#LetitBern

This is me every time I hear another person vow they’ll either stay home or vote for someone other than Hillary on election day should Bernie Sanders not win the nomination:

These people are supposedly the real progressives, the ones who won’t be cowed and manipulated by the lamestream media into becoming mindless Hillarybots. The irony is that a huge chunk of those who swear they’ll never vote for Hillary are basing their opinion on ‘facts’ that have been manufactured or manipulated by the GOP for the past 25 years in an effort to eviscerate her and make people hate and distrust her, and they gleefully hoover it up and regurgitate it all over Facebook feeds and comment sections everywhere. All of this bullshit is pretty easily debunked within like five minutes of googling and a bit of independent thought, but it’s easier to just carry on insisting Hillary is an evil closet Republican (who I guess just votes the same way Bernie does 90% of the time in an effort to further pull the wool over our eyes) and repeating the same tired old rubbish the actual Republicans have been feeding us since the 1990s. I mean, wake up sheeple!

(And this is the point where you pause whilst the Bernie or Die camp calls you an obvious paid shill and an idiot who lacks the courage to join the revolution and instead just wants to maintain the status quo. Done? Great!)

But the real head-explodingness is this fucking stupid idea that if we let the Republican (which at this point is gonna be Trump) win and just wait four years, things will have gotten so bad that Americans will finally snap out of their mindless stupor and the revolution can begin in earnest. 2020 will be Socialistapalooza! We just have to sacrifice our fellow Americans, many of whom we may even know and love, to the gaping maw of the right-wing agenda for four years and allow our country to actually fall off the edge of that precipice its been teetering on for god knows how long, and once everyone is either bankrupt or dead from lack of health insurance or living in a Muslim ghetto with yellow crescents on their arms or being rounded up and sent back to Mexico to help build The Wall or bleeding to death from a botched abortion in a dodgy hotel room or cancelling their wedding because marriage equality no longer exists or living out their Snake Plisskin fantasies and attempting to escape New York, then we can start again from scratch!

I will admit that there is a small, dark, shrivelled-up little corner of meanness in my heart that thinks, ‘Yeah, OK, fine, let the bad guys win, you smug motherfuckers. Let’s see what happens in four years.’ And when the revolution doesn’t come, I can look all these dumbfounded assholes in the eye and tell them I was right. Great revolution, guys! Well done!

But this feeling is only fleeting; I don’t really want this to happen, not only because it would be the most Pyrrhic of victories, but also because I remember how I felt in 2004 after the re-election of George W Bush. I had expected to wake up on the Wednesday morning after Election Day to a better and more hopeful America. I was certain that Bush would lose. But instead I spent that morning crying and feeling hopeless and dejected, and my Republican-voting father poking his head into my room to rub it in didn’t make it any better, and all the righteous indignation I could muster didn’t change the fact that America, as far as I was concerned, was fucked.

One can argue that four years after that, we got Obama, and things got better. So sure, let’s have eight years of Trump horror instead of four! How far do we want to take this? How much misery do we want to force our friends, our loved ones, our neighbors to endure for the chance to start again at zero instead of at halfway there? How many lives do we want to gamble with for the sake of being right?

You might as well have voted for the Iraq war.

Voting for Revolution

I was born in 1979 – the year Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party was elected into power in a landslide victory, making her Britain’s first female Prime Minister. Her term ended in November of 1990, and in the 25 years since then Britain has had exactly zero female Prime Ministers.

When I was a kid growing up in the 80s, I didn’t even know who Margaret Thatcher was, and the president of the US was just some benevolent-looking white guy called Ronald, and then another old white guy called George. The idea of a female president didn’t really enter my mind; in fact the only time I remember thinking about it was when I happened to be watching Popeye one day, and Olive Oyl was singing about all the stuff she’d do if she were president. (I hated Olive Oyl, so it was unlikely I’d have supported her presidential bid.) My sister and I would sometimes play a game where we pretended to be the president’s daughters. But never the actual president. It wasn’t that I didn’t think girls could grow up to be president, but more like it wasn’t even a physical possibility. It’d be like thinking I could grow up to be a spaceship.

I am a reasonably level-headed adult now, of course. I grew up and gained experience and learned things and formed opinions about the world. I know now how radical Olive Oyl’s daydream was.

I am watching this election cycle (and, admittedly, ignoring a lot of it, because otherwise my head will explode and ohmygodnotanotherfuckingdebate) with my eyes covered, nervously peeking out between my fingers, and I’m trying to stifle my fear of Donald Trump actually becoming president with my excitement-mixed-with-anxiety over the thought of actually maybe electing our first female president. And I know that we also had that possibility in 2008, with the same woman, but it felt different then, less urgent. Eight years ago we had the choice between our potential first Black president and our potential first female president, and I was more than happy to concede to the former. It didn’t feel like a loss. I liked Obama; I believed he would be a great president and hopefully do great things. We had time. We would make history and then we could try again. But now it feels, more than ever, like this is our last good shot for a very long time. Oh, how naive we were in 2008! It feels like America has gotten more hostile, more misogynist, and that a lot of people in charge won’t be happy until we’re all back at home making babies and sandwiches. It feels like there is so much more at stake.

