all the magic out of Christmas to the point where you’re encouraging people to think of their family members as 1950s, chocolate-box stereotypes.



*Obviously, not all gifts have to be purchaseable - you can always bypass this particular brand of stress, and make them.

Still Life

This is a guest blog by Alice Thomas - historian, lawyer, award-winning public speaker and baker extraordinaire, who also takes mighty fine photographs, but not usually of women in bikinis. She tweets as @AliceBThomas. Because that is her name.

It was a phenomenal day. But a less than generous photo.

If I could do one thing to improve British women's body image, I would ban cameras.  I'd have an amnesty, collect them all up, and melt them down – possibly to make a giant sculpture of a happy, scruffy woman.

Why? Because cameras are the main way that paparazzi, porn, and magazines – the three corners of the Bermuda triangle of a modern woman's self-esteem – filter into everyday life. It starts with airbrushed cover shots. Then there are the sweat-patches, spots and (whisper it) body hair all properly circled and captioned – “Eurgh! Disgusting!” – so women know what they have to be ashamed. Finally, there are the 25 shots of Imogen Thomas in a bikini, just to remind you that even if you get a few good pictures, someone will wait until you forget to suck it all in to snap another one. Famous women have to be unnaturally perfect from every angle all the time.

That shouldn't matter. Most of us aren't Angelina Jolie and even if the Imogen Thomases of this world clearly like having bikini shots taken, the rest of us aren't obliged to join in. But it does matter, because we are surrounded by cameras all the time. The camera on my phone has more megapixels than Lady Gaga has twitter followers, and any time I go out there are at least 30 photos on Facebook the next day. My experience seems to be pretty standard. The constant expectation that we will be photographed, along with the unrealistic expectations we have of those photographs, can seriously fuck with how we feel about ourselves.

The pressure to look photo-ready is starting to filter through to beauty advice. I was reading a blog post on a bridal site (don't ask) that suggested that even women who never wear makeup should get the full clown-face on their big day because otherwise they'll look 'washed out' and 'anaemic' in the photographs. There was nothing about feeling comfortable and being yourself on your wedding day. Brides just had to remember that if you can pull off full Essex Friday night warpaint and put up with the itching all day, you'll look great twenty years later in the photos.

The article that actually prompted this one, though, was a list of 'women's ideal bikini bodies' that  explained how most of the women in their photographs were actually underweight. Gwyneth Paltrow, the favourite bikini body on the list, is at risk from osteoporosis because her diet is so restrictive her bones are brittle. I remember thinking that my sister looks awesome in a bikini – she's all blonde and curvy with Christina-Hendricks skin – but if you look at photos of her, she looks chubby and pale. I reckon if I saw these 'ideal' bodies in real life, they would look like skeletons or children or bodybuilders.

I'm not trying to suggest that 'bodybuilder', or 'child', or even 'Essex warpaint' is a bad look if that's what a woman aims to look like all the time (I draw the line at 'skeleton'). It just seems that so much of what women do to their bodies and their faces is a response to the idea that the most important part of a night out or a holiday is the photos afterwards. We have been deluded into thinking that, since so much of our life is photographed, the photographs are life.

We should be living our lives for the 99% that's actually living, not the 1% that's stored on a memory card. In the real world, if you're a healthy weight, you get a bit of exercise, you don't live off cake (unless you're Mary Berry), and you don't think about how you might look on camera every second, you're pretty much doing fine. If we can't do that, maybe we should stop asking the women to get thinner or flatter or browner, and start asking Nikon to make more accurate cameras.

'Mena, I made this pie for you'....

So Never Mind the Buzzcocks is back. This makes me fairly to quite happy - not as happy as it would have done in days gone past, in the days when Bill Bailey was a team captain and the show could still pull relatively interesting guests. But it’s half an hour of fairly amusing, ‘irreverant’ entertainment that lasts approximately as long as it takes me to paint my nails and gives me another choice of background telly while I’m eating dinner.

