On Naming Children & Fictional Characters

Sophie and I were both worried about the baby with no name.
(An unhappy looking white woman and baby niece.)

My sister was telling me about a very indecisive couple she knows.  They had a baby and announced its birth, explaining that they hadn't come up with a name yet.  In the UK, you're legally obliged to register a birth within four weeks.  At three weeks and six days, they finally made their minds up. Or at least, kind of - the child now has two forenames, the father refers to her by her first name and the mother by her second.

I can completely understand this.

Names fascinate me. I've always been interested in the origin of names and the way that names evolve, concealing, preserving or celebrating cultural identities. I like the sound of names and the way those sounds conjure up ideas about a person's nature; softness, sharpness, hardness, roundness, grandour, strength, wisdom and frailty. Our arbitrary rules about what makes a feminine or masculine name (which don't apply elsewhere in the world, Peaches). I like the way that people move through different names, diminutives, pet names, formal names, married names, pen and stage names and our ability to change our identity through tweaking or completely changing our names. I like the capacity for the sound of our names to give comfort, arousal, irritation or terror ("They're coming to get you, Barbara..."). In the news, I'm always spotting evidence of nominative determinism; an anatomist called Dr Bone, a bird expect called Prof. Crowe and so forth (I'm sad to report that when I googled the best study I knew into this, I found that it had been debunked - but that only makes it interesting in another way).

So yes, I'm like names.

So if I ever had to name a human being.... well, fictional characters are hard enough.  I spend more time on this than you could ever imagine.  I was relieved when I saw an interview with Graham Linehan who spoke about how the writing of The IT Crowd was delayed because he couldn't quite decide on what Roy's name should be.  And that's the guy who dreamed up Father Ted Crilly.

A fictional character's name, like that of a child, must

1. Be distinct from the names of other characters (or in the case of babies, nearby children) 
2. Be memorable enough in its own right
3. Not have any strong unintentional association with a famous person or fictional character.
4. Fit in naturally with the context of their life (not really applicable to babies) and 
5. Just feel right.

1. Coming up with a distinct name sounds simple, but it is much easier when dealing with fictional characters than people. Just within my own family, there are three Michaels, plus pairs of Stephens, Jeans, Christophers and even Rosemarys - none of whom were first born children taking a parent's name. At high school, there were three Elizabeths, three Emmas and two Georginas in a class of just twenty-five girls. Although we cringe (or admire the massive power of fiction*) when we see that Harry and Bella are now among the most popular baby names, the things that influence name choices are usually quite subtle. You may well find the very special name you've chosen for your child is commonplace among her peers, with no clue why so many people chose Pandora this year. (There was a Pandora at school. Everyone got nervous when she opened her packed lunch...)

Yet if you're writing a family or a class of children, you'd be much more careful about repetition. It's probably as hard to write characters with the same name as it is to read about them and keep track. Emily Bronte gets away with it because she kills the original Cathy giving birth to the next Cathy.

It's not just to do with straight repetition - it's terrifically easy to muddle some names, like Mary, Marie and Maria.  Personally I still have to look up which evil wizard is Saruman and which is Sauron and it's a good job Arathorn only featured historically, given that his son is Aragorn. At least, his first born - the family don't like to talk about his wayward vegetarian younger brother Araquorn. 

I soon cheered up but Sophie had needed to think about it.
(A happier woman with uncertain baby niece.)

When my sister and brother in law were thinking of names for their children, they pretty much ruled out the names of anyone they knew well. They even ruled out my favourite, Phillipa, because they know a man called Philip. Some excuse...

2. Memorability should be easier, in theory, if you're writing fantasy or sci-fi or making up a child's name from scratch. But memorability isn't just about being unique. It also helps

• If a name can be easily spelled. 
• If a name is easily pronounced.  It really matters.  Sometimes it's not possible, if you're writing in English about a non-English culture.  But it is much harder to hold a name in your head if you can't imagine what it sounds like.

War and Peace is the only book where I actually took notes on the characters because I was losing track. Obviously, reading in translation, I can't complain, but I had big problems with diminutives. So for example Pytor or Peter was Petra to his family and Pierre in some contexts. Which would have been manageable if there weren't five thousand other characters I was trying to hold in my head.

I don't know whether to applaud or condemn Dickens for his capacity to come up with memorable names.  The trouble is that characters in the Dickens parody Bleak Expectations wouldn't exactly seem out of place if they came up in one of his novels; Pip Bin, Harry Biscuit, Skinflint Parsimonious, Gently Benevolent and so forth. Certainly Dickens displays a love of language in his ability to come up with names that give you information about a character; Mrs Todger, Edward Murdstone, Mr Bumble, Betsy Trotwood, Orlick and perhaps most the explicit, Uriah Heep.  But it often feels too much. Mervin Peake and Terry Pratchett do the same kind of thing, but then they're writing in fantastical worlds, with no attempt to persuade the reader that these are people you might meet on the streets of a real city.

