Military Wives: Great Song, Great Cause and Sexist Drivel

I don’t listen much to the radio these days and I don’t watch X-factor so my awareness of the UK music scene is virtually non-existent. Occasionally it will rise up to let me know something but otherwise it’s as if we are in completely different universes. So, until two days ago, I had never heard of ‘Military Wives’; through some news item I learned that they were number 1. Anyway, after watching another news item on Channel 4 about them and hearing snippets of the song, I thought I better go onto YouTube to check it out.

Would it be cheesy to say I like it? Because, actually, I kinda do. I can imagine it growing on me too. Plus the lyrics are flexible enough to mean something both specifically to military wives and to more generally to all of us. And it is a perfect single for Christmas, even if it’s not a Christmas song.

However, whilst I  think the song is great and the charities for which it raises funds worthy, I sort of object to the notion of ‘Military Wives’ because it is a bit sexist. It does pander to a traditional image of the soldiers and their spouses and of the family – man goes of to war/work, woman stays at home. ‘Military Wives’ might be visually appealing and it’s great that those who have been in the background have found their voice (although maybe they always had it and no one was listening). But as I watched the video, the big elephant in the recording studio were the ‘Military Husbands’.

There is no definitive image of what a military husband is; we all know what the image of the military wife is. And, the support groups for spouses are dominated by civilian women, so the activities and functions are going to be geared toward this demographic. Husbands of female soldiers have minimal social outlets, and so it becomes difficult for some of them to truly understand their wives’ duties and responsibilities.” (Pamela Stokes Eggleston, ‘Are Military Divorce Rates Really Rising?‘, Blogger News Network, 16 June 2008)

I don’t know how many ‘Military Husbands’ there are but we know they exist, such as Carl Bryant, the widower of Corporal Sarah Bryant, the first British female soldier to die in Afghanistan. Now maybe women in general have been particularly oppressed compared to men. I was horrified to hear one of the women in ‘Military Wives’ refer to a joke about Army babymakers. But one only has to read Carl’s funeral speech to know that being a Military Spouse is an experience that is not about gender.

I also noted in from the music video that it was very much about heterosexual spousal relationships. There didn’t appear to be any reference to civil partnerships. Furthermore, what about all the unmarried officers? Surely their parents and siblings, or long term partners, must be like Military Spouses in a sense.

Now I get that this song is the result of a BBC TV programme and that brings its own limitations. However, I would think that British state television, funded by the taxpayer, would seek to be more representative in its output.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that the above criticism should be a disincentive to buying the single. It is a good song and it does raise money for a worthwhile cause. But it perhaps raises questions about how we treat the military and their families and also how far we’ve really come in terms of sexual equality.

Seminar: Law and the Power of Feminism

This week, I attended an amazing seminar given by Professor Rosemary Auchmuty on “Law and the Power of Feminism: how marriage lost its power to oppress women”. This post is a straight summary of Auchmuty’s talk, without commentary from me.

The title was a twist on a 1989 book by Carol Smart called “Feminism and the Power of Law”, in which Smart suggested that law was not that important for feminism and women’s liberation. The irony is that in the last 20 years, there have been an increasing number of legal solutions to the problem of sexual discrimination, most recently legal protection for cohabitants and same sex relationships.

Auchmuty was interested in the decline of marriage in the UK over the past 40 years. (She emphasised a lot during the talk that her research focused on marriage in the mainstream population in the UK and her conclusions cannot be transposed to specific groups in the UK or to other countries.) She felt that no one had given a satisfactory explanation for the decline and why unmarried cohabitation had trebled in the last 30 years. It was too simplistic to put it down to a change in social attitudes, because the obvious question is why did social attitudes change.

The status of marriage has changed from the only possible option for women to just another lifestyle choice. Auchmuty’s conclusion is that feminism is the most important contributor to the decline. The general lack of pressure to marry, which came about a result, has done more to give women independence than any appeal to legal protection.

However, Auchmuty said that the decline in marriage couldn’t have happened without a number of pre-requisites. Firstly, there was the sexual revolution, a more permissive society, the Pill, greater openness about sex – it gave as much freedom to men as women. Secondly, there were the higher expectations that came with better education and more jobs. Finally, there was the reform of the divorce laws – as the marriage rate has declined, the divorce rate has increased, meaning that fewer and fewer people are actually being married each year.

