"A critique of SlutWalk Singapore? Try again." by Desirée Lim.

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ETA 22 June 2011: You can read Ben Cheah's reply to Desirée Lim's piece and Lim's further deconstruction of that email at her Facebook note. And if one's feeling extra intrepid, one can witness more FAIL from Cheah here: (TRIGGER WARNING - and yes, you have to copy and paste the address if you really want to feel the pain) https://www.facebook.com/notes/benjamin-cheah/the-blame-dialogues/183967081658348. As far as the farm is concerned, we're no longer entertaining Cheah's rubbish on this subject.
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Readers will remember our 'favourite' rape-victim-blaming, Rational Male Blogger^TM Benjamin Cheah from a while back. Well, Cheah has resurfaced from what little manhole in which he resides to offer more useless cents (and sense) on the proposal to host SlutWalk in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. The farm is honoured and most delighted to host our first guest post, this lovely response to Cheah by frequent #sgfeminists contributor, Desirée Lim. This is x-posted here.
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Today I came across a blog post titled "Slutwalk: noble but misguided" by Benjamin Cheah. I am personally for Slutwalk and am pleased that it's coming to Singapore, but as I believe it's important to critique the things we support, I decided to read it. I hoped to read something that could shed light on SlutWalk's shortcomings and limitations in a Singaporean context, which I have been ruminating over the last few days: boy was I disappointed. If anything, it's shown me, all the more, how goddamned pervasive the exact attitudes SlutWalk stands against are, "academically" expressed or not, and how important it is so rally against them. Here is a brief response.

SlutWalk Singapore x Kuala Lumpur’s Facebook page says that one of its goals is ‘to stop victim-blaming in sexual assault, which is a crime that has nothing to do with what we wear or even sex.’ This reveals a dangerous misunderstanding of sexual assault.

Clothing matters. Rapists prefer women who wear clothes that are easy to remove. Rapists want to do the deed as quickly as possible, to minimise risk to themselves. The more time they spend removing clothes, the more time the victim has to defend herself and call attention to the rape-in-progress. Rapists aren’t necessarily turned on by scantily clad targets – but they will prefer targets who are easier to attack.

Naturally, this paragraph displays an excellent understanding of sexual assault, far superior to that of Slutwalk's! So rapists regularly sit around evaluating women's attire, poised to attack the first woman who has clothes that are "easy to remove".

Rapist: "Hmmm. This one's wearing a jacket, so nah. Shit, that one is wearing stockings and ripping them off is going to hinder my rape, so I'll let her off. Damn it, HER dress has BUTTONS on!"

The next time I walk out in a dress with a zip down the back (I can't think of any other article of clothing that would be easier to remove - maybe my old sweatpants that are loose around the waist and can thus be swiftly yanked down?), God help me. In fact, I should conduct sartorial experiments, just in case - does anybody want to volunteer to rip off a series of my outfits so I can be absolutely sure?

A protest march is a public expression of group opinion – but rapists don’t care. They don’t see themselves as part of society. (More on that below.) Protests can’t pressure someone who won’t feel it.

Workshops, fora and meetings attract people who have a stake in the topic. Rapists do not. They won’t show up. They may know someone who attended such a workshop – so they’ll just take her and her friends off their target list, if they care. Or put them on the list, if they care that much. (Again, more below.)

How does this invalidate SlutWalk? Cheah seems to be suggesting that it is pointless because rapists are not going to join women in the march, speaking out against victim-blaming. By the same logic, protest marches against any kind of injustice would be useless as well, since the perpetrators are probably not going to join in. Moreover, did anyone ever suggest that SlutWalk would stop rape? I doubt so. What we're more interested in is changing preponderant public attitudes towards rape - the very attitudes that Cheah himself, as I will show later, cheerfully propounds. He later continues along the same lines: A predatory rapist isn’t moved by popular outrage. He doesn’t even see himself as part of society. A social rapist doesn’t care…and may turn on ‘his’ woman if he learns she took part in something like SlutWalk. It’s not rape to him; he’s just putting her in his place. Right, and we feminists simplistically believe that SlutWalk can "move" and dissuade rapists. The day a protest march moves rapists to tears when they think about their wrongdoings ("This is it! I'll NEVER RAPE AGAIN!"), I'll eat my hat.

The heart of SlutWalk’s stance on rape is its attack on ‘victim-blaming’. SlutWalk believes that society pins all the ‘blame’ of a rape on the victim instead of the rapist. On the surface, this is only logical. A rapist committed a rape, therefore the rapist is to blame. But this is a shallow way of looking at rape – the rape probably occurred because the victim didn’t look after herself.

What did I tell you? Can a deep, incisive, correct way of looking at rape point us back to (gasp) victim-blaming? If you can bear to, let's read on.

Predatory rapists like to ambush their targets. The key word is ambush. They wait in dark, secluded areas, and assess everybody who walk by. As soon as they see a target, they strike. Predators can be avoided by going where they can’t hide and not provoking an attack. Personal safety is beyond the scope of this blog, but for more information, there are plenty of books and websites available. I favour Marc MacYoung, Gavin De Becker, and Rory Miller. While geared towards an American audience, much of what they say applies across cultures and borders. More importantly, they make sense, and their tactics work.

Social rapists are people you interact with. To avoid being raped by them, cut them out of your life, and spread the word about them. Potential rapists tend to fit a profile: if you know what to look for, you can take appropriate measures. They’re not that difficult to spot; they tend to be misogynistic bullies or slick charmers.

Most rapes occur because a woman took a risk, and got burned. She took a risk by walking down a dark alley, by ignoring the three young men lined up against a wall, by leaving a charming handsome stranger alone with her drink, by continuing to live with her abusive husband, and she paid the price. But these are avoidable risks. Most crimes occur this way. It’s controllable, even eliminated in some cases.

Now, two things. I first need to point out how ludicrous the second paragraph is. So, to avoid being raped, I am responsible for developing an internal Rapist Detector that enables me to systematically de-friend any rapist that could inhabit my friendspace. What's more, Cheah claims that they're "not that difficult to spot". I would love to personally introduce him to all my friends, just so he can tell me, afterwards, who is most likely to rape me - lest I suffer the consequences. It's easy! Cheah also conveniently ignores the fact that many rapists are people that you cannot easily disassociate yourself from with the click of a button - what about family members? Work superiors? Husbands you have young children with? Is it my fault that I am raped, or is it their fault for raping me? No prizes for the correct answer.

Secondly, being strongly against victim-blaming doesn't mean that we can't encourage people to be careful. There is a reason why I avoid walking alone in the dark by myself. It is perfectly natural for me to ask a female friend to send me a text when she reaches home safely. Before I left for university my mother gave me a flashlight/alarm hybrid that I was supposed to set off if someone tried to assault me (I never used it). The problem arises, however, when we say, not only that rape happens because we fail to do these things, but that we, as Cheah implies, have it coming.

Let me use a simple example. This point has been explained to death by more capable feminists, so feel free to skip over it, unless you need to be disabused. I am an amateur sailor who decides to go boating in an extraordinarily violent storm. No doubt, I am taking a risk because I choose to go boating in a storm. If I drown as a result, it will be my foolishness at fault, even if no one will say it at my funeral. How is this different from a woman who takes a risk by walking down a dark alley that might be populated by rapists? The key here, which so many people fail to grasp, is agency. Storms have no agency, but rapists (hopefully) do. A storm will continue to rage no matter what, but rapes happen because rapists actively decide to rape. A woman who does - or fails to - do x is in no danger of rape if men do not choose to rape. If we blame the victim and not the rapist, we are assuming that rapists, like storms, are an uncontrollable constant we should accept as a fact of life. Men rape. That is normal. They can't help it. If we believed this, I seriously think it would be a huge insult to men in general.

With the aid of another analogy:

Either: To stop rape, women take EVERY SINGLE POSSIBLE PRECAUTION to make sure they don't get raped. This includes, as Cheah suggests, wearing clothing that is difficult to take off (like thick leather onesies with conspicuous locks on) and fine-tuning their aforementioned Rapist Sensors. Disappointed, potential rapists give up and go home.

Or: Potential rapists stop themselves from raping.

Either: To stop ourselves from being hit by drunk drivers, we make sure we TAKE EVERY SINGLE POSSIBLE PRECAUTION to make sure we don't. We wear fluorescent clothing and refuse to cross roads, ever. Otherwise, it is our fault for being hit.

