Rant about the Power of Stories

I must have been about 12 years old when my mum told me about the nightmare that my brother K, who was 8 at the time, had had the previous night.

I was surprised by this. Not because of the content of the dream, or how it had affected K or mum, but by the FACT that my brother HAD DREAMS. He was a PERSON, not just a little kid who could be a nuisance to me.

Let’s just say I was not the most socially or emotionally precocious child …

I was reminded of this incident some months ago when reading about a grassroots awareness campaign that an NGO was running in some rural Indian village aimed at improving the rights of women.* The program was simple: organising workshops for men, during which they were taught how and why to treat women better. But the level was startling to someone living in my comfortable western, urban, educated bubble. One man, interviewed after completing the workshop, was proudly explaining how he had learnt that he should treat his wife and mother better, because they were people too and had their own thoughts and feelings.

While I’m hoping that all of you (men) reading will know that your wives and mothers have their own thoughts and feelings, why is it still that men have stories and experiences and women have women’s stories and experiences? And men are only interested in the stories and experiences of the default kind?

This was bothering me, so I did a test with one of the most casually comfortable male feminists I know, my partner F.** (This means that everything I say from now on has been scientifically proven.) I asked F to name his 5 favourite movies and 5 favourite authors. He named Lord of the Rings, Pride, The Jungle Book, Matrix and Dinner for One (movies) and Daniel Kehlmann, Herman Melville, Erich Maria Remarque, Ronald Dworkin and Karl May (authors).***

This tallies with statistics. Men read books written by men. Women read more books written by women, but because women read more than men in general, in the end this still means that 50% of male authors’ readership is female (while only 20% of female authors’ readership is male).**** I had a quick look at my own reading journal (yes, I keep a reading journal, shut up) and it appears that since the start of 2014 I’ve read 15 books written by men (42%) and 21 books written by women (58%). Granted, a book written by a man is not necessarily about men and a book written by a woman is not necessarily about women, but I am willing to state that the gender of the author (just like other attributes, such as race, nationality, class) does mean something in considering what the stories are that these authors write.

Same goes for movies. Women go to see more movies than men do (source). Here my facts are admittedly more vague and impressionistic, but let’s see if you agree. Women go to see all kinds of movies, including ones that focus on the stories of men (this follows from the stats – as there are many more women who go to the movies than there are movies about women, they must be also watching the stories of men). But I find it hard to even imagine a man going with his bros to see movies about women. This applies across the spectrum, from rom-coms to buddy road trips (Thelma & Louise) to serious drama (think last year’s Still Alice) and even war movies (which are almost by definition about men, but one exception comes to mind, the 2008 Les Femmes de l’Ombre, which is about four French (women) commandoes sent to rescue a captured geologist). If men go to see such movies, it is because their wives/girlfriends drag them there.

Why is that? Why do men not even consider women’s stories interesting enough to watch on screen (or read)? I get it that the most popular movie genre is a white hetero dude saving the world, but why ONLY this story, over and over again? And I don’t only mean douchebags who complain that the role given to Charlize Theron in the latest Mad Max ruins the whole action movie genre (really), but men in general?

I can only pose the question, I think, inviting everyone to provide their thoughts, and to consciously examine their own entertainment consumption habits. I will also continue to drag F to see movies that do not star white hetero dudes and suggest he read good books written by women. If any of you other smart dudes out there want to broaden your horizons and find awesome authors that happen to be women, I am happy to give tips and recommendations!

Because this stuff matters. Media and culture are key to better understanding which is key to better empathizing which is key to better accepting.

Love and peace.

*I read this in a paper article which I can no longer locate, which means that I can neither give the source nor even the name of the NGO. Bad me.
**He recently ran a ½ marathon wearing a “this is what a feminist looks like” T-shirt, without even mentioning it to me. It was a campaign tee for a Palestinian LGBT organisation. I was so proud of him.
***F told me that apparently info on favourite movies and authors is very personal, so for the sake of fairness, my favourite authors are Terry Pratchett, Margaret Atwood, Sofi Oksanen, Mika Waltari and Chimamanda Ngoci Adichie. I've mentioned my favourite movies in another rant.
****Admittedly this is only one study, but done by GoodReads based on the data their members reported, so quite a comprehensive look at avid readers. The Guardian did some good simple analysis on the numbers.