Feminism (or second wave feminism) grew out of the increasing pressures on women as a result of the above changes. Auchmuty argued that its four pillers – equal pay, equal education/jobs, contraception and abortion on demand and 24 hour childcare – would enable women as participants in society. It’s that that caused the decline to happen. Obviously, progress has been made on all of these but there is arguably some way to go.

The way that feminist ideas spread was through consciousness-raising. It started with small groups of women coming together to theorise and strategise about women’s shared experiences. As more and more people came together, what started off as “sounding ridiculous” became mainstream.

Women’s improved economic status and prosperity came about not through legal protection but because women ignored the law. Auchmuty’s said that this showed that women needed to take charge of their own destinies and were not victims needing protection.

It’s possible that I may have missed out some of what Auchmuty said in my notes. Also, I am writing as someone who had limited knowledge of feminist texts. It’s possible that none of the above is new to experienced feminists.

 

 

My Archimedes moment (via From Tweet to Thesis)

I have been interested in the origin of PhD research and I have started a new blog to collect individual accounts. Here is my first post, about how I came up with my topic. Let’s hope it’s not the last.

I came up with PhD research topic in the shower. Over the previous three years, while working as a paralegal, I was given the opportunity to manage my employer's corporate social responsibility policy. I am not sure why the managing partner decided to select me but I think it might have been something to do with that 'diatribe' about cars. Possibly, the biggest challenge was reconciling the tension between my colleagues as particular individuals … Read More

via From Tweet to Thesis

From paternalism to parental society

Two days ago, I wrote about how the Tea Party’s resistance might be a good thing for America. Not necessarily because of the policies they espouse (that’s not what this post is about). The Tea Party in the US and the anti-cuts coalition in the UK are in fact two sides of the same coin, that coin being the rising up of society through mass grassroots movements to remind government where they come from and what their purpose is.

As I wrote before, the state has traditionally been seen as paternalistic, with responsibility forlooking after a childlike society. This view still resonates today, with current political philosophies such as libertarian paternalism. A father is still a father, no matter how easy going he is. In the feminist critique, however, the alignment of the state with one particular gender has created opposition. Most obviously, this has been between the sexes, but,  where the feminine has come to represent the uncivilised or irrational, this also means between races, socioeconomic groups and between man and the environment. These ‘others’ of the white male have always been subject to oppression. It is this inherent gender polarity, says Jessica Benjamin in The Bonds of Love, that is the problem.

By eliminating gender polarity, the question becomes no longer who is the mother or who is the father but who is the parent. But we are not talking about an ungendered parent, but one who is bisexual or bi-gendered – that is, one who has attributes that have traditionally been identified as male and attributes traditionally identified as female. The important thing is that it is the parent who begets the child. So, if the state is the parent, say, who does the state beget. Does the state create society?

Benjamin argues from her psychoanalytic feminist perspective that the child identifies with the father in order to differentiate itself from the mother. Before this, from the child’s point of view, the father essentially doesn’t exist. In other words, the child created the father  then gave up power to him. This is the obvious flaw with the notion of a paternal state.

Yes, the environment (Mother Nature, say) can be said to have ‘given  birth to’ human beings in an evolutionary sense – according to how God designed the system, obviously – but it is the forming of societies that led to the creation of the state to govern societal relations. So, in reality, society is the parent of the state, with the responsibility to make sure that state behaves well (whatever that means).

The problem in many Western liberal democracies has been apathy in society. Voter turnout has often been quite low and this has allowed to the state to get away with proverbial murder, whether it be the Iraq war, the undermining of civil liberties, massive over spending and borrowing, large scale public sector cuts and lax regulation of the financial services industry, to name a few. But what the Tea Party movement, the anti-cuts coalition, the ‘Stop the War’ protests in 2003, the larger than usual turnout in the UK General Election followed by the forming of coalition , show is the importance of a powerful society, standing up for what it believes to be right and keeping government accountable. This is the parent’s job in relation to the child. When the parent can’t be bothered , children think they can do anything they want or they live in a fantasy world.

The state is the eternal child.

