How I Became A Feminist

Claire Butler

When friends visit my family home on the set of TOWIE they can’t help but marvel at the strange orange inhabitants; stick-thin women teetering along in skyscraper heels, all coiffed hair and jiggling boobs, and groomed men proudly displaying the contours of their honed muscles in tight £2,000 shirts. More uneasy than amused, I watch these Kens and Barbies and remember my confusing adolescence spent in this anti-intellectual, sexualised culture, where living up to a 1950s stereotype was a cause for celebration.

New Star Trek movie trailer shows a dark future for women

Did Star Trek just destroy its tradition of featuring brainy women who do stuff?

I’m massively excited about the new Star Trek film! I’ve just watched the trailer! It’s called Star Trek: Into Darkness. Ooooo. There’s spaceships and exploding buildings and loads of TENSION!

But oh crap: the new trailer hardly features any women. There’s Kirk and Spock looking TENSE and dropping a lot of rhetorical statements and DOING STUFF. There’s a mini-UN boardroom table surrounded by blokes. There’s a baddie with a big collar and he’s charged with ANGER. And there’s one female character who speaks (three words) and another who’s silent and in her pants.

My Women’s Weekend

Simret Cheema-Innis

‘Power to the women’, ‘Say hey-ho, sexual violence has got to go!’ and ‘2-4-6-8 No more violence no more rape!’ These were just a few of the chants that echoed through the streets of London for the Million Women Rise March on Saturday the 9^th of March.

The MWR March against domestic violence began in 2008 and five years on it is still going strong. At noon women’s groups from across the UK rallied outside Selfridges, holding placards, playing instruments and wearing the colour red, a theme that represents the blood of every woman who has experienced domestic violence and those who have been raped and murdered at the hands of men.

Talking to the man in the pork pie hat about feminism

A man in a pork pie hat (not the man I met on the Tube, just another man in a pork pie hat!)

The man in the pork pie hat had been drinking for a few hours that afternoon. He’d rolled down the steps and onto the platform, jostling and joshing with two friends. Now the three blokes were next to me, trying to stand still but finding the situation just a little bit too funny. They were rosy-cheeked and jolly, not flat-out drunk. The platform was not busy, so the pork pie hat man became conscious that I was entertained much more by him and his friends than by the max-size ads pasted over the walls. His friends bumbled further down the platform, but the hat wearer sidled up to me and, making a show of appearing to be sober, said something like, “Good evening sir, got a good evening planned, somewhere you’re going, are you?”

Intrigued to see his reaction, I answered, “Yeah, going to a feminist group meeting.”

Mother

Ellie Stewart

 

For a long time now I’ve found winter, and Christmas in particular, very difficult to get through. The cold and the gloom, the ascetic trees, the sparkling lights in shop windows and the saccharine cheeriness all remind me of terrible times. In certain locations and when the darkness has really set in, I feel transported back in such a way that the vividness of those feelings and images becomes unbearable. I will forever associate Christmas, and the months that precede and follow it, with the death of my mother. 

 

The 20th of January was the twelfth anniversary of her death. I wasn’t able to visit her grave because I can’t drive, and she chose to be buried on a remote hillside in Stroud, which is impossible to access without a car. But I will make a pilgrimage of sorts to Wimbledon Park. I lived there until I was 11 years old and my childhood there was the only time in my life so far when I have been truly happy and content. 

 

We moved to Tunbridge Wells in 1998 and, one year later, my mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She had a hysterectomy, then chemotherapy, and many more treatments in the following two years. Natural cures, a change of diet, herbal remedies, healing- she even turned to religion, in a sense, towards the end. None of it worked. In November 2000 she told me and my younger sister and brother that she was going to die. 

 

Christmas was strange that year. As my mother grew thinner and thinner, the fact that she was dying was not mentioned out loud. I went with my father to buy presents as if things were normal. Standing in The Body Shop, filled with people wrapped up in winter coats, I showed him some lavender bath essence.  

‘Do you think mummy will like this?’ I said.  

