Friday Links

• Male in the Phillipines but female in Germany
• Petition for the right to family reunion (via: the F-Word)
• Religion and racism
• Conservatives, "political correctness" and the incredibly offensive unfunniness of "Saturday Night Live"
• Human rights group urges government to stop gay deportation
• Psychiatry Of Gender And Sexuality, or Why Are My Colleagues Laughing At Me?
• Today in Fat Hatin' (and similar attitudes in the UK)
• Words and opinions
• High proportion of region's PPCs privately educated (note the party breakdowns)
• [Trigger warning] The day the BNP said it had changed its ways
• Because there have to be different words you can use (via Zero at the Bone)
• Man still has to declare 51-year-old buggery conviction
• The Tyranny Of Ikea
• [Trigger warning] On Exploitation, and Anti-Exploitation Messaging
• Life Courses
• [Trigger warning] "I saw only the best of human nature."
• Some more privilege from the social work front lines
• How Stigma Undermines Good Policies
• Lifting the lid on child detention
• I love Big Principal

Reply from my MP

Here's the reply from my MP regarding the recent botched rape trial.

[trigger warning]

[snip header]

Thank you for your correspondence regarding how rape cases are handled by the courts. My previous letter to you on this subject outlined the progress has been made in this area. Convictions for rape and sexual assault increased by over 50 per cent between 1997 and 2007. Unfortunately, however, only 15 per cent of rapes come to the attention of the police (the rest remain unreported) and 80 per cent of reported cases do not get to court. These figures are extremely concerning and highlight how much more there remains to do.

Violence against women and rape are issues that I feel strongly about. At the end of November last year I took part in the 'Reclaim the Night' event organised by the TUC. This was a march through the streets of Durham that was attended by over 100 people in support of victims of domestic violence and rape, after which I gave a speech against violence towards women.

Baroness Stern is currently leading an independent review into the way that rape complaints are handled by the public authorities. The review is examining the whole process of a rape complaint fromthe moment it is first disclosed until the court has reached a verdict. It is focussing on the way that key agencies involved in rape complaints, i.e. the police, health services, local authorities and Crown Prosecution Service, can work more effectively together to improve a complainant's treatment.

The Review is due to report in early March, and its recommendations will focus upon such issues as how to ensure better treatment of rape complainants, how to encourage more victims of rape to report the crime, how to ensure that cases progress further through the criminal justics system, and how confidence can be built in the way that complaints are handled.

[snip footer]

This is the review that is currently nearing completion.

One of the big things that the letter doesn't mention, and doesn't appear to be in the scope of the review - and on which the government has done very little of any use - is prevention. Not the sort of "prevention" that survey after survey shows that a large proportion of the public thinks that the victims should have done, but actual work on reducing the attitudes that lead to those survey results, reducing the number of potential perpetrators, and trying to erode the cultural effects that lead to that.

On that approach, this campaign might be a good start, but won't have much effect on its own. Edit to add: Given how strongly - and early - embedded is the idea that violence against women is justified and normal, it's going to be extremely difficult.

Friday Links

• Spanish advertising standards - a bit of a difference from the UK
• On the love of books
• Still more slow progress on mental health discrimination in Parliament
• [Trigger warning] A pelvic exam without permission is rape (from Renee in Canada) - and the same in Sweden.
• [Trigger warning] On discussions of transracial adoption
• National Secular Society plans protests for Pope's UK visit - and Pope says that the Equality Bill violates "natural law". I'm glad to find that my local Labour MEP doesn't share the opinions of my local Labour MP on this issue.
• [Trigger warning] Attacks on British Muslims are being brushed under the carpet
• From Earwicga - an investigation into gay-to-straight "conversion" therapy (as available on the NHS)
• Disability: When Accommodations Are Imperfect
• Wiping out human variation (from FWD)
• Inappropriate Language: Some Notes on Words and Context
• [Trigger warning] An interview with David Cameron
• Animal cultures
• How white is our media industry?
• [Trigger warning] Court Ignores Man's Domestic Violence Prior to Murder-Suicide
• [Trigger warning] When the people who claim to help are the problem
• From the Fawcett newsletter: assuming no-one else stands, this general election will have the first all-female set of candidates.

