Australian university campuses last week marked Bluestocking Week, a celebration that remembers the first women who entered English universities in the late 19th century.
Women in lecture halls were pioneering. Yet these trailblazers couldn’t sit exams or expect to graduate with an actual degree. Newnham College for women at Cambridge University was established in 1871, but it was not until 1948 that women could hold a full Cambridge degree.
This is merely one area of discrimination that restricted what women could do with their lives. The reality of how little choice women had only a century ago is nevertheless absent in contemporary manifestations of anti-feminism, such as “Women Against Feminism”.
The phenomenon began on Tumblr, with women taking photographs of themselves holding signs that explain their reasons for opposing feminism. The site has been online since July 2013, but it’s only in the last month that it’s really started to generate heat online. Women’s statements range from claims that men are now the true victims of discrimination, to homophobic categorisations of feminists as “man-haters” and “lesbians”.
Any social justice movement with a long history and diverse adherents will exhibit contradictions and problematic ideas. However, Women Against Feminism is not only ahistorical, but fundamentally misreads the nature of feminism and the current status of women.
Let’s work through some of the common assumptions made in these anti-feminist declarations.
(1) “Men and women already have equal rights where I live.”
It is indeed true that in many Western nations women enjoy formal equality, but substantive equality remains elusive. Any of these rights also has the potential to be revoked at any time. Abortion rights, in particular, are continually challenged and overturned. We cannot simply say that feminism has done its work and that women will enjoy the rights and freedoms it has helped to achieve indefinitely.
Also, people regularly travel and migrate. Things might be better “where you live”, but what if you want to go somewhere where women aren’t allowed to drive, gain an education, or report a rape?
(2) “I was raised to be an independent woman not a victim of anything.”
Prior to feminist activism, it would have been impossible for most women to be “independent”, regardless of their parents' intentions. At various points in history, women couldn’t inherit property, work outside the home, learn to read, or even walk down the street unaccompanied. The efforts of generations of feminists helped to give women a say in government, the right to be educated, and social and sexual freedoms.
An independent woman would want to pursue any path in life that she wishes. She’s the kind of woman who would speak up when informed that her job has been made redundant because she’s pregnant, or who would get angry when told that she can’t walk home alone because otherwise she’d be inviting sexual assault. Independence and refusal to be a victim are feminist qualities.
(3) “I am an abomination to feminists” (because I am a stay-at-home mother).
Many Women Against Feminism believe that feminism opposes women’s work at home and denigrates those who don’t pursue careers. Historically, most women had no choice but to remain within the home and care for their children. Until as late as 1966, Australian women had to resign from the public service as soon as they married.
Feminism has always sought rights for women as mothers. Early Australian feminists, for example, campaigned for the government to provide an income to all mothers to recognise that parenting was the equivalent of a job and that it benefited the country. Feminism did challenge the expectation that women have no vocation of her own and be solely focused on cleaning and cooking for her family. This does not mean that feminism derides women who choose to focus on raising children and maintain a traditional division of labour. Though feminists would argue that the reverse situation, in which a male partner cares for the home and children, should be equally possible.
As the vast majority of the world’s government and business leaders and holders of its wealth, it’s bizarre to suggest that men now lack social and political power. Women Against Feminism, however, often propose that men’s rights have been eroded because they usually have less access to their children after separation or divorce.
The continuing perception in courts and the general community that women are better suited to raise children, while men are better equipped to be in the workforce, is not a “right” that women enjoy. In dozens of ways, this belief restricts and hampers women’s rights and capacity to earn. The one drawback that affects men is the only one that anti-feminists mention.
(5) “I don’t need feminism because…”
It is impossible to extricate yourself from collective rights relating to gender, race, or sexuality. Unless you wish to withdraw from society, you will both benefit and suffer from political and social changes to what women can and cannot do. You may not want to need feminism, but you will benefit from its continued work toward maintaining basic rights and eliminating the kinds of sexism that cannot be legislated against regardless. It’s very easy for Women Against Feminism to declare that they don’t need feminism using the voice and powers that feminism made possible and which it continues to fight for.
Michelle Smith has previously received funding from the Australian Research Council.
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The death of Michael Brown is heartbreaking, and Michelle and I send our deepest condolences to his family and his community at this very difficult time … I know the events of the past few days have prompted strong passions, but as details unfold, I urge everyone in Ferguson, Missouri, and across the country to remember this young man through reflection and understanding. We should comfort each other and talk with one another in a way that heals, not in a way that wounds.