And this election cycle feels much more negative to me somehow, and it’s not just because of the standard-issue Hillary Hate that’s being trotted out. Hillary Clinton is probably the most hated woman in Washington. It’s cool to hate her. We’re all used to it. But I’ve read enough headlines and think pieces and seen enough memes in my Facebook feed to know that there’s a lot of in-fighting going on amongst Liberals and feminists alike, and one of the messages I keep hearing loudest basically boils down to ‘How can you vote for Stupid Evil Hillary and her Stupid Evil Vagina when you can instead vote for Revolution?’

And I say that electing a female president is a revolution.

I don’t think there’s any shame in admitting that part of the reason I support Hillary is because she’s a woman, and I want to see a woman elected president. I want it so badly that just thinking about it and how amazing that would be makes me teary-eyed. We’ve been waiting 240 years and it’s about fucking time already. But I do not want a Sarah Palin or a Carly Fiorina. I want a strong, qualified, experienced, capable and unabashedly feminist woman who supports and will fight for issues that are important to me and to other women I love and care about, who can get shit done and be a great president, and I think Hillary Clinton is that woman. And getting elected isn’t even the end of it, because the first female president will also have to serve as the One Example for All Her Gender, to prove beyond all doubt that this wasn’t a stupid idea and that women really can do this whole ‘president’ thing. She will face untold amounts of adversity; will have every decision, every waver of her voice, every motherfucking pantsuit and hair style choice scrutinised; will have so much mud and bullshit slung at her and will have to get up and scrape it off and endure it all again the next day. Remember when Cersei had to do the ‘Shame’ walk through the streets of King’s Landing in Game of Thrones (erm… spoilers)? It’ll be like that. For four years (maybe eight if she’s lucky). She will need the heart and stomach of a king. Much has already been written about all the crap Hillary has put up with since she became a public figure, and which she continues to put up with now, and in fact voluntarily submits herself to because she wants to be president and she knows this is the price of admission. She’s incredibly brave. She’s tough as nails. Who better to undergo the trial-by-fire of being the first female president? If not her, who? If not now, when?

Twenty-five years since Britain had its first and only female Prime Minister, and I can’t help but think that part of that is because Maggie Thatcher really fucked up the test (as well as the country), and – if only subconsciously – people are terrified of having another crazy lady in a leadership position.

I am nearly 37 years old, the planets have aligned and in 2016 I feel like this is the closest we’ve ever come – there is the very real possibility that it could finally happen, and if it doesn’t I’ll be heartbroken. And I want to be optimistic, to hope against hope that if it doesn’t happen now then it will happen soon, that we really have made millions of cracks in that glass ceiling, that I won’t have to wait another 37 years for the possibility. But experience and history tell me that I shouldn’t hold my breath.

Starman

I’m fucking gutted.

David Bowie was so deeply woven into our culture that I – and a lot of us, I think – took him for granted. He had always been there and would always be here. He was a fact of life. Like the sun. Or Christmas. His amazing body of work had ensured his immortality long ago, and had basically become wallpaper. By which I mean incredibly awesome and colorful wallpaper that you’ve had for decades and is part of your home so you don’t always think about it, but every so often you’re sitting in your living room and you look at the wallpaper and think, ‘Man, I really do love that wallpaper.’

That wallpaper was ‘Suffragette City’ in a bar in Moscow, Idaho, where a friend and I had been drinking all day and I don’t think I’d ever been that hammered before in my twenty-three years of life, and somehow we still managed to play pool. I have no idea how we got home.

That wallpaper was ‘Space Oddity’ on the car radio as one of my dearest high school friends and I drove down the road towards my house and childishly changed the lyrics to ‘shitting in a tin can’ and giggled like idiots.

That wallpaper was Jareth, the Goblin King. My first celebrity crush, at age 7.

That wallpaper was ‘Let’s Dance’ at a wedding in 2011, where I danced with the man who would become my husband, and I realised then, as I sang along to the lines, ‘and if you say run, I’ll run with you,’ that he was the person I wanted to spend my life with.

That wallpaper was the BBC footage of him performing ‘Starman’, and (my favorite bit) that awkward kid in the rainbow jumper dancing in the background, staring off into space – in that moment unaware of his small place in music history.

That wallpaper was the radio programme about Bowie’s music and influences that we listened to this past weekend. ‘He hasn’t died, has he?’ I asked, only half seriously. ‘No, it’s to celebrate his birthday,’ my husband said.

This morning I listened to ‘Life on Mars?’ as I got dressed for work, and his voice lifted up in that beautiful way it does on the word ‘sailors’, and suddenly there were tears in my eyes and I let out a little sob. I don’t remember ever being so sad and upset about the death of a musician. It was comforting just knowing he was around, part of the wallpaper.

Now he’s gone. But he will always be here.