‘Oh, no,’ said my father, shaking his head. ‘You can’t get her that, Ellie. She can’t bear to look at her body any more.’  

I looked down at the lavender bath essence. Then I shuffled through the crowded shop and put it back on the shelf. I was so ashamed for not knowing. There were lots of things I felt ashamed for not knowing. Outside, it began to rain. 

 

My mother had long been insecure about the way she looked. She had been very thin and beautiful as a young woman, so after she’d had her three children she had a surgery to try to return her stomach back to the way it used to be. She was always changing the colour of her hair, and I’m not sure what colour it naturally was. When all her hair fell out from chemotherapy, she wore a wig. When it grew back, it grew back grey. I remember a teacher saying flippantly to me: ‘Well, if it means it’ll save her life, it doesn’t matter if her hair falls out!’ I didn’t think that was fair. I thought: no, it does matter if her hair falls out. I think it affected my mother profoundly, as it would me. And anyway- the chemotherapy didn’t save her life. 

 

By Christmas Day, she looked like a skeleton. We had decorated the tree, wound the tinsel round the banisters and hung the lights, and she had sat on the sofa and complimented our efforts. She looked in terrible pain when she smiled. The cancer had started in her ovaries but, despite the medical interventions, it had spread throughout her body and eventually reached her lungs. In the last months she had to have an oxygen tank with her everywhere she went. When we went to look at the plot of land where she would be buried, we had to walk very slowly up the hill as my father wheeled the oxygen behind her and my mother struggled for air. Her clothes sagged on her body and the skin on her arms hung off her bones. On her face the skin pulled tight, and outlined the shape of her skull. When once I hugged my mother and was wrapped in the warmth of her soft folds, and felt so safe- now hugging her was terrifying. What if I snap her?, I thought, as my fingers touched the jutting vertebrae of her spine. What if she breaks? 

 

I was distressed that she wouldn’t eat. I thought that her not eating was the reason she was losing weight. I would chop up tiny portions of the food we were eating at the dinner table and take it to her as she sat in her study, writing in her pink dressing gown. She would say thank you, and smile with effort. I couldn’t comprehend that the reason she was getting thinner was because she was dying. 

 

It might seem an odd thing to get your head around: surely if someone has told you they are going to die, then you accept that as truth? Just as, if I told you that the moon is 239,000 miles from earth, you would say: ‘Yes, the moon is 239,000 miles from earth’. Or if I told you that whales evolved from land mammals that returned to the sea, you would say: ‘Yes, whales evolved from land mammals that returned to sea.’ 

 

But no- for a child it’s different. My mother was my whole life and my whole world. I was too young to have yet understood her as a person and as a woman. She was My Mother. She was the source of all my love, and all my warmth; she was my safety, she was the stillness and the constant. She was always there. Coming to terms with the fact that she was going to leave me forever was like coming to terms with the idea that the sun would never rise again. Impossible. I lived those last months with the immovable notion of doublethink. Two opposing thoughts, both equally true: ‘my mother is going to die’ and ‘my mother will never die’. 

 

And then she did die. 

I watched her take her last breaths at 7pm on a cold night in January. The whole day she had sat in her armchair with her eyes half-open, zonked out on a lethal dose of morphine that was, I learnt many years later, supposed to make the end less painful (though she frequently moaned in pain that day, and slid down in her chair, and was unable to speak and, because our father and the doctor hadn’t told us that she had been given that amount of morphine, I didn’t know what was happening). When my father reached over to turn off the hissing oxygen tank, the bottom fell out of the world. I was hysterical- briefly- and I told her dead body that I loved her, over and over again. Then I said nothing at all. My sister and I lay on the sofa in our living room and listened to our father calling people and hearing the words over and over again, ‘she’s gone.’ 

 

That night we all slept in my parents’ bedroom with the corpse of my mother downstairs, and the next morning my brother and sister and I watched through the bannisters as she was wheeled from the house on a stretcher, in a green body bag. 