Rant Insulting Charlie

(Hi! I'm back!)

Religious nutjobs storm the offices of a French cartoon magazine spraying bullets and fear and all of a sudden we all turn into Charlie.

I was hoping, as we all were, that ultimately something good would come out of the atrocity, like happened in Norway after the Utøya massacre four years ago when the nation came together, confirmed its liberal values and became the most admirable country on earth. There were encouraging signs with the unity marches (I was on the other side of the globe at the time, but there was a Je suis Charlie demonstration even in Auckland) and the awesome cover of the 14 Jan edition of Charlie Hebdo (and the fact that so many news outlets reprinted the cover with full knowledge that this will be considered a provocation by religious nutjobs).

What bothers me is that we are all so keen to be Charlie without much thought for what Charlie really is or was.

Freedom of expression is such a nice concept in theory. It is also nice when we are using it ourselves or someone is using it to criticise something we also see as a problem. But it is distinctly less nice when it is used to insult and offend us.

David Brooks at New York Times wrote a pertinent column pointing out that Charlie Hebdo would have failed in the United States and in Finland Helsingin Sanomat went further by noting that many of its cartoons would have been illegal. Charlie Hebdo was indeed in the business of dishing out insults in all directions, being a quintessential iconoclast.

Should we be protected from being insulted? Germans and Swiss seem to think so. Both countries have decided that to hell with the freedom of expression, the right not to be insulted is more important and protected by the CRIMINALISATION of insults.

Other countries are more restrained and only restrict certain types of insults. The legal systems I know best, namely English and Finnish, still contain blasphemy laws. The thinking appears to be that while our feelings in general are not worthy of protection, our religious feelings are somehow different and more important. The belief in the concept of “holy” is not just an everyday feeling, it is different, indeed holy in itself. Insulting it is worthy of punishment.

The European Court of Human Rights has been of no help, upholding the conviction of a neo-nazi for disseminating anti-Semitic materials* and a ban on a vulgar movie including Christian imagery.**

Herein lies, in my humble opinion, the problem. How can we condemn religious nutjobs for taking the law into their own hands and dishing out punishment for an act that our societies themselves consider unlawful and deserving of punishment? Isn’t that hypocritical? If we want to say, like some religious authorities do, that what the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists did was unacceptable, but that the right punishment was not a bullet in the head, then at least that is honest criticism. If we want to go further, and say that we are Charlie, thereby indicating that we endorse the right to freedom of expression to the extent of insulting everything and everybody, including things we hold dear,*** then we must look in the mirror and repeal the laws that restrict that freedom, whether blasphemy laws, general laws criminalising insults, or vague terrorism laws.

So far that appears to have happened only in Iceland, the smart little country that abolished its blasphemy law after the Charlie Hebdo attacks. France, by contrast, seems to be going in the opposite direction. Some of you will have heard about Dieudonné’s conviction for his thoughtless “Charlie Coulibaly” facebook comment, but more alarmingly I read in my Amnesty magazine that in total 117 people were charged in the two weeks following the attacks under France’s laws that criminalise “praising terrorism”, many of them summarily condemned. Calling the attack “France’s 9/11” appears to have been accurate in perhaps more ways than intended.

This is sad and counterproductive. Locking up islamists when they say hurtful things only furthers their sense of victimisation. If we really are for freedom of expression, we must be for all of it, including insults, and for everyone, including Muslims. When I see that happening, I will be able to conclude that freedom won and the bullets of those religious nutjobs really did hit their own foot.

*Kühnen v. Germany, App No. 12194/86 (1988).
**Wingrove v. United Kingdom, App No. 17419/90 (1996).
***Chapeau here for the French President François Hollande, for standing up so firmly for a magazine that dished out pretty outrageous insults at him.

