Who is manipulating us on social media?

It is Apple or Lenovo? A gorgeous white man with dark
hair and glasses clutches his mysterious laptop.

When Google’s search results became personalised, anxious voices were raised about the danger of keeping individuals within their own happy filter bubble, where they only saw things in which they had an established interest, only heard opinions of which they already approved, only came into the presence of people like themselves.

Similarly, when last month it was revealed that Facebook had been conducting unethical psychological research on its users, people were outraged that they could be so manipulated. Laurie Penny said

“Nobody has ever had this sort of power before. No dictator in their wildest dreams has been able to subtly manipulate the daily emotions of more than a billion humans so effectively." 

And I’m thinking, what about us?

Now, I can’t tell you how big a fan I am of social media – without it, my universe would often shrink to the size of a bed. However, the biggest danger of social media is how, quite unconsciously, we influence and are influenced by one another. None of it is terrifying but - just like bearing in mind that all our free tools belong to commercial interests with American cultural values - this is stuff we need to think about.

On-line and off-line social behaviour differs in three main respects. The first is by far the most explored; with fewer clues to social status and identity, people talk to others with an ease that doesn’t occur in the same way off-line. This is mostly a good thing. Disadvantages are obvious.

The second is that on-line, a person may socialise with a wide group of people at any time of the day or night, in almost any physical location. Things can get intense, which isn't always a problem - a lot of information can be exchanged and friendships can fuse fast. Yet equally, this social world can become psychologically inescapable. It can be hard to leave alone, whether you’re in the middle of a great conversation or a raging argument. It's in your pocket. It sleeps beside you at night.

The third is this world’s typical reliance on one central and cohesive identity for each person. Some people have a few different on-line handles, each used for a different purpose. But most people have just one. Off-line, a person may be one version of themselves with work colleagues, perhaps another with the boss, another on the train, at home, with the in-laws, at choir practice, in the football team and so forth.

In the olden days, the internet was yet another place to be where you could be another, often freer or more authentic version of yourself. It was a place marginalised people flocked to, in order to be around other people like them and to find acceptance of the versions of themselves (as members of sexual minorities, disabled people, crumhorn obsessives etc.) that wouldn't be made so welcome elsewhere. Facebook, in particular, encourages us to consolidate all our identities into one definitive self. 

We need to be aware of this and how it affects us and I don’t think we generally are.

Almost the first people I found on-line as a teenager were other young people with my chronic illness. This was a wonderful thing but after a while, I came to terms with my condition and grew disillusioned with the culture of these groups. I don’t want to tar all illness-related support groups with the same brush or slander my friends who are still part of these groups - most of my experience is with particularly vulnerable young adults. But there are groups, or cliques within these groups, which work like this:

Everything people talk about is placed in the context of illness. Every positive experience must be qualified with the cost in symptoms (probably spoons these days) – this turns a lot of positive experiences either neutral or negative; I had a lovely day today but I will now have three weeks of raging agony. Other people’s positive experiences can be celebrated but not without regret; So glad you had a lovely day; if I did half as much, I would probably collapse and die. Everything that goes wrong in life is put down to or made very much worse by illness. Outsiders can’t possibly understand.

This is a caricature, of course, and it’s very important to recognise that people who edge in this direction are not especially morbid and self-obsessed. It’s all about isolation and belonging. Folk are isolated and vulnerable to varying degrees but have found a group to which they can belong. So they cling onto that, imitating one another’s behaviour and constantly reasserting their qualifications for belonging: I am one of you, I am one of you. Did I mention I am one of you?

It’s a strong example because the common ground is very specific. However, I've seen something like this in pretty much every on-line community I've wandered into since, whether creative communities, sceptic or geek communities, political or egalitarian groups. 

Political campaign groups are particularly at risk because of the combination of passion, urgency (things must change – lives are at stake) plus the issue of public opposition. Any social media campaign will meet with dissent – Blogging Against Disablism Day has a very broad remit, more a carnival than a campaign, but still meets a few voices of derision every year. 

Campaign for something specific, something counter to the status quo or government policy and there are going to be objectors. It may even be that most people in the world basically agree with you but don't care enough to be involved - objectors care enough to let you know about it and often in abusive terms (even if it's about the faces on our banknotes). It can very quickly feel like the enemy is everywhere. This adds to a sense of isolation and increases the need to feel safe and secure within the group. 

And again, the three big difference between on-line and off-line worlds come into play:

My fingers on a keyboard. Photograph by Stephen.

Relative anonymity as well as - I think, more importantly - geographical and psychological distance allow arguments to rage. I've seen trolls, but far more often I see two people who have the same objective abandon basic civility over one small contested matter. I'm guilty of this myself. 

Someone can campaign from the moment they wake up in the morning until they go to bed at night. They might be doing many other things as well, but there’s less likely to be a set time for this activity, after which they leave it alone. Without carefully managed separate accounts and a will of steel, it is difficult to socialise while staying clear of politics. There are rows in grass roots meetings in the village hall, but everyone goes home after an hour or so. 

Having a single on-line identity means that everything feels personal. It’s more difficult to differentiate between an attack on your views and an attack on your person. And then there’s personal branding.

When I first started blogging, I quickly saw that the way to get the most hits, comments and links was to be as consistent as possible; blog about the same kind of thing, or different things but from the same angle. I resisted this, not for any noble reason around authenticity or being true to myself. It’s just that this blog very quickly became a tremendously useful vent and I wanted to  use it however I fancied.

However, there was and is - now more than ever - validation to be had in consistency. There are times when I've had a spell of writing about the same kind of thing (usually gender, sexuality or disability) and it is during these times that I get the most hits, the most links and the most retweets. This naturally drives me to do more of the same. These are also times I have felt quite lonely. After all, I am not all about disability, or gender, or sexuality. Meanwhile, people agreeing with you - worse, simply retweeting or showering you with "likes" isn't engagement. It's tremendously gratifying, it's very nice. It is, in fact, successful branding. If you're a business or someone who needs to sell themselves professionally, this is exactly what you need to aspire to in your professional life. But it's applause, not social interaction. You win fans, not friends. 

Folk always got hooked on applause and I see a lot of that. Not just blogging about the same thing, but tweeting on the same subject, backing that up with Tumblr, doing the same on Facebook. I see a lot of it in political movements, but I also see it in the way someone might tell the same joke over and over, the way some parents now keep a cameraphone between themselves and their kid, the way some people apply cynicism to everything other people care about and then feel compelled to apologise for any glimmer of enthusiasm. It's so tempting, to keep coming back to what works, but when we do that, we risk denying ourselves the opportunity to do something different; it's not who we are, it's not what others expect, we're going to confuse and disappoint them.

I strongly feel we need to avoid being one brand of person - partly for our own health and happiness, but also for the health and happiness of others. We're no longer in high school; we don't have to identify ourselves as the sporty one, the diva or the nerd. We don't need to identify our tribe, fall into line and hold on tight, forsaking all the other interesting people around. 

Believing we have the strengths that others attribute to us can be a confidence boost or it can set us up for a fall. Believing we have the limitations that others attribute to us can be a killer.

Butting Out of Britain's Fertility

Fortunately, most people in my life concur with what my physical health and practical circumstances tell me: I shouldn't reproduce. Well, nobody has ever told me I shouldn't, but nobody has told me I should. Okay, so two people did; one is my Gran who has dementia and has forgotten a great deal about me and the other was a family friend who suggested that pregnancy hormones could kick-start a significant improvement in my health (and if that's not worth a gamble, what is?). Point is, while many women in their early thirties find themselves subject to hints, warnings and occasionally national campaigns, I've got out of that.

An unwell and unhappy looking woman with
a poorly-placed grey wig and a pregnant belly.

I have feelings about this. They're complicated, but entirely survivable and it does mean that I often find myself thinking, "It's okay - they don't mean me."

On the same day we were presented with this fabulous infographic about the dangers of pregnancy to teenage girls across the globe, we saw this photograph of TV presenter Kate Garraway, who is neither pregnant nor 70 and had to be made-up to look like someone who is pregnant, 70 and particularly unwell, because in real life, our pregnant 70 year olds actually look a lot healthier than that. They're blooming, in fact. Or they don't exist. It's one of those, anyway.

