Commenting on Feminism with an Unfortunate Lack of Understanding, and a Vagina

The other day I committed a terrible Internet sin. I am usually so well behaved, an altar boy at the church of Aaron Swartz, but like seeing a piece of china on a sea of glass, one little electronic fragment from billions piqued my keyboard warrior spirit. It was designed to be so and I should have known, I should have seen the subject matter and shouted ‘run away to the latest meme!’ I should have turned off the computer, or at least move onto pornography but no, I am a sinner and I sinned. I commented on an article about feminism.

And I used caps lock. 

I still feel the shame. Beforehand, I had been doing the internet equivalent of a Saturday morning walk; reading the football transfer rumours, flicking through imgur, pretending not to visit the Daily Mail and generally working through those bookmarks that help us avoid work on a Monday morning.

It had then, been a good day on the internet. For one, I had just learned what ‘Tips Fedora’ meant; thereby helping my on-going mission of inserting myself into the rabid Reddit community surreptitiously. Visiting the Guardian, I saw the article title ‘How Amy Poehler and Tina Fey made the Golden Globes the first feminist film awards ceremony’.

Now, I’m convinced that the male brain has been conditioned to react to Feminism in recent years much the same way a terrorist might react to Barney the Dinosaur after a period in Guantanamo, but even to me this felt like a bit of a stretch.

Was it a sub-editor mistake? Maybe, but my fingers were already twitching over the keyboard. Deep breath, read the whole article first. Make sure the author doesn’t refute the main point she is making in an ironic twist. Go back over it again, man, this is an article about feminism where you can make a point. This is important.

Ready? Got that book on feminism in the media at the ready? Are you sure you don’t need to go over Wollstonecraft one more time? No? Caps lock are a go, people, caps lock are a go. 

‘OH MY GOD WILL YOU STOP EQUATING EVERYTHING ANY WOMAN DOES WITH FEMINISM? THEY ARE VERY FUNNY COMEDIANS WHO MADE A DULL AWARDS SHOW SLIGHTLY LESS DULL, END OF.’

The evoking of him-upstairs (or her-upstairs, or her) at the start surprised me. Maybe I was actually annoyed. Feminism is one of the few subjects that really riles me, as well as many other men. As someone who rarely plants their flag on the internet comment boards, what is it about this issue that makes me put finger to keypad?
  

Firstly, a confession; I’m a reformed feminist. About two or three years ago I went down the ‘but it’s really a human rights issue, not a male/female issue’ road which is pretty popular nowadays. It’s basically a divide and conquer tactic – ‘You mean you don’t care about human rights? Oh, yeah I see, you really only care about woman’s rights, don’t you?’ – which sends the core debate spiralling into threads that end up people accusing one another of being ISIS (we’ve moved on from Hitler).

I even invoked the Malala Yousafzai argument (‘that’s a real feminist, with real woman’s issues’) which is the internet equivalent of throwing yourself behind a pram when the shooting breaks out. It wasn’t any particular moment that changed my mind, maybe it was the brilliantly frightening Everyday Sexism Project or the 10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman video, but it gradually sunk back into my mind that yes, woman are discriminated against because they are a woman, and that a separate movement is needed to address this balance. I got an actual high five from a female friend when I said this.

It’s all well and good shouting ‘Equal pay for all!’ but if you don’t understand the only people who aren’t equally paid are woman and minorities, then maybe you should look in the mirror. Or at your penis, because it’s pretty definite that you have one.

This article though, still evoked everything wrong (a top internet commenters phrase that) with feminism; a linking of it to anything a woman does successfully to being a deliberate stab at the male patriarchy. In a brilliant and ironic reversal of the Bechdal Test, every joke the authors pointed towards as feminist were ones made about men. In other words, woman comedians can’t be feminist comedians unless they’re joking about men.

If feminism is able to produce a pavlovian reaction in men, or internet commentators in general, then feminism and the Guardian on the same screen is like changing Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s screensaver to a Charlie Hebdo cartoon. You will get a reaction.