This doesn’t mean that the state doesn’t lack any power at all. As any child knows, parents can be out of touch with the times, so children do need to ‘educate’ parents as well. But obviously a child cannot respond to the parent in the same way that the parent responds to the child. But what’s important is that there is a dialogue or dialectical relationship between the parent and the child, the society and the state, where anti-thesis and thesis come together to form a synthesis, but even if they don’t, both understand the other better.

But even more important is that parents cannot be like children and children cannot be like parents. The Tea Party caucus can be the parent as part of society, but it cannot play that role if it is in government. There is a reason why the government is made up of ministers and secretaries, they have to take the more deferential or submissive role of a child. But this redefinition of the state/society relationship also means that we must abandon the idea of Montesquieu‘s three branches of government. Really, the legislature and the judiciary should rightly be seen as the highest levels of society, since their role is to keep the executive in check and acting in accordance with societal values.

Perhaps the parental society is the true Big Society – big, because it’s about not being a child anymore, it’s about growing up and taking its responsibilities seriously. It has nothing to do with a retrenchment of the state in terms of services provided. No, a small state is one that acts with the humility of a child towards the society that created it and gave it life.

Additional thought

Perhaps the current democracy movements in the Middle East are also an example of the dialectic between paternalism to parentalism. In which case NATO’s intervention in Libya must be like the reality tv show Supernanny, who comes in to help the despairing parent. So, it’s still questionable then.

The Erotics of the Debt Ceiling

So, according to the general gist of the media coverage, there’s just under a week to go to financial armageddon. If the US government cannot get Congress to agree to a lifting of the debt ceiling, it won’t be able to service its debts and pay its bills and…well, to be honest, beyond America, I am not entirely clear on the next bit.

I am actually kinda curious. A bit disappointed that Greece hasn’t defaulted yet, given that all the pundits are talking about the exposure of European banks. It’s a bit like a disappointing porn film. Maybe it’s just my sado-masochistic fantasies LOL. The thought of the world’s biggest economy defaulting on its debts is…well, let’s just say that SOMETHING has to go down I guess you could say that the Democrats want to keep it up with a good hand job. The Tea Party, on the other hand, want to service it with a good whipping (and you thought they were the ultra conservatives). Honestly, how’s a country to decide.

On the other hand, when the choice is between being masturbated by Hilary Clinton verses being whipped by Michelle Bachman dressed in black rubber, it’s a bit of a no-brainer.

On a more serious note, I suppose one could say that national debt really is a type of phallus – you know what they say about countries with massive debts, my debt is bigger than your debt, that sort of thing. Perhaps it is penis envy on the part of governments with smaller debts that masquerades as concern for the regional or world economy. I don’t know. But whether it is ‘penis envy’ or concern, it is arguably in response to the criticisms from the wider society, including the markets and the media. This isn’t in itself a bad thing.

The state has traditionally been seen as paternal. It still resonates now, particularly with current political philosophies such as libertarian paternalism and the nudge agenda. In this respect, therefore the paternal state is asking the maternal society (represented by Congress) to, well, I think you get the picture by now. But this whole gender polarity is perhaps a part of the problem.

Where does the state come from, for a start? It is born out of or created by society. Indeed, as per Jessica Benjamin’s psychoanalytic feminist critique of paternalism, it is people forming larger and larger groups that set up a system to govern their relations. Society only identifies with a rational, paternal state to disidentify itself from Mother Nature. So, in reality, therefore, the state is the child of society, yet the child has been given the power to dominate the parent.

Now of course it is up to the parent how they bring up the child, but if the child does something wrong, then it is surely the responsibility of the parent to discipline. This of course is the basis of the accountability of governments to the people and society. As much as it pains me to say this, perhaps the Tea Party may have a point (god, I feel so dirty, especially after the sado-masochism). Barack Obama has likened the national debt to a credit card bill. Well, I am not a parent, so may be one who is can tell me whether, if your child maxes out the credit card, do you ring up the company to increase the limit?

What makes a man?

I’ve spent the last couple of days at a conference for postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers working in the area of law, gender and sexuality. I was presenting a paper on the impact of incentives on the relationship between society and state. But the whole conference was fascinating – every speaker had something interesting to say. But I think this is going to be one of those events which could change my life.

