A victory for rationality?

This week the UK parliament discussed the embryology bill. Brought in by the government to update the existing law on this subject, some twenty years old and becoming obsolete due to further scientific progress, it was intended to regulate several new grey areas opened up by this progress, but was hijacked by the religious anti-abortion right to reopen debate about the abortion limit of twentyfour weeks. Given a free vote on the subject (i.e. not bound to party policy on this vote) the members of parliament fortunately rejected all proposals to bring the abortion limit down from 24 to 12, 16, 20 or 22 weeks, and rejected it with fairly big margins too. A reason to celebrate?

Perhaps, but the simple fact that the anti-abortion fanatics were able to mount such a campaign in the first place is worrying. And even the most radical proposal still got 71 votes in favour. It’s evidence of the existence of a sophisticated and dedicated anti-abortion campaign in British politics, something previously only seen across the ocean. That a sizeable minority of people dislikes abortion isn’t new, but abortion as a key issue is, as is its embrace by the Tories. the campaign was spearheaded by Nadine Dorries and supported by Ravey Wavey Davey Cameron. It shows how slight ideological differences have become between the Tories and their Nu Labour mirror images that such a relatively minor issue should emerge as a rallying point. another lesson from America: when economic issues are off the table, socalled lifestyle and moral issues become the battlefield.

As worrying as the fact that anti-abortion is now a viable cause in British politics, is the way in which this campaign has been run on “little more than tawdry emotional blackmail, smears and downright demonstrable lies” as Justin put it. That despite this the anti-abortion proposals were rejected and the governmental proposals to strip out the need for inferitility clinics to consider the need for a father figure for couples undergoing IVF treatment, as well as to allow “animal-human hybrid”embryos to be created for research purposes were accepted is heartening. Personally I am somewhat disappointed “saviour siblings” –“babies born because they are a tissue match for a sick older brother or sister with a genetic condition” as the BBC puts it— were disallowed, but than this is a much more complicated issue than the other three.

Hypocrisy is A Smiley Face Telling A Fairytale

Banging head

Sometimes I just want to bang my head on the wall with the sheer jaw-dropping, mind-numbing hypocrisy of it all.

The Guardian’s Jackie Ashley writes this morning about the New York Times April ‘expose’ of Rumsfeld’s paid media sockpuupets, already exposed by many, many progressive bloggers; and in the light of the Times own trumpeting of the White House line and Judith Regan’s fake reports, it’s frankly a bit of a joke.

Ashley purports to be horrified at what the NYT reveals about the revolving door between the media, defence industry, government, military and lobbyists and about US media figures’ personal complicity in building a false case for an illegal war.

So what are the darker messages for us from this American scandal? I was struck by the way in which the deal between the analysts, the TV bosses, the Pentagon and – behind them all – the military contractors, never needed to be explicit. The Pentagon didn’t need to offer cash, or lean on anyone. The TV networks did not ask too much about their experts’ sources of information, or their outside interests.

That this comes as a surprise to her makes me wonder where this woman, who’s paid well to be plugged into politics and world affairs, has been for the past few years. Has she not met the internet? The central narrative of progressive blogs since 2000 has been the complicity of mainstream journalists in pushing the right-wing, pro-Israel, militarist neoliberal line and parroting the White House’s fake war rhetoric.

It;s not as though she’s shown herself unaware of the Murdoch press’ in particular’s role in making the case for war; this is what she said in 2003 during the David Kelly/BBC/Gilligan affair:

Those papers have been intertwined with New Labour ever since it became clear that Blair would be in Downing Street. Blair wooed them, and from the first Murdoch, sensing a winner, responded.

Sun and Times journalists were courted and favoured with leaks, which they could promote as scoops; Murdoch editors were treated as visiting royalty when they were entertained at No 10 and Chequers. It is shameless, unabashed, and was driven both by Blair and by that high-minded socialist and critic of journalistic standards, Alastair Campbell.