Or: People stop drink-driving.

Which looks more sensible? I leave it to the reader.

A journo's juvenile jeers

Journalist Joyce Hooi has weighed in on the whole degradation-of-divorce-proceedings-into-a-flesh-parade barfery that my dear comrade Porky talked about. Hooi's argument, as far as she has one, is that there's no problem with courts treating all divorcing women as hawkers peddling themselves as commodities in a jolly old meat market, because that's precisely what divorcing women are. Products which can be helpfully ranked to assist browsing consumers, since all straight men are exactly the same and can classify all women on the same one linear scale of what they want in a mate.

I excerpt Ms Hooi's offering with humble observations of my own.

THIS weekend, when men in bars all over Singapore size up the pickings available, they will use a new lexicon for attractiveness: a woman will be either 'lump sum' or 'monthly' instead of 'hot' or 'have a few more drinks before you look again'.

Women are "pickings", to be rated by a cost to quality ratio. Charming.

This was triggered by the divorce settlement of a 37-year-old Vietnamese Singaporean woman in which another judge had asked if the woman in question was attractive.

Why is her background even mentioned? As a commenter on Piggy's entry pointed out, you have to wonder if this question has arisen in part because of the nasty stereotypes Singaporeans have about Vietnamese women.

From the subsequent appeal of the lady in question - the maintenance sum for her son had been cut from $12,000 to $600, among several things - I have no choice but to imagine that she's the spitting image of Gisele Bundchen.

Pay attention here, this is a real live example of sexist culture at work. The original report was quite careful to state that "attractiveness" isn't assessed purely on physical terms - which doesn't make the assessment any less problematic, since it still assumes that all divorcing women will and should get remarried, and that women are essentially interchangeable commodities of varying quality. But Ms Hooi has neatly elided this to ensure the discussion is all about women's appearances again, thus using a bad judgment to further an even worse cultural trope! Skilful work.

The cut in child maintenance might not have been solely influenced by the woman's attractiveness, of course, and might have something to do with the fact that $12,000 is a lot of Xbox 3 games, but that's fodder for another column.

Please don't write it. We don't like you.

In any case, enraged feminists (a redundancy, if there ever was one) have objected to the idea that looks have any bearing on alimony.

Yeah, we're pissed off. Gee, you noticed? Quite obviously, being frequently pissed off can only mean we don't really have anything to be pissed off about. It's a mathematical law:

{ IFF* Cause = 0, THEN feminist = enraged }

*IFF: If and only if

Her name is Joyce Hooi, and logic is her weapon.

The two main links in the argument that they object to are: attractiveness is objective, and attractiveness is an indicator of how quickly you can get someone to say 'I do'.

The short rebuttal to both arguments is: surely you kid.

You need to make the long ones, because the short one is lousy.

Actually, on second thought, please don't.

The longer one to the first concern about the subjectivity of attractiveness is this: while there might be room for quibbling about how someone is more of a 7 than an 8, the gulf between a 2 and an 8 is wide enough for most people to see (unless, of course, you're Arnold Schwarzenegger).

Railing against the objective definition of beauty is like saying that America's Next Top Model is bunk; it is futile and makes everyone suspect that the person doing the complaining is ugly.

She's doing the logic thing again! Everybody take cover! Here I refer you to the frolics of some friends of the barn on Twitter (or Clucker, as I would like to see it renamed):

illyrica: Joyce Hooi playground reasoning: "If you object you are ugly haha!" OK I'm ugly. Big fucking deal. This makes me wrong how?

MizHalle: she considers ugly people to be worth less than non-ugly ones so she doesn't have to listen to them
and if you disagree with her article you must be ugly.
So therefore, if you disagree with her article she automatically doesn't have to listen to you!
And therefore, she's automatically always right!
Circular logic FTW! *shoots things*

As a matter of fact, Hooi is simply wrong. It may well be the case that in the artificial playground of Hollywoodified media, there is an "objective" scale of "attractiveness" against which people can be ranked, according to their ability to meet some arbitrary checklist of requirements.

But back on planet Earth, when it comes to the daily grind (heh, heh) of people meeting others, and getting to know one another, and deciding who they like or don't like, and fitting their values and tastes and senses of humour and different sexualities together, and dare I say it falling in love, there simply isn't a scale. We aren't all in the hopeless thrall of the latest Mr & Miss Universe. Many of us yearn for actual people who touch us (giggle) in highly individual ways. There are certainly people who never cultivate brains of their own, and only ever strive for partnerships and marriages as status symbols to be valued in the way that the television producers and the glossy magazine editors tell them to. But they are fewer than they believe, and public policy shouldn't be made around them.

Diversion aside, the other concern - that attractiveness does not have a correlation with chances of remarriage - is naive. Some have brandished the Women's Charter, saying that physical attributes are not mentioned.

The Women's Charter (which begins titillatingly with the definition of 'brothel' but sobers up pretty quickly thereafter) mentions 'income, earning capacity, property and other financial resources' of both parties as some of the determinants of maintenance quantum.

Since marriage is correlated with financial security especially where a woman is concerned, why can't her marriageability be considered part of her earning capacity? The day Donald Trump breaks with tradition and marries a Plain Jane, I will stand corrected.

Open your eyes. Every day people enter relationships and/or marriages that confound the shallow expectations of your sexist media narrative, a narrative which calls them "exceptions" or "oddities" and then pretends they don't exist. "Plain Janes" - that is, the vast majority of normal human beings, who have better things to do than get hung up on boring media stereotypes - get married all the time. Your glib correlations are not borne out by reality.

But also importantly, not everyone wants to get married. Not everyone who gets divorced wants to get remarried. Being married is often, for women, actually quite a bad idea. Not everyone who wants to get remarried can do so to the person of their choice, because same sex marriage is still not possible. The courts of law have no business financially penalising people for not wanting to treat their personal relationships as bargaining currency.

But it gets better. Ms Hooi then tries to pretend she is against reducing people to their appearances and for women's rights:

One of the many studies done found that plain people earn 5-10 per cent less than average-looking people, who in turn earn 3-8 per cent less than those who are good-looking.

...

If a relative lack of attractiveness qualifies as an impediment to your capacity to make a living, it confounds me that people would object that the courts try to redress that imbalance. Some have railed against the idea that women rely this much on marriage. But they do; studies in America have shown that single parents consider their economic situation far more precarious than married parents.

And if you argue on the basis that marriage is simply a technicality that can be postponed even by good-looking women, then the court's approach can be seen to be incidentally progressive. Even if a beautiful women never marries, she is likely to be better taken care of by the workplace and quicker to find a companion who will split the COE with her, compared to a plainer woman.

How exactly are the courts redressing any imbalance here whatsoever? Is the daily objectification and prejudice faced by women over our appearances going to be reduced by this judgment, or is it strengthened by this institutional support? (Hint: the answer is in the first paragraph of your column.)

It might also be good to ask what, in reality, is the "advantage" that Ms Hooi believes "more attractive" women enjoy over "less attractive" ones? Consider the experience of job seekers in China:

In China, sexual harassment and being asked to sleep with interviewers in a tough job market was a very real concern to my friends in their final year of university, and they themselves attributed it to men being valued so highly that women are asked to ‘give a little something extra’ to be considered.

The imbalance that needs redress can't be seen for what it really is without understanding the role gender plays in this. The problem isn't "hot" and "ugly" women battling it out in a vacuum-sealed room of our own. The problem is misogyny, which women are encouraged to ignore while we battle one another for the scraps tossed to the "pretty". The problem is misogyny, and the solution won't be found by defining women as commodities whose value depends on heterosexual male use.

Family law, not Ms Singapore pageantry, pls.

The farm was fazzled this morning when it learnt that a court judge called into question the attractiveness of a divorcee in deciding the quantum and form of her maintenance. The case was brought to public attention as the claimant filed for a review of the judgement on grounds of biasness. I append the contentious portion of the article, with emboldening to my whimsy (read the full article after the cut):

Divorce and the attractive woman
Straits Times
K. C. Vijayan
3 June 2011, Friday

A JUDGE who asked during a divorce settlement hearing if the wife involved was attractive was not being biased, the High Court has ruled.

Dismissing a move by the woman for a judicial review of the case, Justice Choo Han Teck said that was not an irrelevant question for a judge to ask.