Anyway, really simple names, well chosen, can be just as memorable as complex ones; Harry Potter, James Bond or Jim Hawkins, for example. Douglas Adams was great with very simple but memorable names, as well as the sci-fi Zaphod Beetlebrox; Arthur Dent, Dirk Gently, Richard MacDuff and the genius of Ford Prefect, given that Ford Prefect sounds like it ought to be perfectly sensible and ordinary name.

I've also decided there's something about first names with three syllables that benefit a great deal from a monosyllabic last name such as Atticus Finch, Artemis Fowl and Sebastian Flight - such good names!

I'm really struggling to think of female characters in literature who have really fantastic names. Any suggestions?

3. The absence of strong confusing associations should be a no-brainer.  Marilyn was not named after Marilyn Monroe, but having grown up in the 50s and 60s, she still imagines that Monroe is the first thing that comes to a person's mind when they hear her name. Any Kylies or Adeles growing up now may come to consider themselves cursed by their famous namesakes.

One of the strangest criticisms of Fifty Shades of Grey is that it is a book all about a woman who doesn't eat unless she is told to, called Ana, and the only female character she likes is called Mia. Ana and Mia (here's the Google results, which come with a serious health warning) are slang terms used by people with anorexia and bulimia, particularly those who support one another's disordered behaviour through on-line community. It seems to me extremely unlikely that the author did this intentionally, but it is jarring and, when intention is suspected, rather sinister. 

4. Whilst there is virtue in not making life especially hard for a child, I think it would be fairly unhealthy for parents to consider the social context when coming up with a name. Hopefully, your child will go out into the world and mix with a great number of different people.  Name them accordingly.

After a while, we were both feeling better.
(Same happy woman and equally happy baby).

Everything about social context is fluid and riddled with exceptions. My parents say that if I had been a boy, I would have been called Desmond, after my grandfather. I have never known another Desmond and all the famous Desmonds I can think of are much older than me and black.  However, I could have been called Desmond, got along just fine and I'm not sure anyone would have considered it that remarkable.

As it is, I can count on one hand the Deborahs I've had personal contact with (I've met dozens in fiction) and nobody's commented that it is a strange name. I am however, aware that before the early twentieth century, it would be a very unusual name for a British gentile. Same with Ruth, Issac and a few other Old Testament names. (I don't think anyone's been called Nebuchadnezzar since Nebuchadnezzar - apart from the second King Nebuchadnezzar, I suppose, and the name was enough to give him nightmares!) 

Here are further considerations:

• Socio-Economic Class.  Names that don't sit with the class origins of a character jar a lot with me, because they suggest ignorance - for example, when a upper middle class writer has got a Tarquin selling drugs from the council flat he grew up in.  He probably carries them around in a Waitrose carrier bag. However, these trends change very quickly. When I was a kid, Milo was a posh name, then there was a character Milo on kids TV and there are now many young boys called Milo from many different backgrounds. Similarly, I should imagine there are far more British working class Gileses, Cordelias and Xanders around now whose parents enjoyed Buffy The Vampire Slayer. There was a girl at my school called Bali, who would loudly proclaim that this was Bali with an L I (not to be confused with Barley) because that was where she was conceived. I imagine her folks had to be fairly wealthy, whereas these days far more people can afford to travel and use their children's names to commemorate the sex they have had in exotic locations. 
• Age. There is a slightly ridiculous article on the BBC website about baby names which were unlikely to be rehabilitated called In search of a baby called Derek (which of course resulted in such a response from Dereks and their parents that they had to publish a whole page of them) which, although being a little wide of the mark, does make the point about naming, fashion and the course of time. Although, few names completely disappear (except possibly Adolf), there were very few Dillons about before The Magic Roundabout and (contrary to a terrible film I saw last week), you didn't get many Gavins in ancient Rome. 
• Religion.  Most British Catholic families I know, even now, stick to Saints names (there's an awful lot of them). Many Muslims and Jews, regardless of where they or their families come from, choose Arabic and Hebrew names respectively. Although this doesn't apply to everyone, by any means, it is a factor to bear in mind. 
• Cultural Heritage and Naturalisation. One is as important as the other - some immigrant groups will take British names - sometimes even changing existing first and surnames - while others will hold onto tradition. Then, generations down the line, some will revert to traditional names and others will choose British names instead. Which is partly to say that there are no hard and fast rules, but these are things which would be very useful to know about your characters and their background.  Also, if you're writing a story based on a spaceship in the year 3012, with a predominantly white crew with names like Cobalt and Squee, you need to think about why your token Asian guy might be called Rajendra. Also, the white thing.
• Sexuality. This is entirely in the negative - believe it or not, a person's sexuality does not influence what their parents name them at birth. Some girl's names are butch and some boy's names are rather camp, for whatever reason (Round The Horn did for Julian and Sandy forever), but gay people are no more likely possess them than anyone else. Radclyffe Hall (originally Margaret) had the heroine of Well of Loneliness christened Stephen because her parents wanted their child to be a boy. I mean, I know it was a different time and Hall had never listened to Lady Gaga's Born This Way, but you'd think she'd have realised from personal experience that Stephen would have been into girls even if she'd been called Stephanie.

