If you all stick together now it won't be long

This rendition of Talking Union (if you don't let the race-hatred break you up) is honour of the people of France. Because Chirac has announced that he is going to withdraw the first job contract (CPE). That's what nationwide protests, strikes and riots can do. I agree entirely with I/S that it would be the best way to respond to the local version (and to end youth rates).

They're threatening to introduce a more taregetted law. Via Lenin's tomb:

However, the advice that was likely to have been given to the president on Monday is likely to recommend that the controversial contract be replaced by another contract aimed more specifically at young people without qualifications or training, according to people with knowledge of the preparations for the meeting.

This appears to be an effort to break solidarity between students and other young workers. This is a smart move because it was their unity that made the protests so strong and so powerful. But we can hope that we're smarter than they are and the students see that it's one struggle.

I agree and disagree with Interesting Times (a very cool New Zealand blog, that if I didn't know better I'd think I was writing myself):

But this is one hell of a victory - if its immediate concrete affects may be limited, the morale boost, the proof that protest does work cannot be underestimated.

I agree that winning shows our collective power like nothing else. But to win there must be immediate effects (even if only stopping bad things), otherwise it's not a victory.

I believe that Clint Rickards, Bob Schollum and Brad Shipton are rapists

I have been talking a lot about the prosecution of Clint Rickards, Bob Schollum and Brad Shipton for raping Louise Nicholas. But I've never taken the time to outline the entire story for overseas readers. My posts probably make even less sense now that I've deleted material, and to say why I've done so would break a suppression order. So I thought I'd summarise the case.

This post does not contain everything that I know about the case, since I have decided not to break suppression orders. This is also my opinion of the issues, so it's starting point is that I believe what Louise Nicholas says. Sometimes I come to a different conclusion from the jury. Deal with it.

The rapists
Clint Rickards, Bob Shollum and Brad Shipton were all cops in Rotorua in the 1980s. During this time they used their power and their uniform to abuse young women. Louise Nicholas was one of those women. They raped her repeatedly. They would stop by her house and rape her. They raped her with a police baton.

People have posted to this blog about other abuses of power they observed by Rotorua police in the 1980s. People who worked with these men at the time have posted that they believe every word Louise Nicholas says. I find that so terifying, that lots of people knew what those men were like and didn't say or do anything. They didn't care about the women that were being hurt enough to stand up to those men. In the 1980s Louise Nicholas talked to a police officer, complained about what these men were doing to her, he took no action.

Louise Nicholas is not the only woman to be raped by Rotorua cops in the 1980s. She's not the only women to talk about being raped by Rotorua cops in the 1980s. But she is the one who has been prepared to go public. She didn't pursue name suppression, so the trial could be reported on openly.

She went to the police in the 1990s, she told a friend of hers who was also a cop and he encouraged her to go to the authorities. She did, the police reacted as you'd expect. They covered up for each other, they ensured that none of their buddies would go to jail (later one of those cops would make a death-bed confession to her brother, just for added drama). I believe that rape and abuse of power was so systemic that many cops would have a motive to cover up what Clint Rickards, Bob Schollum and Brad Shipton had done.

None of those men were charged; Brad Shipton and Bob Schollum left the police force, Clint Rickards rose through the ranks. By early this decade he was Assistant Commissioner of police, in charge of Auckland.

The Dominion Post (and I'm going to give them credit here, because I'm going to blast the media in a bit) did a good bit of investigative journalism in this case. Followed the whole story, found out about the systemic abuse of power in the Rotorua police. Louise Nicholas agreed to go on the record. You can find those articles here (warning the website owners don't believe Louise Nicholas, but they do keep a very throrough record of the case).

Since then the case has been investigated by the police, and there is a commission of inquiry into police behaviour, that is due to report back in May.

The Trial
A couple of decades after the incidents happened Clint Rickards, Brad Shipton and Bob Schollum were put on trial for raping Louise Nicholas. On the first day of the trial Clint Rickards wore his police uniform, even though he was suspended. He obviously still uses his police uniform to get what he wants.

So many people call it 'The Louise Nicholas trial' - to many she was the person on trial. Even among people who believed her the language they would use was telling, people would talk about her defence lawyers, when of course she didn't have a lawyer, because she wasn't supposed to be on trial - it didn't work out like that.

Some evidence in the trial was suppressed, so I don't know everything that was discussed. I do know that the media did an appalling job of reporting on the trial. They focused on the salacious details, ignored any context, and implied that the trial as reported was the whole picture (you had to read quite carefully to even noticed that evidence was supprsed). The headline in the paper would read "Louise Nicholas Lies" and you'd have to read to the end of the first paragraph before it was clear that this was just what the defence were saying.

In the trial the fact that Louise Nicholas had told of being raped by other policemen, and that the verdict in the other trial had been 'not guilty' was considered relevant evidence. Even though such information is not supposed to be admissable. Even though information about the defendants past was considered irrelevant.

