Why I'm a Feminist

On Saturday the Glasgow Feminist network held a public participatory reading at Borders entitled 'Why I'm a Feminist'. Instead of coming along and having an author or scholar do all the talking, people brought along books and materials that opened their eyes to the fight for gender equality.
I searched around for something by Ensler or Dworkin or Greer or... well any of the feminist authors in my bookshelves that would sum up my reasons, but no-one truly represented my reasons for being a feminist. I then forgot about it until the day, and with nothing else to read I wrote down my piece on both sides of an A4 sheet and jumped on the subway into town without editing or re-reading (looking back, I'm proud that I remembered my statistics correctly!). Here it is with added references.

I wasn't always a feminist. When I was a little girl I just assumed I would be treated fairly... or better than boys because they were smelly and I was pretty and a princess and everybody loved me, of course - but even then there were signs that I was wrong. An example of this is the nursery picture books I loved. There was mummy the housewife or the beautiful queen, and there was daddy the farmer, baker, banker, king, outdoor hero, he-who-saves-one-from-the-big-bad-wolf. The princess would love being pretty, was chastised for messiness and a temper (also known as an opinion) and always needed a prince for lifelong happiness. Lastly, the doctors were men and the nurses were women. Always.
I internalised all of this. I hated trousers and Lego because those were for my brother and told Dad that I wanted to be a nurse "because that's what girls do". He told me that was good and nursing is an honourable profession, but girls could be doctors too. I didn't believe him. (I recently discovered that, around this time, my mum finished her job as a research Biologist not only because she wanted to see her children more but also because she was being given a hard time at work since giving birth to us.)
Then I entered the real world. A world where famous chefs are men but we'd never dream of giving a boy a toy kitchen or iron or anything domestic because it's too feminising. A world where Wal-Mart pulled a line of T-shirts featuring a girl saying 'Someday a woman will be president' because it was in some way 'anti-family values' yet kept the one of a boy shoving an 'uppity' girl ("Problem solved!") despite the worldwide epidemic of domestic violence. A world where I'm told to be scared to go out after dark, even though statistically I'm 10 times more at risk of victimisation from an intimate whilst my brother's more likely to be, and has been attacked by a stranger when out. Where the woman who married Steve Wright, the Ipswich murderer, was recently asked if she thought that if only she'd had more sex with her husband, he wouldn't have seen and killed those women. Where my bodily freedom is government-controlled, whether I want to plan or end a pregnancy. Where I'm 'asking for it' if I get raped whilst drunk even though the majority of rapists are inebriated when they attack, yet that somehow excuses them. Where I'm still likely, in our modern country, to be paid less and given fewer opportunities than my male counterparts, where male violence against women causes more deaths and disabilities to 15-44 year olds than cancer, malaria, traffic accidents and war put together, where almost a third of the British public say violence against women is absolutely fine and half - 50%, one-in-two! - say domestic violence is a private matter that should remain behind closed doors where we can't hear or do anything about it - and where people who say they want this all changed for the better are called man-haters, crazy, or worst of all, ugly fat spinsters *cue mock distress*.

I don't have the answers to this. I believe that my position is perfectly logical and morally right, and I want people to know that when half the population of the world is poorer, less healthy and more frightened than the other, I care. I want REAL equality, new attitudes, men proud to be sensitive and women proud to be assertive; people being who they are as opposed to what they are told they should be.

And I'm going to med school this year.
Your future doctor is a feminist.

Lord wants virgin nurses or no nurses

Well, not quite, but Lord Mancroft is clearly shocked that the nurses looking after him have sex.

Lord Mancroft told the House of Lords that he was treated at the hospital in 2007, and described the nurses as "grubby and drunken".

"The nurses that looked after me were mostly grubby. We're talking about dirty fingernails, slipshod, lazy."

The hospital said it had received no complaint but would be contacting Lord Mancroft to discuss the matter.

Yes, nurses should be held to high standards, should take care of their appearance and personal hygiene as a fundamental requirement of working with hospital patients. And DRUNKEN, you say? They were drinking on the job? They should be sacked!
Oh, no. Nothing so serious. Here's what he ACTUALLY means.

"It's a miracle I'm still alive. But worst of all my Lords they were drunken and promiscuous."

"How do I know that? Because if you're a patient and you're lying in a bed, and you're being nursed from either side, they talk across you as if you're not there.

"So I know exactly what they got up to the night before, and how much they drank, and I know exactly what they were planning to do the next night, and I can tell you, it's pretty horrifying."

Emphasis mine.
Nurses shouldn't act like the patient isn't there and shouldn't gab about their personal lives whilst caring for patients, but come ON! WORST OF ALL? Not the lack of hygiene, the careless attitudes, the laziness - no, these nurses DRINK! and have SEX!!! like MEN do sometimes!!!!!!!!! Pass the bleeding smelling salts, I'm not prepared to be cared for by human beings with lives outside their work. If I'm not going to be nursed by teetotal virgin angels that have no vaginas, or at the very least women who pretend to be just like this, I'd rather not be cared for at all.

