Rant about Silence

When discussing policies and changes to the legal framework relating to difficult issues, a proper understanding of the issues at stake is usually key.  Yet this is often not the case when it comes to issues that have a fundamental impact on the rights of women, especially physical integrity.  I am of course talking about rape, domestic violence, abortion and the like.  Everyone thinks that these things are happening somewhere far away, to some other people, but they are so prevalent that they are by necessity happening right here to people around us.  You may not know about a person’s rape, assault or abortion, but let me assure you that you know people who have been raped or assaulted, or who have had an abortion.

How can we commonly know whether and in what circumstances abortion legislation can be tightened, if we do not understand the reasons for deciding to have an abortion or the impact that decision has on a woman?  How can we know what is the right way to reduce rape if we have no idea of the circumstances in which rape is likely to occur?

These are the main reasons why I think it is so important to break the silence about these issues.  We have recently had some good role models:  The journalist Lucy Cavendish is an example of someone who has spoken openly and unapologetically in Britain about her two abortions.  I also salute the four women who recently told their abortion stories to Helsingin Sanomat with their own names and pictures, helping us all to understand how multifaceted the issue really is, and giving a glimpse into the myriad of reasons why a woman may decide to abort, and how it may make her feel.

There are some indications of similar opening up in relation to rape – at least in the United States if not here.  Hollywood actress and political hopeful Ashley Judd has talked in public about being a rape victim.  A brave woman called Tucker Reed went even further:  Not only did she reveal the story of how she got raped by her boyfriend, but actually publicly named the rapist as well.  I would recommend Reed’s story to anyone, it might help you understand how “mundane” rape can really be, and why a woman might not even always first realise, let alone accept, that she has been raped.

There is a continuum from harassment to sexual assault to rape, which is why the Everyday Sexism Project that Ioana linked in a comment to an earlier rant is so important in more ways than one.  I do believe there could well be a bit of a “broken windows” phenomenon going on here.  It is not called rape “culture” for no reason –not because everyone rapes but because the culture that condones harassment and takes women’s bodies to be public property is likely to increase rape and its tolerance.

Assault, rape and abortion can be tragedies and deeply personal experiences, which is why nobody should be forced to talk about them.  However, to the extent that someone WANTS to talk about them, whether to get sympathy from their loved ones, contribute to public debate or help others in similar situations, it is very important that they not be shamed into silence.

It is of course easy to encourage others to talk about their experiences, but shut up about one’s own.  So here is my story:

I was living in Paris at the time, walking home late at night from a night club.  At some point a man started chatting to me and I did not wish to appear rude, so initially responded.  He wanted to continue the conversation and began making propositions.  I declined, first politely, then more insistently.  He followed me.  He trailed me all the way to my building, and when I firmly told him to piss off, he made a lunge for the door and forced his way in before I could pull it properly shut.  He attacked me in the atrium.  We struggled for a while, but once he realised he was not getting anywhere, or it was going to be a lot of hassle and I could well wake up the neighbours with my yelling, he gave up his original idea, snatched my bag and was back out the door before I could properly realise what had even happened.  Although I got away physically mostly intact, with only some minor bruises and scratches, I was surprised at the intensity of the anxiety attacks I was subject to later, and how long after the original event those kept coming back following some trigger events.

Many of you have heard the story of this attack ... But probably the version that has focused on the robbery, and omitted the fact that it was actually first and foremost an attempted rape.  I now find it hard to explain why I almost automatically erased that part of the story.  I no longer feel any need or desire to do that.

Yes, I was walking home alone in a big city late at night.  Yes, I answered when a stranger spoke to me.  Yes, I continued straight home although he was following me.  No, I am not to blame for being sexually assaulted and I will be damned if I let that asshole, or anyone like him, make me change my behaviour.

Rant about Water

Not long ago I read in Newsweek a short review of Brahma Chellaney’s Water, Peace, and War: Confronting the Global Water Crisis,* in which it was stated that “by the 2020’s two thirds of the world’s population will face problems getting enough of the stuff” – the “stuff” being water. 