So I dove in, all brass and no knuckles, with my caps lock. Then, lo and behold, the author, Hadley Freeman responded and I felt that momentary thrill that must go through the soul of troll’s everywhere. It was politely dismissive, with a little French thrown in to really put me in my place. I did chuckle, although the pang of regret in criticising someone else’s work settled in right after. It was then that the enlightened internet community came to my aid (or for a fight, but I’ll ignore them) and suddenly I was being defended by all corners of the globe. All corners of the globe that strangely only contained men, that is.

And so came the commentators’ remorse, hurriedly trying to clarify the point they made in order to not come across as a rampantly deranged misogynist with an axe to grind but rather a reasonable, kindly soul that should be involved in all debates on the subject in the future. I would be the moderator, the litigator, the arbitrator of all future discussions on feminism. All future discussions on feminism with men, of course, but we were ready to fight, to make a difference alongside our sisters who seem to be sitting in that corner over there ignoring us for some reason.

I had made the classic mistake; I got involved. There is no book in the world, no series of books, no television series, no movie that can accurately describes what feminism means to any one person. No way can we figure out our own feelings because of the relentless mess of ideas we get from books, television and movies, so trying to condense it into a comment box is only going to produce one thing – more comments.

The only thing we can probably agree (okay we won’t agree, but that’s what the comments are for) is that some issues shouldn’t be moved into the feminist arena, and genuine feminists need to be cautious on what issues they choose to use to promote equality between men and woman. Not because we care about provoking internet commentators, but because we should care about not provoking people into becoming internet commentators.

People intimately, and personally, involved in any cause will see that cause anywhere. People not intimately or personally involved in the same cause will only see them talking about it everywhere, and concentrate on the talking, not the issue. If you have a blinkered view of the world, all the world will see is the blinkers.

When this happens with a cause as fundamental as equal rights between men and woman, it knocks it back a couple of steps, or at least sideways. Not fatally, but enough to prolong the argument and extend it into areas where there should be none. The importance of the issue adds to the volume of articles and debate, and that sheer volume adds to the possibility that some of it turns out to be pretty irrelevant to the actual issue.

That helps reinforce entrenched views and helps produce the frustration that turns internet comment boards into a view of Dante’s seventh circle, with no blinkers for comfort.

And so I look in the mirror and again notice the glaring lack of a vagina. Maybe, I say to my penis, we should just stay the fuck out of the party until we're invited.

End of comment.

*Tips Fedora* 

Dear Minister

Dear Minister Shatter,

I’m a man. It’s an unavoidable fact of which my penis reminds me of every day.  Like many men, my penis and I have a very personal relationship that has grown from the day we were born. We play together, we learn together. 

Sometimes I get him to wear a condom, sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I wonder if we’ll grow apart in later life; if he’ll stop standing up for me in hard situations. What if we get a divorce and I decide to cut ties? What if, and it’s a terrible thought, he and his two little buddies get sick and they leave this earth before I do?

The only thing I know for certain is that we’ll make these choices together. We will muddle through life like everyone else, making good and bad decisions, safe in the knowledge that we’ll both be there for each other, always willing to help the other out. And, ultimately, I know that he’d sacrifice himself for me. 

Some of my friends are not so lucky. For one, they don’t have a penis – a terrible affliction I’m sure you’ll agree Minister – and most importantly, the relationships they have with their own partners isn’t always as healthy as mine is with my penis. They fight sometimes, even when they don’t want to. They rebel in the early years, causing no small amount of pain, and sometimes when they are carrying out their most important work, they put each other in danger.

Thankfully, my friends can usually escape this danger. A good mediator can come along and bring them back together so that they can start again. But here in Ireland, these mediators aren’t allowed to do their jobs, and sometimes aren’t allowed to help my friends even when they are in danger.  Sometimes, someone’s friend will die because of it. My penis and I are glad this hasn’t happened to us yet but, on October 28th, someone’s friend died.

Savita Halappanavar spent two and a half days in agony because she and her partner couldn’t make the choice to part ways as peacefully as possible. Instead, they both left behind a mourning family, a shocked nation of people and the backward country they had come to visit. A country that could have saved her life if only their politicians had had courage to stand up against an outdated religious philosophy and the oppressive legislation it had helped leave behind. She died because 'this is a Catholic country'.

I’m a man. I have the option to choose; don’t deny woman the same right.

