OK, Who's Up For A Riot?

I am. There is a magazine about comedy that posits itself as "new" and "hip" called The Fix. Editor Harry Deansway offers us in this edition a run-down of the 50 best acts in Edinburgh, broken down into different categories, each with an explanatory subtitle. And here's who he picks...

Sketch comedy - This is where 2-6 people perform sketches, sometimes with music - 3 all-male groups and 2 mixed groups.

Stand-Up - You know what this is; one man, one microphone and some jokes - 6 men

Hot new talent - Impress friends and family by saying you saw them before they were famous - 6 men

Musical comedy and character acts - Hey, who are these crazy characters???????? - 5 men, one male double-act and one mixed double act

Acts The Fix owes money to - We especially encourage you to see these acts, if for no other reason than to ease the guilt we feel - one man and one all-male sketch group

Modern - Hey man, that comedian just plugged a projector up his arse! You've got to go see this! - 8 men

Veterans - They'll be dead soon, or too rich to come up to Edinburgh any more - 7 men

Women - Well, you've got to let them have a go, haven't you? - 2 women and one female double-act

Something a bit different - Not interested in hearing a man talk for an hour about how small his penis is and why his girlfriend left him? Try some of this weird shit - 5 men

I'm not making this up - it starts on page 37 here.

Of course you may tell me that the comments are intended to be an ironic joke but it's having a direct impact on the careers of women at the fringe. I have had copies of this magazine thrust into my hands several times in the last few days and like most people will have done I flicked through and had I been in a position to visit shows I might well have taken a recommendation or two out of there without noticing that only 6% of recommendations are female acts and a further 6% are mixed groups. I don't know exactly the breakdown of shows by performer gender but I'm pretty sure that's not a fair representation. So female acts are going to be getting less audience as a direct result of his noxious "joke".

Actually if you read more of the mag it's loaded with misogyny. The Editor's letter includes lines like this: "A comedian is the type of person who will say they are not having sex with your girlfriend whilst your mum is giving them a blowjob under the table. That's the sort of person we are dealing with - egomaniacs so mentally unstable that if they thought it was in the best interests of their "career", they would cut off their penis, stick it onto their forehead, and call themselves Dave The Amazing Dickhead." Which of course is supposed to be funny but is also clearly letting us all know that a comedian has a dick, not a vagina...

The mag also contains an advert for it's own online website (on p16 & 17 if you opened the link) with the slogan "NEW FIX WEB-SITE AT LAST ANOTHER REASON TO USE THE INTERNET" next to a "screenshot" of very graphic pornographic images of women.

Of course the magazine is funded by a ton of comedians buying adverts who desperately want to drag extra punters into their shows. The BBC is also an advertiser (p36) as are City Circle Coach Hire (p41), The Pleasance (p13) and Absolute Radio (p7).

I don't have a particular idea what I'm going to do, but please get in touch if you have any ideas, I really think after all the effort put into the female comics photo-shoot we can't let them get away with this.

Please Make It Stop!

OK I love wildlife documentaries - I like watching the scenery and the amazing animals and learning more about the world. So when I saw a new one on BBC One I thought brilliant and couldn't wait to put it on. But "Wildest Dreams" isn't really a wildlife documentary. It's a reality show in which budding wildlife documentary makers are pitted against each other in a pathetic attempt to create drama and tension and win a job making wildlife documentaries at the BBC.

Seriously I've had it on for ages and I've seen about 2 minutes of footage of wildlife and 30 minutes of people sat around a dessert oasis on camping chairs talking.

Worse still it's hosted by Nick Knowles. Why is he doing more and more stuff? He's really irritating - his idea of humour is cheap and uninteresting gags about the cliched "differences" between men versus women. He claims to do charitable work for anti-bullying charities (such as in the inappropriately-posed photo above - seriously, the two young women he is manhandling are in "act against bullying T-shirts) but then he treats the contestants on the show in a really manipulative and patronising manner.

And what exactly does he know about wildlife documentary-making? Why is he the "expert" dishing out the advice? If they had David Attenborough and Saba Douglas-Hamilton I'd at least think the show had some credibility.

This is STUPID. We do not need more reality shows and we do not need any more of that smarmy man. If we are paying a camera crew to go to Africa, they should film the sweeping savannah and the animals and the devastating impact of climate change, not Nick Knowles talking... Hire someone good and go out and make great wildlife films!

Political News From The Fringe

Posted over on The News At Kate blog.

Are You Not Angry Enough Today?