Sophie was very pleased once we'd sorted this business of
naming people out. (a very smiley white baby)

5. It's got to feel right. My sister and brother-in-law had firm ideas for names for their children, but didn't tell anyone before they were born, just in case the babies came out looking like someone else entirely. Sophie looks like a Sophie, but she might have come out looking like a Wendoline or even a Rover.

Part of this issue is around diminutives. I've known parents who name their child Michael or Catherine, but then cringe whenever people address them (or worse, they call themselves) Mike, Mick, Cath or Kate.  And of course, different people attract, prefer, tolerate or loathe the diminutives to their name. Parents need to anticipate this and not mind, but writers need to understand how this is going to work for their characters.

There must be a reason that nearly no-one ever calls me Debbie, whereas Rosemary is known as Rosie to everyone who first met her as an adult.  I don't know what it is, but if we were fictional characters, our author would need to know. Perhaps we are, and they do! If so, someone needs to work harder on the dialogue - way too many ums and urghs.

People call Gerald Gerry, but at some point he decided that he could no longer tolerate it.  He then made the mistake of correcting his son-in-law's innocent mistake (nobody knew Gerry was a problem), with the now infamous words, "That's Gerald, dear boy."  Years later, he is still frequently addressed as Gerald Dear Boy by various family members.  This little story tells you an awful lot about this character and his family.

When writing fiction, some names come to my head and stick so fast that it would be a terrific wrench to change it.  Others take a lot of thought and I can change them several times as I'm going along.  Even the names of minor characters can require a great deal of contemplation - with some books, you can read the writer's contempt for their minor characters, being all Johns and Janes, Smiths and Joneses.

But to name an actual human being, who would take that name and wear it for eighty or ninety years? I'd need a lot more than nine months to work that one out.




Of course, some people get to choose their own name, sometimes when they transition, sometimes when they want or urgently need a fresh start for other reasons. In a strange way, I imagine that's easier, but I'd really love to know how it's done. When one close friend told me the secret of their original name, I exclaimed with horror, "But I'm sure you were never a [insert the most unsuitable name imaginable]!"

* I recently met a six year old Merlin. It was difficult not to ask how he felt about his name.

Bisexuality en Vogue and Other Myths and Legends

For a while, I've been thinking about writing a myth-busting post about bisexuality*.  Then Daniel Warner wrote an article in the Huffington Post, which neatly provides a run-through of almost every myth there is, entitled Bisexuality: Is it Fun, Non-Committal or Just Plain Greedy? (via @GirlWithTheCane) Sometimes, someone will ask a rhetorical question and I find myself compelled to answer. Warner explains,

"As an adult I have never really given bisexuality much thought. When people described themselves as being bisexual I automatically assumed they were gay (if male), trying to make themselves more interesting (if female) or desperate to broaden their appeal and fan base (if famous)."

I recently read that one reason Caitlin Moran's feminism is so appealing is that she doesn't use the word phallocentric. So I won't. It's just that our culture loves winkles, and in the face of the slightest ambiguity, assumes that a person has a preference for winkles (or at least a preference for the kind of people who usually possess them). If a man wears a pink shirt or a flash of paisley, my Dad thinks he must like winkles.  The other day, a friend referred to a boy liking amateur dramatics, as if that suggested he was winkily inclined. When lesbians fail to shave their heads and wear standard-issue dungarees, it is often assumed that deep down, they too have a winkle predilection. We live in a phallocentric culture winkle wonderland.

As a younger woman, the suggestion that I said I was bisexual to seem more interesting (or even sexier) made me feel quite sick with rage. I didn't have the most difficult adolescence as queer adolescences go, but it was pretty tough. Growing up in the environment I did, I was disgusted by my own emotions - not just sexual feelings towards female friends, which felt like the creepiest kind of treachery - but my own capacity for love.  For falling in love with the wrong people.  It wasn't the biggest factor, but this self-disgust contributed to a deep and nearly deadly depression at the age of eighteen. Because, you know, I thought it made me more interesting...