The jury deliberated for three days. After three days they came back with a not guilty verdict.

What Happened Next

I've written about waiting for the verdict, I've written about feeling like thousands of women were waiting with me. I didn't realise how right I was.



The verdict came in on a Friday night. On the Saturday a group of women held a banner saying "Louise Nicholas We Believe You" at the police college open day. Then, on the Monday morning, they gave out leaflets at the railway station.

These leaflets were headed up "We Believe Louise Nicholas", but they also contained some information that had been denied to the jury, breaking name suppression and opening up the possibility that these women would be charged with contempt of court.

It didn't end there. Suddenly the media reporting of the trial, which had previously been focused on the Shipton family talking about how he had been harassed by police, were covering people who believed Louise Nicholas. Some people who recieved a leaflet typed them in, and sent them to everyone they know, these people sent them to everbody they knew. The women who had stood outside the railway station were not the only people who believed Louise Nicholas, they weren't the only people who wanted to do something about it, and they weren't the only people who were prepared to break the law to do so.

I don't want to particularly talk about supression laws. There has been a lot of discussion about suppression laws. To me this seems like a way to avoid talking about rape, the systemic abuse of power, and the ways in which these men used their power to avoid consequences for their actions. I do want to pay tribute to the amount that ordinary women, and men, hate rape. How they see that justice hasn't been served, and how they're prepared to fight back. How many people have been prepared to ignore the law if they don't believe it delivers justice.

What Next
I don't know what's going to happen next, and what I do know I can't talk about. But there are things that you can do about this case.

You can send Louise Nicholas your support. If you e-mail me at capitalismbad@gmail.com, I will forward all messages to her. Or you can fax her messages of support by fax c/o Brent Stanaway, Crown Prosecutor, (643) 366 7474 (just 03 if you live in New Zealand).

You can write about this on your blog. Because these issues are not just relevant to New Zealand, rape and abuse of power by police is a problem all over the world (if you want to know more I do recommend this archive, even though I disagree with those who run it).

The women who are gave out leaflets are collecting money for their legal defence. I don't think they have the ability to collect overseas donations at this stage, but if you live in New Zealand you can deposit money into their bank account 389005005641800 through internet banking (although if anyone out there would be willing to collect money through paypal on their behalf I'm sure they'd appreciate it, e-mail womenagainstrape@hotmail.com). Louise Nicholas also needs money to pay for her expenses. She had to take three weeks off work (as did her husband), and they lived in Auckland and paid for the hotels. E-mail me if you want to know how to contribute to that (a private individual is collecting, and I don't feel comfortable publishing her details on-line).

Finally I'd like to quote from an e-mail sent out by Women Against Rape today:

What can men do?

Many women working on rape issues are not comfortable with mixed groups, for obvious reasons. However, there are other men who share your concerns and men can also do all the things listed above to organise against rape. The power you hold in our society means that you can often challenge other men about their attitudes towards sex and consent.

If other men valued women's rights to their own bodies and defined consent as something more than not fighting back, Clint Rickards, Bob Schollum and Brad Shipton would not have got away with what they did.

Most importantly, ensure that all sex you have is not just consensual, but mutual.

Comment Policy: I will be policing this thread hard. If you don't believe Louise Nicholas find somewhere else to post.

Also posted on Alas

I still believe Louise Nicholas

A relative of Louise Nicholas left this comment at Alas. I replied with this

I would take these posts down if there was any chance it could make things worse for Louise Nicholas, or anyone else who was trying to get justice.

I now believe there is a possibility that this might be the case, so I have taken the comments down.

It's not a decision I made easily, and I don't regret publishing it. I remain incredibly angry about this trial,and the result.

I should be able to collect my thoughts more coherently soon.

I'll write about something else soon, I'll think about something else soon

This photo was taken at a police college open day yesterday. The action lead the news about the case on both channels. I was so happy that that message got out there. I've talked to people on the protest; there were lots of older women who said that they agreed with the banner, that they believed Louise Nicholas too.

I actually think it's clear that some members of the jury believed her too. The jury was out for 26 hours over three days, they obviously disagreed about something. I wonder how those jury members who believed her, who wanted to convict, will feel when they discover what they weren't allowed to know.

[deleted]

Also posted on Alas

Comment Policy Update

I am not hosting any comment that calls Louise Nicholas a liar. Or indeed any comment that talks about rape survivors in a deregatory way.

You want to say that go somewhere else.

I believe Louise Nicholas

The jury has found Brad Shipton, Clint Rickards, and Bob Schollum not guilty of raping Louise Nicholas.

[deleted]

Obviously some members of the jury believed Louise Nicholas, or else the deliberations wouldn't have taken this long. I pay tribute to them, and wish they could have had the evidence that would have convinced the rest.

Waiting

The pattern last two days for me has been dominated by making sure I was listening to the radio every hour, on the hour. National radio marks the hour with their six pips, and I listen to the news, I'm waiting for a verdict. I'm not alone; there are other women listening as intently as me. During a meeting today I popped into someone else's office to listen to the one o'clock news - another woman came in "is there a verdict?"

