Solidarity

With all the wonderful things that are happening in the name of feminism, I've gotten to thinking about how proud I am of the women in my life. This is an important time for us – some are calling it ‘The Fourth Wave of Feminism’. So many of us are passionately fighting  the inequality, generalisation, eroticising, victim blaming, slut-shaming, and other injustices that women worldwide face every day.

It’s exciting, to say the least; things are happening, there’s a shift coming – we can all feel it and we’re welcoming it. Best of all, we've got each other’s backs. So in the spirit of female camaraderie, I would like to pay tribute to one of the most wonderful women I know.

The Lovely Sinann

There are a lot of common misconceptions about female friendships, and my relationship with Sinann has, for me, debunked them all. We’re not catty, or fickle, we don’t spend all our time talking about boys and we’re not [that] emotionally unstable.

Sinann (pronounced Shannon, but she also answers to Cinnamon, Sin-Ann, Sinbad etc.) has been my best friend for just three years. We met in our first year of college, and bonded over a mutual love of burgers and pints, as well as a shared knack for making face-palm decisions.  

Early on in our friendship, Sinann and I enforced a strict ‘Solidarity’ law. It quickly became our motto, as it was basically a vow to always look out for each other. Sinann has supported me through issues life-changing and trivial. If I were to call her sobbing hysterically because I was having a bad hair day, she would absolutely treat it with the gravest importance. She would promptly link me to every YouTube hair tutorial she’s ever seen, and would probably bitch-slap the bejesus out of anyone who said I was being melodramatic. Despite the aforementioned bad decisions and dramatics, this is one of the healthiest and most nurturing relationships I have.

Apart from being a kick-ass friend, Sinann is one of the most inspiring women that I personally know. She’s clever, well-read, opinionated, eloquent, genuine, kind and hilarious. There are a lot of women that we both look up to, but rather than just talk about how awesome they are, Sinann will figure out why they are so awesome, and just fucking channel it. At the same time, she absolutely knows who she is and she doesn't compromise it for anyone. Not that she’d ever need to; the girl makes friends like Ryan Gosling makes movies – meaning ‘rather well and quite attractively’, of course.

She’s read everything I've ever published, gives me immediate feedback, and nags me to stop slacking off between posts. Even though we live on opposite sides of the world, she still manages to be there for me. Just today, I was grumpy and stressed until I got a package from Sinann in the post. I know she had sent it a little while ago, and there was no way she could have known when I would get it, but it really felt like my best friend had come through once again. It was just the hilarious pick-me-up I needed.

I love getting post!

“I wish we were celebrating our birthdays together, but we are free spirits destined to travel the world. Me in the US and you in the UK until eventually Visas run out and we decide to retire together in Cambodia, with matching ‘monk on a motorbike’ tattoos, spending our days drinking $3 Kir Royales and eating Fish Amok. Plan and a half my friend.”

I think that for women who want to see a change in gender equality/perception, female friendship is pretty important. You want to change the way women are treated, and it all begins with how you treat the women in your life. This is why Sinann is inspiring as a feminist and as a friend.

I absolutely could not have gotten luckier.

In Defence of Beyonce Knowles

I’m a little late to the argument, but I recently read an article that called out Michelle Obama for hailing Beyonce as a role model. It left me troubled and a little perplexed, so I’ve decided to construct a delayed rebuttal. Back in April of this year, writer Rakhi Kumar addressed an open letter to the US First Lady, in which she gave Michelle a good scolding for her choice in role models for her two young daughters.

Kumar went on to deconstruct Beyonce’s costume at the Mrs Carter World Tour, and politely explained to Michelle that such wardrobe choices indubitably promote sex trafficking. This letter was originally featured on Huffington Post, but also made it on to Intent and Yahoo, before eventually appearing in the ‘trending articles’ on many a Facebook feed.