 

I think a lot of people misunderstand how people grieve- especially how children grieve. You don’t cry for days and then ‘pull yourself together’. You don’t feel sad for a bit but then, after a year or so, are pretty much OK. I didn’t truly start to grieve for her until I was 21 years old. I finished university and suddenly the great loss I’d experienced opened in front of me like a chasm I could no longer ignore. I was deeply depressed for several years. And I am still very much coming to terms with it all. 

 

One of the main reasons for this was that I wasn’t given the chance to grieve. My mother died on a Saturday and on the Tuesday my father insisted we went back to school because, he said: ‘If you don’t go back now you’ll never want to go back’. Unfortunately, my school had no idea what to do with me. On that first day, they sat me in a room on my own with the company of a dusty TV and piles of books for the English GCSE. After a few hours I decided to go to my maths lesson, because I felt guilty for missing school. (And I’ve always hated maths.) One of the girls turned round to me and mouthed ‘are you OK?’ and I smiled and mouthed back ‘yes’. The teacher- a substitute, well past retirement age- clearly hadn’t been told about my… ‘situation’.  

 

After my mother’s funeral, (which I didn’t cry at because I couldn’t bear to in front of all those people) I went back to school for good. I had a total of three days off to mourn the loss of my mother, and it was the same for my sister who was 12 and my brother who was 10. 

 

I grew up suddenly when my mother died. She taught me how to cook from when I was little, so I was able to make meals for the family. I felt deeply responsible for them. My father cried often in those first few months, but I felt that someone needed to be strong to hold it all together. (Now I feel this was somewhat unfair: my father had adults to talk to and comfort him, whereas I only had 14 year old girls. I remember once sitting with my school friends on a lunch break in which they spent the whole time complaining about how annoying it was to have to go shopping with their mothers. I guess they’d forgotten that mine had died just months before.) My sister and I took over all those ‘mum things’ people take for granted: sorting out Christmas presents, writing cards, entertaining guests. I felt very protective of my younger brother who, on top of all the anger and confusion that comes with being a teenage boy, was trying to come to terms with a terrible loss. I once flew into a rage when I found out that a teacher at school had berated him for not doing his homework and barked repeatedly at him: ‘why didn’t your mum help you?’ I was ready to march into the school myself and give the teacher a piece of my mind, but instead my father wrote an anaemic letter. Our schools were truly appalling with dealing with what is an incredibly rare occurrence in the lives of English children. They were better trained in matters of divorce, sex, bullying, eating disorders and drug use. Death, I suppose, is the final taboo. 

 

I was also, at this time, going through puberty and trying to figure out how to be a woman and how to be an adult. My mother was, like me, very opinionated and fiery. She had strong principles and taught me about sex when I was five years old. She wanted me to meet a man who respected women, and instilled feminist ideas in me at an early age. She talked to me and my sister about periods, gave us books and sent us off to school from the age of nine with sanitary pads and a spare pair of knickers in a dinky little make up bag, just in case. I didn’t start my period until my 15th birthday, and remember how lonely and frightened I felt sitting in a silent white bathroom, that first shock of scarlet marbling the water in the toilet bowl. 

 

My father has difficultly expressing his emotions, hugging, offering praise and so forth. The loss of my mother meant the loss of that assurance and that tactile, all-encompassing love. In its absence I grew to feel that I did not deserve it. I had no female figures in my life to offer me love and guidance. My mother had a very difficult childhood in Australia and New Zealand with a mentally ill mother and a father who was constantly moving the family in the middle of the night to run away from debt collectors. She became estranged from all of them except her second sister Shirley, who stayed in New Zealand. She never had children, and now her partner of 30 years has been diagnosed with lung cancer. My father was an only child and his mother died from a form of Alzheimer’s when he was in his early 20s. Because my parents had moved across the other side of the world to start a life in London in 1979, the only family member I have ever had in this country is my great aunt who lives in Gloucester. From these experiences I have realised how important it is for children to have female role models around them. A mother alone isn’t enough because if she dies when you’re young a deep and essential sense of love and safety is ripped away forever. All you’re left with (especially if you don’t believe in God, which I never have) is yourself, and the air around you, and the terrifying emptiness of the sky. 