We're reading entrails. I got a text message saying "Jury came out to ask judge as question - good sign i reckon'. I agree and the question they asked was a good one. Each hour the jury's deliberations stretch on (they've spent 8 hours yesterday, and 12 hours today) I wonder if it's a good sign. "At least someone believes Louise Nicholas" I say, "I hope they stay staunch" whoever I happen to be talking to at the moment replies.

We listen and wait and worry because we believe Louise Nicholas.

We believe Louise Nicholas, because we can imagine being her, because we're terrifying of going through what she went through.

She was 18 when she moved to Rotorua, 18 and tiny. They were police officers, strong men, and there were three of them. They came and raped her. They raped her in her house. They drove her to one their houses, and raped her there. She weighed 48 kilos (106 pounds), she had no chance of fighting back agains the three of them and they gang raped her.

She wouldn't have felt safe anywhere, she would have lived in terror. Rotorua is not a big town, she couldn't escape. What was she supposed to do? She was being raped by the police; who was she supposed to go to? She was 18, and new to town, one of them was a friend of her brother, what supported networks was she supposed to use to stop it? Who was she supposed to turn to? What else could she have done?

Now they're saying she didn't act like a rape victim should. The defence lawyers say that the fact that she wore a white muslim dress again, after police officers raped her with a baton while she was wearing it, shows that she wasn't raped. The fact that someone remembered her showing a garter to one of the rapists, shows she wasn't raped.

We listen, wait and hope. Hope for Louise Nicholas to get the guilty verdict she's been fighting for, but not just for Louise Nicholas. For all the other women these men might have raped. All the other women who have been gang raped, from Kaitaia to Bluff.

Also posted on Alas

More on the police rape case

The jury in the Louise Nicholas trial will probably retire tomorrow or the next day. The Crown has complete its summing up, all that is left is for the defence lawyers to spend a day or so calling Louise Nicholas a liar and a slut, and say that she didn't behave in the way someone who has been raped should behave.

I've been really disturbed by the coverage. Five Crown witnesses were supressed, but most media haven't mentioned this fact. But the thing that disturbed me the most was the descriptions of Clint Rickards, assistant police commissioner, and one of the accused rapists. The focus on his appearance, talking about how authorative he was, as if that says something about whether or not he is a rapist (well actually I think it possibly does, but not in his defence). The Dominion Post went even further:

You can't see the weighty pounamu pendant that hangs around his neck. Just the shoulders of his crisp white shirt and the tight knot of his blue-green tie rise out of the dock. There is the occasional glimpse of a silver watch peeking out from beneath a shirt cuff and the jagged tips of the tattoos that adorn his right arm.

I'm scared about the out-come, I will be so upset, so angry, if these men are let off because of their power. But I do hold out hope. The jury convicted in another historical rape trial, where I was convinced they were going to let the off. All it takes is one person that sees that the kind of man who wears his police uniform to court, to show his power and intimidate people, is the kind of man who would use the power and intimidation that comes from being a police officer to get what he wants.

Also posted on Alas

People should be freer than capital

I wanted to write a little bit more about my position on immigration, because I think it's an issue that doesn't receive enough attention.

One commenter on my post wrote:

But I have been surprised that many of the people that are vehemently against corporations outsourcing jobs to India and China have no problem with domestic outsourcing to illegal immigrants driving down wages for many Americans.

This sort of rhetoric on immigration is really dangerous, because it drives a wedge between those with work permits and illegal immigrants, and it's wrong. The reason illegal immigration can drive down wages and conditions has nothing to do with the fact that people come from some country with bornwer skin, in fact it has nothing to do with the immigrants at all, it's because the employers use the power they have over illegal immigrants. If all illegal immigrants were allowed to work legally then their wages and conditions would go up, because they could utilise labour legislation, and it would be easier to organise.

I don't actually care about American jobs any more than New Zealand jobs, or Chinese jobs and Indian jobs. No borders isn't just rhetoric about immigration - it has to be a commitment not to priviledge one group of workers above another.

I also oppose tarriff reduction regimes for different reasons than this commenters. While the arguments about relationships between tarriff changes in the first world and job losses (and not just in the first world, but that's a longer post) are important. The real reason I oppose tarriff reductions is that they give companies more power. The more free companies are to move around, the more they can leverage from different localities to move where they are. Improved transport has meant that manufacturing can reasonably easily be moved from one location to another. This has given manufacturers the power to leverage zones where no labour legislation, or most other forms of legislation, apply to them. It's this power, not the job losses, that I object to.

I don't actually believe that 'no borders' could be achieved under capitalism, neither could women's liberation, but steps in that direction are worth fighting for.

