Bidisha

Where are all the women? Sexism in the media - organising the fightback

2012-02-21T15:32:00.003Z

The NUJ is planning an event at TUC women's conference this year looking at how to combat sexism in the media. The event will take place on Wednesday 14 March 7pm at TUC Congress House, 23-28 Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3LS, map here, starting at 7pm. All are welcome - please feel free to forward these details and invite others to attend. If you would like to suggest speakers, put yourself forward as a speaker or help out with the event please email: campaigns@nuj.org.uk

If you want to get outraged and informed before the event, you could read the stats, anecdotes and whistleblows here:

Kira Cochrane: Why is British public life dominated by men?
I'm tired of being the token woman
So, Today is a boys' club. What's new?
We want to hear ourselves think. A call to action against cultural femicide.
Shut up ladies, can't you see we're trying to talk? Women in radio.
I hit the glass ceiling. It really hurts.
On despair.
Literary women, literary prizes. Not often to be found on the same podium.
Casual sexism is nothing but misogyny.
Jane Martinson: It's better late than never for women at the BBC.
Miranda Sawyer: Why women in radio are starting to talk back.
John Plunkett: Put more women on radio, Jane Garvey tells the BBC.
Cazz Blase: Women and the UK music press
Jess McCabe: Women under-represented as reviewers and authors.
The F Word: Anonymous personal recollections of sexism in the media.
Hanna Hanra: Why are the no female DJs on DJ mag's top 100 list?
Helienne Lindvall: Behind the music: where are the women at the biggest festivals?
Rachel Millward: Birds Eye View Festival: And woman created films for both sexes.
YouGov Cambridge, affiliated with Cambridge University, create a major multi-issue symposium on Europe and invite 12 white men and 0 women to speak.
Amnesty TV: global human rights issues brought to you by 12 white men and 0 women
Amnesty's Secret Policeman's Ball music/acting/comedy fundraiser in defence of global free speech for everyone: 28 men and 3 women
Penguin Books UK expect me to big up a book that has 63 men and 7 women in the bibliography
Lyn Gardner: Female playwrights still face sexism.

A letter from Malawi: powerful acts of challenge and change

2012-02-21T12:57:00.000Z

The below was written by Fiona Morrell at Theatre for a Change, who contacted me yesterday. What she communicated was so powerful I asked if I could reproduce her words here. She has many interesting and urgent things to say about Malawi, women, power, abuse, HIV, equality and education. If you would like to know more about Theatre For A Change, please email fiona.morrell@tfacafrica.com

Theatre for a Change was founded in 2003 in Ghana as a NGO focused on HIV prevention. In 2007 it opened an office in Malawi which now employs over 60 people. HIV disproportionately affects women. We use experiential, participatory approaches to equip profoundly marginalised people, almost always women and girls, with the skills and knowledge to protect themselves from HIV and advocate for their gender and sexual rights.

In Malawi we work in two main ways, through formal education, empowering young teachers with skills to pass through to children and make their classrooms more equitable places, and our community work where we specifically work with sex workers.

Sex workers are the most at risk group in the country with an HIV prevalence rate of 70.1%. Our cohort of sex workers go through a process of behavioural change workshops to explore how to gain self confidence and a thorough knowledge of their rights. They then become empowered to become advocates for their rights through legislative theatre. Legislative theatre, based on the ideas of Boal and Friere, is based on the belief that we can tell someone to do something all they like, but it is only through standing in their shoes that real change can be manifested.

The women take their improvisations into places where abusers are, to bars, to the police station. They start performing their stories in their language, and then invite an audience member to take on a role of a vulnerable character. Suddenly a client starts to feel how difficult it is to negotiate for the use of a condom, to feel frightened, to have no choices. The effect is very powerful. Recently the women took their work into Parliament - something which was highly controversial bearing in mind Malawi does not properly acknowledge the presence of sex workers. Their advocacy will help push for legal clarity of their status - something which is currently unsure. They also work closely with the police, the group whom they identify as most likely to abuse them, and who subsequently have the second highest HIV prevalence rate in the country. We hope this will lead to long term systemic change.

One year ago the women launched the equals campaign, demanding the right for women to be seen and treated as equals. This campaign is growing and gathering support from women across the country. Our cohort of women working as sex workers are also given the opportunity to learn income generating skills: metal work, sausage making, hairdressing or dress making which will give them options to leave sex work in the future.

We are unusual in dealing with HIV through promoting gender equality, but we believe, that sustainable prevention will happen only when women are empowered to protect their sexual health. We are soon to start a similar project with sex workers in Ghana.

I believe passionately that the work the women in Malawi do should be heard about and celebrated - not only because of their bravery and determination, but to emphasise that one cannot separate health, social well being and gender - that if we continue to ignore gender inequity we will fail to tackle other great development issues - this really isn't rocket science but it is not, in my opinion, talked about or valued enough.

I have no words. That's as it should be, according to Amnesty.

2012-02-20T01:11:00.001Z

After the travesty of Amnesty TV - a global human rights show created by 11 white men and 0 women - you would have thought Amnesty might think twice when casting the Secret Policeman's Ball 2012, a huge comedy and music fundraising event in celebration of universal free speech as a basic human right. So far 29 men and 3 women will be speaking, acting, singing or performing at the event. Full breakdown and history of this story here.

The coolest woman on earth, volume 298405

2012-02-16T13:04:00.004Z

Around this time last year, minus two weeks, I attended a stunning event put on by the Birds Eye View film festival. It was Sounds and Silents, pairing contemporary women musicians, composers and performers (including Micachu, Imogen Heap, Tara Busch and others) who created and performed live scores for classic short films by women directors. The film, music and combination of films and music were mind-blowing, a testament to women's genius and innovation both then and now. Read my feature on it here.

One of the stars of the evening was the musician Seaming, hailed as "a remarkable talent" by renowned conductor Otto Klemperer. I've been following her career ever since; you can listen to her music here. Seaming is unveiling a lot of new work in the coming months and I had to get behind it.

Image by Michael England, taken from Seaming MySpace page

Seaming will be performing new work, a song cycle entitled 'Songs For My Grandmother', commissioned by the Chinese Arts Centre. Seaming writes to me,

"Expect spycorders, vintage electronics, words by the award-winning poet Judy Kendall, (palindromes, hair..the list goes on..) and also on stage with me will be acclaimed concert pianist Enloc Wu. It is a treat to be working with her again."

They will be performing Songs at the Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester at 8pm on Thursday 23rd February. For more details click here.
They will also be performing at VORTEX at 9pm on Sunday 26th February, with prior support from pianist Leon Michener and drummer Mark Sanders from 8.30pm. For more details click here.

And...

Seaming also has two audio-visual pieces on exhibition at the Full Rabbit show in the basements vaults of Shoreditch Town Hall, from 24th February. For more details click here.

Image by Michael England, taken from
Seaming MySpace page

Dykon and Gaycon Olympia Dukakis stars in Cloudburst, the opening night film of the London Lesbian and Gay Film festival

2012-02-15T23:56:00.005Z

This, from a BFI press release but strongly endorsed by me as I support the LLGFF:

Cloudburst, directed by Thom Fitzgerald, is screening on Friday 23 March 2012, 6.30pm and 8.45pm at BFI Southbank. Oscar-winning actors Olympia Dukakis (Moonstruck, Steel Magnolias, Tales of the City) and Brenda Fricker (My Left Foot, Home Alone II, Albert Nobbs) are septuagenarian lesbian lovers in an unpredictable, heart-warming and romantic road movie.

Cloudburst is a ground-breaking and forceful remedy to the virtual invisibility of older lesbians on the big screen - and it’s very funny. Dukakis plays the occasionally foul-mouthed Stella, whose language really does make grown men blush. The actress has described the film as “terrific, funny, moving and outrageous.” Fricker is Dottie, her lover of 31 years, whose ill-health has forced her granddaughter to trick her into entering a care home. When Dottie is sprung by Stella they decide to make for Canada where lesbian marriage is legal, but the police are on their tail. These two elderly dykes on the run get into a series of scrapes on their way to the altar and spend a blissful day by the sea with a young hitch-hiker who has emotional issues of his own.

Director Thom Fitzgerald is no stranger to the LLGFF. He will have opened the festival three times, a record achieved by no other filmmaker in the LLGFF’s 26-year history: The Hanging Garden opened the festival in 1998 and The Event was the opener in 2004. His most recent films prior to Cloudburst were 3 Needles starring Chloe Sevigny, Stockard Channing and Lucy Liu and The Event starring Olympia Dukakis and Parker Posey. He has won more than two dozen international awards including a Genie and the FIPRESCI European International Critics’ Prize. Um, yeah he sounds great but maybe also get some women directors? Like loads? Like half?

Emma Smart, the Programmer of the LLGFF said, “This is a brave and beautiful Opening Night film that’s laugh out loud funny. The on screen chemistry between Dukakis and Fricker is crackling and their relationship hugely touching and believable. It’s great to see older women portrayed on screen with such wit and depth.”

The full programme of the LLGFF will be announced at a press and public launch event at 6.30pm, Thursday 23 February 2012 at BFI Southbank and will be available on-line at the same time at www.bfi.org.uk/llgff

A love letter with a difference

2012-02-13T11:58:00.001Z

I wanted to flag up an international campaign to get 1 million people contacting world leaders, including David Cameron, in the run-up to the Rio Earth Summit. Calm down, dear, David, it's nothing dodgy: this week (Monday 13th February) sees the launch of a visual global petition titled Love Letters to the Earth aimed at persuading world leaders to enact a law of Ecocide – the environmental equivalent of genocide and a proposed Fifth International Crime Against Peace. The campaign aims to collect 1 million ‘Love Letters’ and present them at the international Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro in Brazil in June 2012.

The Love Letters will feature art and designs from creatives across the world which have been donated at the site Love Letter to The Earth. Supporters and ‘alternative valentiners’ simply need to pick an image and attach a message, which they can then share with a loved one.

Artists from around the world have contributed work for the Love Letter to the Earth site in a wide variety of styles: from traditional Australian Aboriginal painting to digital images created on an iPhone. One contributor says: “I am happy to be a part of this project. I feel we are guests on this planet. It is time to stop taking Earth for granted.”

Polly Higgins, lawyer, author of Eradicating Ecocide: Laws and Governance to Prevent the Destruction of our Planet and founder of the campaign, says: “This is a campaign that is gathering momentum around the world. Now is the time for us to let our leaders know that we love the Earth and we want new laws to protect people and planet.”

Polly Higgins seems like an amazing woman. In April 2010 she proposed to the United Nations a new law of Ecocide. She is at the cutting-edge of a new body of law called “Earth Law”, which also includes the Universal Declaration of Earth Rights. Ecocide can be defined as the extensive destruction, damage to or loss of ecosystem(s) of a given territory, whether by human agency or by other causes, to such an extent that peaceful enjoyment by the inhabitants of that territory has been severely diminished. During war it is a crime to destroy vast tracts of land, but during peace-time there is no crime against it. This anomaly in the law has allowed the damage and destruction of the planet to reach unprecedented levels which the UN say could trigger ecosystem collapse.

The Eradicating Ecocide Campaign was launched in September 2011 with a mock trial at the Supreme Court in London. A jury unanimously found two CEOs from fictional energy companies exploiting tar sands guilty of Ecocide, an event that saw media attention across the world from Brazil’s Mercado to the Financial Times. Find out more about the campaign to make Ecocide a crime here and find out more about the growing movement to create a body of Earth Law here.

Text (c) Eradicating Ecocide campaigners

YouGov Cambridge tell women to listen to what twelve men think and say.

2012-02-10T19:34:00.001Z

YouGov-Cambridge have been sending round an email to news and politics journalists inviting them to a major symposium which will be held in London on Thursday 15th March. The media partner is the FT. The topic is a huge one which affects everyone, women most of all given the effect of budgetary and social services cuts and women's existence, labour, participation and contribution at all levels of life: it's Public Opinion, Economic Governance and The Future of Europe. The organisation seems to be allied to Cambridge University and its YouGov-POLIS Programme for Public Opinions Research. Its slogan is "What the world thinks...and the experts say" and it bills itself as...

...a new kind of research-centre that combines the tools of academic expertise and professional polling to analyse key trends and events in global affairs. Through a mixture of debates, lectures and in-depth, international polling reports, the Symposium will examine how both experts and the public approach the same vital questions of European purpose, crisis and future.

But it is no kind of "new" research centre at all. It's the same old thing. Its major symposium, programme here, features 12 white men speakers and 0 women.

Here's the email that was sent round, below. Think you'll agree that the questions up for debate are extremely interesting. Think you'd concede that the issues are universal ones for Europe and have implications for the rest of the world politically, culturally and economically. Hope you'll concur that since they only needed 12 speakers in all they could have found 6 women from across politics, the media, finance, the backbenches, academia, economics and business to talk. Had it been more diverse, I would have loved to have attended and reported from it. The email:

On behalf of Stephan Shakespeare, Founder & CEO, YouGov plc, we would be delighted if you could join us for the YouGov-Cambridge Symposium on Public Opinion, Economic Governance and the Future of Europe, on Thursday 15th March 2012 at the British Academy, 10-11 Carlton House Terrace, SW1. YouGov-Cambridge is a new kind of research-centre that combines the tools of academic expertise and professional polling to analyse key trends and events in global affairs. Through a mixture of debates, lectures and in-depth, international polling reports, the Symposium will examine how both experts and the public approach the same vital questions of European purpose, crisis and future, including:
To what extent does public opinion impact the economic decision-making process of the EU?
What kind of capitalism will enable us to recover and prosper after the crash?
Is a bolder European Central Bank the answer; should European sovereigns be viewed as TBTF (Too Big To Fail); and can either be democratically justified?
What kind of Euro-governance should we covet and fear between Balkanisation and Federalisation?
Is 21st Century Europe destined to be a ‘hobbled giant’ of the world economy, as the US National Intelligence Estimate suggests?
How do EU polities view the desirability of membership and the health of its governing institutions?
Must the EU and its currency borrow ideas from America’s Founding Fathers to survive?
Is the Euro doomed and Germany too powerful?
What drives public opinion for and against the competing economic arguments for recovery – and how shallow/entrenched are they?
‘What is Europe’ according to public opinion – and if it’s more than geography, what makes it so?

Speakers include: John Humphrys, Presenter, BBC Radio 4 Today Programme; Rt Hon Alistair Darling MP, former UK Chancellor of the Exchequer; Sir Roger Carr, Chairman, Centrica and President, CBI; Jim O’Neill, Chairman, Goldman Sachs Asset Management; Alex Ellis, Director of Strategy, UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office; Sir Win Bischoff, Chairman, Lloyds Banking Group plc; Bernard Jenkin MP,Chairman, House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee; Lord Wood, Advisor to Ed Miliband and Shadow Cabinet Minister Without Portfolio; Lord Glasman, Labour peer and co-editor of "The Labour Tradition and the Politics of Paradox"; Declan Ganley, entrepreneur and founder, Libertas; Georges Ugeux, Former Vice President of the New York Stock Exchange, now CEO of Galileo Global Advisors and Professor Andrew Gamble, Head of Politics, Cambridge University.

A full programme can be found here.

The Symposium is not open to the public but is by invitation only. Registration and coffee begin at 9:00am with opening remarks for 9:30am. We look forward to hearing from you in the hope you can join us for this Symposium.

Warm best wishes,
Emma Sullivan, Business Manager, YouGovStone

and

Dr Joel Faulkner Rogers, Director, YouGov-Cambridge

...and warm best wishes to you, YouGov, for creating a major symposium about issues which affect everyone and inviting 12 white men to speak, and 0 women.

Not On Safari In Harlesden

2012-02-10T12:06:00.000Z

I wanted to write a short piece celebrating the art of perambulation and inspiration. In her Not On Safari In Harlesden project, the author Rose Rouse, whose books include Last Letters to Loved Ones, has been exploring her local area with a range of writers including Louis Theroux, Alexei Sayle, Monique Roffey, anti gun crime activist Michael Saunders, poet Sue Saunders and politician Dawn Butler. Part urban anthropology, part memoir, part art happening, Rouse has been on over 30 walks, which she has described in her column in the local paper, the Brent and Kilburn Times. The site is here: beautifully written, inspiring, intelligent, observant contemporary urban reportage written with great humanity, which really deserves to be published as a complete book as it gives such an insight into modern London. Rose has also also made a short film, Dance Willesden Junction, where she and eight friends in red dance the, er, gritty chic *cough* walkways of the station. Here's a wonderful still:

Watch out for the high visibility maintenance man who gets down to Al Green. We like your spirit, guy:

The death of Magical Democracy and the rise of A Card From Angela Carter

2012-01-31T21:13:00.006Z

The novelist Angela Carter, who died twenty years ago at the age of only fifty-one, was a creative genius, a consummate entertainer, an ambitious artist, a highly sophisticated crafter and a great intellect. [UPDATE, as at 10th Feb 2012: I have just been contacted by BBC radio producer Sara Davies, who has produced a documentary about Carter's plays, which is going out on Radio 4 on Thursday 16th February at 11.30am. She writes:

I hadn’t known about the plays till an academic in Bristol told me about them, and I discovered they were all in the BBC archive. I’ve used excerpts from all five, with interviews with various people who were connected with her back then, including Susannah Clapp, Marina Warner and Carmen Callil, and I’ve tracked down the studio manager who worked on the plays who talks about what fun it was putting them together in studio.

I don’t think many people know this side of Angela’s work, and the plays are such a riot!

Please tune in and enjoy Carter's imagination and genius afresh.]

I have long wanted to write a book of accessible essays, one about each of Angela Carter's major fictions, expressing my fannish enthusiasm, which is effusive and profuse. I'd envisaged it coming out this year, fully embossed, emblazoned and engilded, illustrated and illuminating, a Christmas gift for the literate. I’d call it Magical Democracy, after a phrase used in the Carter obituary written by Lorna Sage, another genius who died too young... and who also edited a wonderful book of essays on Carter, called Flesh and the Mirror, which includes contributions from Ali Smith and Marina Warner.

Magical Democracy would be all my own work, however. I imagined a big table in Waterstones on Piccadilly, with Magical Democracy in the centre and all Carter’s books arranged around it. Last year, in fact, I pitched the idea for Magical Democracy in a long and slavering email to Virago editorial heroine Lennie Goodings. Here it is, for comedy value:

I love Angela Carter and would love to write a big book of funny, enthusing and characteristic critical essays of each of her major works and collections, called Magical Democracy: the work of Angela Carter, to come out in 2012 to mark the 20th anniversary of her death. Phrase taken from Lorna Sage's beautifully written and typically intelligent obituary of her.

I pitched a big documentary on Carter for R4 but was turned down for the happy reason that Susannah Clapp is doing one on her poetry. But since then I have really been itching to do a proper, comprehensive but absolutely mainstream and positive series of big major essays... sort of like what I wrote about Polly Samson (in tone and approach, but longer of course), so not uncritical or un-analytical, but chunky and readable and really for everyone. I would like people to read the collection and then want to re-read all of Carter's works, but also to go forth and delve into the kinds of stories, heroines, myths, operas, ballets, adventures and legends that she herself was so clearly influenced by, and to generally feel a great love of reading, writing and the imagination.

The collection would be, the way book reviews are, comprehensible and motivating even for people who do not know Carter's work well... and it would be in my voice, with all my own biases and prejudices and fancies, and hopefully humour, so not a dry Norton Critical Edition type students' primer.

I was going to do it for my own web site but got thunderbolted by the idea of contacting you first because I could just see it beautifully presented and celebratory of her life and work... and we could have loads of events around it, where writers read from their favourite works of hers...

Understand completely if you're not up for it or feel that it wouldn't be a good bet, or is just a daft idea, so please ignore if this is irrelevant!

She replied, kindly and correctly, that Virago couldn’t justify its publication commercially. Here's an excerpt:

I can't believe it is that long since Angela Carter died. I couldn't agree more with you that she was an extraordinary writer but I am afraid I don't think I could make enough of a commercial go of your idea even though it is wonderful and I would love to read it myself. We did put together a collection of essays by writers edited by Lorna Sage and we still have it in print but it is, sadly a very slow seller.

As a sidenote, the other novelist I’d like to write a book of essays about is Iris Murdoch, my favourite writer, but after some initial interest from Kingston University Press (the UK's centre of excellence for Murdoch studies) that fizzled out too. Seems there’s not much of a market for that kind of thing. I’d call the Murdoch book The Way is Only Forward, after the advice given to self-sabotaging protagonist Michael Meade by the Abbess in Murdoch’s novel The Bell. I’ve written in praise of Murdoch’s genius in The Guardian, chatted it out at the Royal Society of Literature alongside A S Byatt (the only living author whose books I actively wait for, apart from Sarah Waters) and devoted an hour to her in my Radio 4 documentary An Unofficial Iris. But nothing. The 20^th anniversary of Murdoch’s death will be in 2019. Publishers, there’s still time. Money unimportant. I’ll throw in a two-for-one deal on Magical Democracy by 2017, in time for the 25^th Carter deathiversary.

Anyway.

For now, Angela Carter’s life has been commemorated in a beautiful looking, precisely written, perfectly constructed yet melancholy-making volume, A Card from Angela Carter, written by the renowned theatre critic and biographer Susannah Clapp. The book is only about 20,000 words long, hand-sized and gifty, but its chiselled sentences and glinting insights give us a sharp and immediate portrait of an entire life.

This is achieved despite rather than because of its central conceit. Clapp and Carter were close friends for several decades. Carter sent Clapp a series of postcards, which Clapp describes with a crisp humour that far exceeds the interest of the cards themselves, which are reprinted in a drab monochrome and bear brief, sharp, dashed-off messages. So there’s an image of a pot of Texan chilli beef. It’s like a 1970s tea towel illustration, block-printed and painfully indelicate. This is Clapp’s brilliant description:

The picture shows a black cauldron trying to pass as a saucepan. Bubbling with beans and frighteningly red beef, it was sending off a swirl of blue smoke.

On the back – and how I wish Bloomsbury had just turned the card over in the photocopier and given us a glimpse of Carter’s handwriting – the novelist has written,

Carter’s reply to the critics! Texas chilli, it goes through you like a dose of salts. I would like to forcefeed it to that drivelling wimp…preferably through his back passage.

This – Clapp’s description and Carter’s message, both - is pure Carter fiction territory: vehement, salty, violent yet camp, the image of beef and chilli turned to one of gore and guts, nutritive turned into purgative, a recipe for the rectum, the domestic made demonic. But the brevity and sharpness of the message is typical Carter too. She was as much a honer and an architect as she was an impresario or conjurer of literary circus tricks. The stories may happen in the lurid glare of a carnival tent – but the tent’s held up with iron pegs and metal rigging. There is method to the madness, deftness to the dazzle.

It has always bothered me that Carter’s work is often described in terms of stylistic effect, symbolic resonance and folkloric influence rather than mental effort or thematic craft. She is depicted (as Clapp acknowledges) as a literary aerialist exulting in costume, a dazzler magicking up a false yet apposite paradox-world of masquerade and bewitchment, of things pretending to be other things in an infinite hall of mirrors, references refracting off references. It is as though, if one were to smash the mirrors, there would be nothing behind them but stage lights and severed puppet strings. Carter’s fiction is presented by critics as one of high theatricality and loosely picaresque plotting, wild abandon held together with the strands of an unravelling devorée shawl and a spot of false eyelash glue. The books and their characters seem to survive on sheer guts and willpower.

This is a false impression, peddled as much by her lovers as her detractors. Angela Carter wrote with an iron fist in a sequined, fringed, marabou-trimmed lamé glove, holding a scalpel quill. She was a consummate artisan as well as an inspired artist, a romantic as well as an intellectual, a sensualist and a stylist. She may have presided over the revels, but she organised them well in advance and made sure the schedule ran to time. That, in life as well as art, is one of the secrets of great creation: one labours meticulously, tightening those symmetries, buffing those commas, to make it look as though one wrote it (and compel readers to consume it) in a single exuberant swoop.

There is a satisfying tension between the baroque fantasy of what happens in Carter’s fiction and the austere precision with which it is planned; between the lavish indulgences of her characters and their speech and the stern control of Carter’s own ideas. Her characters - whether they are the mercurial, curious, stubborn and inquisitive protagonists of her famous collection The Bloody Chamber or the loquacious giant swan-heroine Fevvers in Nights at the Circus - do not merely enact mechanistic reversals of traditional fairytale martyrdom, overturn overdone gender clichés or blather on pointlessly for page after page of earthy ventriloquism. They are fully imagined lovers, fighters, thinkers, adventurers, charismatic beings. They have heart and soul; they are not just strung up in Carter’s sequence of symbolic events. Readers love Carter because Carter is fun to read: a fantasy novelist who writes ripping yarns that make you feel anything is possible.

A Card from Angela Carter restores the idea of Carter as a constructor of tremendous skill as well as a creator of wild genius. The postcards are merely a device to pay tribute, to illuminate, to analyse, to commemorate and to critique. On their few hasty lines, Susannah Clapp has managed (like a Carter character herself) to spin and hang a tight, light and glittering biography, beginning to end, with teaching jaunts, prize-judging and prize-winning, family, career, lifelong love and mortal illness in between. I am not quoting much from the book because I want you to buy it. But I had to put in this wonderful line:

Her card was a photograph of an armadillo, a curved creature picking its way, like an elderly millionairess, through prickly undergrowth.

Days after having read it I am still wondering how Clapp did it. In barely a hundred pages she has performed an origami trick of stunning expertise, folding an entire life into a half-inch width of book, summarising a life and a body of work, conveying a steely awareness of time’s passing, a sense of history and a complex depiction of Carter’s character and contribution. With her icy, smooth humour and beautiful spare prose, Clapp strips out the tinny taint of campness that surrounds Carter. She does away with the standard critical soundbites – of the macabre, the kitsch, the playful, the carnivalesque, of masquerades and harlequins, dolls and hybrids, fairy lives and horror tales – that obscure Angela Carter under a thick white greasepaint of cliché.

There is not one great mind here, there are two, and both have been undersold. Susannah Clapp’s previous book, With Chatwin, is a superlative personal memorography of the travel writer and explorer Bruce Chatwin, whom she was close to. It was praised fulsomely by all the major papers when it came out some years ago. These lines of praise are to be found, rightly, on the back of A Card From Angela Carter. But Clapp has not produced a major full-length work since, despite her tremendous talent and huge fanbase, obvious from her popular theatre reviews for the Observer, her erudite wit as a theatre critic for Night Waves on Radio 3, her pedigree as a co-founder of the London Review of Books (for whom Angela Carter was a longtime writer) and the support and joy which has greeted the publication of A Card from Angela Carter. It has only been out a week and it’s been covered with great positivity in The Observer (who gave it their Review section cover) and The Guardian, flagged up as a must-buy in ES magazine, reviewed well in The Independent and made a Radio 4 Book of the Week.

I want more from Susannah Clapp. I want a big book. Two thousand word reviews and one hundred page books are too meagre for a magnificent mind and a wide wit. Write a satire about a Biba-chic theatre critic, why don’t you? Just keep a diary and change the names at the end.

A Card From Angela Carter has been created with obvious devotion. Its controlled yet luxurious cream, black, gold and red cover was designed by the brilliant Holly Macdonald and the lovely red-inked endpapers were drawn by Carter’s longtime collaborator Corinna Sargood. There is a twist in the plot to do with these endpapers, which I won’t reveal except to say that it brings tears to the eyes and fully establishes this book as a serious eulogy for a dazzling talent too briefly explored…

…and too thinly praised. Carter was always loved by readers, much admired by other writers and reviewed thoroughly and respectfully. She was a prolific journalist whose great insight turned even casual reviews into weighty and important cultural essays with wide relevance. She was adapted very successfully for film (notably by Neil Jordan for The Company of Wolves) and was an acclaimed dramatist for radio, as well as working speculatively in theatre. However, none of Carter’s novels had ever been Booker nominated. Her last novel, Wise Children, was published with great fanfare but ignored by that year’s Booker jury, leading directly to the establishment of the Orange Prize, now in its 17^th year. Clapp writes, “Her early death sent her reputation soaring.” She adds, however, that

[Carter] was not acclaimed in the way that the number of obituaries might suggest. She was ten years too old and entirely too female to be mentioned routinely alongside Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan as being a young pillar of British fiction. She was twenty years too young to belong to what she considered the ‘alternative pantheon’ of Iris Murdoch, Doris Lessing and Muriel Spark in the forties...

Twenty years after Angela Carter’s death, there is still no major biography of her and no major mainstream critical volume about her work. Could I propose here a small reconsideration of a speculative amateur scholar’s enquiry entitled… Magical Democracy?

Until I complete that magnum opus of trenchant literary criticism and squealing sycophantic hagiography, A Card From Angela Carter by Susannah Clapp can be purchased everywhere, published by Bloomsbury.