That's what Mancroft's insinuating, perhaps with less melodrama. By his own wording, he's treating the fact that these nurses go out, drink, and have sex in their free time with as much horror as if they had been drunkenly humping the patients themselves. The real complaints to be found here are

• that the nurses weren't maintaining an acceptable level of hygiene and therefore could be putting patient health at risk
  
• were discourteous towards their charges
  
• were scruffy and unprofessional, and
  
• that drinking heavily the night before going into work could impair their ability to deliver a high standard of care (whilst discussing this in front of a patient will do nothing for their trust in their carers).

THOSE are complaints. 'My nurses like alcohol and have libidos' is not.

Dear Lord Mancroft,

Grow up, lodge real complaints and stop slut-shaming.

Yours,
Mwezzi.

No "kisskisskiss for you". That might be too slutty for your tastes.



NOTE: Click the title of this post for the BBC article. Neat, huh? Please tell me if you prefer this format or not.

Doctors are supposed to help, right?

Back at the start of November I got ill. Very ill. Can't-get-out-of-bed, can't-eat-due-to-severe-pain ill. It turned out that I'd come down with a nasty case of tonsillitis, so I saw a doctor for the first time since I broke my arm 10 years ago. She was sympathetic and patient, she listened to my concerns and symptoms, gave me a quick once-over and prescribed me a ten day course of penicillin. This particular GP has a long waiting list of patients who prefer to see her, and she must've been busy, yet I couldn't have hoped for better treatment at such short notice.

Fast forward to today. Since my tonsillitis was treated I've had a persistent cough, at one point coughing up thick discoloured mucus for a period of at least 2 weeks. I've had aches and pains, suffered lethargy and disrupted, irregular sleeping patterns, and have been much paler than usual. I'd been working in a pharmacy over Christmas helping people with common winter cold and flu related problems, which may not have been great for my weakened immune system but gave me a fairly good grounding in the basics of what is and isn't normal, and from my personal knowledge of my own health I knew this wasn't a normal cold - they used to be the only health problem I'd have, getting them once a year, and I'd have shaken it off in, at most, a fortnight. This was my first long-term illness; yet still I was prepared to leave it for as long as possible in the hope I'd fight it off unassisted. However, today I finally gave in a saw a GP. Not the same one as last time. He was also a busy man, of course, and I understand that he has many patients to see - but this didn't warrant his interrupting me as I listed my symptoms to 'remind' me that he had house visits to do, as if I'd just popped in for a chat without making an appointment. I was instantly made to feel like a nuisance. My sleeping problems were brushed off with standard advice that I'd seen before - 'try reading, don't use the computer near bedtime, cut down on caffeine,drink something warm and milky, gentle midday exercise, warm baths' - which I'd tried before, but felt so belittled that I didn't say. I wish I had. He looked a little put out when I explained that no, I wasn't a student, nor was I undergoing any stressful points (or at least, not for the full 3 months!). I guess I he realised I wasn't so easily brushed off. My cough was diagnosed, after some chest-hearing, as a viral cough - these are fairly common after an infection like I've had, and can take a while to go away, and I was advised to come back in another month if it hadn't subsided. This is fine, I understand this, but the way it was delivered just made it sound more like he was dismissing me as a hypochondriac than as someone who has a very slim medical file and no history of such complaints who has a very good reason to be worried. On the plus side, my paleness and lethargy was plain to see and he ordered some blood tests done - I suspect anaemia (like my mother has) or some other deficiency, I'll find out when my results come in next week.

This reminded me of another case I heard. A friend of my mother once came in in a fury and said, "If your daughter becomes a doctor, make sure she doesn't become a pompous git!" Her own daughter is away at university and had been suffering from a variety of stress-related and other health problems, and eventually went to see a GP. He basically looked down his nose at her and dismissed her concerns as 'women's problems' and that he 'suspected you girls get these complaints all the time'. Seriously! She has problems which she hasn't had before, goes to see a doctor as any concerned person would, and is told she's overreacting and a silly little girl!

Why are so many doctors - and I hate to say it, but the majority of such complaints I hear seem to be about male GPs towards female patients - such condescending arseholes? They are trained and paid to help all their patients without making them feel like they're stupid or making stuff up. No WONDER the first GP has such a long waiting list, when some of the others at the practise are so unsympathetic. 'Women's problems'? How about, instead of packaging up all sorts of complaints into these two words (which seem to have become short-hand for 'unimportant time-wasting matters'), the doctors explain to the patients the possible causes for their complaints and, if it IS possibly related to hormonal changes in a woman's body, help her to understand what's happening and give ways to help cope instead of dismissing her? We don't get a lot of readily-available information about our bodies aside from 'you'll grow breasts and have periods during puberty. This may hurt a little. Try not to get pregnant or infected if you must have sex. Eventually you'll be unable to have children, so remember to have plenty when you're young or you'll regret not contributing to our already oversized population and following the urges you must have if you're a real woman.' A lot of the changes caused by hormones and the possible discomfort this can cause is ignored, so when women DO experience them it can be worrying or even frightening, so WHY DON'T DOCTORS UNDERSTAND THIS? More to the point, why do we have to go so much out of our way to find out about such things?