He said the court could take into account a woman's prospects of remarriage when deciding the financial support she should receive from her former husband, and whether it ought to be a lump sum rather than monthly payments.

Justice Choo's judgment, released yesterday, explained why he rejected the woman's application for a judicial review to set aside the court orders to settle maintenance issues between her and her former husband.

Lawyers contacted yesterday said that in deciding on maintenance for a divorced woman, the court could consider her attractiveness.

That did not mean only her looks but also other attributes, such as her character, that might affect her prospects of marrying again, said family lawyer Koh Tien Hua.

'The possibility of remarriage is one of the factors the court considers in deciding on the quantum of maintenance payments the woman should get,' he said.

Monthly maintenance payouts lapse when a woman remarries.

Family lawyer Rajan Chettiar said a woman's remarriage prospects were not a factor in the maintenance assessment, pointing to the Women's Charter and his own experience in dealing with family cases.

The Charter lists the woman's age, financial needs and status among factors to be considered when deciding on maintenance.

But the courts have the discretion to consider attractiveness as well when deciding on alimony.

Before I continue, I'd like to remind readers that we on the farm have many issues with the current outdated conception of the Women's Charter and call for a more comprehensive review/amendment. But let's focus today's discussion squarely on the problems of including a woman's attractiveness and the possibility of her remarrying in determining the quantum and/or form of her maintenance (monthly pay-outs or lump-sum).

Alimony is based on the idea that a man entering a marriage becomes legally obliged to provide for his wife throughout and past that marriage. ("Till death do us party; in sickness and in health, etc" ya?) The obligation however terminates when the receiving party enters into a new marriage/contract, as said woman now has a new partner who's taking on these obligations.

Upon dissolution of the marriage, the former husband is automatically obliged to provide for his ex-wife. The maintenance sum is usually dependent on the wealth and financial needs of both parties, although admittedly this is sometimes hard to pin down accurately. There are also many good reasons that people may choose to file for a lump-sum pay out (eg. ailing ex-husbands, cutting ties and moving on, etc) and we respect people's and the court's decision on this. However, we think that, by default, maintenance should be made monthly. This will, after all, be quite befitting of the term "maintenance".

By tying alimony to the *perceived* marriageability of a woman, the court not only assumes but basically frames marriage as a goal for divorcing women. While remarriage is a proposition we're perfectly all right with, should divorcees find someone new (or old) with whom they wish to reenter the institution all over again, there needs to be an understanding that a failed marriage - for many reasons - may very well mean the end of the pursuit of marriage (but not love) for many - this can have little to absolutely no relation to one's looks at all.

As learned as our judiciary may be, I doubt it's vested with the premonitory powers to accurately assess the marriageability of people. Does the courts' assessment, which apart from looks also includes "other attributes, such as her character" (OOoooOohhh, how holistic!), necessarily lead to the divorcees' getting married? What happens when changes (physical and otherwise) occur after the ruling, and these women suddenly drop in ratings (by the courts' standards, not ours) to get remarried? We can haz maintenance review, puhlease? This doesn't even begin to touch on the fact that someone being attractive (by whoever's standards and terms) doesn't mean that they can/will get re/married.

Let's consider the scenario between two women: Ms A who's deemed more likely to get remarried and Ms B who's deemed less likely. Say both women remarry say some 40 years down the road, when they're all of 75 years old: does the court then suggest that Ms A deserves to receive less money than Ms B in the interim 30 years because... What? She didn't do her best to get herself hitched to the chap much earlier, in which case her maintenance term would have terminated itself? If you sense a disconnect here, it's likely because there really isn't any relevance in how much maintenance a woman deserves based on her marriageability.

When did our jurisprudence enter the remit of beauty pageantry to be able to (legally) determine the physical attractiveness (to the ends of marriageability) of any person? Wait, of course ANY ONE, much less a judge, can determine this! This is because there're no absolute definitions of beauty, so any assessment of it necessarily relies on fancies of the beholder/s. An assessment of a woman's attractiveness, therefore, can really neither be conclusively right nor wrong. It is precisely because of this bloody arbitrariness that one's looks cannot and should not be relevant in the decision-making process of maintenance allocation.

What would possess anyone to even begin to consider a woman's chances of remarrying and her looks to be a legitimate factor of the sum and method of maintenance!?!? I understand certain paternalistic reasons for framing a woman's goals and worth as a wife/mother, and also the over-reliance on the institution of marriage and the extended family network for all sorts of social support (e.g. healthcare, public housing, etc). But these are grossly outdated models of human relations, with entailing problematic policies, that all need revision, instead of being further propped up and encouraged by anyone.

"A woman schlemiel".

In light of Singapore's imminent general elections this year, and the ugliness of sexist dissections people feel entitled to enact upon candidates (e.g. Tin Pei Ling), I thought it'd be timely to share some passages from the Rebecca Traister's Big Girls Don't Cry (an interview with the author), which discusses the sexism and misogyny faced by vice- and presidential candidates - Sarah Palin and Hillary Rodham Clinton, respectively - in the 2008 United States elections.

Breaking from writing conventions, I'm just going to paste the relevant passages without comment or leads. This all seems quite self-explanatory:

It's not that male politicians escaped related evaluation (based on looks) ... The scrutiny was much more intense for Clinton, because women value is intrinsically tied to desirability and attractiveness .... For those who supported her had to downplay her feminine attributes lest she be diminished by objectification. For those who hated her the goal was to humiliate her, and at the same time affirm that she held no alluring power over them. As Shirley Chisholm said decades before, "One distressing thing is the way men react to women who assert their equality: their ultimate weapon is to call them unfeminine. They think she is anti-male; they even whisper that she's probably a lesbian..." (pp76-77)

These points of recognition (of sexism) were about identifying with a certain strain of ill treatment, something feminists are loath to do lest they be accused of capitalising on victimhood. But feminism was born precisely because women faced gendered injustices. To identify and overcome obstacles and resistance was to advance the project of female empowerment ... To see a woman get taunted for being simultaneously frigid and lachrymose and then get teased for her smarts was not to ascribe to her inherently feminine qualities of frigidity, sentimentality, or unsociability. Rather it was to witness femininity as it has historically been cast, especially when it threatened male power structures: as a laughable, silly, unpleasant, or devalued condition. Women had watched a popular version of Hillary Clinton, a front-running candidate with whom they may have had a complicated or cool relationship but whose strengths, weaknesses, achievements, and mistakes had never been traditional or one-dimensional, manipulated to fit into retro molds of lightweight (peevish, unpopular, calculating, shrill) feminine illegitimacy. In a cartoon drawn by Pat Oliphant in the days after New Hampshire a bubbling Clinton is shown at a desk, facing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Osama bin Laden, Lim Jong Il and other menacing men murmuring "Aww, she's sensitive--I had no idea"; "Was it something we said?"; and "Buy her flowers." A thought bubble above Hillary's head reads, "You guys are mean!" and in the corner, a miniature Bill remarks, "This is when PMS goes nuclear." In the face of plenty of good reasons to criticise Hillary Clinton, women now realized that for some it still came down to this: the same twisted characterizations used for centuries to bolster the idea that women were unfit to lead. (pp104-106)

Letters to left-leaning publications and blogs bubbled with enmity toward Clinton. As Katha Pollitt wrote, "Vats of sexist nastiness splattered across the Comments section of hundreds of blogs and websites. It's as if every obscene phone caller and every exhibitionist in America decided to become an amateur political pundit." ... The trouble was that because everyone was liberal and officially down with female empowerment, that many women who couldn't cite actual uses of the words bitch or cunt found themselves troubled by their inability to specify the sexism they sensed. "I don't think anyone in my (progressive) peer group ... would be comfortable saying, 'I'm not ready for a woman president,'" said Alex Seggerman, a twenty-four-year-old art history Ph.D. student. Seggerman was an Obama voter but noticed people making remarks like "She's had plastic surgery" or "Her attitude is off-putting," which she heard as "expressions of some deeper issues with the fact that she is a woman." People can always come up with reasons they don't like the candidate they're not supporting," said Dana Lossia, the Obama-supporting labor lawyer. "But no one disliked Joe Biden or Chris Dodd as much as they dislike Hillary." She's never heard her friends say anything explicit: "[They never say] anything where I could say, 'That's a sexist comment.' It's just that I can't understand why they hate her so much."

