Eve and guests discuss women
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Eve and guests discuss women
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I've decided to do something slightly different with the blog this week as, although women in sport is a massive and really interesting topic, it's also a fairly fact/stat-based one where there's not a lot of debate to be had. So a huge thank you to Claire and Alex for talking through it so well last night, but I'm going to use this space this week to chat about something that's been bothering me a bit recently – why are people so reluctant to call themselves feminists?
I began The F-Word in the hope that talking about subjects relevant to most or all young women today in this way might make people stop and think “actually, this does affect me – I must be a feminist then!”. Yay, congrats, nice one etc. End of. But I've come to realise in recent weeks that it's not as easy as that. Yes, feminism is having a massive identity crisis
and one that's leaving young women in their thousands alienated and intimidated, and that's a problem that I'll hopefully also touch on. But at an even more basic level, these same young women seem to be fundamentally misunderstanding feminism in the first place. Please don't get me wrong – I'm not for one minute pitying these women or tutting and shaking my head at them or whatever. I think that their views, rather than being born from ignorance, are a product of society and some branches of feminism itself – which is more than a bit disheartening when you consider some of the things I've heard recently.
I've heard someone adamantly declare that they're “definitely not a feminist”, while another said that she might be if she “read into it a bit more”. A girl in a tutorial I was in recently said, in all seriousness, that she thought “feminists [were] mostly just lesbians”, while another woman described her friend as being a “hardcore feminist” because she believed that her boyfriend should pay for everything on dates. Someone else told me that feminists were “scary and exclusive”. Aside from noting that I seem to be quizzing everyone in my life on feminism all the time, there's a bigger point to take from this. Yes, there's a spectrum here, and there might be some remarks there that most people would agree are missing the point. But others just make me a bit sad really; the idea that feminism is an academic position, or the idea that a movement fundamentally built on equality could come across as exclusive.
For me, feminism comes down to one thing and one thing only – do you want to be equal? If I sat down with each of the young women above and asked them whether they wanted to be paid less than a man for doing the same job, or whether they were happy to be called a slut if they wore a short skirt, or whether they were cool with being whistled and leered at on their way to the shops, I'm pretty sure the answer would be a resounding no. So something has definitely gone wrong somewhere along the line.
I think the ones that depressed me the most were the woman who said that she needed to read more books, and the one who described feminists as “scary and exclusive”. Sadly, I think these are really common misconceptions about feminism and, even more sadly, I think they come from somewhere far more real
than the collective 21st century woman's imagination. I personally think that the only qualification needed to be a feminist is that you're human – altough feel free to correct me if you think I'm doing the canine population an injustice – and believe in a good quality of life for everyone. Feminism is beneficial for men as well, not just women; gender stereotypes are damaging to all genders, and the economic empowerment of women can be nothing but helpful for the economy as a whole. I entirely reject the suggestion that men can't be feminists, and I think it's vitally important that they are for a whole host of reasons including economic, political and social ones. It's up to individual women if they want to engage in these more 'academic debates' or in activism in the traditional sense but, fundamentally, they should be respected for their decision, whichever one it is. I admire women who engage in activism and I believe that it often does have great results. But I also don't believe for one minute that marches, demonstrations and rallies are the only form of protest, and I don't believe that a woman is any less of a feminist because she chooses not to engage in these.
I think a basic premise of feminsim is that women should be able to make choices about their own lives and that these choices should be respected by other people and obviously other feminists. I fully agree (and argued about it in last week's blog) that women are a group of diverse and different people and we're never going to agree on everything all of the time. That's fine. But it's not fine, as far as I'm concerned, to attack a woman over a decision to wear pink, or high heels, or to stay at home and bake because, in this day and age, these are all decisions rather than requisites, and decisions that were only made possible by the feminist movement in the first place. Personally I'm quite partial to my high heels (in this sense I probably don't have much of a choice, but that's less to do with being a woman and more to do with being under five feet tall), sparkly jewellery and all the rest of it. But I still want to be equal and respected. There's no logical correlation between the two.