Why do they do it? Because the deal is frank, and even on its own terms, honest. Murdoch wants media power and Blair wants reliable media support. So long as nobody takes journalistic principle or the public interest too seriously, then there is a deal to be done. One day, if Murdoch gets his way, he will be in a position of terrifying influence over any future government. So this is a dangerous time for the BBC. In some ways it has been here before. In the wake of the Falklands war, when Alasdair Milne was director general, Margaret Thatcher berated him about BBC funding and journalism in terms almost identical to those we hear from Labour now. John Birt had his rows too

Yet this is the woman who professes to be horrified at the way the system in which she works works.

It was all nods and winks. Does this begin to sound familiar? It wasn’t cash for peerages. It was propaganda for access. But isn’t the underlying structure – you do me a favour, I’ll see you right, while neither of us says a word – just the same?

Why yes, it is just the same.

Has it never, ever occurred to Ashley – New Labour’s cheerleader-in-chief this past decade at New Labour’s favourite newspaper – that she’s had privileged access to the PM and cabinet ministers and their aides because, funnily enough, she repeated their lies, supported the party and no matter what her disclaimers, as a result was objectively in favour of the Iraq war ?

Apparently she thinks all that access and tips and cosy invitations and the like came because they like her. Nothing to do with the fact her partner is also a chief political bigwig for the BBC either, oh no. It was all for the sake of her beaux yeux.

Surely no well-educated, observant opinion writer for a major modern newspaper could be either so naive – or so disingenuous – as to truly think that the British punditerati are less compromised than those in the US, could they?

We see the cost of not having an honest, open argument, whether about Pentagon strategy or about how the banking system really works, and the media feel embarrassed: “How did we miss that?” In Washington, and elsewhere, the answers are often the same. It comes down to unspoken deals between powerful people, and smiling faces telling fairytales.

“How did we miss that”? I’ll tell her how she missed that; you never see the dirt you’re sitting in.

Men who explain things to women

So recognisable. Embarassingly so.

He cut me off soon after I mentioned Muybridge. “And have you heard about the very important Muybridge book that came out this year?”

So caught up was I in my assigned role as ingénue that I was perfectly willing to entertain the possibility that another book on the same subject had come out simultaneously and I’d somehow missed it. He was already telling me about the very important book — with that smug look I know so well in a man holding forth, eyes fixed on the fuzzy far horizon of his own authority.

Here, let me just say that my life is well-sprinkled with lovely men, with a long succession of editors who have, since I was young, listened and encouraged and published me, with my infinitely generous younger brother, with splendid friends of whom it could be said — like the Clerk in The Canterbury Tales I still remember from Mr. Pelen’s class on Chaucer — “gladly would he learn and gladly teach.” Still, there are these other men, too. So, Mr. Very Important was going on smugly about this book I should have known when Sallie interrupted him to say, “That’s her book.” Or tried to interrupt him anyway.

But he just continued on his way. She had to say, “That’s her book” three or four times before he finally took it in. And then, as if in a nineteenth-century novel, he went ashen. That I was indeed the author of the very important book it turned out he hadn’t read, just read about in the New York Times Book Review a few months earlier, so confused the neat categories into which his world was sorted that he was stunned speechless — for a moment, before he began holding forth again. Being women, we were politely out of earshot before we started laughing, and we’ve never really stopped.

(Found via Avedon Carol.)

Palau adds: Thanks for drawing my attention to that issue, sweetie, I’d never’ve known without a man to explain it to me…

Undeserving Causes

One piupiu who won't get a Guardian gig

If someone gave you a blog in a national newspaper, what would you do? Would you use it to write about a political issue you care about? Or would you use it to ego-trip, write about yourself and to attack your detractors under a pseudonym, encouraging your friends and family to do the same?

I ask because I’ve come across something that neatly illustrates the points about class, privilege and media access made by so many in that feministe thread I blogged about yesterday. {see previous].