It was a contemporary iteration of Betty Friedan's problem that had no name, a maddening cycle of vague hunches and self-righteous denials that left many of us feeling as though we were going insane. Even (Jessica) Valenti was disoriented by it; she was particularly hamstrung because, as she pointed out, she made her living identifying sexism. "You'd think I'd be able to find an example," she said, adding, "Because it's not [always] explicit sexism, it makes it impossible to argue with people, because if you say something, then you're the wackadoo feminist." (pp169-170)

The liberalish radio host Ed Schultz, who had said on air that (Sarah) Palin set off a "bimbo alert", who asked, in conversation with Larry King and Republican Susan Molinari, "What kind of mother is she? Is she prepared to be the vice president? Is she going to be totally focused on the issues?" The Washington Post's Sally Quinn asked if Palin was "prepared for the all-consuming nature of the job ... Her first priority has to be her children. When the phone rings at three in the morning and one of her children is really sick what choice will she make?"

... The feminist writer and lawyer Susan Estrich weighed in, remarking, "No one would be asking these questions if she were a man. No one asked whether Arnold Schwarzenegger should run for governor because he has four children ... This is how the double standard works ... I have no doubt that Barack Obama can count on his fingers the number of times he has been home in the last 19 months to put his two beautiful daughters to bed ... Does this make him a 'bad father'? Should it undercut his claim to the presidency? Of course not?" (pp233-234)

[Palin] was a bad vice-presidential candidate, like bad vice-presidential candidates before her, and her communications team had allowed a prank caller to get through. She was ill-prepared and inarticulate, and her chattiness about how much she liked Sarkozy's model wife, Carla Bruni, was cringey. But progress takes all sorts, and in the pantheon of political leadership there has been thousands of craven, ill-intentioned, pompous, and stupid men. There was no rule that said that in order to make history Palin had to be a decent, honest politician, nor that she was a rocket scientist. Were we to envision true equality in politics, it would involve as many Sarah Palins as it would Hillary Clintons. As Bella Abzug had said, "[The goal is not to see a] female Einstein become an assistant professor. We want a woman schlemiel to get promoted as quickly as a male schlemiel." (p280)

And just to be clear, this farm also attributes sexism as the cause for the imbalance of attention spent between demolishing Tin's political aspiration and other candidates. Head over to Weekday Blues' post to find out why.

When you say or do something sexist and/or misogynistic towards one person, man or woman, you do it to everyone else because you remind us, the everyone else, that we are supposed to have a restrictive place in life too. Don't try to make this them versus us; exceptionalising the hated as someone deserving of discriminatory and violent scorn, then especialising everyone else as different from the pack, like as if we're supposed to feel good about your not being directly bigoted towards us. Oh, looky, Brownie cookies for us! We have your favour and approval. How lovely!

Though the real beauty of exceptionalising it is that it muddles it for us. Makes it difficult for us to call you out, because people don't like to be associated with the scorn, and then be scorned too. Especially not when a large group of people are the culprits of it. Especially not when we least expect our immediate network best friends, greatly admired people, closest of family members, or supposedly most progressive of internet blogs--all of whom supposed to protect and stand with us from all this grotesque discrimination--be the ones promulgating this bullshit.

Don't kid yourself, there's no us and there's no them in social injustices. It hurts every-fucking-one.

On Women's Charter: What About the Menz!?

This is the final week Ministry of Community Development, Youth and Sports (MCYS) is seeking public feedback for the draft Women's Charter (Amendment) Bill 2010. You can download the consultation paper (PDF) that lays out the proposed changes in simple language, or attempt the Amendment Bill (PDF).

Some of the more interesting parts of the proposed amendments are the creation of Children's Development Account where a portion of divorcing parents' shared assets is automatically channelled into for the children involved. Courts will also be empowered variously to crack down on maintenance defaulters. My personal favourite is that "divorcees who are remarrying will be required to declare in the presence of their new spouses, whether they have any maintenance arrears towards their ex-wife or children from their previous marriage(s)."

We on the farm strongly encourage everyone to give MCYS your opinion on changes to the Women's Charter. Now, however, the animals and I are departing from our usual farming duties to present a roundtable discussion we have on the Women's Charter. Gentle readers are free to steal our ideas and submit them officially, because it's very hard for us to explain why farm animals are so concerned about the Charter.

Roundtable Discussion.

Contrary to popular belief of who we are, it is the belief here on the farm that the biggest lacuna in the Amendment Bill is in its maintaining the alimony-only-to-women stance. Last year, Kanwaljit Soin reintroduced the idea of revising the Women's Charter Act to a Family Charter Act [ed: AWARE used to host "Women's Charter to Family Charter" speech transcript here, but not anymore; after the cut, we offer you instead an excerpt of a parliamentary debate by Dr Soin from 1996 when she first introduced the idea], in which maintenance is adjusted to allow husbands to claim maintenance should their wives be the higher earning spouse--I believe it's for shared custody cases.

I think this makes some sense as roles change, and men begin to step up in their caregiving roles. Not to mention, perhaps with such a system in place, we can begin to drop any machoistic shame of being primary care-givers. An adjustment to leave entitlement will also make especial sense for single fathers.

If we focus on the benefit of the children, rather than What About The Menz, there's probably much more that can be done in terms of this bill as well, perhaps latching onto expanding benefits to single parents.

Oh My Goat:
I think there are also men who have some pretty reasonable issues with the Women's Charter. It's not to say that it's unnecessary - it was revolutionary as far as its protection of women was concerned - but there are parts of it that need to evolve with the times.

Maintenance payments, for one, need to be fairer - it doesn't make sense for a father to pay maintenance to a wife (note: not for the child, but for the wife, which is a separate claim altogether) who out-earns him or is more than capable of caring for herself. It was probably unheard of when the Charter was introduced, but it's not so uncommon nowadays.

If you're a husband living a lower middle class sort of existence, your finances are more worse off after a divorce. You frequently find yourself homeless, likely not earning enough to rent another flat and on top of that, you have legal fees and maintenance payments. It's what it is, and yes, men ought to be responsible for their children, but if you're not earning much to start with, it can make you feel like you have the rough end of the deal.

Magical Chicken:
Wholly agree with Oh My Goat. There's no reason whatsoever why gender should become a blanket proxy for financial capacity and contributions, when these are matters which can be reasonably easily assessed by a judge in and of themselves. I was really glad to see Kanwaljit Soin raise this last year. It's actually rather surprising that men (since they are the demographic disadvantaged by the status quo) haven't organised to push for appropriate change themselves. I wonder if there might be some kind of conflict for some men between wanting to support traditional notions of masculinity to shore up their sense of social status, and what's in their actual financial interests. Another example of how patriarchy is an ideology which fucks us all up.

Badly Drawn Pig:
This is why I think the law can take a progressive lead on things. It shouldn't always be a case of the majority, sometimes unaware or unconscious, society setting the pace of things. The law and the government can, in fact, recognise that certain change would be beneficial - I think we've actually got this in practice in many other areas - and effect amendments that would pave the way to mindset changes. A society where legal mechanisms are in place for husbands' receiving maintenance, is a largely different one in which maintenance is afforded only to the wives. We cannot possibly deny the fact that such an arrangement puts ideas in the minds of people, as often is the case such as Rony Tan, who refuses to retract his foul statement on gay people simply because a legal clause is actually in place that in principle criminalises gay men sex.

Poultrygeist:
Like Oh My Goat has said, my primary problem with the Women's Charter is the arbitrary provision requiring a man to maintain his wife, irrespective of the fact that she may have a greater earning capacity. I think the Court now deals with this issue by varying the quantum of maintenance, but I don't think this is enough in the circumstances since the wife will always have the right to apply to Court for maintenance. I think the issue of parity must cut both ways and the law needs to be amended to reflect this.
 
Second, re: maintenance for the child. Legally, both parents are obliged to maintain the child, but perhaps more can be done by the law in a situation where the man's earning capacity is lower than his wife. As Oh My Goat says, there are many fathers out there who feel they've drawn the short straw, especially keeping in mind that care and control of the child usually is awarded to the mother (with the father being granted the right of access) unless there are extenuating circumstances. I would imagine this is really painful in itself.
 