 

I long to believe in God. I think that the idea of knowing there is someone who loves you unconditionally and is looking after you must be incredibly comforting. For years after my mother died I was desperate to find a love to fill that great emptiness; to feel safe again. Unfortunately, being young and heterosexual, I had only young men to turn to for that kind of love. When I was 19, one such young man told me I needed to ‘get over’ my mother’s death as we sat together on a long car journey back from Cornwall. He had already fallen out of love with me and some part of me knew he was going to go. Two days later, he broke up with me on a park bench beside a children’s playground, and that was the first time my mother’s loss really hit me. He was disturbed at how upset I was, and made himself scarce. I couldn’t understand why I was so devastated, why my body went numb and I had terrible, dark thoughts. And yet I realised, later, that it was because someone was leaving me again. Someone was leaving me and they were never coming back, and there was nothing I could do to change that. This realisation and anxiety reached such a height that for a long time I couldn’t bear for someone to leave a room- in case they never came back. Over the years it became increasingly difficult to be close to people. After all, if you don’t allow yourself to get close to anyone then you minimise the pain that you feel and the damage that occurs when they inevitably leave. (Yes, it is a cliché. It is a cliché because it is true). 

 

I wish I could say that my mother’s death has made me stronger. I wish I could say that there are positive things that have come from it. But there aren’t. It will define my life forever and take me many, many more years to truly come to terms with it.  Eddie Izzard, who is now 50 years old, lost his mum to cancer when he was six. I was deeply moved when he spoke in a documentary made by his ex-girlfriend Sarah Townshend. He’s asked what drives him and he says this: ”I keep thinking that if I do all these things, and keep going and going, then… she’ll come back”. And then he bursts into tears. 

 

I am proud that I have become like my mum in many ways: I write, like she did (she always wanted to be a novelist but died at 50, before she had the chance), I am opinionated and argumentative, I am insecure about my appearance, I love ideas and discussion, I am attracted to intelligence, I want to learn as much as I can, I want to read as much as I can, and travel, and I want children- more than anything. Yet I’ll face the same thing as she did: having children with no one to guide me or give me advice. I won’t have her there to help me. I’ll never be able to hand her my first child. But I want to be a good mother, and I want the father of my children to be as loving and caring as a mother is. Because I couldn’t bear for my children to be to left without me, and have the love they need and deserve torn away from them.  

 

I feel that my writing is- and perhaps always will be- defined by two things: one is that great loss, the fear and emptiness that it left, the pain of having no mother and of being apart from God. The second is my childhood in Wimbledon where, in my made-up memories, it is always late summer and insects dance in the dusty yellow sunlight. And my mother is in that place, and she is smiling, and I am happy, and there is so much hope and possibility and magic.  

 

That was a good start in life. Those days were real, and true, and of a different time. And those matchsticks still glow bright.

 

You can follow Ellie here https://twitter.com/Elliemayonnaise

You can read her short stories here: http://elliemayonnaise.weebly.com/

Modern Fatherhood

Eve Merrier

My father once told me that it was the invention of jeans that made all the difference. That before Levi Strauss’s cowboy creation reach the legs of the British populous, buttoned up, chino-ed gentlemen wouldn’t think of crawling on the floor and playing pretend with their little ones. Perhaps this is just a denim microcosm of cultural change: handkerchiefs and brogues ceased to be imperative as the twentieth century grew middle aged; feminism was chatting about gender roles; and phrases like ‘work-life balance’ entered the vernacular. Perhaps men also wanted to play with their kids. Perhaps they thought it looked like fun. My grandfather’s generation was inhibited by gender norms in many ways- as recently as the 1950s men who pushed prams would be called ‘sissy’ and thought effeminate.