This week, Jack Whitehall is the host, and, surprisingly, the show has managed to pull the relatively impressive feat of booking Mena Suvari - actress of American Pie and American Beauty proportions - to sit side by side with Noel Fielding, and this is pretty exciting. Man, that woman must have some stories - and american guests are always fun, partly because you get the sense they’ve never seen the show, and thus are unprepared when the bizarre and mocking questions start coming their way.

Unfortunately, Whitehall failed to make the most of this mega-booking (though the writers certainly didn’t, making nearly every feature in some way American Beauty/Pie related). Instead, he spent the majority of the show making lewd sexual jokes at Suvari, at one point presenting her with a ‘drawing’ he’d done of his cock encircling her like a snake, and in another instance giving her a pie, apparently decorated with her face, but with a hole at her pastry mouth, in reference to that infamous pie-fucking scene.

When Shooting Stars was in its heyday, there was a bit where Vic Reeves would go up to an attractive female contestant and come on to her by rubbing his knees and making strange faces. It was hilarious. Reeves was ridiculous and ineffectual, not predatory and powerful, and it was funny without being threatening. No-one was ridiculing the woman. The audience (and often the woman being ‘rubbed’ at) was laughing at Reeves.

On the other hand, Buzzcocks jokes were fairly lazy, not massively funny, weirdly sinister and, oh my god, so relentless. Throughout the whole show, Suvari was low-level sexually harassed in a way that was making her seem visibly uncomfortable. And Whitehall hardly had two words to say to the other female panellist - Celia Pacquola - an Australian comic who was all but edited out of the show. It reminded me of an insight Caitlin Moran shared in an interview with Tim Minchin on Radio 4 a few months ago; Moran has been repeatedly asked to appear on panel shows but consistently refuses because they’re ‘a boys game’. And I think she’s probably right. A little bit of ribbing, sure. But maybe vary your content just a little bit. Half an hour of sex jokes and you just wind up looking boring and a little bit sinister.

All in all, getting a woman onto your panel show to simply sit and be the butt of your sex-jokes is not ok. And, unfortunately, unless you’re a connoisseur of LADbanter, it’s unlikely to be that funny, either.

Run for your life.

Exercise is a tricky thing to talk about. As a runner, I always feel a little bit awkward talking about running to anyone who’s not clad in lycra and carrying a water bottle. It’s generally considered a fairly boring topic, but it also carries a suggestion that what’s actually being talked about is ‘weight-loss’. I’m quite used to telling people that I run, and hearing a reply of ‘oh, but you don’t need to lose weight’. I guess this is fairly unsurprising; most women’s magazines will only mention exercise as an alien and obligatory evil in the never-ending campaign to Drop A Dress Size* or get Bikini Ready (are you beach-ready? Why yes, I have a thick coat and an enormous appetite for chips, where do you think we are, the flippin seychelles?!). However, I’m not one to make a sweeping generalistion and not back it up, so here’s an overview of the Cosmo online ‘diet and fitness’ section. It's quite a treat. This page features articles titled:

Are your co-workers making you fat?
Lose inches the low-carb way
(followed later by)
Why a low carb diet is a health risk
Three new weight-loss wonders
and
Stop with the exercise excuses!

Of sixteen articles on that page, only one explicitly mentions exercise in its headline. Someone could easily write another piece about the interesting fact that Cosmo’s ‘diet and fitness’ advice is almost all (sometimes conflicting) diet advice, teaching women to control and abstain, but I’m not going to get into that now. What I will say though, is that it’s very interesting that the only article to take exercise as its main theme does so negatively. Stop With The Exercise Excuses! portrays exercise as a necessary evil that people will do anything to get out of. Instead of tackling this view, the article just insists that really, you should probably put your trainers on, even if you really don’t want to. It does nothing to persuade the reader of why an active lifestyle is a great thing, other than churn out some tokenistic, bullshit after-thought about endorphins, which is pretty much on the same level as telling a child they should eat their greens because they’ll grow ‘big and strong’.