Cinderella, you shall go to the ball. But you can't speak or sing at it. But you can give the organisers your money and they'll make sure to help some guys' careers so don't worry and calm down.

2012-01-30T22:08:00.023Z

Updated on Wednesday 22nd February 2012. Current tally: 30 men, 3 women, blindingly white.

Last year I wrote a long report about Amnesty TV, the global human rights charity's online TV project, which aimed to highlight international human rights issues and was launched to coincide with Amnesty International's 50th anniversary. Amnesty TV was produced by 11 white British men from the telly comedy world and 0 women. Of the 11 men, only one had any human rights work experience. It was this man, Chris Atkins, who told me that "positive discrimination harms the very people it seeks to support," blissfully unaware that the boys' club is and always has been one massive act of positive discrimination.

Every few years Amnesty holds an extremely popular fundraising event called the Secret Policeman's Ball. It was started by John Cleese of Monty Python fame in the seventies and combines comedy and music across several hours of entertainment, performed live but also broadcast. This year's Ball is happening in America for the first time, on 4th March at Radio City Music Hall in New York. Organisers can draw from the UK's and the US's great wealth of talent across comedy and music. Here's a secret detail for fact fans: America is a large country with many people of both sexes and all colours. Of the names announced by the Huffington Post in its report today there are three white chaps (Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart, Russell Brand), 1 non-white man (Reggie Watts, let's hope you have some company soon) and zero women on the comedy side and two all-male all-white bands (Coldplay and Mumford and Sons) and zero women on the music side. Britboy comedians Armstrong and Miller have voiced an animation to promote the event, as reported by a British comedy web site. Total comedian tally: 5 white men, 1 non-white male, 0 women. That sliding scale always makes me laugh. Total musician tally: breaking it down, 8 white men, 0 women. Total gender tally: 13 men, 0 women.

[UPDATED on 22.2.12. According to The Velvet Onion comedy web site, more names have been added, and anyone who gives a damn about women or indeed about anyone 'of colour', will be outraged that this is happening (laughably) in the name of international freedom of speech. Amnesty International are making it extremely clear to global dictators everywhere that...white men are the overwhelming majority of people who deserve the freedom to speak, sing, act, play or perform? They have made damn sure that as few women as humanly possible are speaking. The names added are Noel Fielding, Fred Armisen, Hannibal Buress, David Cross, Micky Flanagan, Bill Hader, Seth Myers, Matt Berry, Chris O'Down, Seth Meyers, Bob Odenkirk, Andy Samberg, Peter Serafinowicz, Jason Sudeikis, Jack Whitehall, Sarah Silverman, actress Rashida Jones and Kristen Wiig. And... Channel 4 have announced that Jimmy Carr will also be joining the lineup. David Walliams has also confirmed that he will be performing. Total gender tally: 30 men, 3 women.]

I have now been contacted by a very high up charity world insider who initially got in touch with me immediately after the writing of my previous piece. They told me that there was tremendous internal concern and opposition not only to Amnesty TV but to the general outsourcing of cultural, fundraising and marketing projects by charities seeking to make alliances with apolitical and ignorant celebrity, fashion and pop-culture agencies/bodies/brands/institutions, which often replicate the misogynistic and racist discrimination the charities are seeking to fight. This person, who I have never met or spoken to and is not a friend, now writes:

The head of brand and events says it’s a line up of the world’s best talent. No women – and I don’t think anything other than white [Not the case - Reggie Watts wins the Token Prize 2012, that's one prize you'd be relieved to share]. And Russell Brand – after phoning someone’s grandfather to publicly say I Fucked your granddaughter ………

Not the first time – in addition to Amnesty TV, Imran Khan several years ago criticised Amnesty for a disproportionately white western line up of journalists at the media awards. Last secret policeman’s ball [in 2008] was Frank Skinner, Alan Carr, Jonathon Ross, Russell Brand, Mighty Boosh, Ed Byrne, Eddie Izzard. There were some women – Shappi Khorsandi, Sarah Millican and weirdly Germaine Greer but even they recognised their token-ness as part of their routine. They don’t learn from their mistakes – or perhaps they don’t think it was a mistake – they have been known to rely on such sayings as “it’s not about political correctness it’s about quality." It’s a shame but basically Amnesty is not standing up for everyone.

I'm not pursuing this story any more as I know a dead duck when I see one. I have more constructive things to do, like eat broken glass and punch myself in the face. I have said it all before and it made no difference to how much women were ignored. People who don't like women much don't involve them much or help their careers or public profile much. They don't want to promote them or raise them up but they do want to use women as exploitable labour behind the scenes. Bet I can guess the sex of the people who'll be wrangling the stars, booking flights, cabs and hotels, ushering people into their seats on the night, writing the press releases, adminning the event from first to last, milling around making sure everything's okay and coming in to clean the place when everything's over. Meanwhile, I bet around half the audience paying to attend the event will be women, who are the major donors to and the vast majority of volunteers in all charities. Ladies, remember what events like this are saying to you: we don't like you, we'll never help you, but we want your money and your labour. They will take this money (earned by you in glass-ceilinged, pay-gapped jobs of your own) and while some of it will go towards very worthy campaigns, some of it will be used to fund yet more cultural projects in which there are no women.

Oh - according to Amnesty the Secret Policeman's Ball has been set up specifically to celebrate free speech. So far 0 women are speaking or singing or playing an instrument but 13 men are. Of those 13 men, 1 is non-white... give it up for Reggie Watts! You have a great weight of representation expectation on you, sir.

Incidentally, for anyone who reads Amnesty magazine - a clear and well-designed paper publication whose issue no 171 for January/February 2012 is out now - you can see just how hard the charity are pushing the Secret Policeman's Ball. The cartoon policeman who's the logo of the event is on the cover, with Guess Who's Back as the cover line. The cartoon was initially designed by Colin Wheeler and is given the occasional makeover: by James Jarvis in 2006 and McBess this year. Keeps the jobs for the boys rolling, boys.

Inside the magazine, the bottom two inches of every page from page 4 to page 27 are given over to a running history of the event with the repeated strapline "Amnesty International 50 YEARS FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION." In addition, a double page spread entitled The Power of Mockery is given to David Javerbaum, the head writer of Amnesty's Secret Policeman's Ball. Javerbaum has "spent the biggest part of [his] career on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" - yup, they all know each other and they all help each other - and he believes that "there is no principle of human freedom more important for a comedian than freedom of expression." In the last paragraph of his piece about the power of laughter he says that comedy "keeps you in a spirit of remembering that we're seven billion people here on Earth, for no particular reason, in a variety of circumstances..." and we should all get along. Which is marvellous. Unfortunately the oppression of one half of those seven billion is perpetrated by some representatives of the other half, some of whom work for Amnesty International and have booked a very high profile event which virtually ignores anyone who isn't a white man.

Looking through the magazine's 23 pages of Secret Policeman's Ball history I have to congratulate them. They have tried desperately to mention as many of the women involved in the event during its history (less than 10%) to try and make it look as if there were, er, more than 10%. The Ball began when John Cleese, an Amnesty donor, promised to "get a few pals together" for a comedy benefit gig. That, in sum, after many thousands of years of socio-political analysis, is a brisk encapsulation of the boys' club employment methodology. Amnesty magazine writes that the pals "included most of the Monty Python team...Peter Cook and Alan Bennett, Dame Edna Everage (a white man, not a dame called Edna), Neil Innes, Eleanor Bron, the Goodies and more." Pretty sure the "and more" didn't secretly cover 10-odd women.

A small image of the poster advertising the musical performances for the third Secret Policeman's Ball shows just two solo women - Kate Bush and Joan Armatrading - and 10 male solo or all-male group acts (Duran Duran, Lou Reed, Peter Gabriel. Mark Knopfler, Erasure, Jackson Browne, Bob Geldof, Nik Kershaw, David Gilmour and Chet Aitkens). The extreme sex and race marginalisation, for an event and a charity purporting to be about global human rights, is shocking. Amnesty are demonstrating with typical conviction and more than 30 years' countable commitment to cultural femicide that when putting together an event in support of global human rights and free speech, you must get as many white men to perform as humanly, globally, rightfully possible.

I have counted up the other namechecks of Policeman's Ball participants on the subsequent magazine pages, making sure there are no duplicate mentions. On the comedy and acting side Amnesty namechecks 31 men: Russell Howard, Jason Manford, Russell Peters, Russell Brand, Michael Palin, Eric Idle, Darvid Armand, Peter Ustinov, The Might Boosh (2 men), Terry Jones, Al Murray, Rowan Atkinson, Harry Enfield, Stephen Fry, Sean Lock, Nigel Tufnel, Vic Reeves, Alexei Sayle, Billy Connolly, Jasper Carrot, Phil Cool, Lenny Henry, Emo Philips, Fry and Laurie, Richard E Grant, Jeremy Irons, Tim Minchin, Lou Reed, Richard Branson. They also mention the cast of Goodness Gracious Me but don't name them. It mentions just 8 solo women comedians: Connie Booth, Jennifer Saunders, Shappi Khorsandi, Ruby Wax, Victoria Wood, Sarah Millican, Sarah Silverman and Kristin Schaal.

On the music side, in addition to the 2 women/10 male acts poster I mentioned earlier, the magazine joyfully namechecks 13 all-male or solo male, pretty much all white acts: Bono, Sting, Donovan, Badly Drawn Boy, Stereophonics, Eric Clapton, Peter Gabriel, John Williams, Razorlight, child abuse image downloader Pete Townsend, Bryan Adams, Jeff Beck and the Neville Brothers. It mentions just 2 women: Julie Korvington (from 1977) and Natalie Imbruglia, who was actually part of a skit in which comedian David Armand performed an interpretive dance to Imbruglia's hit single Torn. Yep, why celebrate a woman's success when you can laugh at it?

Even the special tearjerker hero-victim-fighter-survivor mentions are all male, except one. Femi Kuti mentions the persecution of his father, Fela Kuti; and Turkish musician Sanar Yurdatapan is mentioned. The Burmese comedian Zarganar is mentioned for his political activities but the great thing is that even his persecution helps the boys' club: a German comedian called Michael Mittermeier gets the opportunity to have an adventure by travelling to Burma with another guy, director Rex Bloomstein, to make a film about Zarganar. Mittermeier is photographed with the caption: "As a comedian the right to freedom of expression is precious to me, I simply couldn't exist without it."

Well, lucky, lucky you, to be part of such a wonderful and giving society, in which others' suffering is a chance to help your public profile and an event put on by an international human rights charity, in a large and diverse country like America, with a global audience, spanning the worlds of music, acting and comedy talent, will still make damn sure that 90% of its roster gives the biggest career, reputation and publicity props to gents just like yourself.

The token woman hero-victim-fighter-survivor is Aayat Al-Qormozi, who was "detained, tortured, given an unfair trial and sentenced to a year in prison after reading out a poem critical of the Bahraini king at a pro-reform rally."

I wonder how many women were on the roster at that rally. Be funny if it was the same proportion as at Amnesty International's Secret Policeman's Ball.

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Greta and Boris by Sian Norris

2012-01-26T21:26:00.004Z

A new kids’ book gets a monster miaow of approval. Now agents and publishers must get on board to help make it a hit.

Much is being made of the rise of self-publishing, documented excellently by the Guardian in a series of informative articles here, here, here and here. Its big star is the fantasy novelist Amanda Hocking, whose latest book Switched is out now and brilliant. Bestselling novelist Polly Courtney has opted for self-publishing after hitting the headlines last year when she took a firm stand against her major publishers for giving her highly successful novels - ironically, novels about strong modern women negotiating sexist environments like banking and lads' magazine publishing - a series of objectifying and belittling 'chick-lit' covers. I fully support her stance, which she has made out of principle and at risk to her own thriving career on an issue which many women writers feel extremely strongly about. Given that publishing is itself dominated by countless highly gifted women it is an extremely odd feeling for one's work to be betrayed, belittled and sold out in this way. Courtney's great reputation both as a writer and a seller will ensure that the shift to self-publishing is not too damaging.

I am still generally circumspect about self-publishing, however. Book by book, all other issues excluded, the terms of sales royalties might be more advantageous for self-publishers than those meagre percentages offered in standard contracts by publishing houses. But publishers give an author many other things besides royalty agreements: expertise and experience; advances on proposed books; the support of often massive and longstanding institutions who will strengthen a book’s success through editing, scheduling, advertising, marketing, press tours and the placing of review copies; controlled and supported career longevity through carefully negotiated multiple book deals; promotion and representation in bookshops, the media (from submissions to Radio 4’s Book of the Week to serialisation rights in newspapers) and on Amazon; an international network of established contacts and colleagues including an author’s agent and various foreign and translation rights holders – and much more.

The writers who’ve thrived through self publishing seem numerous until you compare them to the billions of also-rans, chancers, deluded nutballs, embittered failures, self-justifiers, desperados and talentless floggers putting out their unreadable how-to guides, mumbling memoirs, cheesy erotica and seemingly never-ending speculative fiction series for no-one to buy. In self-publishing, as in all gambling, the odds are weighted in favour of the house. There are some blazing successes, but they are massively outnumbered by the countless unsensational failures that we never hear about. You may be able to self-publish your book, but building a stable career which is acknowledged and supported by other professionals, recognised by your peers as authentic and legitimate and that leads to further flourishing is another thing altogether. It requires not just writing talent but strategic skill, financial shrewdness, flexibility, business instincts, tenacity and proficiency at a host of subsidiary tasks from jacket design to typesetting to editing to account-keeping.

However. I have just been sent a short self-published children’s book which I love and want to publicise here. A glowing review follows – so glowing that I should state in advance that I am not personal friends with the book’s author, Sian Norris. I met her once at a speaking event she organised and invited me to in March 2011. When she mentioned that she was starting her own self-publishing company I was interested and asked her to send me something when it launched.

Sian Norris’s book is called Greta and Boris and it’s self-published through Crooked Rib Publishing, an offshoot of Norris’s sharply written blog. Greta and Boris is touching, exciting, cheeky and vivid, with wonderful characters, a strong narrative and sudden delightful details. I believe it deserves an established agent and a major publisher to pick it up and sell it in translation all over the world, lightly edited, boosted by wonderful illustrations all the way through. I would then like them to give Norris a multi-book deal so that her characters can go on further adventures. Later, I would like to see the books converted into gorgeous television cartoons or animations for the world’s kids to watch and love. Given the many below-par books I’ve been sent by publishers over the years, Greta and Boris easily exceeds the general standard of publishability. Now follows some brief industry chat, for prospective editors. Greta and Boris is billed as a children’s novel but is more of a tale or fable – a fast and picaresque vision quest in which a young hero finds her destiny and with it, of course, her inner strength, which she had all along. It’s a standalone work which should boil down to 90 pages when edited. It’s suitable for 7-9 year old readers and is structured in such a way that it can be read or acted out to younger kids too.

Now the fun stuff. Be warned, plot spoilers follow.

Greta has been left alone for the summer and is anticipating a long, lazy season of book reading and toast eating in the company of her pet Russian Blue cat, Boris, under the unscrutinous non-supervision of her absent-minded aunt. Yet on the first day of the holidays, Greta discovers that Boris has disappeared. He’s been kidnapped by the Rat King, a tiny tyrant with a huge ego that’s squealing for attention. Just as Greta’s beginning to panic, she is visited by an elegant cat stranger, Kyrie Mi-ke, who tells her that Boris is more than just an ordinary cat.

No, Boris is not an M&S cat, he’s the crown prince of the Kingdom of Cats and his father, King Marmaduke Nikolai Whiskers Blue, has sent Kyrie to collect Boris’s human to save him. Only Greta – assisted by the famous warrior, Kyrie Mi-ke – can take on such a challenge... but first they must cross a sea made of milk, a war-torn land of racist mice (white against brown, all squeaking in mousy rage), communities of migratory birds living above cloud level, a millpond which shows the observer their true reflection and much more besides.

What follows is an adventure that is both heartstopping and heartmelting, at once sentimental and comfortingly predictable (in the best way: we trust in sleek Kyrie’s guidance and know that Greta will triumph in the end) and pacy and unexpected. The story’s sprinkled with sparkling details, with each location fully realised and a joy to traverse.

The Kingdom of Cats is a lavish Renaissance society, hierarchical and elegant. When the cat nobles wake up “the adult cats started cooking mice or kippers and heating the milk” while in the royal palace breakfast is served by black and white waiter cats bringing “a selection of fried mice and delicately poached salmon...biscuits, bird wings and a number of extra specially ordered items, manufactured cat food being a particular (though disapproved) favourite of the young prince Sweep.” The calm arrogance of cat society confirms what I have long suspected: that “contrary to popular belief, humans don’t own their cats – the cats are assigned to look after the humans.” Boris even has a picture of ‘his’ human, Greta, on the wall in his cat palace bedroom.

Norris has taken every care to differentiate and individuate this society, with the lightest of knowing nods to traditions of cat worship in Egypt, China, Japan and beyond, and to the beauty of different breeds. It turns out that all cats can speak their humans’ languages but choose not to as, Kyrie explains patiently to a boggling Greta, “it would be like you speaking French when you didn’t have to.”

However, again, this is not some twee animal book about plucky talking cats and four-legged anthropomorphs. Greta is the central character and she receives from Kyrie a wondrous education about feline life, which she has overlooked when comfortably ensconced in her trendily ethno-friendly smug existence. She lives in a big, rambling house full of her parents’ work. They are curators and writers, currently in Botswana examining the natives’ wares and helping their own careers. The animal world is a much more dangerous, equal, varied and interesting place by comparison. In a beautiful set piece at the beginning of the adventure, Norris writes,

They had passed towns and villages of mice and voles, the boating communities in the brooks and streams, the bats and birds working the telegraph service, the tunnels that led to the underground cities of what Kyrie referred to darkly as ‘the dogs’ but which Greta understood to mean foxes and badgers. When asked this, Kyrie had just spat and said how all dogs were just one big pain to her.

Quest narratives are a much-loved genre which she tackles with great lightness and ease – and brevity (length being the big tedious dragging millstone of countless duff quest books). Hung with featherweight delicacy around the central adventure are lessons of great human import for Greta. She arbitrates in a squalid fight between the brown and white mice and reveals how she herself has been bullied at school. It requires all Kyrie’s encouragement, at the beginning, to convince Greta that she can indeed save Boris. There are allusions (never leaden, worthy or obstructive) to climate change, bigotry, the balance of ecosystems, humans’ disruption of nature and predatory animal peace pacts. Norris’s world is one in which trouble and discord can always be overcome by mutual respect, friendship and peace. The central relationships – between Greta and Boris, between Kyrie Mi-ke and the royal cat family, between the cats and other animals – have a sweet warmth, depicted with an innocent optimism that is ultimately extremely touching and life-affirming.

In a great, fun passage the warrior cat Kyrie Mi-ke recounts her adventures from sub-continental jungles to African plains to New York and Hollywood via the neon of Tokyo. The final word goes to this finest of felines:

Kyrie smiled and bowed her beautiful head. “Your Highness. A good warrior always knows when to return to her land.”

Agents and publishers: Kyrie’s, Greta’s and Boris’s adventures are far from over. Get involved in Sian Norris’s weird, wild, wonderful world and give her talent the showcase it deserves.

Greta and Boris by Sian Norris is published by Crooked Rib. You can buy it here.

I like some casual sexism with my popcorn and some harassment with my pistachios

2012-01-20T19:42:00.001Z

I am writing at 7:07pm and have just watched five minutes of Inside Hollywood on Channel 5 USA, where the films Man On A Ledge and The Artist were covered and news of a possible Beetlejuice sequel announced. Then the male presenter said, "Now here's some news that'll have most men running for the hills," announced the Sex and the City prequel and mentioned that it will cover Carrie & co's 1980s coming of age "as they begin to ask questions about sex, relationships, love and family and discover Manhattan." The feature lasted perhaps a minute, but a minute is too long for just one sexist sneer. He ended his announcement with the words, "We can't wait. To go out. When it's on." Here's my take on the men who don't hide their loathing, disdain and hate of SATC - and any film which contains (a) more than one woman, (b) where the women are friends with each other, (c) where the women aren't suffering, oppressed, struggling or in pain.

I have been at home today so have had a break from the endemic sexism of everything. Last night was the launch for The Pleasures of Men by Kate Williams, which I attended. Oh...blue-black metallic full-sleeved American Apparel skintight bodycon dress with a high scoop neck, one long kingfisher green satin glove, a full gauntlet of silver cuffs over the top, 100% pure fake diamante stud earrings, black tights with black knee-high socks over the top, patent leather cancan boots and a long silver clutch bag. Yup. Had two glasses of cranberry juice and heard some funny anecdotes about the following:

1. A woman who has a phobia about vomiting. This phobia has destroyed her life. As I commented, "One oughtn't laugh."
2. A novel in which nothing happens except for a woman going down the stairs and almost opening the door. In the climax of the novel she opens the door and goes out. Me: "What's the twist? She's dead. No? Where's her husband? He's dead, she killed him. No? See, this is why I like bodice-busters."
3. An Iranian film in which a little girl goes to buy a goldfish on New Year's Day. The goldfish shop is about to close. The girl drops her money down the grate. Can she fish it out and get her fish? My friend: "At that moment it's like, be still my heart."
4. A series of insider stories, too excruciating to print, about Booker prize judges who've gone up to shortlisted authors on the night itself to tell them they almost won and that it was between them and the ultimate winner. Top agent: "If you almost won you've still lost."

It was an excellent party for an excellent publication, held in a wood-panelled function room in the crypt at St Martins in the Fields.

I left at around 9:10pm (oh... navy blue full length stiff military coat, bespoke, 1950s vintage, emerald green wool scarf, rough burnt-orange suede slouch bag) and was stopped dead by three guys walking towards me on a very crowded St Martin's Lane, just outside Pret. Short guys, between 20 and 23 I'd say, two brown-Hispanic, one black. Portuguese? South American? Singaporean? In expensive, clean, comfortable studenty clothes: baggy jeans, puffy trainers, jackets with plaid shirts underneath and backpacks. Either international students or tourists, travelling to make sure that no women in any part of the globe should remain free of harassment.

"All right, darling. How are you doing?" he asks in good, clipped English, with an openly jeering voice and face.

He's staring hard into my eyes with that classic sneer+leer hate combo which all women know. His two friends are also stopped and staring into my face, cockily posed, grinning, delighted, expectant, watching for my reaction. Oh, they really do love to bait and harass women on the street, don't they? They find it entertaining. This is what my guy got, straight into his face:

Me: What, you want to do a bit on on-street sexual harassment at nine o'clock in the evening?
Him [face falling]: What?
Me: Sexual harassment is against the law.
Him: No.
Me: Sexual harassment is against the law.
Him [Beginning to panic]: No... I didn't.
Me: Sexual harassment is against the law and I'll call the police if you don't shut up.

They hastened away.

That's the way to do it, sisters, B-style.

Penguin Books, I'm going to gift you with some solidarity

2012-01-18T17:47:00.006Z

Dear Penguin Books UK,

Thank you so much for the New Year package you sent me. It was unexpected and delightful, especially the chocolate Santa, which went down a treat, head first. Over the last year I have supported three great books published by you: The Kid by Sapphire, for which I interviewed the author both in the Guardian and onstage at the Edinburgh International Book Festival; All That I Am by Anna Funder, a major novel which I covered in-depth here for free; and The Pleasures of Men, the first novel by historian Kate Williams, whom I interviewed for The Guardian this week, in glowing terms.

I hope it is obvious from this that I like to stand up for my sisters and am not a handmaiden of the patriarchy. Handmaiden business (I believe "grovelling" is the technical term) is boring, submissive, thankless, degrading - and not reciprocated. The reason I am a women's cultural advocate is because of the marked, obvious and ubiquitous belittlement, marginalisation and under-representation of women in culture and particularly the literary scene, despite women being the vast and overwhelming majority of supporters of all arts both within and without the industry. Some call it the glass ceiling, I call it cultural femicide.

Your surprise package contained five books, of which only one was by a woman: it was Sue Townsend's Diary of Adrian Mole, which I already have, as it's a classic. It was written decades ago. The other books were by Roald Dahl and three current books by Rob Brydon, Lee Evans and J P Davidson. Evans's book is blah. Dahl is a matter of taste - savage, cruelly funny and vivid. I have to admit, I do not respect men who write much-loved children's books but are shit, useless, absent fathers themselves. Brydon's book is gentle, witty, thoughtful and well-written although how much can you do with a person to whom not much has happened?

Davidson's book, Planet Word, accompanies the TV series of the same name, which was presented by Stephen Fry, who wrote the foreword for the book. Planet Word is highly readable, thorough, wideranging, entertaining and impressively complex. In a punchy yet never dumbed-down fashion it covers everything from the origins of language to sign language, dialect development, 'dead' and resurrected languages, swearing and slang, innuendo and euphemism, codes, translation, alphabets, printing, dictionaries, the use of language in advertising and propaganda and much more.

It almost completely ignores women. The final part, The Power and the Glory, has chapters specifically referencing Homer, James Joyce, Hollywood screenwriter William Goldman, Yeats, Shakespeare and Bob Dylan and no women. The vast, near-total, more-than-97% majority of the several hundreds of experts, academics, researchers, quoters, endorsers, literary names, interviewees, case studies, editors, critics, writers or anything-at-all mentioned on every page of the book, which I have read in full, for free and on my own time, are white men.

On Planet Word, women barely exist. Davidson's bibliography at the back of the book covers works of poetry, fiction, social science, anthropology, reportage, literary criticism and cultural commentary and spans many decades. It names 63 male authors and only 7 women, of whom 2 have co-authored books with men. 2 of the books are sole authored by women and one is co-written by 2 women. The last is a collection edited by Nancy Mitford. Of the 63 men recommended in the bibliography, the overwhelming majority of whom are sole authors, several (David Crystal, Henry Hitchins, Stephen Pinker and Christopher Ricks) have had at least 3 separate titles mentioned. It is made insultingly clear just which inhabitants of Planet Word are considered worth reading in any genre or field, from any time, with any approach or structure or voice, and which are not.

As ever, bias is made absolutely obvious by people's behaviour, with comical transparency. What's so funny - as if I weren't already laughing so merrily that I can barely type - is what Davidson's acknowledgements reveal about the way male power is supported by countless highly competent, intelligent and efficient women and how it is then used, taken and passed on by the man to help... other men. Virtually all the behind the scenes work is done by women. The editors of the book at Penguin are both women - Laura Herring and Louise Moore. The production team for the TV series are all women - Annie Macnee, Lucy Wallace, Lucy Tate and Clare Bennett - while the sound and editing are all men (nice traditional divisions). The "back-up" team at the production company are all women - Gina Carter, Zoe Rocha, Emily Martin. The BBC series was commissioned by a woman and a man - Mark Bell and Janice Hadlow.

But, when it comes to the people who are bigged up in lavish terms as on-screen experts, analysts and endorsers, rather than sheer labour, Davidson gives a list of 4 men and just 2 women. "In particular I would like to thank," he continues, then mentions four more men, all writers and commentators, one of whom is the literary editor I mentioned in this column, who turned down a (future prize-winning) novel with the words, "Oh, don't you know I never read women's fiction?"

This is the kind of utterly naturalised, casual, automatic and endemic bullshit that women writers, academics, editors, experts, artists, politicians, producers, directors, medics, journalists, lawyers, scientists, thinkers, activists, students and speakers encounter all day, every day. Meanwhile, dozens of women work diligently behind the scenes, using all their energy and expertise to ensure that a woman-ignoring, woman-exploiting man is a success, in an area of cultural life where (as any publishing person knows) women make up the great majority of readers and literary festival attendees. I do not use up my time helping to sell copies of books that feature 63 men and 7 women writers in their bibliographies, when we all know that (again) the vast and overwhelmingly major majority of purchasers, readers, writers, promoters, agents, editors, PRs, executives and production managers of books are women. For a book about words and language, and in a field where, again-yet-again, the overwhelming majority of language and English teachers, literature academics, literature students, creative writing students, library workers and translators are women, Planet Word delivers us a good hard slap in the face, just so we know who's boss.

Penguin, I have faithfully done my duty. I studied your books, including those by authors who've made it totally obvious that they will not be reading anything at all by any woman (or inviting her to speak on a major TV series) on any topic or genre or category, from any decade, although they will happily use up women's labour to help their own careers and then promote other men. I have now put all the books in my recycling bin and they have been taken away to be made into deluxe Charmin for women to wipe their bottoms on, in the spare moments between doing the lion's share of all domestic labour + childcare + exploited full-time work outside the house, just under the glass ceiling + trying to fight seemingly intractable cultural contempt in which their achievements, words, thoughts and ideas are ignored as if we do not exist as intellectuals, only as workhorses.

