THAT'S not what you said in the Jeffries' Tube

I'm not actually sure whether I realised I was a feminist first or a liberal. Logic would say feminist, but it doesn't really matter. Why not?

Because both my feminism and my Liberalism spring from exactly the same point. Every single person I have ever met has been an individual. Everyone has a unique perspective and a unique set of experiences, and I love that. I love that everyone I meet has something new to teach me, and I love learning from them. And therefore I loathe all the nasty little systems of social norms that try to quash that individuality and force people to conform. To put people into neat little boxes and label them so they can be sorted and dealt with without ever having to ask them what they think.

The patriarchy is one such system. It labels women and men* and tells them that this is what you must do to be considered a real woman or a real man. It takes unique individuals and judges them, and in most cases, whatever your gender, it finds you wanting. I'm not a real woman because I wear trousers**. matgb is not a real man because he's really good at childcare and likes cooking. My transwoman friends are not real women because they were born with penises. My genderqueer friends are not real people because they don't express their gender according to society's norms.

Fuck. That. Shit.

This is why I get annoyed when people say that feminists are anti-men, or imply that feminists want to do men down. No. Really, no. I'm a feminist because I want all people of all genders, and none, to be free to behave as they want***, free from the strictures of conforming to the rigid gender norms of society, just like I'm a Liberal because I want all people to be free to behave as they want free from the strictures of all the other forms of oppression, both big and small, that are enforced on us to varying degrees every day.

But it's also why, as a feminist, I detest ideas that are designed to make politics easier "for women". Because they, too, treat women and men as homogenous groups and the average man/woman as representative, when in reality the Venn diagram of the genders looks more like this:


The pink group is men, and the small pink dot is the average man.
The blue group is women****, and the small blue dot is the average woman.
The grey group is people who eschew gender expression, and the grey dot is... you get the picture.

The point is that any one individual may be further from "normal" (i.e. average) for their gender or lack thereof then they are for "normal" for another gender. I'm a woman, I definitely am, but in terms of that diagram I'm somewhere over the far left and covered by all three colours. And any individual you meet is going to be floating somewhere in those clouds, but the likelihood is that they are not really much like the average person of their gender. So treating ALL women (or ALL men) as though what works for the average will work for them? It's self-evidently bloody stupid*****.

We are all individuals******. And the ONLY way to achieve true social justice, to smash the patriarchy, and to make sure everyone gets the opportunities they deserve no matter what their gender, age, race, no matter what their quirks or eccentricities, is to treat every person as an individual. That way all the intersecting privileges and oppressions that we are almost all of us subject to can be taken into account, and the way those things affect all of us as individuals can be taken into account, without anyone suffering for being on the "wrong" side of a percieved social norm.

Rant over.

---

* and you must be one or the other; genderqueer people? You don't exist
** OK, there are LOTS of other reasons I am not a real woman, but that was the first one that came to mind
*** within the confines of the harm principle, obviously. Because if you're harming others you're taking away their freedom of self-determination.
**** the women group os slightly larger because there are slightly more women than men, not just because my mouse hand slipped in paint or anything ;)
*****An example I came across recently was that some events in politics are better "for men" because "men have deeper voices" and thus we need to rebalance this to make it better "for women" who have "higher voices". Now if you only consider the averages, this almost certainly applies. The average man DOES have a deeper voice than the average woman. This is irrefutable fact. But an individual man can quite conceivably have a higher voice than an individual woman, and so the effect of such a rebalancing on those individuals would be to skew things in favour of the man, which is the exact opposite of the effect that the person proposing the rebalancing wanted.
****** don't think I can't hear you Monty Python fans at the back going "I'm not!" *severe face*

I am quite willing to believe that some sex workers are exploited, coerced, and mistreated. Human trafficking is a terrible thing, and should be stamped out. Modern slavery likewise. But when somebody says that the ONLY reason for a sex worker to go into sex work is coercion and/or desperation, that makes me a bit uncomfortable to say the least.

The idea that no woman (because when people say this, it IS usually about women) could go into sex work voluntarily springs from some very sexist (and quite modern) assumptions:

1. Women do not like sex as much as men*
2. Therefore if a woman Does It with a man she must be doing it for some reason other than enjoyment
3. Love is an acceptable reason, money isn't

You all know how I hate it when we are treated as members of our group first and individuals second, so I'm not going to labour that point, but... some people have high sex drives, some people have low sex drives, and those things are not always congruent with gender.