Got that joys-of-srping feeling driving you round the bend. Need to psych yourself up for the day? Luckily The Male's own Liz Jones is on hand with her blow-by-blow account of how revoltingly women age.

To quote her: "if you are over 50 you shouldn't be smiling".

Angry enough yet? If not why not clear away any valuable crockery and read the whole thing?

Tory Lessons

The Tories are proposing that school league tables should be adjusted to reflect the notion that some A-levels are "harder" than others. The subjects they think are hard are maths, further maths, physics and languages. Well I happen to have A-levels in exactly those things: maths, further maths, physics and French and I can tell you for free that they're not hard at all. Maths and physics are the kind of subjects that if you have a naturally logical brain you find very easy. I did much less work than my English-studying school mates. And French I found easy mostly because I'd spent several summers in France working before and during my A-levels.

If we really believe that some subjects are "easier" than others the solution (obviously) is to increase the curriculum for those subjects to level the playing field. As soon as we start to say that a maths A-level is somehow worth more than an English or geography A-level we are short-changing those students with a genuine desire to excel at English or geography. If the levels need resetting then fair enough - feel free to add to the syllabus for the supposedly "easy" subjects and reduce the workload for the harder ones but don't tell kids that their brilliance in art can never outshine their weakness in maths.

Old News, New To Me

Several weeks ago I had a call from a journalist at the Mirror who wanted to ask me about the culture of bonuses in the city. I had a chat with the guy and thought maybe he would use a quote or two. Then I forgot about it. Today however we had the fabulous Steve Parry along to be a panelist on The Comedy Manifesto (all info on my shows here) and he mentioned my "opinion piece" in the Mirror and said he was a bit jealous I'd had my own box right next to Vince Cable but thought I'd made some good points. Well they haven't exactly quoted what I said but the general gist is in line with what I meant and indeed I do make some good points...

That picture in full...

That would be eighty - yes eighty - female comics. And if you have very good eyesight you may be able to spot me - I am in black and hanging round the central pillar on the left. To the right of me (the other side of the pillar, with her hand pointing over her head) is Hannah George - who was on at the last Abortion Rights fundraiser we had and was recently the first person in the UK to graduate with a degree in stand-up comedy. To the left in a white top and blond hair, my good friend Rachel Anderson who is actually pointing at me to help you spot me!

I also had a lovely review of my show. If you'd like to read it have a look here.

But Really Though - Are Women Funny?

Yesterday morning I joined a 79 other female comics for one big photoshoot to hopefully put paid once and for all to the whole "Why don't women do comedy?" and "Why aren't women funny?" line of uninvestigative lazy journalism. It was a lot of fun.

Edinburgh Nights

By the way I'm not going to go on and on about my Edinburgh show on here. So I've set up a side-blog for me to ramble about that over here. If anything seems to be especially about women in the arts or whatever I'll cross post.

Dangers of Drinking Too Much

A woman in Greece has been in court charged with setting fire to the genitals of a male British tourist who, she claims, had repeatedly sexually harrassed her - groping her bottom and breasts and exposing his genitals to her. Whatever the facts in this particular case it has to be said I find it very very easy to believe that male British tourists cause all sorts of unnecessary grief to local women in the countries they visit. It's sexism combined with racism and xenophobia, the patronising attitude that foreign women won't mind or won't make a fuss if you behave inappropriately to them.

When I have been out flyering for my comedy shows in Leicester Square (which for me was a quick way of boosting audience numbers if we were a bit low, but from the outside to the kind of idiot who assumes no woman could be a comedian, looks like a minimum wage dodgy cash-in-hand job likely to be filled by someone from overseas who doesn't speak much English) I would get a lot of harrassment. And a fair bit, though not all, of it would stop when the perpetrators realised I spoke English, and with a relatively middle class accent.

It's gross. It ties in nicely with the news that the Mayor of Riga is unhappy at the behaviour of British stag parties visiting his country.

Now three things:

1) If British stag parties insist on bringing what is essentially an out-of-control British tradition to countries where it is not welcome maybe these countries should return the favour and set up the Pamplona Bull Run at Old Trafford one Saturday!

2) Stag parties and the sort of stuff that is being described in the Greek case are really a sort of watered-down (in some cases not much watered-down) sexual tourism. If we keep allowing lap-dancing and table-dancing bars to proliferate in the UK and the problems of the underground but widely-tolerated prostitution industry are ignored it is only a matter of time before wealthy tourists from elsewhere will be piling to the UK to get their fix of sexism. And when we don't do anything about rape and sexual assault in the UK, the perpetrators are (a) still on the streets and (b) going to assume they can get away with it wherever they go.