Rant about African Women Part 2 - Josephine Baker

 

 

The second stereotype of an African woman is the wild and erotic “Josephine Baker”.*  Her whole being is mystical and sexual, and since sexuality is scary it must be contained.  One of the first things the colonising Europeans did in the 19^th century in many parts of this continent was to impose western, puritan dresscode on semi-naked tribeswomen.  Nowadays this seems so ridiculous.  The Himba women, for example, in their traditional outfits are beautiful, but not particularly erotic.  Most modern Europeans (the same can’t be said for Americans … the nation of the “boobgate”) can tell the difference between nudity and sexuality.

 

I began to get an idea of the power and scariness of the Josephine Baker, though, when I spent just over a month frequenting a Windhoek gym.  Again, this is not “Africa”, it is just Windhoek, but there were women from different tribes, of different ages, shapes and sizes there.  They all appeared to have one thing in common, though: they were admirably at ease with themselves.  The whole atmosphere in the changing room was just very different to what I have seen and experienced in any part of Europe.  The self-consciousness that a white woman does not seem to be able to escape was almost entirely lacking.  So I began to think that the power of Josephine Baker has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with self-confidence.

 

I wondered why that was.  We are supposed to be more emancipated and aware of our rights in the North.  Yet the bombardment of images of how we should look like – and do not look like – is so relentless that it it nearly impossible not to be self-aware, and consequently ashamed of our imperfect bodies.

 

The tabloid press is a lot less developed in the parts of Africa I’ve been to.  The images of perfect women that ARE portrayed are likely to come from Hollywood, where the pictures are either those of white women or of black women whose beauty adheres very closely to white standards (think Beyoncé or Halle Berry).  Maybe this has less of an impact on the self-confidence of a woman who just looks very different.  Recently the standards of beauty have been ever so slightly relaxing, when women like Lupita Nyong’o have entered the common consciousness.  Ms Nyong’o is strikingly beautiful.  However, her beauty is of such different kind to what I could ever be that I can just admire it, without her images on some sub-conscious level chipping away at my confidence.

 

So maybe that is partly it.  While women in many African cultures are traditionally supposed to be less assertive, and subject to male authority, once they can break away from that and enter the public sphere, they do so with confidence in themselves that is not constantly being undermined by a bombardment of insidious messages of how inadequate they are physically, and how important it is to be physically more adequate.  Hence they are less held back, less apologetic of who they are and what they are capable of.

 

I therefore have come to think, tentatively, that Josephine Baker is in fact Mama Africa.  They are the two sides of the same confident coin.  I have also come to appreciate my time at the gym changing room.  Comments about time spent looking at other people at the gym changing room can come out the wrong way, but even at the risk of that I must conclude that I hope some of the chuzpah those ladies had rubbed off on me!

 

 

*Yes, I know Ms Baker was not from any part of Africa, but French-American.  Her “brand” is fitting for this post, though.

 

Rant about the Truth -- as told by White People

A few months ago I was passing by the Peace Palace, the UN complex here in Geneva.  It is the site of many demonstrations, and on this particular day a group of Tamils was displaying posters with shocking pictures of cruelty, accompanied by slogans of what was happening in them.  According to the descriptions, the picture was in each case that of a Tamil, sometimes a child or a civilian woman, tortured/raped/killed (or all three) at the hands of the Sinhalese.

The allegations in the posters were shocking, outrageous. 

I marched to the info stand and told the gentlemen manning it that I knew what the Tamils had been through during the last months of the civil war in Sri Lanka, and that what had occurred probably amounted to war crimes and crimes against humanity.  I told them that I supported their cause and that they were right to protest in front of the UN, as it was about time the international community did something about the atrocities.

The reason I did this was that I had seen all the images on their posters before.  I had seen them, and the slogans, put into context.  I knew who the kid was (Balachandran, the son of Velupillai Prabhakaran, the founder of the Tamil Tigers), I knew who the woman was (Isaipriya, a Tamil news anchor).  I knew all this because not long earlier I had seen a documentary called “No Fire Zone”, which had made me hate humanity and have nightmares.  If anyone is interested in seeing what people are capable of during civil war, watch this documentary, it is really good.  Even if it will make you feel anything but good.