I felt like I was taken back a few decades, to my childhood and youth, where we were told that people in Africa don’t have enough water and are dying of thirst.  This was the prelude to telling us kids to stop wasting water.  Small changes might have occurred, you know, turning off the tap while brushing our teeth or shampooing our hair, but nothing major.  Some years later the toilets with two different flush sizes came on the markets, but that was about the end of that.  I haven’t heard anyone talk about water shortages in years, and it is certainly not something I or those around me take into account in our lives, no matter how socially and ecologically conscientious we try to be in our daily choices.  I can personally say, for example, that I have learnt to LOVE a long hot shower on a cold evening...

And yet, in a few years’ time TWO THIRDS of the world’s population will face problems getting enough water.  That should be a huge problem and a scandal on a global scale.

What is it that turns an imminent humanitarian crisis into news and a global scandal?  Do we just have too many of them, so we have to select which ones to attend to?  What else is happening out there, as potentially disastrous and large in scale as the developing water scandal, that I know nothing about, because for some reason it has not made it into mainstream media – or if it has, then only into a tiny article in Newsweek that I might as well have missed?

*Christopher Dickey, “Big Think: Water Wars”, Newsweek, 22 April 2013

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.

Rant about Lady Gaga

Caitlin Moran in How to be a Woman terms Lady Gaga as “the woman being touted as the next big feminist icon in the broadsheets.”  Moran then describes how she interviewed Her Gaganess, how well they got along and how that led to a wild night of partying in some bizarre kinky club.  Her gushing conclusions on the pop phenomenon smack of starry-eyed fandom from where I am standing, but they also intrigue me, as I had not taken Lady Gaga for a feminist icon. 

Moran goes on to say things like “Gaga is an international female pop star on the side of all the nerds, freaks, outcasts, intellectual pretenders and lonely kids”, and “Gaga’s take on sexual mores is to examine female dysfunction, alienation and sexual neuroses.”  Then comes the drunken conversation in the said club, where Gaga replies to Moran’s thesis about her wearing little clothing but not to titillate men that “’No! ... It’s not what straight men masturbate over when they’re at home watching pornography.  It’s not for them.  It’s for ... us.’  And she gestures around the nightclub, filled to the brim with biker-boy lesbians and drag queens.”

Since then, Lady Gaga was photographed slightly plumpier than usual and got some nasty comments in the media, prompting her to start a campaign called Body Revolution – aimed at getting people to accept themselves as they are.  The goal is obviously laudable, and definitely feminist, but what continues to rub me the wrong way is the fact that she is still a slightly underweight, very attractive woman.  Not that hard to accept yourself in such circumstances, I would have thought.

As for her art, I’m not a huge connoisseur, but it had never occurred to me to describe it as feminist.  I’ve obviously heard my fair share of her songs and seen the videos, but the feminist-sexuality-as-dysfunction-go-nerds message somehow passed me by.  And it still does.  I did some research (read: googled the lyrics to her songs and watched videos on YouTube), and here are some examples: 

Poker face that started it all:  Unless playing hard to get is “feminist”, this one, with its writhing around a pool scantily clad* doesn’t really cut it.

Bad Romance, my favourite among her songs:  The message is just about kinky love with visual theatrics.  “Want you in my rear window, baby, you're sick” seems a pretty clear allusion to anal sex, which I would not have thought to be among top feminist agenda items.

Born this way, with the promising title: On the one hand the lyrics are what it says on the tin, which is a nice message of loving yourself the way you are.  The video, on the other hand, contains some weird stuff, but basically when the chorus comes on, it is Gaga in underwear and long, lushy blond hair looking mighty sexy.  So what are we to take away from this?  It’s ok, Lady Gaga, you were born really sexy?

So I remain to be convinced.  And what bothered me from the start was that if Gaga was indeed being a feminist torchbearer, she was taking a leaf from the book of my own favourite pop star P!nk.  P!nk really IS a feminist icon.  I won’t bore you with my “fanalysis” of her songs, but in case you need convincing, check out some of her excellent work, such as U + Ur Hand (“I’m not here for your entertainment, you don’t really wanna mess with me tonight”), Stupid Girls (“What happened to the dream of the girl president?  She’s dancing in the video next to 50 Cent”), or Raise Your Glass (“So if you're too school for cool, and you're treated like a fool, you could choose to let it go, ... we can always party on our own”). 

Lady Gaga, take note.  This is how it’s done.  Make it less about you and more about your message and then we’ll see.

What’s your take on Lady Gaga – or another pop culture phenomenon that has gotten you thinking lately?

*The videos don’t work from Germany – sorry!