It is entirely possible that some women go into sex work voluntarily, and enjoy it when they get there. In fact, more than possible, it's true; you can find myriad testimonies from such women on the internet and elsewhere. And to dismiss them with "oh well they don't know what they are saying", which is normally the next step for people who think all sex workers are coerced? Surely I don't need to point out how patronising and sexist THAT attitude is?

TL;DR version: I am a sex positive feminist and I don't think feminists who aren't know what they are talking about.

---

*Anyone who thinks all women have lower sex drives than all men needs to be introduced to me, and then to have a gentle chat with some of my partners, only one of whom comes anywhere close to having my general level of sex drive.

Still not dead.

Diet going reasonably well (see sidebar) although I am having to resort to things like creme fraiche instead of cream and similar. I had strawberries and creme fraiche at work yesterday and Brendan asked me how it was; I explained that it was like having a wank because you can't go to the orgy, in that it scratches the itch but is just not the same. The pain in my abdominal region isn't gone but it is reduced, so the diet is having the desired effect.

Am coping reasonably well with doing armpits for August, although I am looking forward to the first of September and shaving again. My pit hair is very weedy and thin, but I still feel really weird with it there. It's been an interesting psychological experiment for me in how much patriarchal norms have infected even me... I was going to do a picture but I figured I'd ask if you guys want to see one first. It feels a bit weird to be putting pictures of my armpits on the Internet.

Climbed Pen-y-Ghent with Holly, my dad, Roxy and Spike today. Having done Malham earlier in the month I think we're probably going to make it a reasonably regular thing. It's good for all of us and Holly likes getting out into nature. She wants to do Ingleborough next. Doggies loved it. Spike is now asleep on my feet and Roxy is dying on the other sofa.

Oh yeah, and the nominations are now closed for the LDV awards. Any of you who have been daft enough to nominate me might like to note that I've changed my blog title after nominations have closed but before the awards because I'm evil. Anyone who can identify where the new one comes from might win a prize. those of you who follow me on twitter might have an unfair advantage in that regard...

As usual, I have been vacillating about what to post for this year's Ada day. I toyed with the idea of posting about the frankly awesome and criminally underrated Pat Moss, because being a racing driver is TOTALLY a STEM career, right? And then I thought maybe I should give signal boost to the excellent Little Miss Geek project. But then I thought about what Ada day is for. Ada day is meant to highlight women in STEM careers who should be an inspiration to the kids of today. And I thought about the people who inspired me when I was a nipper. Aside from my dad, they were mostly people on telly - in terms of science this was Patrick Moore, yes, and David Attenborough, and Terry Nutkins... But also Judith Hann and Maggie Philbin. There were mainstream women on the telly doing science when I was a kid.

There's less of them these days, mainly because science telly has been marginalised in the same way that music telly has - ghettoised into seperate channels and post watershed. But there is a lady who occasionally pops up who I think is amazing, so I'm going to blog about her.


(Image from The Indy)

This is Doctor Maggie Aderin-Pocock. You may recognise her from a number of appearances on the telly. I know her best from James May's Things You Need To Know About... where she appears on a regular basis as a talking head. She's currently a space scientist, but her degrees include physics and mechanical engineering, so she's really useful as a talking head on pop science programmes because of her breadth of knowledge.

Maggie is a fantastic communicator, explaining sometimes quite complex scientific concepts in a friendly and accessible way, but I think the thing I love best about her is a her enthusiasm. She's such a geek! She loves her subject, and communicates that love and joy and enthusiasm in the same way that someone like David Attenborough does, and it's infectious.

I'd love to see her get a primetime science slot. She's smarter and sexier than Brian Cox, and less curmudgeonly and a better communicator than Patrick Moore. And, unlike many of the women discussed for Ada Day, she's here, and available now, and not dead and too late to do much about thanking. So, thank you, Maggie, for all you've done so far; and here's hoping you get to do lots more in the future.

For more about Maggie, check out her profile on the Eden Channel, at The Royal Institution, and her programme on Desert Island Discs.