Also posted on Alas

Sunday Protest Blogging: Open Borders Edition

Los Angeles saw one of it's biggest protests ever yesterday when between half a million and a million people marched against anti-immigration laws. The laws would make it a felony to be an illegal immigrant, and calls for walls to be built along the border. I understand they're due to be debated in the Senate on Tuesday.

The mobilisation against this legislation all over America exceeded media expectations (although the organisers seem to have known how important it was to people). I'd like to pay tribute to everyone who atteneded those protests, and particularly those who put in the organising work to make it happen.

I think it's easy to get complacent about this issue in New Zealand, to assume that just because it's difficult for illegal immigrants to get here, immigration is less of an important political issue here. We get the occasional high profile refugee case. The most famouse is Ahmed Zaoui, an Algerian who was detained for a number of years, after he was given refugee status, because the SIS didn't like him. Or when the government sedated a 16 year old girl in order to deport her back to Sri Lanka where she had been repeatedly raped by her family and feared the repercussions (she has since been given refugee status, and is going to Canada). But although dawn raids to get rid of illegal immigrants still happen, more people probably know the band than the practice.

Businesses exploit illegal immigrants, and it is the immigrants who are punished if the businesses are caught. Last year one bakery was caught paying one of their employee's below the minimum wage and not providing him with holidays for 8 years. He was deported, they were fined $2,000. Employers have huge amounts of power over illegal immigrants, and the only way to change that is to say that those workers should be entitled to live here under the same conditions as everyone else.

I think it's fantastic that it is a people's issue in America, although I imagine it's not for good reasons. My sister met a US border guard at a party (he had brought his border guard badge with him to New Zealand, which was probably the first sign of trouble), he said his job was to shoot Mexicans.

In New Zealand at the moment, the only people who talk about immigration, are people who want it restricted, or businesses who want workers. It's obviously different in America, you don't get hundreds of thousands of people on the streets to promote business interests. I think it's really important to draw a line between people who support a more open immigration policy to suit the needs with business, are confused with people who think that immigration policy should suit the needs of people (so there should be no limits on immigraton)From the Guardian:

Bush sides with business leaders who want to let some of the estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants stay in the country and work for a set period of time. Others, including Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, say national security concerns should drive immigration reform.

By making immigration a tap that gets turned on and off to suit the labour market, employers can try and drive down wages and conditions by treating workers in other countries as a reserve army of labour.

So all power to the protesters, and I'm sure they'll continue to draw a line between those who put people first, and those who put business first, as well as fighting the racist fucks who put up legislation like that up in the first place.

If you live in America and didn't make those protests you get another chance, there's a national day of action on April 10, you can find out more at the immigrant solidarity network.

Also posted on my blog

Feminist blogging

The thing about blogs is they let peoeple talk about whatever they like. So there are an awful lot of blogs out there about women's experiences. Sometimes I wonder if this could be used for something more. If the barrier between feminist blogging, which is primarily about other women's lives, and blogging on 'women's topics' where feminist women (and non-feminist women) write about their lives, could be broken down. What would it look like if feminists who were writing about body image issues and reproduction, linked more to personal stories on weight-loss blogs and mother blogs (and yes it's scary that those are the two female blogging topics that come to mind) and vice-versa. Because I do think that feminist analysis is stronger the more it links to women's experience, and I think talking about women's experience can be something more, it can be consciouness raising.

This is in response to the great 'false advertising' debate. I've read a lot of posts on this issue. I feel like I understand the issues around the role women's bodies play in a relationship, particularly in middle-class white America, but I think many of those observations would apply outside that specific context (incidentally I've also developed a plan, if I am in a relationship with someone who thinks a change in my appearance is 'false advertising' I will simply tell a couple of my female friends about it, and they will take care of him).

But while I know more, I'm still feeling really ambivilant about the debate, because I'm not sure it's what I'd call feminism. In supposedly feminst blogs and comments women have been attacked for feeling like they owe it to their husbands to keep their weight down. From I Blame the Patriarchy

Regarding said ass: Women of some races naturally have asses like that. Women of some races naturally have hair like that too. But the kid’s white, and both hair and butt look bought to me. Also besides, being as they are both staunch supporters of the patriarchy, I assume she’s read the fine print. As soon as her ass goes south, he’ll have (and probably take) the option to find another, younger butt.

I get it, I really do. I understand the frustration, the desire to get angry at a woman for accepting and perpetuating so much shit. When I read this:

My boyfriend, the man I thought I was going to marry, brok up with me after 4.5 years. Because I gained weight. To be fair, it was a significant gain (about 25 pounds).

I wanted to yell at the woman why the fuck are you being fair to a man who leaves you because you've gained 11 kilos? You should be dancing Numfar's dance of joy that you got out. But I don't think that that helps build anything, except the idea that I think I'm better than her. And I'm not, I have my own issues, and I don't write about them on my blog, except with eight layers of feminist analysis. But does that just make me less honest than her?