There was a period of history when a number of famous men came out as bisexual before later describing themselves as gay.  I can't imagine Elton John was actually the last to do this, but I can't think of any recent examples.  I do know that the open bisexuality of famous men is still considered spoken about as a stepping stone to coming out properly.  In every day life, bisexual men are often treated as if they're still half in denial about their true sexuality and that any relationships they have with women are somehow a facade.

I care much less about what folks think of me now, but I worry for youngsters coming up in not greatly improved circumstances. Despite often enjoying straight privilege, bisexual people are more vulnerable to mental ill health than gay people. As a youngster, I didn't know how to describe my sexuality, even to myself, and felt I had made a mistake with every new feeling - oh, I must be a lesbian, oh no, turns out I'm straight all along. I was an outsider, but without an outsider community to turn to.  As an adult, I feel a sense of belonging among queer people, at least until the Daniel Warners of this world chip in.

"Bisexual... Liberal Democrat... you also only drink fair trade coffee, ride a bicycle and recycle your newspapers... unshaven armpits and mohair sweaters."

In fairness, all of that is true.  Bisexual people are better human beings than straight or gay people, apart from our tragically misplaced faith in moderate-sounding politicians. And we love mohair.  I once had this mohair sweater with an asymmetrical neckline, and thick black and baby pink stripes - oh, you had to see it - it was gorgeous!

"I have never suffered indecisive people. You make a choice and stick with it. Good or bad, wrong or right, back door or front door, you better know your way in and your way out and just get on with it. Bisexuality seemed lazy rather than greedy. I couldn't imagine anyone who would be thrilled finding out that their partner didn't really mind if they were Jack or Jill, unless, of course, they were both being taken up the hill together."

See, it's like this.  I lack whatever wiring it is which allows people to discriminate, romantically and sexually, between people of different genders.  When I find people attractive, it isn't because of their gender.  There are sexual characteristics I find attractive, but not for their own sake. It depends on what suits a person.  It depends on the whole package.

Less unusually, I don't have a particular preference for colouring, height or body shape. It's not that I'm not fussy - physical beauty matters a great deal to me, but there are different kinds. Similarly, I read widely, but that doesn't mean that when I recommend a book, I can somehow be considered less fussy than someone who only reads within one narrow genre.

Some people only tend to fancy tall people or blond people or big-bottomed people - and that's okay - but for most of us our attraction tends to work on a more case by case basis. For me, gender is part of that flexibility.

As for partners not being thrilled, I have learnt through extensive research that Daniel Warner has a beard. I wonder if it would be a worry to him if a partner didn't have a particular preference for a bearded man over someone clean shaven?  Some people love beards, some people hate them, but lots of people judge a man's attractiveness according to the complete package. Bisexuality is like that... and then again, it isn't.

After all, if a bisexual person fancies you, then they're attracted to you over a much bigger pool of people than if they were straight or gay. They could fancy literally anyone and yet they fancy you. Of course, whether you feel honoured about this depends on who they are (although bisexual people are almost as hot as they are ethical), but if you were into them, why on Earth would you not be thrilled?

"Now, it's fashionable to kiss a girl and like it. It's okay to admit you may have had a dalliance with Jim when you're really into Jessie and it's not frowned upon if you can get it up for Belinda when you're getting down with Bill."

Yes, yes, bisexuality is naturally non-monogamous.

No, of course not!  It's like this.  Some gynophiles have a preference for say, white women with blonde hair - and as I've said, that's okay.  But most of us aren't wired that way (and arguably, there are strong cultural influences on the characteristics we find attractive, so wiring may be the wrong word in any case).

Most gynophiles (I should imagine, I haven't had time to ask) have the capacity to be attracted to lovely women of any colouring. Straight men and gay women don't tend to have a succession of girlfriends who look exactly the same (when they do, it tends to raise eyebrows).

So imagine a lesbian meets and falls in love with a beautiful white woman with blonde hair.  They marry and live happily ever after. Does anyone ever ask this lesbian, "Don't you miss having sex with black women? What about Asian women? What about redheads?  How can you have a fulfilling sex life without including all these people with characteristics you could be attracted to?"

(Nor, incidentally, do other non-blonde women approach the couple and expect them to want a threesome. Nor is her wife likely to demand a threesome with a brown-haired woman she happens to fancy, on the grounds that because our lesbian can be attracted to non-blonde women, she must be attracted to - and happy to open up her marriage to - this particular one. I hope.**)

At one point, I became smitten with Queen Latifah and rented pretty much every film she's ever been in.  She's been in some truly terrible films, lovely though she is.  I later had a phase of infatuation with Tom Hollander and rented every film he's ever been in.  Those films were better, on average.  I consider these two actors to be very sexually attractive, but I acknowledge that they are very very different in manner and physique.