Rant about How to Solve the Mother of All Basket Cases

Wherever there is a conflict or corruption or the like, there might not always be immediately available solutions, but there are inevitably immediately available culprits.  There is always someone to blame.  Preferably that someone has money, so that they can be guilted into parting with it in order to right the wrong they’ve done.  In rural Kenya, for example, where corruption, small scale scamming and thievery were all rampant, many people seemed to have internalised the message that this was all the fault of the English, having been the colonial masters and royally screwed the country.  (That last part is true, of course – it’s just the causal link to the current woes that I sometimes failed to see.)  A few individuals seemed to take it one step further, and imply not too subtly that I was in fact at fault.  That seemed to have something to do with the colour of my skin, I presume.  Or maybe something had led them to understand that Finland and England were the same thing, I’m not sure.

Sometimes you do not have to go that far into the past to find the culprit.  In the case of Iraq it is the United States in more ways than one.  In the case of Russia it is not Putin-the-dictator-in-the-making, but evil capitalism.  Or so they say.

However, there is one current international basket case that doesn’t fit this pattern: it is the mother of all basket cases, the Israel-Palestine conflict.  We may be more inclined to sympathise with the Israeli or the Palestine point of view, but we’re likely to give little thought to how on earth the whole mess came about.  So let me remind everyone whose fault it is: Great Britain’s.

Not only did you not immediately think of that, but there is a chance you didn’t even know that.  It’s true, though.  Take it from the International Court of Justice:

“Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire.  At the end of the First World War, a class ‘A’ Mandate for Palestine was entrusted to Great Britain by the League of Nations ...  The territorial boundaries of the Mandate for Palestine were laid down by various instruments, in particular on the eastern border by a British memorandum ...  In 1947 the United Kingdom announced its intention to complete evacuation of the mandated territory by 1 August 1948 ... In the meantime, the General Assembly had on 29 November 1947 adopted resolution 181(II) on the future government of Palestine, which ‘Recommends to the United Kingdom ... and to all other Members of the United Nations the adoption and implementation ... of the Plan of Partition’ of the territory, as set forth in the resolution, between two independent States, one Arab, the other Jewish, as well as the creation of a special international regime for the City of Jerusalem.”*

There you have it.  The Arabs didn’t like the plan, the Jews used it as a basis to declare independence and it went downhill from there.  But it was all started by the United Kingdom (supported by the UN), who ruled the territory for a few decades and then got the great idea to settle the terrorised, holocaust-survived Jews on the promised land, as if it was some abandoned territory, as opposed to an area populated by Arabs.  Ingenious.  Who could have possibly guessed that that might lead to trouble?

So while I don’t have any answers to how to solve the Israeli-Palestine conflict, I don’t need to, since England and Finland are in fact two different countries and I hail from the latter.  What I would like to know is what is England (and the UN) doing about it?  I expect all Brits reading this to populate the comments section with ideas ...

*Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (Advisory Opinion), 9 July 2004, ICJ Reports 2004, paras 70-71. 

Rant against Poor People on Airplanes

Even when one doesn’t buy the crackpot science of so-called “climate skeptics”, one has to concede that the real culprits for greenhouse gas emissions are the coal-blazing Chinese (and to a lesser but growing extent Germans – yeah, getting out of nuclear without Plan B was a great idea, wasn’t it) and the shameless and wicked oil barons that push the black gunk on the world and fund the above-mentioned crackpot science.  Apparently also the forecasts are being revised since while the planet is indeed warming, it has recently not been warming at quite the rate as expected.  So the future generations might yet survive, hooray!  Or wait, has the rate in fact been quickening?

All this confusion notwithstanding, I’m a firm believer in everyone doing their bit.  If for no other reason, then at least for the license it gives us to wave a fist at them Chinese (and Germans) and oil barons – not to mention the snootiness we can display towards less environmentally conscious friends at dinner parties and over drinks.

I fly a lot.  I fly for business and I fly for personal reasons.  I don’t fly for “pleasure”, because I hate flying, but it gets me to places I need to go such as Berlin to see F, Helsinki to see everyone or Malaga to see mum and dad (and, ok yes, lounge by the pool, you got me).

I feel constant guilt about my flying.  In terms of personal contributions to carbon emissions, flying is as bad as it gets.  I can munch all the locally grown carrots I want and walk to work, but the fact is that all of that is dwarfed by the ecological disaster that is my flying habits.  On an individual level, my flying probably puts me in the top 5% of worldwide contributors to climate change.  Hence there has not been much snootiness displayed recently on my part.

