YES
Niamh McIntyre

Comments made recently by Rashida Manjoo, which claimed there is an ‘in your face sexist culture’ and ‘a marketization of women and girls’, in the UK led, to widespread indignation and an attempt to overwrite the suff erring of women. The Daily Mail’s headline ‘Britain’s ‘boys’ club’ culture makes it the most sexist country in the world says UN expert… who is from South Africa, the rape capital of the world’ was indicative of the pervasive assumption that sexism is ‘worse’ in other countries and therefore should take precedence over localized feminist activism.

The rapporteur did not claim Britain was the ‘most sexist’ country in the world, but that sexism was more ‘in your face’ than other countries she had visited, offering an analysis of the ways in which misogyny is manifested rather than a like-for-like comparison with other countries. Manjoo’s critics often cited South Africa, where it has been estimated that 40% of women will be raped at some point in their lifetime, or Saudi Arabia, where there is no prohibition against statutory or spousal rape.

Such a qualitative approach trivializes the experience of sufferers of domestic and sexual violence in the UK; assertions that women have ‘never had it so good’ disregard the fact that 85,000 women are raped and 400,000 sexually assaulted in the UK every year. While sexual assault may be more prevalent in other countries, it is extremely disconcerting to see this used to overwrite the experience of women in the UK. Rashida pre-empted the backlash her criticism of the UK would cause, drawing attention to the complacency created by ‘legal and policy responses that are often limited to some harmful practices’ while ignoring broader structural oppression.

The report makes a sensitive case for the interaction of practises of open misogyny, normalized by media representation and groups such as Women Who Eat On Tubes. The confidence expressed in gender equality often relies upon universalizing the experience of middle-class, heterosexual, usually white women in the UK. Contrarily, the UN report is particularly concerned to articulate marginalized perspectives, like those of asylum seekers, BME women, prisoners, LGBTQ women and the unemployed.

An example of structural sexism is the effect of the government’s austerity measures on women. Rashida measures not only the direct impact austerity is having on women by depriving them of crisis centres and trauma services, but also that of general cuts to the welfare system which affect poverty and unemployment, which are contributory factors to violence against women and girls.

The rush to defend the UK, by comparing it with other countries’ records of violence against women, silences the real and pressing issues highlighted by the preliminary UN report. The media’s mocking of Manjoo only serves to validate her judgments about the continued prevalence of misogyny in Britain.

NO
Radhika Seth

Manjoo’s comments about Britain’s ‘boys’ club sexist culture’ described the treatment of women in the UK as worse than that in most emerging nations. Her decision to place the social implications of Page Three, in which women have consented to appear, above the daily violence women face in countries like Azerbaijan and India is alarming.

A Home Office report found up to 1.2 million women in the UK experienced domestic violence in the past year, showing a serious need to address this problem. But if we consider Manjoo’s example of India, a country in which most domestic violence cases remain unreported, there is a qualitative difference. The low numbers of accusations are not only due to the fear of women becoming destitute if abandoned by their spouses, but also because, as a 2012 UN report revealed, 39% of women in India think it is justifiable for a husband to beat his wife. Legislation against sexual harassment has only been recently introduced and is rarely implemented. Manjoo’s comments regarding the ‘visible’ nature of UK sexism suggests that women can at least be outspoken about the injustice they face.

While women are underrepresented in the British parliament, politicians cannot make misogynistic remarks without fear of public reprimand. However, members of India’s Socialist Party are vocal about the need for women to conform to male expectations of correct moral behaviour. Abu Azmi, a regional unit chief of the party, publicly declared that women who have sex before marriage should be hanged. Even the party’s leader, Mulayam Singh Yadav, excused a recent rape case in Mumbai by saying, ‘boys will be boys.’ Such views are not confined to the peripheries of Indian politics.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), predicted to form the largest part of the coalition after the upcoming elections, has an extensive history of violence against women. In the 2002 anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat, minister Narendra Modi, did little to stop the sexual torture and mass murder of women. Asaram Bapu, a spiritual leader endorsed by the BJP, refused to blame the perpetrators of the 2012 Delhi gang rape case. “The victim is as guilty as her rapists,” he said. “She should have called the culprits ‘brother’ and begged before them to stop. Can one hand clap? I don’t think so.”