 

Rivers of Blood

I know that I like to rant about how fucked up and wrong America can be whilst sitting atop my lofty perch in the UK, where everything is a perfect liberal utopia (they have a unicorn on their passport, for pete’s sake), but sometimes, even Britain gets it wrong.

This week MPs voted against a bill that would get rid of the VAT (basically ‘sales tax’ for my American brethren) currently levied on tampons and pads. The government is responding by claiming it is powerless to make those changes anyway and blaming the EU, which I suppose I can’t really argue with, but the fact that so many MPs straight up rejected the very idea of it is what really boggles my mind. How is this even controversial? In 2015?

Because, as it turns out, we are literally stuck in the 70s, which is when the decisions on what would be taxed and what wouldn’t – that is, what was a luxury and what was a basic necessity – were made. And we can’t just go back and change it. So, OK, I can kinda understand how the polyester-clad (and almost certainly male) powers that were in 1972 might consider menstrual products a ‘luxury’ – just look at all the fun those women in Tampax adverts are having playing tennis and doing gymnastics in their white leotards! But surely we can all agree, in 2015, that we fucked up and that tampons and pads are in fact a necessity? (If you think a tampon is merely a luxury, may you never find yourself stuck somewhere inconvenient, mid… ahem… flow, without one.) Why wasn’t this vote unanimous? And why the fuck did some female MPs vote against this? Way to betray the sisterhood, ladies.

My personal Tampons of Choice* cost £1.89 for 32 tampons (this may get a bit TMI, but fuck it, who cares!). That works out to about 6p per tampon. On average, when Aunt Flo is visiting, I’ll go through four in one day, so that’s 24p per day. So over the course of a typical five-day period I’m paying £1.20 for the luxury of having my menses soaked up by a wad of cotton instead of ruining all my pants. Twelve periods per year comes to £14.40. I realise this isn’t a huge amount of money, but when you consider I’ve been paying that (give or take) for about 23 years so far, that’s £331.20 I’ve shelled out for tampons. And I’m buying the cheap ones; some other tampons can cost twice as much. I’m 36, and my two-second Google research says the average age of menopause is 51, so I’ve got another 15 years – or £216 – left to go. That’s roughly £550 that I’d really much rather be spending on something else, and which my male cohorts are happily spending on, like, video games and guitars and whiskey or whatever.

And I know that life isn’t fair and as a Woman Who Menstruates, I’ve gotta suck it up and buy tampons and get on with my relatively privileged life. But I certainly wouldn’t mind a little acknowledgement that I and other women maybe kinda shouldn’t have to pay a tax for that. It’s not 1972 anymore.

* Tampon of Choice is also the name of my riot grrl band.

Some Words on How I Have No Words

Another day, another morning scrolling through my Facebook feed, filled with news of yet another mass shooting in America. I feel like this happens at least once a week. And people are sad. And people are angry. And people are dead. But I can’t quite bring myself to share in the collective grief – I don’t feel sad or angry, really, but more like… just… annoyed. I am fucking annoyed and irritated and exasperated by the fact that I have to keep reading this same news story again and again. That people will express sadness and outrage and disbelief and then nothing will happen, things will go on as they were and then it will happen again and the cycle begins anew. I am fucking annoyed that this happens and people go, ‘Well he was autistic,’ or ‘He was crazy,’ or ‘He was just really depressed,’ or ‘He was a racist asshole,’ and shrug their shoulders and point to the Second Amendment and say ‘What can you do? It’s not like we can take peoples’ guns away! That would be tyranny!’

I am fucking annoyed that the ‘tyranny’ of better gun controls trumps the tyranny of fearing your children may be shot dead whilst trying to go to school.

And I’m really fucking annoyed that this has become so commonplace that I can’t even make myself feel sad about it anymore, that I know it will happen again and again and still nothing will change.

I live in a country that freaks out about knives. The possibility of someone having a knife (!!) is perhaps second only to the possibility of someone having a bomb (yes, I’m exaggerating) in terms of Things That Make People Shit Themselves, and even after ten years living in the UK I can’t help but laugh to myself at how quaint that sounds to me. Knives! But I also feel infinitely safer here than I think I ever could if I were still living in America. When I go back to visit, the sight of police officers carrying guns actually shocks me, and I suddenly remember that pretty much anyone I pass on the street could be carrying a gun (or, you know, just flagrantly displaying them at Chipotle or wherever, because SECOND AMENDMENT MOTHERFUCKERS!).

In 1996, a man walked into a school in Dunblane, Scotland and shot 17 children (the oldest was 6) and a teacher dead before shooting himself. The four handguns he carried were, at the time, legal. A year later handguns would be completely banned in the UK.*

In 2012, a teenage boy walked into Sandy Hook Elementary school in Connecticut and shot 26 children and staff dead. Four months later an Assault Weapons Ban and an amendment to expand background checks on gun purchases were defeated in the US Senate.

There is a serious problem in America which obviously requires some kind of sensible reform and regulation (‘well-regulated militia’, yeah?). How many more people have to die before we finally realise that? I am fucking annoyed at our capacity for being so obtuse.