Recently, this has changed for the better. It is far more socially acceptable for fathers to be more actively involved in parenting. A US study by Yeung et al. suggests that men are doing more childcare: ‘Our findings suggest that although mothers still shoulder the lion’s share of the parenting, fathers’ involvement relative to that of mothers appears to be on the increase. A ‘‘new father’’ role is emerging on weekends in intact families. Fathers’ wages and work hours have a negative relationship with the time they spend with a child on weekdays, but not on weekends.’ So women are still doing most of it, but we get a bit of help on the weekends? I’m paraphrasing unfairly. Lots of men do their fair share, but a lot still don’t.

Also, ‘Dads’ and ‘Mums’ are still seen as separate breeds in many public spaces. For example, my local library runs several events for young children and their carers called things like ‘Rhyme Time’ and ‘Story Time’. So far, so gender neutral. They also feel like they have to run a separate events called, ‘Reading with Dads’. Does this mean that men aren’t welcome at the generic events, implicitly the domain of mums? Or is it just that they’ll only feel comfortable going to something that’s directly targeted at them? My dad was the only father who helped out at our playgroup, and one of the only male volunteers at our primary school.

Shirley Williams, politician and my role model, has a theory about the importance of fathers: ‘I came to realise how often the achievements of women politicians grew out of their father’s belief in them. Look at the list of women leaders. Time and again, the daughter has realised the father’s ambitions not only for herself but for him too.’ So having an involved father makes a positive difference. I certainly benefited from having mine around. But plenty of people grow up without a father, or with one less involved, and they’ve done fine too: brilliantly in some cases. Maybe the benefit for Shirley Williams’ examples is really from having a positive influence- someone who supports and teaches us to reach our potential. There’s no reason that needs to be a dad.

So what needs to change about modern fatherhood? How far have we come? More men are wearing jeans and pushing prams, but I think there is still change to be made.

You can read Eve’s e-book on female role models here:  https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/262650 www.smashwords.com Share

Arguments with non-feminists: suggestions for a crowd-sourced guide.

Emily Harle

 

Christmas is a time of sharing. According to my mother, whilst this apparently includes presents, food, amusing stories, Christmas cracker jokes and a polite response to the question, ‘so how’s your job going?’, it mostly definitely does not include the loud use of the word ‘vagina’ at the dinner table.

This Christmas I got into at least 3 arguments with members of my family about feminism and issues affecting women. They ranged from being about my hairy armpits and why we had ‘male’ and ‘female’ crackers (the ‘vagina’ at the dinner table incident) to if it was possible, and whether therefore we should even try, to reduce the high incidence of rape that exists in this country.

Engaging in debates on feminist issues with non-feminists is something that I imagine we all end up doing, whether its all the time or just occasionally; intentionally or simply because somebody was being so offensive or wrong that we couldn’t help but get involved. I always experience quite a range of emotions when discussing and debating feminist issues with people, from family and friends to co-workers and random people on facebook and the Internet. I often feel bemused and depressed at the lack of some people’s empathy and knowledge, I sometimes feel alone, knowing that i’m possibly the only person who is telling them that what they are saying is wrong and I regularly feel frustrated, like i’m pointlessly banging my head against a brick wall, whilst everyone just finds it amusing. But I sometimes feel eloquent, and brave, and sometimes I get to feel absolutely elated because something i’ve said has made someone think again, or re-evaluate their stance or even just question it a tiny, little bit.

One of the many benefits I have found since joining The Feminist Book Club, reading a wide range of feminist books and enjoying the space to discuss various feminist issues, is that not only have I sharpened my views but I also feel more empowered to share them with others in an effective way. I find debates less stressful and frustrating and I certainly feel less alone.

I think that a huge, but perhaps less obvious, part of the feminist movement is about empowering its members to engage in conversations about feminism, so that we can convince those around us of the problems we face and the solutions we can achieve if only there is the will to do so.

By gathering and sharing this information, as we do in book clubs and activist groups and on blogs we become stronger. How many times have you read a statistic, or a point or a case study that just makes you think, ‘yes, exactly! If I could just tell them this then they would get it.’?