However, it needs to be kept it mind that there is only so much money to go around, especially if the father is earning significantly less, or not at all (as was the case in the article). In these situations, inevitably, maintenance payments are going to be a financial strain, along with legal fees, bills and rent etc. I don't think it's got anything to do with not wanting to help the child - it's not having adequate means to do so, and this is a salient factor which needs to be expressly considered.
 
(But of course with checks to prevent the other side of the coin - recalcitrant fathers who withhold maintenance payments for whatever reason.)

+++
After the cut, read the brilliant parliamentary debate excerpt by the woman who started the ball rolling for all of us, former-NMP and a personal heroine for us on the farm, Dr Kanwaljit Soin; taken from Yawning Bread:

No You're Racist, and Sexist and I'm AWESOME

You may have noticed a cute new webpage floating around the internets called "I Write Like" (not linking). It's a page with a text box where you have to copy and paste (or compose on the spot) a few paragraphs, press a button and you'll get a something you can paste on your blog or Facebook to let everyone know which famous writer you write like. (In case anyone was wondering, I got Margaret Atwood - YAY! - and Dan Brown - kill me now.)

If you've heard of the website, you may also have caught wind of the kerfuffle around the fact that when it first launched, there weren't any female writers in the database of writers you could resemble. A week or so later, there are now 3 female writers (to 37 male writers) all of whom are lily-white. Now I understand that this is just a silly-for-fun website for people to feel briefly thrilled that their name can be used in the same sentence as a famous (or infamous) author (sorta Nicholas Sparks vis-a-vis Cormac McCarthy style), but representation matters, even in trivial things.

Representation matters because our actions are shaped by our environment. Our environment primes us on levels so far below our consciousness that even if we are asked about our motivations, we come up with narratives that, while consistent with how we view ourselves, have nothing to do with reality. A website that uses only white, initially all-male writers to represent how the internet writes, well, the implicit message isn't even all that subtle there.

So people start to comment. Some people cut and paste female writers' texts into the boxes and lol-sob at the male writers they are called instead. Eventually tea berry-blue wrote to the guy who runs "I Write Like". She describes the disheartening and miss-the-point exchange well, but what I want to talk about specifically is this:

Tea,

Thanks for your reply. I’ve added more writers into the database
recently. But I *absolutely* will not add people into the database due
to their race or gender. I will not search for lists of white, black,
Asian, Hispanic, or any other types of people that you _took care to
differentiate_. All people are equal to me, and equality means not
looking at skin color or different types of chromosomes.

I think the question is closed.

–
Dmitry Chestnykh
I Write Like

In other words, it's the I don't think people are different...and since you seem to, YOU'RE SEXIST and also racist.

Honestly, if everyone was so damn equal, why did you only have one kind of person represented? If everyone was all the same to you, then your sample should have approximated what the sampling of writers out there was really like. Include writers like Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Amy Tan, Candace Bushnell, George Eliot, A. S. Byatt, Zadie Smith, Helen Fielding, Monica Ali, Stephenie-frikking-Meyer, Jhumpa Lahiri, Miriam Toews, Tamora Pierce, Holly Black...I could go on. That's just off the top of my head and includes a nice sampling of award winning authors, classics, pop fiction, all women, some of colour. NOT THAT HARD. If gender and race were non-issues for this person, then why the glaring omissions?!

It's because it does matter. And I want to make it very clear that I'm not blaming Dmitry Chestnykh for it in the least. Like the rest of us, he grew up in the same damn world we all did. A world in which whiter is better and where men are main characters. I was talking about priming earlier yeah? Well, we've been primed our whole damn lives to not notice that despite the actual diversity of the world around us, the white male is always the assumed default (Tasha Fierce breaks down the assumed default even in activist circles here). A world in which the only people who don't notice race or gender are the only ones who are the default, and therefore are privileged enough not to. It is also, ironically, a world where we are taught that racism and sexism are bad and that you are a bad person if you're racist or sexist. So people are scared to talk about race or gender. First because any time a light is shone on privilege it does get pretty damn uncomfortable. Secondly because it's as though noticing that people are different qualifies you as some sort of reprobate.

But of course everyone notices race. It starts when we're children, mainly because our parents don't talk about it. It's the same for gender too. Noticing it and talking about it and discussing the deleterious effects of it is how we can fight this shit. It's the opposite of being racist or sexist.

Let's recap. We're not all bad people just because we've grown up drinking the Kool Aid. We're not bad people for noticing differences and diversity. It's not racist or sexist or any-other-ist to make an effort not to under-represent entire populations of people. People that exist in this amazingly diverse and challenging world of ours. The same people whose lives are made worse because we are assumed to be uninterested because we're not talking about it. And while it can be awful to get called out, particularly if you already make efforts to not be racist or sexist, listen because we all have something to learn. Don't just fling it back and start name-calling.

Update: Shakesville's SKM Biblio-vore whose blog can be found here did a quick experiment on "I Write Like", plugging authors' actual works into the engine and seeing what comes out. Interesting and insightful!

Admit impediments

(Confused about the title? See Sonnet 116.)

Faithful visitors to the Barn will know that there is much disquiet among the livestock about the ghastly fetish society has for marriage.

It's a fairly egalitarian fetish, as these things go, shared equally by cranks whose powers are mercifully limited to writing stupid Forum letters and cranks of considerably more influence. Sulthan "Spoilt Princess" Niaz has the benefit of honesty; he at least more or less out-and-out acknowledged that his vision of marriage was unattractive and unpleasant to women. Lee Kuan Yew's "sadness" on behalf of unmarried women (who by his own account are perfectly happy) lacks even that virtue. He just knows, knows, knows, in his infallible bones, that we females* need this thing that we haven't chosen.

And which, according to this excellent article from British newspaper The Guardian, in some developed countries at least, statistically correlates to poorer health and happiness outcomes for women:

In Committed: A Sceptic Makes Peace With Marriage, the follow-up to her international bestseller Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert tries to answer why we make such a hash of it. She uncovers sobering facts about what sociologists call the "marriage benefit imbalance", showing that marriage is an institution that greatly benefits men, not women. A partial list: married men live longer than single men; married men accumulate more wealth than single men; married men are far less likely to die a violent death than single men; married men report themselves to be much happier than single men, and married men suffer less alcoholism, drug addiction and depression than single men. [...] But married women versus single? There's more depression, less career success and less good health in married women and, until recently, a greater chance of dying a violent death – usually at the hands of the men they love.

Only last month another study came out of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany which showed that women who are seven to nine years older than their husbands have a 20% higher mortality rate than if they were the same age. Marrying an older man shortens a woman's life span, but having a young husband reduces it even more, the study found.

In Singapore, you can add the fact that most women who contract HIV do so from partners, including husbands, to whom they have been faithful.

I'm not writing this to knock marriage. It works for some people, and we should all be very happy for them. But this universal assumption that it is or should be every woman's goal in life, and the ordering of our cultural and political priorities around that assumption, and the relentless delegitimisation and hounding of women who might choose differently? Those are pure poison.

The Guardian article quotes Stephanie Coontz, author of Marriage, A History, as saying, "It is the relationship, not the institution, that is the key."

As all Magical Chickens (global population: 1) like to say, "No shit, Sherlock."


* After the revolution, everytime someone uses "female" as a noun when they mean women and/or girls, they will be given 50 hours of remedial English lessons through the medium of interpretive dance as performed by a troupe of sea slugs. Consider yourself warned.

Filial piety: fine feelings and hard work

Parenting is hard work. If only the Singapore government were as good at recognising that when making policies that have material consequences for parents, as it is in making sappy videos full of fine feelings.

But that, of course, as Funny Little World explains, is the whole point. This video on filial piety is about displacing political responsibility from the government for collective problems that need (to some extent) collective solutions. It promotes a moralising discourse, about the fine feelings we should all supposedly have about our parents (failing to recognise that they might have been wholly abusive, indeed perhaps specifically notwithstanding any abuse), to avoid questions about society's and the government's welfare obligations, about the fair and appropriate distribution of the hard work of eldercare, as between individuals and the state.

We were all ruminating on this in the Barn, prompting the following wisdom from the Complaining Cow:

The ad plays on people's fears about growing old alone and unassisted, a huge source of insecurity in a country without a social welfare system. The idea that it's possible for elderly people to be abusive is generally unrecognised (even though many people have experienced this firsthand in their own family, from what I've been told -- in particular elderly people abusing each other). Such behaviour is seen as 'demanding' and 'unreasonable' at most, but something to be put up with because the way society functions is stacked up against older people, so family members have to be accommodating.