The Get Britain Fertile campaign, run by a cosmetics company, seeks to highlight the fact that women become utterly grotesque as they age, lose their youthful good looks and no longer get any TV work - statistically, at 46, it's not only Kate Garraway's "fertility door" that's slamming shut. Getting pregnant can also damage your career chances, and while only 18% of TV presenters over 50 are women, absolutely none of them are pregnant.

I'm fed up with the idea that individual women have a completely free choice about whether to reproduce. I'm also fed up with the fact any of us should be judged, wholesale, for choices which are not entirely ours and aren't anyone else's business.

First off, and this may come as a great shock to commentators and anyone else who has ever pressured or disapproved of a woman about her reproductive choices, but human reproduction requires the fusion of a male and female gamete. There's no way round this - that's just how it must be done. Getting pregnant at any age is not a matter of placing a couple of gametes in close proximity and hoping for the best; even at peak fertility, a cis heterosexual couple will take an average of a year to conceive. Not that women can't get pregnant on the single occasion the condom splits - it happens, but it's rare.

Most women who want to have children want to have them with a partner (though not always a man, or a man who can be a father). Regardless of gender, this makes the decision to become a parent almost always a joint venture, depending not only on two people's mutual desires, but both parties feeling ready, able and not having other important things to do with their life at that particular moment. A woman who makes a unilateral decision to try for a baby within a relationship is abusive, potentially criminal depending on her methods and is unlikely to make a good mother. Certainly she compromises the other parties' chances of parenting to their best ability, since they weren't asked.

A single woman who wants children may be prepared to compromise on the partner issue, but her options are incredibly fraught. If she's wealthy, she can afford IVF and to make up the added expenses of being a single parent, otherwise the obvious method - having regular sex with a man or men who she's not partnered to - isn't going to work any faster, is potentially emotionally complicated for all concerned and is not at all socially acceptable. Single motherhood is still stigmatised, and someone seen to choose this status from the outset is likely to be judged as extremely selfish.

Selfish is a word that comes up a great deal when it comes to women and our made-up choices.

After all, women who have children very young are seen as selfish. They have not established themselves, they may be fresh from education without work experiences or wealth, and their relationships will be seen as fragile and untested (You can't expect a young man to have the maturity to be a parent!). There's the general perception that a woman who has children in her late teens or very early twenties is likely to be or become a single unemployed mother reliant on state help. Selfish.

Women who have children in their late thirties or forties are seen as selfish, because they're fertility is dwindling (so in other words, they're selfish for wanting something they have diminishing chances of getting). Rates of Down Syndrome increase (I mean, there's 750 babies born with Down Syndrome in the UK each year - it's practically pandemic). Then there's weird and stupid arguments like

• If you have a baby in your forties, your child may be teased because their mother looks different to some of the other younger mothers. It would be better not to have children at all, than to have children who might be teased because of their or their parents' physical appearance. 
• If you have a baby in your forties, you have more chance of becoming disabled before your child is an adult. Anyone who can't guarantee their physical capacity to play football with any potential grandchildren they may or may not have, thirty or forty years from now, should not reproduce.
• If you have a baby in your forties, you'll have been reduced to a strict lifestyle of wearing cardigans all year round, listening to classical music and visiting garden centers by the time your children are teenagers. What teenagers need is cool Belieber parents who want to swap clothes, attend the same parties and snog the same boys as they do.

Selfish, selfish, selfish. 

Even women who try for a baby at the right time (I guess the window between twenty-five and thirty-five, coincidentally, when most women have their children) can't get it right. Are you married?  Are you solvent? Can you afford to stop working? Can you afford appropriate childcare if you carry on working?  Not that (a) many mothers or parents generally have any choice whether they work while their children are small - most either can't afford to, or can't afford not to. Nor that (b) having enough money to choose will get you off the hook. Staying at home, idling about and living off your partner's sweat is tremendously selfish. It is only equaled by farming your children out to strangers or encumbered relatives while pursuing your own selfish career goals (goals such as, bringing in enough money to keep a roof over your family's head). 

Meanwhile, women who don't try to have children are selfish.  I've never really understood this.  Even if someone chooses to avoid pregnancy because they really love their white suede sofa and don't want to see it stained, they're not going to hurt anybody.  More often, people choose not to have children for very sound conscientious reasons, chiefly because in their particular circumstances their lives would be less happy if they had children.

Apparently it's selfish because, if we require care in old age, childless people will be looked after by others who they didn't personally bring into the world. It's selfish because childless people enjoy uninterrupted sleep and don't really know what love is. It's selfish because - despite the haphazard mess that is human fertility - it's somehow going against nature.

See this young woman, who is enjoying her life too much as it is (her real problem is difficulty communicating with her husband, but that's entirely glossed over). "I know I'm selfish," she writes to Mariella Frostrup (in her capacity as Worst Agony Aunt Ever) and Frostrup concurs:

I'm anxious about the absence of profundity in your decision-making. You give me no indication of the "things you love", but they appear to centre on disposable income. Deciding whether or not to have kids is, happily, your prerogative. But to treat it so lightly, to squander the extraordinary gift women alone have been given, because you're enjoying your present "lifestyle" seems a hollow victory for those aforementioned campaigners for women's dignity and rights.

I suppose that's one up from drawing a picture of a particularly ugly woman and saying, "This could be you! Somehow! If a dramatic make-up artist really went to town on you!"

Then there's folks who want children, or are ambivalent, but simply don't have the option. There's medical things - sometimes a very slight, mysterious and unseen obstacle that all the reproductive tech in the world can't fix, other times major issues like chronic illness or major injury. But there's also myriad legitimate reasons that folks who could potentially reproduce and would like to feel that that's just not possible - that to do so, would be utterly wrong.

There is no big fertility crisis in the UK just now. The population is increasing. Globally, population growth has to slow down for the quality of life of our species to continue to rise. What we need to fight for is for better sexual and reproductive health for everyone, to learn to respect one another's choices whilst also respecting the limits of personal choice and to recognise that reproduction is not something that women ever do alone.

Now go and read two much better posts: Infertility, patriarchy, profit and me or "KERCHING!" - Infertility and woman blaming, woman shaming, woman controlling. by Karen Ingala Smith and on a lighter, but not insincere not, Diane Shipley's What I think about when I think about thinking about thinking about having children.

Sexual violence & the practical presumption of innocence

Includes discussion of rape and childhood sexual abuse.

Sorry to launch back on such a subject, but this is a source of great frustration.

There's a principle in social justice that is important, but sometimes badly worded and often misunderstood. The principle is usually worded something like this:

If someone says that they have experienced rape, we should believe them.

I have written before about the importance of believing people when they talk about their experiences, unless and until you have a good reason not to. This particularly matters when it comes to sexual violence, because our trust can make the difference between a dangerous abuser being allowed to continue, committing worse and worse crimes, and that same person being brought to justice and taken out of circulation, discouraging others who would follow that path.

Yet our society is particularly bad at this. We are skeptical about rape. We are over-anxious about the idea that innocent men* may be subject to false-accusations. Sometimes, our principle is read as

If someone says that they have experienced rape, we should condemn the suspected perpetrator. 

This sits against one of the most important principles in law: a person is to be presumed innocent, until they are found to be guilty. Although this is usually a pernicious misinterpretation, some people actually word it like that. Some people do, for example, believe that we should condemn all the famous men arrested under Operation Yewtree, because they must all have been accused by someone.

There then follows an argument, which pitches the rights of a rape victim against those of a person accused of rape. This is a really big problem, a thorn in the side of any constructive discussion of justice and sexual violence, so I'm going to try and unpack it.


We've moved beyond trial by combat.

In days of yore, if a chap had been assaulted, had his cattle rustle or had someone trample a crop circle in his field on a drunken Saturday night, he would be given a big heavy stick. The person accused of these crimes would be given a similarly heavy stick and they'd be expected to decide the case by fighting it out. People knew it was a very stupid system, even at the time, but they were superstitious about lawyers and saw little alternative.