I am grateful for one thing, however. The manworshipping package contained a list of fresh, original and exciting new releases for Spring 2012, many of which caught my eye and which I am delighted to preview here. The overwhelming majority of the books on Penguin's list are by women. They are all extremely strong titles in their categories or genres. The list makes it clear that Penguin is obviously a supporter of women's talents, a sharp observer of readers' interests and a champion of smart, exciting books by new and established voices. So, what happened? I do not consider it any kind of New Year's gift to be given the opportunity to worship men who seem unaware that women exist as anything other than plentiful, useable (and usually overworked and underpaid) labour, diligent workers to be thanked briefly in the acknowledgements after 300+ pages, multiple Notes and a full Bibliography from which they have been rigorously, near-totally excluded.

Here are some great-sounding Penguin titles for Spring 2012:

The Pleasures of Men by Kate Williams. A darkly thrilling trawl through murky Victorian London as a young woman becomes obsessed by a notorious serial killer, The Man of Crows. Out now. A link to my Guardian article on this is here.
The Woman Who Went To Bed For A Year by Sue Townsend. Townsend brings her classic blend of social satire, sharp observation and broad comedy to the story of a woman who decides to ditch the Fantasy Dream Wife And Mommy identity, tell society to go stuff itself and retire to bed, leaving her ungrateful brats and husband to Deal With It. I cannot wait to read this. It's out on 1st March.
The Chaperone by Laura Moriarty. Looks like a slick and fast jaunt through 1920s Broadway as New York's lights beguile two women who dive into its roaring 20s flappery delights. I love this kind of aspirational, glam, brittle-edged story. Out 26th April.
The biggest 'event' on the list will be Saved by Cake by Marian Keyes, an enormously popular author of genius (and former Orange Prize judge, yo!) whose books have been unjustly belittled as 'mere' 'chick-lit' but who is screamingly funny and has the gift of tackling any topic from alcoholism to domestic abuse in a way that is utterly natural, realistic and often heartbreaking. There is nothing lightweight about this author, she is prolific, fearless, intelligent, frank and enormously gifted. So it has been a real blow to fans to learn of her struggle with depression ...a struggle which she's won, with typical wit, through the Zen of Baking. Keyes starts out as a total kitchen novice who bakes a cake for a friend and realises that her spirits are rising along with her sponges. This book describes how she kneaded, beat, whisked, rolled and cooked her depression away. I even love the cover, a pastel and turquoise spoof of the Dream Mommy Domestic Goddess manuals which seem to be all the retrosexist rage these days. The book's out on 26th February.

There is now a very brief Mumsnet thread on this, in which one comment really stood out:

Bidisha's post ... highlights that the majority of the behind-the-scenes people who make things happen in the book/meedja/culture world are women... but the people in the spotlight are still mostly men.

My first job was at a company which, like Penguin, was owned by Pearson. We were all invited to the Pearson AGM and I vividly remember sitting in the hall amidst fellow employees who were probably 80% female. On stage was a woman - our ceo, Marjorie Scardino - surrounded by several middle-aged men in grey suits. The disparity between the gender balance of the employees and the gender balance of the top management struck me very forcibly...

Join the Writers Bloc

2012-01-16T15:25:00.005Z

This week sees the launch of Writers Bloc, an admirable and wideranging new international project bringing the greatest minds to the biggest issues. In a series of politicised, topical and necessary essays, the world's leading global writers submit original commentary, reportage and analysis about education internationally. The project has already garnered much-deserved coverage all over the world and includes Petina Gappah, Nick Laird, Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, Aleksander Hemon, Zadie Smith, Rachel Holmes, Nathalie Handal and Kamila Shamsie as project contributors. Kamila Shamsie has written an excellent essay about Writers Bloc in the Guardian. The writers have covered issues in Palestine, Haiti, Nepal, Bosnia, Bangladesh, India and Zimbabwe, amongst many other places, and are part of a new urgency in global protest, intellectual and ideological ferment, proposed reform and politically-infused arts activism. For quick links to the Writers Bloc essays and news-bites please check their Twitter stream. Or better yet, attend the launch of Writers Bloc at the Free Word Centre in London tomorrow. If you can't make this event, it will be streamed live so you can watch it on your computer.

UPDATE, as at 10.2.12. You can now enjoy:

The live stream clips of the launch event
The audio recording of Riz MC’s response to the event here
Guernica Magazine's website where the Writers Bloc essays are published, including Kamila Shamsie's article on Pakistan and Rachel Holmes’ article on Palestine
Further news of the Writers Bloc and Free Word Centre in partnership

Being stuck on the Tube really is the (arm)pits

2012-01-16T14:41:00.000Z

Look out for artist and activist Sarah Maple's posters, up at Angel Tube station over the next few days. I like them. Maple is a highly successful young artist who has exhibited across Europe and was the winner of Channel 4/the Saatchi Gallery's 4 New Sensations art prize, amongst many other achievements. She specialises in poster and photography art, including one I commented on last summer, The Opposite To A Feminist is an Arsehole. She will be showing at the Aubin Gallery in London for a month from 9th February 2012. Kick off the new art year with a look at her fresh, cool, clever, politicised and great-looking work.

Women of the World 2012: advance announcement

2011-12-21T23:32:00.005Z

Delighted to pass on this press release:

SOUTHBANK CENTRE’S WOW FESTIVAL RETURNS IN 2012 AND GOES INTERNATIONAL

Friday 2 – Sunday 4 March, Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, Baltimore, USA
Wednesday 7 – Sunday 11 March, Southbank Centre, London UK

WOW – Women of the World, Southbank Centre’s festival, which launched in 2011, returns for a second year in 2012 to present, recognise and celebrate women on both sides of the Atlantic. Coinciding with International Women’s Day on Thursday 8 March, the festival of live music, talks, debates, theatre, film and comedy returns to Southbank Centre for a second year and launches in Baltimore USA for the first time in March 2012.

WOW Baltimore will take over the home of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra (BSO) - the Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall – from March 2 to 4 2012. The BSO’s Music Director and Southbank Centre Artist in Residence Marin Alsop and Southbank Centre’s Artistic Director Jude Kelly are co-Artistic Directors of WOW Baltimore, and the centrepiece will be Voices of Light, a remarkable combination of the 1928 film The Passion of Joan of Arc with a score by Richard Einhorn, conducted by Marin Alsop.

WOW 2012 at Southbank Centre will again feature some of the best female musicians and performers including performances by Sinéad O’Connor, Emmy The Great, Sarah Gillespie, Duo DorT and the return of EQUALS Live 2012 to the Royal Festival Hall – a joyous showcase of the best female singers united in a call for gender equality. Sandi Toksvig will host Mirth Control – March of the Women 2012, featuring comedian Jo Brand and a women-only orchestra, and Birds Eye View will present an evening of new musical scores by composers Tanya Auclair, Anna Meredith and Roshi to three silent films, celebrating the work of screen icon and movie mogul Mary Pickford. Theatre will be provided by Lisa Dwan in a one woman-play about filicide, and producers Fuel, who will be sharing stories of inspiring women through a participatory installation and performances.

There will be another impressive line-up of speakers and debates with talks from scientist Jocelyn Bell Burnell, India’s first female police officer and social activist Dr Kiran Bedi and British entrepreneur and explorer Alex Foley, who was the first female fire-arms expert at Sotheby’s. Panel discussions will cover the challenges of global feminism, how world finance affects women’s lives, women and the Arab Spring, the politics of hair and sessions on how to ask for a pay rise. The festival will also include the announcement of the long list for the Orange Prize for Fiction.

Led by Southbank Centre's Artistic Director Jude Kelly, WOW – Women of the World festival emerged from an unprecedented series of consultations with hundreds of individuals, organisations and figureheads, with input from a steering committee including Rosie Boycott, Shami Chakrabati, Baroness Helena Kennedy QC, Catherine Mayer, Gauri Sharma Tripathi, Kate Mosse, Gail Rebuck, Frances Osborne and Sandi Toksvig.

Through WOW – Women of the World festival, Southbank Centre aims to contribute to the empowerment of women and girls on a year-round basis. As part of WOW 2012, Southbank Centre is working with London schools, including Mulberry School for Girls in Tower Hamlets, to programme a conference for an invited group of school girls and their mothers to discuss what makes a great 21st century education for girls. Southbank Centre will build on the success of the 2011 speed-mentoring sessions by offering more tailored and in depth speed-mentoring opportunities across a breadth of subjects and industries, as part of an ongoing commitment to developing and promoting mentoring schemes for women.

Jude Kelly OBE, Artistic Director of Southbank Centre said:

Throughout history, many women’s achievements have gone unnoticed or unsung. I created WOW - Women of the World Festival to celebrate the formidable power of women to make change happen, to remind us of our history, to draw attention to injustice, to enjoy each other’s company and to encourage men to add their support as we set out to achieve a fairer world. I was overwhelmed by the positive response to WOW in 2011 and am excited to build on this success with another great festival at Southbank Centre in 2012 and our first international WOW in Baltimore.

Over 8,000 people attended more than 100 events at WOW 2011 and the festival was a great success – from the women-only orchestra to the Equals Live concert with Annie Lennox, Paloma Faith, Kate Nash and V V Brown; the special edition of Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour broadcast from Southbank Centre, a talks and debates programme featuring everyone from Bianca Jagger, Shami Chakrabarti, Jyoti Mhapsekar and Joanna Trollope to Helena Kennedy, Juliet Stevenson and Lynne Franks and the hugely popular speed-mentoring events.

Full details of the talks and debates programme at WOW – Women of the World 2012 at Southbank Centre will be announced early next year. You can book online here. Details of performances at WOW – Women of the World 2012 at Southbank Centre - are listed below:

Wednesday 7 March

BESIDE THE SEA

Wednesday 7 – Thursday 8 March, 8pm Purcell Room at Queen Elizabeth Hall, £15

Beside the Sea is a one-woman play about a mother who is driven to extremes of mental and physical despair, performed by Lisa Dwan. Taking on the theme of infanticide with tenderness and bravery, this is a story of irrational fear, where love crosses the border into violence. Adapted from Beside the Sea by Veronique Olmi, translated into English by Adriana Hunter. Directed by Steven Atkinson. In association with Peirene Press.

WOW DEBATES & TALKS PROGRAMME

Weekend pass £30 (£15 concessions). Day passes available for £12 (£6 concessions)
Running alongside the concerts and performances, WOW will include a series of debates, workshops, performances and networking and mentoring opportunities across the Southbank Centre site from 9am to 7pm each day. Throughout the festival there will be space for meeting, networking and exchanging ideas. WOW will also include speed-mentoring opportunities and the chance to browse a free market all weekend, with stalls including a hair stylist and a finance clinic.

PHENOMENAL PEOPLE: FUEL

Friday 9 – Sunday 11 March, 11am-3pm Fri, 11am – 7pm Sat and Sun, White Room at Royal Festival Hall, Free to day pass holders
In an installation created by Natasha Chivers, Lizzie Clachan and Melanie Wilson, guest artists will tell their stories of inspiring women, and digital artist Stef Lewandowski will transpose them to an online space, in which audiences across the digital realm will be able to interact, as participants, with the stories and dedications created by the event.

DUODORT: QUANTULUM – FRIDAY LUNCH

Central Bar at Royal Festival Hall, 1pm, Free
Formed in 2003 by pianists Kate Halsall and Semra Kurutaç, Duo DorT specialise in contemporary music combining the powers of piano duo, keyboard and electronics in any combination. They have performed and commissioned music from a wide range of leading composers of today. Their intriguing new project Quantulum features commissions from six young female composers – Kerry Andrew, Christine Abdelnour, Ailís Ní Ríain, Helena Gough, Yuko Ohara and Elo Masing - and is supported by Arts Council England and PRS for Music Foundation. The name Duo DorT is a fusion of the pair’s combined British and Turkish roots. Duo, meaning a partnership of two players and dort (or dört in Turkish) translating as the number four; two pianists, four hands. Their first EP Triple Point has just been released on the Squeaky Kate label.

SARAH GILLESPIE – FRIDAY TONIC

The Clore Ballroom at Royal Festival Hall, 5.30pm, Free
Musically Sarah Gillespie’s sound is a melting-pot of urban-folk and middle-eastern blues. Described as “streetwise and romantic, tender and tough” by the Daily Telegraph, her lyrically driven songs are conveyed with a powerfully sensuous voice and deft finger-picking guitar. With her distinctive delivery, Gillespie is a passionate and formidable storyteller – wrestling with the toils of life, love and yearning in a style that blends everyday banter with raw poetry. Performing with her quartet for WOW, Gillespie creates a mix of emotive ballads, raucous gypsy swing, blues and vaudeville - not to mention some wild Arabic-infused flourishes courtesy of regular collaborator Israeli-born Gilad Atzmon. However, within all of this, the influences of Bob Dylan, Tom Waits and the Velvet Underground can clearly be heard. "Totally original music… Sarah Gillespie is brilliant, the bee’s knees" - Robert Wyatt.

SOUTHBANK CENTRE PRESENTS EQUALS LIVE

Royal Festival Hall, 7.30pm, £35/£40/£45/£50
One of the highlights of the Women of the World festival, Southbank Centre Presents EQUALS Live will again bring together some of the most powerful female talent in contemporary music today. The concert will celebrate the strength and unity of women across generations and mark the 101st anniversary of International Women’s Day, recognising women’s accomplishments and raising awareness of the inequalities and challenges that women still face and inviting a new generation to come together and call for gender equality. Line up to be announced.

BIRDS EYE VIEW SOUND AND SILENTS – MARY PICKFORD REVIVED

Purcell Room at Queen Elizabeth Hall, 8pm, £15
Birds Eye View, the UK's leading celebration of women filmmakers, returns with another programme of specially commissioned live music to silent film. Celebrating screen icon and movie mogul Mary Pickford (1892 – 1979), three new female composers (Tanya Auclair, Anna Meredith and Roshi) premiere new scores live to three silent films. Canadian born Mary Pickford was the first female actor not only to produce her own work but also to have complete control of advertising, choice of directors and final cut. She co-founded the American film studio United Artists and throughout the 1910s and 1920s, Pickford was believed to be the most famous woman in the world due to her prolific acting career. Three films from Pickford’s career – The New York Hat (1912), The Female of the Species (1912), and Amarilly of Clothes-Line Alley (1918) will be screened to a live score by three contemporary female artists: Anna Meredith is an in-demand composer/performer of acoustic and electronica, Welsh-born Roshi absorbs Iranian influences in her experimental folk, and multi-instrumentalist Tanya Auclair merges British, Rwandan and Canadian roots. Audiences can expect the unexpected as the sounds of today meet the pictures of a century ago in this rich and exciting line up.

Saturday 10 March

WOW DEBATES & TALKS PROGRAMME
Weekend pass £30 (£15 concessions). Day passes available for £12 (£6 concessions)
Running alongside the concerts and performances, WOW will include a series of debates, workshops, performances and networking and mentoring opportunities across the Southbank Centre site from 9am to 7pm each day. Throughout the festival there will be space for meeting, networking and exchanging ideas. WOW will also include speed-mentoring opportunities and the chance to browse a free market all weekend, with stalls including a hair stylist and a finance clinic.

SINÉAD O’CONNOR PLUS SUPPORT

Saturday 10 March, 7.30pm, Queen Elizabeth Hall, £22.50 / £27.50
Irish-born icon and iconoclast, Sinéad O'Connor has been making music, rejecting stereotypes and defying expectations for more than a quarter century. This year she performs from her new album, How About I Be Me (And You Be You)? which will be released on 21 February 2012.

EMMY THE GREAT

Saturday 10 March, 8pm, Queen Elizabeth Hall, £16/14
Two years after her critically acclaimed debut album First Love, Emmy The Great returns to WOW with songs from her new album Virtue. Taking the form of a series of personal myths that she refers to as 'digital medieval', Emmy confronts her life without fear accompanied by a string section that creates a strange, ambient, twisted and atmospheric music.

Sunday 12 March

MIRTH CONTROL: MARCH OF THE WOMEN 2012

Royal Festival Hall, 7.30pm, £25 / £20 / £15
One of the highlights of last year’s festival, Mirth Control: March of the Women, 2012 is back in the bigger venue of the Royal Festival Hall. Sandi Toksvig once again hosts a night of comedy, stories and music inspired by great women, with comedians including Jo Brand, and an astounding all-woman orchestra.

BookEnds, 1952-2012: 60 great Jewish books of the last 60 years.

2011-12-20T01:51:00.003Z

On the occasion of Jewish Book Week's 60th anniversary, the team have decided to attempt the impossible task of listing 60 great Jewish books of the last 60 years. They have done so, and the list is diverse in terms of genre, form, voice, politics, style, era, themes, market. This is from the press materials:

The discussions were so heated that at some stage the whole idea seemed doomed. This is a list which aims at reflecting what Jewish Book Week stands for: culturally Jewish, open minded, probing, consensual. To find out more about how the list came about, read the JBW blog, Bagels & Books. They are in alphabetical order and listed as fiction, drama, poetry, non fiction and children's books. [EDIT: I would add, the list covers everything from history, diary, memoir, political science and religion to contemporary realist and allegorical novels, minimal kids' fables and much more. There is laudable openness and diversity here. Of the 60 books, 11 are by women. 49 are by men.]

Now it's your turn. JBW would love as many people as possible to send in their "must have been on the list" choices via email or by posting on facebook. But remember, for every new book, another one has to go.

This is the official Jewish Book Week list of 60 great Jewish books of the last 60 years:

Aharon Appelfeld, Badenheim 1931
Saul Bellow, Mr Sammler's Planet
Linda Grant, When We Lived in Modern Times
Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate
David Grossman, See Under: Love
Joseph Heller, Good As Gold
Howard Jacobson, The Mighty Walzer
Thomas Keneally, Schindler's Ark
Imre Kertesz, Fatelessness
Jerzy Kosinski, The Painted Bird
Nicole Krauss, The History of Love
Bernard Malamud, The Fixer
Albert Memmi, The Pillar of Salt
Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces
Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness
Cynthia Ozick, The Shawl
Chaim Potok, The Chosen
Philip Roth, American Pastoral
Bernice Rubens, The Elected Member
Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated
Andre Schwartz-Bart, The Last of the Just
Isaac Bashevis Singer, Enemies - A Love Story
Art Spiegelman, Maus
Elie Wiesel, Night
Tony Kushner, Angels in America
Arthur Miller, The Price
Harold Pinter, The Birthday Party
Neil Simon, The Odd Couple
Arnold Wesker, Roots
Yehuda Amichai, Poems of Jerusalem
Leonard Cohen, Lyrics
Allen Ginsberg, Kaddish
Paul Celan, Poems
Dannie Abse, Ash on a Young Man’s Sleeve
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty
Bruno Bettelheim, Children of the Dream
Avraham Burg, The Holocaust is Over, We Must Rise from its Ashes
Anne Frank, The Diary of Anne Frank
Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust
John Gross, A Double Thread
Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man
Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes
Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation
Louis Jacobs, We Have Reason to Believe
Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Judaism, Human Values and the Jewish State
Primo Levi, If This Is a Man
Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope
Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Problem
Claudia Roden, The Book of Jewish Food
Leo Rosten, The Joys of Yiddish
Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference
Roman Vishniac, A Vanished World
Edmund de Waal, The Hare with Amber Eyes
Leon Wieseltier, Kaddish
George Steiner, Language and Silence
Adin Steinsaltz, The Talmud
Judith Kerr, When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit
Shel Silverstein, The Giving Tree
Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are

- JBW 2012 runs from 18th to 26th February at Kings Place in London.
- Read the JBW blog and listen or watch past talks here.
- ORT House, 126 Albert St, NW1 7NE Tel: 020 7446 8772

text (c) Jewish Book Week

Victim of vicious long-term sexual violence failed by Pakistan justice system

2011-12-17T22:54:00.000Z

Campaigning group Equality Now has issued an urgent alert after the brother of a teenager gang-raped by police has been shot dead outside a courthouse in Pakistan. The organisation is calling on government officials to protect 16-year-old Uzma Ayub and her family and to ensure justice in her case .

Equality Now is challenging the government of Pakistan to ensure justice in the case of this 16 year old gang rape victim. She was held captive for almost a year during which she was gang raped by a number of men including police officers. The rapes have resulted in her becoming pregnant. She has been fighting for justice with the support of her family and in particular her brother who was tragically shot dead outside the court house earlier this week by relatives of some of the accused police officers.

Equality Now is an international human rights advocacy charity working on issues of violence and discrimination against women and girls around the world. They work with grassroots women’s organisations in country in order to determine the best responses to women’s rights abuses. They have over 35,000 organisational and individual members in 160 countries. Their main areas of work are sex trafficking and prostitution, sexual violence, discrimination in law and practice and FGM.

More details of the case are as follows:

Uzma Ayub is from the Karak district in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan. She was abducted by police and held hostage for nearly a year, during which time she was repeatedly gang-raped by men whom allegedly included police officers and a civilian member of the Pakistani Army. On 9 December 2011, Equality Now learned that Uzma’s 25-year-old brother, Alamzeb Marwat, who had been supporting her pursuit of justice, was hit by a car and shot dead outside of a Karak court house while picking up legal documents with Uzma.

Following pressure from the media and local human rights groups, five men have now been arrested, though one is still at large. In light of this murder and ongoing threats against Uzma and her family, Equality Now is deeply concerned for their safety and has issued an Urgent Alert calling on Pakistani officials to ensure the family’s immediate protection; make certain that Uzma’s case is properly investigated and that all the perpetrators are prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law; protect local human rights organizations that are being threatened; and to bring Alamzeb’s killers to justice without delay.

“This case epitomizes all the problems with Pakistan’s justice system – a system that repeatedly fails victims of sexual violence,” says Equality Now’s Global Director Yasmeen Hassan. “First and foremost, police officers who perpetrate sexual violence enjoy widespread impunity for the crimes they commit, using terror tactics to intimidate victims who dare to bring such violations to the justice system.”

The abuse of women by police in Pakistan has been well documented and was the subject of a 106 page report released by Asia Watch and the Women’s Rights Project in the 1990s. Uzma’s horrific situation, which has left her eight months pregnant, is yet another example of this ongoing epidemic. Uzma’s family is continuing to try and fight for justice despite grave threats being made against them, rampant police corruption and a district court that has been slow to act. Equality Now has further learned that police officers have been putting pressure on members of the local community and encouraging fundamentalists in the area to demonstrate against the arrests of the accused.

Fundamentalist groups have also carried out protests against Uzma, accusing her of dishonoring her community and carrying an illegitimate child which they say should be aborted, and three local human rights organizations which have been assisting her. Currently the case is adjourned as some of the accused requested an out of court settlement with Uzma and her family – a settlement which the family has repeatedly refused. In fact, the murder occurred while Uzma and her brother attempted to get away from relatives and staff of the accused officers, who approached Alamzeb in an attempt to pressure him to accept a settlement. Though today the Peshawar High Court issued a notice that a high-level committee will investigate the case, Equality Now and local groups do not put much faith in this as a similar decree was made prior to Alamzeb’s murder.

Equality Now’s goal is to mobilize global public pressure so that Pakistani officials will properly and immediately address the violations committed against Uzma and her family, including those aimed at stalling her quest for justice. Pakistan is a signatory of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights which states that “all persons are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to the equal protection of the law.” Additionally, under their own Constitution, all citizens are considered equal before the law and are equally entitled to its protection. However as this case clearly demonstrates, this equality will never be achieved if the very people who are sworn to uphold its mandates are the very ones who are violating it. Says Hassan,

“Pakistan has just passed two important laws aimed at the protection of women from harmful practices, including acid throwing and forced marriages, demonstrating that there is political will to further women’s rights. But as a preliminary matter, the Government has to ensure that women are not violated by its own agents and that all perpetrators, starting with police officers, are brought to justice.”

To learn more visit http://www.equalitynow.org/
text (c) Equality Now from their press release

Happy Christmas, hipsters: a warming tale

2011-12-15T17:20:00.000Z

I'm in American Apparel on Carnaby Street (oh, just some knee-high socks in aqua blue, peach and yellow and a lime green leather pencil pouch) when a Fleetwood Mac song comes on the shop stereo. Slow gasps of joy from the boys and girls working in the shop.

Girl: Fleetwood Mac. I love Fleetwood Mac.
Boy [in wonder]: The Seventies....
Girl: Stevie Nicks is a goddess. She is a total legend.
Boy: When I was a baby, I couldn't sleep? My mum couldn't get me down to sleep. The only thing that put me to sleep was listening to Fleetwood Mac.

I know. Smile emoticon. Children say the cutest things.

Refugee women and the power of words

2011-12-15T16:36:00.000Z

The writer, campaigner and broadcaster Natasha Walter is the founder of an amazing organisation called Women for Refugee Women. Among many other activities and initiatives, they provide free English classes to women who have sought asylum. The women who come to the classes have all fled persecution and abuse of one kind or another, from imprisonment to trafficking for forced prostitution to honour crimes. These classes are taught by volunteers to about 40 women every week. The women who come to learn are desperate for education and since they are all living destitute or on benefits it's very hard for them to find classes that they can access.

Because these classes are unfunded the students and volunteer teachers are desperately in need of books. So we've made a wishlist on Amazon of books that they would love to be able to use; from dictionaries to graded readers. If you care about books and the power of words, you might like to buy a gift that would really make a difference to someone's life this Christmas. Please click on this link to view the list and feel free to flag up this notice to anyone you know who would be interested in participating and helping.

text (c) Women for Refugee Women

Ryanair: red hot fares, red hot sexism

2011-12-12T13:42:00.007Z

This, from Change.org:

In the new Pan Am series, Christina Ricci says to a customer with wandering hands, "I'm not included in the price of your ticket." Pan Am is supposedly a recent-historical drama series about the birth of air travel, set several decades ago... and yet, as we see, its depiction of sexism and harassment is still pertinent today. The Guardian have covered this in an excellent article, Flights of Fancy: The Truth About Female Cabin Crew.

The most recent perpetrator of sleaze-in-the-skies is Ryanair. Ryanair has a poor record when it comes to sexist advertising, but a newspaper advert they produced recently is their most offensive, sad and demeaning so far. Featuring a woman in her underwear with a finger in her knickers, the slogan proclaims "Red hot fares & crew!" As you can see from the charmingly retro ad on the left (setting it in the past makes it okay, as every sexist ad man knows), it looks as if the woman herself is being sold for a tenner, along with a freezing cold flight in a crumb-filled tin can, where the other passengers applaud upon landing because (a) they can't believe they have got back to the ground in one piece, and (b) they have never been on a plane before and are not v sophisticayted. Relax, Ryanair, I am only having a little bit of light-hearted bantering fun - the same kind you no doubt think you're having with this sad ad.

[UPDATE, as at 15th February 2012: the advert has now been banned by the ASA but the man behind it, Ryanair head of communications Stephen McNamara, has branded the ASA "PC quacks" for upholding human women's right not to be objectified as pieces of meat. Sexist men really are angry, aren't they? Much angrier than women's advocates. I mean, I write these articles all day, but I don't go completely mad and throw insults about when I do. I don't need to, because the gendered contempt I'm talking about is obvious. It's often simply a matter of looking, reading, counting. Misogyny-peddlers get angry when called on what is, after all, blatant and deliberate, as though they are victims rather than perpetrators, targets rather than attackers, subjects of punishment rather than malicious objectifiers whose actions have been questioned instead of passively accepted.]

Women throughout the airline industry are furious at Ryanair's attempt to cast female flight attendants in a predominantly sexual role, undoing years of work to change their image -- and possibly encouraging harassment and advances by male customers.

Ghada, a member of an airline cabin crew, started a petition on Change.org demanding that the advert be pulled immediately. Click here to sign Ghada’s petition and tell Ryanair to stop using this demeaning advert.

"My work colleagues, many of whom are male, work hard with me to ensure the safety of our passengers. Safety is our number one priority, not the brand of our underwear," says Ghada. She wants to make it clear that sexist representations of women in the airline industry will not be tolerated. A public outcry can get the ad banned -- and send a clear message to other companies considering similar marketing ploys.

Add your name to Ghada’s petition now, and make it clear that Ryanair should be selling their service, not the attractiveness of their female staff.

text (c) Change.org except the sarcastic additions which are obviously by me.

UPDATE, as at 14th December. I have spent part of this afternoon speaking with people on both sides of the process: the advertisers who invest in print campaigns which start at several hundred thousand pounds and can go up into the millions; and the newspapers, magazines and other outlets which need advertising in order to survive. My conversations shed an interesting light on the mentality of both parties. It is no secret that print matter - especially big name glossy magazines and broadsheets - are funded by advertisers, not by sales to readers. It is extremely expensive to keep a publication going without committed and plentiful advertising. When a contract or relationship is in place it is the advertiser's responsibility to maintain the level of its images and messages; the publication does not have the time or resources to look over every single thing that comes through and cannot exert the kind of editorial control that it would have over its own writers, art department and other staff. More than that, the power is weighted in the advertisers' direction. Advertisers have been known to exert some influence on editorial, particularly in the fashion, beauty, lifestyle and luxury goods magazine sector. If an advertiser is displeased, for some reason, the retraction of their support from a publication can cause that title to collapse.

