Post from my blog (http://tenderhooligan.wordpress.com/)

I was really shocked the other night when I watched two minutes of “Bigger, Fatter, Gypsier” on Channel 4. I was flicking around stations and was stopped by the horror of this show. Channel 4 is known for making programmes which degrade, belittle, horrify and ridicule, but it’s outdone itself with this one. Viewers are encouraged to laugh at “gypsies”, their culture, their beliefs, their lifestyles, and their customs. In short, Channel 4 appeals to the collective elitism in us all and asks to to join them in making fun of the “savages”. It’s horrible.

What I found almost more upsetting, however, was the numerous posts on my twitter and facebook feeds which were joining in the game. She’s wearing a pineapple!! OMG!, and such like. Not big. And not clever.

There have been several criticisms of the programme this week (from segmentpolitics, liberalconspiracy, and the guardian, to name but a few), but none more poignant than this open letter to Channel 4. It was written by a 17-year-old Romany male. Here is the link to his blog post. Below is the copy and paste for your convenience.

Dear Channel 4,

I am writing to you with the hope that you will stop ruining my life. While you’re obsession with my ethnicity is flattering, it has become somewhat apparent to me that you might have gotten the wrong end of the stick. This is sort of awkward for me, because I don’t want to be the one to break it to you, but your documentary, ‘Big Fat Gypsy Weddings’, is unfortunately a work of fiction. There is no need to be embarrassed, it can happen to the best of us, and thus I hope my letter will help you establish the facts, after all I’m sure you are passionate about fighting discrimination against ethnic minorities. Don’t be modest now, we know you are…right?

It surprised me to discover that 99% of Britain’s Gypsy and Traveller population are Irish. Correct me if I’m wrong, as I am sure you have done lots and lots of research on this topic, but just 10% of the Gypsy andTraveller population are actually Irish Travellers. The majority, like myself, are in fact Romany, yet your ‘documentary’ seems to ignore our existence. While I have nothing but respect for the Irish Traveller community, you seem to be unaware that we are two distinct ethnic groups and thus there are many differences between our cultures. While Irish Travellers originate from Ireland, we can trace our routes back to India, so it was hardly surprising that I was somewhat confused when you use the word Gypsy in the title of your ‘documentary’ about Irish Travellers. I was even more confused when your ‘documentary’ about Irish Travellers seemed to feature an alien culture that even most Irish Traveller’s didn’t recognise.

Read more at the blog.

From my blog:

No, I’ve not stopped blogging again but I have done lots of other things (including moving house) that have kept me busy.

Anyway, |’m back now. Sort of. And I have a new design. I ain’t ‘alf tired of the stock of wordpress designs. They do add new designs often but none of them do quite what I would like. (I’m not sure what that is but I would know it if I saw it.)

The world seems to have been taking some very funny turns recently. I still can’t fathom what happened in Norway (though I’m not entirely surprised by it either). Breivik appeared to despise anyone who wasn’t white, western and male, and it’s always disconcerting to hear about those sorts of views. He’s not the only one, of course, but most anti-“other”s don’t go shooting up whole islands of young people. Most of the coverage of Breivik’s atrocities have, thus far, been predictable (the war on terrorism, a [re]new[ed] white-supremacy, a growing xenophobia towards the east) but I was intrigued by Anne Applebaum’s slate piece this morning which compared Breivik’s beliefs with those of thebirthers in the US. Applebaum argues that Breivik’s main objection is to his government’s legitimacy (or lack of) in the same way that the birthers question the legitimacy of Obama’s presidency. Such views are conspiratorial at best, and ridiculously paranoid at worst. But they’re still having their day.

In any case, while I think that Applebaum is not correct in dismissing Breivik’s racism (and sexism and homophobia etc.), she does make a good point about a growing (though disorganised) trend in these sorts of revolutionary movements.  She mentions Marx, too, but seems to be dismissing him as a nonsense. As I read about her thoughts on these new rebellions, however, I started to feel unnerved that The Revolution, when it’s arrived, has not been that advocated by Dear Old Karl, even though that’s the one that we’ve all been told to wait for.

Let’s face it, many of us would be quite happy with the overthrow of capitalism (at least those of us who have old socialist souls), but at the same time we can all be secure in the knowledge that it’s not likely to happen any time soon so we don’t have to worry about imminent mess and inconvenience. One can’t be so sure with these illegitimists.