There is nothing that resembles this in UK criminal law. We have an adversarial trial system, where lawyers actively argue with each other, and sometimes with witnesses (another big issue around justice and sexual violence) but criminal cases do not pitch the accuser against the accused.  The victim of a crime (who may not be accusing anyone in particular) goes to the police. The police investigate. If they find enough evidence, they consult the Crown Prosecution Service, who may decide to take the suspect to trial. It is then the Crown that prosecutes, not on behalf of the victim but on behalf of the state, since a crime against one person is a crime against us all.

Yet so often, when rape and abuse cases are discussed, they are spoken about as if the victim and the suspect are two sides of a naturally ambiguous legal dispute. Folks argue for the anonymity for rape suspects or the removal of complainant anonymity in order to establish parity between the two parties, as if their respective positions can possibly be compared. They cannot.


Anonymity is a very simple issue, so let's clear that up. 

People who report rape and sexual abuse are given anonymity - that is, nobody is allowed to publish or broadcast their name or other personal details - for three very good reasons:

• Even if we could do away with the colossal stigma, sexual violence effects people in uniquely personal and complicated ways, and should be treated like the most private medical information. Lose anonymity and reporting would plummet.
• Rape victims are extremely vulnerable to intimidation and coercion, especially when they have been raped by people they know or by people with power and influence. Even without anonymity, many rape victims drop cases because they have been explicitly or implicitly threatened by their rapists and their allies. Lose anonymity and this would be even more commonplace.
• A rape victim who has reported a rape that didn't result in conviction is more vulnerable to experiencing rape again, and less likely to report another attack. Lose anonymity, and provide rapists with easily identifiable potential victims who are much less likely to report.  

Complainant anonymity is not about making rape victims avoid embarrassment, but is a tool for justice which helps protect fundamentally personal information, makes rape victims more likely to report and follow through the legal process, as well as helping to prevent rape happening again.

Anonymity is not awarded to adult suspects, outside exceptional circumstances (e.g. those involving state secrets), although the police and courts make decisions about releasing names to the media. It would be a particularly bad idea to award anonymity to rape or sexual abuse suspects for two very good reasons:

• Most rapists have multiple victims, each of who tend to believe that they are the only one. Especially in cases where a rapists has power and influence, evidence around a single instance may not be enough for a conviction. As soon as a name is published, other victims know they are not alone and have the opportunity to come forward and a stronger case is forged. 

(This doesn't mean the media handle such information at all well, and their mistakes can not only permanently damage the reputation of innocent people, they can jeopardise a fair trial and undermine the legal process.)

• The percentage of reported rapes that result in conviction is rather low. If suspects were granted anonymity, a rape victim would have a choice between effectively awarding their rapist lifelong anonymity on the chance he or she might be convicted, or else side-stepping the legal process and maintaining the freedom to discuss their own experiences in whatever way they saw fit.

Thus, granting suspect anonymity would result in less reporting, fewer convictions and, since rapists would feel altogether safer, a higher incidence of sexual violence.

Presumed innocent until proven guilty does not mean treated as innocent.

When someone is suspected of an offence, they will be obliged to speak to the police and they may be detained in custody whilst being questioned.  If a person is charged for an offence, a court will decide whether or not they should be allowed to be released on bail. Some people - still innocent in the eyes of the law - will be imprisoned for months awaiting trial.

Outside the criminal justice system, there are obvious steps that other people need to take when someone is suspected of a crime, whether the police are involved or not.  As human beings, we observe and listen to folks reactions, thoughts and experiences with other people all the time, and we'd be foolish if they didn't influence our behaviour.

Whether or not the police are involved, there's a big leap between treating a suspected rapist with caution - allowing their alleged victim distance from them in social settings, for example, not leaving them alone with potential victims - and organising a lynch mob.

In fact, there's a difference between believing someone when they say they have been raped and believing an accused person to be a rapist. After all...


The innocence of an accused person and the honesty of an accuser are not mutually incompatible.

Rape victims cannot always reliably identify their attackers, whether it is because they are complete strangers or because alcohol, other drugs or head trauma are involved.  In such cases (when they are taken seriously), the police are likely to question many innocent people; people who drive certain vehicles, people who were at a particular party, people who look a little like the attacker. People are occasionally charged with rape due to straight-forward mistaken identity.

Meanwhile, and especially with childhood sexual abuse, we have issues around memory.


Someone with inconsistent memories is not necessarily a liar.

Imagine someone was abused by her uncle as a child in the 1970s.  Nobody knew at the time, so she buried it in the back of her head.  She never spoke about it, so never called it abuse, and now, forty years later, she doesn't really remember why she doesn't like the uncle she sometimes still sees at family occasions - it's just like a very strong gut feeling. She may have other PTSD symptoms, but as they have been going on since childhood, they are a normal, part of who she is.

Then the news about Jimmy Savile hits.  She reads other people's experiences of abuse which chime with her own.  She sees images and hears descriptions that remind her of that time, of her childhood, accompanied by stories of abuse. Everything she buried so thoroughly has been stirred up.  Memories begin to come back, only in a form that she can actually cope with. If she was abused by a famous man she once met, then she will be validated by a shared experience that she's heard so much about. She can get help. She can even tell her family and friends without breaking anybody's heart or splitting the family. So it comes out like that.

This is not to say that this will be happening a lot, but over hundreds of cases, it will be happening a bit (and the police know this). Many victims of child sexual abuse know exactly what was done to them and by whom, but because it is such a bloody awful thing to happen, usually committed by trusted and influential adults and often kept secret for years, many children's minds produce (or are guided towards) more palatable versions of events.

Sometimes, something like this can happen when adults are raped.

There is only room for one overarching principle for lay folk and it's not "Innocent until proven guilty"

We have no moral obligation to remain impartial - we can't police our instincts and opinions, only choose what to do about what we believe.  We have no moral obligation to presume that a person is innocent, until they are proven guilty. We have no moral obligation to believe a story which does not ring true to us. But...


We do have moral obligations around what we say and do. 

To tell someone who has been raped that they are lying about their experience is obviously a tremendous and wanton act of cruelty. It discourages reporting, it discourages victims from confiding in others, let alone pursuing justice and it makes the world a much safer and more comfortable place for rapists.

Whenever someone expresses doubt about a specific rape or reported rape in general, you run a very high risk of doing the above. In a public forum, you can guarantee that's what you're doing. This doesn't mean that folk can't defend an accused person's character (that's fine) or talk about false-reporting, but we absolutely have to take steps with language and generalisations to make sure that rape victims know you're not talking about them. These steps are rarely taken; protestations that a man is innocent almost always hinge on a defamation of the alleged victim's character and discussions of false reporting make sweeping statements where anyone but the perfect victim (nun held at knife-point by stranger) could feel discredited.

This isn't just about people's feelings, it is about justice and crime prevention.

Meanwhile, there's precisely nothing to be gained from letting a false-accuser know you're onto them. Anyone who reports a rape knows that some people will not believe them - the same must apply to those who haven't been raped.  So there's really nothing to be gained from that, and everything to be lost.

See Also: Some Things We Could Actually Do To Prevent Rape

This is too often about protecting men and masculine sexualities.

In fiction, only very evil men commit rape. Good men are often sexually forceful, but that's always somehow okay - because they're good! Men themselves cannot be raped, because sex is always a good thing for them. Our entire culture is invested in masculine sexuality - particularly heterosexuality - being a great thing, a source of both humour and pleasure, an expression of desire, love and all that is good about being a man.  And to the greatest extent, it is. It's no more magical than the sexualities of other genders, but most things most people do sexually are about pleasure for all concerned. Sex is wonderful. Sexual organs are both amusing and beautiful, according to context. Sexual desire doesn't hurt anybody, and most people's sexual behaviour is entirely positive, often loving, sometimes creative and occasionally procreative.

Unfortunately, bad behaviour is not as exceptional as our culture would like to think. Our culture is automatically skeptical about rape, and especially skeptical about the idea that a likeable man, or even a man who doesn't have any scales or horns in view, could behave monstrously in this way. Some people call this skepticism Rape Culture, and it certainly runs deep.