I should first make it clear that I respectfully disagree with Kumar’s deductions. Her post was problematic for two reasons:

1. It’s Misdirected

There is clearly no shortage of admiration or respect between Beyonce and the Obama family. During Barack Obama’s original presidential campaign in 2008, Beyonce repeatedly and publicly proclaimed her avid support.

She went on to gush about Michelle Obama, hailing her as “the ULTIMATE example of a truly strong African American woman.” Unsurprisingly, Beyonce was invited to perform at the president’s inaugural ball, and the Obama-Knowles alliance has been going strong ever since.

I think it’s safe to say that Michelle and her kids know Beyonce Knowles a little better than Ms. Kumar does. After the unwavering encouragement, and the success of Obama’s campaign, to ask Michelle not to allow her children to look up to a supportive and adoring family friend is presumptuous. To ask her not to let them admire a confident, independently successful woman who uses her prominence to passionately promote healthy body image for young women? That’s bizarre.

More to the point; Kumar’s problem isn’t even with Michelle Obama. It’s with Beyonce, her stylist, and, erm... sex traffickers.

2. It’s Slut Shaming

“Beyonce, performing in sheer body suits, nipples displayed, mouth open, high heels and sheer tights, shaking her butt on stage, can no longer be held by world leaders as an icon of female success.”

When I read the above passage, all I could hear was 30 Rock’s Kenneth earnestly professing that “everyone knows the only thing we should be ashamed of is our bodies.”

Look at that shame!

Under the guise of empowerment, Rakhi Kumar breaks a fundamental rule of female solidarity; absolutely no slut shaming. To paraphrase Tina Fey in Mean Girls, we have got to stop calling each other sluts and whores; it just makes it okay for guys to call us sluts and whores. Furthermore, I can’t shake the impression that Kumar is worried Beyonce will have our sisters and daughters sashaying down the road in glittering lingerie, leaving them open to attack from sexual predators. And to be fair, I get impression because that’s exactly what Kumar is getting at:

“Understand that in an obscene act of manipulation by the young men who will pimp them, for a very short amount of time - maybe only for a half an hour in one of their early encounters - young girls who are trafficked do actually get to taste the experience that they have identified as ultimate feminine success: they get given hot pants or body suits like the one Beyonce's dancing in, they dance for men who find them alluring, and for a very short time, these very young girls are convinced that they've made it - only to be assaulted, abused, and sometimes murdered in the years ahead, by the men who they thought wanted them.”

I find it astounding that Kumar can attempt to hold Beyonce responsible for the crimes of human traffickers. The argument is disturbingly similar, in my opinion, to the controversial remark by Constable Michael Sanguinetti back in 2011. Speaking at a crime prevention conference at York University, Sanguinetti advised that “women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized.”

What Kumar is saying is this; Beyonce should not encourage girls to dress provocatively lest they should attract the eye of a perverted deviant. 

My question is this; Is warning women not to provoke rape and attack the only course of prevention against sexual crime?

Couldn’t we warn men not to rape and attack women?

I found the Open Letter to Michelle Obama tasteless and misguided, and I’m not sure why I found it labelled under ‘parenting’. Kumar advises a mother to steer her children away from a potential role model on the basis that she dares to embrace her body in a world where female sexuality is often exploited.  It’s a blatant and indignant attack on perceived wantonness, not a gem of a parenting tip.

Furthermore, if Michelle’s kids are indeed listening to what Beyonce has to say, the Obama’s have nothing to worry about.

Beyonce's own 'Open Letter to Michelle Obama'

Animated Fish v. On-Screen Mutilation

"Oh God..."

"Oh no..."

"Oh why?"

"Oh God, no, why, my childhood!"

Pixar’s collective filmography is like an emotional theme park; this is widely held as an inescapable fact. Their films are marketed to kids, but they deal with all these deeply tragic subplots that, for some reason, I never see coming. And yet, every time I see a Pixar film, I’ve inevitably got two thick black streaks running down my face by the end of it. So either Pixar knows how to strike just the right balance between innocence and pathos to get its audience going, OR I wear way too much eyeliner.