You might be wondering why I called this article a suggestion for a crowd sourced guide for feminists. Because that’s what I think we need, we need to share more, not just about the various awful things going on in this country and around the world and how we are going to take action (as we already do) but also about the various effective (and ineffective) ways we find of persuading people of our points. What works, or doesn’t, on these individual levels also affect the larger protest/awareness raising-level with larger groups of people.

I think this information falls into two categories: 1. knowing our opponents, which is essential in how we pitch our arguments and even the argument that we pick (which I don’t think we, as a movement, currently think about enough), and 2. knowing the issue, which then enables us to win them over, even if its only a tiny bit.

I am going to start with a couple from each category which I found  recently and a dilemma that I often have when debating with people that I could really use some help with.            Please respond, either in the comments below or on the facebook page with others that you have found particularly effective and any solutions to my dilemma and hopefully we can all help each other to feel a little less alone and frustrated, and a bit more empowered, in the discussions we have.

 

USAID- Why invest in women
The women of the world earn 10% of the worlds income but work two thirds of the working hours.

74% of the cuts in the UK so far come from women’s incomes. 

This  infographic shows how investing in women makes a big difference to a country.

Talking about how men shouldn’t have conform to masculine stereotypes and that its the other side of the same coin works well to dispel myths about feminism being only about women and it certainly throws them off guard when they think that’s all you’re going to say!

Making it personal, e.g. ‘(name) wears a dress when she goes out, that doesn’t mean she shold have to put up with men making offensive remarks’ at her to get away from the ‘well you should she what some women wear out, its no wonder they get coments’ point.

The dilemma: What do you say when you get to the point in the conversation when somebody accepts that there is a problem but then says something along the lines of ‘yeah, but it’ll never be solved’?

I look forward to your responses!

You can follow Emily on twitter here:  @EmilyHarle

2012 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog. Thank you to all our contributors and commentators and here is to continued fantastic writing and blogging in 2013!

Here’s an excerpt:

600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 2,500 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 4 years to get that many views.

Click here to see the complete report.

Courage

Eve  Merrier

Bronnie Ware is a palliative care nurse. In her time caring for people in the last days of their lives, she has noticed a pattern in what people say when they realise they are nearing the end: ‘I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.’ This was the most common regret as they looked back on their lives. I don’t want to have the same regret in my last days. 

This is absolutely a feminist issue, because firstly we must consider- what do others expect of me? Why do they expect this of me? I believe that expectations of women have long been circumscribed by society’s gender norms. Although in many ways the situation is far better than it used to be, old-fashioned attitudes still pervade the media and thus the consciousness of the populous (or perhaps vice versa). I remember my sister as a child, cheerily telling people that she wanted to be a doctor when she grew up. The reactions spanned from gentle amusement to, ‘don’t you mean a nurse?’ Thank goodness those opinions were negated by the strong message from our parents- you can be whatever you want to be. Her medical career is going swimmingly and we’re all very proud. 

I think there’s still rather too much emphasis on a pink and frilly girlhood for courage to be a lauded quality in girls, but it certainly should be. Women through the ages have courageously acted to improve the situation for our gender. They show that change is often incremental, but infinitely possible. I know that there are many obstacles yet to overcome: pay is not properly equal, maternity rights are incomplete and there are many levels of ingrained out-dated prejudices in people and institutions that make choosing a non-traditional career and lifestyle a struggle. Despite this, we should strive to do what we are passionate about and what we find fulfilling. Betty Friedan, the original chronicler of female domestic dissatisfaction, wrote in 1963 that every woman should be able ‘to seek new roles and responsibilities, to seek their own personal and professional identities rather than have them defined by the outside, male-dominated society’. I believe this is still a vital aspiration. 

Hopefully, at the end of our lives, we will be able to say, ‘we had the courage to live a life true to ourselves, not the life others expected of us’. So I’m with Edith Piaf: Je ne regrette rien! 