The wrong solution to the wrong problem

Over at the online magazine Agendered, there's an article by Samir Deger-Sen entitled Social Conformity as a Collective Action Problem (Or Why do Most Feminists Wear Make-Up?). In it, he puts forward an argument that women wearing make-up is a bad thing because it reinforces social norms (such as "women should wear make-up") that harm women, and wonders how this could be stopped. I think both the basic premise of the argument and the reasoning used are flawed and themselves based on harmful assumptions.

Firstly, this argument puts the responsibility of ending the problem of social conformity pressures entirely onto the women who are being subjected to it, rather than blaming the mostly-male group of people at the top of the kyriarchy who introduced it in the first place, and encourages blaming women who do conform for the existence of oppression, with sentences such as "Yet every time a woman conforms she re-enforces the social norm. She makes it stronger and harder for other women to resist.".

The article tries to counter that by also pointing out that it's rational for women to wear make-up (or essential in practice, never mind merely 'rational'), and that "collective action problems" are well known, but it doesn't get far enough away from the blame for comfort.

Secondly, the argument ignores that any individual woman might have numerous reasons for using or not using make-up. Lesbian and asexual women, for instance, are unlikely to find "makes one more attractive to stereotypical men" a compelling argument for wearing make-up (and neither, of course, would many women who are sexually interested in men). Some trans women will need to wear make-up for their own safety and health, others to convince their medical gatekeepers that they are sufficiently female. Many women, regardless of cis/trans status or sexuality, and indeed along with some men, wear make-up because they find changing their appearance to be fun. Not every use of make-up is conforming to society.

In the same vein, the author's opinion is that there should be "a ban on beauty product advertising and plastic surgery". An outright ban on plastic surgery is obviously a problem - reconstructive surgeries or gender reassignment surgeries are essential for many people - but there's no clear dividing line between some "reconstructive" surgery operations and some "cosmetic" plastic surgery operations. As with make-up, and beauty products more generally, the situation is far more complicated than "A good, not-A bad".

The article asks "Is freedom too important a value to curb [...]?" when talking about the possibility of government intervention to oppose a particular beauty standard - but forcing people not to have a particular appearance is just as problematic as forcing them to have a particular appearance. Of course freedom is too important a value to curb when your goal is to increase freedom.

Thirdly, the argument ends up reinforcing the basic value judgement at the heart of sexism. 'Using make-up', in this argument, could be substituted for just about any activity considered generally feminine without affecting the argument. The argument goes that 'Women shouldn't do these activities because they're conforming with the inferior female social role, and that makes it harder for women to break out of that social role. Instead, women should do things (either through individual action or government encouragement) that are not traditionally feminine.'

Rather than opposing the value judgement that says "men/masculine good; women/feminine bad", it accepts this and adds a corollary "and therefore women should act as much like men currently do as possible".

A reversed social pressure is the result of this approach - as well as the general social pressure for women to wear make-up, feminist women are subjected to a secondary social pressure not to do so. As above, other aspects of women's appearance can go into this secondary social pressure - if make-up is discouraged, what about wearing a skirt, or pink, or having long hair, or blonde hair, or doing anything at all that a hypothetical stereotypical man might find attractive. There is too much moral value placed upon appearance - especially women's appearance - today already, and this intersects with racism, ageism, ableism, fat-phobia, and more, in a variety of well-documented unpleasant ways. The way out is not, however, to simply place a negative moral value on a particular appearance instead, which simply adds to the problem.

Ending sexism requires opposing, not accepting, the notion of masculine as superior to feminine (and also the notion that the two are a simple binary, of course).

This is why the false dichotomy - doomed individual actions or a government-enforced alternative appearance standard - in the article's final paragraph appears. Neither option is good, because the question being asked starts from the wrong assumptions. Rather than joining in the policing of women's appearance from a different direction and suggesting that the wearing of make-up might be "immoral", instead be accepting of any choice about appearance and encourage others to do likewise.

People as individuals can be accepting of other individuals' appearance (whether or not it includes make-up) and not pass judgement either on others or themselves for their appearance. They can also encourage this behaviour in others. The government could pass stronger legislation against unfair appearance requirements at work. Men could make a conscious effort not to either judge women on their appearance or assume that women's appearance is for their benefit anyway. These collective actions have two advantages: - firstly, they work in support of diverse freedoms, without continuing to criticise women for the way they look; secondly, the effect is purely additive: there is no requirement for some unattainable critical proportion of people to start doing them before they start being useful, and nor is there necessarily any negative individual consequence.