If a close friend or family member of mine was accused of rape, I would be instinctively skeptical.  I would need an awful lot of proof (although I wouldn't seek out the alleged victim and demand it from them). In some cases, I'd perhaps never believe it to be true.  This is not a bad position to be in.

However, if you have the same instinct about almost any story of rape, then that's probably programming.  We grow up with that.  We learnt that rape is a terrible crime and being falsely accused of such a crime is very nearly as bad.. But rape is rare and false accusations are perceived as so very common that the subject should be raised every time sexual violence is mentioned.

This is borne out by responses to Operation Yewtree. Despite the fact that the police and Crown Prosecution Services have acknowledged that Jimmy Savile was a prolific paedophile who should have been put away long ago and the confessions of Stuart Hall to various acts of child abuse, I have seen it said that:

• This is a "Celebrity Witch Hunt"
• These historic allegations are driven by compensation culture. These people just want money.
• These historic allegations are driven by attention-seeking behaviour. 
• The 1970s were a less politically correct time, when all men committed a variety of sexual crimes and nobody minded - we can't judge what happened then by the standards of today!
• Too much time has passed - if these allegations were true, we'd have heard of them by now.
• Too much time has passed for any of this to matter to anyone. Victims need to get over themselves.
• The entire inquiry is about some kind of twisted sexual purity movement that seeks to persecute any innocent rich old man who happened to molest a nine year old in his younger days. Lower the age of consent! Remove complainant anonymity! Problem solved!

(This post is just about the possibility of false accusation; we're equally programmed to seek out extenuating circumstances on behalf of a rapist: What was she wearing? Was she drunk? Was she flirtatious? This is stuff that many of us have had to unlearn.)

But this is sometimes just about power.

There is great power to be derived from treating a vulnerable person, desperate for validation, with doubt and disbelief. Way too many people get a kick out of that, whether they are expressing doubt to the face of an individual victim, or expressing doubt in a public forum or a newspaper column where they know victims will be reading.

Sometimes, people really do express disbelief because they want a slice of the power a rapist has. Sometimes, it is alarmingly obvious what they're doing.





* The reason this is mostly about men being accused of rape when women may also commit rape and be accused of it, is that we don't take women rapists seriously at all. If a woman is accused of rape, we don't worry about her reputation being damaged - in fact, when female teachers have been convicted of raping their male pupils, there are comments of "Wish she was my teacher when I was at school." and so forth. All this is terrible, and all of it is interconnected. Our terrible attitudes to rape - of whoever, by whoever - come back to our expectations of masculine and feminine sexuality.

Marriage, Surnames, Legitimacy & Gender

When I got married for the first time, I did not seriously consider changing my surname. My ex complained about it beforehand, but when the time came I think he congratulated himself for being so modern.  There was one person in my circle of acquaintance who had a problem with it, complained to my mother and insisted on address me as Mrs Ex's Surname from there on in. This annoyed me, but we weren't close. Meanwhile, everything was straightforward - much more straightforward than if I'd changed it. I didn't have to change my name with any companies or institutions. I sometimes didn't bother correcting strangers who addressed me as Mrs Ex's Surname but then, I didn't always bother before we were married, same as I don't bother correcting every time I'm called Miss or Mrs instead of my preferred Ms. There are only so many hours in the day.

I'm sure other people, in other communities, experience far more hassle than I did or maybe feel more offended at the misnaming. Personally, I have had far more trouble maintaining a consistent title - with one bank account, I had Ms on my debit card, Mrs on my cheque book and Miss on my bank statements!

This marriage is completely different - I feel like I need to say that a lot, not as a defense (the first one doesn't count; this is the real thing.) but because I think folk need to be aware of the fact that these things can be so completely and utterly different that it's hard to use the same words to describe them; love, romance, even marriage. Abused and otherwise miserably partnered people often feel that any given person will always have the same kind of relationships, with roughly the same dynamics, and the same kind of problems. Abused and otherwise miserably partnered people often buy into the fairly widespread cultural meme that Love Hurts and folk - especially men and women - can never have both passion and peace with one another. This is not so.

However, this has nothing to do with the fact that the surname thing is looking very different this time.  It's not because I am more in love (I am perhaps in love for the first time) or more committed (I was very committed, but this time I am certain*). It's about other things which have nothing to do with the quality or strength of this marriage, but matter a lot to us. They include:

1. It's something we're talking about together. The whole subject is completely different when two people who are getting married ask the question, "What shall we do about our names? Shall we share one? What shall we call ourselves?"  Frankly, I swung back and forth about what I should do until the conversation became about our choice. This changes everything. 
2. Stephen's family have welcomed me in and offered me all manner of unconditional things I have never had before.  I feel a tremendous closeness and affiliation with them.  There's a part of me that really likes the idea of sharing a name with them, almost like taking the name of an adopted family. 
3. At this point in my life, I am known by very many names; The Goldfish, Deborah, Deb, Ms Kelly, D H Kelly, Auntie Deborah, Agent Bum Bum, Love, Sweetheart and all manner of more personal petnames and nicknames (in English, Welsh and Latin). Changing the name I am known by in some contexts would not be the same as changing my identity. In fact, it provides the possibility of another identity.  I like being all these people.  It actually feels like an opportunity to have another name, another identity to do things with. 

(1) isn't a reason to change names, but a starting point from which everything is on the table. But see what (2) and (3) have in common? Immensely personal. To do with us, our families, where we are in life.

Here's another personal thing. I would never consider changing the name that I write under.  Even though I have little published work out there, I like being D H Kelly.  It is a good name for a book spine.  Even as a child, I wrote stories with by D H Kelly under the titles.  However, given that I am working towards a career where this name is associated with a body of work, I quite like the idea of having another name for other things I want to do in my life. Often living with two surnames in use is presented as a compromise, but I think that's only because it's something men nearly never do. Having spare names can be useful.

There are folk who think that a woman changing her name upon marriage is necessarily making an unfeminist decision (all stats US - I'm sure keeping names is both far more common and acceptable in the UK, unless I roll with an extraordinary crowd).  This really bugs me, for several reasons:

For one thing, feminism is not about individual women and the personal decisions they make - personal decisions that some women will necessarily find easier and more desirable than others.  Feminism is all about removing social and political pressure, so that women (and others) have a real choice.  Naturally, women who make certain choices set a good example to others (it is possible to do this another way, even if the world suggests otherwise), but the choices themselves are personal, complicated by personal circumstance, and so haven't got much to do with a social and political movement. Women shouldn't have to apologise to our sisters for the personal choices we make around identity - in fact, feminism is all about relieving such a burden.

Most same-gender married couples I know have a shared surname. They presumably arrived at that through mutual discussion, weighing up their options, the individual feelings and any professional factors around the names they had. This is how it should be done.  Every couple, upon marrying or having a child should have a conversation which begins "What shall we do about names?"  It could be a very short conversation, it could be an ongoing discussion over a periods of months.

But  even if we all did this, unless we do away with the custom of familial surnames altogether, around half the couples who share a surname would share a husband's surname and around half of all children would take their name from a father. Sharing a husband's name is not wrong; the problem is that women feel under pressure to do so and couples often don't consider the other options.

Meanwhile, the reasons that there isn't a completely free choice relate to two far bigger, far more problematic aspects of sexism which we need to address head-on.

The first is about legitimacy.  As demonstrated by my own experience, some relationships are stronger, more committed and generate more love, happiness and creativity than others.  Some are utterly miserable and still others are dangerously awful.  However, we cannot see into people's hearts and there are very few external signs which might indicate what kind of relationship two people might be having.

Yet in our culture, we raise romantic partnerships above all other relationships; we see lasting romantic love as something both necessary and sufficient for happiness, particularly for women.  Then we set about judging whether or not someone's relationship is legitimate according to very specific and ever-changing criteria. For some couples - for example, those where one partner is coming through the immigration process - the subjective legitimacy of their relationship is a very serious matter. For other couples, legitimacy is an on-going issue among family and friends. Some examples for criteria would include:

• Whether or not a couple live together (even when they have work in different locations). 
• Whether or not a couple are married (and when this happened, how this happened)
• Whether or not a couple have children together (especially if they have children by other people)
• Whether or not a couple consists of a man and a woman (preferably straight and cis gender)
• Whether or not a couple are monogamous (or at least seem monogamous)
• Whether or not a couple are well-suited in superficial terms (same background, culture, age, disability status, earnings bracket etc..)

