Speaking out on Free Speech

It never fails to amaze me how often people try to silence me by talking about free speech.  If you believe in "free speech", then say "I disagree with you but I respect your right to hold and express that view". Doh.

Personally I am in favour of free speech as a general ideal.  I don't however think that it is something that should be defended to the exclusion of all other concerns.  If twenty children are standing around one smaller child shouting "ugly little shit", I do not care for their right to free speech - that is bullying and it needs to be stopped and measures taken to prevent it happening again.  If I see a pile of BNP leaflets in my local library I pick them up and throw them away.  Even if they say nothing even vaguely controversial.

It's not about something being offensive because that's a rather meaningless concept.  I can look at a picture of kittens playing with wool and say "I am offended". People around the world have regularly looked at pictures of their imaginary friend (who of course must never be depicted) and decided they are offended.  We can't waste our time sacrificing free speech because somebody is offended.

When people stand outside abortion clinics with images of aborted foetuses I call that bullying, not free speech.  If people want to put those images on websites or campaign leaflets then fair enough (though again if I find them in my library, as it happens, I chuck them out) but outside clinics is harassment. Which is really just a grown-up word for bullying.

I think there is also a temptation to confuse editing or promoting with attacking free speech.  When newspapers edit content, that's not attacking free speech.  Well not unless they edit it so that it changes the author's meaning, or misrepresents what they were trying to say.  They might accept one article and not another, and that is their right.  If that wasn't the case I'd exercise my right to free speech and have a lengthy column in every single newspaper in the UK every day. The one in the Daily Mail would just say "Richard Littlejohn is a total idiot" over and over again.  But they can publish what they like and when I disagree I can write angry letters and if they won't publish them I can put them on other websites or this blog, or Facebook, or whatever.  And if Facebook decides what I've written is not acceptable on their platform they can also remove it, cos it's their website.  Similarly I do not publish every comment made on this blog.  Only the ones that I think are of interest to my readers.  Unless you all want to buy viagra and hear about the ways in which I "deserve" to be violently gang-raped...?

And I am also entitled to a view on what criteria others should use to edit their content.  I'm entitled to say I think the Guardian should moderate comments on it's Comment is Free site more carefully, or that they should include more voices challenging prostitution and less presenting full legalisation as a solution to abuses. I'm entitled to think Nick Griffin shouldn't have been allowed on Question Time. It's about who is given a particular platform.  I think I should get to write for the Mail, but he shouldn't be on Question Time. Those are my opinions. Yours may be different. We can all say them, but not on BBC One unless specifically invited.

I'm also entitled to an opinion about how businesses run and how they are regulated.  If you want to have the world's weirdest sex and invite your friends and neighbours to come along and watch, I fully defend your right to do so (obviously assuming it's all very clearly and carefully consensual).  But I think lad mags should be sold on the top shelf at newsagents and pornography websites (which make large amounts of money from adverts on their sites or paid downloads and subscriptions) should be made to remove violent scenes and make the rest available only to over-18s who have opted in using a verified credit card or proof of ID. None of this is about free speech, it's about how businesses are regulated. I also think supermarkets shouldn't be allowed to sell battery-farmed eggs or products made from them. You might not agree with me - but it's not about free speech and it IS my right to express those views if I want to.

Now a website appeared a few days ago that I caught wind of called Rape Is No Joke. The website tag line says "Campaigning for comedy without misogyny" and they offer a pledge where comedians and comedy clubs can pledge not to tell "rape jokes" and not to put on comics who do.  Now I understood from this that they were asking people not to tell jokes which trivialised rape or blamed victims. I didn't take it as meaning the subject could never be raised onstage. I mean if someone wants to talk about having been raped - wow, give them a mic, what a brave thing to do. And if someone (like me, I do this) wants to make jokes about the poor police response or about the awful things that the likes of George Galloway and Brendan O'Neill have said, again, that's great. I assumed the website was not saying the word could never be uttered or subject could never be raised. I assumed that "rape joke" (especially since they were talking about ending misogyny in comedy) meant the bad sort. So I signed the pledge and posted the link up so others who wanted to could do so.

Suddenly I'm the wicked witch of the west (again!). Apparently firstly I am told I wrote the site. I did not, I don't know who did, but I like them. Apparently (actual quotes):

"Comedy is the last bastion of free speech" - ha ha ha, if that's true we are fucked. Every comedy club in the world has a booking policy, some nuanced and helpful, others arbitrary and stupid. In my opinion. Comedians who do racist material are not as popular as they used to be, most clubs won't book them. Rightly so.