Beside such misogyny, the UK ought to be proud of its position as a liberal democracy in which many politicians advocate equality. Women are free to both express their discontent and campaign for change. Putting the ‘sexist lad culture’ of the UK alongside the genuine widespread oppression of women in so many countries only insults women in the developing world for whom rape, violent beatings and forced marriages are daily occurrences. Sexism in the UK is far less widespread and severe than in countries like India, and an acceptance of this fact should not be viewed as imperialist self-congratulation.

Einstein once quipped, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” As soon as I arrived at Oxford, it came to my attention that much of what academics and students write is utter gobbledygook.

Some academics seem to take pleasure in constructing sentences completely incomprehensible not just to the layman, but even to students of their own subject. All I can do is wonder why. What does it prove? Do they show that they are such geniuses that they find it impossible to communicate with lesser mortals? Or maybe the ideas they are trying to convey are so complex that they require impenetrable terminology?

I suspect that it is not an academic’s high calibre of intellect that forces them to write like this, and that it is more likely an elaborate bluff. By ensuring that you do not understand a thing they are talking about, they trick you into thinking that they know exactly what they are talking about. From my own tutorial experiences, I smell a rat. After all, it is only when I do not have a clue about what I am saying that I bullshit to the maximum. If I start using words like “discourse” or “subjectivity”, I know I am really in trouble. Conversely, it is only when I actually know my stuff that I feel comfortable using simple phrases.

Don’t just take my word for it. The late Dennis Dutton, a philosophy professor from the University of Canterbury, was so incensed by this ‘awkward, jargon-clogged academic prose’ that he set up a “Bad Writing Competition” to find the most egregious examples of it. What follows, the winner of the competition in 1999, is a perfect example of this pernicious evil. Let me present an extract from a work of Judith Butler; fasten your seat belts, folks, you are in for a ride. 

 “The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.”

I admit I don’t have a clue what this means. Do you? Dennis Dutton doesn’t. He says, “To ask what this means is to miss the point. This sentence beats readers into submission and instructs them that they are in the presence of a great and deep mind. Actual communication has nothing to do with it.” At least one intellectual has got it right.

This needless jargon goes against the purpose of academia. In the context of a world where academics are continually engaged in a desperate search for something, anything, to justify the continued funding of the study of the humanities, academia cannot subsist in its own little bubble. Academics have to make a consistent effort to make their specialised research accessible to the wider intellectual environment and even to the general public. As much as they might contest otherwise, academics are not being employed to engage in some obscurant hobby of theirs. Thus, the language with which they frame their research should be equally accessible. Whilst it doesn’t have to be Wikipedia Simple English, there is a happy medium to be had and one that is not weighted to the bullshit end.

In a similar vein, tutors should not get so wound up when students use simple, even colloquial, English, so long as it is grammatically correct. After all, when I applied to Oxford, it was beaten into me that it was the quality of the idea that counted, not the complexity of the vocabulary used to convey it. If that was not a façade to tempt innocent sixth formers in, then it should still stand on arrival at university. There is little point in having an idea unless you can convey it clearly. Mark Twain once said, “I never write ‘metropolis’ for seven cents when I can write ‘city’ and get paid the same.” With simple, elegant style, he gets right to the point. Tutors and students, cut the crap. It achieves nothing but making the writer look like a pretentious twit.

I end with Einstein again, who explains the problem much better than I ever could. “Any fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius—and a lot of courage—to move in the opposite direction.”

In a recent interview with Q magazine, vocalist and guitarist for Warpaint Theresa Wayman had some choice comments for Beyoncé and Rihanna. She said that Rihanna “could have done something so much more soulful and artful” with her talent than the career which she has pursued, and criticized Queen Bey for “basically looking like a slut” in the videos for her new album, especially ‘Drunk In Love’. She seemed exasperated about the attitude of feminism towards such behaviour, bemoaning the fact that “they all take it as women’s liberation”.

