Celebrating international women's day

Sisters you are warmly invited to:

BRUNCH!

to celebrate international women's day.

at 10 a.m. on Saturday the 3rd March
at Contact me for location


We will spend some time celebrating the wonderful things women have achieved as well as reflecting on the great loses we experience as women. We will also have an opportunity to explore some ways Christians can respond to domestic violence.  Then we will go marching, along with many others with a vision for a just and free world. (www.millionwomenrise.com)


You are welcome to join us for some or all of this. Children also welcome. We have been offered the venue free and I shall provide food, but contributions are welcome and it would be good to be able to make a contribution to the venue.


Please RSVP by leaving a comment with your email address and I'll send you info (I won't publish your email address) so I know approx. numbers and also if you have any dietary requirements.


Please also feel free to pass invite on to people who may be interested but please stress need to RSVP and that this is a Christian women's event.


Keep on rising!


Jenny

The Journalism of Rape

I posted a question on Facebook which was  "how do you define rape without the phrase forced sex?" We need to give journalists a language to explain what rape is. I started to comment on the ensuing discussion but it got a bit long so I put it here instead...(and edited it slightly!)


I don't know much about journalism or about whether the flurry of outrage about the reporting/ sentencing of rape on Twitter recently is unusual (I suspect not) but being new to Twitter I am feeling a bit overwhelmed and needing to pull together all my thoughts and reflections. (I process things externally and am rubbish at thinking in the quiet of my head!)


We've had articles stating that 13 and 14 year olds were forced to have sex and some were raped, as though these were two different things. We've had a 40 month sentence for the rape of a child because she was a "willing" victim (which is, as far as I'm concerned, an oxymoron)... oh and she looked 14 (um...that's still illegal. In fact, given the context it would have been rape had she been 30... oh, and they filmed it so that's also making extreme pornography even if she had been 30). We've had the councillor who felt like an embarrassment and left the conservative party, while other Peterborough councillors where baffled at why she felt like that. 


But all this reminded me again how powerful words are and therefore how careful we must be with the words we use. Sometimes when I think about it I want to say nothing at all. Words can be clumsy, full of unspoken meaning and betray ugly values and prejudices we don't even know we have. But silence is no answer. So we tread cautiously forward with ears wide open till our speaking comes closer and closer to the  truth.


What I think those articles were attempting to say was that forced sex is rape. They were just a bit clumsy about it. But often people use the verb "to have'"in connection with rape and maybe that's what needs to go? Initially I was thinking it was the term "sex" that needed to be dissociated from the term "rape" but that could get very tricky and how would you describe sexual assault? So now I'm thinking its the term "to have" that's problematic. Rather than "they forced them to have sex", should we be saying "they forcibly took sex from them"? I don't know but if we say "they had sex" where it's consensual and then in another context say "they forced them to have sex", the only difference is the force, which is not the only difference. 


Also, how do we define "having sex"? I would want a definition incompatible with being raped because people who have been raped won't feel like they've had sex. To say "they were forced to have sex" also possibly narrates what happened from the perpetrators point of view.  Perhaps we should be saying "they did not give consent to the enforced sex the perpetrator took from them", or "they could not consent as they had had their freedom and capacity removed by the perpetrator who took sex from them". I also liked the suggestion of the word "using" rather than "having". "Using a person for sex without them giving consent" or "they were used for sex without being given the right to consent".  


Anyway, however we describe this, we must be clear that all of it, not some of is rape. If the victim, looked 14, wore a short skirt or was an embarrassment, then those are the things they are "guilty" of and last time I checked none of those things where illegal. As was tweeted recently "blaming the victim" is another way of saying "protecting the perpetrator". 

Comments very, very welcome.

In Mourning for the Lego of yeasteryear

I never wanted to be the sort of parent who told their child who could and couldn't be their friend but there are five friends I do not want my daughter playing with. She will not be playing with Mia and her pets, getting her hair done with Emma, drink smoothies with Andrea, go to one of Stephanie's parties or even play in Olivia's tree house or dream up great inventions with her in her workshop. (http://friends.lego.com/en-us/Default.aspx)


Lego how far you have wandered from what is beautiful. The Lego I remember as a kid was probably beginning to become dominated by male characters  but there was at least still space for my imagination to believe it had permission to be there, to create and to explore.

Lego being the amazing, brilliant toy that it is, has a unique opportunity to offer play spaces for children that allow their creativity to flourish and their sociological imaginations to run riot dreaming about what life could be like.

A family in a house that turns into a boat, a spaceship or a dragon.

The new 'Friends' theme fundamentally constrains children's play and sends some very clear messages:

1.) Friends are the remit of girls - not boys; and girls are friends with girls only.

2.) The activities girls do are limited to domestic and caring functions. If they are going to step out of these roles (Olivia's inventor workshop) then that is the exception not the rule and they must plaster all such activities in pink or lilac lest they compromise their femininity.

3.) The website very clearly lets you know that you must conform to one of these types of femininity. You can take an on-line quiz where you have to choose between fairly obtuse objects. This detailed and well-researched psychometric test will then tell you which type you are like, because apparently there are 5 types of girl in the world.

4.) This is clearly and obviously marketed at girls so what about the rest of the Lego world? Clearly it becomes 'for boys' and there is indeed a dearth of female characters in the rest of Lego's universe. The message is clear: boys and girls are fundamentally different. What is male is normative.

5.) The message is no longer 'discover something very, very, special: themself'. Instead it is clearly: don't you dare get out of the box. But try conformity, stick with the pattern, don't invent, you mustn't have a go or create. Keep 'you' very very quiet.

It also sends out some not so clear messages:

How old are Mia, Emma, Andrea, Stephanie and Olivia? Their clothing, interests and language would suggest that they are children (especially as Olivia's house clearly has a Mum and Dad). However, they are physically very developed to be children, and very skinny. In proportion to the average woman's waist they have very large breasts, probably not quiet as bad as Barbie but not far off. This mixing of adult  body images (and unhealthy ones at that) with children's themes contributes very directly to the sexualisation of children.

There's a great short history of Lego's marketing and gender over at feminist frequency (http://www.feministfrequency.com/2012/01/lego-gender-part-1-lego-friends/).

For my part I am one very sad mother worried about the pink universe my daughter may have no choice but to grow up in. The glimmer of hope is represented by the Lego my mother has stashed away in the attic and then there is that prayer that the world might change and that this ridiculous notion of deterministic binary gender could be dropped. One day.