The pseudonym piupiu in the comments caught my eye :

piupiu says:

April 11th, 2008 at 2:49 pm – Edit

the thing that i liked about blogging, when i was really into personal blogs about 3 years ago, was that often i was reading someones blog for months even before i figured out what colour they were. for me, it was a really democratic way of getting insights into loads of different viewpoints and lives and backgrounds.

More…

That name, piupiu, had already recently crossed my radar several times elsewhere.

That brings up a topic I was determined not to blog about, so as not to give it and them the oxygen of publicity, which is the Guardian Comment is Free section’s hiring of the dedicatedly self-publicising and equally dedicatedly untalented Fowler twins Ruth and Claire as bloggers, apparently because a] They’re young] b]They’re white c]They’re female and goodlooking d] They went to Oxbridge, oh and did we say they’re goodlooking and they’re twins, oo-er, and one was a stripper once, nudge, nudge? Cor, posh totty, that’ll get the hits up.

It’s a complete mystery to many Guardian readers and commenters how else they got the gig.

Can you think of any good reason why a supposedly intelligent and well-regarded left of centre newspaper would hire the writer of this solipsistic twaddle?

I started to think of feminism more when what I was doing in life became unconditionally anti-feminist. I was grinding cock for a living in a strip club, getting my tits out – c’mon, there’s no way around it. I was even more the antichrist for feminists. And suddenly I was heralded as a Messiah for Modern Women! Women, it seemed, felt oppressed and desexualised, and what I was doing was “unleashing my sexuality” and “expressing myself as a female”. There I was thinking what I was doing was making a quick buck and garnering some interesting stories along the way, and all the time I was illustrating that the cause of feminism had actually been about choice all along – and if you as a woman wanted to be an objectified commodity, you could go and do it.

Or this:

A friend of mine said wistfully the other day: “Politically I’m on the left, but Tories are so much more fun to hang out with. They laugh at themselves, they don’t cloak their prejudices in psychobabble, and they don’t tell me I can’t have an opinion or care about an issue because I went to private school, I’m white and my family’s well-off.” Anna felt uncomfortable, she said, hanging out with her leftwing friends who made her feel guilty for her “decadence” in having a hen night consisting of a meal and a few drinks. Her best friend, a Cambridge-educated lawyer, had pointedly avoided this, and spent her hen night planting trees in the countryside, before going to the (organic, local produce) pub with a clear conscience.

All her posts are like that.

So far I’d been treating the glorious invective in the comments to their terribly-written, self-obsessed posts as my own personal source of fun, determined, as I said, not to give them any more publicity.

Commenters had already debunked Ruth Fowler’s claims to be a working-class comprehensive girl with gusto and pretty much filleted her posts too:

AllyF

Comment No. 1234907

March 30 15:07
GBR

“I’ve read the books, studied feminism’s history, seen the glossy pics of mutilated vaginas in Marie Claire magazine. The problem is, it just doesn’t affect me.”

Ruth, in these two sentences you reveal exactly why you are certainly *not* a feminist. I’m not sure if by ‘affect’ you mean ‘it doesn’t create any emotional reaction in me’ or ‘it has nothing to do with me and my life’ but either way, the root starting point of any movement for justice (and I for one would include feminism in that) is making common cause with the victims of injustice.

I don’t think it even requires a shared identity. I’m male and consider myself a feminist (although I know some feminists would exclude me, different argument.)

When I read about systematic brutalities such as FGM; when I read about mass rape being used as a weapon of war; when I read about the legal system’s wholesale failure to address paltry rape conviction rates; even when I read about mundane injustices in the workplace and payroll, then I *am* affected. I am affected enough to speak up about my anger, get involved, try to find some way to make a difference.

I would never condemn you for your former line of work and fully believe every woman has the right to do whatever she wants with her life and her body. That’s not part of the equation. But anyone who just doesn’t give a shit about injustice against women is, de facto, no feminist.