And so on and so forth.  I have heard folk cast doubt on the strength and potential longevity of a second marriage because the second wife wasn't as pretty as the first.  People are odd.

For some folk, marriage itself is about making a relationship legitimate - it is about a public declaration and celebration of a commitment.  Some people choose not to marry because they feel affronted by the idea that they need to prove their love in a public way. When it comes to personal choices, we do what feels right, which is so complex and personal it could never be neatly analysed by anyone on the outside.  Some non-religious people feel the need to marry in church; this may be about their parents or community, ideas about a proper wedding from childhood or for reasons they don't fully understand. This is absolutely fine.  I would only criticise someone (e.g. the Catholic Church) who claims that marriages outside church are less legitimate**.

And this is exactly where the pressure on couples to share the husband's name comes from; it's something that, for some people, renders other people's marriages legitimate or not. I'm sure that, despite the general grooviness of our social and family circle, some people would see Stephen and I sharing a surname (mine or his) as a sign of my greater commitment to this marriage. And that's a problem. But not one we can personally solve with any choice we make.

The other issue is about gender and relationships.  As with so many more significant lifestyle choices - being partnered, getting married, having children, the distribution of domestic work and childcare - we talk about this stuff as if women are making unilateral decisions.  We talk about a woman choosing to keep her name or take that of her husband, as opposed to a couple choosing to keep their own names etc., in the same way we talk about women choosing to marry, choosing to have children, choosing to stay at home or go to work etc.. In reality, whilst individuals have a personal veto (and we're still fighting for all women to have such a veto), when it comes to relationships, reproductive choices, childcare and paid work, we're often talking about a completely free choice that nobody has.

Romantic relationships involve many factors of complex chance and at least two ready-formed people whose life circumstances will be as muddled and messy as everyone else's. Women don't just make this stuff happen. Neither do men. But we live in a culture where these subjects are spoken about in these terms;  relationships and children are women's responsibility. Women must make the right decisions. Women must look after their men and their children, whilst resisting the loss of their own identity (which to some means a professional identity, and others means a youthful, sexually available identity). When a couple takes the wife's name on marriage, I should imagine that the wife, rather that the husband is the target of any criticism - how could it have been his idea?  Whilst we expect men to pursue sex, they are treated as weirdly powerful yet passive entities in long-term romantic relationships.

The name thing is a rather small matter - not many people get to learn our surnames, let alone how we acquired them - but any argument for or against a particular course of action on the part of women plays into this model. If we want to change the historic bias towards patronymic surnames, we need to stop talking about a woman's decision at marriage and start talking about couples and the pressures they face.


* Quite honestly, when I married my ex, I didn't expect it to last. Part of my motivation to get married was to have legal protection, because he frequently threatened to leave and take everything. Yes, this was an utterly stupid reason to marry - one of many utterly stupid reasons involved. But I just wanted to make things better and failed to even entertain the (now) obvious strategy for doing so.

** One odd aspect of the Catholic Church's rules against divorce is that previous marriages outside the Catholic Church don't count - if you previously married in a registry office or a synagogue, you may have this marriage discounted and remarry in the Church (it's not as simple as that, but it is possible). It is as if nobody who didn't marry in the Catholic Church is married at all.  However, I am yet to meet a Catholic who actually sees it that way. Meanwhile, I know Catholics who were abandoned or abused by spouses who can never marry again within their faith, without a lucky lightning bolt taking out their exes. 

How Not To Talk About Domestic Violence Towards Men

Content warning: As well as domestic violence, brief discussion of suicide. 

Help for men victims of domestic violence can be found at Mankind and Men's Advice Line who explicitly offer support for gay and bisexual men as well as straight men. 

Men victims of domestic abuse are almost invisible and that is a problem for everyone.

Whenever I've written about domestic abuse in the abstract, I've tried to use gender-neutral language, partly because of fairness and partly because gender is such a big problem in abuse.  Presenting victims as necessarily feminine - usually young, straight, white, non-disabled middle-class archetypes - alienates a lot of women, as well as excluding people of other genders. Presenting all perpetrators as men makes men's violence seem natural, something good men must actively resist as opposed to something anyone, of any gender, may choose to do or not.  It makes violence committed by women seem aberrant and trivial.

As I've said before, hearing stories of abuse from male friends and family was a huge help in recognising my own situation for what it was. Whenever I read or heard stories about women victims, I found reasons that I was not that kind of woman (i.e. one much more vulnerable and typically feminine than myself).  All the stories matter.  All domestic violence is connected - abuser's behaviour is often so similar, regardless of gender, sexuality, class or cultural background.  As a society, we should be ensuring that we support all victims and do what we can to prevent all kinds of domestic violence.

But whenever I read about domestic violence on-line, on newspaper sites or blogs, there's a great deal of commentary that amounts to "What about the men?"  These comments are almost always problematic. There's the standard misogynist nonsense, of course, but the comments that disturb me most are by folks - apparently men and women - who seem to genuinely care about the problems of men victims being ignored and side-lined, but seem to believe that attention on violence against women detracts from their cause.

It is because I believe that there is no way to tackle domestic violence unless we tackle all of it that I find these comments so deeply infuriating and wanted to address the ones I see time and time again:


1. It's especially hard for men who are abused because they have been taught never to hit a woman. 

I'm sure there is a particular humiliation in being beaten by someone who is smaller or physically weaker than you - or is regarded by society as gentler, softer and more physically vulnerable than you - but there is no problem in the idea that you shouldn't hit a woman.  You shouldn't hit people.  Of course, there are circumstances where I concur with the law that it is okay to hit any person, if it is necessary to prevent a rape, serious physical injury, a kidnapping or violent death. But hitting a person because they are shouting at you, or because they hit you first?  Never okay.

People who are abused by men may also consider retaliation and resist the temptation because they've been brought up not to be violent at all (as is the case with many women), or because they don't want to hurt their abuser, or because they are afraid of their own strength or capacity to inflict damage, or because they feel sure that if they hit back, they're only going to prolong the attack and get hurt all the more seriously themselves. All these things passed through my mind during abuse, but the greatest of these was quite noble; I felt it was fundamentally wrong to hurt someone - anyone - unless somebody's life depended on it.  The one time I was truly afraid for my life and tried to find a way to defend myself, the prospect of causing the necessary harm was almost as scary as what might happen to me.

Whenever the comment is made about men being taught not to hit women, it suggests that intimate violence is sometimes the answer and men victims are disadvantaged by believing otherwise.  Or maybe that a society in which women fear the violence of their partners would be a better place?  Whether it is against your nature or your conditioning to hit your loved ones, that is something which helps you not to be an abuser (and gives you the prospect of happy and healthy mutually-loving relationships).  It does not make you any more vulnerable to abuse.

I imagine that some abuse victims do sometimes hit back in circumstances that fall short of immediate self-defense, but I guarantee that this will not have made their situation any better.  Relationships where both parties are violent towards each other can only end in disaster.

On a similar theme...


2. Stories of abuse which include the sentence "I never hit her once."

I think I understand why some men say this; because they feel defensive.  Discussion of domestic violence which focuses on the dynamic where men abuse women seems to make some men feel as if they have been personally cast in the role of abuser just by being a man.  No serious or sensible person believes this to be the case.  Many women survivors of abuse by men gain a more positive attitude towards men in general after they have escaped and realised that their experiences were exceptional and abhorrent, as opposed to the way men are.

However, whenever someone says "I never hit her once" it strongly suggests that hitting one's partner would be a normal response. The idea that it would be somehow natural for men to hit women who mistreat them lies at the heart of many of our problems with domestic violence; the idea that violence is simply more difficult to resist for men and a natural consequence for women who (deliberately or not) make life difficult for them. It says men abusers can't help themselves, and the violence of other abusers must be trivial, if not entirely fabricated.