Post from my blog (tenderhooligan/ wordpress)

I’ve written about this genius before (here or elsewhere or somewhere). He’s an evolutionary psychologist from the London School of Economics (LSE) – one of the top universities in the UK – and he writes, a lot, for Psychology Today. Now,Psychology Today is not, by any stretch of any imagination, a reliable academic source but it does have readership. It’s probably the best feeder of pop-psychology around at the moment.

I’m not a fan of evolutionary psychology. I don’t like its reductivist approach in making everything about sex. Because that’s what it does, when you strip off the big words. The boys have sperm, the girls have eggs, the boys want the girls but the girls need the boys and then a whole host of things happen that bring us where we are today. One of my very favourite colleagues does a bit of evolutionary psychology, and he argues it well, but I just don’t agree with the premise or the implications. No more than I agree with any of the offensive, sexist, racist, ill-informed claptrap that  Satoshi Kanazawa is known for on Psychology Today. (Not that I am equating my lovely colleague with Kanazawa, of course).  His latest stint involved a piece which was entitled “Why are Black women less physically attractive than other women?” Yeah. Seriously.

The piece was met with uproar, naturally, and was removed from the site almost immediately. (It doesn’t even deserve a critique but if you’re interesting in reading one anyway, you can find an interesting post here on Sociological Images.) Since then, change.org, a petition site, started a petition demanding that Psychology Today stops publishing sexist and racist articles and explains why  Kanazawa’s piece was published initially. (If you were cynical of mind and suspected that it was published because it’s good for site traffic, you may not be wrong.) The peititon also called for the removal of Kanazawa as a contributor to the site. And not before time. Indeed, since then, the student body of  LSE have called for Kanazawa to be sacked. He is not doing that institution, or the academy, any favours at all.

Two weeks after the offending article, Psychology Today issued an “apology”. It’s very sorry indeed if anyone was offended by the article. (Read: we’re not saying the article was offensive but if you were offended then I suppose we’re sorry. But you should probably be less sensitive.) It’s not good enough. Kanazawa is still listed as a contributer and Psychology Today did not address any of the on-going issues with his pieces, choosing instead to pretend that this piece was an isolated incident. Please sign the petition to keep the pressure on Psychology Today to address this problem properly. Its claim that it doesn’t support the publication of racist or sexist pieces is disingenuous when it had to remove a piece for exactly those problems. We have to put up with, “I’m not racist/ sexist but…” in too many places on the Internet and we shouldn’t have to put up with it on a “academic” site too.

Psychology Today is probably hoping that this will turn out to be a storm in the teacup (and, sadly, it probably will for there’s a lot of -isms around and eventually we’ll have to move on to the next one) but it really, really shouldn’t be allowed to wait it out and get that moron Kanazawa back on the front page again next week.

Post from my blog (tenderhooligan/ wordpress).

• I was shocked this morning to hear a report on Radio 4 that there is something of an “adoption apartheid” in Britain (reported by thetimes). White children in care are three times more likely to be adopted than black children, and the waiting time for initial decisions about black children is up to six months longer than it is for white children. Delays and discrimination are apparent at every stage of the adoption system, the report says. One would think that as the little brown babies are all the rage nowadays in some circles, young black children would not be discriminated against in this country, but perhaps the little brown babies are only desirable (read: fashionable) if they’re born to mothers more than 1000 miles away. The Times is subscription only these days, of course, but I’m sure there will be several other reports about this story throughout the day.

• How is this going to work? Nearly two-thirds of universities in England want to charge the highest fee available (£9,000) for all of their courses (BBC). Now, far be it from me to pass judgement (ahem!) but I can think of about four institutions in this country who would get away with charging nine grand a year, and the rest can sing for their supper. The government (in its infinite wisdom) initially stated that universities could charge £9,000 only in exceptional circumstances so I have no idea how two-thirds of England’s universities are going to argue that one. But there’s a larger and more important issue at stake here. If it wasn’t already blindingly obvious, higher education has, once again, become the preserve of the elite in England. There is lots of tokenistic chatter about continuing to widen participation and ensuring the less-well-off can still afford higher education, but at £9,000 a pop, we all know how ridiculous that is. The current social mobility rhetoric of David Willets et al is now bordering on offensive.

• Libby Brooks’ Guardian piece - beware the anti-abortionists’ tiny steps towards reform - discusses worrying progress being made by the anti-abortion movement in the UK (which has utilised some of the same movement’s tactics from the US).