I was thinking about the ad, where the elderly mother says she wants to move out. Personally, I think I would want to have my own household when I'm old (whether or not I have children), and I wonder, in the context of the fictional ad family, why her moving out would be a bad thing for the family? The family in the ad seems to have no choice but have the grandmother live with them. I'm aware there are all sorts of possible reasons: eg if someone for some reason she can't afford their own home anymore, or needs assistance, or does want to live with their child's family but just suffers occasional fits of pique against them, etc.

But these in turn point to problems like homelessness, access to care for mental/physical disability, general accessibility of our built environment to anyone who's not 100% able-bodied; and MCYS's response to that seems to be: have children now so that they'll provide you with these social services FOC when you need them, 'cause we sure as hell ain't going to. Which fucks over everyone who can't or won't have children, or for whatever reason doesn't want to depend on them.

The Cow also raised questions about the other toxic messages packed away in the ad:

Also: what's up with all the other toxic narratives that are peripheral to the ad's intended message but tightly woven into its fabric?! Eg setting up the woman as the primary caregiver of the family in both generations (it wasn't the man's cooking the grandmother was criticising, was it?), framing relations between the woman and her mother-in-law as adversarial, etc.

My Magical eye alighted upon these items too. Not only does the filial piety conversation attempt to displace collective obligations onto individual households, it also (less overtly) displaces collective obligations onto women, in particular, who are assumed to be the ones who should provide free care work for the sake of family togetherness. The stamps of this assumption are all over the video, which is - funnily enough - entitled "Father and Son". There is no indication of what relationship the woman has with her own parents (presumably this is a nod to the notion that they ought to have bothered to have a useful child, i.e. a son and not a daughter, of their own); in fact, there are no daughter-parent relationships portrayed at all. Not only is the work of cooking done by the woman, but also, at the beginning, she goes off to sort out tasks on behalf of the family, while telling her husband and son to stay with her mother-in-law and with each other. The lesson the boy learns is evident in his question: he asks not about the work involved in caring for his grandmother, but about his father's feelings.

The message here is gendered. The fine feelings of filial piety are for men and boys: but the hard work of elder care, which makes the sustenance of those fine feelings possible, is for women and girls.

If we have to watch videos about fathers and son, I think I prefer this ad:

A nation of WTF

I have been roused from my Magical torpor by an unbeatably vile missive from one Sulthan Niaz to, what else, the Straits Times forum. Apparently Singapore is "a nation of spoilt princesses. Lo:

THE Association of Women for Action and Research (Aware) seemed to suggest last Thursday ('Singapore still far behind in true gender equality: Aware') that women are free from blame for the declining birth rate in Singapore.

In Singapore, most parents urge their children to excel in studies and focus on their career. Few prepare their children for the rigours of parenthood.

Many households also employ maids. As a result, our boys and girls grow up lacking parenting skills and are clueless about household chores. The boys, however, have responsibilities forced upon them in the form of national service. Not so the girls. They are free to place personal ambition above all else.

And here begins the flight from Reality to some bizarro fantasy world. I wouldn't mind going there for a while, though; it would have been nice to grow up "free to place personal ambition above all else". I am a wistful Chicken.

Many women choose to remain single because they do not see the need or the urgency to get married. They do not need a man to provide for them and they can always depend on their girlfriends for emotional support. As for sex, few see the need to have it regularly.

If it is the case that women don't see any benefit to themselves to getting married - and it's by no means clear that that's true, otherwise I would no longer be bombarded with nauseating and ridiculously stagey wedding photographs on Facebook - then, Sulthan Niaz, it is for the best that they do not marry. If you are suggesting that all women are obliged to marry even at the cost of their own aspirations, then, well, let me put it this way: it's not feminists here who are presenting it as an institution of oppression, but you. You are arguing, in no uncertain terms, that compulsory marriage must be instituted and must come at the cost of women's happiness. You therefore present, in fact, one of the single biggest arguments against women ever valuing the institution of marriage. Congratulations.

Even when a woman does want to get married, her expectations get in the way. The man must be her 'type'. He must have a great job, good income, be reasonably good-looking and he must also charm her off her feet before she will contemplate marriage.

These frightful harridans, how dare they believe they should marry to get something out of marriage? Clearly, they should marry just because, uhm. Because any man at all has been magnanimous enough to confer legitimacy onto their pathetic female existences - so how dare they want anything like love, or compatibility, or sexual attraction? The unbearable cheek - it's like they think they're people whose feelings and desires actually matter.

Our society glorifies the career woman. Lifestyle and fashion magazines devote pages to tips for the career woman to get ahead. Floors in shopping malls cater exclusively to the needs of these women and credit card and insurance companies vie for their money.

That would explain the predominance of degrading sexual objectification in all that woman-oriented advertising, then. I'm sure the promotions of those things women are relentlessly sold and taught that we require actually further our happiness and well-being instead of trying to drain money out of us by encouraging insecurity and self-hatred. Also, of course this career advantage for women means that businesses all over Singapore and the rest of the feminist-infested world are wholly dominated by women. Of course.

As a result, women are spoilt for choice. Egged on by society, free from national service and reservist obligations and not needing a man, they are totally free to focus exclusively on their careers. Choosing to get married and have children is committing career suicide.

Funny how this "logic" works - so if women did national service and had reservist obligations, we would all be popping them babies out. Absolutely. Err. What?

The conclusion is inevitable. We have raised a nation of 'spoilt princesses' unwilling and unable to handle the rigours of motherhood.

The conclusion is inevitable. You are the most putrid concentration of hatefulness this side of Pluto. Fuck off, and when you've finished fucking off, kindly fuck off again.

Sisters in Solidarity & online petition.

The fiasco that is one fucked-up China One Club evicting Marla Bendini, for no other reason than the fact that she's a transwoman, has led to the form of Sisters in Solidarity (SIS). At the helm of SIS, are Leona Lo and Marla Bendini herself.

Over the last week, SIS has organised themselves to form a Facebook group, set up their blog, organised a press conference, put together a social enterprise for transwomen, and have gotten a written and an online petition running.

This pig salutes the women behind SIS for all the work they've done in the short span of time, and I sincerely hope the SIS engine grows and keeps trucking!

For now, we encourage our readers to lend their names to the online petition. The petition is simply crafted, decrying the many instances of discrimination based on the sex expressed on their identity cards, their failure to pass as some stereotypical imagination of what a woman should look like (newsflash: a lot of ciswomen won't pass that test too, you assholes). And because they're transwomen, people think being rude is okay, or that being treated as second-class citizens undeserving of fair investigations is justifiable.

We agree with the petition: stop discriminating against transwomen, regardless of whether or not they've undergone sexual reassignment or if you think they can pass off as some fictitious ideal of what women should be, and if you insist on being discriminatory, then at least have the very courtesy to be open about it.

And if you won't be open about it, don't worry, we're onto you assholes and wholly intend to name you and shame you as and when you rear your ugly head. Because, this is the we'll know where all your fellow assholes congregate, thus can avoid Teh Stupid altogether.

Sign the petition now!

(Sisters in Solidarity petition aims to garner 1000 signatures. After which, the petition will be sent to various "nightspot and club operators" accordingly.)

China One outright discrimination against transgender Marla Bendini.

This needs circulation: China One club in the Clarke Quay area is another fucked-up institution.

Marla is an artist and pole-dancing performer who happens also to be a transwoman. China One had engaged her dance troupe for a gig, but mid-way through preparations, Marla was asked to leave the establishment without reason. Upon further query, the General Manager, who ordered her removal, claimed that she should know the reason for her removal. It harks back to a prior episode where she was asked to leave the club because her being trans is "is simply not their THING".

Well, China One, you're a fucking douche, and you should know why. We hope this gives you PR hell because it is simply not our thing otherwise.

And oh, by the way, FUCK. YOU.