"Implication is that if you don't sign pledge you're seen as not willing to act 'responsibly'" - yeah and if you refuse to say you're not a racist, we might all think you're a racist. But no-one is stopping you from writing your own statement of what you consider responsible and what you will and won't include in your set.

"If we start that where do we end it?" - in a world without rape culture, yeah!

"I would of though of all people to attempt to censor be Kate its very very hypocritical" - I'm not censoring anyone, I'm putting people in touch with a golden glorious opportunity to express their views on rape and rape culture and to choose to express their own commitment to ending it.  You are welcome.

"Rape affects men too you know" - well if it affects men too isn't that DOUBLE the reason not to trivialise it and belittle the victims? And may I be the first to add: Waaaaa what about da menz...

"As someone who works in the criminal justice system, I can assure you that EVERYONE takes rape allegations seriously." - interesting that we've still got a 6% conviction rate then. Also I personally know a number of women who've been to the police to report rape and been ignored and belittled and disbelieved and treated like crap. In fact I don't know any women who've had good treatment after reporting rape.  Not admitting that's a problem would seem to make you a part of the problem. Plus rape culture affects women's decisions as to whether or not to report.  If comedians are making jokes suggesting women are at fault if they are raped, that might mean women don't go to the police.

"This comes across like an attempt at using emotional blackmail to advance your own particular agenda." - yeah that's what I was planning when I POSTED A LINK ON FACEBOOK.  Definitely.

(this is my favourite) "All sounds ominously like loyalty oaths and anti-commie affirmations in 1950s USA" - yes, circulating a link to a website about rape jokes is definitely just like trying to persecute communist 'sympathisers'. No, I mean it, you're definitely right there. Thank goodness you pointed it out, there I was being all McCarthy-ish, suggesting people might want to sign a pledge about violent crime and sexism in stand-up comedy.  One day someone will write something like The Crucible about me. Really. I can hardly wait.

This has nothing to do with free speech.  Clubs have freedom to put the acts they want onstage (again otherwise I'd play a lot more clubs that I do). Acts have the freedom to do whatever jokes they want. If you or your club wants to make a choice not to include "rape jokes" then go for it. If you'd be willing to sign it if the wording was slightly clarified, why not drop the website a line and say so? Or start your own website. Be a part of the solution. And if you don't want to sign it at all, don't sign it.  But don't come telling me that my circulating the link has infringed your right to free speech because I will be exercising my freedom to not listen to you or your probably not very good comedy routine.

Woman's Hour and Joan Baez!

So I was on BBC Radio 4 Woman's Hour today talking about the Unilad scandal. Plus in the green room I met Joan Baez - another guest on the show. You can listen to it all again here for the next seven days I think.

I'm also quoted (rather fittingly) in another article today about sexism in comedy on John Fleming's blog.

More radio, Ada Lovelace and less Clarkson (please?!)

Well I hate to say I told you so (I don't, I love it) but three year's ago I wrote an article called "I HATE Jeremy Clarkson", and today 21,000 complainers to the BBC agree with me. I was invited on the BBC Wales phone-in show with Jason Mohammed to discuss it at length (for a whole hour!). It'll be available for 7 days to "listen again" here, I'm on throughout the first hour.

[Celeb gossip aside - when I arrived at the BBC studios there were tons of paparazzi outside, apparently they were hoping to catch both Chris Martin and Jessica Biel who were coming in for interviews. Both came and went while I was on air, so I didn't get to hang out, they could probably see I was busy!]

Another lengthy item for your listening pleasure, finally up online is the show I hosted celebrating women in technology for Ada Lovelace Day. It was recorded by the ace Pod Delusion team who I have given interviews and soundbites to before on other subjects. I am on and off doing bits and bobs as host throughout but you'll also get to hear Maggie Philbin, Gia Milinovich, Helen Arney, Sue Black and Suw Charman-Anderson who are all fascinating.

Finally just now I was on George Galloway's TalkSport show discussing how totally rubbish it is that the Sports Personality of the Year Awards shortlist is 100% male. They don't have a function to replay it but the clips often show up on YouTube, let me know if you find it!! Basic conclusion: Yes it's rubbish. The nominations are chosen by a range of sports editors including those working at "Lad Mags" (i.e. soft porn and misogyny titles like Nuts and Zoo) and even the supposedly mainstream sports editors cover basically no women's sports aside from the Olympics and Wimbledon. Plus there's a lack of funding for grassroots level sports across the board, but especially girls. And with eating disorders and obesity at epidemic levels it needs sorting out. The end.