If we set aside the issue of the mainstreaming of the objectification of (young, thin, white, passive-looking, conventionally beautiful) women and the way they are used to sell everything from insurance to cat food to aeroplane seats, advertising is supposed to integrate relatively seamlessly with editorial. Even a strikingly clever advert should not jar. It should be easy to read, easy to understand, easy to act on, easy to skip, easy to forget about, easy to be impressed by. Given the amount of advertising out there, there are relatively few complaints. So if something snags on readers' consciousness and provokes a strong negative reaction for its sleaziness, it is not only poor gender politics and poor advertising but a sign that something is seriously wrong. If an ad is considered particularly sexist within an already-very-sexist cultural context, that means it really is, really, rather, very, very sexist. It mars the brand for a much longer time than the ad campaign lasts.

Another comment from a major publication which runs advertising prompted a smile: major brands often run slightly different adverts for "inside London and the M25" and "outside London and the M25" - bringing me back to my earlier point about what is considered v sophisticayted and metrosexapolitan, and what is not. Either way, Ryanair (along with Lynx deoderants and Pot Noodle) have been in trouble with the Advertising Standards Authority before and seem, for all that, remarkably committed to their current route despite the turbulence. That was an aviation joke. Maybe, like the naughty cheekie chappie teasey schoolboys they no doubt think they are, they like to be spanked by an ASA reprimand every now and again. That is an advert I would like to see, but am unlikely to, as Ryanair only objectify women, although both sexes work as their cabin crew and both sexes (and all ages, creeds, nationalities, shapes, sizes and orientations) travel as their passengers.

Activists and women's advocates have long been critical of the ASA as sexism in advertising is, after all, obvious and endemic, and the ASA has done relatively little to take a strong stance against it in the past. However, I think this is now changing, as this Mumsnet thread indicates, and am delighted to learn that the campaigning group OBJECT are working with them to get them to understand, however laboriously, that we are human beings and not stupid useable pieces of meat.

I wonder what exactly Ryanair are trying to say, and what they are trying to sell. I will write this in small words and simple sentences so they can understand. It is mainly women who organise and book family holidays. This advert would not appeal to them. Women who do not have to do this type of unpaid family labour also travel, for both work and leisure, in equal numbers to men. They would not be interested either. This advert would not entice me to buy anything from Ryanair, it would prompt me to boycott them. Equally, I cannot imagine a sleazy man (the only type of person to whom this ad might possibly appeal - non-sexist men would not be impressed) paying a whole tenner to buy a ticket to go to Stansted to get on a plane to sexually harass a Ryanair cabin crew member when he could harass multiple women, all the time, on the street, for free ...as victims of endemic street harassment know. Ryanair, you are an airline, as your name implies. Your job is to sell oddly small and sometimes vomit-encrusted vinyl plane seats to a range of international destinations. You are not sex traffickers, selling human women to harassers, johns and punters. Get a grip on yourselves, so no-one gets a grip on us.

With thanks to Mr Anonymo, who phoned me today.

"I can't understand why you are so angry": a gentleman pens me a note

2011-12-12T12:32:00.007Z

from: M. Bitter [names have been changed]
date: Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 12:17 PM
subject: I can't understand why you are so angry

I am writing as someone who has read your various columns and blog for some time.

You speak about "The consequence of betrayal" at length, it really seems to have affected your life and I am a little puzzled as to why that is.

Here's my story which I don't expect you to particularly care about. Many years ago I fell in love with a young Kenyan woman. She made me feel complete and I sacrificed almost everything for her.

I married her against the warnings of almost everyone who knew me and then guess what? She frigged off a few weeks after she had gained her permanent right to stay in the UK and told me that she had never loved me and that I was a joke to her.

Today she has a UK passport and has amazingly treated her second husband even more shabbily than me.

During all this time she believes that she walks in the light of Jesus and God and generally treats life as if it is a grand adventure. As a side note I recommend that you always beware those who treat life as an adventure as they tend to trample all over other peoples lives and feelings on a regular basis.

Now this is a tale or woe, of betrayal and yes it is also a tale of moral cowardice because some people chose to remain friends with my ex wife despite knowing full well what she did and stating to me that her behaviour was "indefensible".

But its MY tale of woe and I don't expect anyone to assume that all women are delusional moral vacuums just because she is.

I meet people every day who inspire me. I often meet people and think "How can we as a society be screwed up if people like that are among us?"

I hope that anger isn't your career, I hope you don't, on a certain level keep the issues which upset you alive because they are such good copy.

You are young, intelligent and live in the greatest period of human history so far. I know that things can get better and they will.

Take care and I hope you have a nice holiday period.

Readers - dear readers - good day to you all. If you are not smiling gently at the brief Mumsnet thread inspired by this, give me some moments to explain that I am angry for these reasons: Tired of being the token woman. // The subtle art of misogyny. // So Today is a boys' club - what's new? // It's simple - just invite more women on air. // 30 seconds of misogyny in the lifts at Broadcasting House // Thank you, Radio 1 DJ Greg James, for today's edition of 30 Seconds of Misogyny // I hit the glass ceiling. It really hurts. // On despair. And I am angry for these reasons: Stand by your man? Hell no \\ You can never go back \\ Relics \\ Gordon Ramsay's appetite for sexism \\ Casual sexism is nothing but misogyny \\ Love letters \\ The boys' club, old and new \\ Say it sister - a girlfriend gives some tough love and His Friend's A Philanderer Too: A One-Act Play And I am angry, as I explain in The Consequences of Betrayal Year One and Year Two, because of the connection between the emotional, sexual, 'private' abuse of women and the same perpetrators' public, professional, cultural and systemic exploitation, discrimination, marginalisation, harassment, ignoring and belittlement of women, their active worldly support of other perpetrators and their petty, chippy, creepy, personalised, patronising, overfamiliar and apolitical dismissal of women's experiences.

Kymiy soaps: too too cute

2011-12-11T15:38:00.001Z

I love all design, fashion, style and aesthetics but don't usually plug specific items on this site. I'm breaking my rule for a friend, Paris-based Nazanine Nayeri, an IT entrepreneur who has (as a side project) produced a line of pure, olive-oil-based soaps that are exquisitely wrapped in Liberty fabrics. They are presented in lovely box sets, and can be ordered from the web site. They are gorgeous, they work and I wouldn't say it if it wasn't true. If you love them, let Nazanine know: nn@kymiy.com

His Friend's A Philanderer Too: an urban one-act play

2011-12-08T19:05:00.003Z

The first time it's a tragedy. The second time, it's a farce.

I am writing this in Caffe Nero somewhere near Piccadilly Circus. I am smiling to myself. I've just had a coffee with a friend and colleague, and the subject of One Year On: The Consequences of Betrayal and its action-packed sequel, Two Years On: The Consequences of Betrayal came up in conversation.

Me: I'll never forgive him. He's given me a life sentence of complete and utter fear and terror. Why is it that he gets to live, and I must die?
Her: I saw him the other day, actually, at a party.
Me [beginning to hyperventilate, going hot and cold]: And just you saying that sends an absolute flash of terror up to my skin. Huh! Now I have to be afraid for the rest of my life. He's usurped everything, everything - most of those contacts came through me - and I lose everything, and suddenly I'm on the outside and he's on the inside? [Getting short of breath.] He pretended to be this nice, shy guy who never goes out. And then I keep meeting friends who say they've seen him at parties.
Her: He just seemed like this sad person. Standing around. At the edges. In a group of tattooed men. Like himself. Wearing black. But the funny thing is, there's this person who was also there, Vladimir Esposito von Carraldos de Pan-Pan [not his real name] and he's been flirting with me over the email. And he's a friend of his. And they were chatting to each other. And I thought it was funny that they knew each other.... and Vladimir's got a partner. And kids.

God, they really do stick together don't they? What other substance can you think of, that sticks and smears and stinks like that? Vladimir E von C de P-P is an academic at a London university and the event in question was an academic and radio presenter's book launch. If they all wear black though, and stand around, at least we can spot them. And, philanderers, here's a special message to you, too: you do not think that women are human, or else you would not be so abusive, exploitative and deceptive in your treatment of us. Because you don't think of us as human, it does not occur to you that we remember what you have done, that we observe how you behave, that we log when our friends' mistreaters are present and that we talk to each other about you. It does not occur to you that as well as bodies to be objectified and used and hearts to be conned for your amusement, we have minds that think and remember, souls that suffer and mouths that speak in friendship to each other. We out you, we describe you, we reveal, we warn, we tell, we know, we name. We do not keep your abusiveness to ourselves. We do not protect your mistreatment. And when, in casual conversation, we reveal links like this - of liars and cheats who are friends and colleagues and co-condoners who socialise with each other in off-times and help each other's careers in on-time - oh, how we laugh with disgust.

I'm just about to see a play. The Ladykillers, it's called.

Sexual harassment during Reclaim the Night, West Yorkshire

2011-12-07T22:24:00.002Z

I have been contacted by someone via Hollaback, the international anti street harassment movement. The writer reports on the vicious sexual harassment she experienced during a Reclaim the Night march in West Yorkshire. The post is here and I will reprint the body of it below - but please visit the original site because it contains links to other articles, testimonies and Hollaback resources. Sexual harassment is absolutely endemic globally and I have written about it here and here and am a supporter of Vicky Simister's high-profile Anti Street Harassment campaign. The BBC have covered the issue here and the Guardian have also covered it here - and in many further articles. If you want some denial, belittlement, dismissal, perpetrator excusal, claims of lying and outright victim-blaming, read the comments below the Guardian articles.

The woman contacted the Yorkshire Evening Post about the events she describes. The paper ignored her letter, which is below. The editor of the paper is Paul Napier but as you see here from the staff and contacts page, which you can use to express your concern, there are many women in high positions at the paper. Despite this, they obviously do not regard sexual harassment in Leeds as an important issue.

Here's the letter, which was posted to Hollaback today. [UPDATE: I am either delighted or depressed to announce that following this blog post the paper has now printed the letter. The link is here. I am pleased that this blog and that Hollaback are making some kind of a difference in foregrounding theses issues but of course extremely angry that the issues exist in the first place.]

An open letter to the people of Leeds

I don’t know what you all did this weekend, but Saturday evening rather than staying in watching TV, or going out for some drinks, I got the train from Calderdale to attend the annual Reclaim the Night march in Leeds. Although they started in Leeds 1977 in response to the Yorkshire Ripper and the suggestion that women should stay inside in they wish to be safe from violence and sexual assault in the City this was the third event I had attended.

As I met with over 100 other women all ready to `reclaim the streets,` raise awareness of the low rape conviction rate and issue of violence against women. I know lots of you were also out on the town and having a nice evening, some of you saw us and waved, or took a leaflet, or looked bemused at a big group of women all wrapped up protesting in Leeds at 7pm on a Saturday night. However, I’m wondering what it was that led a percentage of people we passed to react to us with such a degree of hostility, violence and aggression?

I’ve both worked and socialised in Leeds before, so why have I never encountered this level of abuse in the past? I don’t understand why a large group of men verbally threatened me two minutes into the march, and shouted in my face comments so sexualized and lewd that this paper wouldn’t print them even if I wrote them down. I wonder if they knew how shocked and saddened this made me feel?

As we passed with our banners and chants, did the people who acted in this manner not think we could easily have been their wives, grandmothers, sisters, partners, aunts or daughters, what was it about what we were doing that made some people act this way towards us? I wonder if the group who stood in a line and swore, shouted and threw plastic bottles full of liquid at us near the dark arches would let me know what angered them so much about a group of women walking through the City protesting against violence against women? Why did this make you violent?

I would love to ask the angry middle aged man outside the Northern Monkey pub on the headrow if he knows how scary I found him when he was shouting and swearing at me? Did he know that I thought he was going to assault me or another member of the group? What made him follow screaming, demanding we come back so he could shout at us more when we tried to walk away?

To what extent where the threats, violence, aggression and hostility toned dowN because some of us had small children with us? I wonder if those reacting in this way noticed them? Was it because we were women? Was it because we were protesting? Was it because you believed women ARE actually safe from violence and threats on the street of Leeds, and that this event has no place in the City?

These aren’t rhetorical questions, I’ve been wondering the reasons all day and would like an answer if anyone can offer me one. What was it all about?

We want to hear ourselves think: a call to action against cultural femicide

2011-12-06T12:35:00.049Z

NEWSFLASH, ON 21ST DECEMBER: CERI THOMAS FROM THE TODAY PROGRAMME HAS NOW ISSUED A STATEMENT IN RESPONSE TO THE GUARDIAN'S RESEARCH. Please skim down until about halfway, to where it says UPDATED. I have added excerpts of women's complaint letters and done some fresh research about Today's lineup over the last 9 days and there is now a Mumsnet reaction thread here with more than 70 responses.

Last month I received a letter from a dismayed radio listener, who has noticed the ignoring of women at all levels of the media and public life. She mentions her many complaints to the producers of various shows and the way they have largely been ignored. At major speaking events at The Women's Library in London last year and at The Arnolfini in Bristol this year - a sold out event called Where Are The Women? - countless women approached me and said that they had complained to major media shows and organisations and were dismissed, patronisingly rebuffed or ignored.

While the ignoring of women is a problem across all public platforms, whether it be radio, TV, policy debates, panel events or festivals and conferences about everything from pop to politics, Radio 4's flagship current affairs programme Today has received particular criticism for having 4 men and just 1 woman presenter, a persistently low number of female reporters, guests, subjects and interviewees and a management team who seem to think this is not a problem despite enormous media pressure to change.

On this morning's show on Tuesday 6th December, aside from the presenters, Today had 20 male voices and just 5 female lady-women. Yesterday it had 14 men and 7 women. On Friday 2nd December it had 18 men and 6 women. On Thursday 1st December it had 18 men and 3 women. On Wednesday 30th November it had 17 men and 6 women. On Tuesday 29th November it was 18 men and 6 women. Notice, ladies, we never get above 7, and the men never get below 14 - usually much higher actually - and that's not even counting the presenters, who are 80% male.

In an article I wrote in May this year, Shut Up Ladies, Can't You See We're Trying To Talk?, I made a survey of representation across various networks (not just the BBC and not just talk radio) and all viewing times. It makes for very depressing reading, especially for any woman, like me, who is an experienced broadcaster and an avid radio-lover, who wishes to have a career. I know, how very dare we? Here are the stats for Today:

On Friday 20^th March 2011, Radio 4’s Today programme featured 28 men, including the 2 male presenters, and 1 woman. The previous day they had gone completely mad ...and gave us Ladies’ Day: 7 whole women spoke, including presenter Sue Macgregor, alongside 21 men. The day before that it was a much more acceptable 4 women and 19 men. I have no idea what that spike on Thursday 19^th was about. 7 women! Using up the space that men could have occupied! By Friday, thank Patriarchus, He That Knoweth, natural order had been restored.

Nothing has changed since then. In Kira Cochrane's shocking and unmissable article about cultural femicide this week she revealed, after months of primary research, that 84% of reporters and guests on Today are men and 16% are women. Cochrane's piece presents a terrifying vision of an entire culture which sidelines women across all media and all outlets/networks/institutions, but Today's stats are the worst of an already-dreadful bunch. Cochrane writes, "On 5 July you had to wait from 6.15am until 8.20am to hear the one female contributor who appeared alongside the 27 male contributors on the programme." There is currently a raging thread about this on Mumsnet, started when Kira's piece came out. There was also an instant and very interesting response in the Guardian letters page, here.

What could be behind the femicide, I ask myself? What on earth could it possibly be? Back in March 2010, speaking on Radio 4's Feedback programme, Today's editor Ceri Thomas said about this issue:

It's quite hard to have a formula that helps you decide who should be the new presenter. I can say quite honestly that it would not be, was not and will never be the case that being a woman will be the overriding criteria

When asked why more women were being seen on the BBC News channel but not heard on Today, Thomas said,

Because I think those are slightly easier jobs. They are difficult jobs but the skillset that you need to work on the Today programme and the hide that you need, the thickness of that, is something else. It's an incredibly difficult place to work.

and

...what you can't expect is that the Today programme is the first place you'll see those changes [ie. more women] because it's just too tough an environment for novices, frankly.

But I don't think the public furore is really about the presenters as much as it is about the guests. Today is honoured among listeners for a good reason. It is serious, quality broadcasting. Every day there are more than 20 expert guests, usually live, talking about more than a dozen different subjects, in dozens of different ways. Today is able to tackle any issue, in any area, about any country or culture, in any discipline. Its producers can (seemingly) access any speaker, craft any item and set up any discussion, interview or debate. It is capable of excellence in everything, except including women. Day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, only 16% of its guests or reporters are women, and 84% are men. That is why listeners are angry.

I have addressed the issue of the under-representation of women in a series of articles with statistics and anecdotes, many of which blow the whistle on the day-to-day misogyny of some of the producers, editors and commissioners I have worked with at broadcasting, media, arts and culture institutions: Tired of being the token woman. - The subtle art of misogyny. - So Today is a boys' club - what's new? - It's simple - just invite more women on air. - 30 seconds of misogyny in the lifts at Broadcasting House - Thank you, Radio 1 DJ Greg James, for today's edition of 30 Seconds of Misogyny - I hit the glass ceiling. It really hurts. - On despair.

Do we care? Yes we do! Everywhere I go, in public or private, in every in-depth conversation I have, with friends or near-strangers, this issue comes up. Countless women tell me they have written in to events organisers, editors, producers, impresarios, governors, MPs, whoever - and been brushed off. Countless extremely able women tell me they would love to be involved in these events as speakers, experts, advocates, artists, performers, debaters, subjects and commentators. They ask me to put their names forward, which I do, only for them to be ignored, talked down, frozen out.

What to do? Does complaining help? Cochrane spoke to Ceri Thomas on Friday 11th November, when only two female contributors appeared on the Today programme. The previous day there was just one. Thomas told her (three times, as Cochrane reports) that the issue of female representation "almost never comes up as an issue from the audience... I suppose it might be two letters a year, or something of that nature."

Only two? Check your Spam box. Oh - and perpetrators, please stop victim blaming. We are not your secretaries or subordinates and it is not our job to write you a memo to remind you that we are human beings, that we exist and are worth listening to. We are not going to beg you submissively to recognise our worth. You should recognise it anyway, if you are decent human beings yourselves and do not have some kind of misogynistic, man-worshipping superiority complex. We are not shy, unwilling, thick, boring, absent or too busy cooking and cleaning to attend. We expect and demand fair, unsneering and equal treatment and representation and you must supply this. You must change your behaviour.

If any programme, event or venture keeps its number of women guests at a steady 16% or invites 26 men and just 2 women to talk at an industry-wide conference, as happened at this year's Next Radio event, it is because it chooses to, not because women are too lax, amidst all the other oppression we constantly witness and experience, to write in and plead for basic recognition and humane treatment. Are perpetrators really so passive, hate-filled and unwilling that they need serious prompting to acknowledge and reflect the fact that we are 50% of the audience and half the world? Do they so despise the thought of contacting women, inviting women, being in women's presence and hearing women speak as experts, endorsers, analysts and subjects of celebratory discussion as writers/artists/thinkers/innovators? As ever, perpetrators make their hatred clear by their behaviour. They do not like women so they do not have any near them, except those used behind the scenes as exploited labour in a system which promotes and celebrates men as geniuses, on any topic, in any manner, in any field.

Those non-media outsiders who victim-blamingly say that women 'should' push themselves forward have not understood how events, conferences or shows are organised. Guests are cast, invited and briefed by producers in advance; potential guests are not supposed to psychically intuit that an unannounced and unpublicised event is in its early stages of organisation, and somehow get in there. It does not work like that - and indeed, confident women who do put themselves forward are, according to the double standard, slandered and punished for shrillness/loudness/bolshiness/aggression/whatever. The responsibility, the agency, the decision and the fault is on the perpetrators and the issue is one of sexism. As I wrote way back in late spring of last year:

We no longer live in an age where female thinkers, writers, philosophers, academics, artists, theorists, activists or politicians are rare. The discrimination is obvious. All you have to do is count. It's all the more galling given that women equal or outnumber men as attendees of arts festivals, concerts, readings, discussions and debates, and as arts and humanities students at university. Women write, read, edit and publicise more fiction than men. Women make up the majority of executive, PR and organisational staff in arts and cultural institutions. Women's ticket revenue, licence fees, book purchases and entrance fees are being used to fund events at which women artists and thinkers are marginalised with breathtaking obviousness.

Regarding the issue of women and broadcasting, I want to celebrate Sound Women, a coalition of amazing professional women in radio who are sick of institutional sexism, discrimination, marginalisation and cultural femicide. All the women in Sound Women are known, seen, heard in public and cannot be ignored or sidelined. They include Fi Glover, Margherita Taylor, Miranda Sawyer and many, many others. Sound Women maintains a hundreds-strong (and ever growing) list of willing women speakers in all fields so that when programme producers and editors lie that no women are available or able, they can easily be disproved. See the Guardian feature here. Read Jane Garvey advocating for more women here. Feel our rage that of the 14-strong Sony Awards committee, only 1 is a woman (and she is an absolute radio heroine, R4 controller Gwyneth Williams) and that at this year's Next Radio conference there were 26 male speakers and just 2 women. The conference website claimed, "We promise no panels, no suits, and no waiting forever for a rubbish session to end" - and a sexism so deep that women were not even allowed to speak, although we could sit passively and listen to 26 men.

This issue, prompted by Kira's article, has truly opened Chauvin's Box.

This is what Sound Women suggest regarding the Today programme specifically: that people write to BBC Trust Chairman Chris Patten - ah, Lord Patten, a posh man who will never have to worry about these issues or be affected by them - and get our friends to write too. For a bit of encouragement, there's already a growing Mumsnet thread on this, based on a shortened version of this article. No ranting, please, and no abuse when you write in. Just concern, stats and a fervent desire for the glory of radio to reflect the intelligence, interest and intellect of its 50% of loyal women listeners. Send it to Chris Patten at chris.patten@bbc.co.uk and cc in his assistant june.prunty@bbc.co.uk - because, of course, the best partiarchal prop for a powerful man is a subordinate female assistant who does all the real work and has now been placed in the awkward and unfair position of fielding these messages.

Sound Women have drafted the letter below, but please feel free to adapt and change it, especially if you are a Today listener but do not work in the media and have additional points you’d like to make.

Dear Lord Patten

The Today Programme on BBC Radio 4 has four male presenters and just one woman, Sarah Montague. In addition to this, today it’s been revealed that on average 84% of its guests and reporters are male, and just 16% female.

As [a woman working in the radio industry, and] an avid radio listener, I am deeply disappointed by these figures. If the Today audience is made up of 50-50 men and women, as Today Editor Ceri Thomas claims, then this means that the women in that audience are being under-represented and badly served.

Ceri Thomas also says he receives only two letters of complaint a year, and seems to think this means the audience don’t care about the issue. Well we do care. We don’t always write letters of complaint – sometimes we change to another station or shout at our radio instead – but if it will make a difference then please accept this as a letter of complaint, to which I would greatly appreciate a response.

I know the representation of women on air is an issue you feel strongly about, and have spoken about before. I hope you can encourage the BBC to bring about the change that is needed, and look forward to hearing a more balanced version of the Today programme, with many more female contributors, reporters and presenters very soon.

Thank you for reading this email.

Etc.

Fingers crossed. And if anyone wants to start up a (paid) women's radio station, I'm 100% in on the arts and culture side. Just contact me and it's a yes.

UPDATED at the end of the working day on Wednesday 21st December 2011: After the enormous reaction created by Kira Cochrane's article, which has (my sources tell me) prompted fervent debate in many major arts and cultural institutions, many women contacted me attaching copies of their own complaint letters. A very senior woman and former London bureau chief at a major international news and reporting agency told me that she was "at a 'Gender Agenda' event discussing this last week and was struck by how internally focused it was and that barely a single man was present to discuss the issue." In her letter to the BBC she wrote the following:

I am writing to address the perception that appears to be prevalent at the BBC: namely, that a failure to deluge the inbox of BBC executives with complaint about female representation on news and current affairs programmes is evidence that this is not an issue. On the contrary, it is a most pressing and serious concern and one that needs to be addressed urgently.

As [COMPANY] London Bureau Chief from 2007 to 2011, and a former financial and foreign correspondent, I personally put myself forward on numerous occasions to talk on serious business and political topics relating to the UK. Instead, I was invited on (just twice) to review newspapers during the general election.

Busy, professional women like me have full-time, executive jobs that rarely give them time to write letters of complaint – but if it will make a difference then please accept this as a letter of complaint, to which I would greatly appreciate a response.

...I hope you can encourage the BBC to bring about the change that is needed, and look forward to hearing a more balanced version of the Today programme, and other news and current affairs programmes, with many more female contributors, reporters and presenters very soon.

Another woman, a radio lover and longtime Today listener, wrote to the BBC:

I noticed in that article that Ceri Thomas, Editor of Today said that he received hardly any letters about the lack of women presenters and contributors to Today and concluded that the audience didn’t care very much.

I grew up with Today and still listen to it briefly most mornings. I do care about the lack of women on the programme, and think it effects the way in which stories are covered and the way in which some issues are largely ignored. I’ve never written to complain – I just turn off the radio and get my news on-line instead.

I think the Guardian research should be a wakeup call to the BBC (and print media, which doesn’t come out of it well either, including the Guardian). Please can you tell me what you intend to do to ensure that we get something a bit closer to gender balance on our airwaves?

Another woman, a very prominent journalist, wrote the following:

I am writing to complain about the under-representation, nay near invisibility, of women on the Today programme.

...Specifically, I find it hard to believe that Ceri Thomas says he only receives two letters of complaint about this woeful under-representation of women on the Today show per year. I question this figure and would like it confirmed.

As as writer for [COMPANY] I would welcome your comments on how the BBC is going to address this situation.

In the letter sent to me before the Guardian article a listener wrote,

My friend and I share regular tallies of the low numbers of any women’s voices on the Today programme. Lots of rage and gnashing of teeth. I have written to the producers/editors/ complaints departments in vain.

My point is that not only is there a dearth of women presenters – women are routinely not invited on to the Today programme to discuss the topics presented, women’s names are not even referred to in discussions. The words “her”and “she” are not heard. Education controversy – let’s wheel out Chris Woodhead, Anthony Seldon – because clearly there has never been a notable women headteacher or schools inspector. It’s not just laziness, a question of the usual suspects invited on the programme over and over again - it’s a powerful bias that ensures that women’s voices simply don’t matter, that women don’t matter. I sit and listen and watch the minutes tick by as we are not only marginalised, but are inaudible, invisible, non-existent.

You could land here from Mars, tune in to the Today programme and - on some days - I kid you not – up to an hour later not have a clue that women exist at all.

I’m 60 in December – all that struggle in the 1970’s - and I cannot bear it. How many other young women are going to protest?

Another point - if Woman's Hour can respond at 10am to a breaking news story and get women on the show - academic/politician/vox pop/historian/scientist/other worker or professional/whatever - to interview, just why can't the Today programme do the same?!

I have now received messages from the BBC Trust and also from Ceri Thomas of Today. See the below:

from: Trust Enquiries TrustEnquiries@bbc.co.uk
date: Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 5:47 PM
subject: : Today programme
Dear Bidisha

Thank you for your recent email to Lord Patten, Chairman of the BBC Trust. I am responding on Lord Patten’s behalf as a member of the Trust Unit which advises and supports the Chairman and Trustees. I understand your concerns about the number of women presenters and contributors on Radio 4’s Today Programme.

As Lord Patten received a number of emails expressing similar concerns, we are responding to them all in these terms. I can assure you that equality is an issue that the BBC Executive and the Trust takes very seriously and, as you may be aware, it’s the Chairman’s view that there should be more women both on radio and television.

However, the role of the Chairman, and of the Trust, is distinct from that of the BBC Executive and day-to-day editorial decisions - such as selection of presenters and contributors to the Today programme, for example - are rightly the responsibility of the BBC Executive and ultimately the Director General as Editor-in-Chief.

Reflecting that distinction, the BBC complaints process requires that complaints are handled by the BBC Executive in the first instance. The Trust’s role in the process is to consider appeals from complainants should they be dissatisfied with the responses that they have received from the BBC’s management. I have therefore forwarded your email to the editor of the Today programme, Ceri Thomas, and he has provided the attached response.

Should you remain unhappy and would like to progress your complaint further, you can do so using the BBC complaints process via BBC Audience Services, details of which are available on the BBC complaints website www.bbc.co.uk/complaints. Following this route means we can deal with complaints in a logical progression from BBC management to the Trust and those most closely involved with the complaint have an opportunity to respond first. I hope this is helpful and thank you again for bringing your concerns to our attention.