You never hit her once?  Of course you didn't.  I never hit my abuser either.  If I write about my experiences of poverty, I don't have to state that I never took money from my Granny's purse.


3. Domestic Violence is not a gender issue because men are victims too.

This is partly a linguistic problem, but one that really matters.  Gender does not mean, about women, or  the sole concern of women or indeed, something men do to women.  Men have a gender too!  There are other genders!

Gender usually plays a massive role in domestic violence.  Almost whenever men who have been abused by women tell there stories, the abuse is heavily laden with gendered language and ideas about what it is to be a man; their natural inadequacies as men or their inability to live up to some ideal of manhood.  The same applies to people abused within same-gender relationships and even non-romantic ones.  Abusive parents tell their sons to man up or their daughters to be more ladylike or else they criticise they sons as insensitive men and their daughters as over-emotional bitches.  All of that and much much more.

Domestic violence is not exclusively a women's issue (even if only women were abused, it should still concern us all).  But talking about gender in domestic abuse is not the same as saying it is all about women or that it is something that men and only men are responsible for - an accusation repeatedly made towards anyone who writes about domestic abuse, regardless of the language they have used.


4. Women abusers make false accusations and everyone believes them. 

This is a circular argument.  All abuse victims will be disbelieved by someone, either specifically or, as such comments demonstrate so well, generally.  Marginalised people are routinely disbelieved when they describe their own experiences. It's particularly offensive to see mention of false accusations under the harrowing personal accounts of abuse victims who have been brave enough to describe their experiences, as the implication seems to be that any woman who speaks up about abuse may be covering for her own abusive behaviour.  All abusers lie, but it is extraordinarily unlikely that a lie should be taken this far.

All abusers blame their victims, lie about their crimes and try to present themselves as the victim of at least something; abuse itself, other mistreatment, cheating, lies, disloyalty etc.. Women abusers are almost certainly more likely than men to threaten to make false accusations of violence, but male abusers have their own arsenal of effective dismissing and discrediting strategies.

Anyone who has children with an abuser has reason to fear a custody battle, because those people see children as a legitimate weapon, and our family courts are a bit of a mess. There is a bias towards women as primary caregivers, but mothers still sometimes lose their children to abusive men who are able to manipulate the system (especially if they are in any position of authority - a police officer or a doctor, for example).

Custody battles aside, abusers are extremely unlikely to take false accusations very far, for exactly the same reasons that victims are unlikely to talk openly about or pursue justice for the crimes against them; identifying oneself as a victim has a massive social and psychological cost.

Part of that cost is the doubt of others.  Part of that cost is paid if you ever write about or speak about your experiences of abuse in a public sphere, only to be told that people like you are motivated to lie in order to keep the house and children you never had, or to cover up the abuse that you never committed.



5. More men are killed by domestic violence if you count suicide.

This is in response to the indisputable fact that women are much more likely to be raped, hospitalised or killed by their partners or former partners - two women a week in the UK.  This doesn't mean that men cannot be raped, hopsitalised or killed by domestic violence - a man is killed by a partner or former partner once a fortnight. The naive idea that men's experiences of domestic violence is necessarily minor and cannot sharply escalate is deadly dangerous.

Domestic abuse is a common, massively underestimated cause of mental ill health. Abuse victims do sometimes kill themselves, sometimes long after the relationship has ended.  However (a) suicide is absolutely not the same as murder, (b) casual discussion of suicide as a direct consequence of certain experiences can be very dangerous for survivors of those experiences and (c) threats of suicide are common weapons abusers use, especially as control over a victim begins to slip away. We should always take care when talking about suicide.

Suicide threats* are probably extremely common during messy break-ups and terrible rows even between otherwise reasonable people, when one party feels their world is falling apart and will say anything to try to persuade the other to stay. This is always a very bad thing to do, but fortunately, it is rarely meant or taken seriously. There are significant differences for abuse victims because

• The threat may come from someone who is no stranger to violence. 
• The threat may come from someone who has made outlandish threats and carried them out in the past.
• Victims are used to being blamed and taking the blame for their abuser's unhappiness and misfortune.

My ex's declared capacity for suicide had hung over me for years, especially as I was the main cause of his depression. During the months after I left - despite removing the supposed source of his unhappiness - I genuinely expected him to kill himself.  He talked about it at great length (it's a tragic myth that talking about it means a person won't go through with it). In order to carry on with my life and proceed with the divorce, I had to accept that he could die and hold me responsible.

Honestly, with hindsight, I do not know whether the threats were all bullshit or not.  But I'm describing behaviour that took place when I was at the strongest I had been in my whole adult life, and even then, there's no way I can pretend to have been indifferent to the idea that my behaviour could be even a contributing factor in someone's violent death. I had lived through the guilt of having a close friend attempt suicide years earlier. The threats would have been quite enough to regain control over someone with only a little less going for them. (Our culture tends to romanticise scary obsessive self-destructive behaviour by rejected men.)

Threats of suicide are a major red flag in violent relationships; someone who threatens suicide as a weapon of control is more likely to take someone else's life.  Meanwhile, there are all kinds of other things we need to concentrate on if we wish to prevent suicide (like ditching this casual pop psych cause and effect model of suicide) and take care of the mental health of all people who have been abused. Using suicide to have an argument about the relative damage caused to men and women? Pointless, crass and dangerous.


6. Women receive all this support and men receive none because people keep talking about violence towards women. 

Provision for victims of domestic abuse is poor. Provision for victims who aren't women is appalling.  This is definitely not the fault of women victims. It's not the fault of people who advocate for women victims or talk about violence against women. Domestic violence is simply not spoken about enough in our culture. Anyone who speaks up about it is making the world a slightly better place.

Same with cancer. Research into various cancers gets far more funding than any other medical condition, including those which are more common, or more commonly deadly or disabling. Dementia, for example, costs the economy much more and is, often though not always, a much more unpleasant condition for both the person with it and their family.  But dementia receives a fraction of the funding and attention that cancer receives. Are people who work or raise money for cancer charities and cancer research facilities to blame for the limited research into dementia?  Would it ever be worth having an argument about which group of very sick and dying people are more deserving of attention and help?  Would it ever be less than odious to respond to an account of someone's life with cancer by saying, "It's okay for you with your fashionable disease..."?

There are loads of reasons why provision for victims who are not women are so very poor.  Some of these are to do with numbers; typically, women are more likely to be in danger of their lives and less likely to have the financial and practical means of effective escape.  Some of this is to do with accidents around how and when refuges and charities have been set up (disabled and queer women can also find themselves shut out).

However, most of this is cultural and we're all part of this culture. We have an almost adversarial model of heterosexual relationships, where men and women are having to fight or deceive one another for their mutually exclusive needs. Men and women are not supposed to get on. People ask explorers who are in love with one another how they manage to be alone together for months together without killing each other. There is more mainstream humour around violence towards men**.  My straight women friends and family are much more likely to joke about slapping or hitting their partners if they misbehave (although others do sometimes make those jokes).

But perhaps most of all, as a culture, we struggle with the idea that men can be hurt in these ways. We treat violence (along with verbal aggression and other controlling behaviour) as something that belongs to boys and men; that boys and men will both be violent and cope with violence. In movies, men are beaten, stabbed and shot and are seen to survive all manner of violence without trauma. The idea that an intimate partner can take control of a man's life through verbal aggression, humiliation, criticism and a level of violence which might not even leave a bruise, doesn't quite fit.

Anyone who talks about domestic abuse as some kind of battle of the sexes issue, where they make generalisations about men's or women's attitudes and behaviour, where they paint a picture of the world divided into warring heterosexual couples, when they suggest that members of one gender cannot be trusted on their accounts, then they're making the whole situation worse. They are perpetuating the myth of a natural conflict between men and women - a myth that is a gift to all abusers. They are silencing victims who are already taking big risks to speak out. They are shutting down these discussions.


7. It's all the fault of feminists that male victims of domestic violence are ignored.

In my corner of the world, the only people I see talking about domestic violence towards men are feminists or people who share the values of feminism.  There's no point making a blanket defense of feminism and claiming that feminists have never said or done spectacularly stupid and harmful things on this and many other issues (ha!). But people who cause a fuss about violence against women are not the enemy when it comes to tackling violence against people of other genders.