So say I got together with Queen Latifah - it could happen one day. Why does being bisexual mean I couldn't be happily monogamous, when say, the capacity to fancy someone short, slight, white and very very English, doesn't? Is gender really the biggest difference between Queen Latifah and Tom Hollander? Really?

Oh okay, but my point is, not to me.

Of course, some people are promiscuous.  Some people (gay, straight or bi) are unfulfilled having sex with just one person and will seek out a wide variety of sexual partners. However, most people can be very happy with one person.  Most people who are lucky enough to fall in love, fall in love with one person, and are only seriously interested in having sex with that person (some monogamous people have a promiscuous fantasy life, others do not).  Some people fall in love with and partner more than one person, but I've never known a polyamourous person to keep a checklist of characteristics that each partner must represent.

It's all about love, man.  Clearly you don't have to be bisexual to have sex with people of all genders - most gay men, and quite a few gay women I know have had heterosexual sex at some point, whether under social pressure or as an experiment and very many straight people - especially men - have had homosexual experiences at some point. They never had to make a choice and stick to it.  In some cases, they had to find out who they were.  In other cases, they were horny and went where the mood took them.  Reports of pleasure, horror and dissonance vary widely.

But bisexuality, like homosexuality, is ultimately about romantic feeling, identity and love - the big stuff.  If it was just sex, we could all choose to live straight lives and avoid a lot of hassle. And I suspect that, when people are allowed to be themselves, the capacity for monogamy, commitment and devotion is fairly evenly spread across all orientations.

Finally

"Bisexuality is en vogue, it's the new black and it's the boy/girl thing that's on every boy and girls lips."

If this were true, there wouldn't be articles like this one.  It wouldn't be okay to talk about people of any sexuality as if it were something between a lifestyle choice and a rude joke.

As a bisexual cis woman partnered to a man, I have three metric tonnes of straight privilege.  But there are plenty of bisexual people who suffer the full force of society's homophobia every day and still have this kind of crap to deal with, even from within the queer community. And that really sucks.



In other news, I had a rant at Where's the Benefit? about Lord Freud and the Risk-Taking Poor.

* To me, bisexual means having sexual desires towards people of both my gender (homo) and other genders (hetero).  Other people believe the bi in bisexual implies that there are only two genders, or that a bisexual person is only attracted to men and women.  Such people may prefer pansexual, and I would prefer to use pansexuality for clarity, only very few people know what it means and it still conjures up images of fauns to me. Not that fauns aren't tremendously sexy, what with cute little horns and tail, the posture of a man wearing high heels and those legs, covered in lovely mohair...

** Yes, this did happen to me.  The odd thing was that the woman in question was straight, was with someone else and had shown no interest in either of us, but these seemed smaller obstacles to my ex than getting me to agree to it.  When I didn't, I was told that I only said I was bisexual to seem more interesting.

Down with Coupledom, Up with Love!

People don't have a whole lot of conscious control over romantic love.

You can, of course, enjoy the state you're in and work to maintain that happy state. So for example, if you prefer being single, it's best not to sign up for uniformdating.com. But if you want to be absolutely sure, you've also got to avoid lingering eye contact with strangers on buses and in book shops, avoid making new friends with people of romantically-compatible genders and orientations, and ruthlessly ditch old friends at the slightest change in your feelings about one another. You can have sex, but only with deeply unattractive strangers, and even then there's some risk that you might get talking, find that they have a dazzling personality which cancels out the warts, and that third eye, though not matching the others in size or colour, has a certain sort of bloodshot charm in the first cool light of morning.

So however much you love the single life, if you are capable of romantic feeling, a mutually-electrifying bolt may strike.  It's perfectly healthy to work on the basis that it won't, but if it does, your choice will be significantly diminished.  If two people are in love and want to be together, it is unlikely that they will prefer any life without the other.

This is why when I see the phrase single by choice, I wonder.  Some people are, of course, aromantic or not particularly inclined to romance, and others have phases in their life when they're not interested, but that stuff's not a choice either.  However, it really doesn't matter. For one thing, some people can exercise romantic preference in ways others cannot and maybe I can't understand. For another, we live in a culture which privileges the heterosexual couple above all other combinations of adults and family units. Single people are certainly not the most reviled sexual minority (I mean, how?!) but our culture is constructed in a way that makes being single - a state that most people will experience for at least some years of their adult life - tougher than it ought to be.