There. I hope I’ve solved your existential crisis

Then, what a co-incidence, her similarly untalented, yet equally attractive and Oxbridge twin Claire also turned up with her own Guardian blog and in defiance and disregard of all blog civility (such as it is) both Claire and Ruth regularly visited up in each others’ comments to roundly abuse their critics, sometimes as themselves but often using sockpuppets.

The trouble is they’re crap at sockpuppetry too. From details dropped or even direct allusions made it’s easy to tell who is who.

One of those sockpuppets is piupiu, aka feministe commenter aka Claire Fowler.

So when this secret stalwart of the comments sections of the popular feminist blogs gets a platform in a national paper, does she use that opportunity to write an informative and impassioned piece about her “…insights into loads of different viewpoints and lives and backgrounds” as she boasted about at feministe?

Does she buggery. She writes a horribly dated, Daily Mail circa 2001, asinine piece about googling her own name:

Me and me and me

It may be vanity, but Googling yourself can be a disconcerting experience. Especially when your namesakes seem to be doing rather well
Claire Fowler
April 13, 2008 11:00 AM

I Google myself incessantly. Most days. Definitely once a week. Yes, I know it’s a hideous vanity, but there you have it.

I don’t give a flying f*** about my namesakes, except to bestow upon them my mental wrath at their infrequent existence at the top of the virtual foodchain. These Googlegängers seem to be doing rather well. There’s a borough council’s housing options manager, an associate dean at Princeton University, some Bebo bimbo (but we won’t talk about her, except to confirm she ISN’T ME!), and then my favorite. The doctor specialising in the neurology of the bladder and sexual dysfunction. The last one is especially interested in something rather nasty (sexual dysfunction and urinary retention in young women – otherwise known as Fowler’s syndrome).

Groundbreaking stuff.

A platform in a national and international online publication is something many more seasoned and talented writers deserve than the Fowler twins. To see them, and Claire particularly, use their privileged access to a national and international readership for the purpose of mere ego-wanking, while posing privately – unless I’m very much mistaken – as a concerned feminist in the comments section of an actual feminist blog, that makes my blood boil.

It’s no crime to be young, gauche and self-regarding but this is arrogance and egotistical hypocrisy. This is what the Guardian wants in its writers these days? Not so, they say

Social justice has always been at the heart of our journalism and we will consistently give a voice to disadvantaged communities around the world most affected by climate change.

Uh, huh sure you will – disadvantaged people like the Gogartys and the Fowlers..

Shame on the Guardian for their cynicism in hiring these two, particularly in light of the Gogarty fiasco. Unfortunately given the pair’s undoubted talents for self-promotion, as with Gogarty I’m sure we’ll be seeing a lot more of them in future.

Plagiarism, Appropriation, Personality and Politics

The presidential primary is forcing existing tensions on the US left to a high pitch of twang.

The campaign is forcing an intense bout of self-examination and blood-letting in the already incredibly self-referential and self-obsessed US feminist blogosphere – and now in addition to the increasingly vicious Clinton /Obama divide there is a new rupture. Pandagon blogger and now popular speaker and author Amanda Marcotte, who is white and from Texas, has been accused of intellectual appropriation and even plagiarism by a group of women of colour bloggers, with some apparent justification.

She’s being criticized for having been commissioned to write an article on immigration for Alternet while failing to point to any of the work that’s gone before on WoC blogs and sites that have dealt extensively with immigration as a feminist issue. Some have gone so far as to allege plagiarism.

One blogger, the much respected writer, blogger and campaigner Brown Femipower, has quit blogging over the furore: many of her peers, who have also been doggedly influential in opening up an overwhelmingly white, male US-centric blogosphere to women’s voices, and women of colour particularly, are incensed that their work has, as they see it, been stolen. Holly at feministe has all the background links:

Half of you have read about this already and I’m the other half would really like to know what happened. (Hat tip to belledame for pointing me to a good summary… and be sure to follow the other links from that post. And also these more recent ones.) From what I understand, BFP does not want to be at the center of this maelstrom; that’s part of why she’s removed herself, and I respect that. But this is out there now, it touches on many things that need discussion badly, and the silence of a blog like Feministe saying nothing is a little too loud of a statement for my gut. So here we are.