*Edited to add: I don’t mean to suggest that American gun laws should be as extreme as the ones in the UK. I know that would never happen (26 dead children at Sandy Hook and we can’t even pass a background check amendment, for fuck’s sake), and I don’t even necessarily agree that an outright ban is the answer. The solution lies somewhere in between the two poles. Or as my very clever friend Jen said earlier today, ‘The solution is as multi-layered as the problem.’

Commuting is a Bitch

It’s a metaphor for life!                         http://mentakingup2muchspaceonthetrain.tumblr.com/

Anyone who’s seen ‘Men Taking Up Too Much Space on the Train’ (or anyone who has been female and a commuter) knows that sometimes, even just trying to mind your own business and get home from work without having to rub up against the fucking patriarchy (literally!) is pretty much impossible. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve had to scrunch myself up to make room for some dude blithely standing with his hands on his hips, elbows jutting into what should be my personal space, swinging his stupid backpack around whilst I try to read an article off my phone like 2mm away from my face. This may be the most literal demonstration of what it’s like to be a woman moving around – and trying to claim her own space – in the world. It’s annoying, but I’m used to it. I put up with it (sigh). I get on with my life.

But tonight, for the first time, I was actually afraid.

I could hear them hooting and hollering and being obnoxious from the other end of the platform – a group of about six guys, clearly very drunk. ‘Great, a stag do*,’ I thought, and then proceeded to ignore them along with everyone else. They carried on being loud and annoying. The train arrived. I got on and took my usual spot by the door opposite; it’s a short journey and I like being able to pretty much hop straight off at my stop. Then I heard them. The drunk assholes were getting on the same carriage. Much to my dismay, I realised they weren’t going into the carriage to find seats – they were going to stay standing, right next to me.

I start perusing Facebook on my phone and scrunching myself up (I’m a pro at this), taking up as little space as possible. The men are already spreading out, moving into my space. They’re all much, much bigger than me, obliviously shifting about and brushing up against me. But it’s only a ten minute journey. I can deal with it.

Then one of them starts shouting.

‘Hey! When was the last time you got done for rape, mate?’

‘He’s a convicted sexual predator!’ another one chimes in.

‘Yeah, but she probably fucking deserved it.’

‘She probably did, but not the way he did it.’

Suddenly ten minutes seems like a very long time. My muscles tense up. A little knot forms in my stomach. I don’t think these men are actually going to sexually assault me. In fact, they’re not even paying me any attention. I’m invisible. But my Spidey Sense is definitely tingling, and I feel genuinely afraid. These men are large and loud and aggressive. There’s no one else nearby but me and them. I can’t get past them and they’re blocking both of the doors into the carriages. I quickly weigh up my options and decide that it’s better to remain where I am rather than ask them to let me pass and call attention to myself.

I try to make myself smaller. I am very, very interested in Facebook right now. I am so intently staring at my phone. I don’t have headphones, but I sure as hell wish I did. They start shoving and antagonising each other. The train rocks back and forth and one of them loses his balance and nearly elbows me in the face.

‘Watch it, there’s a lady there!’ one of them says.

Fuck.

I don’t think these men are actually going to sexually assault me. We’re on a train. In public. It’s well-lit. There’s a train manager around somewhere. Guys don’t just go around randomly assaulting people on trains. These guys are too absorbed in their own drunkenness. I am being ridiculous.

‘Dude, watch out for that lady!’

See? They’re calling me ‘lady’. That’s a word you use for an old person. Someone’s mother. They’re not calling me a ‘girl’ or a ‘bird’ or whatever. They’re not interested. I continue to ignore them. I turn my back to them and face the door, acting like I’m just preparing to get off the train. I’m watching them behind me, in the window’s reflection. Pay me no mind. I don’t think these men are actually going to sexually assault me.

We pull into the station. I take note of two Transit Security Officers milling about on the platform, and I decide that I’m going to tell them about the aggressive drunk men, to ask them to perhaps keep an eye on them. But I look over my shoulder and see the drunk men haven’t gotten off the train like I’d assumed they would. So I change my mind and exit the station and head home. I’ve never been so happy to get off a train.

I don’t think those men were actually going to sexually assault me.

You can’t know what anyone’s going to do.

* or, a ‘bachelor party’, to my American comrades

It’s Not Just a Game

She’s aiming at you, trolls.

I am not what most would consider a ‘hardcore gamer’, or at least I wouldn’t describe myself as such.