3) Remember all the women-don't-drink-or-it's-your-own-fault-if-you're-raped adverts? And the ones where we were told if we let our friends get in an illegal minicab they'd defintely get raped and it would be our fault. In fact even two weeks ago ministers were warning that women going on holiday to Greece should drink less or ... you guessed it - they'd get raped. So where in the light of this new case are the Home Office paid-for posters warning men that if they get drunk abroad they should expect to have their genitals torched? Instead the guys parents - who were not there at the time - are quoted as saying the twenty-year old who was celebrating the last night of a two week five-lad holiday definitely didn't harrass anyone. Did anyone really expect his parents to say "He probably did it, he can be a right tit"?

...But Is It "Art"?

Camden Council has decided that burlesque shows where there is stripping and nudity should require adult entertainment licenses, like strip shows and lap-dancing venues do. And I know I sound like the oldest prude in the book but they're right.

And I do feel mean about this because I have a number of good friends who perform burlesque, and for the most part what they do is genuinely alternative and intended at least in a positive way. The thing is that already I've seen amateur burlesque nights springing up around London and they are really using that term to mean "stripping but we can't be bothered to get a license". I fail to see how the line can be drawn. The council will still have authority to grant licenses if they want to.

On top of that I am still not totally comfortable with burlesque as an art form. A number of comedy clubs have sprung up recently offering a "cabaret" of comedy and burlesque. I am not, and am never going to be, comfortable going on stage when the last performer has just stripped off. And it is tangibly restricting my career, just as it used to when I worked in finance and wouldn't socialise in strip clubs.

To give a concrete example of why I feel that way: I was asked a couple of years ago to do warm-up at a highly prestigious burlesque show happening in Edinburgh at the festival. I said I thought I'd feel uncomfortable surrounded by glamourous dancers, to which I was told "no-one will be looking at your face". Confused I asked what they'd expect me to wear and was told "Don't worry, we'll lend you a basque". To be honest that's what I was most worried about so I declined the job and it was given to a male act who performed in jeans and no doubt got his own BBC series on the back of it or some such.

Some venues will still apply for and be granted licenses and for the rest of the burlesque world I can only suggest doing something wildly alternative and positive - keeping your kit on! No-one is suggesting demanding licenses for venues where nudity doesn't happen.

Oh Look...

...me having a good old moan in The Observer!

Dear The Independent Sports Section

I wonder if you remember on March 23rd this year you carried an opinion piece by the then Sports Minister Andy Burnham bewailing the limited coverage of women's sport in national media in the wake of England Women's victory at the the cricket world cup? I wonder in the light of that whether you shouldn't rename your current supplement Great Male Sporting Moments since aside from a brief appearance by Jane Torville all fourteen of the moments commemorated celebrate men's sport. Should your younger female readers conclude that the only physical excellence to which they should bother aspiring is to have a man swing them round an ice rink in a leotard and miniskirt*? Or will you be bringing out a second series next week of Great Female Sporting Moments with classic scenes of Paula Radcliffe, Dame Kelly Holmes, Dame Ellen MacArthur, Laila Ali, Mia Hamm, Martina Navratilova, Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson, Dame Mary Peters, Rachel Heyhoe-Flint and of course the 2009 England Women's Cricket Team? If so I look forward to reading it.

*Not that this isn't a very difficult thing to train for and do - just that it doesn't really represent the breadth and depth of female sporting ability.

What Not To Wear

This, for starters, is revolting. Women in Sudan being given lashes (not the mascara kind) for wearing trousers in public. Now the issue is that the lashes were given under Sharia law which is only supposed to apply to Muslims - the women were mostly Christian or animist.

Of course the notion that non-followers of a religion should adhere to it's laws is stupid - but still one I hear a great deal in the UK on issues like abortion and gay marriage. But more importantly:

1) Who exactly gets to decide whether a woman in Muslim or not? Is she herself genuinely entitled to a free choice on the matter? I strongly doubt it.

2) Where is the righteousness in following the laws of your religion out of fear of being flogged rather than out of personal piety?

3) Assuming the Muslim community wishes others to follow Islam - how exactly do they think this is going to attract new converts?

Wimbledon Women

A report yesterday in the Daily Male says Wimbledon officials actually admit they put more attractive female players on centre court and leave the most talented, less attractive female players on outer courts.