One particular speaker spoke on research that she is doing concerning the treatment of children who are born intersex, that is born with genitalia and/or secondary sexual characteristics from two sexes. The parental response, understandably, is to push for ‘corrective’ surgery that makes the child into a ‘normal’ boy or girl. I found this presentation particularly challending because it went to the heart of  the most basic label by which I identify myself. Am I male because that’s how I was born or because I brought up that way? What is it that makes me a man?

In Genesis 1:27, “God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them”.

This is often taken by Christians to mean that God created two sexes, male and female, and that, along with other verses, he intended for marriage to be between a man and woman only. Now, with sexual orientation being based on sexual attraction and feelings, I can see how easy it is to argue, rightly or wrongly, that sexual orientation is a choice. But, with intersex, we are talking about an actual physical condition which can be seen and touched. It is difficult to argue that God did not create people as intersex. In other words, there are people who are created male and female. So, I wonder whether Genesis 1 could be reinterpretated to mean than individual human beings comprise attributes that are commonly known as both male and female. If that is the case, then it is difficult to argue that marital relationships can only be heterosexual in nature.

Remaking the world

Given the times that he wrote in (late 18th to early 19th centuries), it is not surprising that Hegel does not have much to say about the environment. Not too mention frustrating if one is doing research in environmental law. But, there are hints of a connection between humanity and the environment. At the beginning of The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate, he says that the hostility of the environment (represented by the Flood of the Bible) was a result of man’s hostility to it and each other. As part of my phd thesis, I am using a psychoanalytic feminist reading of Hegel to develop a dialectical account of the relationships between society, law and the environment.

It is a lot easier to see that the environment affects the way we live than the effect we have on the environment. Of course, the most obvious manifestation of this effect is in pollution. But, apparently, scientists are saying that we are moving into a new geological epoch, the Antropocene, where we are literally making the world in our image (i.e. rotten to the core).

In a sense, geoengineering isn’t something we do to solve the problem of climate change. It is the cause of climate change. Instead of being radiated back into space, the carbon dioxide remains trapped near the planet. That’s a hell a lot of energy, and it is expressed as ice melting, water heating, increased cloudcover, etc. Reinsurer Munich Re said that “the only plausible explanation” for 2010′s catastrophes, the drought, heatwave and fires across Russia and the mega-floods in Pakistan, Australia, Brazil and elsewhere was partly global warming.

I don’t even know what to call this post

It’s been a whole week since I have last posted. The last few days have just been so hectic, with the last minute arrangements for an academic symposium last Friday. But I must say, everything worked out really well. I was amazed at all the positive comments I received afterwards and during the weekend and it really made it all worthwhile. Not that that’s why I organised the event but it’s good to know that others got something out of it.

I now need to finish a paper that I am presenting at another workshop this Friday, so I am not going to blog too long now. But, as part of the paper and my PhD thesis, I try to create a model for describing the relationship between society, the state and the environment,  by using feminist discourses to draw a line from Hegel’s philosophy to the UK government’s definition of household. Obviously, I am not going to going into too many details for the moment but this has helped me to see the Hegellianism of East 17 (or, more specifically, one of their songs).

 

Try telling that to the masses…

The further down the research path I am going, the more difficult I am finding to actually explain what my research is to non-academics (i.e. friends, family and acquaintences). I mean, how exactly do you tell someone who has not studied philosophy or any particular philosophy about the inner depth of Hegel. After all, a year ago, I was one of them. He’s not the easiest person to read (understatement of the year), even though I do think his philosophy and particular readings of it describe this world exactly.

But what amazes me is that there are so many different ways to read Hegel. Towards the beginning of the year, Hegel was, for me, an arch liberalist economically and socially. Now, I am starting to see the more socially conservative, statist work that influenced the likes of Marx. Everyone says that Hegel was an extremely liberal Christian but I can see quite clearly a philosophical compatibility with orthodox (i.e. conservative) Christianity. And to confuse everything, there is something here for feminists and environmentalists, as long as you go down the psychoanalytical route of Jessica Benjamin. Go figure!

So, as far as any of my social circle knows, my research is about the way that the state uses incentives to encourage social responsibility, particularly recycling. Feels incomplete but so much easier.