In fact, if you want to borrow my stolen Tardis and head back before Second Wave feminism, to a time where little short of murder going on within a household was a private family matter, men victims of domestic violence had even less hope of escape, support or justice. Increasing attention on and discussion of domestic violence as experienced by women - together with increasing attention on sexual abuse and violence - has made room for, rather than stifling, discussion of intimate violence experienced by people of other genders.

Yes, people still imagine a woman (a certain kind of woman) when they think of a victim of sexual or domestic violence.  But at least folks now have some consciousness that these things aren't confined to newspaper stories or soap plots, that these things happen all around us.  Feminist discussion allows us to define abuse far more broadly that physical domination through brute strength. All this benefits everyone.

More needs to be done, but it is everyone's responsibility.  It is not up to people whose focus is violence against women to shift their focus.  It is up to all of us to talk about all the problems society has and see about ways we can change it for the better.


* I hope it is very obvious, but just in case, a suicide threat is not the same thing as someone reaching out and confessing to suicidal thoughts in order to seek help, comfort and support. This doesn't mean a threat is always framed "If you do X, I will kill myself."  In my experience it is often "Fine, you do X as you want to and I will kill myself." or "Now you have done X, all that's left for me is to kill myself."

**Although when it does crop up, humour around violence towards women tends to be more serious, e.g. rape jokes, as opposed to "I'll give him a slap." jokes. Only this weekend, there's been another issue with t-shirts with "humourous" slogans about violence towards women.

Feeding Christians to the Homophobic Lions.

Being queer and being Christian in our culture have a fair few things in common at the moment.

For example, there are people who disapprove of Christians and/or LGBT people who believe that

• it's something people ultimately choose to be and therefore could reason themselves out of. 
• it's a fact that reflects on one's whole personality, one's hobbies and interests and especially one's politics.
• it's something that fills one with smugness about one's superior lifestyle. 
• it's something that one is compelled to spread around at every opportunity, encouraging if not coercing other people to be the same. 
• it's something that makes you a bad influence on children.

Yet queerness and Christianity are often spoken about as if they are not only mutuality exclusive identities, but as if the rights of one contradict the rights of the other.  This isn't true.

The people who argue that this is true are predominantly Christian homophobes, who would very much like it to be true.  Homophobia is becoming increasingly unacceptable and, in certain contexts, illegal. For some people, this presents all the righteous indignation of being persecuted and a sense of justification in their hatred, without anything very bad actually happening to them. Which is a bad thing for queer people and good Christians alike.

Now, there are many obvious differences between sexuality and religion, where these things come from, how likely they are to change in a lifetime and how much power we have over them.  Clearly, some religious ideas are actually wrong and we can reason them away, whereas, there is no right or wrong - nor rhyme nor reason - about who we love and how we love them.

However, all this is mostly about love that others find confusing. Love for a God who may not exist.  Love for a human being of the same gender. Some folk, who have never experienced these things themselves (and a few folk who have and wish they hadn't) find it so strange they think it must be wrong.

There are also big differences between the way that Christianity and queerness are treated within our culture.  In politics, queerness is a much less acceptable and Christianity is almost default; the Conservative Party has precisely one out homosexual MP and Nick Clegg is the very first leader of any political party to be an open atheist. Our head of State is also the head of the Church of England and there are twenty-six places in the House of Lords reserved for C of E bishops. All kinds of political events as well as legal oaths, decrees etc., invoke Christianity by default. (Historically - such when I was a kid - these privileges were much greater; Christian assembly at school every day, non-church goers banned from adoption, blasphemy laws etc.. I can't think of any other group who have lost quite so much social and political privilege, quite so rapidly.)

In popular culture, Christianity is not at all cool.  It is far more acceptable to mock Christians than gay people on TV (I mean Christians, not Churches which, like many institutions, deserve mocking and in some cases, outright condemnation). In popular entertainment, it is easier to be openly gay than Christian. In British fiction, especially television drama, Christians are almost universally aggressive, delusional zealots or effete figures of ridicule. Writers and artists continue to use Christian religious imagery combined with sexual, violent or scatterlogical imagery to make their work shocking (I realise some artists use religious imagery as part of self-expression, but it is at least often about garnering attention.)

One trouble is... how things are in the US.

To most Britons, religion in the United States is baffling, hilarious and deeply disturbing. Of course, we only hear about the extreme stuff, about TV evangelists, creationists, people who bomb abortion clinics and people who use God to justify gun ownership and capital punishment. Their laws allow people to picket funerals to shout abuse at the mourners because they think that's what God wants. They have large groups of people being persuaded that the world is about to end. And religion really really matters in US politics. Politicians talk about God all the time, in the most bizarre contexts. In the UK, politicians sometimes mention faith or Christianity specifically (e.g. "This is a Christian country."), but never ever mention the old man in the sky.

Often, Christianity in the UK is criticised as if it was operated in the same way, or had the same political power, as it does in the US (worse, a caricature of the way things are in the US). I would say that the different ways in which Christianity is understood are a particularly profound illustration of the massive cultural differences between our two countries.

Another trouble is... The Catholic Church

Not Catholics. Blaming Catholics for the considerable sins of the Catholic Church would be like blaming the people of an undemocratic country for the sins of the current administration. Sure, they could leave their country, but they love their country and anyway, that's where they grew up, where their family is and where they feel at peace.  However, senior members of the Catholic Church are still trying to wriggle their way out of responsibility for decades of covering up for and enabling child rape and other abuse. They are still spreading myths about condoms to people for whom HIV/AIDS and overcrowding are the two greatest threats to health and happiness. And they are still talking about homosexuality as if that's a worse thing, worse than all this - worse than climate change!  The Catholic Church is in big trouble, both morally and in terms of its place in the modern world.

I don't know about Catholics around the world, but British Catholics are certainly not represented at all well by their Church.  However, Catholics and their church are frequently lumped together, with Catholics assumed to be guilt-ridden prudes, obsessed with what other people get up to in the bedroom.

A third trouble is...

There are people who get very angry about Christianity - not just angry at the bad things done in Christianity's name, but angry at its very existence -  and in my experience, they're almost always people who with few natural predators when it comes to freedom and social justice.  People who genuinely think that in the UK, in 2012, calling oneself an atheist is a daring act of rebellion against society itself.

Yes yes, there are contexts, families, certain work environments, school catchment areas, where this can be genuinely uncomfortable. But atheists, agnostics and other non-religious people are not subject to nearly so much religious-based violence or harassment as even Church of England Christians, let alone other groups. This may be partly because we're not so easy to identify; there's no non-religious clothing or symbols and we don't congregate in and around prominent landmarks, but even so. My atheist church organist brother-in-law is frequently invited along to Christian events with church friends who add, "It is quite a religious thing, and we wouldn't want you to feel uncomfortable."

And then there's homophobia.

Homophobia is often presented as the preserve of religion - specifically Christianity, in most contexts within our culture - for a number of reasons. These include:

• It's a picture that appeals to the news media, who tend to see only the word sex in sexuality. If it's Christians complaining about gay people, then that's sex and religion in the same story and if you can somehow throw politics into that mix, you've as good as struck gold!
• We're all inclined to simplify the stories we tell about people and behaviour. Religious oppression is a much easier story to tell than the complex social, cultural, sexual and religious reasons why a proportion of the population is still homophobic.
• If it was all down to religion, it would be much easier to sort out. 
• If it was all down to religion, then all non-religious or not-especially-religious people could wash their hands of responsibility for homophobia.
• Some vocal Christian homophobes talk about their homophobia if that's what their religion is all about - that bars to hate speech and discrimination against LBGT people are bars to their religious expression.  

By some queer fluke of my social circle, about half the Christians I know are gay.  The rest are a mix of egalitarians and social conservatives. Yet none of my socially conservative Christian friends or family members have ever said anything homophobic in my presence. 