But I’ve enjoyed playing computer games for most of my life, starting with perennial favorite Oregon Trail and moving on to other timeless classics like Carmen Sandiego. When I got older I started playing – and, even though I wasn’t really the target audience, actually enjoying – my dad’s military-oriented games like 688 Attack Sub (I liked to be contrarian and play the Russians) and F-14 Tomcat. When I was maybe 12 or 13 I found my true gaming niche, in the form of a buggy, crash-to-desktop-prone RPG with lame graphics and a cheesy MIDI soundtrack called Darklands. It was a fantasy RPG (er, that means ‘Role Playing Game’ for the uninitiated) set during the Holy Roman Empire, with a massive area to traverse and enough random encounters and side quests to keep you busy enough to forget there was actually a main plot you were supposed to complete (which I never did), and it was awesome.  From there it was Diablo and Diablo 2 (I’d love to play Diablo 3 if I thought my weedy laptop could run it), Baldur’s Gate, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and a loooooooong stint playing Neverwinter Nights. I currently run around pretending to be an Elf on Dungeons & Dragons Online (that’s one of my alter egos in the picture up there, and she’ll totally kick your ass). 

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I enjoy gaming. It’s not, like, my life. I don’t know everything about every game, and there are loads that I’ve never played. That’s why I don’t call myself ‘hardcore’. But I take an interest in gaming and I know a bit of what I’m talking about.

Which is why it brings me no pleasure to say I’ve been following the so-called #GamerGate controversy with increasing  levels of exasperation and despair. If you don’t know what I’m referring to, just google it, read up, and prepare to facepalm. Or cry. Or break something. What began as essentially an exercise in good old-fashioned slut-shaming under the guise of ‘ethics in journalism’ has metastasised into a depressing mass of harassment, bullying, and your standard-issue rape and death threats – aimed predominantly at women – in an attempt to silence them and, it seems, drive them out of the gaming community altogether. See, these harpies have, like, opinions, man. Opinions that differ from these cretins who call themselves ‘gamers’. Opinions like: ‘I sometimes feel unwelcome in the gaming community because of x, y, and z, and I’d like to see things change,’ or ‘If your true aim is to push for more transparency in games journalism, maybe you should focus on that and stop harassing women,’ or ‘I love games and the gaming community but sometimes it can be a little misogynist.’ And what better way to prove that these women are wrong than to call them a stupid cunt and threaten to rape them? Or wait until one of them writes an honest, thoughtful blog post about how she’s hesitant to talk about #GamerGate because she’s afraid she’ll get doxxed… and then doxx her? It’s all in the name of ethics in games journalism!

My own experience with gaming has admittedly been generally positive; I’ve never in my lifetime of gaming been subjected to any hardcore harassment or bullying, and I’ve never been threatened with rape or murder (apart from the occasional PK), in-game or otherwise. Maybe it’s the types of games I play; maybe pointy-eared fantasy nerds are just inherently more egalitarian? Or maybe it’s because in the past when I played online I tended to avoid groups and preferred to go solo, or if I did play in a party it was usually with people I knew (these days I play online exclusively with my husband). Or was it because I never used voice chat and didn’t announce my gender, so people just assumed I was a guy? Whatever the reason, I’ve come to realise that I’ve probably just been really lucky, and that my experience as a female gamer may very well be somewhat of an anomaly.

But this hasn’t been the experience of other women. I’ve read countless articles and blog posts describing how they’ve been threatened and harassed. How they’ve been driven from their homes and forced to cancel events. How they’ve had enough of the abuse and just straight-up quit. This is happening to them because they have an opinion and the audacity to voice it. This is happening because a contingent of woman-hating troglodytes within the gaming community don’t like what these women are saying, and would rather they just shut the fuck up and play. Or better yet, get the fuck out. This is happening under the guise of a ‘progressive’ hashtag movement. This was happening long before there was a hashtag for it.

Before I started playing DDO, I spent countless hours in an online game world for Neverwinter Nights. It was (and still is) created and maintained by one guy in his home, the world was vast and detailed and fun, and it was inhabited by a relatively small group of friendly and supportive gamers. If you wanted to roleplay, that was cool. If you wanted to skip all the talking and just kill goblins, that was fine too. Like crafting skimpy battle thongs for your female assassin character? You could do that. Prefer actual armor that covers your ass? No problem! Both guys and girls played on the server, and I witnessed no blatant misogyny or harassment. People helped each other and offered advice to newbies, but you were also left to your own devices if you chose, free to explore the world on your own terms. It was all the good things about gaming wrapped up into one brilliantly designed realm, and I actually formed online friendships with several of the players. It was a real gaming community.

And that just goes to show what a gaming community can be, without hateful trolls ruining everything. It’s proof that gamers aren’t a bunch of mouth-breathing monsters; they’re actually really awesome people.

I know that there are people within the #GamerGate movement who aren’t misogynist dickfaces. I believe that they genuinely are concerned about ethics, and they want to implement positive change within the games community. But they have unfortunately aligned themselves with a disingenuous movement which doesn’t give a shit about ethics, and is using it as a cover to continue spewing hatred and abuse. It doesn’t matter if these trolls are a minority within #GG; they’ve already done enough damage to completely sully the name, like it or not. So if you want things to change, if you believe that the gaming community should be a safe and inclusive place for everyone, you should be backing the hell away from #GG. Supporting the movement – however well-intentioned it may be – won’t help, because it’s too late. It’s poison. It’s Kryptonite. Talk to the hand. Nothing to see here.