Yours Sincerely,

A Man

G@@GLE is Watching You

Look out the nearest window and see if there’s anyone watching you. I bet there isn’t.

Now look at the screen. You’re being watched right now; by me for one. I’ve got your IP address, which city you live in and how you got here. And I’m not even trying.

Yep, the online world is becoming downright creepy. For so long the reserve of the outsider opinion, the wild tangent and brilliantly weird sub-cultures, the internet is morphing into a giant megastore of sameness. It’s like going outside really.

Except that it's not. Because when you’re outside you may be being watched, but there isn’t someone following you with a little radar that is sending ping-ping noises at you all day. When you walk into HMV you can browse around, ignore the sales person and walk out again safe in the knowledge that no one knows you considered buying a Coldplay album.

But when you click that connect button and open up Google you are really opening your curtains to a giant Peeping Tom who's staring through the gap trying to see what you’re doing. You can’t bash a keyboard anywhere in the world without a little robot peering through its binoculars and taking down notes. For people in marketing, their only problem up until now was how to use it.

That’s about to change. The old days of mass spamming about Viagra tablets (available in all good Eastern European pharmacies) is ending, with proper personalised advertising coming your way. Up until pretty recently ago it was all quite crude. Thanks to the internet, many a frustrated teenage boy has briefly thought that a hot woman in their area wants to have sex with them that very night. Genuinely personalised advertising is much more subtle. 

We’re already used to filling in online forms and voluntarily giving up our information to organisations in exchange for something we want. Now though, we’re handing out information to companies we don’t mean to. When you’re on Facebook, it tracks six other tabs that are open on your browser. So while you might be keeping it clean on Facebook, that video on Porntube that’s loading up (way too slowly) is going into a database that will be sold onto advertisers.

Someone, somewhere, will know that you prefer blondes over brunettes.

At the moment that collected information is generally going into massive databases to be categorised into broad demographical strokes. Soon however a spreadsheet just for you will start being developed; you may already have started the process yourself – the new Facebook Timeline is a fancy looking spreadsheet, but a spreadsheet nonetheless. This handy little device gives a history of your activities on Facebook over long periods of time, in what is basically an online diary of your life. Isn’t that sweet?

Apart from the strange conceit of letting your friends read your diary, there are others that also want to see what you’re up to and are doing it right now (and it’s not just that creepy bloke that you met in Australia one night who’s ‘liked’ every post you’ve written ever since). Facebook makes its money by selling your information en masse to advertisers and your personal information - those petty little thoughts that once disappeared into the ether - is their golden ticket.

But what matter? Being in a group of ten million people is hardly an invasion of privacy. It’s only one step further from being lumped into the masses watching Dancing on Ice and being force-fed advertisements aimed at this group. Well, it’s going to start trickling down where you’re no longer being sold something as a group of ten million, but a group of one.

If you’ve signed up for the timeline you’ve basically given an advertiser a link not only to your likes and activities but also your moods over time. It gives them access to you as an individual, and now the technology is there so they can start selling to you like one. One day you may not be able to walk down a street and see an advertisement that isn't relevant to you. 

By watching your timeline develop advertisers will learn that you drink less in January, go on holidays in June, are liable to get the flu around October, spend more on Christmas presents than the average person and go to the movies a lot during Oscar season. Once an advertiser knows this, it knows what to sell to you, when to do it and, crucially, how to sell it to you.

That’s okay though, we can handle it. We are the cynical generation, the internet savvy group of hipsters that don’t go ‘on trend’ when we’re told to, we know what the faceless corporations are up to. We go out and protest once a year against the greedy rich and may even pitch a tent outside the Central Bank and shout ‘down with capitalism’ and refuse to drink mochachino’s from Starbucks.

WE WILL NOT BE INFLUENCED. 

Except of course that we will be, and willingly so. We’ll sign up to the latest fad, we’ll ‘like’ a company so they can pat us on the head and say ‘well done’ and we’ll keep buying mochachino’s (they taste nice, so fuck off hippy).

We’ll buy stupid stuff we don’t need and instantly regret it; we’ll follow the latest fad and look back on the pictures with feigned embarrassment. In short, we’ll do exactly the same things our parents did, because all this gathering of information and personalised advertising are just more sophisticated methods of old sales techniques.

