Feminist Friday XV - When is a school skirt too short?

Northgate School in Ipswich, to ban skirts from its school uniform.

I listened in horror as I heard a discussion on BBC Breakfast talk about this the other day.

The view was put forward that it was too distracting for boys to see young girls in short skirts.

Again, the assumption is that it's the female of the species who should amend her behaviour accordingly. Should we not be making it clear to boys that, Not Ever, are they entitled to behave inappropriately towards girls and what they are wearing is completely irrelevant?

It's depressing that all too often people make assumptions that girls who wear short skirts to school aren't necessarily interested in academic work, shall we say. It's a load of utter nonsense. There is no correlation between skirt length, intelligence, aptitude and potential.  Banning skirts of any length just reinforces this prejudice and for that reason alone I think it's wrong.

Earlier this year, I wrote about how some misguided fool at Glasgow City Council had written to parents advising them not to let their children wear short skirts or tight trousers to school to avoid attention from paedophiles. I was annoyed  by some of the comments posted - one person even suggested that girls in short skirts were more at risk of becoming "the school tart" than of being targeted by a paedophile. Again, derogatory language used to describe a female which would never be thought of when discussing what boys get up to.

I think we all know that high school years are punctuated with lessons spent daydreaming about the latest object of your desire instead of quadratic equations, the periodic table or Lady Macbeth at her most dastardly. We all did it regardless of what anybody was wearing.  And it doesn't necessarily end when you leave school, either. Growing up is about learning how to behave in relationships, how to form adult friendships and that is every bit as important as academic development. School is the right place to kill off ill-informed assumption and prejudice, not perpetuate it.

Feminist Friday XIV: Don't frape me

I really must get into the habit of posting my Feminist Friday posts on a Friday - I hope Transatlantic Blonde, who runs the series, doesn't get too annoyed with me.


This week's topic is language in general and the use of the word "c***" in particular. It's not a word I like, or use and I find it highly offensive that a word for female genitalia comes at the top of the hierarchy of sweary words. While you would never find a woman being called, for example, a p***k or a d******d, presumably because comparison with such symbols of masculinity is seen as well above our station, men will happily use terms for intimate female body parts to insult each other. The clear implication is that women are subordinate to men. 


Some people think that reclaiming these words is the way to go. I disagree. I think they deserve to be consigned to the scrap heap of history, just like some terms to describe race which are, rightly, no longer considered acceptable to use in any sort of company.


I will, however, admit to a double standard on this. I am much more tolerant of feminist women using that word than anyone else, because I understand what they are trying to do even if it makes me feel a bit squeamish.


But there's one word doing the rounds at the moment which is guaranteed to make me incandescent with rage whenever I see it.


My Facebook status at the moment is:

"Caron Lindsay is a duck. Quack quack."

Grand. And, of course, I didn't write it. My daughter got hold of my iPhone. She tried to blame a smurf, but I know the truth.


The first time it occurred to me to put a passcode on my iPhone was not out of fear of it being accessed by some random stranger, but to protect it from my family. My sister and her kids were having some juvenile fun with Facebook statuses which made us all laugh. However, what stopped me in tracks was the use of the word "frape" to describe this process. That would be short for Facebook rape.


Yes, that's right. The horrendous violation of a person, which traumatises for life, is being equated to putting out some lavatorial humour on someone else's facebook status which is easily wiped out with the delete key.


I can't stand to see one of the most serious crimes imaginable trivialised in this way. It's wrong, and frape is another word whose use needs to be challenged. It's probably more dangerous because its use is completely mainstream and isn't considered rude at all. 

Feminist Friday XIII: Television, Kids and Sexism

I'm writing this as part of Transatlantic Blonde's Feminist Friday series. I know it's Saturday but punctuality has never been my strong point.

This week's theme is television - how male and female characters are portrayed in the shows our children watch. 

A couple of weeks ago, East Dunbartonshire Liberal Democrat MP Jo Swinson asked tv executives to take action on gender stereotyping.

Jo is so right about the way in which programme makers make girl characters all pink and precious while the boys get to do the action stuff. The Disney princesses are starting to improve, slowly - in Tangled, Rapunzel does a lot of the action herself, although she does seem to think she needs a bloke to show her the sights of the outside world when she's more than capable herself.

I think the first images kids get are particularly important in forming their expectations of what life has to offer them. If kids see that the norm is for boys to have the leadership roles and all the fun, as they do in 2/3 of tv aimed at them, then that doesn't help anyone. Boys grow up thinking girls naturally take a subordinate role and they have a sense of entitlement to power and girls' confidence and expectations are limited.