In any case, I know I’m not alone. 

YouTube comments about the Toy Story 3 Furnace Scene

So we’re not monsters, right? We can all empathise, even if it’s with computer-animated fish. I remember this being a prevalent topic back in primary school, when my peers and I were being urged to develop our essay-writing skills; ‘desensitization in the media’. Back then, I thought the idea was a load of bollocks. It’s just TV, I thought, it’s not real life why would anyone get upset over this stuff? Clearly at the time I didn’t grasp how totally intertwined our everyday lives are with our varying forms of entertainment. We look up to characters from our favourite books and relate to characters from our favourite films and shows. Entertainment can so easily influence our perspectives and perpetuate cultural ideals – it’s both dangerous and wonderful.

As I said, we talked about desensitization at length in school, usually in the context of violence in the media. Amongst our teachers, it was generally agreed that violence had become normalized in a very dangerous way. They believed violent behaviour was so common in entertainment that we’d begun to shrug and move on when it happened in everyday life.

Now, I’m not saying they’re wrong. As a society, we totally have. But these violent films and shows are generally a case of art imitating life, and the kind of gruesome violence we’ve been seeing is nothing new and it’s not as a result of what we’re watching on a Friday night. The Romans had all kinds of crazy torture methods; they used to tie up their victims, slather them in honey and let them drift off to sea where they’d slowly rot and simultaneously be eaten alive by all manner of insects. 

And those guys didn’t even have TV. 

But I digress. What I’m getting at is that yes, the majority of us are totally desensitized to violence and emotional trauma in entertainment. We don’t scream at horror movies the way Hitchcock’s audiences might have, and we no longer groan and cover our eyes when Tarantino’s latest anti-hero skins and hacks at his enemies.

Except... I do.

As soon as that red corn syrup starts spraying around, I cringe and groan and bury my head into the nearest cushion. There’s a scene in Django Unchained where a man is ripped limb from limb by ravenous dogs. At least I think that’s what happened; I didn’t actually manage to watch that scene all the way through. Later on in the movie, Dr. Schultz (played by the magnificent Christoph Waltz) has a traumatic flashback to the incident, and he’s seen flinching and shaking - I can honestly say that that was my reaction, too. It’s even worse when kids die on-screen – I feel as heartbroken as if they were my own nieces or nephews. Looper totally took it out of me, as did Changeling.

So, why do I keep going to see these terribly violent movies? Well, because I appreciate that they don’t censor their stories. For the most part, the films in question don’t just throw in horror or violence or tragedy for the shock factor, they do it because otherwise the story would seem to be set in a weird Earth-like realm where everyone is protected by a magic anti-reality bubble. They do it because it’s a reflection of our world. I think Cher Horowitz said it best; “Even if you took out all the violent shows, you could still see the news. And so, until mankind is peaceful enough not to have violence on the news; there’s no point taking it out of shows that need it for entertainment value!”

Ha! A semi-serious post and I get to reference 'Clueless'! It's the little things...

The idea for this piece originally came from a realization I had about my significant other. He’s rather stoic, and pretty much unflappable. He’d scoff at me for flinching at any horror movie, but when he watched Up for the first time, there was some definite choking up.

To be honest, I’m glad he identified with Carl and Ellie, and I’m really glad that I still can’t stop myself from forming attachments to the ever-illogical stock characters in gory slasher movies. Getting upset about a character’s misfortunes reminds me that awful, terrible things really do happen every day, and it makes me so relieved to know that I’m in no way desensitised.

So yeah, I cried a little when Marlin left Dory in Finding Nemo, and when Sully terrified little Boo in Monster’s Inc, and when Andy’s toys faced the furnace in Toy Story 3 and when Carl and Ellie found out they couldn’t conceive a baby in Up.

Pixar movies make me cry – thank God.