Many WoC bloggers understandably see this alleged plagiarism as business as usual – white person rips off black person’s work and takes credit; the old, old story. That it’s a self-described fellow feminist and progressive doing it makes it all the more painful, but really, at bottom whoever it is almost irrelevant – what is important is that the class and race inequalities of wider society are being mirrored online. The meta-issue is that people have had their voices and work appropriated far too often and they are not going to take it any more – now is the time to draw a line.

It is becoming a litmus test for progressives online and off. Holly at feministe again:

If you go look at some of the other posts cropping up about this incident, there’s a theme of investigating “the facts.” Who was where on which date, when did this or that get written, who had prior knowledge of what other writing? And so forth.

I understand the desire to try to establish individual wrongdoing or innocence — to try and prevent the same thing from happening again, whatever position you’re taking. But as I have tried to say at length before, I think the discussion of individual guilt often distracts from the bigger picture of racial injustice. I don’t care if there was actual plagiarism or a more abstract kind of plagiarism, if one writer did or didn’t get an idea from a conference or from another writer. What I care about is that when white feminists undertake to write about the issues of women of color — such as immigration, which is clearly a massively race-infused issue — they should do so in solidarity with women of color. In ways that give political voice to women of color, to immigrants, to those whose voice is generally not heard as loudly.

When any of us have a soapbox, an opportunity to get up and talk, we must continue to stand by those who aren’t called on. If you want to consider yourself an anti-racist or a white ally to people of color — if you want anyone else to consider you those things — then it behooves you to swim against the current. If everyone did, perhaps the tides would turn, even if it was just in our corner of the blogosphere. And sometimes all you have to do is simply call out the hard work of another woman who went before you, who has paved the path that you’re walking down with research and ideas and words and strong feelings. All you have to do is cover your bases, pay your respects, and make sure you can’t be read as trying to take sole credit.

Fair enough. But global is also local and personal and Amanda Marcotte, understandably having made a name for herself as a feminist blogger of note, sees the accusations as a deliberate and malicious attempt to ruin her career. From the comments to the same post:

Amanda Marcotte says:

April 10th, 2008 at 9:44 pm – Edit

I’m not sure if I’m hurt more by scurrilous accusations about my intellectual honesty, or the assumption that I’m too stupid to make connections myself without someone holding my hand. What I do know is that the number of grad students and people holding multiple degrees involved in this shows that we’re talking a group that knows that setting out to destroy someone’s reputation as sport is deeply fucking wrong. Deeply. Fucking. Wrong. Unethical to an extreme.

I think that that excerpt from her many comments to that post’s a fair summation of her position. Full disclosure: I spent a very brief time with Amanda when she visited Amsterdam. I liked her; she came over as bright and clever, a nice if somewhat politically naive American and no more careerist or ambitious than any other modern young American woman I’ve met. But at least she made the effort to find out about other lives and other realities; so many of her peers don’t.

But then again, she had something many of her blogging peers didn’t and which has given her a big headstart in her career; an established blog and an established voice to take over.

Pandagon was of the original big blogs of the baby blogosphere, one of the first big wave, and it was started by two male writers, Jesse Taylor and Ezra Klein[See comment below]. Amanda was orginally a guest blogger then began blogging permanently, while Jesse and Ezra eventually left the blog for other careers; Amanda claimed the blog, had a post noticed by Playboy, was picked up (and equally swiftly dropped) by the Edwards campaign and now Pandagon is Amanda Marcotte. It’s a brand, and its commenters a demographic golden nugget. But a brand can be damaged and no wonder Amanda is fighting back tooth and claw.

Feminist writers who become successful will always walk a knife-edge. They are convinced that they are building their career on talent and ideas but they succeed because they are what the establishment wants to hear, the acceptable voice of dissent. Lookit the cute, feisty feminist! But then again, you have to live and if you can make a living by your opinions and your writing, while spotlighting injustice and oppression, then why shouldn’t you? Or so goes the argument.