But the digital age means we're now moving on from that. Where once we would see an advertisement, be influenced by it, and then move on, we’re now beginning to have a conversation with those advertisements. We tell it how interested we are in it by spending longer than usual on the page, we tell it how cool we think it is by sharing it with our friends, we give it instant pleasure by clicking on it and asking it to tell us more.

When we like it, we actually click a button to tell it so.

And it’s only going to get weirder. How would you feel about personally endorsing a product? You do it already, ‘liking’ a company’s product on Facebook or following them on Twitter. Of course, you’re doing this so you can win free stuff, or supporting your friends’ business, or simply trying to associate yourself with a ‘cool’ product, but what you are really doing is putting your personal seal of approval for all your contacts to see.

The vision in Minority Report where a persons’ face is recognised when entering a shop and a personalised message appears targeting an advertisement at them is already old hat. The future will be where you, yes you, give the message to your friends. There won’t be a celebrity or a nameless model trying to sell you shit; it’ll be your friends’ face on the cereal box. And because those little robots know exactly what you’re doing all the time, that girl that you cyber stalk will be the one selling you that new brand of jeans, telling you that you’ll look great in them. Maybe they’ll add in a suggestive wink.

My bank account would be empty in a day.

And this will happen to me even though I know exactly what’s going on. I wonder what I’d be like if it began to happen the minute I was born? If a marketing executive knows that a three year-old girl is interested in Barbie dolls than they will also know they’re most likely to become obsessed by the latest teen ‘pop sensation’ when they become a teenager. And, what’s more, through their online musings on that pop sensations wavy hair, that marketing executive will have their contact details to follow that child throughout their entire lives, hitting the right sweet spot at each age level. It’s efficient.

Your ‘friend suggestions’ on Facebook and Twitter will become linked to products you like rather than by whom you know. You will, in short, become friends with people because you have the same commercial interests in, not because they make you laugh or you had a drunken fumble once. And others will sow those commercial interests in your mind from such an early age you won't even notice it.

Sucked into a homogenous void where every action and interest is categorized into a column on a spreadsheet, you can be then kept on the right path by being selectively shown those friends that are doing the same things. Even if you're in a minority sub-culture, you’ll feel surrounded by like-minded people and be safe in the knowledge that that product you’re buying will help you fit in even more. Each time your ‘friends’ will give you a leg-up onto the next rung of the ladder where a whole range of new stuff will be waiting for you to buy.

You will advertise products to others.

So that giant megastore of sameness that the internet is now will change into a billion different megastores of sameness; one for each individual. The illusion of choice will in reality be a prison, keeping you trapped inside a universe you created so you won't ever want to leave, and buy everything in the store while you’re there.

Big Brother isn’t being created so the government can watch your every move, it’s being created to sell you stuff. And it will not be formed by a shadowy cabal in a smoky room or whatever the conspiracy theorists are saying that week; it will be created in your bedroom, by you.

You’re being watched; be careful out there.

* Spambots take note: I prefer brunettes. Act accordingly. 

Whoops, there goes another government

It's a bad weekend when you think it'd be better to wake up on Monday and for it to be 1983 and find that your converse runners have been replaced by a pair of steel-toed Doc Martins. Hell, even the music was better; we have Justin Bieber as the soundtrack to our impending doom. To crave hearing Bananarama on the radio is a terrible thing.

After a few years of epic news, it seems it's now about to get apocalyptic. A year that began with an ineffective debt deal in America has ended with European markets plummeting, Greece collapsing, the English feeling smugger by the minute and the Italians increasingly looking like they’ve all just walked out of a bunga bunga party and have to explain to their better halves what the hell just happened.

Happily though, at least those poor Wall Street traders are still looking on the bright side.

So how did it come to this? Was it that the population of the world suddenly becoming extra greedy trying to ride the boom gravy train? Was it the governments heaping sovereign debt upon sovereign debt so they could buy their next election? Was it the banks, the financial traders, or the ratings agencies? Was it the lizard people?

No, no, partially, and…. quite possibly (Jim Corr can be very convincing). It was the political classes’ deregulation of the financial markets what done it.