Yours sincerely,
John Hamer
BBC Trust Unit

And this is is from Ceri Thomas, the editor of Today, exactly as sent to me, unedited, uncut and complete. It was sent from the man above as an attached Word document. It is aggressive, cold, arrogant, patronising, immature, punitive, derailing and defensive in tone, with no greeting, politeness, sign-off, contact details, introduction, tail-off or anything else. It personally singles out Kira Cochrane in a bullying and sneering way, when in fact the negative critique of Today has been made, rightly, by many people of both sexes across the media for nearly 18 months. As is obvious from the tone and style, Thomas cannot even pretend to be respectful of women or to take this seriously. It is written as a short school essay. The title in bold is original too:

Response from Ceri Thomas:

Your complaint springs from an article in the Guardian which contained extracts from an interview with me. Your letter quotes rather selectively from that article so, for the sake of completeness, I think it is worth bearing in mind the fuller context. In addition to noting the relatively small number of complaints which have come directly to the programme each year about the numbers of women on Today, the article contained the following exchange between me and the Guardian journalist, Kira Cochrane:

‘I asked if there was a strong enough female presence on the show at the moment. "I think nearly every day there is not," he said. "And within the programme it's a very active discussion. And not just a discussion – it's pursued actively, too. Every producer on the programme is aware we're trying to increase the representation of women on air. People such as the planning editor, who is in a position to do a bit more about it, have it as a specific objective." He adds that the show's listenership is about 50/50 men and women.’

It is difficult, on the basis of that exchange, to characterise the representation of women on air as an issue about which Today does not care.

The broader question raised by your complaint is what the 'correct' proportion of male and female guests on Today should be. The figures quoted in the Guardian article are inaccurate, even on the specific days which are mentioned, but there is no argument about the fact that the programme has more male guests than female. This is a programme, however, which deals largely in areas of public life in which it is a simple statement of fact to say that, at senior levels, men outnumber women. To give just two examples, about 75% of MPs are men, as are over 80% of board members of FTSE 100 companies. The same skew exists in virtually every corner of the public arena which listeners expect Today to cover. It is inevitable, to a large extent, that the male-female balance within organisations in the wider world will be reflected on air.

Having said that, the programme clearly acknowledges the need to achieve the best possible representation of women on air consistent with listeners' expectations of Today's editorial agenda, and it is actively working to do that.

Thomas claims that "the figures quoted in the Guardian article are inaccurate, even on the specific days which are mentioned." This is not true. Cochrane's article links to the specific programme line-ups mentioned, which anyone can check. The team at the Guardian rechecked the data multiple times to ensure accuracy. The Guardian has an extremely prompt and rigorous complaints, corrections and clarifications desk which deals with specific inaccuracies and Thomas has not contacted them with any objection. The furore over Today's extreme marginalisation of women began long before the Kira Cochrane article, as far back as March 2010 when Thomas gave his interview to Feedback. The data I have supplied in this piece, all of it accurate, is from March 2011 and November - early December 2011. The Guardian's research took place over the entire summer of 2011 and is accurate.

I have now done even more research over the last 9 programmes, analysing every line-up and every item. Here it is:

The Today programme has 4 male presenters and 1 woman. Aside from the presenters, on Saturday 10th December there were 19 male speakers and 2 women. On Monday 12 December there were 17 male speakers and 2 women. On Tuesday 13th December there were 17 men and 6 women. On Wednesday 14th December there were 18 men and 4 women, of whom 3 were speaking on one item about domestic violence. On Thursday 15th December there were 18 men and 7 women. On Saturday 17th December there were 19 men and 3 women. On Monday 19th December there were 22 men and 6 women. On Tuesday 20th December there were 19 men and 4 women. On Wednesday 21st December - today - there were 18 men and 6 women.

In the last 9 shows the general Thought For The Day, which is specially commissioned and not so closely pegged to the news agenda, had 6 men and 2 women. One of these women, Canon Angela Tilby, was used twice, probably because the producers could not stomach having another whole entire female she-creature stinking up the place. Across the last 9 shows, again, the number of men did not go below 17 and the number of women did not go above 7. These figures vary only minutely from those mentioned earlier in this piece for summer of this year (counted by Kira Cochrane's team) and spring 2011 and spring 2010, counted by me. Across something like 100 items the only one featuring all women was one about male violence against women. Because we are just victims, aren't we, of male femicide - both physical and cultural.

The Today programme does not just cover Parliamentary affairs or big business, nor does it only feature heads of major FTSE companies, political parties, conglomerates, major organisations, firms or any other endemically sexist institutions. Over the last 9 shows, these are just some of the topics Today have covered: the production of frankincense; Russian parliament; UK planning reforms; homelessness; found recordings of writers reading their own short stories (in which 3 white male writers were named, and 0 women); children testifying in court; pensions for council workers, NHS staff, teachers and civil servants (an item in which 2 men were invited to debate despite the overwhelming majority of public sector workers being women); commission on foreign currency bought on credit cards; large companies' tax liability; ambulance journeys; high street revenues; chronic fatigue syndrome; Syrian human rights; birdsong, the age of criminal responsibility; child poverty; London's social history; illegal immigration; wind turbines; the Zimbabwe elections; the greatest invention of all time; interviewing children in court; job seeking; the cost of green energy; homeowning and negative equity; a newly discovered Charlotte Bronte manuscript (in which a male trustee of the Bronte society was interviewed - yes, where there is female genius, be sure to dilute its power and remember, female genius must be dead); land rights in Southern China, the Egyptian elections; badger culling; diabetes; children in care and adoption; funding for care for the elderly; cholera in Haiti; violence in film; UK Uncut; foster care; maths on the curriculum; Ealing studios' films; teaching history in schools; Jamaican patois and Bible translation; Kinks singer Ray Davies and his new musical; tax breaks for married couples.

The most random item was the author Alexander McCall Smith [no diss to him - his books actually have excellent women characters and plenty of 'em, and they speak, too] getting an entire 3 minute slot of his own after Tweeting that it was "painful" to chuck away old books. He authored an item on 14th December revealing some of the responses to his Tweet and "gives his own tips on bookshelf management."

Over the last 9 shows the vast and overwhelming majority of named editors and correspondents (in politics, the environment, Moscow, parliamentary affairs, sports, the Middle East, home affairs, business, Scotland, Scotland business, North America, politics, health, science, world affairs, Beijing and religious affairs) are white men. There are 2 named women as correspondents on defence (Caroline Wyatt) and in the arts and one female sports newsreader. These 3 women are used very sporadically, unlike the main sports (Garry Richardson and Rob Bonnet) and business (Simon Jack) guys.

I will now give just a selection of the job titles of speakers on the last 9 shows. They are not all heads of companies, heads of political parties, major institutions, banks, companies, government bodies, quangos, thinktanks or heads of anything else. In fact the vast majority of speakers are just reasonably-ranked, broadly experienced and capable professionals who know what they're talking about. Here goes: archaeologist, farmer, zoologist, Pentagon official, green campaigner, classical music promoter, magistrate; climate change science analyst, diabetes expert, historian, academic in journalism and screen violence, maths teacher, academic in planning and local governance, varied museum experts and curators, drama and literature curator at arts institution, professor of psychology, member of Criminal Bar Association, pensions analyst, economist, music magazine editor, music journalist, management consultant, evolutionary biologist, science writer, researcher in animal behaviour, novelist, songwriter, UN human rights worker, consultant paediatrician, Conservative, Labour and Lib Dem MPs across all areas, contributing editor of current affairs publication, sleep researcher.

In the last 9 days Today has featured 167 male guests and 40 women. That's 19%. There's something else: of the 19% of women in the last 9 shows, women are massively over-represented as victims, subjects and case studies rather than experts, academics, influencers, analysts or endorsers. So, one is speaking about black students' experience at Cambridge, one was an evacuee from the Basque country to the UK in 1937, one fled Burma after the Japanese army invasion 69 years ago, one (on Wednesday 14th December) is named as a domestic violence survivor who "lived in an abusive relationship for a decade", one is a case study of homelessness, one is a foster carer and one is a Bangladeshi woman giving an interview about her abusive husband, who cut off her fingers.

So, can we only speak when we have been brutalised, abused, victimised and forced to flee?

Yes we can! But remember, even then, you are only allowed to be 19% of the total number of speakers, absolute max, last year, last season, yesterday, tomorrow and Today. Got it? They do not like us. They are not going to change. We have been told, good and proper.

There is now a Mumsnet comment and reaction thread on this, with some very interesting additional observations, some of which I have excerpted below. Each set of quotes if from a different contributor:

One woman wrote:

"What Ceri Thomas' response basically says is: You are only interested in this issue because of the Guardian article. And anyway there aren't enough women in prominent roles, so it's your problem. Well, I am interested, Guardian article or no. And I intend to let them know regularly. Is one email a month too many? (And another one from my mum and my sister, who I will get to write in as well)

The stuff about women in prominent roles is just there to confuse the issue. Firstly, you could always try inviting the women that are there in prominent roles instead of more or less ignoring them, and secondly, as Bidisha points out on her blog, the guests are frequently not in those roles in any case. I am just as capable of analysing the economy/ literature/ various random topics as all those random men!"

Another woman wrote:

"Great to see the highlighting of the fact that it isn't just reflecting who is high up as that isn't who the guests are.

A specific example, the other day they had men talking about town planning reforms. Now this is indeed male dominated profession. However the head of the professional body, the RTPI, is a woman. So if it's that they need the 'heads' then it would have been a woman. But of course they didn't, they had people much lower down the 'food chain'. Who could have been women or men. They were talking about basic general interest stuff so they had many many people to pick from. And so the cycle continues with the profession being represented as male.

Bidisha did you see my spot that they had someone from Seoul women's university the other day and it was a man?"

Another woman wrote:

"OH MY GOD WHAT A DICK HEAD!

Is he really, genuinely saying that as 75% of MPs are men, women don't need to be represented? Women don't mind hearing mostly from the men who dominate business? MPs are there to represent everyone including women!! Oh my god I hate getting this angry. Bullshit bullshit bullshit. He's making excuses and expecting us to buy it."

Another woman wrote:

"I actually can't write anything articulate or thoughtful here because the noise in my mind is just "RAGE RAGE RAGE RAGE!"

ugh. UGH. RAGE!"

Another woman wrote:

"I am a regular listener to the Today programme (and a relatively recent "convert" to feminism in a conscious sense) and I think a nerve has been hit. Ceri Thomas's reply suggests that the Today programme are trying really hard to balance things more. I'd like to know how they are trying to do this. I suggest one method would be retiral of the adverserial John Humphries. I find his attempts to turn any interview into a battle tiresome and inappropriate.

I almost wonder if the calibre of men on the show (presumably educated, intelligent and ostensibly egalitarian) belies the continued sexism. No-one there would probably either see themselves as sexist nor consciously wish to push women out of the programme. (I am making assumptions here). I'd be surprised if the representation of the genders isn't more balanced further down the chain (i.e. researchers) and so would guess that this is problem (like many) requires a mindquake. I know that until I'd read Mary Daly (Gyn/Ecology - my first foray into feminist literature) I hadn't considered sexism and the importance of feminism to a great extent. If it took an educated woman like me until I was 25 to really get it, how can we expect the men of our society to even attempt to understand when they are the group benefiting from the inherent inequality.

Gah. Merry Christmas everyone."

Are you quite a frothing beserker? Then jolly well join in!

2011-12-05T01:27:00.001Z

I wanted to write in support of the already very marked critique of the current government's cuts, which will disproportionately affect women. I have been alerted, via the ever-excellent Mumsnet, to a group of "ordinary people, mainly women, who feel the government has gone too far with the cuts." The group wants to be "a focus for all the groups protesting against the cuts and provide an outlet for people who are worried or scared and feel they need to do something. We are hoping to be accessible whether people want to just read and be better informed or sign petitions, write or be part of more direct activism."

The inspiration behind the group was a Mumsnet thread, I'm Not Quite A Frothing Beserker But I Am Getting Rather Cross With Our Government Messing With The Good Stuff. That thread was so full of passionate writers who know exactly how the cuts are affecting ordinary people that a new thread has begun to catch the overflow: Frothers Unite, Time for Change. Now, I think a frothing beserker is a rather excellent thing to be, so I want to stand by this group, which has a blog, Too Many Cuts, a Facebook page and a Twitter stream, using the #frothers hashtag. Join in if you want to protest against economic measures which will see this country's women - and with them, our children, partners, friends, relatives and parents - thrown to the dogs.

Shocking, stunning, horrifying, unmissable.

2011-12-05T00:02:00.003Z

The Guardian's Kira Cochrane has produced an exhaustive, serious and very informative, though devastating, study about the representation of women in all walks of life, from politics and the media to comedy. Here it is. Full disclosure: I am quoted in it briefly. The article is the result of several months' study by a diverse group of researchers and gives a complete picture of just how strongly women are pushed out of the public frame - and how this impacts on girls and young women's sense of their own voices and possibilities. There is currently a very strong thread on Mumsnet about this issue, here.

I would urge anyone who cares about this to get onto the Guardian comment thread and talk, give your own experiences, encourage other women, participate positively and in solidarity. This is a hugely important article and it's all about us and our place and space. Don't let the derailers and trolls dominate!

Place your bets for the inaugural William Hill Sportswoman of the Year Award

2011-12-01T13:41:00.002Z

Out of its longstanding commitment to women's rights, female emancipation, the elimination of cultural femicide and human rights issues generally, betmakers William Hill have created a female alternative to the BBC's Sports Personality of the Year, which this year features a 10 man, 0 woman line-up despite many women athlete's great achievements in 2011. To compile its list, the BBC asked 27 sports editors, the overhwelming majority of whom are men, for their nominations. Despite women's excellence this year, all the editors (which included sexist mags Nuts and Zoo) submitted lists in which women were heavily outnumbered; more than a third (10) gave all male lists. The Guardian has covered this extensively and excellently here, here, here, here - in a great piece by Andy Bull, here by Jane Martinson and here, where the BBC defends itself against formal complaints by women MPs and points out that in the past, "at least two women have always previously been shortlisted for the main award." Yes! At least 20%. Be thankful for that ladies (and quit yo' moaning). Anyone interested in institutional misogyny in the world of sport and sports media should read the horribly funny, genuinely enthusiastic, honest and wideranging Get Her Off The Pitch! by Lynne Truss. The link will take you to her own website, which is as hilarious and observant as all her other work.

Thank you, William Hill, for standing up for women. I know your heart is where our wallet is. Here are the details, taken from the press release. All the breathless punctuation, erratic quality of tone and random capitalisation remains. It is well classy. When the final shortlist is agreed you can vote for your favourite online or act like a lady and pick up one of the coupons which will be available in all William Hill outlets - yes, I am talking about that notoriously female-heavy and woman-positive cultural space, the betmaker's shop. Now I am off to watched looped re-runs of all of Boots's Here Come The Girls adverts. Enjoy:

The inaugural William Hill Sportswoman Of The Year Award will be decided on the 21st of December, the winner of which will gain a VIP trip to the William Hill King George on boxing day as well as £1000 Charity bet on the big race & a Trophy for the mantelpiece. To Nominate Your forgotten female: Go to the William Hill Facebook page. The shortlist will consist of the ten sportswomen with the most nominations. The final shortlist will be confirmed on Monday, you can then vote for your favourite at http://news.williamhill.com/ or pick up one of the 240,000 coupons which will be available in all William Hill shops from mid week. “The award is designed to give members of the public the opportunity to choose both the shortlist, as well as the winner. It has been a good year for Women’s sport, let’s celebrate it,” said Hill’s spokesman Rupert Adams. Further Information….0208 918 3858……0784 1011 584

UPDATE: As at 14th December 2-11 , the shortlist is now up. Here's the press release I was sent:

The shortlist for the inaugural William Hill Sports Woman Of The Year Award has been announced and it is time to vote for your favourite. Hills are accepting votes online at http://bit.ly/SWOTY2011 or you can pick up a coupon in any of the 2350 William Hill shops. The Shortlist For The William Hill Sports Woman Of The Year, as voted for by William Hill customers:

Rebecca Adlington: Won a gold and silver medal at the World Aquatics Championship in Shanghai.
Charlotte Edwards: Captain of the all conquering England Women’s Cricket Team.
Jessica Ennis: UK No.1 Heptathlete, won silver at World Championships.
Tamsin Greenway: captain Of The Surrey Storm, bronze medal winner at the netball World Championships.
Helen Jenkins: British No.1 Triathlete, qualified for Olympics after winning the Hyde Park Event.
Sarah Stevenson: Won gold at the 2011 Tae Kwon Do World Championships.
Kelly Smith: England Striker who competed in the Women’s Football World Cup earlier this year.
Hayley Turner: Rode 83 winners in 2011, including two Group One wins.
Beth Tweddle: Grabbed gold at European Gymnastics in Berlin.
Chrissie Wellington: Added a fourth Ironman World Championship title in 2011.

Vote Online until Midday 20th December
Vote In Shop until 9.30pm on the 18th December
Winner Announced on 21st December 2011

Um, William Hill, I know you have better things to do than work on basic literacy skills, like betting on sport, but perhaps you could hire a new person to write your press releases? Capital Letters Do Not Go Everywhere.

Two Years On: The Consequences of Betrayal

2011-12-01T01:31:00.018Z

I was going to write an update to one of the most serious, personal and popular articles on this site, One Year On: The Consequences of Betrayal. It concerns a moment, sometime past midnight on 1^st December 2009, when I discovered that a friend whom I liked, admired, respected and loved – may a rampant beast of prey rip his gullet in twain – was nothing more than a Tiger Woods or, since this is an annual update, a Rio Ferdinand, a Ryan Giggs or an Ashton Kutcher. Ah, those 'family men'. Ooh, like Hugh Bonneville, the johnjuncter who hates women so much he buys them to do what he wants in bed and then forcibly silences them so they can’t say what they want after it. Watching Lost in Austen will never be the same again! I’ll keep that one up there until his lawyers get in touch. Oh - and hello, Mrs Bonneville, if you're reading this. You're married to a piece of scum who buys women for sex because his pleasure and sense of power, plus the kick of lying to you, added to the frisson-kick and career/image benefits of being known publicly as a lovely family man, are more important than anything else.

Back to the toxicity. Because my friend RG – may the heavens open and send a plague of ravenous clicking cockroaches upon thee – was well-known in his field and a colleague as well, I found that the subsequent dismantling of everything I had ever known, thought, believed in, hoped or had faith in stretched not only to my personal life of friendships but also to my professional life, my social life and my daily existence. I discovered that being stabbed in the back does indeed literally feel like being stabbed in the back.

As I uncovered the extent of his emotional mistreatment of women and his layered lies I also uncovered the extent of the outer world’s collusion and protection. I could not work for, promote or protect these people any more, or stay quiet about the sexism I experienced and witnessed every single day. This led to further articles, a sense of intense despair and an annihilating collision with the glass ceiling. The contempt for women which I encountered in this one individual was, I realised, shared by many colleagues of both sexes. Should any culture fan wonder why it is that some (many, most) shows, events, panels, literary festival and so on have no women, or heavily outnumbers women, let me tell you, it’s exactly what it appears to be: misogyny and man-worshipping. Hence the phenomenon of cultural femicide, of female radio silence and of literary women and literary prizes not being on the same podium. Oh, quick quote: Roman Polanski gets a cover-mention in Empire magazine’s Dark Knight Rises issue. Congrats, Ro. How's the raping going?

But that’s the deep, underlying, 5000-years-old issue. Let’s talk about surface issues. I have become implicated in an abuser’s mess, found my name dragged into filthy gossip, appeared as a colluder, complicit or someone who turns a blind eye to and even abets the emotional abuse of other women. RG – may the circles of hell open and Satan roast you on his pitchfork while you squeal in agony and fruitlessly plead with the Fates – has given me a life sentence of crippling fear, anger, disgust and grating humiliation. I live in the constant terror of hearing his name, seeing it or his work, bumping into a mutual friend or colleague or indeed into him. I live a reduced life in which I do not read the papers, listen to the radio or watch TV, so profound is the physical and spiritual sickness. To betray, to abuse, is to tear something extremely fundamental in the fabric of the universe.

To experience the effects of betrayal is to have everything in one’s life destroyed but not rebuilt. As Alex Heminsley says in a frank piece in this month’s Elle magazine, “Suddenly, I doubted my own judgement, questioning the motives of all those who loved me most, and disbelieving their kindest words. I was consumed by anxiety about what other mistakes I might make.” RG has earned my derision for ever, but this does not matter. An abuser, physical or emotional, does not think that women are human; indeed, an abuser is a sadist who enjoys women’s pain, or he would not inflict it. For himself, he has earned great outer success. Were I to out this person, I would be attacked, not him, although he is the perpetrator.

To experience betrayal is not only to be maliciously and deliberately deceived for one period in one setting by one immoral person acting with premeditation, malice, sadism, forethought, coldness and controlling secrecy. The effects go far beyond the incident and are completely enmeshed in a wider culture which does not punish abuse and even rewards it. It is not just about boyfriends and girlfriends doing things in secret or colleagues and friends gossiping, but about misogyny, machismo, abuse, impunity, hypocrisy, corruption, power dynamics, the solidarity of abusers, work, success, society, culture, the future, the glass ceiling. One is attacked in one’s fundamental beliefs, at the level of one’s emotional certainty and at a physical level – because the emotional pain is wholly physical. I spent most of the last two years feeling, literally, as though I was being cut with knives. My skin crawled when I was alone. Then it crawled when I was in company. I lost and gained weight erratically, unrelated to my diet and exercise. I have lost my looks, etcetera.

But the betrayal and realisation also happen at a political level. All betrayal is a type of power play. After that first discovery I discovered many more, the majority perpetrated by those who sit in offices and give interviews talking in a nice, liberal, egalitarian way, while constantly abusing, sabotaging and undermining women in the most intimate, savage and destructive ways. This understanding of the ubiquity and connectedness of professional discrimination, personal abuse and cultural excusal, of perpetrators covering for each other and assisting each other’s careers, combined with the sheer physical agony, led to a series of intense articles, both here and in the Guardian, in the months that followed: On despair, Stand by your man? Hell no, You can never go back, Relics, Gordon Ramsay's appetite for sexism, Casual sexism is nothing but misogyny, Love letters, The boys' club, old and new, So Today is a boys' club - what's new?, Say it sister - a girlfriend gives some tough love and His Friend's A Philanderer Too: A One-Act Play

The effects and consequences two years on are exactly the same as they were one year ago. My life now is worse, and less. I no longer want to succeed, because I don't believe I can succeed. I only want to survive without being destroyed. If anyone says or does something decent I think they are lying, tricking or playing a game. If someone seems pleasant I think it is just because they are a good liar – and, horrifically, I have often been justified in this cynicism. It simply never occurred to me that anybody would lie and cheat. As Margaret Atwood writes in The Handmaid's Tale: "The moment of betrayal is the worst, the moment when you know beyond any doubt that you've been betrayed: that some other human being has wished you that much evil."

Evil is the right word, but the moment of realisation was not the worst. The worst was and is the neverending aftermath. When certainty in life has been destroyed, the only thing left is magical thinking: I must pray that I am surrounded by colleagues and friends who do not despise and abuse women, who do not lie to us and enjoy it, who like to read our words, hear our voices, watch our films, who are not sleazy, who like to be around us and who realise that we are human beings. But I do not believe these prayers will work, because prayers and belief require faith. You can never be unbetrayed.

RG, I want to congratulate you: you wanted to become successful, and you have. Every time I see your name and see you pretending to be a ‘nice guy’, talking softly, being charming, namechecking your partner and mentioning women artists every so often, I feel like I have been stabbed in the heart and I boil with anger and total and utter devastation that this is the world I have to live in now, for the rest of my life. I feel intensely sorry for your students, your sister, your neice and all your friends and colleagues. I am glad your mother never found out how you mistreat women. When I see women grovel to you I want to be sick. The duplicity of the two-faced is tremendous to behold. When you are setting up, gameplaying and tricking someone, RG, the trick is real to them. They do not know they are being used and manipulated. How easily you people abuse. How tightly you stick together. How assiduously you take everything you can get. How smoothly you lie. How is it that you thrive? Why is it that you get to live, and I must die? Not because of what you did, but because of what I have learned: we cannot win against the boys’ club. They hate us. I am ambitious, fearless, talented and strong, but the culture which supports and abets you is corrupt and misogynistic and the game is rigged. You wanted to lie to, deceive, sabotage and cheat many women, and you did. You thought you would be assisted and protected by countless other men and their geishas, and your own groupies, and you were. Your friends and colleagues are exactly the same as you in their 'private' mistreatment and public annihilation of women, and one day I will name them. You didn’t want to explain or apologise, and you haven’t. You wanted to be an abusive man, and you are.

More portraits from Palestine

2011-11-30T15:41:00.002Z

All photos from Ramallah, April/May 2011. Photos by RH

OBJECT: news and events

2011-11-26T12:23:00.005Z

* Saturday November 26th - RECLAIM THE NIGHT!
Join OBJECT and march with thousands of women through central London to reclaim the streets, calling for an end to violence against women. Look for the OBJECT banner at the assembly point so that we can sing and chant together as we march. More info here

* Saturday December 3rd - CONFERENCE: 'CHALLENGING PORN CULTURE'
International Conference featuring leading academics and activists from the UK, US, Australia and Norway, including Prof Gail Dines, author of 'Pornland' and Jennifer Hayashi Danns, author of 'Stripped', plus OBJECT, Imkaan, Women's Support Project and many more. Places are limited so advance booking is strongly advised. For further details and registration see: http://www.challengingporn.org/

* OBJECT is advising the Advertising Regulator, the ASA
Following our roundtable meeting with the Prime Minister, OBJECT is now acting as an advisor to the advertising regulator, the ASA. The ASA have committed to stricter regulation of adverts which hyper-sexualise women as part of their commitment to tackle the sexualisation and commercialisation of children. Recent succsses include a decision to ban a new series of Lynx adverts which were degrading to women. You can complain about an advert here

* Protest outside the Miss World Finals
November 6th: OBJECT joined London Feminist Network, Million Women Rise and UK Feminista to revive the spirit of the 1970 protest outside the Miss World Finals in London. Wearing sashes emblazoned with ‘MissOgynist’ and ‘MissRepresented’, protestors sang and chanted to make the message clear: 'Beauty pageants are sexist and outdated and they have no place in twenty-first century Britain!'
See news coverage here
See OBJECT factsheet on beauty pageants here

* Fem 11
November 12th: OBJECT were delighted to run a workshop for 700 people at the inspiring and motivating Fem 11 conference. We were honoured to meet so many dedicated and courageous individuals and we were pleased to have the oportunity to question Mayoral candidates about whether they would publically support a campaign to end the sexual objectification of women in the press. The answers were positive - now is the time to ensure that they live up to their promises. Email any responses you get to anna@object.org.uk

* Lap Dancing Clubs - Update
Ongoing: To find out the latest news about how councils across the country are using their new licensing powers to regulate the lap dancing industry and to learn more about how you can have your say in the licensing of lap dancing clubs, please see the OBJECT website here Take action now!

* Book and Nomination - Jennifer Hayashi Danns to carry the Olympic Flame
OBJECT has nominated Jennifer for her outstanding work in raising awareness of the harmful realities of lap dancing. Jennifer's nomination has been accepted and she is now in with a chance of being a Torchbearer in the London 2012 Olympic Torch Relay. You can view Jennifer's nomination here Details of Jennifer's book (co-edited with OBJECT's former lobbyist, Sandrine Leveque) can be found here

* OBJECT in new book 'Big Porn Inc.'
"With contributions from leading world experts and activists, Big Porn Inc offers a cutting edge exposé of the hidden realities of a multi-billion dollar global industry that promotes itself as a fashionable life-style choice... This fearless book will change the way you think about pornography forever." For more reviews and to order a copy of the book see here

all text (c) OBJECT

From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe: Lessons on Tackling Violence Against Women and Girls

2011-11-21T12:26:00.001Z

On the first anniversary of Lynne Featherstone MP's appointment as the UK Government's Champion on International Violence Against Women The Gender and Development Network invites you to reflect on

the year passed and the year to come. The debate will be from 1-3 pm on Thursday 24 November 2011 in Committee Room 6 at the House of Commons.

Speakers:

Lynne Featherstone MP, Champion on International Violence Against Women
Rt Hon Alan Duncan MP, Minister of State for International Development
Netsai Mushonga, Director of the Women's Coalition of Zimbabwe (WCoZ)
Selay Ghaffar, Executive Director, Humanitarian Assistance for Women and Children in Afghanistan (HAWCA)
The event will be chaired by the ever-brilliant Jane Martinson, Women’s Editor of The Guardian

RSVP by 22nd November to lauren.donaldson@gadnetwork.org.uk

Please attend this event to demonstrate to the ministers how seriously you take the issue of violence against women, and to match the commitment the government is showing in sending two ministers to speak at the event.

