International Women’s Day, autism and wondering who is right

It was International Women’s Day yesterday, and I was cross about it. Again.

Even on normal days, I’m cross at the world (by which I mean, I suppose, society) a lot. Because it is often noisy and unfair, and is nearly always illogical.

I am particularly cross on International Women’s Day because it is particularly illogical. It makes no sense that a day which originated with grassroots activism is no longer anything to do with feminism.

Writing about pop as though it really mattered: music journalism and women

Gatekeepers. All women know about them, whatever their job or chosen leisure activity. And the music business has always been one of the top villains. 

Within that crowded field, Jann Wenner, co-founder of Rolling Stone magazine, recently emerged as an arch villain. In case you missed it, he put out a book of archive interviews which was full of old white blokes. When challenged about the lack of women said: “none of them were as articulate enough on this intellectual level”. And made a similar point about Black musicians. Prat.

The ensuing controversy even lost him his gig with the ever-irrelevant Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, which isn’t exactly squeaky clean when it comes to ignoring minorities. 

So why am I writing about this now?

Book review: Lead Sister – The Story of Karen Carpenter

 

Husband: “What are you reading?”

Me: “A biography of Karen Carpenter.”

Husband: “What’s interesting about Karen Carpenter?”

It’s true – and it comes up many times in Lucy O’Brien’s new book Lead Sister – that Karen Carpenter had an image problem. Basically, she wasn’t very rock’n’roll. 

Books that defined my generation. Or not.

My generation.

Douglas Copeland is getting a lot of publicity at the moment. His novel Generation X is 30 years old. Cue lots of nonsense about generation theory. Again.

The Guardian Review carried a piece called The books that defined a generation. There are two things wrong with this concept. 1. Generation theory is nonsense. 2. Generations don’t define themselves by books.

#EveryWomanYouKnow: some advice for the nice men

Photo from the Women's Equality Party.

I don't want to be inspiring. I just want to be safe.

On Monday this week, it was International Women’s Day and social media, as usual, was full of people going on about “inspirational women”. They failed to notice that the theme this year was #ChooseToChallenge. And we all are now.

Let's hear it for non-amazing women

You missed one.

It was International Women’s Day last week. I couldn’t help wondering what was the point.

How difficult is it to know how to treat people with respect? #MeToo

I am angry. I'm writing this hoping it will make me feel less angry.

I realised last night that the anger has been growing - ever since the Weinstein story broke - and the last straw was this:

Disgraced former defence secretary Michael Fallon telling a female BBC reporter that sexual harassment was “acceptable” 10 or 15 years ago.

No, it wasn’t. It was never acceptable. Why is that even something that needs to be said?

Sugar and spice and all things nice… thoughts on No More Boys and Girls

Gender-neutral 1960s Christmas present.

So I’m watching No More Boys And Girls on the BBC, a heartwarming story about how a teacher and a doctor help children to develop beyond the gender stereotypes that our culture tries to limit them to.
 
And I can’t understand why someone would disagree with this.

Book review: The Lost Women of Rock Music

I sometimes find myself having to explain punk rock to women my own age who weren’t part of it. On one occasion, someone said to me: why did you like punk, wasn’t it very male and aggressive?

On the contrary, I said, punk was great for women because lots of women were making music where they had not had the chance before. I’ve always believed in this line and until recently it never crossed my mind that after punk this didn’t really carry on.

Pancakes, International Women's Day and what not to say to a feminist

I'm actually more excited about it being Pancake Day than International Women's Day. As someone said on Twitter, social media seems to have reduced International Women's Day to the level of National Chip Week.

And I never like the idea of being told when to think about any particular issue - whether it's Comic Relief or Valentine's Day or Climate Week. Or Women's Day. I'd prefer to choose myself when I want to be charitable, romantic or green. Or feminist. And preferably not as a one-off.

On the other hand, there is something relevant to women in society that's been bugging me for a while. I don't expect to be popular for saying this but I'll say it anyway.

It's not big and clever to use the C word. It's not even funny.

Identity

I always hated the term ‘new wave’ (punk for people who don’t like punk). And I always hated those ‘women in rock’ articles you used to get. And still do. But I quite enjoyed a recent Radio 4 show called Women of the New Wave.

Yes I am a feminist II

I’ve been watching the BBC series Women with mixed feelings. Partly frustration because I want viewers who don’t know about feminism to understand and there isn’t enough context to do that. And partly anger at how little has changed.