Since deregulation (taking away the rules governing the financial markets) began in earnest during the 1980’s a combination of banks, financial traders and rating agencies has managed to screw up the world to the point where the Sun will surely be printing a ‘Can the last person to leave Europe please turn the lights off?’ headline on their front page any day now.

The financial world, for so often quite a boring and static place became, after deregulation, a place where money could be made, fast, and the phrase ‘greed is good’ became the calling card of a generation. Of course, where there is money and growth governments and politicians will always want a piece of the pie and then try and claim credit for baking it in the first place. When the rules began to be relaxed and growth began, it reinforced the view that this was only the beginning.

This deregulation was all due to the propagation of the ‘Invisible Hand’ theory, which basically says that the markets would naturally regulate itself; a type of survival of the fittest but with stocks and shares rather than teeth and claws. In reality it was the governments saying ‘Jesus, this money shit is really fucking complicated, isn’t it? Anyone here know economics? No? Fuck it, let them do it themselves then’.

So they deregulated the financial markets at a rate that would make a rutting rabbit blush.

But that’s okay because someone was watching what was going on, right? We all know the answer to that one. Government watchdogs became next to useless, in Ireland they were left under-manned, underpaid and under-qualified. If anyone of them showed promise and started questioning the financial markets, the banks simply hired them. Those that stayed were told, day after day, that the market would look after itself; the ‘invisible hand’ was watching it all. So they missed the bit where the invisible hand started reaching into our back pockets and riffling through our wallets.

And let’s not even mention the ratings agencies; they became so entwined with the banking system that they changed from independent watchdogs to the financial markets lapdogs.

The upshot was that deregulation changed how the world valued things, or rather how we assigned value, and no-one in the know pointed out that this was inherently wrong. Where once we valued goods on how desired by the world they were, we now valued them based on how well the traders on the financial markets could sell them to the world. We let them bundle up solid gold and sub-prime loans into one package and sell them on as if they were the same. No-one knew what they were buying anymore and nothing was based on what value it brought to the world.

And this is the crux of the thing; the world had changed from rewarding productivity to rewarding the printing of money. This printing of money wasn’t done in mints around the world, it was done by taking a dollars worth of debt, repackaging it and selling it on saying it was worth ten dollars. So suddenly the world had nine dollars circulating around that didn’t actually exist. This happened literally millions of times to the point where the world was awash with fake money; the financial collapse around the world was when people woke up and realised that fact.

People blame the banks and irresponsible lenders, and rightly so. These people knew exactly what they were doing. There are countless examples of traders describing the packages they were selling as ‘complete shit’ while the rating agencies gave them the highest ratings possible in the knowledge that they were junk, safe in the knowledge that the ratings they gave were only opinion and not subject to law.


CEO’s at the top mostly didn’t understand what was going on (these people really aren’t that smart) except that they were making pot loads of money, and didn’t care because they were busy buying their new personal jets. Within the worldwide financial system there were lies, widespread illegal activity and now there are deliberate attempts to destroy companies (and countries) so they can make money while they collapse.

The simple fact though is that we let them do it, even after watching Gordon Gecko in Wall Street.

If the governments had paid a little more attention to human nature and, y’know, the entire history of mankind, they’d know that greed will always trump rational thought in the short term. Put ten Wall Street traders into a house made of money and they’ll tear down the walls and collapse the roof above their heads until the driving rain outside comes in and destroys everything, including the money they’ve stuffed in their pockets.

The financial markets don’t, and never have, produced anything of value. They assign value; that’s their role. With deregulation, they were suddenly able to create ‘financial packages’ that added value that didn’t exist. It was like someone selling you ten bars of gold, promising they’ll store them in a bank account for you but when you actually go to open it up, you find there’s only one there. It was also the equivalent of handing Kim Jong-il a gun and telling him that all his antics are clearly the work of a man that has a small penis; things are going to get messy.   

And now governments are terrified of the overbearing influence of the stock markets – an influence they themselves helped create. Whenever a debt deal is announced, the media doesn’t ask the politicians what they think first, they check to see what the financial markets are saying. Governments are falling across Europe because the stock markets now have the power to collapse them.

We need to take back that power. And fast. We need to give the financial markets a spanking that only a guest at Madam Daisy's house of ill-repute would enjoy. We, quite frankly, have to show them who's boss. They serve us, not the other way around.