I don’t know if the Tamils holding the protest outside the UN cared about my expression of solidarity.  But I’m guessing that not all that many passersby gave such unqualified endorsements of their cause.  This is because not many people had seen the documentary.  This fact gave me pause, because if it had not been for the documentary, I would have been quite suspect of the protesters’ claims, outrageous as they were.

Would I not have believed the protesters so easily if I had not seen the documentary, because I, along with many others, have become jaded by fake and manipulated images of atrocities in Syria and elsewhere?  If this is the answer, then it is a healthy one.  In the days where everyone can easily falsify pictures, one should be slightly wary of photographic evidence, especially when emanating from interested parties.  (Even if countries such as Iran or North Korea haven’t quite completed the advanced course on photoshop yet ...) 

Or was it because “No Fire Zone” had been made by – let’s be blunt about it – a bunch of Whities?  Do I trust Whities to tell the truth more than I trust the Tamils actually on the ground, suffering through it all?  A worrying thought, but one that I have not been able to entirely shake.  It is a frustrating example of internalised racism.  Frustrating because (if it is true) I can’t rid myself of it and frustrating because it is so profound.  Somebody please pass the brain bleach, I don’t want to be like this!

On the more important, and less self-important, issue of what happened to the Tamil people and will there be consequences for this, there are some good news.  The UN Human Rights Council passed a resolution on 27 March 2014 to open an enquiry into war crimes in the final stages of the civil war in 2009.  I don’t know if this was because of the Tamil protests or the documentary.  “Who cares?” one could say, the main thing is that something is happening.  Or then again, if the world in general is suffering from collective internalised racism, then that would indeed be a problem.  So let us assume that the UN is not (only) finally reacting because a bunch of white people said so.

Rant about "the new face of Russia, efficient and friendly and open to the world"

 

I am not quite sure whether to laugh or cry.  It is all just so absurdly, cynically, poetic.

I felt a tiny tinge of vindication with all the brou-ha-ha preceding the Sochi Olympics, where it looked like finally the grand lie of “politics should not be mixed with sport” that had been perpetuated around the Beijing Games and the human rights violations that they were built upon was not very often voiced.  To the contrary, we heard all kinds of noises about gay rights, corruption and environmental degradation.  Us Westerners were eagerly wagging our fingers, and it seemed to work to some extent: Putin went on to release a host of political prisoners, including most famously the Pussy Riot performers Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina as well as Mikhail Khodorkovsky in the run up to the Games.  We could all slap ourselves on the back and focus on the sport.

The sports were as fascinating as ever, nobody can fault that.  However, I was mortified to find out how completely, utterly we forgot all about the moralistic posturing once the Games were on the way.  The corruption and environmental degradation had not gone anywhere, but instead of continuing to highlight this, the REAL cost of the extravaganza to the people most affected, Western media was unanimously gushing over how great the organisation was and how gleaming the brand-spanking new event venues.  Environmental activist Evgeny Vitishko was sentenced to 3-years in prison on trumped up charges and the indefatigable Pussy Riot were beaten and detained during the Games.  Did you notice?  If you noticed, did you care?  If you did, good on you, you were just about the only person in the whole world.

This is what the President of the International Olympic Committee Thomas Bach said at the closing ceremony; it pretty well sums up the general media feeling about the Games:

President Bach thanked Putin for his “personal commitment to the extraordinary success of these Olympic Winter Games”, as Putin watched on from the stands.

(…)

Bach said the 25,000 volunteers had shown the new face of Russia, efficient and friendly and open to the world, and described the Sochi Winter Olympics as “the Athletes’ Games”.

Earlier in his address, the IOC President urged global leaders to follow the Olympic society in displaying peace, tolerance and respect, which he described as sending a “powerful message” around the world.