Eve is our newest writer and very excited about contributing the blog. She has wrote an e-book called ‘The Brilliant Women Collection’ about finding positive feminist icons.

You can have a look here: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/262650

Or check out Eve’s website here: eveproofreads.com/books-etc

Erotic rape- cinema’s dark entertainment

Ellie Stewart

You may not have heard of Teeth, the 2007 B-movie directed by Mitchell Lichtenstein (son of pop-artist Roy Lichtenstein). It is a film that focuses on a virgin teenage girl who preaches Christian chastity to her peers, before discovering that she is in possession of the mythical vagina dentata: a toothed vagina, that enables her to maim any man who sexually violates her.

It was billed as a black comedy horror, and, upon the recommendations of film critics I have great respect for (Mark Kermode and The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, who called it ‘good, clean fun’), I made the mistake of watching this film the other night. I got through less than half of it.

I thought the film was going to be a witty (albeit silly) schlock horror movie exploring male anxieties about female sexual power. The idea of the vagina dentata is a fascinating symbol: what if a woman’s body had the internal power to fight her rapist? And what does the existence of the myth tell us about the male anxiety of entering the dark female space that they withdraw from diminished?

Writer and director Lichtenstein clearly had no interest in these ideas. From the moment we see Dawn talking to an audience of school pupils about the value of ‘saving yourself’, I realised the film was (at least in part) a piss-take of the absurdity of the Christian right’s abstinence movement in the US and their scare-mongering tactics used to discourage impressionable teens from taking parting in sinful sexual activities. Lichtenstein chooses to use Dawn’s terrifying biological abnormality as a symbol for this anxiety: WHAT IF YOUR DICK ACTUALLY GOT BIT OFF? Therefore all power is taken from the female protagonist and we are just watching a film in which a director has used the sexual assault of a young women as an entertainment device in his shitty movie.

I watched a man rape a woman and get his penis chomped off by Dawn’s angry vagina.This scene was unequivocally constructed for entertainment purposes: to shock the audience, and make every man watching it cross their legs. All I saw was rape. All I felt was empathy for this thinly written character. When it was time for the scene in which a male gynaecologist rams his hand into Dawn’s vagina, as her cute Bambi eyes bulge and she pleads ‘no! that hurts!’, I reached for the remote and turned the fucking thing off.

What a despicable thing for a man to do: use rape and sexual abuse in a black horror context, for fun and entertainment: the ‘good, clean fun’ that Peter Bradshaw describes. Men are obviously meant to identify with the dudes getting their wangs munched off. The depiction of a rape is merely the set-up: yes, the men are punished for their crime but, in the end, the rape that has occurred is forgotten as it is superseded by the visual violence of male castration- presented unashamedly as the greater horror of the two crimes. Not morally, but certainly in terms of terror, pain and injustice.

My immediate and instinctual distress at witnessing the rape of a woman on screen to serve entertainment purposes led me to consider the depiction of rape in cinema in general. Is it ever OK to show rape on screen? And if so, when is it OK to depict it and where do we draw the line as to how it is portrayed? (Apologies: that sounds like a question Carrie Bradshaw might pose in an SATC episode that focuses on real issues and, you know, not shoes).

The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) has very clear guidelines on sexual violence in films. Their judgement of the portrayal of rape in a film determines what rating a film is given, whether it requires cuts to be rated, or whether it can be rated at all (if not, it is banned as unwatchable, like the infamous experiment in depravity ‘A Serbian Film’).

One of the key issues that the BBFC addresses is whether the portrayal of sexual violence eroticises or endorses sexual assault: if so, the film will be required to make cuts in order to remove this possibility. While the BBFC rightly concedes that ‘proving direct causal links between the viewing of any media item and subsequent specific undesirable actions is almost impossible,’ it does maintain that ‘sexual violence and media research suggests a number of different types of harmful effect from certain depictions of sexual violence including: the stimulation of aggressive sexual thoughts and fantasies; the cultivation of anti-female attitudes; and effects on subsequent behaviour.’