Despite these ugly personal attacks, there were real benefits from reading so many different perspectives on one issue. One of the things that really disturbed me, and showed how good the patriarchy (still don't like the term) is at colonising our minds, was that we shouldn't just want to attain beauty standards to catch a mate, we should want them for ourselves. From a comment on I blame the patriarchy

I’ve met women who have “let themselves go” after marriage out of the idea that they already have their man, so they don’t have to try anymore. To them, the idea of putting any kind of effort into themselves was a tool to get a mate, and once they had the mate, they could stop doing those things. I’m not saying that one has to wear make-up, exercise, whatever to be happy, but it disturbs me greatly to think that I should only care about my appearance to trap a man, and once I’ve got him I can just “let myself go.”

A slightly different version of the same thought on Tertia

It doesn’t matter if you are 10, 15 or 50 pounds heavier than you were when you got married; if you take pride in yourself and dress nicely, do your hair, spray some perfume on, wear pretty earrings etc, you will feel nice and you will look nice. And I am sure that is all that most men want. They want us to like ourselves and to be happy. Because they know, the happier we are within ourselves the sexier we will feel, and that can only mean good things for the long suffering husband. A happy wife makes a happy husband.

Unfortunately, I can't really have a conversation here about what these women have said, I'd be attacking them, attacking what they said. Informal, unsure conversations, where you learn stuff together - it's easier to do that in person.

Which is a shame, because the analysis I found most interesting came from blogs that would probably identify more as Mommy blogs than feminist blogs.

Moxie seemed afraid that everyone would hate her when she came to I Blame the Patriarchy, but I thought her analysis was really useful.

I've been thinking about this topic all day. The notion that a woman owes it to her husband or her relationship to keep her body thin (or whatever way the culture decides is beautiful--I'm sure there are women in Africa who feel pressure to stay fat) is part of the truth that when a woman gets married her body no longer belongs to her, but instead is the property of and a symbol of the marital unit.

It's the woman's responsibility to get and stay pregnant. Even if she gets pregnant easily, she's the one who takes the entire physical hit of the pregnancy. Heartburn, acne, sciatica, backache, hemorrhoids, varicose veins, PSD, tendonitis, skin tags, stretch marks, insomnia, swelling. And the labor and delivery is a horror, featuring pain and often cutting or tearing, even when it's relatively easy. Even if a woman loses all the pregnancy weight, her body is never the same. She sacrifices her body for the family unit.

She goes on to explore what happens if a woman can't conceive and how this changes as the baby gets older. It's a really good point, and so much more of what so many other writers say makes more sense when it's put in context.

I've been reading Jody from Raising WEG for a while, I love her analysis and her writing (and freak out at the very thought of triplets).

As Moxie points out far more eloquently than I could, stress and our mental responses to stress affect our eating habits, too. And exercise that comes naturally to single people gets very hard for parents to find. And I'll also point out that I don't believe we are our bodies, and that there's a difference between living well in the body you have, and trying to make your body into something it was, or should be, so that it looks better to other people. It's been my experience that it's not any more work to learn to love your body as it becomes.

[....]

Your body isn't your self. Your relationship with food isn't your relationship with your body. There are many ways to be attractive, and they don't remain static over time. And the thinner women in our neighborhood? I'm pretty sure at least two of them are anorexic. Anything is better than an eating disorder.

I'm going to end with my favourite story. The one that makes me think that maybe this sort of conversation is worthwhile. Maybe it will give women strength, and show them that they are not alone. This is Jen Creer from inkstains

The reason I thought this is because my husband clearly thought differently about me when I was thin and then when I had gained weight in my marriage. One year, when we had two small children, he started running and playing tennis and racquetball and lifting weights. He told me finally that he couldn’t sit around and become a fat slob like me. He said, “No man can respect a man with a fat wife. If you don’t lose the weight, I will leave. If you gain more weight, I will leave.”

I will never forget that conversation. We were sitting in the bathroom at two o’clock in the morning. I was sitting on the lid of the toilet, and he was sitting next to the tub. Our sixteen-month son was sitting in the steamy tub, suffering from the croup. Our four-year-old son was asleep in one bedroom, and our three-week old baby was asleep in another.

Yes, that’s right. I was three-weeks postpartum when my husband said those words to me. And the time that he chose to get back into shape? Was when I was pregnant with his third child. I had a total of three C-sections, and I was not even allowed to pick up our middle child, let alone exercise when he sat and said the coldest words I’ve ever heard from someone who was supposed to love me more than anyone.

Ok that's not happy, but her next sentance was:

That was the night I stopped loving him

There's more to the story. Awful horrible stuff that makes me furious, but three years later she did leave him.

I do think bringing together different women's experiences of the same problem can be helpful. I even think this debate is. But without trust, without sisterhood (with all the problems that brings), I'm not sure this is building anything much. I'm worried that it's just making 'feminists' another group of women with special interests and experiences.