If we don't wake up to that fact than Justin Bieber’s winy pre-pubescent voice will be the least of our problems. 

For a (really bad) explanation of basic financial terms, click here.

Why Premiership Footballers Aren't Paid Enough

Well, this will be a tough one to justify, but hear me out.


Sometimes when watching a football game in any of the major leagues around Europe you can almost hear the commentator saying '€200,000 a week passes it to €120,000 a week, he jinks around €80,000 a week, feints to pass to €250,000 a week before falling over €180,000 a week.'


The wages seem obscene, especially for what it is a game with no inherent purpose or intrinsic value. How can we pay a man who kicks a ball around a field ten times more a week than a teacher gets in a whole year? How do we justify that? It's easy really; we tax the shit out of them.


Warning: this next section is about taxes, please bear with it.


Last year, Barclay's Bank, using various legal loopholes, only paid 1% corporation tax in England. This is compared to the 50% tax rate paid by a Premiership footballer*. This means that it only takes 2 Premiership footballers earning €250,000 a week to pay more tax in a year than a bank that makes €1 billion in profits. In 2010, Google’s Irish operation took in some €10.1bn in turnover – and paid only €15.3m in taxes.


In most industries, money flows upwards. Directors get huge bonuses for performance (or usually, for not actually dying) and money is paid out to shareholders in vast amounts. The employees on the factory floor are squeezed to a minimum, so profits are at a maximum, justifying the massive wages and dividends paid out. People are fired; wages are cut - just so profits, and the value of the shares, go up. And all the while the people taking all the money can say 'look at the bottom line, we're successful, we deserve it.'


In football this is turned on its head. Although kicking a football has no intrinsic value, it's still the core function of the business, just like the dressmaker is to the fashion industry. But while the dressmaker gets minimum wage, in football it's the factory worker, or our overpaid footballer to be exact, that gets the money. At some of the major English clubs, wages account upwards of 80% of turnover (Liverpool are one of the biggest spenders).


Imagine if your own company paid out 80% of its turnover to its employees? It's essentially a massive profit sharing scheme. Its communism as it's supposed to be. The workers work hard, and the workers are rewarded for performing well by sharing in the profits of the company.


This is way beyond the stock option bullshit that was peddled around over the last two decades. That is a long-term scam, creating employee loyalty while also driving up the company's stock price, most of which is owned by the big executives. And when the company goes tits up, it’s the employees stocks that end up being worth the least and sold last.


So football is one of the few industries that truly rewards its mid-level employees (unfortunately, the ubiquities tea lady can only be paid so much, no matter how good a brew she makes) and links its financial success to them. And this is in one of the most competitive environments on the planet, so pure capitalists can’t complain that these massive wages dent productivity.


Football is capitalism tamed, because society lets it make as much money as it wants, and then takes half of it back. The money is not lost to the directors who funnel it to offshore tax havens. The real question is how the government then distributes that wealth, because real democracy is not one person, one vote, it’s really about the equal distribution of wealth, something that we have been getting worse and worse at.


The gap between rich and poor has grown in more than three-quarters of first-world countries over the past two decades, mostly due to the inadequacies of our tax systems. We, as a race, have gone backwards; and this all happened during one of the biggest booms in the history of the world.


In order to ensure a minimum standard of living, protect the weak and give opportunities to the poor - all while still rewarding achievement – then wages (and taxes) have to both go up. And when the money flows into wages, suddenly we have a method of control, a way of distributing this wealth to where it is needed. Once you start dragging money away from the 1% super-rich of the world’s population, then the tax breaks and loop-holes start to disappear and the money starts to trickle into government coffers.


Then it’s up to us to make sure that Bertie Ahern isn’t the one spending it.



* It has to be pointed out here that Premiership footballers, through a variety of means, can dramatically reduce the amount of tax paid. This is a universal problem with the tax systems. There is essentially no difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion if it comes down to your ability to pay someone to do it for you. This is an entirely different argument, but in reality corporate tax rates are much, much lower than personal ones. In 2010, 25 CEO's of the top 100 companies in the U.S. were paid more in wages than their entire organisation paid out in tax. Read that sentence back again. It’s a different, and much bigger, story.


.