The modest group of protesters standing vigil outside the office of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service may not initially appear to embody the alarming infiltration of US anti-choice tacticians into the rather less noxious abortion debate on this side of the Atlantic. But the presence of 40 Days for Life, a Texas-based, church-funded anti-abortion campaign, in London’s Bedford Square over Lent is a reminder that, with a coalition led by the traditionally choice-sceptic Conservatives, peddling a localism agenda that favours the involvement of voluntary, charitable and religious organisations, the concomitant dangers for British women may be more real than they seem.

These campaigns are being helped along, of course, by the now notorious Conservative MP Nadine Dorries who appears to be prepared to say and do anything to get abortion restricted in this country. It’s a pity (for her) that a recent report by the Royal College of Psychiatrists refutes many of Dorries’ favourite lies which claim that abortion always negatively affects mental health. It might not be enough to get her to be quiet but it might be a start.

In other “news”, while looking down my Comment is Free RSS on google reader, I must have noted at least ten pieces about Kate Middelton. Enough already! I don’t care. Who does care?! Seriously!

Post from my blog (tenderhooligan/ wordpress).

Ok, yes, I possibly have been on the Interbets all week. Here’s some of what’s been happening:

• It’s quite unbelievable, still, that France passed the “Ban on the Burka” law last week, but it did. Needless to add, there was outrage. The irony of telling women that they’re not allowed to wear what a patriarchal culture tells them to wear is not lost on Sarkozy, I’m sure, even if he is brainless. You cannot beat oppression with oppression. (Though we shouldn’t fool ourselves that Sarkozy et al were thinking of the women at all here. No, this is thinly veiled - pun intended - Islamophobia at its best.) And as if it’s not offensive enough as it is, the Guardian reported that refusing to comply with the ban will result in a fine or a condition to have lessons in “French citizenship”. Arrange the following words in a sentence: off, fuck. Within hours of the ban coming into force, women were being arrested for continuing to wear the veil. Well, you would wouldn’t you! There are several excellent blog posts around the Interweb which discuss this issue in much more detail than I do here: thefword, delilah-mj, msmagazine, and lattelabour for starters.

• Budget 2011 leaves women out in the cold (fawcettsociety). The 2011 budget spells trouble for women in Britain. There’s been talk for a some time now of how the vast array of cuts introduced by the coalition government will affect women, and the picture is now becomnig clearer. First, a piece from the Guardian reveals that job losses have affected women the most and, second, a report produced in partnership with the Fawcett Society (‘The Impact on Women of the Budget 2011’) highlights the following issues. It is not looking good.

- The current economic strategy looks set to undermine gender equality in the labour market: if current trends continue, more women than men in the UK will be unemployed, for the first time since records began. - The bonfire of regulations will remove the protections that women and men with caring responsibilities need in order to be able to work. - The increase in the Personal Tax Allowance threshold will not touch the most vulnerable, and among those who will benefit, men will gain £140 million more than women. - Without action to tackle entrenched gender inequality within the apprenticeship sector, where women earn on average 21 per cent less than men, the Government’s flagship expansion in apprenticeships and training opportunities will not improve the employment opportunities young women face and do nothing for older women. - The businesses set to benefit most from new tax breaks and other incentives are typically owned and invested in by men while schemes to support women in business are scrapped.

• The Ivory Coast standoff ends, but the nightmare for women continues (msmagazine). Most mornings when I wake up, I’m inclined to be rather discontent with my lot for a few minutes before I come to (I’m tired, it’s cold, I have too much to do; that sort of thing). Reading about the women in the Ivory Coast reminds me that I don’t even know I’m born. Though the conflict in the Ivory Coast has come to an end now, women and girls there are still being persecuted (kidnapped, beaten up and raped) daily. They’ve been through all of this before in 2004 and they’re going through it all again. And we don’t know the half of it.

Pender [a gender-based violence Technical Advisor for IRC] conveyed reports from women of gang rapes, rapes of entire families and sexual slavery, as women and girls are “taken as wives” for weeks at a time. “These women have experienced things that we cannot even imagine–and many for the second time,” said Pender. The collective memory of rape and violence from the last Ivorian war, in 2004, is still fresh. In fact, the recollection of “what happened last time,” and the threat of new violence has driven many girls and women to flee.

• Finally, Americans seem to [want to] forget slavery (prospect). When a research centre asked why the American Civil War took place, a frightening number of respondents answered that they thought it was about the rights of states. The reason for the war is disputed, of course, but even I (a European) know that slavery was as central a reason as any other.