What gives me the willies is couples who behave as if they have made a choice. It makes me worry that they did. These are the sort who believe that life is always better lived in pairs and that everyone, absolutely everyone would be better off if they were to follow suit.  Due to my medical condition, I have only been single for four days since I was eighteen, so I've never been subjected to the mean things said to single people, but I do hear things said about them. Obviously, there's the universal assumption that single people are lonely, unfulfilled and actively looking for a partner, but the other great offenders include

• "She could easily find a partner if she wasn't so fussy." You can be too fussy about food when you're eating nothing but baked beans and white bread. You can be too fussy when shopping for a pair of winter shoes when it's already November and you're still wearing sandals. You can even be too fussy when applying for a job you only need as a stop gap.  You can't be too fussy when it comes to love or sex or any significant emotional investment. This stuff is about joy!  In the absence of the joy potential, what's the point?  And how precious is romantic love if you're not extremely fussy?  "I love you, but any number of people would do just as well."

• "If only she met someone, maybe she'd be able to lose weight."  I've also heard meeting someone as the solution to mental illness, financial hardship and simply being a little bit odd.  I don't know how common the weight loss one is, but I have a family member who says this about any woman who is both fat and single, whatever her life circumstances.  As well as the assumption that all fat people want to lose weight and the assumption that love will do that (what with all those full English breakfasts in bed, boxes of chocolate, romantic restaurant dinners, champagne celebrations, tiramisu-flavoured body paint etc.), it reminds me of a time that pregnancy was recommended to me as a way of boosting my immune system. Not a responsible attitude towards major life events!

• "He'll settle down once he meets a nice girl."  This is usually heard about young men who are in some kind of trouble or aimlessly drifting, but can be heard about men of any age who haven't met other people's standards of growing up and settling down.  It's this idea of men as naturally a bit savage and useless and women as a civilising force. To me, it begs questions such as, would such a man want such a woman? Would such a woman want such a man? Might the two of them not make one another dreadfully unhappy, given that one is apparently a Neanderthal and the other is a Homo Superior?

Much of any critique of the single life or coupledom is about gender stereotypes. When attached people lament the plight of their single friends and family, it is often gendered; women need someone to look after and men need someone to look after them - and sometimes vice versa, but always in very gendered ways; a man providing money, a woman providing someone to be ambitious for etc.. When the BBC asked for readers stories about single life, some men wrote about their freedom from controlling women and some women wrote about their freedom from infantile men. Several readers felt compelled to mention that they weren't gay or anything. Single, but not gay - who could have imagined such a thing?

(Weirdly, I observe that missionary marrieds are particularly moved by the plight of their single gay friends, and try to set them up with even greater desperation. If straight Susan is single, they'll try hooking her up with the postman who is roughly the same age, shares her love of Thai food and has a cousin who was an extra in Susan's favourite movie (although he's never seen the film himself).  If lesbian Laura is single, they'll try hooking her up with a woman they met on holiday in Brazil, who still lives in Brazil, is thirty years older than Laura and already has a wife.)

Coupledom is, of course, completely overrated and our culture acknowledges this fact at the same time as thrusting it upon us as a model of normality.  You only need to watch your average ad break to see what our culture depicts as normal couples, not getting on very well, resenting each other and buying stuff to make them feel better. The Dulux paint one is my favourite - look at the exchange of looks between these two at the end!  It started out so nicely with the sexy red walls, but now their life has become - like their walls - grey.  It's a fate worse than magnolia! 

There are various practical and financial advantages to pooling your resources with another person. And the idea is that it is nice to have someone else around to listen to your troubles and to be able to have sex without so much as putting your best shoes on.  That's the idea, but it is awash with complexity and trouble unless you genuinely, sincerely and consistently delight in one another's company. After all, you have to listen to their troubles, and maybe they have a headache - or a shoe fetish! Meanwhile, apart from the sex part, all of this could be achieved with close friends or family members (or what s. e. smith describes as a queerplatonic partner), without all the cultural expectation of exclusivity, permanence and the dedication of most of your free time.

Because being in a romantic relationship with someone who isn't even your friend has got to be far lonelier and more humiliating than being single, especially when you've been led to believe (by your culture and perhaps your partner too) that this is a great deal better than the alternative. Lonely people often live in terror of increased levels of loneliness. But here's something I learnt.

After I left my first marriage, I considered whether I had wasted ten years of my life being miserable and lonely. And at times, I had been desperately lonely, have many unhappy, humiliating or frightening memories from being with my ex. However, I also have many happy memories from this period of my life. I didn't see nearly enough of them, but I did have very good times with friends and family. I lived in interesting places and enjoyed the world around me. I read a great number of books.  I learnt to play the guitar. I made stuff, I sewed, I painted, I started this blog. I studied. I listened to a lot of music and watched lots of films. And against incredible odds, I wrote my first novel (which is now prize-winning, if as yet unpublished).