– Statement by US president Barack Obama on the passing of Michael Brown, August 12, 2014.
Many Americans share president Barack Obama’s sentiment regarding the death of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. This is clearly indicated in the deeply felt hurt experienced by so many and the massive swell of moral support people of all backgrounds offered to the young man’s parents in recent days.
But to suggest that all, or even most, Americans feel the same would be severely misleading. Some citizens, drawing on media-fed imagery and timeworn stereotypes of young black men, have gone so far as to suggest that the unarmed teenager’s tragic death at the hands of a Ferguson police officer was self-inflicted, of his own doing, deserved and the result of his defiance of state authority.
A young man with a promising future notwithstanding, too many in the United States view the disputed events that led to Brown’s death as the reasonable, albeit unfortunate, consequence of his errant behaviour.
These views are not necessarily based on ignorance or even racial animus. However, it must be made clear, these features remain entrenched themes of contemporary American culture and life. The devaluing of Brown’s life is informed by a form of marginalisation that refers to the condition of those whom the broader society chronically excludes from economic networks and networks of care – or what American legal scholar Richard Delgado describes as being “beyond love”.
Missouri in general and the St Louis metropolitan area in particular has a long history of this kind of exclusion. A New York Times editorial on Brown’s death, for instance, describes “the history of racial segregation, economic inequality and overbearing law enforcement that produced so much of the tension now evident on the streets” of Ferguson, a suburban town of 21,000 people. The editorial goes on to note that:
until the late 1940s, blacks weren’t allowed to live in most suburban St Louis County towns.
In addition, a core American cultural value that gives priority to property rights over human rights informs such indifference towards the lives of especially young black men and women. This is evident in the almost immediate media shift from the focus on what some regard as the state-sanctioned murder of Brown, whose lifeless body was left exposed, lying on the open boulevard for over four hours, to an over-emphasis on the loss of property in Ferguson in the aftermath of his death.
In this instance, the importance of property is evident in the roll-out of body-armoured police, the deployment of tanks and police cars to barricade citizens, and the wanton firing of tear gas and rubber bullets into peaceful crowds.
In effect, these domestic military manoeuvres in an overwhelmingly black neighbourhood were in no way intended to protect the lives of its residents but rather its property.
Even Obama’s words betray this sentiment. His reference to “strong passions” and emphases on “reflection and understanding” and on talk “that heals, not in ways that wound” is in tacit reference to the days of unrest that followed Brown’s death. But these wounds and so-called violence in response to Brown’s death were directed at the economic institutions and patterns of oppression and racial violence that figure so prominently in the marginalisation of many of Ferguson’s residents.
The violence that the authorities would be prudent to attend to are the very structural forces that oppress the youth who have responded en masse to the senseless death of one of their own. For sure, there are many older adults, sincere, concerned and operating in good faith, who have joined them.
The waning generations too must partner with their daughters and sons in transforming the conditions under which America continues to bury its young.
Garrett Albert Duncan does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.
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News of Robin Williams’s suicide will have taken many of us by surprise. We always feel a mix of emotions when we hear someone famous, successful, creative and much loved has been suffering unbearable distress. But the fact remains that most of us are not equipped to see the suffering of people beyond their public mask.
Although nowadays we’re familiar with the idea that mental health problems can affect anyone, it nevertheless strikes us as particularly, sad, poignant and inexplicable when we hear of the death of someone who seems to have achieved what many of us aspire towards.
We all want a happy, healthy life and family or friends to share it with, and to enjoy the good things life has to offer. Many of us also want to be successful; to win the prizes of our chosen profession, just as Williams did.
Indeed, many of us also believe we would enjoy being rich, but even that isn’t necessarily true. Many of us think we would be happy if we were creative, were able to make people laugh or weep at the truths of our existence, to know that we were loved by millions.
It seems very odd to us, from this perspective, when we learn that rich, successful, creative, funny people can be unhappy. But the fact remains that mental health problems can affect us all.
All deaths are tragedies; when a well-known and well-loved person dies, there is an understandable (and touching) outpouring of messages commenting on just how loved, how beautiful and how talented that person was. But this is true for us all.
Each daughter, each son, everyone who feels so desperate that they are tempted to end their lives is beautiful, talented, loved and loving.
For any number of reasons, material or even artistic success may not lead to happiness. Perhaps because for many people such material success does not address the things that really matter to them. Or perhaps because many people have other problems in their lives.
If a person is struggling to recover from substance abuse or drug addiction, for instance, as Williams was, material success can seem pointless at best, and even unhelpful.