Feel free to send love letters to them, and to save you the trouble of visiting their website:

China One
Block 3E River Valley Road
#02-01 Clarke Quay
Singapore 179024

Tel: +65-6339 0280
Email: info@chinaone.com.sg

Marla's letter I reproduce in full:

CHINAONE OUTRIGHT DISCRIMINATION AGAINST TRANSGENDER MARLA BENDINI
29 Apr 2010 at 03:30
CHINAONE
April 29, 2010

Acro Poleformers from Acro Polates, the pole fitness studio I train at, are performing at ChinaOne this evening. I was there with other performers as well as the studio director, Suzie Wong, and award-winning Pole Dance performer and instructor from Australia, Suzie Q. Things were going as planned and the performers did a great job during the 1st half of the performance.

Just before the 2nd half of the performance started, a bouncer came up to me and said that the manager wants to speak to me and wanted me to follow him outside the club. I obliged, even though the manager should come over and speak to me personally instead of having me escorted outside at his beck and call. I waited outside for a few minutes. but the said manager did not show up so I walked back into the club, even though the bouncer tried to stop me and said that I'm not allowed to enter.

When I was inside, I told that Suzie Wong and the performers that the club management wants me to leave and that I am not welcomed in the club. Suzie Wong explained to them that I am part of the group invited and we are here to support the performance. The bouncers was adamant that I leave and I am not welcomed. I told them that I do not want to create any trouble and I will wait outside.

I was greeted with a heated argument between the club managers upon stepping out. As it turns out, the manager was Lawrence (See story below). He was yelling at his colleagues and staff who "let her (Me) in". They explained to him that I was part of the guestlist and he was hissing with anger that no one informed him that they were letting guests in without his acknowledgment. I guess if he held all that power to who enters and who leaves, he should be working as a bouncer or a door host, not sit in his office counting his paycheck. So all this yelling and argument happened right in front of the club entrance, I was standing there and Suzie Wong came out soon after to see how I was doing. Lawrence, the GM, turned to me and started yelling at me saying that I should not step into ChinaOne again and he has told me so before. I asked why is he yelling. Suzie stepped in at this point and said she would not proceed on with the show because this is disrespectful. Finally, we agreed that this was between the management and I left the club to wait for them to finish the pole dance performance. The girls came down soon after and were noticeably upset about the situation.

I am very thankful and touched that my friends stood up for me. Even Suzie Wong, who was running a business, was prepared to give up this gig because of the way the management treated me due to my gender.

I love you girls- Suzie W, Suzie Q, Eunice, Karen & Kat and the rest of the girls who left earlier after the 1st half of the show.


**

September 4, 2009

I don't go to ChinaOne anymore because the management approached my transsexual friend while I was getting drinks at the bar. They told her to ask me to leave. They had no idea she was a transsexual as well. When I asked why, they were reluctant to give the reason. I asked to see the manager because none of the bouncers knew how to handle the situation because they were just acting on orders.

The General Manager, Lawrence, finally came out and said "I should know it myself."
He was rude and indignant as if I've done something shameful. I was not about to be pulled out of a club like that and have people trample all over me. I asked again why I should be asked to leave the club without a valid reason. Lawrence, the GM, replied again that he does not want to get into this and I should know the reason why. He was shifty and was almost hissing at me.

He wanted to check my ID, and again, I said if they gave me a reason, I would gladly give them my ID. He continued to evade my question and said "I should know why". I refused to leave without a valid reason- I've been there on many occasions and it is simply ridiculous to ask me to leave like so.

Finally, Lawrence (GM) gave up and said "OK, Not everybody knows you're a man."
To which, I promptly replied, "So what's the problem here?"
He said "This is simply not their THING"

I questioned their establishment- I am here to drink and enjoy myself, whatever ''THING"' ChinaOne is into seems to venture more than just a pub/club scene. I demanded a full refund of me and my friend's expenditure that night and left.

He finally apologised and said it is not his policy but the upper management. I said he is the General Manager and he should respect us and make changes to this 'unwritten' rule.

So here's to clubs and bars who think they can just discriminate transgenders on the premise that they are trying to run a 'respectable business'- we are fabulous and consider it an honour we fancy your club and choose to take our gorgeousness there.

Marla, we at the barn stand with you, and thank you again for shedding light on another disgusting establishment.

Please join Leona Lo and others in taking a stand against these flagrant (and subtle) discriminations against transgender people. Join the Facebook group and let's get organised!

Happy Ada Lovelace Day

Ada Lovelace was the world's first computer programmer. Like many women in history, she lived in an age where the barriers to her enjoying independent recognition of her abilities were enormous, but that didn't stop her from producing visionary and groundbreaking work.

Although there were no computers as we now know them in the early 1800s, a different sort of "computer" was already in existence. This was a person whose job was to perform long and arduous calculations to find the values of logarithms and trig functions, calculations we now perform with electronic calculators. These human computers produced sets of mathematical tables for use by astronomers and navigators among others, but, unsurprisingly considering the difficulty of the calculations, these tables were known to contain many errors and mistakes. So Charles Babbage decided to create a machine, called the difference engine, to perform these set calculations automatically.

This was the age of steam, with electricity no more than the subject of early experiments, so the difference engine was envisaged as a mechanical machine, with brass cogs and moving pistons, to be powered by turning a crank or by steam.

During the construction of the first prototype, Babbage began to think about an even more advanced machine - the analytical engine - that would be able to store data and perform sequences of instructions defined on punch cards and fed into the machine, like the Jacquard looms of the time. This would mean that the analytical engine could be programmed to perform any type of calculation and be a direct forerunner of the computers we use today.

Lovelace saw the prototype difference engine and was fascinated by it, and by the possibilities of the plans for Babbage's analytical engine. She began to correspond with Babbage and became an expert on the engines. But she held back from publishing her own work on the subject, instead offering to translate an Italian scientist's report on one of Babbage's lectures. Women at the time faced great difficulty working and publishing in science, and, when Babbage, aware of her knowledge, asked "why she had not herself written an original paper on a subject with which she was so intimately acquainted", Lovelace modestly replied that the thought had not occurred to her.

Babbage and Lovelace agreed she should add her own notes to the translation and this addition ending up being three times the length of the original work. Her Translation and extended notes (published in 1843) became the most important work describing the analytical engine and how it could be used. Most famously, the "Notes" contained the first published computer program - instructions on how to calculate the Bernoulli numbers. It doesn't look much like what we now think of as computer code, but when punched into the instructions cards it wouldn't look that different from computer instructions on the punch cards used up until the 1970s.

Like Rosalind Franklin, who made vital and underacknowledged contributions to the discovery of DNA, Ada Lovelace's work was presented as a footnote to the achievements of a man.

The inventor of the first computer compiler was also a woman: Grace Hopper.

Wing salute to these undersung heroines.

In which I'm pissed off, so welcome This Apocalypse.

It seems after last year's AWARE Saga, people of all Very Concerned Dudely and I'm-A-Woman-But stripes no longer trust Singapore's leading women's rights non-profit organisation to do anything right, including demystify feminism as a holistic belief that benefits EVERYBODY at their own website (the list is affixed after the cut).

Just where do these people come from!?!?!

You get the likes of Professor Derrick Diapermouth poo-pooing all over, mostly to first suggest that OHNOES! Them feminists with their puny minds are wrong about feminism, by using the exact same point that the AWARE bloggers did--that feminism isn't a circumscribed by chauvanism. To wit, here's the lovely AWARE's elementary-level debunking:

Myth: “Feminist” is the female equivalent of “chauvinist”.
Fact: Feminism does not support sexism against either gender. Feminism works towards equality, not female superiority.

The estimable Professor alerts us to the very fallacy of such an assertion, by quoting Wikipedia no doubt because academic rigour has attained at a whole new level of awesomeness, and even offers you a nomenclature that'll better save your feeble minds: (emphasis to my piggish whimsy)

Please get your terms right.

To clarify: Feminism refers to the movement for establishing establishing equal rights and legal protection and gender equality for women, and campaigning for women’s rights and interests (Wikipedia).

The corresponding movement for men’s rights is not male chauvinism, which is sexist, but (progressive) masculism, which campaigns for equal rights and treatment for men, and sees itself as complementary to feminism.

Both movements have the same goal in mind- to change cultural perceptions and legislation which treat either gender unfairly, but are distinguished by their focus on, and campaigning for, one particular gender.

Some interesting issues to consider- conscription, child custody, alimony and child support, domestic abuse of men, and higher incarceration rates and longer sentences for men for the same crime as compared to women.

To wit- feminism is about women’s equality, masculism is about men’s equality, and if you’re interested in true gender equality and sympathetic to legitimate grievances of both males and females, you are a gender egalitarian.