The main thing tying all the above quotes together is that these are all young women who don't seem to realise that sexism, and consequently feminism, affects them. I don't want to be depressing – “you thought your life was great? Well guess what, you're actually oppressed!” – but my point isn't that these women aren't experiencing these issues, it's that they aren't identifying them as being feminist issues. So for these women who are all Edinburgh students in their early 20s, maybe childcare and pay gaps aren't the most important problem for them right now. But I'm willing to bet they've all received unwanted attention in a club, or felt apprehensive walking home alone once, or felt that they couldn't speak out when laddy boys at pre-drinks made them feel uncomfortable. That's what my shows are all about; I've tried really hard to make sure that each one is about a topic that's big and broad enough to make women – and men – stop and think about whether it's affected them. And chances are, it has. So I'm sorry ladies, but whether you like it or not (and you should definitely like it), you're probably a feminist.
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During In Session’s
Fringe specials in August, we were delighted to welcome Seafieldroad aka Andrew Eaton-Lewis into the studio to sing a few songs and tell a few tales. Lily and Andrew had an in depth discussion about songwriting, inspiration, and details of Seafieldroad’s upcoming concept album
“Through The Night”. You can find Seafieldroad’s music at http://seafieldroad.bandcamp.com
Seafieldroad by Radioblagger on Mixcloud
Tracklisting:
1. Findhorn
2. Circle The Wagons
3. The Palace of Light
Pioneers is a column that focuses on discussions surrounding digital culture, including news, reviews and features of games and other webby things that are going on that are interesting. If you have something you’d like featured or think is worth exploring get in contact – hitch@nanu-nanu.com, or sound off in the comments below.
The biggest news story from the last week or so in the gadget world – and from the buzz some prominent online communities – was the end and death of Twinkies. That's right, Hostess is to close; the company responsible for not only the twinky (not sure of the singular of twinkies) but also other equally sexually repressed names that your gran would be accustomed to including Ding Dongs, Sno Balls and Ho Hos. RIP, Hostess.
The fact that this has become such staggering news, particularly online, can be accounted by a number of factors. First up, by far the most prevalent strata of the population who find themselves online are geeks and stoners – almost exactly twinkies' main audience. The second reason that it has become mainstream news, is that it emerges within a wider economic and political narrative that can suit both ends of the political spectrum.
The background to the closure of Hostess is bankruptcy – but reasons for the baker conglomerates demise still remain contested. For those on the right, the force of worker unions have been suggested as pushing the company to breaking point, with demands leading to strikes ending in the loss of 18000 US jobs as the company has to close its doors. For those on the left, the process of bankruptcy has focused attention on other economically dubious practices with an unhealthy culture of mismanagement seeing bonuses and compensation reaching near astronomical levels. Frankly, if a business can't afford to pay it's staff a living wage, then it should not be considered as an economically viable business. But this is neither here nor there for a discussion on pioneers.
The reasons for spending a week to discuss the biggest news in tech are various. The reaction to the news has been one of horror. People have thrown themselves into shops to stock up on the baked goods, for fear of their complete destruction. Many have opined that the brand has such value that this, along with other asserts, will be bought up in the vulturous capital practices that follow the end of such a business – this despite Twinkies already existing in a business that industrialised the production to its limits, streamlining costs to such the extent of not actually being commercially viable. I'm sure some other company will take – but will they ever be able to
On ebay, twinkies have already been auctioned off at extortionate prices – with one lot of a ten pack including a Wii-U, the recently launched nintendo games console, thrown in for free to sweeten the deal selling for a cool $4,499.99 – with many desperately hoping that they can bag a supply to last them beyond their desires. Worse than this – these lots are selling. People are willing to fork over money for some cheaply made, snacks. The people of America have articulated in huge volumes, an hysterical devotion that goes beyond our wildest imaginings.
And yet despite this no one, as far as I have seen, has mentioned that twinkies are just golden sponge-cake with a creamy filling – the hysteria has consistently revolved around the apocalyptic sign of destruction and death. But you can make them themselves. Not only can they be made, by human hand, but they can be made fucking easily. In Wal-marts and shopping malls across America you probably wouldn't even need to venture that far from the Twinkies' aisle to pick up a sponge-cake mix and a Twinkie cream mix. You could even, dare I say it, bake them from scratch using eggs and the like.