Perhaps with material success (especially, perhaps, in show business) comes a superficiality and artificiality in those surrounding you that can make it difficult to find true meaning and purpose in life. And it may even make more genuine relationships difficult to maintain.
It is only really possible to understand each person’s life, the reasons behind their happiness or unhappiness, and the reasons behind their actions, by understanding how they see the world. Artists and comedians can help us understand this.
Creative genius – such as that shown by Williams – can reveal sensitive and appropriately ambiguous aspects of mental health problems and the wonderful but tragic nature of a life fully lived (think of his films The Fisher King or Dead Poets Society).
Artists can help us see beyond the notion of someone being a “victim of mental illness” and instead, lead us to think about what it means to see life through someone else’s eyes.
Many psychologists and psychiatrists have speculated on a link between mental health problems and creativity. The relationship appears to be a complex one, and probably more closely related to our stereotypes than to reality.
Just as we like to think material success makes people happy (when this is not always true), a stereotype of “madness” is the crazy but creative iconoclast, cheerfully making bizarre but imaginative connections.
There is some truth to this; comedians seem to have somewhat unconventional thought processes (but then we probably could have guessed that). And people prone to so-called “hypomanic” episodes of energy and excitement seem more likely to be in the creative industries.
But the relationship isn’t strong. For all the reasons described above, mental health problems can affect us all, so we are all liable to experience both elation and depression. Perhaps the more strongly we engage with being alive, the more strongly we feel all emotions.
So perhaps people in creative industries can make imaginative leaps that the rest of us are incapable of, but this may well bring some threats as well as benefits. After all, if you can think of a hundred uses of a rubber chicken, you can probably also think of a hundred reasons why you’re not as clever as you think you are.
And perhaps comedians use humour to manage their relationships with others – even though that may seem somewhat unsurprising, given their profession.
But most importantly, we should be very careful about two assumptions.
First, we can all experience mental health problems. It’s a mistake to assume that because a person appears to have material success, they are content – there can be a million reasons for a person’s unhappiness.
And it’s a mistake to assume that, for some people, mental health problems add wackiness and eccentricity but are otherwise benign; when a person is suffering, that suffering is real.
Anyone seeking support and information about suicide in Australia can contact Lifeline on 131 114 or beyondblue 1300 22 46 36. In the UK, the Samaritans can be contacted on 08457 90 90 90 or on email at jo@samaritans.org
Peter Kinderman works for the University of Liverpool, and is affiliated with the British Psychological Society and the Council for Evidence-based Psychiatry. He receives funding from a number of research charities and Councils.
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[Robin Williams via s_bukley / Shutterstock.com]
Between 2003 and 2011, 8,000 to 40,000 unaccompanied migrant children from Central America were stopped every year on the southern border of the US. When this number boomed to more than 57,000 during the first nine months of 2014, president Barack Obama announced an “urgent humanitarian situation requiring a unified and coordinated Federal response” at the border.
In early July, Obama asked Congress for $3.7bn in emergency spending to increase man power and surveillance at the border, and expand facilities and legal services for detained children. Later in July, Obama met with the presidents of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, from which many of these children come.
There have been many debates about the causes of this surge of child migrants, as well as the best strategies for addressing the trend along the border and abroad. But there has been little if any discussion about what happens to child migrants who successfully enter undetected. We can only speculate on the consequences of the US’s failure to address the crisis.
Since the summer of 2012, I have conducted observations and interviews with Guatemalan Maya young adults between the ages of 18 and 35 who arrived as unaccompanied minors between four and 19 years ago. My research shows that violence and poverty are not things of the past for unaccompanied Central American children who come of age in the shadows.
Although it is violence and poverty that push children to emigrate, many whom I’ve worked with report that a big motivation is the lack of education and job opportunities to escape these conditions, and the replication of their own suffering in the lives of younger siblings.
Arriving between the ages of 12 and 17 without a parent or guardian awaiting them, unaccompanied Guatemalan children enter Los Angeles’s low-wage workforce to support the families they left behind. Many enter the garment industry where they work 11-hour days for up to six days per week without a break, proper lighting or ventilation.
A young garment worker in his or her first weeks on the job might make $85 per week for anywhere between 58 and 66 hours of labour. Over time, these young people make between $280 and $420 per week. Children work feverishly to make the most of their two cents-per-button and six cents-per-seam wages, a workday that is no less physically exhausting as it is mentally and emotionally. Legal status, age and ethnic discrimination, and often language barriers keep children in the most vulnerable work conditions.