This is exactly my problem with depictions of rape on screen, and is one I also apply to my views on violent pornography. It is easy to dismiss someone who finds depictions of women being violently raped on cinema/television/computer screens as being someone who is against freedom of speech, or even a killjoy and a prude. But closing down all discussion is as fascistic as right wing activists like Mary Whitehouse who condemned so-called ‘video nasties’ in the 70s without even having seen the films she was so incensed by.

I suspect that by using rape in cinema for entertainment purposes, by the acceptance of showing the sexual abuse of women in mainstream films, and by the constant drip, drip, drip of such imagery and ideas, an undercurrent of misogyny pervades in society. It is insidious. If you regularly view women being victims of sexual abuse in mainstream cinema- a medium which is intended for entertainment- surely that is going to have some impact on your views of rape and of women?

When I searched ‘rape in cinema’, the first result was ‘Movies Rape Scenes – A Video PlayList on Dailymotion’. This is a collation of clips of rape scenes from movies on a mainstream video sharing website clearly intended as masturbation aids for highly disturbed individuals. The infamous, harrowing 9 minute anal rape scene from Gaspar Noe’s gruelling Irreversible is titled ‘Monica Belucci gets fucked hard from behind’.

To further my point: take The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, a cultural phenomenon of recent years. The original trilogy by Steig Larsson were a huge success, devoured by a wide spectrum of society. The books were made into a series of successful Danish films directed by Niels Arden Oplev, which are now being remade by The Social Network director David Fincher.

Apart from the fact that it is deeply troubling that graphic rape scenes seem to be accepted in cinema as long as the woman gets revenge on her rapist, I am disturbed by the fact that the graphic, violent anal rape of the female protagonist in the first movie (both Oplev and Fincher’s versions) did not seem to be an issue for the audiences who went to see it in droves. Many reviews barely mentioned it, or mentioned it fleetingly, or jokingly. Fincher himself joked that the movie wouldn’t win awards because ‘there is too much anal rape in it’. If that isn’t a sign that director has used a rape scene in his movie for entertainment rather than to truly show the horror of this terrible crime, I don’t know what is. The rape scene in Fincher’s film is gratuitous, and invites the audience to enjoy it in a masochistic way, in the same way that people seem to enjoy viewing the aftermath of car crashes on the motorway. It is a desire within us all: but why are so many filmmakers keen indulge their audiences’s darkest desires?

Some have argued that if you didn’t show rape on screen in a visceral way (especially when it is integral to the plot), it wouldn’t be as potent. Is it not enough to suggest the rape, to show the aftermath, the trauma of the victim, or to just say ‘this woman was raped’? Do people need to hear the screams, to see her struggling in desperation, to see a man force himself inside her, to see the blood? If that’s a case, then that is deeply, deeply troubling and says a hell of a lot about our generation’s de-sensitisation to violence and horror.

In any case- I think that’s an excuse. I don’t think graphically depicting rape in cinema is the result of anything more noble than a pornographer’s mentality: ‘give the people what they want’. It doesn’t matter how depraved it is- if it sells cinema tickets and DVDs, then it’s worth including in a movie. I also think there is a connection between the fact that the vast majority of film writers and directors are male, and the acceptability of depicting graphic rape scenes of women in mainstream cinema. Child rape is rarely depicted in cinema (especially the rape of pre-pubescent children) presumably because everyone knows how horrendous that crime is. The rape of women is frequently portrayed in mainstream cinema, sometimes in extended scenes. Are they really depicting the horror of the crime, or is their something indulgent and possibly pornographic in these visions? There is no denying that cinematic depictions of simulated rape do have erotic power for many people- it may be disturbing, but it is true.

I am not for censorship necessarily: but I am for discussion. I would be very interested to hear other people’s thoughts on the depictions of rape in cinema, and what should be acceptable, or whether it should be acceptable at all. And do you think that normalising the inclusion of graphic rape scenes in mainstream cinema may have a slow, insidious affect on people and their attitudes towards women, sex and rape?