The above notice was sent to me by Womankind Worldwide, an international charity whose work I admire greatly and with whom I hope to work and support more intensively next year. In the meantime, don’t miss their Three Butterflies Lunch on Friday 25 November 2011 at The Savoy Hotel, London. The Three Butterflies Lunch will raise much needed funds for Womankind’s Worldwide’s work to end violence against women, increase women’s participation and secure women’s human rights. The speakers this year are Jude Kelly, Artistic Director of the South Bank Centre and Netsai Mushonga, a human rights defender and Nobel prize nominee from WW partner the Women’s Coalition of Zimbabwe. Find out more and buy tickets here.

Amnesty: Write for Rights

2011-11-16T10:58:00.001Z

Amnesty International is launching a new Write for Rights campaign in celebration of the organisation’s 50th anniversary and to mark International Human Rights Day. Amnesty's other celebration of its 50th year was to launch Amnesty TV, an online global human rights series made by 11 white men and 0 women. Of the men, only one, Chris Atkins, had any human rights experience (the others were from British telly comedy). When challenged about the all-male makeup of the team Atkins told me that "positive discrimination harms the very people it is supposed to support." Read all about it here.

Let's hope they can do better with their new campaign, details (from a press release) below:

Amnesty, the pioneers of activism, is encouraging people to pick up a pen and change a person’s life in a return to the classic, hand-written letter, which has proved such a powerful tool for change. Millions of people around the globe take all forms of action for Amnesty’s campaigns, from online petitions and other methods of digital communication to public rallies and demonstrations. But in the organisation’s 50th year, the humble hand-written letter is being championed once again, in a “penaissance”.

It is hoped that more people than ever before will write a letter demanding action on one of the ten cases in the Write for Rights campaign. The cases illustrate the diversity of Amnesty’s work; from people facing the death penalty to communities facing forced eviction and women who are challenging the impunity which allows soldiers in Mexico to avoid justice for rape.

Kate Allen, Director of Amnesty International UK [yes, it's a woman! Thanks, sister], said:

In 1961, when Amnesty was started, our founding members had no idea whether ordinary people writing letters to Heads of State and other people in power would make any difference. It turns out that it did, and it still does.“These days, we Tweet the President of Azerbaijan, or e-mail the head of the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles – and we will continue to deploy every weapon in our arsenal - but the humble, classic letter is a uniquely formidable tool. A letter has the power to embarrass, persuade, protect, coerce and force people to alter their behaviour, and ultimately to change the world. If you want to right the wrongs, write about them.

The ten individuals and groups who feature in Amnesty International’s Write for Rights campaign, include; Jabbar Savalan, a 20 year old history student in Azerbaijan who is serving a prison sentence for anti-government comments he posted on Facebook; 75 year old Hakamada Iwao, believed to be the world's longest serving death row inmate who has spent the last 43 years awaiting execution in Japan and Inés Ferndández Ortega and Valentina Rosendo Cantú, two rape survivors in Mexico who have tirelessly campaigned to have the perpetrators of the attack brought to justice.

So... on Saturday 10 December (Human Rights Day) Amnesty International is hoping that an unprecedented number of people across the UK and around the world, will write to people with the power to stop human rights abuses. Thousands of school pupils across the UK will be writing letters on behalf of the cases on Friday 9 December. To find out more about the ten cases, click here.

Women and Film in Africa: Overcoming Social Boundaries conference at the University of Westminster

2011-11-15T10:58:00.002Z

The University of Westminster’s Africa Media Centre is celebrating the achievements of female African filmmakers who have overcome the double oppression of patriarchy and colonialism to produce some of the most original and thought provoking films it is possible to see today.

The Africa Media Centre is bringing together notable female African directors, actors, scriptwriters and academics from all over the globe for a two day conference in London on 19 and 20 November. Filmmakers will share experiences, reflect on the contributions made by pioneering women from the past up to and including the present day and discuss the influence that women have in the television and film industry and on audiences in Africa.

The keynote speakers are as follows:

Jihan El-Tahri is an Egyptian-French writer, director and producer of documentary films. Her award-winning films include documentaries filmed in the Congo, Angola, Zambia, Tunisia and other parts of the world, including Saudi Arabia. Her latest film Behind the Rainbow deals with the transition of the ANC from a liberation organization into South Africa’s ruling party.
Yaba Badoe is a Ghanaian-British documentary maker, journalist and novelist; she is a visiting scholar at the University of Ghana. Her directing and producing credits include the award-winning documentary The Witches of Gambaga the story of a community of women condemned to live as witches in Northern Ghana.

The two-day programme includes film screenings and over 40 presentations by filmmakers, actors, academics and other contributors from Africa, Europe and America.

Jane Thorburn, co-director of the Africa Media Centre, says:

The immense contributions by female filmmakers are sadly underrepresented, both in industry debates and academic research. This conference represents a great opportunity to learn at first hand how so many African women filmmakers have successfully made films and documentaries despite the additional difficulties of working in Africa.

Topics will include the following themes: the Influence of Feminism on African filmmakers, women in front of and behind the camera in African film, women in the African feature film industry, women in technical roles in film, video and television in Africa, women documentary makers in Africa, gender and the representation of women in African film, audiences for films by African women/female audiences in Africa, case histories of leading African women film makers, women scriptwriters, African women acting in video, film and television, the censorship and the portrayal of African women in film and television, the role of NGOs in commissioning women filmmakers and issue-based films, how African governments have helped or hindered filmmaking by African women.

Event details:

Full conference: Standard rate £135. One day rate £95
Full conference: Student rate £55. One day rate £40.
You can register here.
Fees cover: conference pack, lunch, coffee/tea, a wine reception and administration fees.
Please follow the link here or here

Text (c) The University of Westminster press release

A letter from a listener

2011-11-11T13:30:00.003Z

"Hi Bidisha

I’ve just been directed to your piece on women in radio by a young woman, the daughter of my friend. My friend and I share regular tallies of the low numbers of any women’s voices on the Today programme. Lots of rage and gnashing of teeth. I have written to the producers/editors/ complaints departments in vain.

My point is that not only is there a dearth of women presenters – women are routinely not invited on to the Today programme to discuss the topics presented, women’s names are not even referred to in discussions. The words “her”and “she” are not heard. Education controversy – let’s wheel out Chris Woodhead, Anthony Seldon – because clearly there has never been a notable women headteacher or schools inspector. It’s not just laziness, a question of the usual suspects invited on the programme over and over again - it’s a powerful bias that ensures that women’s voices simply don’t matter, that women don’t matter. I sit and listen and watch the minutes tick by as we are not only marginalised, but are inaudible, invisible, non-existent.

You could land here from Mars, tune in to the Today programme and - on some days - I kid you not – up to an hour later not have a clue that women exist at all.

I’m 60 in December – all that struggle in the 1970’s - and I cannot bear it. How many other young women are going to protest?

Another point - if Woman's Hour can respond at 10am to a breaking news story and get women on the show - academic/politician/vox pop/historian/scientist/other worker or professional/whatever - to interview, just why can't the Today programme do the same?!

I also emailed Matthew Bannister on Last Word a while ago to ask him how is that women don't seem to be dying nearly as much as men- and I've noticed the programme has improved somewhat - at least he replied to me and said they were trying."

All That I Am by Anna Funder

2011-11-08T16:08:00.002Z

All That I Am is one of the most impressive, frightening studies of the approach and aftermath of war that I’ve ever read. It is about precursors and consequences, clues and fallout, foreboding and legacy, assembled with the single-minded intelligence of a detective sifting through other people’s lies, regrets, self-justifications, denials, hidden heroism and memory.

The book is, as Anna Funder says in her afterword, an act of imagining and recreating the skin, sinew and muscle that once connected the bones of real events. It features a wide cast of refreshingly intelligent and articulate people from the German playwright Ernst Toller to Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein and W H Auden – men honoured by history for their creative gifts, pioneering discoveries, genius for self-expression, depth, political engagement and principles. It covers Hitler’s emergence as a leader in the long aftermath of World War I, focusing on the six years of his increasing suppression of intellectual, critical, political and democratic activities before the outbreak of World War II. We observe the ruthlessness with which he implemented new law after new law, steadily breaking all conventions of justice, equality, democratic protection and freedom, in a stunningly audacious campaign of Nazi double-think. Funder’s genius – so obvious in her award winning non-fiction book Stasiland – is for uncovering vital, devastating truths about power and the ease with which those who want it get it, by lies and force.

Many things are known about Hitler and the Holocaust but that ridiculous, terrifying man did not come out of nowhere. All That I Am is the riveting story of the pre-events, the violent crushing of opposition and the sabotage and betrayal of the resistance. Its hero is not any of the Great Men I’ve namedropped above but two real women, Ruth and Dora, political activists who were instrumental in fighting Hitler every step of the way, assisting refugees leaving Germany, trying to preserve the intellectual and political life of the soon-to-be-disenfranchised and writing frantically from America, London and elsewhere in Europe to convince the rest of the world that Hitler was a threat. It is a novel about great unseen acts of heroism and resistance and a tribute to the impressive personalities of ‘ordinary’ women and men who did not see themselves in a heroic light and whose political beliefs went against the notion of individual heroism.

The novel presents us with a completely new method of looking at events. The only way to depict a shattered world is through a shattered story. The people, the locations and the times are disparate. Friends are separated; the present and memories of the past contrast sharply; methods of depiction splinter and fail, leaving gaps, contradictions and overlaps; there are different takes on the same events.

Ruth is a survivor – and, in real life, a friend of Funder’s – living out an ignominious but witty old age in present-day Sydney, satirising her own physical failings with the confidence of a woman who has earned her sarcasm. She is a former activist who has travelled the world and served time in Hitler’s prisons, but is patronised and treated as a child – or simply ignored – by the people around her. She is treated as though she is a stupid, useless female with no story. In truth she has been an active participant at the heart of world events. One day she receives an old edition of Ernst Toller’s (real) autobiography, I Was A German, found in storage in the New York hotel he lived in briefly as an exiled intellectual in 1939, using a young émigré, Clara, as a secretary. The edition is full of interpolated sheets of paper, Toller’s own act of restitution, dictated to Clara. The extra pages tell a (true) story from the early 1930s that Toller had omitted out of ego and guilt – that of Dora, his lover, comrade and secretary (and also Ruth’s cousin), who was caught and imprisoned by Hitler’s police in her attempts to smuggle Toller’s papers out of the country.

By the time Ruth receives the package Toller is long dead, Dora is also dead, most of the friends are dead and history has seen what Hitler did. As Ruth reads Toller’s telling of Dora’s story she reflects on her own friendship with Dora during the same period. Ruth tells the story herself in parallel, bringing their international circle of friends, comrades and colleagues back to life. Together, skilfully, perfectly, Funder assembles a portrait of an entire society of richness, culture, bravery and fervent political participation, which has been written out of history or overshadowed by what came next. Toller is an author writing with apparent honesty, although we realise just how much he has left out and just how enormous his ego is. Ruth is herself a gifted photographer – her first camera was given to her by Dora – who works for hours to frame, take and develop a shot. Both art forms are created not just by the addition of words of visuals but by subtraction, editing, erasing, the deliberate and precise construction of images or narrative. Both creators are fallible; as Ruth says, “it is entirely possible to watch something happen and not to see it at all.”

Throughout, Funder excavates the negative spaces of the stories, dramas and pain that happened before, between, around, and the anguish of those whose considerable power had been defused through forcible exile. She makes stunning and tragic revelations about the intensity of anti-Semitism and racism in England and of the Nazi German presence in London, something I had not known about. She writes movingly about the cultural, linguistic, intellectual and social devastation of all displaced people, whether they are refugees, objectors, exiles, asylum seekers, migrants or prisoners. What she has to say will resonate far beyond those touched by the specific consequences of Nazism.

One observes with growing alarm the negative transformation of German society in its steady and (for Hitler, deliberate, concerted and systematic) plunge into hellish destruction. The novel begins with a disturbing mixture of tragedy and hope. Dora and Ruth are “completely German” secular Jews, wealthy, clever, stylish, successful, highly cultured, from homes which are not just good but lavish. It is a depiction of existence before subjugation. The ending of World War 1 creates a brief desire for a pacifist revolution and a far longer legacy of damage to its mentally and physically wounded former soldiers, many of whom are German Jews. There are half-gruesome, half-amusing scenes amongst the horribly injured inmates of an army sanatorium. Funder’s excellently crisp descriptions of fighting and carnage have a shocking immediacy, as do her revelations about German’s secret war hospitals for those so wounded that they would be unfit for civilian life and unsuitable for public visibility lest they lower morale and “frighten women on trams.”

The way power- and violence-hungry governments lie to their people to justify war is one of the main themes of novel, and is just as relevant now as then (Hi, Tony Blair, if you’re reading this). Hitler rises with a powerful conviction that Germany’s loss in WW1 is a humiliation which must be avenged, first by making it strong, pure and infallible from the inside. For all his outward bombast and his easily caricatured manner, he is a far from hot-heated politician. He begins with ragged demonstrations by callow Swastika-wearing youths but in the six short years covered by the novel he has developed multiple vicarious/proxy bodies of brutality – the SA, the SS, the Gestapo. Ruth, Dora and their friends go from being on the inside – prized as Berlin intellectuals, smug, secretive and sexy – to being on the outside, in fear of their lives.

If you were reading this in a speculative fiction novel, the coming dystopia would be so clichéd as to be unbelievable. But it was all real. Dora finds “a list of thirty-three people Berlin is making stateless by decree. Because of political opposition or…for having ‘violated the duty of loyalty to the realm and the people, as well as damaging German interests’…They’re taking everything – houses, flats, cars – stripping people of their qualifications, impounding their bank accounts, cancelling passports. They are making us legally cease to exist.” Well before the Holocaust Hitler’s goons set up, follow, hunt down, drive out or kill all dissidents, journalists, political critics, challenging political parties, intellectuals and other opponents: “When they found eight Communists hiding in a cellar in Mitte they simply boarded it up. People walking to work heard their calls from the vent at pavement level but no one dared help.”

At the same time, Dora and Ruth and their comrades discover that youth soldier training camps have sprung up all over the country, that production of weaponry and air and road transportation vehicles has begun in regional factories and that the development of electricity and wirelesses for all homes has been mobilised to enable the Nazi propaganda campaign (the radio should be renamed a “Hitler Hearer”, one character quips). Hitler introduces laws which suspend all prior notions of justice, democratic process and political engagement and – to put very simplistically – imprisons or kills anyone who is not for him. The Holocaust grows out of this fervent act of mass ridding: “thousands of anti-Hitler activists were being held in ‘protective custody in makeshift SA barracks – empty factories, a water tower… even a disused brewery. Soon there was not enough room. That was when they set about building the concentration camps.”

All That I Am is a fully-formed novel as well as a devastating depiction of real events. Its artistry can be found in the unity and cohesion of all of its images. Every phrase or observation is related to the linked themes of ageing, memory and narratives of the past; of survivors’ guilt hidden or revealed; of covert political activity and covert emotional dynamics; the revelation and withholding of political and personal truths; breakages in narrative, distinctive narrative forms and interrupted narratives like rebels’ coded messages, censored reports and lists of the condemned. This is not fine writing for fineness’s sake but a way of striking allusions against each other to reinforce the whole. Seemingly innocuous comments – like the ageing Ruth observing that a hospital gown is designed to “remind one of the fragility of human dignity, to ensure obedience to instruction, and as a guarantee against last-minute flight” – are devastating in the context of the wider narrative. The young Ruth discovers her talent for photography – “The camera’s shutter was a lever at the side of the box. It made a long, soft, metal sound, the sound of capture and theft” – which is exactly what is to happen.

The novel is also a work of gendered justice for which I am grateful. Ruth and Dora’s milieu had many women participants who were just as gifted, just as fearless and worked just as hard as their male comrades. The women were instrumental in assisting people of both sexes and all classes trying to flee Germany, and of alerting the wider world to Hitler’s threat. They were, additionally, prominent spokeswomen in the fight against the oppression of women before and during Hitler’s time. However, despite what they say, they suffered themselves from this oppression during their own lifetimes and have suffered from the erasure of women from history in the many decades since.

Toller and the others are Names, great men, great artists. As Toller ruefully says in the novel, Auden leaves lunch to write a poem that will still be read in two hundred years’ time (hey, but not by me). Thomas Mann and Einstein show up to speak for Toller’s release from prison. The men are in a boys’ club supported by the world and by history. They know each other and help each other; and history knows and has helped them. It ignores the women. Despite the women’s deluded proclamations of equality (and the men’s patronising ones), they are voluntary subordinates – Dora is Toller’s little assistant, safeguarding his genius while he marries someone else. His guilt, when it comes, is too late and too self-indulgent to prompt anything but contempt. Ruth is the girlfriend of (real) star journalist Hans Wesemann and sees herself, with typical self-abasement, as “an anchor for his high-flying.”

Funder exposes these contradictions with sly satire and the fineness of a true artist. The men’s torments are funnelled into masterful works of art, heroic reputations, connections, cultural power, international fame and worship, which they are given by everyone and take full advantage of even when in the depths of existential pain. Toller, dictating in New York in 1939, writes sleazily and objectifyingly about his new secretary Clara, and just as sleazily and self-justifyingly about the old secretary, Dora. Ruth writes about Dora with a very different emphasis – she has human respect and understanding for her energy and intelligence. This is what makes All That I Am a work of art and not merely a factual fiction: its flawless differentiation of voice and viewpoint, its subtle calibrations of psychology and subtle revelation of people’s individuality, nobility and hypocrisy. The women are left with no name or legacy or reputation for genius or heroism while the men – Toller, Spender, Isherwood, Einstein, Auden, Mann – have everything gifted to them for free by history. On this point I thought of how much has changed since Hitler’s terrible triumphs (as he saw them) ….and yet, how little has changed, that it has taken until 2011 for just two or three of the heroines of the 1930s to be shown proper respect, given credit and a place in official history.

Funder’s book is an impeccable act of cultural restitution, a beautifully written novel, a strong countermove against the neglect that official history has perpetrated against her heroines and a true horror story about the incremental development of fascism, dictatorship, autocracy and genocide.

All That I Am is published by Penguin.

UnderWire short film festival. Women are seen, heard...direct, produce, critique and create.

2011-11-07T10:11:00.003Z

UnderWire, the UK's only short film festival dedicated to showcasing the raw cinematic talents of women, have announced the programme for their second annual festival, running 23 - 26 November at The Shortwave Cinema in London, featuring an eclectic mix of genres, themes and aesthetic styles across seven short film strands.

Underwire is the most exciting new film festival to launch in the last few years. Alongside the Birds Eye View festival, which returns in 2013, it is redressing the under-representation of female talent with positivity, creativity, energy and joy. More than that, it gives film lovers an opportunity to discover thrilling talent, to be lost in stunning visuals, engaging stories, brilliant performances and sharp scripting. And it proves, with its chock-ful roster of amazingly gifted women, that when the people behind discriminatory lists, events, awards nominations, festivals, articles, histories and references protest that "there just aren't any women around" or that women are too shy/absent/modest/unambitious/minor/petty/small to make the grade.... they're lying.

With awards for Best Director, Best Producer, Best Writer, Best Editor, Best Cinematographer, Best Composer and Best Film Journalist, the festival hopes to move the UK film community towards a more gender balanced industry, which recognises and encourages the work of women working across a range of crafts in the UK.

UnderWire was established by co-founders Gabriella Apicella and Gemma Mitchell in 2010. Gemma Mitchell and Helen Jack are the co-Directors of UnderWire 2011. Festival patrons include Samira Ahmed (journalist for the Guardian, the Independent, Radio 4), Kim Longinotto (director of Divorce Iranian Style, Sisters in Law), Andrew Kötting (director of Gallivant, Ivul), Nira Park (producer of Scott Pilgrim v the World, Attack the Block), Laura Mulvey (author of Visual and Other Pleasures, Fetishism and Curiosity).

“With more than double the submissions and industry events from last year’s festival, we hope to increase opportunities for film creatives and audiences looking to meet and share work at a time when funding and resources are constrained within the UK film industry.”vHelen Jack, co-Director of UnderWire.

"UnderWire will provide a much needed impetus to take a look at what new female voices in film can do. I'm really looking forward to watching the talent emerge." Rebecca O’Brien, Producer Sweet Sixteen, Looking for Eric.

"There is a burst of female energy in British film at the moment, so having a forum for them to share their work at UnderWire is great!" Maxine Peake, Actor See No Evil, The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister

The films in this year’s festival look at issues ranging from national identity (The Cake, Sunday), female sexuality (First Bite, Nocturn), adolescence (Biatch, I Luv Matt Johnson) and social responsibility (N25, Himalayan Sisters), bringing together work that looks to plant the seeds of engagement and discussion for everyone who attends over the four days in November.

Alongside the film programme, UnderWire is hosting a day of affordable industry events on Saturday 26 November at The Shortwave Cinema and The Bermondsey Square Hotel. Sessions include Ladies First: Representation of Women in Music Videos, A Room of Her Own: Writing Leading Ladies and The Feminist and the Flirt: Performance Video Art, amongst others.

For the full programme details, visit http://www.underwirefestival.com/

All text except the 2nd paragraph is (c) UnderWire press materials

Savage Messiah by Laura Oldfield Ford

2011-11-02T13:53:00.003Z

Images by Laura Oldfield Ford, from an upcoming poster campaign. For more details
click here.

Are you ready for a concrete future? Laura Oldfield Ford is a visual artist whose talent was developed at the Slade and the Royal College but whose sensibility is chiselled into fineness by the streets, blocks and derelict spaces of East London. Savage Messiah is the name of her fanzine, a collection of exquisitely worked pen and ink drawings that reveal the rigour of her Fine Art heritage, spiked with political awareness, polemical anger and a born documentarist's passion for people and places. The original fanzine editions were handed out in lots of 20 or 30 at a time but have now been collated in a fat, beautiful, black-paged book published by Verso, whose promo page can be found here. The book features an excellent introductory essay by Mark Fisher and Ford will be speaking at several UK events in the coming weeks.

Ford is as much a fine artist as a streetpunk. Alongside the development her work through fanzines, fliers and flyposters she is shown in traditional gallery spaces and will have a solo exhibition at the Hales Gallery from 25th November 2011 onwards, featuring billboard images of her work. I welcome the scale of a gallery-sized project, as Ford's art deserve grand and close inspection. How ironic it should be that the very yuppies - wealthy young City professionals buying up newbuild penthouses in edgy East London - should hang her work on their exposed brick walls. Given the mainstream acclaim Ford has received and deserves I almost think the 'zine, which is also published online, belittles the industry behind the images. It is clear that each one is the product of many hours' closeted studio work by a creator who has developed her craft with great commitment and discipline. I want to see them up close, on great quality paper, framed, large scale, in the peace of a gallery, with all its institutional endorsement. And I would like to be sent a big one so that I can have it for myself.

Savage Messiah is reportage turned into art of breathtaking precision, political sensitivity and power. On day-long research walks of ten miles or more, Ford covers everything from 'Hipster HQ' - the rapidly-developed and quickly gentrified areas around Dalston, Hackney Wick, Haggerston, Homerton and Shoreditch - to the poor, unhip council blocks which have received no funding or improvement despite endless promises, to the corporation-plundered once-wastelands of the far East London 2012 Olympic site. The chillingly named Olympic Delivery Authority has sealed off this area with a concrete wall surrounding what will be the Athlete's Village, supported by numerous international leisure brands policed by private security firms.

Ford observes, sketches and photographs these areas, which are simultaneously forgotten and earmarked for exploitation, making notes and speaking to residents. The result is not straight reportage or urban landscape recording but reality with the zoom lens sniper eye tuned to the max. The cracks in walls, the scrubby greenery growing between slabs, the broad backs of massed riot police and the sad, scratchy graffiti cut into the page with intense monochrome menace. There is, appropriately, a savagery and sharpness underlying Ford's work, equal parts anger, despair, love and urgency. The images are beautiful and terrible: fantasy figures of fashion brand advertising on hoardings next to blocks of flats with smashed out windows.

I would like to see equal recognition of the complementary element of Savage Messiah: the text. Printed in white Courier font on the inky matte background, Ford composes journalistic essays based on her observation of the sites she visits (her riffs on the gleaming monstrosity of Westfield shopping centre are hilarious), reports on her experiences and relays candid conversations with the many hundreds of residents of the unglossy areas usually ignored by lifestyle mag articles on the coolness of the East End. The stories are sad, funny, tragic and true. They are not reported verbatim but are as honed, edited, balanced and polished as the visuals.

Savage Messiah functions as both a literary and an artistic history of the vast geographical area Ford covers, often starting with a present moment like a property earmarked for demolition or an area blocked against wanderers or trespassers. It then moves back in time to excavate the experiences of locals, uncover previous uses of the site and reveal many different biographical, architectural, social and cultural manifestations across the decades. It is as much a seemingly-spontaneous (but actually highly refined) postwar people's history as a fierce and visually stunning contemporary elegy for an East London that will soon be engulfed in the razzmatazz of the 2012 Olympics - before being abandoned once more.

Protest: the coalition has cost Bristol's women nearly £45 million

2011-10-26T01:44:00.002+01:00

Bristol Fawcett offer a stark warning as coalition cuts cost Bristol’s women nearly £45 million -double the cost to the city’s men. A report compiled by the local gender equality activist group Bristol Fawcett has found that the coalition spending cuts are costing the city’s women nearly £45 million – twice as much as the cost to men. The group fear that the impact of the spending cuts on women will entrench and increase gender inequality in the city.

Bristol Fawcett and their supporters will be gathering on College Green between 12.30 – 1.30pm on 3rd November to protest the impact of the cuts on women, ahead of the council’s budget announcement.

But where is this huge cost coming from? The report explains how the cuts are impacting on Bristol’s women. Key findings include:

The changes to the benefits and tax system will cost Bristol’s women a shocking £44,825,450 .
This includes cuts to tax credits, benefits to pregnant women, family and care benefits and unemployment benefits.
Cuts to housing benefit leave Bristol women up to £15 a week worse off.
The cuts to the EMA will leave around 3,000 Bristol students without the support they need to continue their education.
The council are cutting the health and social care budget by £7.3 million and the PCT by £19 million. The number of women needing these services outnumber men by several thousand.
Women make up 63% of council workers in Bristol. The council are planning 240 job cuts in 2011/12 alone.

Bristol Fawcett believe that “these cuts are unfair and unnecessary. The impact on women’s lives will further entrench economic and social inequalities between men and women living in Bristol.” The report was produced with the aim of illustrating just how dramatic the impact of the cuts has been, and continues to be, on Bristol’s women. The results are clear – women are bearing the brunt of the Government’s deficit reduction plan, and it’s costing them dear.

The National Fawcett Society, an organisation dedicated to fighting gender inequality, has praised the report and the reasons for writing it:

“ Drastic reductions in public spending have left women facing a triple jeopardy of cuts to jobs, benefits and services that have over recent years helped to narrow the gap between women and men. This report spells out the real impact of cuts on the ground in Bristol, and shows clearly how many will have a disproportionate impact on women. It’s reports like this that help us make sense of what’s actually happening to people around the country.”
Anna Bird, Acting Chief Exec, Fawcett Society

Bristol Fawcett have worked closely with a number of local organisations to collect their data and develop the report, including Shelter, Child Poverty Action Group, Unison, Bristol Citizens Advice Bureau, Voscur (a voluntary services organisation), Bristol Violence and Abuse against Women and Girls Strategic Group, Bristol Partnership Equalities Action Group, Bristol Rape Crisis. NextLink (support housing for domestic violence survivors and victims) and Platform51 (formerly the YWCA).

In response to the report, Bristol City Council have told Bristol Fawcett:

“We are consciously thinking about the three aims of the Equality Duty as part of the process of our own decision-making on our Medium Term Financial Plan. The Equality Duty will be one of a number of factors that we need to consider. We will therefore be looking closely at this report which will assist us in making our recommendations.”
Barbara Janke, Leader of Bristol City Council

Bristol Fawcett hope that their report will be a wake-up call to decision-makers, and bring an end to budget policies that deepen gender inequality in the city. There are fears for the city’s most vulnerable, as domestic violence charities lose funding A local domestic violence support service, Wish for a Better Future, lost all its local council funding as a result of cuts to local government spending. One independent domestic violence advisor told Bristol Fawcett, “the funding cuts mean we will have lost our core work of supporting victims and survivors.”