And we should be speaking out against these assholes, these angry, spiteful bullies who have nothing better to do than destroy their community from the inside. We should be saying, ‘Look, this kind of behavior isn’t cool, it’s fucking disgusting and it isn’t welcome here.’ We should be talking about what we can do to actually make things better and more inclusive for everyone. We should be leading by example, so those on the outside can see the kind of decent, awesome people most gamers surely are. Fuck #GamerGate, start a real movement! We can’t ignore the trolls and hope they go away. Feed the trolls, stuff them full of counter-argument and riposte, and show them who the real gamers are. They don’t deserve the title of ‘gamer’.

A Barbaric Yawp

I don’t know how old I was the first time I saw Dead Poets Society – eleven or twelve maybe? – but for a long time it was one of my favorite films. Yes, it’s a bit treacly and melodramatic and, dare I say, cheesy, but it moved and inspired me, sparked a deeper interest in poetry and literature, and made me want to be a writer. (OK, and I also had a mad crush on Knox Overstreet. Actually I think I cycled through crushes on all of the main characters. Except for Cameron, that tattling ginger bastard.)

And, thanks to Robin Williams’ performance as John Keating, it also made me hope that I might one day have an equally inspiring teacher – a teacher who made me feel like what I had to say was important, that I could be Great, and who, with a dash of enthusiasm, encouragement and the occasional John Wayne-as-Macbeth impersonation, would help me find My Voice. I fancied myself as the shy, quiet Todd Anderson, suppressing my own barbaric YAWP and longing for the right moment to stand on my desk (I was a bit of a daydreamer and fantasist, if you couldn’t tell).

The thing about Keating was that you totally believed in him, he was real. Williams took all of his maniacal nervous energy and poured it into the character and then tamped it down, letting it out in little bursts of subtle brilliance – a shift of expression, a twitch of the mouth, a look in his sad and lovely blue eyes. You knew that he loved his students, that he loved is job and that he was himself invigorated and inspired by inspiring them. And maybe Williams was able to make Keating so believable because, if you take away the ‘teacher’ bit and substitute ‘actor/comedian’, he pretty much was Keating – inspiring audiences and making them believe in him, whatever role he was playing.

I never really had a real live John Keating teacher, though I did have several who inspired and encouraged me in their own non-standing-on-desk ways. I can’t say that I would never have pursued writing if not for Dead Poets Society; it’s not as if I had zero interest in books and writing before Keating came along, but I think it definitely helped point me in that direction.

The last time I remember watching Dead Poets Society was like 12 years ago. I was showing it to my boyfriend at the time, who had never seen it. I’d raved about it and told him it was my favorite film, and I was excited to share it with him. He spent the whole time making fun of it, mocking its earnestness and questioning my taste and judgement. When it got to my favorite part – the bit where Keating pulls Todd up to the front of the class, covers his eyes and helps him to spontaneously compose a poem (the bit that always makes me cry) – he started laughing and going on about how lame it all was, and was I seriously crying? I turned the film off then, leaving poor Todd up there in front of the class, mid-poem, and I’m pretty sure we had a fight. I can’t remember if he did the whole, ‘No, no, let’s finish the film’ thing, but I do know that we left it there, and didn’t watch to the end.

So fuck it, I’m watching it now. For the Captain.

Let Them Eat Viagra!

When I was 19, I was prescribed birth control pills in an attempt to:

a) help clear up my severe acne (it fucking didn’t), and

b) alleviate the debilitating cramps and other general misery I suffered as part of my awful, awful periods (it totally did!).

And if it also: c) kept me from getting unexpectedly pregnant, well that was awesome too – just don’t tell my mom!

I worked in a doctor’s office at the time, and my doctor, who was a lovely and very cool person, gave me some free, one-month sample packs of Ortho Tri-Cyclin. God only knows how much these would have cost out of pocket (this was 1998, and the Socialist Nazi Death Panels Affordable Care Act was merely a glimmer in Obama’s eye), and luckily I never had to find out, as she continued to top me up with free samples. When I left for University she sent me off with a six-month supply. I got more when I came home for Christmas.

When she moved to another practice and was no longer my doctor, the freebies obviously ended. But by then I had finished school and was officially too old to be on my parents’ health insurance, so I became one of the millions of Americans who didn’t have any. I couldn’t afford to pay for luxuries like prescribed birth control pills (or, you know, just going to the doctor in the first place), so I stopped taking them. Soon I was back to spending roughly three days per month doubled over in pain from severe cramps and downing ibuprofin in an effort to just get through the day – never mind the whole ‘birth control’ part of the pill.*

A couple of years later, my minimum wage drugstore job began offering basic medical insurance, so I eagerly signed up. I saw a doctor for the first time in about three years (fortunately I had been lucky enough not to have gotten seriously ill or injured during my time without coverage) and, armed with a new prescription for my dearly-missed Ortho Tri-Cyclin, went to my nearest pharmacy to fill it. Alas, my shiny new insurance did not, in fact, cover contraception, and when the woman behind the pharmacy counter told me how much I’d have to pay, I sheepishly asked for my prescription back and practically ran out of the store before I started crying. I don’t know why I felt so embarrassed and ashamed – it wasn’t my fault; I’d done what I was supposed to do as a responsible adult and sacrificed part of my measly wages for health insurance. But because the medicine I required was not considered mandatory, was in fact seen as some kind of frill or extraneous indulgence, like a fancy coffee from Starbucks, it wasn’t my insurer’s responsibility.