“But no!”, people will respond, “it's not the same… It doesn't equate – baking your own will never match the god like quality of Hostess' delicacy”.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the twinkies' factories are not magical workshops run by elves, but mechanized arms of capital that barely employed people, real flesh and blood, to keep the machines oiled. It makes them convenient, sure – it's a hell of a lot easier to pop along to a shop. It may even be cheaper too. A company that is built around the manufacture of these goods has probably worked out the perfect cost-efficient recipe (not necessarily the tastiest mind) that makes the production as profitable as possible. But don't let yourself confuse convenience, efficiency and cost with prestige.
Walter Benjamin wrote about mechanical reproduction in his seminal text “The Work of art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility” in 1936. He was referring to the work of art moving away, say from the painted to the photographed, from the stage to the screen. Although the reality depicted is expressed precisely with more size, speed, and clarity, this move towards the mechanical reproduction lost something of the presence that made art, in some sense, magical. Something happened which meant artwork moved from being of the cult (a religious object) to being an exhibit (in a museum or cinema) – losing it's presence and “aura” to become something “authentic”, an idea of aesthetic quality that emerged as part of the move to these technologies. As techniques modernise and grow in efficiency, something is lost of the personal, the spiritual, the magic of the artist as opposed to the accuracy of the scientist.
In the modern world however, it would appear that something else has changed. As the production of things have become industrialised, the gap of “aura” and authenticity has still emerged, but we have grown to become more alienated from the processes of production in may sphere
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s of life – from the food we eat, the clothes we where and even the work that we do. In this gap where “aura” might be said to have used to be – objects created by these mechanized, and now digitized, processes have found a different mana been created which mystifies these objects.
One of my favourite films of all time is Wall-E. I will argue to the end that it is the finest film that Pixar has created, and potentially the finest film that will ever be made (and yes, I even find a certain charm with the last half hour that most seem not to enjoy). It constantly explores the dissonance between the mechanical and the natural, between the artifice and life. I bring this up here for a number of reasons – as if I need any at all. In Wall-E's world, nothing is used as it should. In his trailer, he keeps an archive of interesting things – without knowing much about what they do. Rubik's Cubes and Lighters are stored in lots, unknown to Wall-E as having purpose beyond mere curiosities. He even keeps a VHS in a toaster, and plays it through an ipod, shelved in an abandoned fridge – then magnifies that image to the size of a television to watch back kitsch musicals that themselves explore the manufacture of love, and longs for this human touch. It is not only mis-use that is explored, but finding charm in the mundane – in one moment, he finds a spork, and does not know whether to put it with his collection of spoons, or collection of folks, so places it safetly in the middle.
On that wall display, there is the Twinkie – or the Buy N' Large equivalent “Kremies” – which Wall-E takes down and places for the sustenance of his hapless friend, a nameless cockroach. This is both a hilarious reference to the myth that the twinkie and the cockroach will both survive in a post-apocalyptic situation, but also touching as the robot seems to care and have bonded with something that even we have no connection. The cockroach itself is often considered to be of nature, but appears to be programmed to respond to conditions of warmth, light, and dampness – and even programmable with science – that confuses our notion of the natural.
Within the film itself, film makers made efforts to replicate cinematic techniques that are often lost in modern digital production. The opening sequence, an homage to the silent cinema of Chaplin in particular, struck everyone as being fresh and original despite clearly being borrowed – an idea overtly referenced by the film-makers. Similarly, much of the cinematography was aided by Roger Deakins, with digital animators hoping to replicate the use of lens that is no longer required, manufacturing poor quality digital reproduction to use effects like lens focus and so on. This attempt to mirror the analogue over the digital is an attempt to locate the film as part of a canon of film – throughout harking back to so many other films of science-fiction that it would be foolish to try and name them all.