As the majority of people doubtless realize, these comments fall within the misogynist practice popularly termed ‘slut-shaming’. Beyoncé, so the story goes, is reclaiming her sexuality and using it to empower herself. The assumption that she is a victim just because she isn’t wearing very many clothes is demeaning to both Beyoncé herself and women everywhere. And this is OK so far as it goes.

It would be difficult to argue that Beyoncé, or indeed Rihanna, is not in a position of power. She’s had numerous best-selling albums, she is the highest-paid African American artist of all time, she is involved in her own fashion line, she heads a whole host of charitable ventures, and she runs her own label (having significantly severed business ties with her father, who controlled Destiny’s Child, in 2010). Of course Beyoncé’s use of her sexuality in her music videos and live performances does not constitute victimhood. She chooses how to appear in her videos and reaps the rewards.

But we should not dismiss out of hands the comments of Theresa Wayman, who is in a pioneering all-female band characterized by its feminist leanings. Warpaint occupy a wonderful position as an indie band entirely made up of women in a genre mostly populated by groups that consist of four lads enthusiastically playing their instruments, jumping around stage like they’re Dave Grohl’s kid brothers and spending all their parents’ money on expensive UK tours as soon as they leave public school.

And Wayman’s comments highlight what is an important thing to consider in the modern music industry. There is a dramatic disparity between the presentation of men and the presentation of women in modern music, especially in the modern phenomenon of the music video.

Labels and production companies in the music industry are overwhelmingly dominated by men. According to Creative & Cultural Skills, the gender divide across all music industry related jobs is 67.8% male to 32.2% female. A survey in 2012 by the Association of Independent Music showed that only 15% of labels are majority-owned by women. A host of other statistics show that women consistently earn less than their male counterparts.

Sexism appears to be rife in the industry, with Canadian artist and feminist icon Grimes posting on Tumblr last year, saying “I’m tired of men who aren’t professional or even accomplished musicians continually offering to ‘help me out’ (without being asked), as if I did this by accident and I’m gonna flounder without them”. Other artists who have spoken out against sexism in the industry include Marina & the Diamonds, Solange Knowles and M.I.A.

While it is not OK to call Beyoncé a slut, we ought to remember that this is not a black-and-white issue. It is difficult to separate the male gaze from music videos which involve beautiful women wearing very few clothes, especially when those videos are paid for, produced and directed by men. After all, let us not forget that one of the most popular songs of last year featured in its music video semi-naked women posing next to the suited and booted stars of the track: the music industry’s most recent villains Thicke and Williams.

Warpaint themselves work within a sexist system, and it is inevitable that the frustration at the constant marginalization that they must experience would be exacerbated if they perceived other prominent women in the industry as ‘letting the side down’. Wayman’s comments are misplaced, but they are not to be ignored.

When the news of Nuts’ imminent closure first hit the nationals I welcomed it, seeing it as a positive step forward for feminist activism. I can still find little cause to mourn the passing of the publication, which to me has always appeared to objectify women rather than provide an empowering platform for models to exercise independent choice.

I always supported the Lose the Lads’ Mags campaign, because of the belief that these magazines do more harm than good to feminism. By objectifying women and propagating sexist attitudes, these magazines certainly risk lowering female status and pave the way for a culture of disrespect and violence towards women. One need only consider the Plush assault on Teddy Hall student Jeanne Ryan at the end of Hilary Term to see that violent misogyny is very much alive and well – even at our university. It could only be the normalised view of women as sex objects that would prompt a man to grope a female stranger in a club and respond so angrily when she didn’t welcome his advances with open arms.