They say plagiarism, she says influences, but both sides are arguing from clashing premises. The accusers are arguing for an academic standard of intellectual rigour, morality and honesty in online discourse which I suggest is unreasonable; such rigidity does not necessarily translate to the world of modern cross-platform publishing, which wants more content, more, more, and damn the hindmost. There is also an argument to be made that if a writer were to acknowledge every political influence ever, then each piece would be so overburdened with footnotes and acknowledgements as to be unreadable.

But Amanda is not just a celebrity woman blogger but a speaker-at-conferences, a public progressive, a personality, if only minor, who holds herself out as a voice for the oppressed and her personal success is inevitably built on the experiences of others. This is not the first time she’s been accused of hijacking others experience for her own career either. It has become something of a career leitmotif.

At very least it can be said that Marcotte is interposing herself, unwanted, as the editorial filter and interpreter of others’ work and experience; because of her ethnicity doors have opened for Amanda that would slam shut in the face of others and because what she writes is filtered through the same class and race consciousness that informs much of modern culture, then what she says and how she says it is much more acceptable to the ear of the white public, which is really all the publishers and advertisers are bothered about.

She has little control over that, though; it’s not her fault she fits the commercial zeitgeist so well, but she could at least acknowledge that. Anxious Black Woman makes the point perfectly:

To me, the other part of this white privilege is the simple fact of mainstream media choosing to render our knowledge meaningless, marginal, “too angry,” as others have said, and a host of other “problems,” while our white counterparts receive the welcome mat and easier access to journals, newspapers, and publishers. For example, why is Stuff White People Like, which I believe just started this year, already getting a book deal (I got this news from Professor Black Woman – can’t find the direct link) when the rest of us, who have offered the same critiques of whiteness (although I’ll admit that blog is hilarious and could see the mainstream appeal) keep getting editors at publishing houses who say they don’t want to “regurgitate” what we’ve already written on our blog, so any book deal we get had better be “original” and “not yet published”? I do think the publishers have a point, but I’m wondering if the author of SWPL received the same criticism, or is it just the very appeal and “marketability” of white people that gives the author access to publishing? Not to mention that, although the blog critiques whiteness, it is still by its very nature a promotion of said white culture and is therefore more palatable for the white supremacist society that chooses who to promote and who to ignore.

I’m using that one example to suggest that the same sentiment perhaps guided Alternet to publish Amanda Marcotte while ignoring BFP, who not only has kept the issue of immigrant women’s rights at the forefront of her blog but has also provided the groundwork for such so-called “progressive whites” to sift through and downright steal from. The very politics of her access to publishing in a mainstream site is problematic, but to then fail to cite and LINK back to BFP is just the worst forms of silencing.

It seems to me that Marcotte is a symptom as much as a cause: but she has committed two particular sins. She’s failed to sufficiently openly acknowledge the influence of other women and writers of colour on her own work – and worse, she has failed to hold the door open for them to follow her through. In that she fits the pattern of almost every prominent political woman on the broad US left so far. Can you blame those shoved aside, yet again, for being angry?

It’s not so much about who has the loudest voice or platform – or even about the scrabbling to get it, or personalities, though both are factors – but more about who gets chosen to have the loudest voice and about who does the choosing.

This apparently minor split amongst feminists isn’t minor at all. It’s another front in the larger war for the soul of the progressive left in America and consequently of the Democratic party and of a potential future presidency. Revolutionary or reformist? Inclusive, or supportive of continuing privilege?

In any battle of ideas there is bound to be collateral damage; I’m not happy to see a fellow feminist under attack and it’s hard enough for a clever and opinionated woman to earn a living, but sometimes, as belledame so pithily points out in riposte to Amanda’s above comment, sometimes politics is about more than one person.

[Edited to correct my crappy English and to better reflect reality]