And had I been single, I might have done a lot more of all that and would have been a very great deal happier. Of course, I don't have a clue - genuinely - how I would enjoy being single. I wouldn't live alone because I couldn't, and so long as I found somewhere comfortable to live, I imagine I would be cool with it.  Being mutually head over heels in love (despite the collision and entanglement of legs) makes me extremely happy, but putting all this time, energy and emotion into somebody who is anything less than fantastic? Never again. I have fantastic friends. I have fantastic family members. I am, myself, fairly fantastic. Stephen gets my time, energy and love because he is super-fantastic, and gives me much more in return.

Love is underrated.  Romantic love is underrated, and treated with cynicism in our culture. I think it's tragic the way that the idea of coupledom, a state of gender-based mutual irritation and tolerance, has become the dominant model of what romantic relationships are like.

But all the other kinds of love, and especially friendship, are even more underrated and undervalued. Love is a big part of what makes any of us happy, but it comes in many different shapes and flavours, and rarely involves a conscious choice. 

Disability in Fiction - A Load of Lovely Links

Thanks in part to your support, the brilliant Lisa Egan made the Independent on Sunday's Pink List, coming in as the country's 78th most influential LGBT person.  Leave this place at once and read her excellent acceptance blog post on the double discrimination of being disabled and gay.  Hooray! (That's hooray she made the list, not that... well, you know what I mean.)

I've been meaning to compile a list of useful links around the fictional representation of disabled people. This is going to be a work in progress and I would very much appreciate your help.  I've compiled this list by memory and from the links given in the comments, so if you have a link to any resource, blog post or article on this, please add it to the comments and I'll add it to my list.

And by all means, if in the future you write or create something about disability in fiction, feel free to come back and (as long as it is suitable) I'll add it to the body of the post. 

Resources:

Visibility in Fiction: Inclusive Young Adult Fiction

This is Stuffed Olive's project which promotes fully inclusive young adult fiction; "specifically fiction with protagonists from groups with limited visibility in popular culture" including disabled people.

Information For Writers With Disabled Characters

The idea is to compile a database of information writing by disabled people about their impairments, how they are misrepresented in fiction, examples of where they are represented well and resources to help writers represent them better.


Media Representation of Disabled People

Provides a basic and accessible breakdown of the problems with disability as currently represented in the media in general.

Disability and Representation

Rachel's blog covers many disability-related subjects, but features frequent reviews of books and other cultural materials featuring disabled people.

Lisy Babe's Thoughts on TV and Film

As mentioned previously, Lisy talks about disability in TV and film and she also frequently uses this Tumblr to link to useful or pertinent articles or news.

s. e. smith

is one of the most prolific writers on social justice and popular culture on-line, writing about disability and other identities in film, television and books. However ou writes about all sorts, all over the place, so all I can suggest is that you follow ou particularly at Bitch Magazine, but also Tigerbeatdown, Global Comment and ou own blog, this ain't livin'

The FWD/ Feminists With Disabilities Archive

The FWD team did loads of book, television and film reviews.  I especially recommend trawling through them if you are a non-disabled writer or lack confidence in writing characters with particular impairments. The FWD team were not any kind of representative cross-section of disabled people and we all have different sensitivities when it comes to this stuff (especially language), but a little reading here would give you a good idea about common mistakes and cliches, together with some of the nuances of good representation.

Bogi Takács: reviews of literature featuring disabled characters.

Loads of fairly short, very readable reviews featuring common tropes of disability in fiction. Prezzey also has a tag for reviews of work by disabled authors.


Blindness Resources Guide for Fanfiction (thanks chordatesrock)

Advice that focuses on portraying a particular blind character (Auggie Anderson from Covert Affairs), however contains tips and resources that would be useful to anyone writing a blind character.

Articles, Essays and Blog Posts: 

this ain't livin': Writing The Other

s. e. smith addresses the anxiety that writers may feel in writing about people with different identities and outlines the importance of putting character before identity. 

Not Writing But Blogging: Writing the invisible visible - AND doing it well.

Writing on Stella Duffy's blog, actor Lisa Hammond describes the various fears that can stop non-cliched disabled characters appearing on television, and disabled actors being cast in roles which aren't all about their impairments.

SpeEdChange: "God Bless Us Everyone"

Ira explores the position of Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol, his history as a character in the book and the subsequent movie adaptations and his changing symbolism over the years.


Bea Magazine: Bitches Be Cray: The Good, The Bad, and the Pretty Little Liars of Mental Health on TV

This is all about recent (possibly current) US TV shows, but Diane Shipley writes well about the use and abuse of female characters and mental illness in fiction.

It's not actually about fiction, but since this trope has not been covered by any of the other links and it is very well written, Unreliable Witness: Experience mental illness? Oh, you must be creative


Lisybabe's Blog: Handle With Care by Jodi Picoult
and So scared of breaking it that you won't let it bend (a review of Unbreakable)

These posts are very specific, about one particular book and film and about the representation of one condition.  But they provide very good examples of the ways that writers and film-makers can latch onto the idea of a medical condition and twist the facts to fit a dramatic story, without considering a readership or audience who have that condition.