Exercise as a topic in women’s magazines is cushioned in a discourse of ‘weight-loss’. Not health. Not even really fitness, or strength, or vitality. Weight-loss. It seems to suggest that ‘if weight-loss isn’t your goal, why the hell would you even be in a gym?!’ This whole ‘necessary evil’ approach to occasionally-moving-your-body in order to change your appearance creates a pretty thankless, impossible situation: if trying to look like Rihanna is your only reason for pulling on a pair of trainers, you’re probably only going to give up two weeks later when you realise that you still look pretty much exactly the same as you did before.

It’s a shame that this is the predominant way in which most women’s magazines will ever talk about exercise, because in this approach, your body is the enemy and something that needs to be transformed and moulded into something (or someone) entirely different. The important thing is the beholder; if you’re not looking acceptable in beachwear, you should really sort that out. In this view, exercise is awful, and the only good thing to come out of it is that you’ll change how you look**.

In three months of half marathon training, I’ve lost no weight. I say that happily, and with no sense of failure, as losing weight was never my aim. Give or take a few pounds, I’m exactly the same weight I was when I started all this running malarkey. My stomach is maybe a little flatter, my legs perhaps slightly more toned, but the change in appearance has not been dramatic and is certainly no more than could have been achieved by some fairly structured underwear. If the only positive thing about exercise was its role in changing how we look, I would’ve given up a long time ago. Luckily, it isn’t what I go running for.

Ever keen not to always just be talking about myself, I spoke to a couple of friends of mine about why they go running/jumping/climbing trees. The thrill of setting (sometimes gruelling) challenges and achieving them, was one cited motivation. One friend particularly loved the simplicity and independence of running. My other friend is a team player, and it was the competition that was a strong motivaton for her. Both of these women acknowledged that exercise greatly increased their self-esteem, which is something I’d agree with; but it’s not a self-esteem that is rooted in how they look, or how others behold them, but one that is rooted in the knowledge that they can do something really, really well. They get their thrill from the success, the challenge, the strength and the ‘my body can do WHAT NOW?’ of what they do.

As for me, I love running, and it’s for the reasons that my friends also shared; It’s made me fitter, it’s made me faster, it’s made me stronger. It's not easy, and I have to work at it, but that makes it all the more rewarding. I can run up hills now, big, big hills***. I can run 10 miles. I can run for 2hrs. When, 5 months ago, running 5 miles was a mammoth challenge, the progress I’ve made is quite thrilling, and more than a little bit addictive. My body isn’t the enemy, or something that needs to be changed; it’s a tool, an asset, and I marvel at the things it can do now. I’m not going to deny that seeing my body get a bit leaner is quite nice, but it’s certainly not the primary motivation driving me to repeatedly return to the blood sweat and tears of long distance runs.


Exercise is not something I do to ‘get’ something; to ‘get’ ‘a washboard stomach like Cameron Diaz’s, a bum like J-Lo’s and a pair of pins like Elle McPherson’s’ . It’s not my means to a future where I’ll hopefully, finally, be happy with what I am. I don’t do it to ‘get’ a life, I do it to ‘have’ a life. Running is joyous. In a ‘ergh, I’m bright pink and I taste of salt’ kind of way. It’s given me so much more energy, and my mood has rarely ever been as consistently good as it is right now. Running allows me to do big, looping routes around my city, and see parts of it I’d never before discovered; It’s been a bonding point between me and my boyfriend, who runs with me, goes to the gym with me, pushes me out of the door if I get a bit lazy; It’s allowed me to raise £500 for Mind, the mental health charity (and if on the off chance you’d like to sponsor me, you can do it here). On Sunday, when I do The Great North Run, running will be the reason behind an INCREDIBLE day out that will include my family, live bands, the Red Arrows and a heaving sense of achievement.

And then, in October, I’ll be running a 5k zombie infested assault course in Cambridge; my main motivation here being, obviously, the need to see if I would outlive my friends in a zombie apocalypse.