To make a long story short, for the next few years I ended up getting my pills from Planned Parenthood, who offered a scheme for low-income women allowing them to get three months’ worth at a time for a donation of $5 or $10 (or for free if they were really strapped – I usually paid $10). I currently live in the UK, where I get all my basic healthcare – including contraception – for free on the NHS. I get my prescription, take it to the pharmacy, tick a little exemption box that says ‘contraception’ and, because choosing when to become pregnant is considered necessary healthcare for women in this country and not some frivilous treat for slutty sluts who have all the sex, I pay nothing (prescriptions in England usually cost £7). No questions asked. No need to justify or defend myself. I feel immensely lucky and privileged to live in a country that provides universal healthcare, even though, at least in the industrialised world, that privilege is considered a basic human right, and is in fact the norm.

I watch what’s happening in America right now – this fanatical resistance to Obamacare; the Supreme Court’s sanctioning of companies putting up religious road blocks, further hampering women’s access to medicines they need; the gross, misogynist comments from men telling women to ‘keep their legs closed’ and stop expecting to have their slut pills ‘paid for’ by their employers (never mind that the vast majority of married women also use contraception) – and I genuinely don’t understand what the fuck is going on, why this has to be so bloody difficult.

The people who own Hobby Lobby ‘sincerely believe’ the contraceptives they object to cause abortions, even though there is no scientific evidence to support this belief. The Supreme Court acknowledges this, yet the belief itself – not the facts – is enough to warrant the objection. The precedent has been set. They’ve opened the floodgates.

I sincerely believe that women are people – this is an indesputable fact. That they have a right to choose when to have children. That they have a right to enjoy their sexuality – be it with a monogamous partner in a marriage or long-term relationship or three guys they met in a pub last week – without shame or punishment, and without the fear of becoming pregnant when they don’t want to. That they have a right to access medical care that enables them to do this, without some asshole calling them a whore.

What about my beliefs? Where is our protection?

* I feel I should stress that I am not saying using birth control is only necessary or justified if you use it for purposes other than avoiding pregnancy, such as helping with painful periods. Contraception is a legitimate and necessary part of healthcare for women, full stop. Even if she is a total harlot like Sandra Fluke.

How to Argue with a Feminist (if You Must)

By Si Griffiths (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

As I alluded to previously, I had the unfortunate pleasure of arguing with a dude* about feminist issues on Facebook. The whole thing was aggravating, exhausting, emotionally draining and, truth be told, really upsetting. I have known this guy for a long time, and feminism has always been a bit of heated topic between us. I never really understood why he was so stridently anti-feminism (I think he’s one of those people who think ‘feminist’ is a sexist term, and who would call himself a ‘humanist’ or an ‘egalitarian’), or why, no matter what I said or how many well-written, thoughtful feminist essays I pointed him towards, he just couldn’t ever seem to consider that I might have a point. After several years of ridiculous shouting matches (and, I have to add, a couple of rather civil email exchanges) I’d pretty much decided that it was one subject we just shouldn’t talk about. There was no point. But then the Great Facebook Debate of June 2014 happened, which quickly devolved into ugliness, weirdness and general WTF-ness, and ended with him verbally attacking me and two of my friends, after which I (somewhat reluctantly) decided to block him. At the end of the day, I don’t have the time or the patience to argue until I’m blue in the face with people who are just being assholes and don’t want to listen.

‘But dude, not all men are like that!’ you might be saying. ‘Some of us really want to discuss this stuff! We have questions! We want to learn!’

I hear you. And rather than use this platform to ridicule and publicly humiliate Facebook Guy with a blow-by-blow account of his asshattery, I have decided to turn it into a tool, an example through which to teach men** how to actually have a thoughtful, polite and grown-up conversation about feminist issues with feminist women.

1) ‘Check Your Privilege’

Yes, I totally went there.

I’m actually not a big fan of this phrase; I find it a bit dismissive, and think that a lot of people use it as a sort of shorthand for ‘stfu straight white dude,’ which, obviously, upsets a lot of straight white dudes who want to take part in a conversation. Having said that, I do believe that if you’re going to enter into a discussion on feminist topics, and you are a man (or, particularly, a straight white man), you need to consider that you are coming at the issue from a place of privilege, and that really matters.