That so many young Americans believe a revisionist account of the Civil War is, if anything, another sign of our collective refusal to deal with our difficult past. Slaves built the White House and fueled Wall Street, but we want nothing more than to forget slavery and the central role it played in our nation’s history.

Couple this finding with the recent revisionist adaption of Huckleberry Finn (to remove the n-word) and one wonders if America wants to forget all about its sordid past altogether. I hope not.

Simmons believes that history provides some of the answers. “We have a legacy of black men being painted as rapists. From the murder of Emmett Till and the Scottsboro trials, black men have been unjustly lynched or jailed for doing something as innocent as winking at a white woman,” she explains.” And so to counter all of this, we feel that we have to prove the myth wrong by saying ‘No, black men don’t rape,’ but sometimes they do, and because we want to protect them, we choose to say nothing and blame the woman.”

So if we reject the stereotypes about black men being brutal black bucks who want to savagely rape white women, it means that we accept the jezebel stereotypes about black women. “Black women [have been seen] as oversexed and promiscuous, [which] makes many people extremely insensitive to black female victims,” says Imani Perry, an associate professor of African-American studies at Princeton University.

And while, in 2011, African Americans no longer worry about public lynchings, we are consumed with fear about the prison industrial complex and an unfair American legal system. In the minds of some black folks, speaking out about rape means handing over our men to the oppressive “system.” Therefore we make a conscious (or unconscious) decision to sacrifice women’s well-being for the freedom of men.

Emphasis added. A take I had not considered. Non-white female victims of rape “take” the victim-blaming in order to dispel the myths that black men rape. I am not sure what to think of this right now.

(Source: mixmasterjeff)

Nearly 70 years ago, Recy Taylor was gang-raped at gunpoint. Her attackers admitted to kidnapping and raping her. And nothing was ever done about it.

As a young African-American woman living in Abbeville, Alabama, in 1944, when Jim Crow laws institutionalized discrimination against black people, her hopes of legal redress were slim. Though Taylor’s cause gained international attention through the efforts of a well-known civil and human rights activist, Rosa Parks, she couldn’t force racist and sexist law enforcement in Abbeville to take action.

Today, Recy Taylor’s name and story have been swept under the rug and go largely unrecognized in America. “The sheriff never even said he was sorry it happened. I think more people should know about it … but ain’t nobody [in Abbeville] saying nothing,” Taylor lamented in an interview with The Root.

“It’s curious, to say the least, that Taylor’s name is not mentioned in history books,” Cynthia Gordy criticizes in her article at The Root. “While most analyses of circumstances that inspired the civil rights movement focus on black men — being lynched or railroaded into jail, or facing down segregationists — the stories of countless black women like Recy Taylor, who were raped by white men during the same era, have gone understated, if not overlooked entirely.” The modern ignorance of a case that launched a major campaign run by an impressive coalition of progressive groups, one that was successful in pressuring the Alabama governor into investigating but was then blocked by city law enforcement, is a sad reflection on our attention to the darkest spots of American history.

“It was a long time ago,” Taylor told The Root. “But I still think something should have been done about it.” Not so long ago that Taylor isn’t still pained by the memory of the assault and failure of justice. Her brother, Robert Corbitt, has spent the last decade of his retirement searching for information on her case and seeking a long-delayed justice, after Taylor broke down into tears while telling him about the gang rape 55 years after the fact. “I’d like a public apology from the city of Abbeville and the state of Alabama,” Corbitt asks, and Taylor agrees that this simple measure represents the least that could be done, after police took the lead in covering up the horrific assault against her.

Help Recy Taylor get the apology she deserves and public recognition of the injustice perpetrated by signing this petition to Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley, Abbeville Mayor Ryan Blalock, the Abbevile police department, and state and city representatives.

There was an interesting item in the New York Times last week that didn’t get much coverage. As compared to white women, Hispanic women are fifteen times more likely to receive a test for chlamydia, the most common sexually transmitted infection. Black women are three more times likely to receive a test. As reported in the prestigious, peer-reviewed Journal of Duh, the chlamydia rates for Black and Hispanic are off the charts as compared to white women.

Dare I say the racial differences in STI testing is due to doctors’ racial prejudices about the sexual behaviors of Women of Color? Yes, I dare say. And someone who holds the prejudiced belief that People of Color are “promiscuous” (I put it in quotes because it’s a word I would never use) might see the stats and have his or her own biases confirmed.

(Source: fuckyeahfeminists, via thefeministhub)