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* Don’t you love the way that ‘Drop a Dress Size’ articles never make any reference what size you might already be, so whatever size you are, you should always be thinking about getting smaller.


**I do appreciate that school PE lessons probably also have a major part to play in the general ‘exercise as form of punishment’ mentality, but that really is a whole other blog for a whole other day.


***I can run up Headington Hill. Slowly. But, by gads, I make it to the top.
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Silence, please.

The way people use the phrase ‘freedom of speech’ and ‘free press’ is becoming a bit worrying. Especially when people start trying to use it to silence those who have legitimate and constructive criticism of the press. This particularly worried me recently when a friend of mine posted a link to a petition to ‘Take Bare Boobs out of the Sun’, inviting those who felt the same way to sign the petition as well. It was a fairly low-key, non-strident situation; ‘here’s something I care about, if you care about it too, look at this’. Before posting the link, my friend confided in me that she predicted it would illicit some less than constructive comments. After all, as my friend succinctly pointed out, feminism on facebook does tend to be like magnesium in water; introduce the tiniest amount, and the reaction is violent.

Proof of this theory was the veritable shit-storm of bollocks that followed that post, veering wildly in topic from freedom of the press, to women’s choice, to whether we should ever talk about anything except starving children. That’s the thing about facebook comment threads, isn’t it? It takes ordinarily quite intelligent and sensitive people and turns them into furious soundbites. And I’m the first to admit that I was one of those furious soundbites, reacting angrily to brainless-sexist-comment after brainless-sexist-comment (and, in the process, not really doing myself any favours*). Anthropologically speaking, it’s a fascinating thing, but it’s another blog for another time. What I want to focus on is the way some people tried to silence my friend by paradoxically waving the bloodied truncheon of ‘free press! free press!’. The initial comment went a little something (as in, exactly) like this:

Are fucking with us?? [sic] This country prides itself on a free press. If you don't like it, then don't buy the sun!

The initial thing that had me puzzled was the fantastic logic that the only form of protest should be passive and market driven; if you morally oppose something, don’t dare say anything about it, just keep your money in your pocket and keep your lips closed. Which is an interesting idea coming from someone who simultaneously champions the ‘free press’, a form of free speech. Crying ‘free press’ whilst aggressively shouting down someone with a different world view is a very uncomfortable paradox, but doing it whilst also suggesting that the only power we hold is as consumers is almost disturbing.

Yes, the press should have freedom, but we should also accept that freedom of the press does not mean ‘freedom from criticism’. Journalists have a pivotal role in society; they have the ability to shape discourse and steer opinion. It’s reasonable to expect them to recognise that they hold a responsibility, even if they don’t decide to respect it very much. If a journalist wants to write utter bollocks about how Nicola Benedetti should probably just get her tits out, they’ve got to take responsibility for their decision to be shit at their job, and accept that people will criticise them.
So, shouting ‘free press’ and ‘free speech’ does not mean you can say whatever the dick you like with no consequences. You can speak freely, but you must be able to accept responsibility when that offends people; when what you write or say is offensive to the values held by society and your readers.

If The Sun newspaper wants to continue printing pictures of topless babes giving inane and tokenistic views on current affairs, whilst women across the country are still battling for, among other things, equal pay and freedom from violence, then The Sun has to be prepared for the fact that many people will find that offensive and upsetting, and subsequently want to voice that upset. And don’t tell me it’s all about the girls’ choice to pose; I’m a slightly pudgy ginger chick with small boobs and short hair - I doubt that my choice (if it existed) to pose naked on Page 3 would have little bearing on the reality of it actually happening.


The bottom line is that, most of the time, when people criticise the press, they are not trying to censor it, or damage its freedom, they’re simply saying ‘hey, you’re really, really bad at your job, and we just thought you should know’.

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*Leading to the decision that I will NEVER AGAIN take part in a facebook comment-thread fury again. My blood pressure can’t take it.

Also, the petition is linked here. Please feel free to sign it.

https://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/dominic-mohan-take-the-bare-boobs-out-of-the-sun