Women are facing a choice of pay-cuts, redundancy and reduced pensions in the public sector. Said one worker,

"I'm a local government employee and over the last eighteen months there have been reductions in staff numbers through the ending of temporary contracts. This has meant huge gaps have appeared in the work of the organisation with either no one to do them at all, staff covering for absent posts and areas of important work simply not being done. We are constantly being presented with schemes to "encourage" us to leave with varying incentives like voluntary redundancy, part-time working and early retirement, yet no forward planning to direct who is eligible to leave nor information about who will cover the work if people do leave. All colleagues are concerned about their jobs and futures and management just don't seem to understand the level of fear and worry people have. Now we are told the government are introducing a pension tax on public sector workers to help pay off the debt. I'm in line to lose an extra £1000 per year along with having my pay frozen for the last three years, inflation and the VAT rise, I'm experiencing about a 20% pay cut in real terms and now they want to punish us even more for something that was nothing to do with us. The public sector has been successfully demonised by the government but we are the people providing services for those most in need - you can't privatise everything. This country is going back 30 years and no one seems to be standing up to try to stop it."

Event details:

Location: College Green
3rd November
12.30 – 1.30pm (press call for photos at 1pm)
Who’ll be there? Bristol Fawcett, the report authors, supporters and the women affected by the cuts
Press contact: Anna Mapson at annamapson@hotmail.com

Notes:

Bristol Fawcett is a local branch of the National Fawcett Society. They campaign and lobby to improve policy and services for women and girls and bring an informed gender equality perspective to local decision making bodies.
Last year, the National Fawcett Society challenged the coalition government’s emergency budget. They believed that the budget would disproportionately have a negative impact on women, and estimated that 70% of the cuts would hit women’s purses directly. A judicial review of the budget was called, and the Government admitted they had not conducted a gender equality impact when creating the budget. In response to this, Coventry produced a report on the impact of the budget cuts on women which motivated Bristol Fawcett to create their own report.

No Women No Peace

2011-10-26T01:33:00.002+01:00

Ten years on from the invasion, Bristol feminists stand in solidarity with Afghan women. Their demands are simple. Include Afghan women in peace negotiations.

In 2001, the protection of women’s rights from the Taliban was used as a justification to invade Afghanistan.
10 years on, women’s rights are being compromised, as women’s demands are ignored and their presence is excluded from peace negotiations. The very negotiations that aim to decide their futures.

On Monday 31st October, women and men across the country will gather to hold vigils as they stand in solidarity with the women’s rights activists of Afghanistan. They ask the Foreign Secretary to remember and consider that without women involved, there will be no peace.

Why the 31st October? The 31st October is the anniversary of UN Resolution 1325 that:

Affirms the importance of women in peace making initiatives
Urges member states to keep women fully involved in conflict resolutions and the peace making process

What is the Bristol Feminist Network asking?

"Later this year, William Hague will attend an international conference that will decide what happens next for peace in Afghanistan. We ask him to respect the UN Resolution. We ask him to urge his colleagues to proactively ensure that Afghan women are involved and have a voice in the negotiations that will decide the future of their country. The 31st October will see women and men gathering across the country to tell William Hague: DON’T TRADE AWAY WOMEN’S RIGHTS IN AFGHANISTAN."

Event details:

Location: Pero’s Bridge, Bristol City Centre
Demo gathers at 5.30pm, press photo call at 6pm
Monday 31st October
Wear green scarves, in solidarity with Afghan women’s rights activists.
Press contact: Sian Norris sianm.norris@googlemail.com
More info: http://www.bristolfeministnetwork.com/

text (c) Bristol Feminist Network press release

Lucky Bunny by Jill Dawson

2011-10-23T23:53:00.001+01:00

Jill Dawson excels in literary ventriloquism, getting under the skin of a character and telling us their story, seemingly in their own words. Like all people who love to talk about themselves, her protagonists reveal much more than they realise. So it is with Queenie Dove, the narrator of this fast and wily adventure set in London's East End in the 1940s and beyond. The novel seems, at first, like the triumphant and enjoyable self-aggrandising of a fast woman, a talented thief on the make, laughing in the face of machismo and misfortune. It becomes, in the end, a moving and sobering account of survival, sharply told and brilliantly researched.

The self-christened Queenie is determined not to have her listeners feel sorry for her, but the circumstances of her life speak for themselves. She is a child of the slums, born to an alcoholic and irresponsible but charismatic father and a high-spirited but disadvantaged mother. Both parents, as well as Queenie and her younger brother Bobby, are in and out of jails, nuthouses, borstals, cells and halfway houses, existing in a shady world of criminal gangs, shoplifters, vice, clubs, black-marketeers and scammers. It is a seedily glamorous existence where the thrills are cheap, the decor is tacky, the perfume's gone off and sex and violence are close (and closely linked) just beneath the surface.

The events of the novel are related by Queenie with the brassy belligerence of a practiced confidence trickster. The period details are big, brash and bold: the Italian cafes, police raids on private clubs, new fashions, popular songs and criminal revelations seem glossed from newspaper reports and scandalised headlines. The era, like its characters, is revealed with broad brushstrokes that evoke the on-the-make excitement of Lucky Bunny's scrappy, big-talking personalities. Similarly, the action is fast and dramatic. There are heists and periods in the slammer, raids and thefts, screaming fights and rigged races.... but it is a testament to Dawson's skill that beneath the excitement there is always the ghost of the girl Queenie used to be, anxious, unloved, frightened, tough and determined to keep on going. Queenie sees herself as a success, but she is not. She sees herself as a liberated woman, but she is not. She sees herself as a main character, but she is not. She is a gangster's moll, a bit part player, a woman with resilience but little power. She is heartbreakingly proud of her skills as a thief; but she is not so skilled that she doesn't get caught. She is not an agent or a heroine, a leader or a mastermind.

Despite its surface thrills and spills and Krays era glamour, Lucky Bunny is a novel of great concern, human sympathy and seriousness. It is a novel of ideas and society, disguised as a romp. It never forgets the person behind the lipsticked and audacious self-creation that is 'Queenie Dove', whose real name we never learn. It deals with the consequences of poverty, the effects of violence, the attraction and risk of criminality and the forging of character through necessity and deprivation. The novel ends with a stunningly depicted night time train robbery ...whose end result I won't reveal... but for all its grand scale and luridly attractive action, the reader comes away with a far subtler appreciation. In the end I understood and admired Queenie Dove - and admired Jill Dawson, too, for creating something so fine from such brutish elements.

Too cool to blank

2011-10-19T18:43:00.000+01:00

This dropped into my inbox. Don't know who the artist is, haven't been to The Gallery in Redchurch Street, don't know who Delamain Arts are or what Visual Dirt is. But the flyer was too cool to blank.

Beauty in Truth: a film about Alice Walker

2011-10-10T00:48:00.003+01:00

The interview below, by Marian Evans, is cross-posted from Gender Across Borders and celebrates the work of two remarkable women: the writer and human rights activist Alice Walker and film-maker Pratibha Parmar, whose documentary about Walker, Beauty in Truth, is launching next year. 2012 is the 30th anniversary of Walker's great work, The Color Purple. As you can read below, Parmar has much to say about women in film-making, the broader arts culture and beyond.

Alice Walker

Alice Walker’s life and work have inspired me, shown me that it’s possible to be a writer and a global citizen with love, spirit, courage and laughter. There’s The Color Purple and Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation, as well as the Broadway musical. And there’s so much more: poems, essays, short stories, novels like Possessing the Secret of Joy—about female genital mutilation—and her latest book, The Chicken Chronicles. So when I heard that Pratibha Parmar of Kali Films was making a documentary about Alice Walker, called Beauty in Truth, I was very excited.

Pratibha Parmar is a multi-award-winning filmmaker with a family heritage of protest. She has lived and worked on four continents: Asia, Africa, Europe, America, and has created many “filmic spaces where women of color can reach each other across the various diasporas”. These spaces include her very first video Emergence (where Palestinian, South Asian, African-American, and Chinese women speak about their art), A Place of Rage (about June Jordan and Angela Davis within the American Civil Rights movement, shortly to be re-released on DVD), an earlier film collaboration and accompanying book with Alice Walker, Warrior Marks, also about female genital mutilation, and a feature, Nina’s Heavenly Delights, “a surprising love story where Scottish humor meets Bollywood spectacle”.

Director Pratibha Parmar

Pratibha kindly answered some questions while she completed preparations for Beauty in Truth’s Indiegogo campaign, to raise money to complete post-production.

How did you decide to make Beauty in Truth?

The idea was conceived over a Christmas break four years ago when Shaheen (my partner and co-producer) and I were watching a stack of DVD’s in a cosy hideout in Northern California. These DVD’s were all biographies of ‘iconic’ men, such as Frank Gehry, Andy Warhol and Bob Dylan.

Immediately we wondered out loud about the absence of cinematic visions of ‘iconic’ women. Where were the STACKS of films on women who have challenged, changed and shaped history and impacted on contemporary culture? I came to filmmaking from a passionate desire to see stories about women, particularly women of color who are rarely seen on mainstream television or cinema screens in all our/their complexity and nuance. So it isn’t a surprise that my default position is to always ask questions.

Where are the in-depth explorations of women as thinkers and public intellectuals, women as history makers and shapers, women who are inspirational leaders and role models for upcoming generations? Where indeed was a film on Alice Walker who is rightly considered one of 20th Century’s most significant writers? And so started the journey of this film.

I am focusing on completing Beauty in Truth before the end of 2011 and want to launch the film in 2012, the 30th Anniversary of The Color Purple.

We have had many funding challenges in the last few years yet we are proud to say we have completed 85% of our filming with just a few small grants as well as major extensions on credit limits on our personal credit cards. More recently support from ITVS who have been fantastic has boosted us. We have interviewed some amazing people including Danny Glover, Steven Spielberg, Gloria Steinem and of course Alice Walker herself.

For me the most frustrating thing about the whole process has been how it’s had to stop and start as we apply for funding, wait for news on our application, pick ourselves up again when the answer is not we hoped for, find another grant to apply to and so and so on. This has meant that for the first time ever in my filmmaking life, I have had to work with different DPs (Directors of Photography) and not the same one throughout. My work as you know is very visually led and so for me the crucial relationship is with my DP.

But this time around, I have had to find DP’s locally in the different cities we were filming in and some times it didn’t work out the way I would have liked. That’s been damn frustrating.

One particular highlight was interviewing Yoko Ono in Iceland when she was giving the LennonOno Peace Award to Alice Walker for her humanitarian work. It was on Lennon’s 70th birthday so the whole event was ultra special. After I finished the interview, one of the people in Yoko’s circle who had been with her for a long time said to me that it was the best interview she had given in a really long time. So of course I was thrilled. Not only did she talk about Alice (they both went to the same college, Sarah Lawrence, but at different times) but she also shared anecdotes about her own work and her and John Lennon. It was such a privilege to talk to her.

You’ve already undertaken a very challenging project with Alice Walker, the Warrior Marks film and book. How do you stand alongside Alice as you make Beauty in Truth?

I think every time we make a film we are laying ourselves wide open because most times we come from a place of passion for our work–a passion that helps us to fly over the iron fences in our way. And when you make work that comes from that deep place within your bones, it’s inevitable that you feel exposed and vulnerable. When we made Warrior Marks, it was a challenging and difficult journey primarily because of its subject matter, female genital mutilation. Out of such shared experienced grew a mutual trust and respect. Recently when we finished shooting an interview, Alice said, ‘You know Pratibha we wouldn’t be having these conversations if we weren’t friends’. So I know that the content of our conversations for the film is precious and I feel honored that she has trusted me with her story.

What can you do in a documentary that you could not do in a book about Alice Walker, or she could not do herself, in a book?

There is in fact an excellent biography by Evelyn C White on Alice Walker called A Life: Alice Walker. I highly recommend it. Visual storytelling particularly with a biography is an exciting challenge and with Alice’s story there is of course the gift of her evocative poetry and fiction. So there is an opportunity here to weave some of this writing embedded into visual montages throughout the film, writing that often reflects key moments in her eventful life. It’s a beautiful way to anchor some of these turning points. I am excited to work with animation, graphics and moving images to create these visual vignettes that hopefully do justice to Alice’s writing.

Has funding been problematic for this project because of women’s lack of access to capital in general? Or to our collective reluctance to support women filmmakers, even though we want more women-centred stories?

Okay let’s start with some startling statistics, which give an idea of what women filmmakers are up against—only 7% of directors, 13% of writers, and 20% of producers are female. Given such a dearth of female representation in front of and behind the camera, is it any wonder that we continue to have a struggle to get funding for female stories and voices.

And within this context many of us especially those of us who are declared feminists are experiencing acute funding challenges. It’s hard especially when you make films that don’t fit into the dominant white, male paradigms at the best of times but right now its pretty dire.

But still, I have to admit that I didn’t think it would be as difficult as it has been to find funding support for a film on one of the most compelling, history making, writers of the 20th century. And I am not exactly a beginner director either. Just this week I read that US T.V. networks hire hardly any women directors and in a situation where women were/are already a minority, our continual disappearance both in front of and behind the screen is worrying.

Women are usually the first hit in any economic crisis as we are witnessing all around us right now with the current crisis and when it comes to our voices in the media the situation just gets worse. There has been an overall shift in recent years towards strident conservative, right wing thinking, which adds to the struggle to get funding for films that don’t fit into their retrogressive lens. Alice Walker’s outspokenness on issues such female genital mutilation, as well as the Palestinian people’s struggle, makes some funders nervous about supporting the film. I know this to be the case from some of the comments we have received.

And it’s not just the right wing. Recently there was an article in the New York Times about the documentaries screening at the Toronto Film Festival and there was not one mention of a film by a woman. Documentary is a genre in which women have always been very prominent. But suddenly when the genre becomes ‘sexy’ and more publically profiled because ‘named’ male directors are turning to the genre, it’s only the male filmmakers who get name checked. Melissa Silverstein who writes the Women In Hollywood blog did a great piece on this.

In the Warrior Marks book, you wrote that the “controlling, curbing, and problematizing of women’s sexuality have always been cross-cultural”, and sexuality is a theme in your work. To sustain your cross-cultural work, and the anger that accompanies it, you must need vast resources of love and courage. Has some of this come from your very long domestic and creative partnership with Shaheen Haq? Has your own sexuality influenced your work? And if so, how? And what are your views on LGBTQ representation in South Asian media?

I believe that everything you are and have been shapes your creativity. In my case my diasporic personal history is an intrinsic part of what has made me. I was born in Kenya, grew up in the UK and was brought up to think of India as my ancestral home. Currently I am making home in California. My status as a woman, a woman of color, an out lesbian and a feminist has challenged me in finding ways of negotiating a world that insists on making me into the ‘other’ but I also love that this outsider identity has given me an opportunity to revel in more imaginative ways of engaging with the world.

As for my relationship with Shaheen–yes indeed I would not be who I am today, doing all that I do without the love I have been blessed to experience with my partner Shaheen Haq. Her faith and abiding confidence in me during my many ‘dark nights’ over the years has pulled me through. Together we have broken many many taboos–for a start she comes from a Muslim background and I from a Hindu–both religions and communities historical ‘enemies’ since the partition of India. My parents fought against British rule in India but they also harboured a lot of anti-Muslim sentiment as a result of the bloody history of that partition. Ditto for her family. And then on top of that we have stepped completely outside the cultural norm and rejected a heteronormative expectation of us, all this has thrown us way off into the margins.

But I have always embraced the margins which is where some of the most exciting and innovative work comes from. I made Khush in 1991, the first South Asian lesbian and gay documentary. The film spanned India, UK and Canada. At the time I had no idea what the impact of this film would be but to this day I have folks who tell me that had it not been for that film, they might never have come out to themselves, or their families or friends. When I went to India in 1991 to film interviews, homosexuality was illegal and not many people were (understandably) willing to be on camera. I went back in 2008 when I was invited to screen my lesbian romantic curry romance, Nina’s Heavenly Delights. I met many many lesbians and gay men who were out and open about their sexuality. Things had changed absolutely and it was wonderful to see that. More recently homosexuality has been decriminalized in India and there are regular LGBT marches in places like Delhi, Bombay and Calcutta.

For me LGBT representations made by South Asian LGBT filmmakers like Sonali Gulati are far more exciting than any found in South Asian media. Bollywood films have started to include queer characters but they are so often full of stereotypes. Self representation is powerful which is one of the reasons I decided to become a filmmaker.

You have a teaser on the film’s site. Have you got any other images or footage to share?

We now have a longer trailer, which we hope people will view and share as much as they like. We also have quite a few production stills and some of these are on our website alongside my blog. I am about to venture into unknown territory and explore a whole new way of raising funding. Inspired by some amazing success stories, we have decided to take the plunge and start a crowd funding campaign for Beauty In Truth on Indiegogo. And as the IndieGoGo campaign gains momentum we plan to release a few choice video podcasts from the film.

What do you need? How can we help?

Crowd funding is an exciting way to raise money through grassroots outreach and potentially an excellent way to build community and audiences to have dialogue and discussions with. I truly believe that there is a diverse and widespread international community of people out there who want to see this film, especially women. Films like this do and can make a difference. But we need YOUR help. There is only two of us doing this with the help of a few well wishers. Please spread the word on the film. We are asking people to follow us on Twitter and Facebook, tweet/ email their friends, post to Facebook and help get us donations on our Indiegogo site. Become Beauty In Truth Ambassadors and hold parties in your home, community centres and gardens…anywhere really where there is beauty and light and good food.

We want to build an active and vibrant community around the film and if people tell us about their fund raising efforts via a short video or even a short blog or an email, we will post it to our Facebook page (Alice Walker Film) and on our website.

Alice Walker on her land.

Thank you, Radio 1, for today's edition of 30 Seconds of Spontaneous Misogyny

2011-10-06T14:55:00.001+01:00

In my column a few weeks ago I introduced a new game, 30 Seconds of Spontaneous Misogyny, prompted by - well - 33 years of life on this planet, and a conversation which happened in front of me in a lift at Broadcasting House. It's a good game because one is never short of participants, examples, tactics, intriguing new phrases or settings. You can play it any time, anywhere, and you don't even need to try. Some days a woman can claim a top trumps full house with multiple moments to relate to her friends. I thought I'd publicise the latest edition, which happened less than 25 minutes ago as I write.

I'll set the scene. I am in my study and Radio 1 is on. It's 2.30pm, immediately after the news broadcast. DJ Greg James and news reporter Chris Smith are having a pleasant conversation. Greg's talking about the idea, prompted by the death of Apple's Steve Jobs, that one must seize the day and do all the things you secretly wanted to, for life is short. I like this idea and am thinking about the one thing I'd most want to do, and most fear to do, which is write a historical, mythic fantasy adventure series with a brilliant heroine, following her life from her teens into adulthood. Greg says he's had a text from a guy called Omar, whose act of Seizing the Day was to ask out the girl he'd always liked. Omar says that he and the girl are now engaged.

Chris Smith: What - all in one day?
Greg James: No...I don't think so.
Chris Smith: He's a fast worker!
Greg James: She's easy.
Chris Smith: Well - clearly.

!Women Art Revolution: a brilliant and salutary film by Lynn Hershman Leeson

2011-10-02T22:52:00.001+01:00

I am writing to celebrate the film Women Art Revolution, poster image above, which is being showcased by one of my favourite London galleries, the Whitechapel. For over forty years, Director Lynn Hershman Leeson has collected hundreds of hours of interviews with visionary artists, historians, curators and critics who shaped the beliefs and values of the Feminist Art Movement and reveal previously undocumented strategies used to politicize female artists and integrate women into art structures.

!Women Art Revolution elaborates the relationship of the Feminist Art Movement to the 1960s anti-war and civil rights movements and explains how historical events, such as the all-male protest exhibition against the invasion of Cambodia, sparked the first of many feminist actions against major cultural institutions. The film details major developments in women’s art of the 1970s, including the first feminist art education programs, political organizations and protests, alternative art spaces such as the A.I.R. Gallery and Franklin Furnace in New York and the Los Angeles Women’s Building, publications such as Chrysalis and Heresies, and landmark exhibitions, performances, and installations of public art that changed the entire direction of art. New ways of thinking about the complexities of gender, race, class, and sexuality evolved. The Guerrilla Girls emerged as the conscience of the art world and held academic institutions, galleries, and museums accountable for discrimination practices.

Over time, the tenacity and courage of these pioneering women artists resulted in what many historians now feel is the most significant art movement of the late 20th century. Carrie Brownstein composed an original score to accompany the film. Laurie Anderson, Janis Joplin, Sleater-Kinney, The Gossip, Erase Errata and Tribe 8 are some of the gifted musicians who contributed to our soundtrack.

About Lynn Hershman Leeson:
Writer / Director / Producer / Editor Lynn Hershman Leeson pioneered site specific, performance and interactive media. Most recently, she was honored by the Digital Art Museum in Berlin with the d.velop digital art award (d.daa), the most distinguished honor for lifetime achievement in the field of new media. Her other honors include the prestigious Golden Nica Prix Ars Electronica, the ZKM/Seimens Media Arts Award and, as a Sundance Screenwriter Fellow, she was honored with the Flintridge Foundation Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Visual Arts. She has also received The Alfred P. Sloan Film Prize for writing and directing Teknolust, and in 2006, the International Association of Digital Arts award for “innovative storytelling,” Zero One Prize for “Media that Matters” and a Creative Capital Grant for her documentary, !Women Art Revolution. In 2009, she became a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Siggraph. Hershman Leeson wrote, directed and produced the feature films Teknolust, Conceiving Ada and Strange Culture, in addition to 14 other films and shorts. The films starred Tilda Swinton, were shown at the Sundance Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and Berlin International Film Festival, and were all internationally distributed. Her artwork is held in numerous collections, including at the Museum of Modern Art (New York), The National Gallery of Canada, DG Bank (Frankfurt) and The Walker Art Center (Minneapolis). She has published extensively, is the Chair of the Film Department at the San Francisco Art Institute and Emeritus Professor at the University of California.

Screening dates for !Women Art Revolution:

The official UK Première, Launch and In Conversation between Lynn Hershman Leeson & Achim Borchardt-Hume, Whitechapel Gallery's Chief Curator, is on Saturday 15 October at 3pm. The price is £6/ £4 concessions.
Free screenings are on Sunday 30 October at 3pm, Sunday 13 November at 3pm and Sunday 27 November at 3pm
There will be a screening and In Conversation between Griselda Pollock and Lynn Hershman Leeson on Sunday 11 December at 3pm, price £6

text (c) Whitechapel Gallery press

Facebook says rape incitement pages are like a 'rude pub joke'

2011-09-26T11:08:00.009+01:00

In the last week I have publicised and wholeheartedly endorsed articles written by team members at Change.org which show the large number of Facebook pages celebrating, advocating and inciting the rape, abuse and violent assault of women. There are pages about "Riding Your Girlfriend Softly Cause You Don't Want to Wake Her Up", a page about "throwing bricks at sluts" that includes a photo gallery asking "Bang or Brick", pages called "Raping Your Mate's Girlfriend to See if She Can Put Up A Fight", “Kicking Sluts in the Vagina”, “I Know a Silly Little Bitch that Needs a Good Slap”, "Don't You Hate it When You Punch a Slut in the Mouth and They Suck It" and "Punching Pregnant Women in the Stomach." The page about "Abducting, raping and violently murdering your friend, as a joke" has more than 16,600 Likes.

You can read the entry about it here: Facebook refuse to remove rape incitement, rape apologism, abuse and misogyny pages even when begged. The article links to a petition, now more than 170,000 signatures strong, urging Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg to remove and condemn these pages. I followed up this story for the Guardian, here. So far, Facebook have done nothing.

I want to see a man with his power, profile and leadership take a stand against the endemic violence and abuse of women. Rape incitement and rape apologism are not issues of free speech but of the violent abuse of women, which is absolutely mainstream worldwide and supported by all sides of a culture in which this type of abuse is ignored or belittled, the victims are demonised and blamed and the perpetrators are defended and excused. This article comes in the wake of Topshop's two T-shirts of Hate, one of which compared women to dogs while the other made light of violent perpetrators' typical jeering excuses. Topman's eventual retraction statement contained an extra free bit of added misogyny by saying that the T-shirts of Hate were "light hearted and carried no serious meaning." Yes, that's right: sheesh, we overreacted and are being humourless. How stupid of us not to realise that being compared to dogs and having perpetrators' excuses thrown back in our faces, in a world in which the endemic abuse of women is perpetrated with impunity, are all just a bit of jokey banter. I suppose misogyny is lighthearted and carries no serious meaning when you are the perpetrator, not the target.

Topman's hatred of women is not to be outdone, however, and their T Shirts of Hate spurred other womanhaters across the fashion world to best them. So Chargrilled came up with, and then took down, a classy number with No Plus Rohypnol Equals Yes. Here's the dead page where it used to be on sale. When people complained, the company issued a message that seemed extremely apologetic, until their own CEO Charlie Shiner took to his now deleted Twitter account and said that he "doesn't care" if people do not like rape-loving T-shirts, as they are not meant for "ugly feminists" anyway. Thank goodness for Google caches, for screendumps and for bloggers like this one, who blow the whistle when they can.

I have now learned from Jane Osmond at Women's Views on News, the superlative site which has now replaced the broadsheets as my source of information on women's and girls' welfare, that there has been some reaction from Facebook about these pro-rape pages. The article relates to a 3,000-signature strong UK petition asking Facebook to delete a specific page that contains ‘joke’ posts about rape against women. The page is called "You know she’s playing hard to get when your [sic] chasing her down an alleyway", screenshot here, and contains posts such as "I have raped many women….no lie" and "I rape a pregnant bitch and tell my friends I had a threesome."

The Facebook reaction is not good. Letters to the press from rape crisis and anti violence against women's groups have been ignored and Facebook have openly defended these pages despite thousands of people protesting against it through the FB report mechanism. In a statement given to the Annie Othen Show on BBC Radio Coventry and Warwickshire on 17th August, Facebook said:

We want Facebook to be a place where people can openly discuss issues and express their views whilst respecting the rights and feeling of others. We have now more than 750m people around the world of varying opinions and ideals using Facebook as a place to discuss and share things that are important to them. We sometimes find people discussing and posting about controversial topics

It is very important to point out that what one person finds offensive another can find entertaining – just as telling a rude joke won’t get you thrown out of your local pub, it won’t get you thrown off Facebook.

The petition was launched on August 19 by student Orlagh Ni Léid after Facebook issued the statement above. Orlagh commented:

I stumbled across this page and was shocked to see not only rape ‘jokes’, but outright advocacy and even apparent confessions. I started the petition when I found out that Facebook refused to take the page down and the UK mainstream press proved unresponsive to a letter from Rape Crisis England and Wales. Facebook is an influential social force and in a world where 1 in 5 women is a victim of rape or attempted rape, these pages are more than a ‘pub joke'. Surely Facebook should not be perpetuating rape culture?

Further, Facebook appears selective about how it applies its rules – for instance, a policy against breastfeeding pictures is upheld, indicating that breasts are offensive when used by women for anything other than being objects for men to look at, but that rape is not offensive. In doing so, Facebook have made it clear that it does not consider groups which condone rape to be in violation of their own hate speech rules (terms and conditions, section 3 safety, point 7).

The petition can be signed here.

UPDATE, as at 7th October 2011:

Facebook have made yet another strong statement in support of the rape pages and appear determined to keep the pages up at all cost. Read the Guardian article about it, written by Lizzy Davies.
Facebook's stated defiant reasons for refusing to remove the pages are a direct contradiction of their stated policy, despite what they say. Read the Guardian article about this, written by Cath Elliott.
Women's Views On News have also updated their reporting of this new, second refusal, in this article. Full disclosure: I am not asociated with WVoN, but they have quoted me in their piece.
Women's Views On News have, as at 13th October 2011, issued a new press release. More and more advertisers are pulling their ads from the pro rape pages. However, Facebook still refuse to take them down. Meanwhile the person who started one of these rape-loving pages is threatening to sue Facebook if the page is taken down. As a lady, brought up in all the diplomatic arts, let me say to that person: don't you have anything better to do with your life, you loathsome piece of shit?

Facebook refuse to remove rape incitement, rape apologism, abuse and misogyny pages even when begged.

2011-09-20T23:02:00.004+01:00

This, from Change.org, but endorsed wholeheartedly by me:

Facebook says that hate speech and incitements to violence are banned and will be removed from their site. So why are they maintaining a page called "Riding Your Girlfriend Softly Cause You Don't Want to Wake Her Up"? And another page about "throwing bricks at sluts" that includes a photo gallery of portraits asking "Bang or Brick"? There are pages called "Raping Your Mate's Girlfriend to See if She Can Put Up A Fight", “Kicking Sluts in the Vagina,” and “I Know a Silly Little Bitch that Needs a Good Slap.” There's another page entitled "Don't You Hate it When You Punch a Slut in the Mouth and They Suck It." It has 2,086 Likes. There's another page celebrating the pleasures, for the perpetrators, of "Punching Pregnant Women in the Stomach." The page dedicated to "Abducting, raping and violently murdering your friend, as a joke" has more than 16,600 Likes.

There has even been an organized effort to use Facebook’s own reporting system to flag these and other pages that encourage rape and violence against women so they’ll be taken down. But Facebook hasn’t done a thing.