You do not launch a military invasion of foreign territory on a day’s notice.  This means that while President Putin was lapping up the praise of the foreign media and politicians for his “personal commitment” to the “extraordinary success” of the greatest winter sports event of the world, one that apparently “display[ed] peace, tolerance and respect” and the “new face of Russia (…) open to the world”, he was preparing indeed to send a “powerful message around the world”, but not quite the one we thought was coming. 

Rant about St Galentine

Valentine’s Day is a tough one.

On the one hand, love is always good and never celebrated enough.  Realistically speaking we all need the occasional nudge to voice our appreciation to the special somebody whose “special-ness” might get neglected in everyday drudgery of work, family and a mountain of dirty laundry.

On the other hand, the whole business is uncomfortably hetero and not a little sexist, suggesting that a woman’s happiness depends on a loving man.  There is an unmistakably “feminine” (in the derogatory sense of the term) whiff of desperation and clinginess about Valentine’s Day.

The resourceful ladies in the feminist movement in the US of A have resolved this conundrum by adopting the cringe-free version: Galentine’s Day, introduced during the second season of Parks and Recreation.  Galentine’s Day is a celebration of that underappreciated virtue that is a woman’s friendship with other women.  There is a misperception that women are all jealous bitches in the workplace ready to trample any ambition seen in their female colleagues and jealous bitches in their private lives pretending to be friends with other women only to try to steal their husbands/boyfriends.  Really, I’m not exaggerating.  Try to think of a few examples of positive representation of women’s relationships with other (unrelated) women in the media and you will draw a blank.  THIS is why Sex and the City was so revolutionary.  (Here is a good recent article on this phenomenon more broadly.)

So hooray to Galentine’s Day.  Because in real life all us lady people are surrounded by numerous other lady people providing us with happiness, support, advice and laughter.  I can tell from professional and personal experience that lady people are GREAT.

But as great as Galentine’s Day is, it is still a bit exclusionary.  Not all of our friends are women and some don’t like the gender binary to begin with.  Really, who cares who your friends are, as long as they provide all the wonderful things that a friend provides?  So Galentine’s Day is an improvement, but it is not quite there yet.

Finnish readers will know by now where I’m going with this, because Finns have solved the whole thing decades ago.  You see, Finns were wary of the icky pinkness of Valentine’s Day from the beginning.  The joke goes like this:

The wife is mooching so visibly that even the husband notices, prompting the compulsory question of “What’s wrong?”  “You never tell me that you love me” the wife responds.  “I told you at our wedding ten years ago, didn’t I?  Well, I’ll let you know if I change my mind.”

So Finns have never celebrated Valentine’s Day in the romantic sense of the term.  Instead, 14 February in Finland (and in Estonia) is Ystävänpäivä (Sõbrapäev) – Friendship Day.  It is a day when we give cards to our friends and hug them and tell them how awesome they are.  What could be better than this?  Not everyone has a “valentine”, but everyone has friends, and everyone loves to tell their friends that they’re great, as well as hear this in return. 

I don’t think the idea is patented or even copyrighted, so feel free to implement it in your countries!

Hyvää ystävänpäivää everybody.

Rant about a Particularly Hot Piece of Ass

My cousins A and P told me that they were watching the 2013 Eurovision Song Contest held a few months ago in Malmö, Sweden. (Hooray to great cultural traditions!)  Apparently in the Finnish broadcast one could send text messages to the production company and these would scroll along the bottom of the screen as the finalists were performing.  A and P noted that many of the comments were lewd and openly sexual, saying nothing about the songs, but focusing solely on the physical attributes of the artists.  Once they noticed this, they began following the comments and discovered that they related solely to the men – without exception.  Nobody made comments about the looks of the female artists (or at least none were published), many of whom were trying just as hard as the men (if not harder) to look sexy.

This is of course what I did at the end of my last post on football.  I made a very thinly veiled crass remark about the looks of professional male football players.  Had I been a man, and making a similar kind of a comment about, say, a female swimmer or gymnast, it would probably have come across as stupid and more than a little sexist.  But I will hazard a guess that that is not how it came across when I made it about men.