Migrant children go to great lengths and endure physical and emotional pain to pay their living expenses, repay the debt of their migration (which is upward of $4,000) and send money to expectant parents and siblings. In one case, an 18-year-old who had lived in the US for five years at the time of our meeting said he puts all of his money toward rent and his family, saving only five dollars per week for himself. All the while, children feel depression, isolation, and a longing to be with their families again.
The young people we’ve interviewed say education is the only way out of their circumstances. But many are unable to attend school due to work schedules or unable to afford continuous enrollment in English classes. Those who make it to class do so with tired eyes and little energy left to give.
Life is particularly tough for Guatemalan Maya youth who primarily speak indigenous languages such as K’iche and K’anjobal. In the US, these young migrants learn Spanish at work or in their communities. The transition from indigenous language to Spanish and finally to English often requires the repetition of English as a Second Language (ESL) classes and results in years of “retraso” (setback). Of the approximately 100 unaccompanied young adults I have met, only one in his early 30s has completed high school.
When it comes to access to services, unaccompanied child migrant workers transition into young adulthood under impoverished and exploitative conditions, without the support of parents and guardians. The pressures of financial responsibility, isolation, and cultural dislocation push some youth into drugs and alcohol, others to isolation and depression, and others as far as suicide. The need for support services is great, but their availability is sparse.
Though many new services are now opening due to heightened attention to unaccompanied migrants, there are very few existing services that cater to the settled population, particularly those older than 18 years of age and the indigenous language speakers.
Support services available during business hours are inaccessible for those working for their own survival and those of families abroad. Fear of deportation hinders young people’s confidence in seeking professional, legal and financial services. Medical services are perceived as luxury and sought out only after weeks or months of discomfort or pain.
These youth recognised their marginality but are not paralysed by it. Since summer 2012, I have witnessed the launch of book clubs, community gardening groups, sustained involvement in an informal support group, which I have called Voces de Esperanza (Voices of Hope) in my work, and commitment to the local church.
Rick Loomis /Pool/EPA
While debate rages about the numbers of children now arriving at the Texas border, countless children have already entered the US and are now young adults, forging a life in the margins. Rather than stalling immigration reform in the US, this reality should press the government to move forward confidently.
In a recent report I recommend providing legal protection based on the length of stay. US immigration policy geared toward the inclusion of undocumented youth, such as the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act which was proposed in 2001 and the Deferred Action of Childhood Arrivals signed in 2012, require they meet education or potential military service requirements.
Though most of the unaccompanied migrant youth do not meet these requirements, they have contributed to the US economy for many years, build their local communities and aspire to a full life in the US, but lack the resources to thrive. The time to act is now.
Stephanie Lynnette Canizales does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.
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The spacecraft is Rosetta, and its target is 67P/Churuymov-Gerasimenko, named after its Ukrainian discoverers. The spacecraft will study 67P’s nucleus at close quarters as it falls towards the sun, when it will come to life with a tail created by sun’s warmth.
In November 2014, before activity levels rise too high, a small lander – Philae – will be released for a soft landing on the nucleus’s frigid surface. The height of the comet’s activity will be in August 2015, with Rosetta’s mission drawing to a close at the end of that year.
This ambitious European Space Agency project was born from Europe’s first planetary mission, Giotto, which provided a close-up “snapshot” of the Halley comet in 1986. Giotto’s resounding success sparked a push by many European planetary scientists to carry out an even more ambitious comet mission. The resulting mission is by far the most scientifically capable and ambitious to date.
Comets are interesting to space researchers because they could reveal a less-understood story about the birth of the solar system. As far as is known, these icy bodies represent the least processed material remaining from that time.
At our planetary system’s outer edge, it is believed that there lies a vast reservoir of countless frozen bodies ejected during the formation of planets. These contain varying proportions of dust and ices. These ices vary in their composition, depending on their birthplace in the early solar system. Studying them therefore provides an insight into the conditions that prevailed when Earth and the other planets came into being.
When one of these bodies is disturbed from its position it could start falling towards the sun, where it is heated, releasing gas and dust which create the comet’s tails. It is only a few comets that are visible to the naked eye from Earth. Most, like 67P, require telescopes to be observed. Much has been learnt about comets from telescopic observations, but spacecraft missions have already demonstrated that being close to a comet is vital to understand more.