Oh and footnote on the general internet abuse situation. The response on Twitter to my remarks suggesting Clarkson shouldn't have said the horrid things he said about striking public sector workers:

ChriisMorgan67 Chris Morgan

@

@Cruella1 love to track you down and give a good slap bitch

6 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply

And footnote 2: Thanks a gazillion to photographer Charlotte Barnes who took the photo at the top of me leading the march at Reclaim The Night 2011. I love it!!

Anna vs The Lads

Want to watch a lad mag editor squirm? Go on, you know you want to... This is so great! Anna from OBJECT takes some monster dickhead apart:

More Women's Hour

Sandrine Leveque (from Object), Rebecca Morden (from LFN and Scary Little Girls) and I were all interviewed this morning by Woman's Hour for a piece to be aired on Wednesday about the rise of "lad" culture and the backlash against women, etc. I think although we were interviewed for ages probably it will wind up being a 30-second clip that is used. For overseas listeners you can listen online at 10am UK time here.

My Wonderful Industry

Two things:

1) I was on BBC Breakfast TV this morning talking about Lad Mags again. They had me on with a guy (Derek) who used to edit Loaded and Maxim (or something like that). We were discussing whether the current voluntary code (which no-one adheres to) of not selling them to children should become a compulsory code. His argument was no because "some people enjoy them".

If there's one thing I hate more than those who argue in favour of porn, it's those who argue in favour of porn with logically meaningless arguments. So I said "some people enjoy child pornography - should we legalise that too?". And then it sort-of kicked off and there was a lot of raised voices and a lot of me interrupting him and making sure I got my point across since his wasn't even a point.

By the time I got home my inbox and text-box were full of messages from people saying "good job" and "well said", etc. Here's a sample one: "I saw you on telly this morning as I was getting ready for work. Your peremptory manner left the slimeball umming and erring. It was great to see.." (thanks Crispin!).

Then I got a facebook message from a guy I don't know. He must have looked me up by my unusual name. Fine. I get lots of people doing that to say they agree or the disagree with me. Cool. But instead he had messaged me to say that he hoped I didn't mind some unsolicited advice and that while he agreed with me he thought I should have been less forthright, and listened more.

As an incident this really shows how deeply entrenched male priveledge is doesn't it? Has he been invited to make repeated appearances on TV? Does he write an award-winning blog? Does he work as a professional public performer? Not that we know of, and yet he felt like he would just send me some advice, as a "favour". And that advice, as it happens, was to sit back and take it while a pornographer defended his sordid industry.

So I declined to respond (if you message people on Facebook they can then access your friends, etc for a month...) and instead reported it as harrassment. Still seething a bit though. Jeremy Clarkson can count himself lucky I didn't run into him today!

2) One thing I didn't get the chance to rant about today is the impact Lad Mags have on my industry (stand-up comedy). All of them publish sexist jokes which have become increasingly acceptible in recent years and as far as I can tell they more or less invented the "women aren't funny" myth.

At one point FHM (I think) ran some comedy awards and in the "Funniest woman" category were Catherine Tate, Jo Brand, Lily Savage*, Dame Edna Everage* and the option to vote for "none of them". As I recall despite the tone of the the piece Catherine Tate managed to win it.

I've actually been introduced to the stage and before I get to the mic heard audience members (guys) go "Uh, oh lads it's a bird, lets go to the bar...". And if some of them are saying that out loud you can bet some more are thinking it and before I've even started it means I have a harder job than the guys on before and after me.

The BBC of course takes a much more fair and gender-neutral view of comedy, as witnessed by these photos taken at the British Comedy Awards.

Photo tally...
Comics: Male 2, Female 0
Comedy actors: Male 4, Female 2
Random totty: Male 0, Female 3

*Footnote for overseas readers. Lily Savage and Dame Edna Everage are male comedians who perform in drag.

(Photo by Matt Farrington Smith)

Porn Addicts

Article on the BBC about the rise in men who are addicted to internet pornography. Not very surprising. Of course the article is all about how the men who have the addictions suffer. Not about how the women in their lives - both relationship-wise and their colleagues, friends and family members are affected. If you want to see what our easy-porn culture is doing to women take a look at the footage from Australia of women being chased by angry mobs of men shouting "get your tits out for the lads".