Why is that?  Is it not a double standard?  Why do women feel the need to make sexist remarks about men’s bodies, and why are these tolerated?

I gave this idea some thought, and while I don’t have any definite answers, my guess is that it is some kind of a reclaiming exercise.  “Reclaiming” is what black people have done in appropriating the previously used derogatory term “nigger” for their own use, just like women have done with “bitch”, handicapped people with “cripple” and gay men with “fruit” or “queen” – just to give a few obvious examples.  So what I think has happened with the whole objectification thing is that women have taken a practice formerly reserved for men and appropriated it for their own use.  While men are no longer permitted to do that with impunity (remember what recently happened to BBC’s John Inverdale and his blooper about Wimbledon champion Marion Bartoli?), women are cheekily turning the tables and giving men a taste of their own medicine.  What we are in effect saying is “I don’t give a damn whether you have talent / brains / sense of humour – I just see you as a hot piece of ass and it is my right to objectify you in this way”.  

The fad will undoubtedly die down, but for now, I may just take advantage of it a few times before it is gone.  So all overpaid famous men beware: I couldn't care less about you, your skills, opinions or personality.  What I want to know is whether I am getting some eye candy or not.  

I'm sure all Wayne Rooneys of this world are quietly crying into their beers having learnt this harsh truth about my wishes and intentions. 

Rant about German Crooks

Having had a go at Great Britain a few weeks ago, it is time to turn to Germany.

The starting point of this rant is Switzerland, though.  Switzerland has been an interesting place to be now when the world’s attention has been turning towards tax evasion, and Swiss media has been fascinating to follow.  For example, when the Cahuzac affair became public knowledge, Swiss media emphasised the fact that the authorities here had immediately responded when requested to do so by their French counterparts, revealing the information that forced the story, and Mr Cahuzac’s political career, to unravel.  Similarly, when “Offshore leaks” hit the news, the Swiss press was ever so slightly gleeful in its “see?  It’s not just us!” attitude.  To some extent my beloved neighbours have in fact been since vindicated, with the EU starting to look into cleaning up its own back yard (also known as the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, the Isle of Man, the Channel Islands, Luxembourg, Netherlands Antilles, Cyprus etc) in addition to putting pressure on others.

And here is where Germany enters the picture.  One of the main aspects of this chase of tax evaders has been the see-saw between Switzerland and Germany, where Germany has tried to force its smaller neighbour to enter into a bilateral treaty that would give the German tax authorities the right to automatically get information about deposits by German tax payers in Swiss banks.  When the diplomatic arm-twisting has failed (in the last round it was actually the German parliament that rejected the agreed text as not tough enough), the tax authorities have taken the dubious short cut of buying stolen data containing just such information instead.  This has now happened several times.

In all this one thing appears to be forgotten: it is NOT criminal in this country, or any other, to put money in a bank account.  The Swiss banks have in fact done nothing wrong.  By contrast, it is not only criminal, but morally reprehensible, to evade taxes.  Tax evasion, like corruption, is stealing from the poorest members of society.

So why are so many Germans so keen to defraud the tax authorities?  Hey Germans, the Swiss pay their taxes without any grumbles!  Time magazine says it’s because they have their direct democracy, but I think the reason is simpler: taxes here are low and we get good services for them.  Why would you not pay?  It’s value for money!  The Finns also do not really evade taxes.  Partially I think because there are not that many rich people in Finland, partially because the total transparency of the system (everyone’s tax records are publicly available) discourages hiding and makes getting caught more likely and partially because it is publicly totally condemned.

Shame on you Germany, the promised land of tax evasion.  Stop bullying Switzerland and focus on figuring out the reasons why your citizens are so eager to engage in stealing from the poorest members of society.  As far as I understand, tax evasion gets very light penalties* and must be pretty acceptable behaviour, since so many people do it.  Maybe that could be a place to start ...

*My understanding was that if you confess tax evasion in Germany you escape criminal sanctions altogether, and only have to pay the back taxes, but F assures me this is not the case.