Also posted at Alas

Why liberals (or leftists, or socialists or anarchists) don't make better lovers

An anonymous writer fromGQ made a list of the top 10 reasons Republicans were better in bed (David Farrar got quite excited) Ann from Feministing replied with a list of top 10 reasons liberals were better in bed. Here's #5:

5. Foreplay. Liberal men are so intellectually sexy that everything is foreplay. Republicans might get started in the cab after dinner, but the liberal man’s in-depth knowledge of (and vehement opposition to) various state-level abortion restrictions has got me all hot and bothered before we’ve ordered our entrees.

While this made me chuckle (and in a personal sense it's not inaccuarte). I also found some of the comments at Pandagon very amusing

But I kept on coming back to 'but....', I can't accept this argument even as a joke.

I've known left-wing men who couldn't grasp the radical notion that women were people. I've known left-wing men who treated women as objects for their conquest. I've known women who were raped by left-wing men. I've known women who were beaten by their left-wing boyfriends.

I wish that wasn't true. I wish that you could know that once a guy knew how to talk like he thought a woman's body was her own, you could trust him. I wish I could . But unfortunately it's not true, and I think it's foolish and dangerous to pretend that it is.

Also posted on Alas

Unfair

I have a plan to write a long post about the responses to False Advertising a post in which Morphing into Mama says that she believes that to significantly change your appearance after you get married, for instance by cutting your hair or gaining weight, is false advertising.

Before I go any further I do have to quote Twisty:

And, lard-jesus no! MIM, who says she “works” to maintain her figure “for myself and my husband,” goes on to suggest that a person’s weight is indicative, not, as a rational person might imagine, of how much she weighs, but of her degree of “self-respect.” Overweight people, MIM asserts, are probably “depressed.” She asks, “can you imagine still maintaining the same level of physical attraction for your mate when he’s depressed?”

There has been a huge response to MiM's post, and it's that collective response that I want to write about. But before I can do that I have to express disbelief at the context in which she reached this particular conclusion:

Recently, in my psychopathology class, I was reminded of this conversation with Husband. My classmates and I were discussing a journal article on bulimia nervosa and speculative reasons were being tossed around as to why the majority of the women sampled were married.

“Maybe married women feel more pressure to be thin for their husbands,” one young, unmarried classmate said.

“Really? Because when I’m in a relationship, I get all comfortable and actually tend to plump up,” said another, very honest young woman to my left.

“Well, first I don’t think it’s fair to say that being married caused these women to be bulimic – especially since being in a relationship can make one conscious about one’s weight just as being single can. When you’re single, you want to be in good shape not just for yourself, but so that you can feel confident about how you look and feel like you can attract a partner. When you’re married – and especially after having kids – you’re conscious about your weight, which may motivate you to watch what you eat and exercise, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll develop an eating disorder. I am conscious of my weight, so I don’t snack, and I exercise. Personally, I think it would be unfair to Husband if I gained a bunch of weight and did nothing about it.”

She was having a conversation about why eating disorders were more commmon among married women, she thinks about her body, food and exercise within her relationship, and her conclusion is that it wouldn't be fair to her husband to gain weight.

I'm reminded of last year's anti-feminist women's rights co-ordinator at the local university. She wasn't into 'No Diet Day' so she renamed it 'Love your body day'. How do you love your body? By eating fruit and doing yoga.

I don't want to blame her for thinking like this, there's a lot of resources poured into to making women feel like this. It just makes me terribly, terribly, sad and angry.

Also posted at Alas

Radical Youth are my heros

In Auckland, over 500 school students walked out of classes today to protest youth rates. They were going to have a rally but they turned it into a march, and blocked the intersection.

I'm just so impressed at their dedication, organisation, and all round on-to-itness. There was a fantastic interview on Morning Report and some lovely bits from the rally on Checkpoint:

I saw that on the radio they tried to discredit us, they said we were here to get out of school, they said this was truancy. This is not truancy this is activism. No More Youth Rates

Just when I was comparing New Zealand unfavourably to Paris.

Healthy Living

I realised that I hadn't explained myself very well in my Body Shop thread. Or rather I'd paraphrased an argument without actually making that argument.

I hate The Body Shop, have a for very long time. I've never had a use for the dumb soaps and gels and whatever they make (although I did go through a stage when I was 14 of buying them as presents for friends, if I didn't know what else to get them). They're such a huge part of the idea that it's alternative and a moral good to be healthy, and what it means to be healthy is to fit a traditional idea of beautiful that I'd happily watch as every single one of their stores burnt to the ground.

I wanted to explore the link between health and beauty, and the idea that health is a moral good, a little bit more to explain.

The equation of 'beauty' and 'health' is really common and really insidious. The most obvious example is weight, and (despite rather a lot of evidence to the contrary) the conflation of thin and healthy. In circles (usually middle class and slightly politically aware circles) where it's not acceptable to talk about weight loss straight up, generally exactly the same conversations take place, but people are talking about 'health'. If someone is nervous of complimenting a woman for losing weight, they'll talk about 'healthy' she looks.