Yes, I am a feminist

I like a good gossip about Mad Men. (Is Roger still in love with Joan? Is Don losing his grip on cool?) But it’s interesting to discover how different people have different perspectives on the same thing. One of my colleagues (age: under 30) confessed she was surprised to see the extent to which a woman’s status, in that particular time and place, was tied to her husband’s job.

Young British women, it seems, have no concept of how different, how recently, women’s lives were from their own. They take for granted the fact that their independence and autonomy are now considered the norm. It’s not their fault: apparently, no-one told them.

Today is International Women’s Day. I’ll be putting the Guardian poster up at work.

A new series about feminism, Women, starts tonight on BBC4. I intend to make all my nieces - and nephews - watch it.

School's out

More proof that the 1970s was definitely another world. I came across an old school magazine while helping my mother clear out her loft. On the last page, after the lists of prefects and embarassing ‘creative writing’, was the title ‘News of Old Girls’. And what was the news? A list of girls who had graduated from university? A list of interesting and fulfilling jobs that they had taken up? No, a list of marriages. Just a list of marriages. So all the previous pages highlighting positions of responsibility, showing off exam results, and displaying creative talent, led to this. Changing your name. What exactly was the point of all that education?

David Cassidy and the concrete ceiling

One day in the mid 1970s I horrified my English teacher when she found me reading Jackie magazine. She knew my favourite book was Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and couldn’t understand how I could hold two such contradictory positions.

Holding contradictory positions is, of course, a requirement of being a teenager (or any other transitional period, eg becoming middle-aged). And, as a talking head said in a recent TV programme about the magazine ‘If it was in Jackie... Jackie magazine was the bible.’

Outside the classroom, Jackie taught me everything I knew. How to put on make-up (I still do it the same way today). How to lose weight by eating half a Mars bar instead of a whole one. What to wear. How to talk to boys. There was sensible advice from Cathy and Claire, and some slightly less sensible (in fact, rather dodgy) fortune-telling quizzes. And there were, of course, the posters of Marc Bolan and David Cassidy, even if it was tricky putting them up without getting sellotape on the wallpaper (I think I was at university before they invented blu-tack).

It was also, as another talking head put it, ‘a 1950s bubble merging into the 1970s’. I didn’t realise until I bought a copy of a Jackie anthology for my sister’s birthday how shocking its real message was. Any girl shown in the magazine who had a job was a secretary or, if she was really glamorous, a receptionist. That was it.

When I started secondary school, the headmistress went round the class asking us what we wanted to be when we grew up. The majority chose to be hairdressers or air stewardesses (and this was a grammar school, where you might have expected some aspirations). Well, the only role models we had for 'career women' were scary spinsters like her and her colleagues.

By the time you got to sixth form, things had changed a bit. If you were top of the class you were going to university. A little below and you were going to teacher training college. Anyone left after that was going to work in a bank. University wasn’t a career move: it was an end in itself. No-one suggested what you might do afterwards. I’m not sure anyone actually came out and said it, but I got the impression that the main purpose of university was upward mobility via marriage. I was expected to find a nice middle-class boy who would go into a nice professional job so I wouldn’t have to worry about a career... Actually, what I did do at university was discover feminism.

This is recent history. So why are we surprised by headlines about the ‘concrete ceiling’? There are many good reasons why there are so few women in the board room. Partly it’s because, in the business world, social bonding is done through conversations about football not conversations about shoes. Partly it’s because women are too sensible to buy into the long-hours culture: we’d rather have a life. And partly it’s because we were never taught to want it. Partly, of course, it’s also because we grew up in an era where working for ‘the man’ (as opposed to ‘a man’) was not something to aspire to anyway.

But there weren’t alternative role models for girls, either. When I started looking beyond Jackie magazine, I had to find my inspiration in things written by men and about men: there was, after all, no book called Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman.

Why Patti Smith matters

I’ve been to see a film with the 16-year-old heroine who says her favourite musicians are the Stooges, Patti Smith and the Runaways. I would love to believe that such 16-year-olds exist. I’m not sure whether I do. But it made me think back.

It’s hard to explain to a man why Patti Smith was so important. It’s hard to explain to someone who cares about guitar solos why punk rock mattered. Maybe it didn’t matter that the Sex Pistols sang God Save the Queen in Silver Jubilee year and were banned from being number one (the past really is a different country). Maybe it didn’t matter that English people finally started making records in English accents. Maybe it didn’t matter that people were making music, and writing about music, who had never been allowed to before.