Jo cites Dora the Explorer as a good example of kids' tv - although I think the programme used to be better. I wasn't particularly impressed when they brought her cousin Diego in and now I see they have a rather sickly tutu clad Dora ballet iPhone application. Why can't we just go back to the good old days, when Anna was week when it was just Dora, Isa, Backpack and Boots against the cunning of Swiper the fox? Dora was just becoming popular when Anna was a toddler and there was literally no merchandise available here - I spent a fortune buying games and stuff on eBay for her. Anna grew up with Dora - and she certainly picked up a fair smattering of Spanish from her.

I hope that tv executives take note of what Jo is saying but I won't be holding my breath. They won't listen to her alone, so they should actually hear from other people who feel strongly about this, each and every time we think there's an example of this sort of stereotyping.

We often have news and current affairs shows on in the background in this house. It's long been a concern of mine that Anna sees shows like Question Time with only one woman on the panel to discuss the issues of the day.

Anna is a huge fan of Doctor Who which has much improved since the seventies when Louise Jamieson played companion Leela in a costume that left little to the imagination. This was apparently a ploy to get more dads to watch the show. These days the companions are much more involved in finding the solutions and interacting on a more equal basis with the Doctor and other male characters. The best role model in the Who universe is Sarah Jane Smith, the first companion I ever knew in the 70s, reintroduced in 2006 and subsequently given her own spin off series, The Sarah Jane Adventures. This intrepid journalist now saves the planet from alien invasion and rescues aliens from the ignorance of humans. there's a bit of gender stereotyping in that she has a sonic lipstick rather than a screwdriver but I can forgive that. A middle aged female action hero is definitely to be welcomed. The actress who played Sarah-Jane, Elisabeth Sladen sadly died earlier this year. It's been really great to share a love of the character with my daughter. There's a reason her middle name is Elisabeth.

It worries me, though, that the women who appear in tv programmes have more constraints on their appearance and age than men. Will Tess Daly be presenting Saturday night entertainment shows into her 80s like her colleague Bruce Forsyth? I'd like to think so, but my daughter is growing up in a world where that doesn't happen.

Even if the television programmes themselves are ok, the adverts in between them are often Sexism Central. I was furious to hear James Nesbitt's dulcet tones promoting action toys for boys and dollies for girls as recently as last Christmas.

I tend to take the view that it would just be counter-productive to even attempt to isolate Anna from gender stereotyping on tv. I just try to encourage her to recognise it when it occurs and that it's wrong.

There's lots of excellent tv out there and, like it or not, it'll be a huge influence on our kids' lives. Our job as mums is to equip them with the skills to recognise when things they see are unfair and just plain wrong.

Feminist Friday XII: The global perspective - teaching our kids to value equality

This is a really brief contribution to this week's Feminist Friday and it poses more questions than it resolves.

As mother of a 12 year old daughter, I have huge concerns about the pressures she'll be under in the next decade of her life. These years will see the greatest pressures on her to conform in terms of looks and attitudes to what an unforgivingly misogynistic culture expects.  Boys her age are already watching freely available internet pornography in which the women are portrayed as mere receptacles instead of equal partners. That is bound to affect their expectations of how relationships work.

I spoke to somebody who works with young women in this area, half hoping she'd tell me that I was worrying too much about this. She told me I wasn't.

I want for her to come out of the next decade a happy, confident woman with a clear idea of where she wants to go in life and how she can achieve that. I want her not to take any nonsense from anybody in relationships and to be able to recognise and expect healthy dynamics within them. I also want her to believe passionately in all women having the opportunities open to her.

I think it's important for all young people, boys and girls,  to know that, actually, many women in the world have much more to worry about than what they weigh, or how they look. There's a balance between scaring them and making them aware of the effects of a culture in which women are not treated as equals. Every day women, some not that much older than Anna is now,  are forced into marriage against their will, beaten, raped, systematically abused. Mutilation is a cultural norm in other places. Kids need to understand that there are huge restrictions on what women can do across the world.  Boys need to understand that the women in the pornography they watch online have no power in its creation and may be forced into participation after being trafficked. They need to know that for women without access to even basic medical care, a pregnancy is a potential death sentence.

There are so many cultural influence which seek to narrow the focus of teenagers to looks and relationships and pretty much nothing else. Raising awareness of the terrible injustices women face across the world is surely a win win, as it gives kids a different perspective on their own issues and will hopefully make them angry enough to do something lasting about it.