Ugh.


[UPDATE: All this 'medical rape' stuff recently just got me even more riled. Men and women across the medical establishment are ignoring their own patients. All these stories are coming from women - that is the one common factor in these tales so far, it is WOMEN who are feeling that they have been truly violated, although there are men who are also having their concerns and voices ignored. Where is all this arrogance coming from? Why are doctors, nurses and midwives ignoring the need for their patients to consent to any and all procedures, failing to see how traumatic it can be to have ANYONE force ANYTHING upon someone who's already in a vulnerable state? Are doctors also carrying out prostate exams on men whilst they're repeatedly told to stop, or are they only forcing things into women 'for their own good'? WHAT'S GOING ON?]

I'd rather eat chocolate, too...

... but I won't deny that other women prefer 'exercise'.
Joan Sewell has just written a book. But not just any book, oh no. This book is about how any woman who is not like her must be delusional.

The idea that women’s sex drive can match men’s is politically correct piffle, says Sewell, who is 45. Her memoir, I’d Rather Eat Chocolate: Learning to Love My Low Libido, recounts one frustration after another in a buildup to an anticlimactic conclusion: she’s just not that into sex. Such a pronouncement may not be titillating, but it’s groundbreaking, says Sandra Tsing Loh in the March issue of the Atlantic.

Libidinous ladies parade across our television screens—in Sex and the City, for example, or Desperate Housewives—but Sewell thinks they’re faking it. Like many real women, they are conforming to an image of supposed sexual liberation as they throw down their men and play rough. Poor Sewell, then, is the deviant.

The ensuing interview basically draws out her views: she doesn't like sex, and actresses and porn stars are faking it because that's their job, therefore all women are faking it because they are incapable of doing anything other than imitate the imitators. Or something.
I'm a bit like Sewell, in the fact that I have a very low to non-existent sex drive (and I'm not even married or over 40, something she feels factors into it) and think that the current raunch culture encourages girls and women to put on the display of lust where there is in fact none. However, our views diverge there. Whist Sewell decides that women all have low libidos and fake it all the time even when not in the public eye, I feel that women have different libidos and some fake it due to social pressure; but even then, many have the confidence to say 'no' if they aren't in the mood. Certainly, there's a problem with some feeling obliged to put out when they don't want to, feeling they must be something wrong with that - this is something to be remedied. But to go as far as saying that women are almost all sexless is like saying that women are almost all gagging for it - it's not progressive, ground breaking or subversive, it's just another way to make people feel that there's something wrong with them.
She also implies (if not yells, in your ear, with a megaphone) that all men are sex fiends who are only being monogamous to keep the little lady happy. Wow, what a way to box the men in AND make their partners feel guilty. This woman is clearly a beacon of truth and light to us all.

Update: I think this quote sums up the interview.

It’s all an act, then, and the truth is that men are fundamentally lustful and women are not?

Men are far more interested in sex, and if they can get as much sex as they want, they’re going to try. They do tailor their sex drive, at least the gentlemen do, to women. Sometimes they have to, just to get them into bed, and sometimes they genuinely want to. But men had harems in the past. Women’s lib has made monogamy more of a standard, but if it were left up to men, would that be a standard? You know, I don’t think so. I think they like having a main squeeze, a woman they can be emotional with, but they also like the idea of having sex on the side. Are women completely monogamous? No. But it tends to go the other way far more.

You talk about evolutionary influences on libido, and I wonder how real you think they are, how acutely you think we feel them.

Well, across so many cultures, men are more promiscuous, men want more variety, men want more women. And for women, security overrides the sexual urge. That happens because, well, the woman’s sexual urge is weaker. Maybe it is because of biology.

This argument ignores socialisation, for a start. Let's take Islamic culture, for example, where men can take up to 4 wives. Is this because they are inherently more lustful? Well, the reason given in the Koran is that men have a duty to protect women, so taking in more than one wife was a way of looking after those such as war-widows or older women who were more dependant and needed shelter and support. It isn't encouraged in the scriptures to take more than one wife simply because you want them, and if you are incapable of treating them all equally then you should remain monogamous. (How closely this is followed in some areas is a different story.) Before Islam, in some Eastern countries it was fine for women to have several husbands as well, though this was outlawed by the new religion. I'm going to look this up and get back to you (I can't find mah book!) but there is also a community out there (in the great beyond!) which actively encourages women to take multiple partners. Here in the West, however, women's sexual desires have up until comparatively recently been ignored or even denied - sexual desire of any description was seen as a disease in women in the 19th century and a variety of treatments, including clitoridectomy, were used to 'cure' them of their lustful ways. Now, having no desire may be seen as a bit odd at the very least, and asexuality is recognised to be the least common sexuality out there. While Sewell isn't going as far as to say 'women have no desires at all', she is putting 'low libido' as the norm for the vast majority, largely based upon her own experiences and assumptions from data which can be interpreted in a number of ways.