I’ve been thinking about starting this blog for a long time.
Some of you reading this may know me in real life, many of
you may know me only online, probably due to one or more shared interests, some
of you may not know me at all.
But what this blog is about... what I want you to know about
me is... I’m a feminist. There. I said it.
And I’ll be honest here, I’ve shied away from saying it publicly
for a long time. Because somehow, feminist/feminism has become a dirty word –
successfully tarnished by the male patriarchy with accusations of
humourlessness, jealousy, over-sensitivity, lesbianism, man-hating... etc etc
etc.
And I’ll admit, I’ve been afraid of attracting those
accusations/slurs if I came out and said the F-word about myself.
But here’s the thing. My eyes have been opened. And once
that happens, you can’t go back. You can’t undo that awareness of inequality in
every aspect of our society. And you can’t help but get angry about it and want
to do something – anything – about it.
For me, the starting point was the No More Page 3 campaign.
As soon as I heard about the campaign, I signed up straight away. For me, it
was a no-brainer. As the campaign puts it, “boobs are not news”. How can it
possibly be considered normal and acceptable and okay, in this day and age, to
have soft porn images of women printed on a daily basis in a newspaper? An alleged “family newspaper”?
Since when is soft porn “family” consumption? And what are we teaching our
girls – and our boys – by accepting and normalising this daily dose of soft
porn alongside the news? That men are dynamic, important individuals who
feature throughout the newspaper, fully-clothed, doing important things –
running the country, winning sports events, making big business decisions. And
women? Well, women are basically just a nice pair of tits to have a quick ogle
at whilst you read about all the important things men have been doing. We are
teaching our daughters that a woman’s primary role and value is her sexual
attractiveness and availability and we are teaching our sons that a woman is an
object – a silent, biddable, propulsion system for a nice pair of knockers – of
value/interest only in terms of how attractive she (or her boobs) is.
Page 3 makes me angry.
And the fact that it has become so normalised and accepted that people can’t
seem to see (or perhaps wilfully refuse to see) how damaging it is, how not freaking normal or acceptable it is,
makes me even angrier. I fully support the No More Page 3 campaign... and not
just because of the campaign itself and what it stands for but also because of
where it has lead me. From following the NMP3 campaign on Facebook and Twitter
etc, I’ve found myself reading more and more incredibly intelligent, articulate
blogs and articles about a variety of feminist issues.
It’s also lead me to the Everyday Sexism Project and that was the real eye-opener for me. If
you’ve never taken a look I highly suggest you do. And I defy anyone to read
the user-submitted stories on there – stories not only of horrific sexual
assault and abuse but also, more insidiously, of the constant torrent of
discrimination and objectification on a
daily basis, to which women are routinely subjected – and not open their
eyes and realise that, despite all the advances of the past years, we are a
looooong way from women being treated with anything like equality and feminism,
far from being a dirty word, is still very badly needed and still has a lot to
achieve.
How can we possibly say that feminism is no longer needed,
that equality has “gone too far”, etc etc etc when I don’t know a single woman
who has never been inappropriately touched/groped in a nightclub, when some men
still think it’s perfectly acceptable to catcall/comment on a woman’s body as
she walks down a public street (and then get offended/aggressive if she doesn’t
like it), when rape victims get blamed for being raped because of what they
were wearing, when male bosses still think it’s acceptable to joke “Who did you
have to suck off to win that contract?” to a female employee, etc etc etc etc
ad infinitum. And this behaviour is so commonplace and “normalised” that women
are expected to just take it in their stride, just shrug it off, accept it as
e.g. an occupational hazard of going out dancing in a nightclub. No! Why should
we?!! Why should we have to?!!
I am a mum to two gorgeous, bright, funny, pretty, young
daughters and, quite frankly, it bloody terrifies me to think about the world
they are going to grow up in and the challenges they are going to face. From
gender stereotyping of toys right from pre-school age teaching them that girls
are only supposed to like pink and frilly things and not be interested in cars or
rockets or “action” toys, to the constant media barrage of images telling them
that to be successful they’ve got to be thin and attractive and sexy (and to
appear “willing/available”), to the soft porn lads mags and “newspapers” like
The Sun telling them that getting their tits out for the lads is an
aspirational career choice, to boys at school pressuring them to sext and then
using the threat of disseminating the pictures to pressure them into sexual
acts, to the statistics that 1 in 3 women, worldwide, will be the victim of physical
and/or sexual violence at some point in their life.
It doesn’t bear thinking about. And I need to do something
about it. Even if that something is, right now, the small step of “coming out”
and saying “Yes, I am a feminist and this is NOT acceptable”. With two small
kids and no real childcare I can’t go to meetings and rallies but I can and
will do what I can to spread the word of the NMP3 campaign and to share
important links and stories on social media – and to blog about important stuff
on here. I can't hope to be as eloquent and articulate as the many awesome blogs I see linked to from the NMP3 page but I shall do my best.
This first post has turned into a major rant but boy, it feels good to get that all off my chest (no pun intended).
And before I go, there's another thing I’ve shied away from doing and that is getting myself a
NMP3 t-shirt. I’m 40, I’m overweight, and I freely admit that I worry that
wearing a NMP3 t-shirt is going to open myself up to the kind of abuse that we
so often see from Page 3 apologists (including The Sun themselves – remember how
they aggressively ripped into Clare Short when she dared to challenge the
validity of Page 3 back in 2004, calling her a fat jealous killjoy?), accusing
me of being jealous because the Page 3 “girls” are slim and sexy and I just
wish I looked like that etc etc.
Well, fuck it. I’m done with hiding and I’m done with being
afraid of being attacked for my views. I stand by them and I believe in them.
And I’ve ordered that NMP3 t-shirt and when it arrives I shall wear it with
pride.
XX Ali