Rosetta and Philae carry with them a comprehensive suite of instruments to study all aspects of the comet. Gases will be sampled, dust will be examined under microscopes, the nucleus will be studied from microwave to ultraviolet wavelengths, and its interior probed by radio waves. The experiments include hardware from Imperial College London and the Open University, with British scientists also contributing to other instrument teams. From these measurements, chemical and physical processes that occur on the nucleus and within the comet’s tenuous atmosphere – the coma – will be deduced.
Over the past few weeks, the bizarre shape of 67P has gradually been revealed. It resembles a highly misshapen dumbbell measuring around 4km along its longest dimension. In the last days before arrival, the nature of the surface was resolved. It is a bizarre mix of hummocky terrain and a scattering of house-sized “boulders” on flat plains, all apparently covered in thick layers of dust. As expected, the nucleus’s dusty coating reflects little of the sunlight that falls on it.
Despite arriving in 67P’s vicinity, Rosetta isn’t in orbit about the body just yet. As the gravitational field of this lumpy body isn’t well established, the spacecraft is executing triangular paths around it, with its operators carefully monitoring deviations from that path to deduce the nucleus’s mass and density. Once the nucleus is better understood, Rosetta will be moved closer to place it in orbit.
Rosetta’s operators admit that November’s landing of Philae on a body as small and strangely-shaped as 67P will be challenging. The mass, and hence the gravitational pull of the nucleus is extremely weak, and when close to the nucleus, the direction of “down” varies significantly over very short distances. Several busy months finalising the landing sequence lie ahead.
The science return from Rosetta is expected to be immense. Already data gathered during arrival at the comet, when its activity is still weak, may well have amounted to enough to lead to a revolution in the understanding of comet nuclei. This is only the beginning. We may learn more about comets and the early solar system in the next 18 months than during the past 50 years.
By Geraint Jones, University College London
Geraint Jones receives STFC funding. He is a member of the Royal Astronomical Society.
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The following is an excerpt from a 2005 speech that Bill Moyers gave at the National Security Archives on the occasion of its 30th anniversary.
In it, he talks about the events leading up to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which was signed into law 40 years ago this week. The resolution — created and adopted in response to two altercations that reportedly took place between US and North Vietnamese warships on Aug. 2 and 4, 1964 — authorized President Johnson to escalate the war in Vietnam.
In his speech, Bill references a trove of declassified documents that the National Security Administration had just released that indicated the second incident had never actually happened.
In 1963, Bill Moyers was hired as special assistant to President Lyndon B. Johnson and later served as the White House press secretary. Bill Moyers left the White House in 1967.
Because of the Freedom of Information Act and the relentless fight by the Archive to defend and exercise it, some of us have learned more since leaving the White House about what happened on our watch than we knew when we were there. Funny, isn’t it, how the farther one gets from power, the closer one often gets to the truth? Consider the recent disclosures about what happened in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964. These documents, now four decades old, seem to confirm that there was no second attack on US ships on the fourth of August and that President Johnson ordered retaliatory air strikes against North Vietnam on the basis of intelligence that either had been “mishandled” or “misinterpreted” or had been deliberately skewed by subordinates to provide him the excuse he was looking for to attack North Vietnam.
I was not then a player in foreign policy and had not yet become the president’s press secretary — my portfolio was politics and domestic policy. But I was there beside him during those frenetic hours. I heard the conversations from the president’s side, although I could not hear what was being told to him by the Situation Room or the Pentagon.
I accept now that it was never nailed down for certain that there was a second attack, but I believe that LBJ thought there had been. It is true that for months he had wanted to send a message to Ho Chi Minh that he meant business about standing behind America’s commitment to South Vietnam. It is true that he was not about to allow the hawkish Barry Goldwater to outflank him on national security in the fall campaign. It is also true that he often wrestled with the real or imaginary fear that liberal Democrats, whose hearts still belonged to their late fallen leader, would be watching and sizing him up according to their speculation of how Kennedy would have decided the moment.
So yes, I think the president’s mind was prepared to act if the North Vietnamese presented him a tit-for-tat opportunity. But he wasn’t looking for a wider war at that time, only a show of resolve, a flexing of muscles, the chance to swat the fly when it landed. Nonetheless, this state of mind plus cloudy intelligence proved a combustible and tragic mix. In the belief that a second attack suggested an intent on the part of an adversary that one attack alone left open, the president did order strikes against North Vietnam, thus widening the war. He asked Congress for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that was passed three days later and opened the way for future large-scale commitments of American forces. Haste is so often the enemy of good judgment. Rarely does it produce such costly consequences as it did this time.But did the president order up fabricated evidence to suit his wish? No. Did subordinates rig the evidence to support what they thought he wanted to do? It’s possible, but I swear I cannot imagine who they might have been –- certainly it was no one in the inner circle, as far as I could tell. I don’t believe this is what happened. Did the president act prematurely? Yes. Was the response disproportionate to the events? Yes. Did he later agonize over so precipitous a decision? Yes. “For all I know,” he said the next year, “our Navy was shooting at whales out there.” By then, however, he thought he had other reasons to escalate the war, and did. All these years later, I find it painful to wonder what could have been if we had waited until the fog lifted, or had made public what we did and didn’t know, trusting the debate in the press, Congress and the country to help us shape policies more aligned with events and with the opinion of an informed public.