All this ties in heavily with Benjamin's notion of aura despite trying to emulate an older, inefficient form of mechanical process. To what extent that . But we hold dear a notion of nostalgia attached to past technologies. Think about Instagram for a second. The app uses modern technology, cameras in smartphones, and renders them through filters to appear to be of a different age. Through algorhythms, Instagram pulls at the heart strings, and manipulates an image to become something which could have been made in years gone by – but only on the surface. These new images appeal to our sentimentality, even for those who did not have any original, authentic or personal attachment to the technology itself. That the aesthetics of an image can be changed is one thing, but the method, and even the subject matter, the dispensability by which we take photos without analogue restrictions
Understanding the difference between what a thing is and what a thing is worth is now an important, and even radical, process for many. Hidden beneath layers of processes to create the appearance of something lies a reality that has to be remembered and known. Unlike the material world of capitalism however, much of the digital world does not hide its processes in the same way. Vast swathes of the internet are given over to teaching how to produce and create websites, how to programme and code, and much of the internet is open and accessible to all to simply view what is working behind the scenes at the click of a button (for those of you who've never bothered, right-click this page and “view source”).
To what extent the aura of production is still present in this world of software – even if seen through the basic technology itself, in the sense that companies can almost animate grains of sand to dance and perform marvels in processing and computation – but the concept of openess, that puts the rational and irrefutable logic of construction at the centre of the internet is an important one that if employed correctly, radically alters the way the world works. And this logic needs to be applied elsewhere.
It is thus remarkable that when these two words collide – the wild consumerism of hostess and the undeniably intelligent and informed culture of informatics, whose own central thread must be the role of the invisible, of the power of intellect above the surface – that the wood can't be seen for the trees. There is nothing special about the twinkie, and I'm sure many knew and discussed this element in sharing this news. But even so, we must protect against the alienation of capital, regardless of where it appears – and know there are soft spots where even intellectuals and professionals lose their rational sense if you press the right buttons.
*I apologise for the rather lax use of Benjamin here. You should definitely have a go at reading him if you get a chance.
As always, a big thank you to both guests on this week’s F-Word: Oliva Rafferty who argued for chivalry as a form of benevolent sexism, and Daniel Swain who felt strongly that it was an old-fashioned and irrelevant argument.
While I can genuinely see both sides of the chivalry debate, I do find it hard to support the suggestion that it’s old-fashioned and not worthy of our time (sorry Daniel). To me it seems that this view comes from a misconception about what chivalry actually means in this day and age. I feel really strongly that you can never just transplant yourself into a different time or place and say that you know how you’d feel or react, and so I’m definitely not making arguments about your Granny and “the good old days when people had morals and men were gentlemen and bla bla bla…”. Simply chivalry as it manifests itself for young women in the 21st century. So it’s true that ‘chivalry’ comes from the French word ‘chevalier‘ meaning knight, and it definitely conjures up images of horsemen and damsels in distress – but one of the main arguments against chivalry
is that it’s a remnant of an older and more sexist
time, so let’s not make it credible again by updating its name.
But fair enough, chats about language can be fairly abstract – so does chivalry still exist nowadays in the real world? I think the argument that it doesn’t ignores the suggestion that language and concepts evolve over time and we’re not talking about knights on white horses fighting dragons anymore (although if
chivalry was still as cool as that then maybe I could get on board). Chivalry as I see it is not just when a man holds a door open or your boyfriend carries something heavy. I’ve rarely found myself personally offended by chivalry despite having many doors held open for me in my time, and that’s because the men holding said doors were doing the same for other women, children and men, and therefore not expecting any return from their action. That’s what marks chivalry aside from general good manners. I can’t lie, I’m a bit of a manners nazi and there’s nothing that riles me more than bad manners; if a man slammed a door in my face, I’d be furious. But I’d be equally furious if he ran ahead of me to sweep it open in a grandiose gesture to save my dainty little hands from – god forbid – pushing it open. Chivalry isn’t manners because it expects something in return and therefore reinforces male control of a situation. You can say chivalry’s dead but I’m willing to bet that a large percentage of the men out there would find their masculinity bruised if a woman pulled out a chair for them or bought them a drink in a bar.