Fancy that. When AWARE feminists seek "equality" for women, you'd think they'll mean to move women up so that they women can be EQUAL to men. Which means, if men are worse off, then in order for women to be equal, they might have to up men's statuses? Like arguing for the revision of the Women's Charter to become a Family's Charter, improvements of which include maintenance of husband should divorcing wives be found fit to make the monthly pay-out? I know our resident Magician has already laid it out for you in a different manner, this might come as a bit shock to many people, but equality here's how equality works:

You < Me ≠ Equal;
You > Me ≠ Equal;
You = Me = Equal.

On top of that, most feminists are hard-pressed to concede that making a Bigger You suffer under the same restrictive logic that a Smaller Me suffers is the way forward. At least "feminazis" at the Barn never. fucking tire of saying. that.

Professor Diapermouth even directs us to this fuck-awesome van diagram to tease out my male-chauvanist mates and the "radical feminists" from Teh Truly Awesome:

(I lie; I added my artistry to the diagram! The real chart is not remotely as pretty as mine, much less "clarifying".)

Gosh, if there's anything that annoys this male, unfeminist, gay asian pig are mansplainers, you know, the ones who always like to tell you, gay, womanly, fat, skinny, thin, yellow, brown, white, *insert facets of your self you relate to*, how you're not really gay, or feminist, or a pig enough. And always, as Twisty notes, "In a tone that suggested so deep a reverence for his own intellect that he’d expect the solar system to explode if he failed to execute this very important takedown on my blog."

But just when you thought it was all over, you meet Sir Fred Sottile-Solate in shiny armour, warning you this:

... Feminism by its very name is a gender specific promotional project. Many women have been duped into believing that there is a basis in gender equality. Many women have been victimized by feminism and in fact are paying the price this very day. Like communism and socialism and fascism, Feminism is an ideology that is based on hate and is doomed to failure. Unfortunately it will leave behind a population only made worse for the effort. I am sorry this is true and wish it weren’t, but truly feminism is a disaster for any good people involved. Only the evil benefit.

I hate to pit my dudely speak-from-privilege card against yours, but no, Fred, I'm afraid you're wrong on this, but for no other reason than that I can selectively string my words together to formulate something that escapes educated, reasoned assessment, generalising only to make it sound like your beliefs are that of a misogynist seeking to have women return to a time when their bodies are properties of their husbands, fathers or brothers.

A time when women have not even a conception of legal force to protect them from rape, or that there can even be a day--after a long time of their being equal providers--where they can be remunerated for the labour they put in, save that money under their own name, and not need the company of men in order to go to the shop to buy fucking groceries so that, ohmygod, she doesn't starve, because, ohfuck, she's human!!!

Which means she possesses emotions, wants, desires, aspirations, dreams, feels pain when hit, feels hungry when starved, and feels hopeless when people around tell her that she should stick it because she's just doesn't deserve anything because there's always this other guy, this other kid, this other fertilised or unfertilised ovum, or this other very important, malodorous logic brewing in your head that justifies her not getting something you'll putatively accord some abstract dude.

I'm sure all the women, children some women have to bring up, are really, really upset that this false hate-inspired movement called feminism for all this. I'm sure they're all fucking bawling their eyes out that they're eating the food they have on the table while thinking hateful thoughts about you, which they bought with the hateful money they received from the wages they've worked for by hating on you, and all these tears form a river because it's so fucking frustrating to finally, or at least not all cases, be able to say "no" to unwanted bodily contact which might or might not be related to why they hate you.

Boohoo, dear Sir.Boo. Fucking. Hoo.

Frankly, I've never seen a rosier image of apocalypse--I say bring it!

P/S - AWARE bloggers, please write to us if you're interested in guest-blogging or cross-blogging with us to discuss why suddenly so many people feel obligated to explain what feminism and AWARE's agenda is for AWARE. Don't worry, we can even pretend that we didn't orchestrate this discussion and that it just so happens that we're on the same page! Maybe my mom will appear at some point to femmeplain that she did not impart any skills in passive-aggressive stunts.

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People We Love: Jolene Tan at The F Word.

As a good part of the world is celebrating the emergence of spring, we at the farm have also been busy preparing for a good harvest ahead. So do excuse us for the sudden dearth of posts.

For the time being, it's come to my attention that a very 'stray', familiar Singaporean feminist by the name of Jolene Tan has risen to write about feminism in Singapore's context at the prominent UK blog The F Word. In her first exquisite post, self-explanatory titled "A False Necessity: Singapore's Maid Trade", Tan incises:

I suspect that for many Singaporean women, abusiveness towards [Foreign Domestic Workers] is also connected to fear and anxiety about our own place in society. Patriarchal attitudes simultaneously devaluing and gendering care work and domestic work are well-ensconced in Singapore, but the prevalence of FDWs staves off, to some degree, arguments about the role of Singaporean women in private and public spheres, by replacing the grossly undervalued labour Singaporean women would have been expected to do with grossly undervalued labour that foreign women are made to do. The hierarchy and unfairness remain in place; we’ve just changed the demographic on whom the worst burdens fall. Which is, of course, from a humanitarian perspective, little change at all.

We need a rethinking of existing ways, and an understanding that care work and domestic work are work, and the people who perform this work, whomever they may be, should be accorded proper respect and status. Instead, we have imagined into being a hellish necessity: that there must be maids, who must be subjugated; and only by meting out the ill-treatment that defines this degraded role can we reassure ourselves of our own precarious superiority over it.

For those who are unacquainted with Tan, she was part of the Terrible Three™ who rattled the delicate sensitivities of our marital-rape-approving society with the No To Rape campaign a little less than a year ago--a cause we at the Barn not only fully support but have also written quite extensively on.

We happily welcome back the original "pro-gay, feminist family-busting" blogger (after the untimely death of Glass Castle); nothing excites us more than someone who goads Them Big Blogger Boyz and Unaccompanied Ursidaes!

But enough bootlicking sentiments and echo-chamber-chamber-ber-ber-ber-ing on my part.

Please just hop over to The F Word to follow Tan's on-going writing; already archived:

1. "Same garbage, different continents" - On the fetishisation of Asian women as "delicate lotus flowers of mind-reading, uncomplaining wish fulfillment fantasy",
2. "Important questions from Gita Sahgal" - On the very fishy and unfair suspension of duties for Amnesty Gender Unit's Gita Sahgal, after she called Amnesty out on their ties with an unsavoury organisation,
3. "Race to the Bottom" - On the various ideals of beauty (e.g. big eyes, fair skin) that Asian women are subject, and the complications of "patriarchy [shaming] women and girls into aspiring to femininity, and then [shaming] women and girls for achieving it."

What's shit for the goose

Some anti-feminists like to point out bad things that happen to men, in service of the delusion that this invalidates the feminist contention that women should be treated like human beings.

This is a profoundly stupid argument. If you'll excuse my fowl mouth: what's shit for the goose is also shit for the gander. If certain gender norms currently lead to acid being thrown on women's faces, the cause of equality is not served by throwing acid on men's faces. Likewise, being a jerk to women who are sexually assaulted does not suddenly become acceptable behaviour if you decide to be a jerk to men who are sexually assaulted, too.

Feminists present analysis in gendered terms because at the moment, many people invoke "because she is a woman" or "because he is a man" as a justification for the ill-treatment of human beings. Since this invocation is so widespread, and so commonly accepted, it stands to reason that attacking this bullshit gendered reasoning helps to undercut the social illusions that sustain social environments friendly to ill-treatment.

But there are kinds of ill-treatment that are all too ready to find all kinds of homes. When society hurts men in a way that it more typically reserves for hurting women, that doesn't make the wrong against women any better. It just means more people are getting hurt.

And given how lucrative it can be for companies to promote insecurity so as to peddle fake and possibly dangerous "cures" to non-existent "problems", it should be no surprise that men are increasingly being taught to hate their bodies in a way traditionally reserved primarily for women.

Make no mistake about it, men, sexual objectification shouldn't be seen as pro-you but anti-women. Objectification hurts everyone. It's pro-nastiness and anti-human. We should rejoice about the extent to which you escape it, and work to extend that comfort and confidence to women too.

The sad example of Franklin Heng, who died after undergoing liposuction, is one particularly graphic example of what can be at stake.