But it's much more common than that. Most of the examples are just laughable. Beauty sections in magazines are now called 'health' sections. Hair products claim they will promote 'healthy looking hair' (because ensuring that your dead-cells are healthy should be the priority of everyone). The state of your skin is seen as indicative of your overall health. Performing beauty routinues, like moisturising or body scrubbing, are portrayed as part of maintaining your health.

Some are more scary:

The American Cancer Society offers the "Look Good…Feel Better" program, "dedicated to teaching women cancer patients beauty techniques to help restore their appearance and self-image during cancer treatment."

Of course this is bullshit, you can't tell someone's health by looking at them, and a lot of so called health routinues won't increase your longevity, or your quality of life at all.

Now this is partly just a marketing technique, the more women challenge beauty standards, the more useful it is to have different justification for selling exactly the same products. But I think it's become a lot more significant than that, because health is portrayed as a moral good. This particular conflation is a very powerful one for fucking with people's minds, and very useful for ensuring certain sorts of behaviour (mostly buying stuff, but also not challenging the way our society is organised).

The first step to believing being 'healthy' is moral is to show that 'health' is something that is under your control. Now personally, I reject this idea as deeply offensive, as well as being wrong. Wile there are some things that you can do that will promote the length of your life, and increase the ways you can use your body, most of it is just luck. Either it's your genetics, or it's a result of environmental factors you can't control (like poverty, or being exposed to depleted uranium). It's very tempting to believe we can control our body, how long we live, how far it holds out, but most of us won't be able to.

To give a rather silly example of this I have had a number of people tell me about the quality of their teeth, how they don't have fillings, and they each give a different reason for this (they brush every day, or they eat a lot of cheese). Now it seems to me that it's far more likely that fluoridated water, and improvements in detal practice are the reason my generation's teeth are better than our parents.

That's why I think it's wrong, the reason I think it's offensive is it promotes an idea that everyone could get better if only they tried hard enough. It turns illness into a form of personal failing. Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a fantastic article about this in relation to the breast cancer industry (and yes unfortunately it is an industry):

My friend introduces me to a knot of other women in survivor gear, breast-cancer victims all, I learn, though of course I would not use the V-word here. "Does anyone else have trouble with the term 'survivor'?' I ask, and, surprisingly, two or three speak up. It could be "unlucky," one tells me; it "tempts fate," says another, shuddering slightly. After all, the cancer can recur at any time, either in the breast or in some more strategic site. No one brings up my own objection to the term, though: that the mindless triumphalism of "survivorhood" denigrates the dead and the dying. Did we who live "fight" harder than those who've died? Can we claim to be "braver," better, people than the dead? And why is there no room in this cult for some gracious acceptance of death, when the time comes, which it surely will, through cancer or some other misfortune?

The idea that 'health' is a result of our individual actions is now dangerously firmly placed. We can beat heart-attacks, breast-cancer, alzheimer's, arthritis, dementia and everything else if we try hard enough.

As well as being awful in it's own right, this idea turns anything that is promoted as improving health as a moral good, even if it doesn't actually improve your longevity or use of your body.

This idea is so insidious that it has often been adopted by the left, where being 'healthy' can be portrayed as not just morally good, but alternative - or even radical. So we end up reinforcing our own version of the mainstream ideology. Constantly things that are supported for political reasons (say veganism) are promoted for their supposed health benefits, as if good politics and good health, automatically go together (I have a much, much, much longer rant about this particular topic, but it'll have to wait for another day).

I started writing this whole post because mythago asked me "why is buying soap kowtowing to patriarchal, capitalistic ideals about beauty?" I want to make it really clear that I don't think the solution to the problems that I raised is to stop eating in a particular way, or buying a particular product, or trying to live in a way that you find nourishes and sustains you.

What I do think is important is we challenge the ideology which equates beauty, health and morality, and promotes health as something we can control. We can stop praising people for being healthy, we can stop telling people they look healthy, we can stop assuming that just because we agree with something politically it'll be good for our bodies, and we can stop using moralistic language to describe food.

And that's why I hate the Body Shop.

Also posted on Alas

Sunday Protest Blogging: Paris

They certainly know how to protest in France. There the government proposes fire-at-will legislation, and 120,000 people take to the streets of Paris, where they occupy buildings. Here we'll be lucky if it gets beyond a few grumpy blog posts. Unfotunately I don't speak French, but if you do the Paris indymedia site looks interesting.

When I said in my post on the body shop that I don't have any time for ethical businesses, it's not because I don't think there's any hope of creating change, but because I think obsessing about your shopping can distract people. It's because I believe if people work together collectively and organise together to challenge existing power structures, then we can be stronger than they are.

18 March

This weekend is the third anniversary of invasion of Iraq. So I hope you spent at least some of it at an anti-war protest (unless you support the occupation, in which case).