The Independent: Why do Bond villains need facial scars?

Victoria Wright talks about the unrelenting trope of the villain maid evil by a facial disfigurement.

Feminist Philosophers: Moving Beyond The Stereotypes

Posts on disability at Feminist Philosophers are a touch disappointing, but the comments thread under this post contains many recommendation for good fictional writing with disabled characters.

I stand by own posts about 10 Things Fiction Writers Need to Remember About Disability (1-5)

and 10 Things Fiction Writers Need to Remember about Disability (6-10) 

These are mostly about addressing common mistakes or assumptions about the lives and behaviour of disabled people including sexuality, attitude towards impairment, the practicalities of life and megalomania. Again, the comments contain some good stuff too. I've also got a Fiction tag which has some other posts on disability and fiction.

The following links are all courtesy of chordatesrock - Thanks! 


Rabbit Lord Of The Undead on how hallucinations & delusions are nothing like on TV

An excellent and personal explanation of one person's experience of hallucinations and delusions, which are, of course nothing like you see on TV or film.


kestrell: What Good Writers Still Get Wrong About Blind People Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3

Three detailed essays on blind characters in fiction, as well as general stereotypes and misconceptions about blind people and their abilities.


katta: Some Clues on How Not To Write Deaf Characters.

A critique of the common mistakes that writers make when writing deaf characters, with a particular focus on American Sign Language (although I'm sure the same applies to BSL etc - it's about meaning, not words).


The 32nd Flavor: A House Rant, As Promised

Milkshake writes in detail about the character of House and some of the impossible things fanfic-writers want that character to do, including activities that would need a great number of pillows.

Right, what have I forgotten or not seen yet?  Yes, my criteria is fairly loose.

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.

---------------------
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.

Lisa Egan for the 2012 Pink List.

LGBT Disabled Heroes: Frida Kahlo, Lisa Egan and Lord Byron (also feat. Betty the Cat)

"Is there really anything brave and wonderful about wanting to get drunk and stick your tongue down someone else's throat?"

It was with this line, in an article called Locked Out Lesbian about the physical inaccessibility of gay night clubs, that Lisa Egan joined the ranks of my personal heroes.  She later told me that it was through this piece on BBC Ouch! that her father first learnt that she was gay.

A pretty young wheelchair-user with
a purple hoody and a drink, probably Absinthe.

A stand-up comedian and post graduate student in TV and Film, Lisa wrote about issues such as how disabled people are much like movie vampires and the horrors of Christmas shopping as a wheelchair user, until illness forced both her comedy and academic career into indefinite hiatus. As well as being a massive personal blow, this was very bad timing. A good few decades have past since it was quite such a bad time to be chronically sick in the United Kingdom.

In recent years, Lisa has become one of the hardest working disability activists fighting the punishing benefit reforms which are threatening the lives and quality of life of disabled people. She founded and runs Where's the Benefit?, probably the largest active disability group blog, as well as the Where's the Benefit Podcast?.  She has made radio and TV appearances, as well as writing for the Guardian, the Huffington Post and the Independent about disability, welfare reform and the Paralympics (having been a Paralympic hopeful herself).

Last December, Lisa wrote very bravely about the harsh reality of her own situation and the how the abolition of Disability Living Allowance may leave her without a life worth living, leading to a surge in signatures to Pat's Petition against benefit cuts (which you can still sign, if you haven't already).

Lisa (bottom left) and fellow campaigners at an anti-cuts
march last year.

Even in the face of such gloom, Lisa remains passionate about pop culture and the importance of disabled and LGBT people's representation within it.  She keeps a Tumblr Lisy's Thoughts on Disability in Film and TV, took on Ricky Gervais, Jodi Picoult and once wrote about how Katy Perry (who also kissed a girl and liked it) brings her close to tears.

Lisa has major problems with modesty, once stating, "Being fat, ugly and fairly dull makes me unattractive. Being disabled is one of the few things about me that I'm actually confident in."

This is the only reason why she's not one of the most prominent faces of disability campaigning, instead working and organising others behind the scenes.

As you can see, Lisa really ought to be on The Independent on Sunday's Pink List, a list of the 101 most influential lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in Britain, nominated by members of the public. As well as giving Lisa the recognition she deserves, it would be great to have a disability activist (or indeed any disabled person) on that list. And quite seriously, can you think of 101 more influential queer people? I certainly can't.

So if you would, please pop over to the nominations page before Sunday and write a few sentences about why Lisa should be on that list.  Thank you.

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.