Buying a drink is a perfect example of how chivalry has evolved as times have. I can’t be sure, what with being born in the 90s an all that, but I’m guessng there weren’t many one night stands in the 12th century – chainmail would be a bit of a pest to get off, for one thing – so there wasn’t the same motivation for men to shower women with drinks all night. There were no boardrooms, let alone women in them, so no “saving the budget meeting until later so that the ladies don’t get bored”. And I’d imagine that men were too busy galloping around or sharpening their swords to even talk to womenfolk, let alone censor their conversation because there were ladies present. It’s a shame that the conflation between chivalry and manners means women are often looked down on for wanting an extravagant wedding, or enjoying pretending to be a princess when a waiter in a fancy restaurant pulls a chair out for them. It’s the subtle nuances that mark chivalry apart from manners, and that make some instances of chivalry more offensive than others – in a serious relationship you might expect a man to treat you like a princess now and again but in that situation you both know where you stand, you’ve already got what you want and he’s showing you he appreciates you. It’s not so cool when you feel uncomfortable about accepting extravagant gifts from near strangers or when you’re made to feel like you can’t just go
home at the end of a date because someone has pulled out all the stops and just paid for your dinner.
But my biggest problem with the suggestion that chivalry is irrelevant and out-of-date goes wider than just chivalry into bigger ideas of feminism and just how to treat people generally. Fundamentally, I think that if something is a problem for even a tiny number of people, then it’s a problem. Not experiencing something yourself doesn’t make it non-existent or not worthy of your time, otherwise we might as well not bother about wars or hurricanes or third world poverty. Suggesting that something simply isn’t a problem for women anymore is to suggest that women are something other than a heterogeneous group of people with opposing thoughts, backgrounds and opinions, which is a slippery slope in my book. I don’t feel personally offended by chivalry on a regular basis, and maybe there are other ‘women’s issues’ that are more relevant to me right now as a 20 year old student in Edinburgh. But maybe if I was 20 years older, or a dress size smaller, or a few inches taller, or living 50 miles away, or in any kind of different situation at all, it might be a mssive problem for me. It might be the biggest problem I face as a woman. And that is not irrelevant.
Alex Howard of Charlotte Productions joined us in the studio to chat about upcoming theatre production: Twelfth Night 1912. Expect Suffragettes, divine English accents and yellow cross-gartered stockings.
You can catch the performance You can play our 3D slots for free or try your luck with real money! Register now with WinaGames and enjoy up to $100 FREE on unique online slots like 2 Million B. TONIGHT at 7.30pm, Saturday 24th 2.30pm and 7.30pm and Sunday 25th 7.30pm at Augustine United Church, George IV Bridge.
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You can buy tickets HERE.
Tonight's Nanu LIVE is back to being exactly that, live. Tune in to freshair.org.uk at 7pm for our most packed episode yet.
Alex Howard, cast member of Twelfth Night 1912, will be joining the team in the studio to chat about Laura Witz's adaptation of Shakespeare’s classic tale presented by Charlotte Productions. If you have any questions for Alex comment below. For more information on the play check out www.charlotte-productions.co.uk and to buy tickets head to xtspro.com/-/twelfth-night/.
Discussion this week will turn to two photography exhibitions currently in Edinburgh. A Hero Of The True West is currently on
display at Summerhall showcasing Jim Marshall's work with Johnny Cash, more information can be
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m-marshall/”>found here. The Edinburgh International Festival appointed Sally Jubb Festival Photographer 2012, an exhibition of her work can be found at The Hub on the Royal Mile. Information about the exhibition can be found here and Sally's website can be found here.
Elyse will also be covering the intimate Franz Ferdinand gig that she attended on Friday at Mono in Glasgow, to celebrate we will be playing some Franz Ferdinand B-Sides. Check out Elyse's review of the show here.
This weekend The Vagina Monologues visited Edinburgh and two of our contributors to this weeks show went to see it, it was the guys. We will also have our weekly Edinburgh culture and lifestyle recommendations.
7pm on freshair.org.uk
The podcast of The F-Word broadcast on freshair.org.uk on Monday 19th November
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You can find the blog
post about this episode here.