The Wellington demonstration was fantastic. The numbers were up on last year. While 250 people doesn't sound like that much (particularly if you live somewhere big), our numbers are up on last year (which ruins a perfectly good theory of mine about the relationship between activists involved in organising a protest and people who turned up, oh well won't stop me using it). There were even people there who I didn't recognise, but what really excited me is that some of those people's didn't just turn up, they had organised to do stuff.

But that's not the main point of this post, because towards the end of the protest someone got arrested and this lead to the usual chain reaction and four more people were arrested (even that isn't the main point of the post, however frustrated I may be about protesters inability to count. If the police outnumber us then they can do whatever they want and the best idea is to get out of their way as soon as possible). What I want to write about is the gendered insults protesters were yelling at the police.

The police were all men, and both male and female protesters were playing up the way they were acting was a sign of failure of their masculinity, some of the comments were actually about the size of people's dicks.

Now feelings were quite high. I'd made 'Louise Nicholas is a Hero' patches and given them out to a bunch of people on the demo. The police were even more violent than usual (and I'm semi-used to police attacking my friends).

But to me that's all the more reason to reject traditional ideas of masculinity (and I think it's just plain stupid to taunt overhyped, specially trained, violent cops about their masculinity).

Also posted on Alas

Oh no where will I buy my ethical beauty products now?

I hate the body shop, have a for very long time. I've never had a use for the dumb soaps and gels and whatever they make (although I did go through a stage when I was 14 of buying them as presents for friends, if I didn't know what else to get them). They're such a huge part of the idea that it's alternative and a moral good to be healthy, and what it means to be healthy is to fit a traditional idea of beautiful that I'd happily watch as every single one of their stores burnt to the ground. So I was highly amused when I heard that The Body Shop had been bought by L'Oreal, and that Anita Roddick is personally over 100 million pounds richer.

Now the Body Shop is particularly awful, other 'ethical' businesses are built on something slightly more solid than making money on women's insecurities about their bodies. But that doesn't mean that any form of ethical businesses will make any difference to the way our worked works. If it makes you feel any better to buy 'fair-trade' coffee and chocolate then go ahead, it won't harm anyone.

The thing is that consumers who want their products made in a certain way are no threat to capitalism. It doesn't matter whether people want pink products, or products that are slightly less exploitative, if there are enough of them (and they're prepared to pay) they become a market and that need can be met. You're not going to challenge capitalism by buying stuff (or even by not buying stuff). L'Oreal buying the Body Shop is the natural and expected outcome of a project that was always about making money.

Also posted on Alas

That's 3,999,999 thank you very much

All throughout the city I see signs telling me that our Commonwealth Games team is 4 million strong. So I wanted to register myself as a conscientious objector from nationalism.

Another advertising campaign asks "Where do Gold Medals Come From?" You're supposed to go to Sparc's website to get this answer:

They come from ordinary kiwi kids who are encouraged, supported and then developed to become extraordinary young athletes motivated to spend years in intense training to reach the world stage.

They're wrong the actual steps to getting a gold medal looks more like this:

1. Find an environment with some gold in it.
2. Build a mine, destroy the environment, and save money by leaving out as many safety features as possible.
3. Hire a whole bunch of people to work in the mine, pay as little as possible.
4. Bust unions, anyway you can, try violence.
5. Get a whole bunch of other toxic chemicals and mix them with the gold.
6. This is actually where my knowledge of gold-mining and smithing runs out, but you get the picture.

Right to Work

I haven't been able to find a copy of Pita Sharples speech in support of Wayne Mapp's bill going to the select committee on-line. But I have a copy in my e-mail, and I'd like to talk about it, because it's stupid. Here is an extract:

I come to this House today, desperately aware of the need of people in my constituency, in my electorate, particularly in South Auckland, to be able to walk in the door to a job. However, we are also committed to protecting
Workers' Rights - so that workers' rights are not impinged on, workers are not abused, do not suffer from exploitation.

These are heavy issues, and our caucus has grappled with the challenge inherent. What takes precedence? The Right to Work or the Workers' Rights?

[...]

The impact of systemic bias, of institutional racism, the plight of the jobless are still issues of significance for this nation - and we must have the courage and strength to consider options.

We therefore will vote on principle, wanting there to be room for discussion, but also always aware of the juggling act to protect Workers' Rights alongside the Right to Work.

There is no juggling act needed to protect Workers' Rights and the Right to Work. One of workers' rights is the right to work, and the only way to protect that right is actually protecting it. For example, if you tightened the law on fixed-term contracts, that would be protecting the right to work. If you said that people had to be employed directly, and people couldn't use temp companies and sub-contractors, that'd protect the right to work. Even a tiny bill like the Employment Relation Amendment Bill, currently before parliament, would protect the right to work (it would enact the protection parliament already tried to give vulnerable workers, but failed due to general incompetence and a ridiculously conservative appeals court).

This bill does not protect the right to work, it attacks it, because it gives employers the ability to arbitrarily deny workers' right to work within the first 90 days of employment.

Also published at Alas.