Simply put: I should fly less.  So should you, even if you don’t fly as much as me.

The reality is, however, that as long as flying is as cheap as it is, neither you nor I will cut down on it. 

Do you remember what it was like when we oldies were growing up, or at uni/college?  We did NOT hop over to Vienna or Lisbon or Istanbul for a weekend, because we had no money for it.  The flights would have cost several hundred pounds (no Euros back then!), which was well beyond our budgets.  The 20-something kids nowadays have it different.  Even on a student budget they take mini-breaks to other countries and fly off to Mexico or Vietnam to backpack between terms, because they can.

I think that the subsidies to air travel should stop and the cost of jet fuel should actually include a huge tax to cover for the environmental externalities of flying.  If a carbon tax is ever implemented anywhere, it could take care of this.  The EU emission trading scheme obviously includes flying, but the whole system is a total dud.  If a working one is ever conceived (ideally a world-wide one), it should definitely include flying at its actual cost and impact. 

I think what I’m making here is a very sensible proposal.  Yet, when I’ve made it in conversation, it has been immediately rejected.  F, for example, has told me that I’m elitist and pointed out that if my idea was reality only I could afford to do the bi-weekly visits that are the lifeline of a long-distance relationship, since I have a job and he is still a student.

Obviously if flying was made more expensive it would mean that less people could afford to do it.  I don’t see a problem with that – in fact it would be the whole point: reduce flying.  There have always been activities that are beyond the means of most people.  I don’t own a private jet or a mansion or a Lamborghini, all of which pollute and contribute to climate change, but I don’t get called an elitist for being OK with this state of affairs and not demanding that we should all be able to afford all that.  The reason I get called an elitist for advocating more expensive flying to discourage it and cover the actual costs of it is because we have somehow come to think in recent years that being able to afford to fly (“hyper-mobility” as it is called in the green lingo) is some kind of a basic human right that should be available to everyone, regardless of their financial situation.  Well it ain’t.  It’s an expensive and polluting activity and it should be discouraged.

So I say hike up the prices, ban Easyjet and get the proles off planes!

Rant about Beautiful Men

So ... As a true believer in equality between the sexes, I feel obliged to follow up my post about good-looking women with one about good-looking men. 

But enough about men, let’s talk about women.  More particularly, about what women do – and should do – when seeing good-looking men.

Stunning women complain that they don’t get approached by men, because men find them to be intimidating.  Surprisingly enough, I don’t have any personal experience of that, so can’t confirm or deny.  But I do know that even us plain-janes get our fair share of cat calls, wolf whistles etc. – all women do.  This is not good; it is harassment.  Harassment comes in many shapes and sizes, and men often don’t understand it, but it is completely, and in all circumstances, WRONG.

Apart from harassment, though, women more often get positive comments about their looks.  This is something that women, as well as men, engage in on an almost daily basis.  We all comment if an overweight friend has slimmed down and is looking better for it, or if a colleague has a smashing new haircut.  In the age old sport of flirtation and pair-formation (or “pulling”, as it is known in England,) often exercised in bars and night clubs, complementing women is a tried and tested strategy.

Not so with men.

It is not common – or perhaps even appropriate – to complement men’s looks.  We are primed still to expect (in the heterosexual context) men to be more active in pursuing women, and women simply have the job of accepting or rejecting wooing candidates.  Some of this is cultural, some biological.  Females are pickier than males when it comes to pair-formation (and not just in humans) since they invest more in child making and rearing.  It is also still the way things are just done among this particular species, and hardly questioned.

If you suggest to a woman that she should complement good-looking men around her, she will in all likelihood resist the idea.  Women often think that pretty men know that they are pretty, and are narcissistic and proud of their looks.  In my experience, this is not necessarily the case.  Encouraged by the example of a friend, I have a few times in my life just walked up to a particularly fine specimen and told him that I thought he was good-looking.  I then proceeded to wish him a nice evening and walked away.  The reactions I got?  Blushing and shy, surprised and pleased “thank you”s.

I used to therefore think that this was a practice to be encouraged.  However, understanding more about harassment, the many forms it can take, and how the harasser often does not understand he is in fact harassing his victim, has made me pause and think twice.  Did I in fact harass the pretty boys?