As far as I can make out, none of them understand homosexuality to be some great bane on the human race. They may see it as wrong, but wrong in the same way other consensual sexual behaviour can be, like infidelity or having sex with a member of UKIP - a private wrong, and something that is between a person, their partners and their God, not something that decent people pass judgement on in polite conversation. Many of my friends are ethically vegan or vegetarian, but I don't hear them telling others that meat is murder. I think most people who object to homosexuality on religious grounds see it a bit like that; believing that this not the best way of doing things, but it's kind of up to individuals to work that out for themselves. 

This must be one reason why the Church of Scotland, having sent out 200, 000 postcards for church attendees to simply sign and be sent to the consultation on equal marriage, got a little over 10% back; either most church-goers are in favour of equal marriage or they simply have more pressing things (like poverty and deprivation at home and abroad) to concern themselves with.

This, compared to the bonafide homophobes I know. People who make lewd jokes about LGBT people, who use gayness as a insult, a mockery, who make sweeping statements about what queer people are like, the damage they do, who don't want queer people near their children and who spend a hell of a lot of the time worrying about whether anything they do might possibly be perceived as a little bit gay.  The ones I know are too polite to shout at people in the street or throw bricks through windows, but it's all in that same infected vein. 

And these people are not religious. They are people who grew up anxious about sexuality, because we have live in a world obsessed by but disgusted by sex and sexual expression. They are people who grew up anxious about gender roles and the near impossibility of fully conforming to them. They are people who grew up with a sense that love is precious in a way that means it should be rationed. They are people used to blaming perceived outsiders - pretty much any perceived outsiders - for the social and economic problems in their own lives. They are people whose humour is very heavily based on mocking other people - again, especially supposed outsiders. They are people who very easily adopt a position of victimhood in the face of changing social attitudes, which they call political correctness.

If they were religious too, they'd claim it was a position of faith and throw a few Bible verses in there (if they'd actually read the book) but it couldn't make it any worse.

I think everyone needs to get behind equality, and religious tolerance is part of this.  It would be ludicrous to make concessions to discrimination law - or indeed, common behaviourial standards of any kind - on the grounds of religion.  But Christians are not the enemy of queer people.  Homophobia, in all its weird and horrible forms, is.

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I know this post is all about Christianity and a lot of the same things apply to other faiths, but there are some major differences (like Christianity's unique place in our culture and history), and Christianity is the religion I know by far the most about.

Making feminism not racist isn't classist.

Caitlin Moran is a journalist and TV critic who writes in an entertaining way and has remarkable hair. She wrote a feminist memoir called How To Be a Woman.  Because she has such a public voice, she has come under criticism from other feminists on a number of occasions for, for example, using the words retard and tranny for humourous purposes in her book. She acknowledged the problem and pulled the word retard from further editions. A few weeks back, when asked why she hadn't raised the issue of all-white casting in Lena Dunham's New York-based sitcom Girls when interviewing the writer, she said on Twitter, "I literally couldn't give a shit about it."

This isn't about Caitlin Moran. People who had high expectations of her were disappointed and upset. But then prominent white feminists tried to defend her and a row ensued. This accumulated in a New Statesman article which has made me very cross, and demonstrates the big hairy problem at the heart of feminism.

The article is called In defence of Caitlin Moran and populist feminism by the Vagenda team. Lisa Millback summarises the piece very nicely in her comment on an F-Word blog as

"Making feminism not racist is classist"

The article lays the problems of feminism at the doors of unnamed "academic feminists" who use long words like "intersectionality" (they quote, but don't actually credit Flavia Dzordan's My Feminism Will Be Intersectional or It Will Be Bullshit, a weighty and largely inaccessible piece with an average word length of 4.3 characters which concludes with the impenetrable sentence, "My cats would be delighted to pee on you.").

The team that educated us on sexism as experienced by Porsche-drivers explain about working class women who can't cope with these big ideas and even bigger words;

You’ll still be left with hungry mouths to feed, or a violent partner, or a shit school. Winning places for women on the boards of FTSE 100 companies is not a priority when your benefits have just been cut and your ex-partner keeps moving house to avoid the CSA.  Going into certain state comps and discussing the nuances of intersectionality isn’t going to have much dice if some of the teenage girls in the audience are pregnant, or hungry, or at risk of abuse.

I subscribed to Vagenda Magazine for the first few months. It's mostly about women's magazines and body image issues, exclusively effecting young thin non-disabled straight cis women. It's often very funny, but the privilege issue and unrelenting cis sexism (it's 2012; possession of a vagina does not a woman make) began to grate. But I never read anything about chronic poverty, education, benefits, pregnancy issues, childcare provision or abuse. Genuinely and sincerely, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that; this is fun, populist feminism. We do need a lot of voices and these lasses write well. Women's magazines are awful! Underarm hair is lovely! Vagina is a funny word!

However, this is not the kind of feminism that speaks for Vicky Pollard typical working class women with their teenage pregnancies, violent partners and difficulty understanding long words. Nor is Caitlin Moran's - she's a TV critic, above all else; my limited impression is that she's like Charlie Brooker with more interesting hair. So this is a pretty weird defense of Moran, especially when she is being accused of dismissing race in the context of popular culture (her area of expertise) - she's not been criticised for her failure to use academic language or to speak for women in big business.

But it's also an unfair caricature, all by itself.

"This woman does not represent me", they will think of their well-meaning lecturer, because how can she, with her private education and her alienating terminology and her privilege, how can she know how poverty gnaws away at your insides and suppresses your voice? How would she know how that feels?

The kind of feminists concerned with poverty and class are almost always those who know a lot about it. A few may be highly educated (working class does not equal low intelligence or no education) and work in academia, but most work in the communities from which they came. They do front line work (there are all kinds of campaigning, but campaigning isn't the only kind of feminist work). And they often don't look like Moran; they're very often women of colour, disabled women, fat women, queer women, Muslim women, trans women - often women with entirely unremarkable hair.

These are the people who know that, for example, being black and a woman means you can count non-stereotypical representations of people who look a bit like you in popular culture on the fingers of one hand, but giving a shit about that is unlikely to make any difference - you need to rely on pretty thin white media-palatable feminists to ask those questions for you.  But they're also likely to know that being black and woman means that you're more vulnerable to poverty than other black people and other women, and less likely to be able to raise yourself from poverty.

There's a word for that.  That word is intersectionality.  It's not important that everyone knows or understands the word, because the concept is easy enough to grasp.  Belonging to more than one oppressed group means that those oppressions work differently. Black women's experience of racism is sexualised and their experience of sexism is racialised. Belonging to one oppressed group also means that one's privilege works differently; being a white Muslim or a disabled man, for example, can mean you're not counted by a prejudiced society as wholly white or wholly masculine.

Poor and working class people get this because they are more likely to belong to minority groups and have multiple oppressions (given that being poor is one of them). They are also much more likely to have close friends, partners and family members who have multiple oppressions than wealthier and middle class people. Working class people are society's big mixers.

Earlier this year, Nat The Fantastic ran a feminist conference called Intersect all about intersectionality. Check out the videos, note the cut glass accents, the complex language, glimpse the Posche Boxsters parked in the disabled spaces outside. These are some of the British feminists who are talking about intersectionality.

There's a reason why they're not mainstream or have national platforms like women who look and sound like Caitlin Moran and the Vagenda team*. It's that reason is the big problem with feminism, the reason why so many women feel that feminism has nothing to do with them and their problems. It's that privileged feminists, along with the mainstream media, refuse to acknowledge that all our gendered problems and their interactions are worth time and attention.

See also The F-Word: Is intersectionality an elitist concept?,
Ain't I a girl? and A problem that  stubbornly refuses to budge.
Black Feminists: Dear Vagenda Editors...
Bim Adewunmi: What the Girls spat on Twitter tells us about Feminism
Another angry woman: How to be better on insectionality, privilege and silencing

For a much better article about socio-economic class and feminism, I'll remind you of Louise McCudden's Three Faces of Feminism: Louise Mensch, Laurie Penny and Jodie Marsh.


* I really don't want to suggest for a moment that these women are where they are because of how they look and sound. They are all talented intelligent writers and, as funny women writing about feminism, aren't exactly establishment. However, it's not a coincidence that the only women we seen given a platform to speak about feminism by the mainstream media look and sound an awful lot like them.