 I also never found the argument that lads’ mags celebrate the female body, thereby awarding women status, convincing. There is a clear double standard between topless men on covers and completely naked women poised with a seductive ‘come hither’ glint in her eyes – but what really gets me is that this sexualisation of the female body is overtly heterosexual. Surely if glamour modelling celebrates the beauty of the female form, there would be no need to tailor these magazines solely towards men, excluding lesbian women from the target readership.

The lack of respect these magazines have for women is obvious when one considers how they responded to the requests for ‘modesty bags’ to hide their front covers. Publications like Nuts ignored overarching public opinion, preferring to be pulled from high street retailers than to respect the wishes of ordinary women made uncomfortable by their covers. How can it be argued that these magazines empower women when they ignore the complaints of the people they are supposedly celebrating? Not to mention the argument that exposing staff and customers to explicit covers can legally constitute sexual harassment and discrimination.

Regardless of any feminist outlet that models argue these publications award them, I cannot regret the passing of a publication which so flagrantly ignores concerns that their content objectifies women and is potentially damaging. But while I am relieved that one less publication containing pornographic material will be sold in everyday spaces – an act which normalises this sexualisation of women – I still cannot argue that Nuts closing is a win for feminism, simply because of the reason for its closure.

The BBC reported that the readership of lads’ mags like Nuts, Zoo and Front decreased by more than seventy per cent over the last eight years. By the latter half of 2013, Nuts’ sprint run had fallen to nearly a sixth of its peak circulation.  The general consensus is that Nuts  is facing closure due to the proliferation of internet pornography, rather than changing ideology prompting a decline in sales. The stats certainly support this line of thinking as according to Websense, the number of porn sites rose from 88,000 to nearly 1.6 million in a four year period.

The appeal of these videos are obvious – where readers of lads’ mags are limited to photographs of posing models, viewers of online videos have a limitless supply of hardcore pornography for absolutely nothing. Videos such as ‘Fill the gagging bitch with cock’ and ‘Pornstar Nicki Hunter rammed in all holes’ are likely to provide sexual pleasure but quite clearly perpetuate the misogynist ideology that concerns critics of lads’ mags.

It is true that the models in lads’ mags may be at risk of exploitation – particularly if they are not as reputed as figures like Jodie Marsh who have the influence to dictate what they are comfortable doing. But the women in videos on Redtube may have been filmed without their knowledge or have been coerced into participating – or the video could have been leaked without their consent. This explicit content not only encourages a sexualised and objectified view of women, but on occasion will even display violent or sadistic actions; eighty-eight per cent of scenes in porn films contain acts of physical aggression, according to Covenant Eyes.

The content of these videos certainly has the potential to do more harm than can be ever claimed of lads’ mags – without necessarily providing the formal employment which will be lost with the closure of magazines like Nuts. Women who happily posed for these publications as an empowered act or to further their careers (as many actresses have done) cannot benefit from the porn industry in the same way. The internet porn industry cannot be contained in the way that lads’ mags can; behind a modesty bag, these publications cannot normalize the over sexualisation of women to anyone other than the paying reader. Internet porn is accessible to men, women and children of all ages and is untraceable – with a few clicks all browsing history is gone forever. Parents may not ever realise what their children are being exposed to until the damage has already been done.

The social and economic costs are significant even if one argues that Nuts closing is for the greater good. While I’d be happy to see the back of lads’ mags, these publications at their worst are certainly the lesser of two evils.

Sunny Hundal came to journalism in a very different manner to most. In a world where the established media has been increasingly been trying to move online, Hundal succeeded in creating his own career by effectively using the Internet to build his own platform through blogging. Hundal started blogging at Pickled Politics but is most well-known for the blog Liberal Conspiracy, which became the UK’s most popular left-wing blog under Hundal’s editorship. Since then Hundal has proceeded to write for a number of publications in the print media, including for The Independent, The Guardian, Metro, New Statesman, The Times, and Financial Times.

Hundal explains how he came to blogging and then journalism through online publishing. “I used to run a magazine called Asians in Media that was entirely a web project. It became an online magazine which lots of people in the industry read, because it broke news. I was an unknown then. Online publishing gave me a chance to break out and get noticed – that would have been very difficult five to ten years before that. Blogging was simply an extension of this. I got into it because I saw blogs, at the time, while I was running Asians in Media and saw this fantastic conversation going on.”