Today I was watching the tennis from the sofa largely because I'm something of a fan of the Williams sisters who are much more likely to use the phrase "I'll play any bloke who's brave enough"* than "I'm hoping to move into glamour modeling" and at one point Serena Williams graciously pointed out to the umpire that her opponent had won the point. The (male) BBC commentator (whose name I do not know) commented "One thing that Richard's done - he's made them very good on court. There's no bitching about line calls".

Argh! Excuse me while I bang my head against this handy wall. Firstly Richard Williams did not build his daughters in some sort of lab. Their successes and their graciousness is their own - no one sees Murray win a point and congratulates his coach or his Mum. Secondly if Murray complains about a line call would a commentator say "Oh dear, Murray's bitching about the line call"? One standard for men and a totally different one for women.

*They did this once and lost to a guy ranked about 200th, but not without winning some games on the way there.

"Hilarious" Prostitution Story

This story is hilarious as long as you block out in your mind the notion that women trapped in the sex industry are actually people. I see this happen so often - the idea that a story about unusual behaviour related to prostitution is funny. Who on earth released the story to the press? Police? How sick is that? Shouldn't they be asking what can be done to help this woman? Puke.

Chilling Read

Computer problems here which mean myself and Mr Cru are currently sharing a computer - hence why I've hardly blogged for ages. Anyway to keep you radicalised until it gets sorted out try this piece from The Curvature for size...

Rape and the Police

This story from yesterday's London Paper is shocking and horrifying. One element of it that I am still spitting about is the time line. Police were "today" (i.e. yesterday) hunting for a rapist who attacked a woman on 3rd July last year.

This guy hid in a roof above a toilet and leaped down to rape a teenage. He doesn't sound to me like the kind of guy who should be left to roam the streets for a year before being apprehended. How many other women have been attacked while the police did nothing? And how hard would it have been for the rapist to leave the country in the space of a year thus ensuring he never faces charges for his crimes.

Only a few months ago we were horrified to discover John Worboys had been left by police to roam the streets searching for new victims while outstanding cases against him were left to fester. When are police going to start taking rape seriously?

But of course The London Paper doesn't bother asking questions to chase up that angle (like when was the crime reported and why has it taken so long to chase up on it?), instead it focuses on the fact that Bono and Prince Harry sometimes went to the nightclub in question. Well whoopee - I wonder what they usually have to drink and what they think of the music... oh hold on didn't someone mention rape a minute ago? So question two: When is The London Paper - and other media - going to take rape seriously?

F****** Sexism

I was on Five Live on Tuesday night as Richard Bacon's "presenter's friend" which is a really fun job where you get to chat about all the subjects that come up. We interviewed Pete Waterman and met an amazing duo called Nathan Flutebox Lee and Beardyman (whose act you may have seen on YouTube and is really quite amazing). In between the subject of Gordon Ramsay was up for discussion.

In case you have missed the story in question Ramsay is over in Australia at the moment promoting a new restaurant and took the time to appear on a TV chat show hosted by Tracy Grimshaw. While on air he said a few rather rude things to her about her appearance, making fun of a mole on her lip. She took it as a joke and laughed it off. Then at his live show he held up a really horrible picture of a woman on all fours with six breasts and a pig's head and said "This is Tracy Grimshaw". Some sources claim he also suggested she was a lesbian (cos that's an insult right?).

And brilliantly something happened. Grimshaw herself responded to the situation saying she had been very upset by it. She also said - and I love this quote - "Obviously Gordon thinks that any woman who doesn't find him attractive must be gay. For the record, I don't. And I'm not.". The Women's Forum Australia made a statement saying "Why should he get paid for depicting a woman as an animal and publicly deriding her looks? He shouldn't make money through the verbal abuse of women." and even the Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd joined in saying Ramsay was "a new form of low life". After initially dismissing it as a joke Ramsay has now been forced to make a very public apology.

Well you know me readers - the last thing I would want to be considered is smug but I do think us feminists can smell a misogynist coming at 200 yards and I've known from day one that Ramsay has a bad attitude towards women. Firstly I remember in one of his early TV shows he had a special section in which he campaigned to "Get women back in the kitchen". The concept behind it was of course a perfectly reasonable one - to encourage people to make more home-cooked food - but he had to make it about women and about reviving antiquated Victorian ideals that have destroyed women's lives for centuries.

Secondly remember when he had three-year-olds going round in badges that said "I'm a vegetarian tart"? I even blogged about it.

So lashing of "Well Done Australia" served up with a sprinkling of "I Told You So".

Abortion Debate

I wrote a piece for Reuters yesterday about the murder of Dr George Tiller and the implications for current abortion issues here. My piece here or the "balanced"* debate here.

*"Balanced" is very much a matter of opinion I think.