Watch “Bill Remembers LBJ’s Road to War,” in which Bill looks back on President Johnson’s deliberations over America’s role in Vietnam and his decision to escalate and send in more troops.
Digital mass surveillance is having a chilling effect on US democracy, affecting journalists and lawyers, a report from human rights organisations has warned.
The report, by Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union, concludes that some of the most fundamental freedoms are under threat. The organisations argue that the government’s policies on secrecy and preventing leaks, as well as its stance on officials talking to the media, undermine traditional US values.
When it comes to journalism, the Snowden case has already had an impact in a number of high-profile cases. In July 2013, staff at the Guardian had to destroy hard drives containing files leaked by Snowden under threat of action from the UK government. In February of the same year, David Miranda, partner of former Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, was held at a London airport for nine hours under the UK Terrorism Act, because of Greenwald’s association with the Snowden case.
These concerns do indeed appear to be playing out in the industry. In 2012 alone, the US federal government reclassified 95 million pieces of information. It’s not clear how many of these were made more or less secret but overclassification is becoming a concern. It has been estimated that between 50% and 90% of classified documents could be made public without them posing a security threat.
The Obama administration has also used the 1917 Espionage Act to routinely target whistleblowers. Under the current presidency, eight people have been pursued for leaking information to the press, including Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, the WikiLeaks source. Just three such prosecutions were pursued between 1917 and Obama’s election.
“We’re not able to do our jobs if sources are in danger”, a national security reporter told Human Rights Watch and the ACLU. These concerns are in turn leading to increasing use of encryption technology among a significant number of journalists interviewed for the report.
But while the use of some tools such as the Tor browser or the PGP encryption service to secure emails can definitely reduce the risk of being exposed to government surveillance, the report notes that many journalists fear they are not completely safe. This was a fear raised by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Erich Schmitt when he warned that asking sources to protect their digital communication can actually attract more attention to their communications. Others reported having to pay for encryption technologies out of their own pocket and while some journalists are being trained to use them by their employers, others are having to do it alone.
These difficulties are also affecting public discourse, especially in the United States. If sources are reluctant to talk, information doesn’t get through to the public. When it comes to reporting national security issues, several journalists described the climate in the US as comparable to what they might come up against in more authoritarian countries. Journalist Peter Maass is quoted in the report as saying he is “horrified and outraged” by the situation, revealing that he has the same problems working as a reporter in the US as he did in the former Soviet Union and North Korea.
Similar concerns are expressed in the report by lawyers, who warn that client confidentiality is at risk. “I don’t send any information by email, attachment, or phone”, says one interviewed defense attorney, “I don’t use GChat or WhatsApp for anything but ‘Hi, what’s up?’. I don’t even talk on Skype.” By contrast, the government officials interviewed for the report backed NSA surveillance.
In October 2013, the Committee to Protect Journalism released a report denouncing the dangers which journalism is exposed to in the US in the wake of the Snowden case, coming to similar conclusions as the two human rights organisations. And it came to no surprise for some to see the NSA listed in the 2014 Reporters Without Borders Enemies of the Internet report.
This report is not the first to raise concerns about the future implications of what we have learned from the Snowden leaks but it gives us a broader picture of the magnitude of the case. Snowden himself has accused the NSA of setting fire to the future of the internet but now it seems journalism and the legal profession are in danger too.
In fact, the Snowden case implicates every field of our constantly connected and wired society, especially when it comes to digital communication through commercial and popular tools and social media. We should be outraged but we should also use the case as evidence in the fight to narrow the scope of surveillance, reduce government secrecy and better protect national security whistleblowers – as well as the lawyers who defend them and the journalists who tell their stories.
Philip Di Salvo does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.
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Online daters continue to express outrage about the revelation that OkCupid has been experimenting on users by telling them they matched well with people they had nothing in common with to see if they still got on anyway. Many feel they have been treated like lab rats. OKCupid remains utterly unapologetic.