Analysing why he started blogging, Hundal identifies his desire to provide a perspective that he thought was missing from most political debates. “I sought to bring to the blogosphere a point of view about progressive Asians with liberal ideas. I thought that voice was missing, so I wanted to bring that to the blogosphere especially, and as a medium; I thought a blog was a good way to do that.”

“With Pickled Politics, my first blog, the mission statement was to offer people a more progressive liberal voice from the Asian community and to illustrate that these voices existed even though they were being drowned out by the national media, the ethnic media and politicians themselves.”

When I ask him whether he believes that voice is still missing, he comments, “I certainly think that there is a tendency, especially in the news media, to see Asians as ethnic blocs or as a religious bloc and to assume that religious voices are representatives of voter opinion, when they’re not. Certainly, organisations that have put themselves forward as representing ethnic voices or religious voices, I have felt, were not progressive enough.”

However, Hundal believes it is still not easy to challenge the conservative voices in the media. “I used to get criticism, all the time, for challenging the Muslim Council of Britain, the Hindu Forum of Britain, and the Sikh Federation. We published a manifesto in The Guardian about this, in 2007, saying that these so-called community leaders only speak for themselves and not for the communities they claim to represent. “Having a range of voices out there and allowing those people to tell their own stories is certainly the best way to tackle that.”

By the time of his second blog, Liberal Conspiracy, Hundal had already established a reputation for himself as a distinct voice online. Consequently, when he launched Liberal Conspiracy the aims were far broader. “With Liberal Conspiracy, the mission statement was to offer a hub for left wing opinion, views and campaigning in a way that wasn’t there before. When I launched it in 2007, there certainly wasn’t a place like that – now, there are obviously far more. In those days there were lots of bloggers working in their own spaces. There wasn’t a place people could go to – a collective space. I felt that someone had to create that so I did.”

Hundal has remained true to his roots by continuing to blog, but now also regularly writes for established media outlets. Recently, Hundal has written extensively on India, particularly about violence against women there. He published his first book, India Dishonoured, on this subject in May 2013 as an ebook with Guardian Books, which soon made it into the top five of Amazon’s non-fiction bestseller list. When I ask him, which direction he thinks India will go as its economy continues to develop, he responds “I think that India has a lot more cultural power than it has economic power. The diaspora is spread all over the world and those people are very active in the politics and economics of those countries. I think in that sense, India punches above its weight in some ways even China doesn’t. India is a very proud nation. They have this sense of history and they think that this country is great and always will be great. That’s one of the reasons why, in India, they always see themselves as competing against China, because they want to see the glory days of India becoming one of the world powers again.”

“There is so much corruption there I think it is very difficult. Over the next few decades I think that India will plod along unless something drastically changes – and I don’t see that happening, unfortunately.”

Hundal’s work on India is interesting, because it seems to mark a new direction in his work towards anticipating the world’s emerging news stories and helping to bring them to the fore. Talking to Hundal, it becomes clear that much of his success has come from his ability to anticipate the changing media landscape. However, it still came as a surprise to many in October 2013, when Hundal announced that he was standing down as editor of Liberal Conspiracy to become Journalist in-Residence at Kingston University, as well as to pursue other projects. Reflecting on his decision to become a part time lecturer at Kingston University, he says. “I suppose that it was a natural progression for me. I’ve always been interested in how technology shapes journalism. I’ve become a journalist by using online media to spread my stories. If the internet was not there, I would now not be a journalist.”

“Not enough people appreciate how internet culture can enrich journalism and how you need to understand how internet culture works in order to further that journalism and get more people to read it. You can’t just translate print onto online – it just doesn’t work like that”.

“I only teach part time and I find it very enriching. It is great to be able to help students and say look at what you can do, in a way that you couldn’t twenty years ago.”