Wait, don’t go! I know that the dreaded word ‘privilege’ is provocative; it offends men and puts them on the defensive. ‘How can you tell me I’m privileged when my life has been really hard?’ you say. ‘I worked my ass off to get this shit job at the slaughterhouse and nothing was just handed to me dammit!’ This is because you don’t actually understand what we mean. And rather than argue back and forth about it for however long, I will instead point towards this essay, which I think offers one of the best and simplest analogies I’ve probably ever come across to explain the concept of privilege. In fact I totally stole this analogy once in an effort to explain to Facebook Guy what I meant when I talked about male privilege, and that it was, like, actually a real thing. (No prizes for correctly guessing whether or not it worked.)

Or, if you’re more into comic books and geek culture than fantasy RPGs, I give you an alternate viewpoint via Doctor Nerdlove.

Please, go ahead and read up. I’ll wait…

So, why does this matter? It matters because, as a man, your experience of the world is very different from my experience of the world. And you’re probably saying, ‘Well, no shit!’, but one of the reasons so many men find it so easy to argue against feminism is because, you know, they don’t know what it’s like to be us. Your experience is your reality. You don’t see or experience sexism like women do in our day-to-day lives, so it’s easy to believe it doesn’t exist, that it isn’t real, that we’re just making it up. This is male privilege. And this is why you need to ‘check’ it.

2) Seriously, don’t do the ‘not all men!’ thing.

Trust me. We know not all men are misogynist fuckheads. In fact I’ll go so far as to say that the vast majority of men are not misogynist fuckheads. We are not talking about you and your non-misogynist fuckhead brethren. We are not blaming you as an individual or men as an entire gender for everything (#NotAllFeminists!). If you think that this is what feminism is about, go forth and google for a bit, do some reading, educate yourself on mainstream feminism and feminist issues, and please stop being so defensive. (And before you come back at me with a list of notorious quotes from man-hating feminists to prove that I’m full of shit, have a gander at this.)

We don’t need to keep having this argument; it only wastes time and takes the focus off of what we’re actually trying to talk about.

3) Also, don’t do the ‘what about the men?’ thing.

Just as we know that not all men are chauvinist pigs, we also know that men are raped too; that they are abused by their partners; that they have their own impossible body standards to live up to; that they often get the shaft over custody of their children; that they are more likely to die in a war; that they are expected to be tough and stoic and never to cry or show weakness; that nobody thinks they can properly operate a washing machine.

Men point out these things in an effort to somehow invalidate feminism, or to prove that men have it ‘worse’ and we should just shut up and enjoy another slice of that tasty equality cheesecake we’ve made. The thing is, most of this stuff is the result of a patriarchal society. Feminism is not the cause of these masculine problems; it’s seeking to destroy them (the problems, not the men). Feminism (apart from being the radical notion that women are people!) is a movement which is actively fighting against a patriarchal society that harms both men and women, but has historically harmed women in much more tangible ways. That’s why it’s called ‘feminism’ as opposed to ‘humanism’ or whatever. So yes, women do recognise and care about the problems that men face – but until we’re actually on equal footing (and sorry, but we’re not), we’re going to need a lot more feminism than we are masculism.

Which isn’t to say discussions about men’s issues are never appropriate or that feminists don’t want to hear them. But don’t go barging into a feminist discussion, particularly on a feminist website, screaming ‘WHAT ABOUT THE MENZ?’ It’s just rude.

4) We’re not all lying in order to promote the vast feminazi conspiracy.

A common response to women’s reported experiences is a demand for ‘proof’ or ‘more details’ – the implication being that an exact, verbatim transcript of whatever event the woman recounts is needed in order to make sure she didn’t just misinterpret something (i.e. ‘it wasn’t really sexism, you were just being an irrational feminist’). Don’t come into a feminist discussion asking for charts and graphs and annotated quotes and photos. No one’s on trial here, OK?

Maybe you didn’t realise how insulting and infuriating it is when you ask what, exactly, was said or done. Or maybe you honestly believe you need some sort of proof that sexism and misogyny are real, and if you are a woman, it’s just part of your everyday experience. I suppose you could start by re-reading point #1 above. Once you’ve done that, google ‘#YesAllWomen‘ and read some of the thousands of tweets from women experiencing this shit every day. Or this essay describing how goddamn tiring it is to have to constantly defend not just your opinions, but your own personal experience to people who don’t believe you, and who will argue and tell you you’re wrong, even when you can provide the proof they insist upon. Or, like, talk to some women you know. Ask them about it. Listen to them. And take them at their word.

5) Learn what irony is.

Don’t read an essay about, for example, how women are constantly asked to prove their arguments and are generally doubted and then comment that you’re not sure it’s that simple and you need more details. You just end up proving the essay’s point.

6) Finally, if things don’t go your way, don’t start spamming our inboxes with insults and comparisons to Andrea Dworkin. 

That shit just gets you blocked on Facebook.

 

* There were actually two dudes involved in the discussion, but only one of them truly upset me, so I’m talking about that one in particular.

** I know, I know. #NotAllMen! I’m aware that there are also anti-feminist women out there. But in my experience the people who argue with me about this stuff have always been men, so I’m using ‘men’ here. If you are one of the Good Guys, please assume I’m not talking about you.