Now, Change.org member John Raines is going straight to the top. He started a petition on Change.org telling Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to take down these pages and take a stronger stand against violence against women.

Will you sign John’s petition to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg? Sign on, and tell Facebook to remove pages promoting rape and violence against women now.

The petition has more than 160,000 signatures and still Facebook have done nothing. When 1 in 3 women will be sexually abused and/or assaulted in her lifetime, pages like these -- and the reactions they elicit -- are downright scary. Tens of thousands of people have "liked" these pages. Some people even use them as platforms to share rape fantasies and receive explicit tactics for how to carry them out.

Tell Facebook to take down pages that promote violence against women

John has seen the devastating impact of sexual violence and rape firsthand, on his own family. That's why he created this petition on Change.org to get Facebook to enforce its existing policies and to make it clear that content promoting rape and violence against women violates Facebook's Terms of Service and won't be tolerated.

Please sign John's petition. Tell Facebook to stop providing a platform to promote rape and violence against women.

Thanks for being a change-maker,
Shelby Knox [the incredible woman behind Change. org] and the Change.org team

Free Verse: The Poetry Book Fair

2011-09-19T12:57:00.009+01:00

If you want to support independent publishing and you love poetry and poetry books, please come along to the Free Verse Poetry Book Fair at Exmouth Market Centre, Exmouth Market, London EC1R 4QE this Saturday, 24 September 2011, from 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. Entry is free and as you can tell by the cool poster, it's going to be an uplifting and inspiring day which will affirm your faith in poetry and the organisations and events that support it. You can celebrate the originality of independent publishing as the following small presses will be displaying and selling their books: Anvil, Arc, Carcanet, CB editions, Donut, Egg Box, Enitharmon, flipped eye, HappenStance, if p then q, New Departures, Nine Arches, Penned in the Margins, Rack Press, Reality Street, Salt, Shearsman, Shoestring, Sidekick, Ward Wood, Waterloo, Waywiser and zimZalla.

As the organisers point out, there are deeper motivations behind this event than merely bringing together the lovers and practitioners of the art. The fair is a symbol of cultural survival against the financial odds. Like many organisations in many areas, the Poetry Book Society and the Poetry Trust both had their funding cut by the Arts Council in the March 2011 budget guillotine frenzy:

The fair celebrates the variety and vitality of contemporary poetry. It is also a response to the decision of Arts Council England in March 2011 to cut its regular funding of two organisations... who for many years have helped make poetry books available to more readers than they’d otherwise get to, and of a number of publishers whose work (translations, new writers and neglected older ones, local writing) was in accord with ACE stated priorities. A table at the book fair is being made available to the Poetry Book Society, free of charge, to publicise its work.

For more information please contact info@cbeditions.com

One tiny note to the organisers. In sending out press information for this excellent event, please notice which names you're highlighting, who you're leaving out and who you're implying is culturally important (and who isn't). The formal press release has no women mentioned on it and makes me want to ignore your event the way the press release ignores women, who, as you know, will be the majority of audience members attending and supporting the fair. You are selling the event to journalists by saying it's being opened by Michael Horovitz, pointing out that there will be a souvenir programme featuring new work by Simon Armitage and providing a big supportive quote by Benjamin Zephaniah. There are countless major women poets (entirely off the top of my head, in 3 seconds: Jo Shapcott, Carol Ann Duffy, Jill Dawson, Jackie Kay, Fleur Adcock, Lavinia Greenlaw, Liz Lochead, Malaika Booker, Bernardine Evaristo,Wendy Cope, Imtiaz Dharkar, Ruth Padel, Helen Dunmore) who could have been approached to support the event for your press release.

Your all-male trio of namedrops is all the stranger given that only one of the men (Horovitz) is actually reading at the event. It makes me want to delete your email before I click on the list, which you sent as a separate Word document with no fancy typsetting or letterhead, of your actual and excellently-curated readings, in which brilliant women are brilliantly represented. You have put together a roster of appearances that anyone who both supports women and loves poetry would be delighted to attend. Yes, we work diligently at our desks and read our sincere little scribbles out loud, ever grateful, but we also deserve the headlines, the top quotes, the honorific appointments, the big celebration, the major sell, the starry commissions, the cultural weight, the mentions and the fancy, schmancy fonts.

Here's a list of the day's readings for everyone who wants to go and listen to these wonderful contemporary poets at this necessary and thought-provoking event. The day is not just for lovers of the word but also lovers of the book and supporters of the broader creative culture in which all these things flourish:

10.30-11.00 Ward Wood: Sue Guiney and Peter Phillips
11-11.45 Michael Horovitz
12-12.30 Happenstance Press: Jon Stone, Kirsten Irving, Lorna Dowell, Peter Daniels, Clare Best and D A Prince
12.30-1 Nine Arches Press: Ruth Larbey and Matt Merritt
1-1.30 Reality Street: Jim Goar and James Davies
1.30-2 Rack Press: Roisin Tierney, Nicholas Murray and Katy Evans-Bush
2-2.30 CB Editions: Christopher Reid and Nancy Gafford
2.30-3 Carcanet: Will Eaves and Ian Pindar
3-3.30 if p then q: Lucy Harvest Clarke and Tom Jenks
3.30-4 Flipped Eye: Max Wallis and Kate McLoughlin
4-4.30 Penned in the Margins: Gemma Seltzer and Siddhartha Bose
4.30-5 Waterloo Press: Jeremy Reed, Niall McDevitt and Philip Ruthen

UPDATE: Okay, I cannot believe I am following up a pernickety snerpickety article with a grin on my face rather than a frown, but I have now received emails from the organisers which have just confirmed that these are, pretty much, the most nicest, decentest people. You must go to their event. I am putting excerpts of the exchange up here to make you smile, restore your faith and remind everyone that we can all make a difference, small and big, and be positive... and that sometimes people are just rather wonderful.

A major producer writes to me:

Thank you for helping us spread the word! I'm sorry about the press release - we could have so easily avoided the problem with some simple rewording. I'm very glad you did click through to the list of readers though, and that you agree the day itself looks like a worthwhile one. I will do a better job of representing the mix of poets in advance material in the future - thanks for pointing this out. Thank you for such a positive post overall - hope to see you on Saturday!

I write back to her:

Thanks for such a lovely email - as soon as I put the piece up I felt bad because obviously huge, huge amounts of work, efficiency and dedication go into events like yours and I hate being That Person. I should say, I don't believe for one second that these sorts of things are deliberate, or malicious, or anything like that. It is totally obvious how diverse and wideranging the event is. I think I notice it a lot because I get sent so many press releases and these deep sorts of cultural patterns then become very obvious. Anyway, roll on Saturday, it will be a huge success I know.

She writes back to me:

No no - as soon as I saw your post I couldn't believe I hadn't noticed it before sending out all the info. It's such a stupid mistake to make. And it's a shame, because we have put thought into getting an interesting and diverse mix of readers on the day itself. It's always good to point it out - it's too easy to become complacent, and I'm kicking myself. Anyway, thank you again for the enthusiastic post - it's much appreciated!

If that doesn't make you feel generally great and in my case a bit choked up and misty at the niceness of people, I don't know what will.... unless it's this email from a gent behind the event:

Huge thanks for helping to publicise next Saturday’s poetry book fair on your blog. As for the gender issue, point taken. I’ve never before organised anything bigger than a one-person reading, and this has been a learning curve for me: it began as a late-night whim at the time of the ACE cuts, at which time I was thinking of maybe three of the presses who’d had funding cut and another three or four, and then it just grew, and now there are more presses than the room can comfortably hold and I’ve had to turn others away. We did approach one of the major women poets you mention but she didn’t reply; one or two of the others I chose not to approach because I thought them too, well, Establishment. (Armitage and Reid were approached because, although they too are Establishment, they’ve made a point of publishing with and supporting small presses throughout their careers.) But yes, the omission of women on the press release was bad.

Why there hasn’t been an event like this in London (there are others outside London) for so long, I can’t think. If we get enough people, I’m hoping [THE WOMAN QUOTED ABOVE] - who has been amazing - and maybe one or two others, younger than me, can pick it up and do something bigger next year, maybe over two days, and turn it into an annual event.

And this is what I wrote to him, edited because I mentioned some confidential day-job details:

I am smiling very much now as I have just received an email just as lovely as yours from [THE WOMAN QUOTED ABOVE] too, confirming the feeling I got when I saw your poster and roster that you are just utterly butterly wonderful people.

I notice the gender thing a lot simply because as a hack I'm sent info about everything cultural on the planet so patterns of omission/including/bolstering of reputation become very obvious, and so often there's a no-women press release....along with a pretty much no-women actual roster, and no lovely mixed readings to leaven the grief. Your event is not, for one second, sexist, and when I saw the list of readings I was grinning and applauding. My day job is [AS AN IN-HOUSE BALLERINA FOR NASA] and I understand ...the incredible pressure producers are under [WHEN ONE'S TUTU IS ORBITING MARS].

And YES! to a bigger and longer event. You could extend to the Free Word Centre who I'm sure would get behind it, or camp out at the Southbank for 3 days? Or collaborate with the British Library... if there is anything I can do to help facilitate this in any way, please let me know, I am on board (and am not just saying that!) If you want someone to advocate, to patronise, whatever it is, give me the word.

After that I think you will agree, we are all lovely, lovely, lovely people. Have a great week, everyone reading this, and top it off by attending the Free Verse Poetry Book Fair on Saturday at Exmouth Market Centre, Exmouth Market, London EC1R 4QE from 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. Entry, like some verse, is wild and funny and free.

A FINAL NOTE: I thought I should also mention Poet in the City, who have launched an extremely interesting programme of talks, readings and interviews at venues around London and is lucky to have received funding as a new organisation in this Arts Council round. Their work is excellent and includes valuable programmes involving using poetry to help sufferers of mental health issues, youth work, outreach work and much more. But, I ask myself, are they lovely? After Poet in the City sent me details of their autumn events I wrote to the man who sent me the details, POIC chief exec Graham Henderson:

graham@adventco.co.uk
dateFri, Sep 16, 2011 at 11:26 AM
subjectPoetry and mental health scheme
mailed-bygmail.com
hide details Sep 16 (4 days ago)

Hi there and many thanks for your email about poet in the city,

A wonderful organisation and a great range of speakers and events. I am extremely impressed by your daring and diversity - making links with international writers and issues. Very exciting and extremely inspiring.

I was very interested in your 'poetry and mental health' programme and wondered if you're looking for writers to be tutors for this? I have done a lot of work in this capacity, bringing writing/storytelling/poetry/expression to [VARIOUS PLACES WITH VARIOUS ORGANISATIONS]. It is the hardest thing but also the most rewarding thing; often a far cry from the delights of the literary scene as we think of it - yet profoundly valuable. And the people are always strong, funny, inspiring. I had students who talked about certain workshops they had done (with other writers) years afterwards. I will shortly be working with [AN ORGANISATION] on a brief project going into UK refugee centres to work as a writer with families there.

I've stuck my biog in a link on my name but please absolutely ignore this if it's irrelevant. I just wanted to write in support of what you do and see if I could offer something I had some experience in, not as an expert myself but because whenever I work in these roles I come away learning so much myself about people's resilience and depth.

Best wishes, [ME]

No reply. My conclusion: they are good. But they are not lovely.

From Manchester To Palestine with love

2011-09-15T11:52:00.004+01:00

My forthcoming reportage book, Beyond the Wall, Writing a Path Through Palestine is based on my first visit to the Palestinian Occupied Territories. We were due to visit and speak at the Freedom Theatre in Jenin but decided not to as it was too soon after the assassination of its director, Juliano Merkhamis. The theatre's crew and company are still regularly harassed by the authorities.

I have now heard from Madani Younis, the artistic director of the Freedom Studios theatre company based in Bradford, West Yorkshire, about an event which seeks to raise money and support for the Freedom Theatre. This will be an evening of music and spoken word performance at the Contact Theatre in Manchester this Friday, 16th September, from 7pm until 11.30pm. Donations of £5 would be welcomed by the organisers from those attending this event. Madani writes:

At the Decibel Festival this year in Manchester Rawand Arqawi from Freedom Theatre Jenin, Palestine will be giving a talk in response to the theme of “Art in a time of conflict” . When I heard that Rawand was coming to Manchester I felt this to be an opportune moment to show a sign of support and solidarity in their struggle from one group of artists to another. With the support of Contact Theatre and Manchester based artists we have put together an evening of some of the most exciting emerging and established voices in music and spoken word performance. These artists have agreed to share their art to support the work of Freedom Theatre in Palestine. All monies raised will go directly to Freedom Theatre and the necessary work they are doing in Palestine.

We hope that you too can support this event by attending and showing your support for Freedom Theatre, Palestine. I sincerely hope that by sharing our art with others here in the UK we can help make a difference to fellow artists in Palestine.

The event will be at the Contact Theatre in Manchester on Friday 16th September 2011 at 7pm.

Apprehension and hope: women activists ignored, women leaders unite

2011-09-01T20:43:00.002+01:00

Every so often I feel like relinquishing my human rights advocacy and running a donkey sanctuary until I die. Indeed, there is a donkey sanctuary nearby. The donkeys are free to roam until they stray beyond their owners’ territory and discover that the region is staked out with electric fences. At the hub of each set of fences is a small, easy-to-miss generator, ticking sharply as the current flows, producing strong deterrent lines of power. The donkeys are friendly but have learnt not to approach the wires because the kickback is too painful. So they stay in their enclosure, pretty and mild, staring blandly from a safe distance.

That is what it’s like being a woman and that is why I’ll never stop being an activist despite the fact that activism is sometimes depressing, repetitive and exhausting. The alternative is a life of passive acceptance, even safety and contentment, in a seemingly nice environment ringfenced by lines of power and territory, limitation and demarcation, definition and imprisonment, which we did not choose but were born into. We have had no say in the shaping of the world because our ideas were ignored, overruled by force or diminished by the threat of force.

I will risk the pain of the kickback for the prospect of freedom. This is daunting because it requires the rising up of the few against the many, the active minority against a passive majority, the incensed against the complacent, the inspired against the unquestioning. Activism is a chore and a weight, not a thrill. Only when one speaks up does one realise just how much antagonism and resistance there is, fuelled by surface complacency, fuelled by the deep misogyny, racism, militarism, capitalism, individualism and labour exploitation which have made the world what it is. Activism is a full time job which I and many other people do in addition to our actual full time jobs – jobs which are often themselves poisoned by the types of discrimination and bigotry I mention.

Despite this, millions of women work tirelessly and fearlessly all over the world, fighting the machismo which has warped society for women, girls, men and boys in too many countries to mention. But is their work being ignored? I have been contacted recently by numerous international women’s charities. One woman wrote on behalf of “a network of organisations focusing on women's rights and conflict.” They work with the UK government, making sure that its peace and security practices safeguard women living in countries affected by violent conflict. They are shortly to initiate a campaign on women and Afghanistan and want to “mobilise British activists to hold the government to promises made to Afghan women when the UK went into Afghanistan ten years ago.” The woman continues,

The UK and others are involved in discussions about transition out of Afghanistan and we and the women's rights activists that we work with in Afghanistan are really worried that women's rights will be seen as something negotiable, disposable or unimportant in the rush to leave.

Women’s human rights have always been seen, in her so-apt phrase, as negotiable, disposable or unimportant, not only in war zones but in all areas of life. Her message echoed another email exchange I had this week, with a woman from another charity. I admire this charity hugely as it focuses on working with women’s specific local enterprises, co-operatives, programmes and projects in multiple countries, instead of ‘swooping in’ to provide an all-purpose altruism plan. Each project is tailored to the needs and strengths of women in that country, in that region, in that context, at that time, whether it be developing agricultural skills, empowering girls in education, bringing more women to participate in existing political and electoral practices, developing trade and economic skills, establishing apprenticeships, educating women about their rights, tackling domestic violence and much more. The woman from this charity wrote, in a thought-provoking and inspiring email,

One of our big priorities for the coming year is to build links with the UK feminist community and help to make connections between the women’s movement in Britain and in the countries we work in. It’s a source of endless frustration that even the most well-intentioned coverage often leaves the brave and inspiring work of women’s organisations in the developing world out of the picture.

These phrases – being left out of the picture, being disposable and unimportant – reflect how women are treated, how women are represented and what is thought about women, even amongst people who claim to be progressive. This holds whether we are survivors of injustice or activists against it or both. So the global abuse and exploitation of women is ignored; and when women mobilise globally to act against abuse, that is also ignored.

It is easy to sink into despair when reading these messages because one has the feeling that for all women’s seemingly infinite reserves of resourcefulness and strength, the men and women in power still behave as though we do not exist in any meaningful way. We are exploited for our bodies as providers of labour and use of different kinds – administrative, organisational, agricultural, sexual, domestic, nurturing of children, caring towards the ill, supportive of older relatives – and this labour is unacknowledged, underpaid or unpaid and undervalued.

We deserve much more than this. We are human beings with thoughts, experience, ideas and innovation on our side. We have a physical and mental strength that men should revere instead of exploiting. We wish for our ideas about the world to be heard and our vision for a nonviolent world society to be acted upon. More than that, women and men – and more importantly, girls and boys – deserve to grow up on a planet which has not been destroyed by violence, abuse, greed and cynicism.

I do not believe hope is lost, but perhaps it is hidden. In the background of activists’ despair is a women’s movement which is millions strong and encompasses everyone from student groups and grassroots activists to international world leaders. I have recently been informed of an annual gathering of extremely influential women from all over the world, who unite to look at a range of international issues affecting society. The Women's Forum for the Economy and Society, which meets from 13^th to 15th October, is not dealing specifically or exclusively with women and conflict or the aftermath of war but aims to covers all major leading-edge global issues. Speakers include Christine Legarde of the IMF, Emma Bonino the Vice President of the Italian Senate speaking about violence against women and the Nobel Prize winner and human rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi speaking about the Arab uprisings. These delegates and many more are participating in a powerful event whose roster of talks is impressively far-reaching. The calibre of the speakers and their combined social, intellectual, cultural, political and economic clout gives me faith that when these women decide something, it will happen.

The Women's Forum for the Economy and Society is the first international summit of its kind and will be celebrating its 7^th anniversary this year. This year’s meeting focuses on “How our world is changing, and what we can do to shape this change.” It is a shaming indictment of the international political system that thousands of years into human ‘civilisation’ it is a unique selling point that a major – even crucial – forum actually has “women’s voices and perspectives... featured along with their male counterparts in plenaries”. I urge you, activists, media, students, journalists, interested parties, to cover it, watch it, attend it, support it. It is proof that though we may feel we are on the margins, ignored by the mainstream, these powerful women are thinking, talking, communicating and pledging constructively with confidence and solidarity.

Here you will find outlines of some of the debates and panels happening at the event and here is a list of just some of the speakers’ biographies. Both are taken from the official press materials provided to me. Typically, this being an event which foregrounds women’s intellect, energies and capabilities, it packs an enormous amount into three days. There are sessions on climate change, new technology, social media, women on boards, energy resources, political economy, religion and secularism, scientific research, violence against women, bio-ethics and more.

I would add one reservation to my celebration of this event, which I hope to be reporting from in full next year: it tacitly accepts and promotes the fundamentally individualist, capitalist, corporate basis which I mentioned earlier and assumes that ‘success’ and ‘power’ are largely achieved by and exercised through commercial endeavour in a hierarchical organisation whose winners can then philanthropically shower down their benefits on the people below once they have achieved sufficient standing themselves. There is even a session on the failure of global capitalism to ensure equality – and one of the speakers is the Executive Vice President of Nestlé. This is no huge criticism. I only mean to point out that the power being discussed, shared and used here is mainstream and predisposes a stability, wealth, moderation and centrism on the part of the societies, industries and countries represented on the panels. The forum generally has a business, government, commercial, legislative, entrepreneurial and powerful leadership approach rather than a humanitarian, communitarian or activist campaigning basis, although some few NGOs and philanthropic groups are represented. It is broadly accepting of established sources of financial and political power. The majority of speakers are drawn from international corporations, banking and technology groups, the global media including the Wall Street Journal and Reuters and various extremely high level government bodies including those representing women world and state leaders. There is a gala dinner hosted by Barclays and Cartier are hosting its annual Women’s Initiative Awards. But, hey, you know, capitalism. You can’t survive in it – but it’s everywhere.

And finally...the sheer numbers of powerful, dynamic, articulate, unafraid women present in all of these debates, whatever the topic or format, shows that when TV, live event and radio producers who ignore women bleat that women are shy, unwilling, incapable or absent, they are lying.

For journalist colleagues wishing to cover the Women’s Forum, press details and interview requests should go to Briar Burley: briar.burley@mslgroup.com

Selected sessions of the 7th annual Women's Forum for the Economy and Society

2011-09-01T20:34:00.001+01:00

Opening plenary: What keeps us up at night, what we wish we could change, and what sustains us? The moderator is Patricia Mitchell, President and Chief Executive Officer of The Paley Center for Media. Speakers include Yamina Benguigui, writer, film director and Deputy Mayor of Paris, in charge of human rights and the fight against discrimination.
What if the energy landscape requires us to change dramatically? With growing uncertainty regarding nuclear safety, environmental issues with oil, coal and shale gas extraction and use, food supply/biofuel concerns, high cost of renewables, the period of cheap and easy energy seems a thing of the past. What will our troubled energy sourcing mean for individuals, industry, and the planet? Speakers include Amos Bromhead, Senior Energy Analyst, International Energy Agency; Wenhang Huang, Director of the Division of International Cooperation at the Department of Climate Change, NDRC; Carlos Ghosn, Chairman and CEO, Renault Nissan Alliance; and Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, Minister for Environment, Sustainable Development, Transport and Housing of France (In principle
Two degrees warmer: Mitigating and adapting to climate change. Understanding the geopolitical and environmental impact of rising temperatures. What are the challenges for governments and industry, what difference can we make as individuals? The moderator is Nina Gardner, Director, Strategy International. Speakers include Bonizella Biagini, Senior Environmental Specialist, NGO Coordinator, Global Environment Facility; Cleo Paskal, Associate Fellow, Energy, Environment and Development Programme, Royal Institute of International Affairs; and Changhua Wu, Greater China Director, The Climate Group

What if we started with the human point of view in our design processes? Meet corporate anthropologists, sociologists and engineers at the cutting edge of the people-centered design movement, to discover the difference this approach can make and what still holds it back. Speakers include Gretchen Addi, Associate Partner, IDEO, and Lead, THRIVE Program; and Anna Kirah, Innovation and Design Anthropologist, former Senior Design Anthropologist, Microsoft Corporation.
What if corporate key drivers became totally different? Across different sectors, corporations are struggling to understand the factors that will drive success and decrease volatility in their performance. Human resources, the digital revolution, sustainability, supply chain management, E-reputation: why and how might different business key drivers rise to the top in the future? The moderator is Patricia Szarvas, Lead Anchor, CNBC Europe
Generation Y in the workplace. Meet the next generation and join a discussion with Millennials on their social values and perspectives on careers and corporate organization and performance. Will this generation really be so different from Gen X? Speakers include Claire Boonstra, Co-Founder, Layar; Chiara Palieri, former Director of Public Relations, Model European Union 2010; Jessy Tolkan, Executive Director, Energy Action Coalition; and Malyse Uwase, International Orientation Coordinator, Bucknell University
Being a woman: Our different perspectives. Join an international panel of women to discuss whether it is a good time to be a woman in their country and region. What are the perspectives for the the rights accorded to women, and the opportunity to enjoy these and to succeed in a chosen role or career? The moderator is Alessandra Galloni, Bureau Chief, Southern Europe, Wall Street Journal. Speakers include Nell Merlino, Founder and President, Count Me In for Women’s Economic Independence; and Christine Ockrent, former Deputy Managing Director, Audiovisuel extérieur de France.
What if social networks could improve business operations? Social media are now part of our daily life. But it's just the beginning of the revolution. Social networks are also a new way to organize and promote relationships between people working within the same company. Discover in this workshop how social networks can become a ―new ―DNA within organizations, increasing their flexibility, productivity, and creativity.
A women on boards bootcamp designed to help women optimize their search for board opportunities, facilitated by Susan Stautberg, President, PartnerCom Corporation, and Co-Founder, Women Corporate Directors.
Will the Arab uprisings truly become Arab springs? The Arab world has seen remarkable political protests and revolt this year in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Syria, Jordan, and Libya. But will these upheavals result in greater political freedoms and economic reforms able to create jobs and give hope to the poor? Will women be empowered politically and economically in the process? And what if renewal is blocked or stunted – what then? The moderator is Raghida Dergham, Columnist and Senior Diplomatic Correspondent, Al Hayat. The keynote speaker is the Human rights lawyer and Nobel Laureate. Shirin Ebadi. The other speakers are Nedwa Al Dawsari, Director, Partners Yemen; Lina Ben Mhenni, Blog Author, A Tunisian Girl, and Assistant Professor, University of Tunis; Alison Smale, Executive Editor, IHT; and Dalia Ziada, Egypt Office Director, American Islamic Congress.
What if there were new ways to address poverty, precariousness and inequality? Taken on a global scale, capitalism is seen today to be failing ordinary people. The friction between business and society is at all-time highs. Government (itself facing serious legitimacy challenges) is being called on to put issues of poverty and inequality ahead of economic competitiveness. What is the vision and framework to create a long-term capitalism able to bring society and business back together? And what are the next steps for government, business, and civil society to participate in a new way to create economic progress for all? The moderator is Tumi Makgabo, Executive Director, AfricaWorldwide Media. Speakers include José Lopez, Executive Vice President, Nestlé.
Can our societies be religious and secular at the same time? Europe and its Muslims, secular and religious Judaism in Israel, Hindus and Muslims in India, the conservative movement in North America: why are secular and religious groups in such value conflict today? Has the secular state failed, or can it still be home to peoples with different religious beliefs and values? The moderator is Deborah Berlinck, Paris Correspondent, O Globo and speakers include Massimo Introvigne, Director of the Center for Studies of New Religions; Tehmina Kazi, Director, British Muslims for Secular Democracy; Kalpana Sharma, Independent journalist, former deputy editor and chief of bureau of The Hindu and Roni Yavin, Executive Director, Elul.
What if tomorrow’s leaders see change-making differently? And what does society need to do to foster more change "the millennial way"? The moderator is Barbara Bylenga, Founder and President, Outlaw Consulting. Speakers include Adi Balderman, Senior Trainer, Debate Ltd.; Marina Filiba, Founder, Argentinian branch, I Am Challenge; Deepa Gupta, Co-founder, Indian Youth Climate Network; Priyanka Jain, Founder and President, iCAREweCARE; and Courtney E Martin, Author, Do It Anyway: The New Generation of Activists
Is social entrepreneurship the new business of the future? Social business has been getting great press and increasing support from philanthropists, governments and corporations. But will this sector be able to keep its poverty focus as it grows and successful social enterprises scale up? And doesn’t the sector risk becoming a substitute for public welfare (without the taxation powers of governments)? Speakers include Ann MacDougall, CMO, Acumen Fund; and Daniela Nascimento Fainberg, Founder and Director, Instituto Geraçao
What do we have to do to save the European social model? Europeans once took great pride in differentiating themselves in terms of their social model of higher taxes for decent unemployment and old age benefits, educational support, public health provision, and other programs in the social good. How (if at all) can this social model be saved. The moderator is Diane Brady, Senior Editor and Content Chief, Bloomberg BusinessWeek. Speakers include Bruno Coquet, President of the Employment Committee of the European Union; Ann Mettler, Executive Director and Co-Founder of The Lisbon Council; and Monika Queisser, Head of Social Policy Division, OECD
Violence against women: What are some solutions for change? What are the kinds of policies and programs which have been shown to reduce violence against women in its different forms, and what can Forum participants do to help advance the issue? The moderator is Keith Krause, Programme Director, Small Arms Survey, and Director, Centre on Conflict, Development & Peacebuilding, Graduate Institute of International & Development Studies. Speakers include Emma Bonino, Vice President of the Italian Senate; Tala Dowlatshahi, Senior Adviser and US Representative of Reporters Without Borders; Mary Ellsberg, Vice President, Research and Programs, International Center for Research on Women; and Charlotte Watts, Founding Director, Gender Violence and Health Centre, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.
Technology and society. Our everyday lives are increasingly unthinkable without the extended social world, or culture, of digital technologies. What are the frameworks for moral and emotional identity in the new digital culture? What is happening to learning and education as knowledge is increasingly created, held, and evaluated on-line? Will our children, the first generation of digital natives, end up less – or differently—intelligent as this revolution advances? Speakers include Daphne Bavelier, Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester and Sara de Freitas, Director of Research, The Serious Games Institute, Coventry University Technology Park.
The closing speech will be by Christine Lagarde, Managing Director, International Monetary Fund

The above is a selection of the events taking place during the Women's Forum. (c) The Women's Forum press materials.