It would be nice to think that the dating site is the exception to the rule and that companies don’t generally cross the line of decency by experimenting on their users. But nothing could be further from the truth. Most websites you use will try out some kind of experiment on you at one time or another.
These days it’s pretty rare to go to a big website and not be tracked somehow, even if it’s a charity. If you download a browser plug-in such as Ghostery you can watch websites as they watch you.
Ever since Eric Ries wrote The Lean Startup, tech firms have been wise to the value of carrying out a type of user experimentation called A/B testing. It’s at the core of many business plans in Silicon Valley and in tech clusters around the world.
The basic arc of any new start-up was, for a long time, quite simple. Entrepreneur comes up with a brilliant idea; entrepreneur does something like Dragons' Den to get money from venture capitalists; entrepreneur spends money on shorts-and-sandals-wearing software engineers to build product over one or two years; product is launched; entrepreneur prints t-shirts to help promote new product; new product dives faster than Tom Daley into product oblivion.
Historically most new start-ups fail and they fail because no one wants their product. This isn’t really surprising, since technology experts tend to be just that – experts in technology, not in people.
But Eric Ries suggested a new methodology for startups: entrepreneur comes up with a brilliant idea; entrepreneur prints t-shirts. But if no one buys the t-shirt, entrepreneur doesn’t bother building the product. This saves huge amounts of money and time which can be devoted to building better products that people actually want.
Ries wasn’t the first to invent this method. Showing different kinds of adverts and getting people to respond to them is one of the marketer’s stock tools. The statistics and scientific methods of psychology have been carefully applied to marketing since the 1950s.
The essence of the lean start-up method is to create a launch page announcing your new (non-existent) product. Start ups like Dropbox began with a simple webpage with a video describing their new product. At the bottom was a box inviting you to sign up as a beta tester. But there were actually two videos. When a potential customer arrived on the site, they were randomly assigned video A or B. Each would promote a slightly different version of the future product.
In the case of Dropbox the entrepreneurs thought that backing up would be the most useful facility and sharing was an also-nice-to-have. By counting how many people signed up as a beta tester they could measure what people wanted. In practice sharing seemed to get the biggest vote and backing up was almost irrelevant. In fact, they found that the users didn’t really care about almost 90% of the functionality the engineers had invented so they simply didn’t waste time building it.
Any company can use this tactic to find out what their potential customers actually want in a week or a month and can then go on to build something that will actually be loved. AirBnB continues to develop using this approach and even has a blog discussing the experiments and process. The customer as lab rat is such a common startup tactic that companies like landerApp now offer cut price landing pages with A/B testing built in.
For many, the use of lean start-up methods is a welcome application of scientific principles to the design of new products and services. This is what OKCupid has been doing with its users. I would personally prefer to use a product like OKCupid which is constantly on the look out for a new way to improve its algorithms and interface design over another company which is sitting back deluding itself that it has the ultimate (but untested) method. I don’t use OKCupid by the way, I’m happily married. (My wife made me write that.)
A/B testing is a common aspect of most commercial and even not-for-profit websites, and we should be pleased about that. If the alternative is waiting until some entrepreneur magically comes up with the right product based on a guess then perhaps we should all be signing up for experimentation.
Perhaps the real revelation from OkCupid’s testing is that its findings suggest that even bad matches could come together as happily as good matches. This implies that for the one in five relationships that reportedly started online, all that angst-ridden form-filling and hand wringing about profile pictures was not necessary. You may as well enlist a gang of orangutans to throw darts at passers by until they find you a mate. OkCupid does the service for you, producing less noise, less excrement and gets through significantly fewer bananas in the process.
OKCupid’s honesty about the testing and openness about the results is a sign that it has matured as a company. Perhaps you should go out and print a job lot of t-shirts that read “It’s OK, I’m a lab rat”. You never know, they might sell and you could start a business.
Nick Dalton does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
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[Happy couple in a photo booth via Shutterstock]
Can men be feminists? As a man who spends a substantial portion of my professional and personal life teaching, researching and thinking about feminism, this is a question I come up against frequently. And it seems I’m not alone: a recent Ipsos poll across 15 “developed” countries found almost as many men as women support feminism, while a quick Google throws up around 50,000 hits for this flashpoint question.
The question plays a big role in debates about men’s relationship with feminism and gender equality at large. This should come as no surprise; recent years have seen a welcome revitalisation of feminist activism and writing, much of it in direct response to persistent (and in some cases resurgent) forms of sexism.