How do we engage more of our young people with these issues and ensure that they learn to appreciate the need for a society to value all sorts of equality and diversity? How do we cut through the crap that's bombarding them and let them see how others are forced to live.

Feminist Friday: Princesses, Time Lords, Planets and Ponies

Well, I'd planned an early night and a glass of wine, but Ellen suggested I take part in Transatlantic Blonde's Feminist Friday series. Today we're talking about gender stereotyping our kids, or not, as the case may be.

When I was a little girl, I had zillions of dolls and the only real thing, apart from writing,  I have ever wanted to do was to be a wife and mother. I'm not sure the dolls caused that, though. And I'm quite happy with the wife and mother thing, too. We will never know if things would have turned out any different if I'd had dinosaurs rather than dolls, but by the time Anna was on the way, we were both quite aware of the effects of gender stereotyping and expectation and we were clear that we didn't want her to be constrained by it.

I guess the priority for my husband and I was that our little girl should first and foremost grow up feeling secure in herself and confident in her abilities so that she could feel free to succeed at whatever she wanted to do. I hadn't felt particularly free to express myself as a child and I wanted her to be in an environment where she could always be herself, to expose her to as much of a range of interests and toys as we could and let her gravitate towards what suited her.

We wanted to keep her out of the clutches of the clever marketing people for as long as possible and though she had loads of toys, we tried to keep them as gender neutral as possible in the early days. No screaming, garish pink or anything like that. We also wanted her to grow up with the idea that she made her own destiny and didn't need to wait for a prince, handsome or otherwise, to do it for her.

And so it came to pass that a personality with quite eclectic tastes evolved. She did the Disney thing, big time, with all the princesses and everything. I tried to temper that with subtle exposure to a more feminist approach. During one Edinburgh Festival, for example, we went to see a really good play about another Princess who informed her parents in no uncertain terms that she wasn't going to get married, she was going to go travelling and off she went. And she solved a lot of problems and rescued a lot of people along the way. Well, maybe not so subtle, but it was well done and very funny.

The things I dreaded most were Barbie and My Little Pony. I'd had Sindys, because they had brown hair like me - but they, too, had succumbed to peroxide by the time Anna could have shown an interest in them. My Little Ponies were the most glaikit looking bits of garish glittery nonsense. Utterly loathsome. Well, my girl has always preferred animals to dollies, so our involvement with Barbie was fleeting. In fact, I think we only had one because it came with a carriage and horses. Unfortunately, the ponies were around for longer. She loved them. They made me wince, but I had to embrace them. Imagine my guilt when she told her daddy, at the age of 4, that she wanted to ask for ponies for her birthday, but she thought she'd better not because Mummy didn't like them. Mummy had to tell her that it didn't matter what Mummy thought - if she wanted something so much, she should always feel free to ask for it.

So, yes, we had princesses and ponies, but at the same time, she was obsessed (for she's a bit like her mother, that way, she doesn't really do casual interest, it's all or nothing), with planets and space. On our study wall is a picture she painted at nursery depicting the sun and all the planets, including Sedna, which had a temporary flirtation with that status.

Her pre-school DVD of choice was Walking with Dinosaurs. To this day, she remains fascinated by both space and dinosaurs. She was thrilled when one of her school topics this year was space. They had to invent their own planet. She was having none of this call the planet after some bloke business - hers was Aphrodite.

While the girls at her school have been getting more interested in fashion and make up, she's been catching up on almost 50 years of Doctor Who. She loves the old stuff too, especially if it involves Tom Baker. I am having trouble convincing her of Sylvester McCoy's merits, though. I mean, how can anyone think Silver Nemesis is boring?

She's blossoming into a geek with attitude now - she went to school the other day with her towel, for Towel Day, in celebration of Douglas Adams' work.

I've been quite horrified to see men I thought were sane and rational have a complete hissy fit at the sight of their son in a tutu or wearing cloppy shoes. There was one guy who, actually, turned out to be a complete nightmare, whose son just loved dressing up in feather boas and Princess dresses, the more garish the better.  This sort of thing is ignorant, homophobic nonsense, which could cause untold harm one day.

Our philosophy has always been that of course we're going to inculcate some of our values into our daughter. All parents do, and it's not usually a bad thing. However, we also wanted to give her the space to be herself from the start. Clearly a child can't and shouldn't be expected to take life changing decisions, but their tastes and aptitudes need to be respected.

And I'll miss those ponies when they're gone. Don't ever tell anybody that.