Lad Mags and the Mainstream

Didn't I say the other day that Lad Mags were trying to take over the comedy industry? Oh look now the BBC is reporting on the Loaded comedy awards... I know they've been running comedy awards for a while now but last year or the year before under "best female act" their options included Lily Savage, another drag act and the option "none of them". Why would we take these kind of things seriously?

(Pictured, one of the funniest women in reverse drag - Janette Tough).

Lag Mags, US-Style

Often seems that it's only us UK-based feminists who have to contend with the propaganda disseminated by the so-called Lad Mag culture. My views on that sort of thing are well known, having featured even on the BBC. And of course all over this blog too. Now the misogyny-as-mainstream-youth-culture movement has apparently reared it's ugly head in the US too as witnessed by the headline "Is It OK To Demand Anal Sex?"...

... well ... firstly it's not ok to demand anything sexually. Obviously.

Secondly at several points in the article the guys interviewed express sentiments that are just horrifying. That they asked women for anal sex because of the bragging rights it gave them down the pub later. That they liked anal sex because the woman was in pain. That they found anal sex less difficult to deal with emotionally than vaginal sex.

Anything you do in bed because of what your mates will think, because you enjoy watching someone suffer or because you are afraid of cunts is a mistake.

But really what we are seeing is another cause/symptom of the pornification of society. Pornography, which gets more and more mainstream by the second always tends to focus on oral and anal sex. Evolution certainly didn't mean to pre-dispose us to like these things so really this can be seen as evidence that pornography is not about sexual desire. Porn is about power, and you're getting much more power out of a situation when the other party is likely to end up in pain (or choking in the case of the sort of oral sex these sites tend to show). It's pretty hard to hurt a woman through vaginal sex - however hard you do it. No pain = no power = no fun.

And women are not immune to culture. The more these things are normalised, the more they feel they need to live up to standards we are led to believe are now universal.

The weird thing is, much as the media normalise these attitudes, there is demnad out there from guys who already think like that. Long ago when I was a single blogger I tried an online dating service and one guy I emailed back and forth a few times casually mentioned that refusal to have anal sex was "a deal-breaker"! To which I swiftly replied that sexual "deal-breakers" were themselves a deal-breaker for me. And he was still mailing me weeks later saying intelligent things like "you might enjoy it" and very much missing the point that I only date people who aim to please me in bed, not tick off a list of obscure practices I can or can't be talked into.

The True Colours of Lad Mags

If you think that Nuts, Zoo, FHM, Loaded, etc are just about harmless fun and great tits, read this post from CharlieGrrl. Made me so angry.

Why Is It Always Our Fault?

The Guardian in it's quest to provide the latest and most insightful research, is now publishing the results of surveys by FHM... This in itself poses a problem for me. If we are to assume that results of a survey compiled through FHM are a fair portrayal of the views of men in British society we are implicitly accepting that FHM's readership is an "average" sample of men. Of course it's not - it's a minority of men who enjoy reading deeply misogynist material. So unsurprisingly the results reflect that.

So this apparently is what men want: "a 50/50 partnership, in which both they and their partner would go out to work, sharing childcare and housework". So how would that work then? You would pop the child in a drawer in the office from nine to five while you both worked? I don't think it's possible to do half the housework and half the childcare and hold down a full time job. And where is the evidence that these modern-thinking guys are actually doing any more housework or childcare?

Here's another quote: "men believe they have made a dramatic shift in roles in the last 30 years - at the behest of women - the survey also suggests that men feel women have now changed their minds and want to go back to old roles." Sure. Or women stuck with these neanderthals are realising that if they want the job done properly they need to do it themselves.

Media Disorders

Reports from the International Committee for Stating the Blindingly Obvious suggest that media sexualisation of young girls isn't very good for, err, young girls. Try to contain your surprise and amazement.

When I was fifteen and rapidly developing anorexia nervosa I can remember very consciously thinking that adult women were treated like pieces of meat and I didn't want to be treated like that so I would keep my body super-thin and child-like. In wasn't a question of media influence, it was a clear thought-out decision. And these were the days before Lad Mags, the situation is a lot worse now.

Kiddie porn

There's an article on the BBC discussing how pornography has become a standard part of the lives of many young people in the UK. I'm not saying lad mags are solely to blame, but this is axactly why people like myself, Object and Clare Curtis-Thomas would like to see them moved to the top shelf (or just banned, I'm open-minded...).