What’s more, a substantial number of men are getting directly involved in this activism; even celebrities such as Pharrell Williams, Professor Green and John Legend have openly tried to grapple with the conundrum of men and feminism. It seems that many are thinking through the different ways men can productively engage with the struggle for greater gender equality.
Unfortunately, however, the question of whether men “can be feminists” is not always a helpful place to start.
Some of the reasons why should be obvious. The question reduces men’s relationship with feminism to a concern with labels and self-identity, and presupposes that we can just answer the question with a straightforward yes or no.
This seems simple enough, but its effect is potentially divisive. If the answer is no, then we risk relieving men of any responsibility to engage with the feminism. This might lead to struggles against sexism being belittled as “women’s work”, reinforcing a division of political labour and confining its remit to half the population.
But if we say yes, we risk ushering in a wave of self-proclaimed male feminists who might talk the talk, but fail to actually do anything to contribute to the advancement of gender equality in their everyday lives (this brings to mind the retro cartoon postcard in which a stern moustached man snaps “look kitten, I don’t give a damn what you think, if I say I’m a feminist then by god I am one!”).
Given this false choice, why is it that “can men be feminists?” is so often the starting point for discussions of men and feminism? The answer has to do with widespread stereotypes of feminism itself.
In mainstream media, asking whether men can be feminists is typically a roundabout way of asking whether feminism can be defined in a way that “accommodates” men. The question poses a sort of logic puzzle which aims to resolve whether or not the very idea of feminism rules out the possibility of a “feminist man”.
Asking if men can be feminists is therefore often a covert way to ask what feminism even “is”. It’s another example of a familiar media cliché: trying to “figure out” feminism by asking whether certain things – waxing, listening to Miley Cyrus, consuming pornography, being a man – can “count” as legitimately feminist, or whether they exclude men from being feminists altogether.
These questions reduce feminism to a lifestyle choice, framing it as lightweight and frivolous. Even worse, they presuppose the existence of some feminist authority figure, neurotically policing the boundaries of what’s acceptable for feminists to say and do.
Indeed, feminist academics are themselves frequently called upon to assume this role, asked endlessly to pronounce on whether one can be a feminist and vajazzle/wear lipstick/go to a lap-dancing club – all standard journalistic enquiries directed at feminist scholars.
Asking if men can be feminist is often just another way to frame feminism as something too puritanical and alienating for ordinary men and women. It subtly taps into the prevailing stereotype of feminism, the pop-culture caricature of gender campaigners as terminally humourless pedants.
To pose the men-as-feminists question in the first place risks feeding these pernicious misrepresentations of what feminism is and does. Clearly, we need another way to generate discussion about men’s role in the struggle for gender justice.
It has been suggested we could start by working to show men that it’s in their own interests to participate in the struggle for gender equality. As sociologist Scott Coltrane has pointed out in his work on gender, family and parenting, men in more gender-equal families live longer, are healthier, have more rewarding relationships and have better sex.
The obvious pitfall of this tactic is that it suggests men can reasonably give up any involvement with feminism once it no longer furthers their self-interest.
Another option – frequently floated in the mainstream media – is that feminism needs to “rebrand” to present itself as more docile and less alienating to men. But surely the onus should be on men to engage with feminism, rather than on feminism to be appear less threatening.
Perhaps the initial question – “can men be feminist?” – isn’t so counterproductive as long as we reframe it. Maybe we can interpret the question not as a banal dilemma or a logical problem to be resolved, but as a challenge: “Can men be feminists” rather than “can men be feminists?” A question analogous to “Can I run a half marathon?” rather than “Can I support Man City and retain a commitment to socio-economic fairness?”
This presents feminism as an ideal, an aspiration, not as an identity to be donned like an eye-catching hat. Posing the question in this way would suggest that yes, men can be feminist, but it acknowledges that being feminist or feminist-allied is (and should be) difficult and challenging. For men, after all, it means taking a serious look at how we benefit from the persistence of gender inequality – and thinking about how we can meaningfully help to change that order in the course of our day-to-day lives.
In a world where women remain systematically disadvantaged in media, politics and public life, and in which violence and harassment are daily realities, it should be obvious that we need to expand the discussion of the role men can play in the struggle for gender equality.
But to do so, we need more a nuanced vision of the different ways men might productively engage with feminism. And that means moving on from the preoccupation with whether or not men can “be” feminists in the first place.
Jonathan Dean does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
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[Pharrell Williams via Jaguar PS / Shutterstock.com]
