Links, in lieu of a rant.

Oh, I am angry. And I could write for days and days about why, but that is likely only spark comments which made me more angry. So yeah, activist and awareness links are what you shall get.

Trigger warning for rape and abuse on everything.

NUS Women's Campaign's call to sack Ken Clarke - article on Student Broad Left, and more details on Facebook.

Non-survivor privilege by Jennifer Kesler on What Privilege?.

Hathor How-To's: Supporting a Friend Who's Been Sexually Assaulted by Maria at The Hathor Legacy.

How You Guys Can Prevent Rape by Heather Corinna at Scarleteen.

Stop talking about rape and start listening by Kate Harris at Be Young and Shut Up.

Lastly, Edinburgh Reclaim the Night is this weekend, please shout at anyone who says it's been banned or cancelled. I shall be there shouting at people in a hi-vis jacket. And will hopefully be drowning my anger in a sea of feminist solidarity, or at least letting it out by marching and shouting and singing and dancing.

A not so surprising twist.

(Spoiler warning for the first episode of the new BBC series of Sherlock Holmes.)

It's taken me a while to work out what bothered me about this episode, other than the fact that I seemed to get things about 5 minutes before Holmes did, and then get bored while they were slowly hinted at. What really bothered me was the 'no-one suspects the taxi driver!' aspect. Really? As a woman who has lived for years in London, I suspect the taxi-driver. Not without reason - John Worboys* is the worst known example, but there are others. The whole thing came across as written by someone who had never done the mental calculation of whether it was safer to walk home alone, or get into a car with a stranger. And then realised that there is no safe choice.

I think this is one of aspect of the original stories that doesn't translate well in to the modern world.


*He is also just one of the reasons that TfL's Cabwise posters make so very angry. But that's a separate rant.

I expected better.

This post will make no sense to anyone who hasn't recently read the article I'm talking about. But I needed to rant.

'Incorporation . . . rapes women of the legitimacy to historicise women'
Purvis and Weatherhill, 'Playing the gender history game: A reply to Penelope Cornfield' in The Feminist History Reader (ed. Morgan), 2006

I understand that the argument that the shift from women's history to gender history has decentred women's experiences, and is a 'malestream incorporation strategy'. I may not agree with this view, but I do feel it is important to question the value of gender history, and the story of a neat, progressive transformation from women's history to gender history.

But what's not OK is using rape as a metaphor to describe that transition. An intellectual trend which marginalises women is not the same as sexual violence. It's fine to make the point that they are connected as part of the same system of oppression, but to conflate the two seems not just an exaggeration but deeply offensive. Also, I'm not sure it makes grammatical sense to say someone was 'raped of' something.

And another thing - what the HELL is the whole playing gender history as 'tootsie' versus as a 'woman' thing about? I don't understand it well enough to know if it's transphobic, but my instinct is yes.

Actually, I had a happy childhood.

This was sparked off in my head by this brilliant post by the wonderful Arwyn at Raising my Boychick, and the comments other people have left there. It got a bit more personal than I intended.

My mother died when I was 2 years old. If you ascribe to theories of maternal deprivation, from that point on I was doooomed. Unless I was already doomed because my mother went back to work when I was 6 weeks old. Or doomed even earlier than that, because she had been uncertain about having children some years before I was born. (Yes, some-one has suggested that this was likely to be the cause of my depression.) I've had at least 3 medical professionals who basically went 'Aha! That's why you're fucked up!' when I mentioned my mother's death. They've leapt on it as the Ultimate Cause of my mental illness.

All of which seems unfair on my poor old mum. I'm not going to deny that her illness and death probably had a serious effect on my emotional development, my character and my long-term mental health. But the exact same thing is true of the death of my grandmother when I was 7, and the bullying I experienced when I was 11. To pinpoint the cause of all my mental health problems to one event, almost 20 years ago, seems absurd.

And you know what, it's also sexist. It assumes that my mother was the most important person in my life at that point, which isn't true - my father was my primary carer. The response from many people seems to be based on the idea that there are particular kinds of love and care which can only be provided by a mother. That places a really large burden on women with children, and sets expectations which are incredibly hard to fulfil. It's not fair in fathers, other family members and the other adults in children's lives. Growing up, I had many people around me who I knew loved me and cared about me. I was never emotionally deprived or neglected. The assumption that the death of my mother inevitably led to a miserable childhood, and in turn to my adolescent and adult depression seems to discount those experiences.


I suppose it's the inevitability of that explanation that bothers me too. If childhood bereavement automatically leads to adult mental health problems, where does that leave me? I can't go back in time and save my mother from cancer. And considering that the cancer was probably present in her body before she got pregnant, that would most likely result in me not being born. Talking about her death upsets me in the short term, and I'm really not convinced it will do any good in the long term. To some extent, I feel I've said everything I have to say on the subject. Her death seems very disconnected from the reality of my life now.

The reactions from most people when they find out about my upbringing range from pity to curiousity. I'm not quite as tragic a figure as an orphan, but it's clearly too much to expect for me to be normal. My guess is that in a society where a range of family structures were common, motherlessness would not be seen as such a freakish and pathetic state. But I don't know if I'm going to far there - criticising people who are simply empathising, extrapolating from their own relationships with their mothers and their grief at their imagined (or real) death.

This has been a tricky post for me to write, as it's at the intersection of the politics I'm very passionate about, and my painful personal experiences. I feel almost like I'm being too defensive, too sensitive. My instinctive response to the idea that children need their mothers around them all the time is to shout 'My mother died and I'm fine!'. Except for much of my life I haven't been 'fine', by most definitions. It's a balance I'm still struggling to strike - acknowledging the impact of my mother's death, without downgrading the love and care and support I received from other people throughout my childhood.

Things which have resonated with me recently.

I'm depressed, but otherwise fine by Dorian. Although at the moment I'm more likely to be feeling the opposite of 'not depressed, but unhappy'. There's a defensiveness there - not wanting myself or others to worry every time I'm in a bad mood that my mental health is slipping.

A choice made every day by s. e. smith. Most of the past year I've been tee-total, and the conversations about why got very dull very quickly.

The case of the disappearing spoons by Arwyn. Which is a better explanation than I could have written of some of my reactions after things got messy when I started writing about feminism on my old blog.

Therapy, and therapists.

ETA: This was mostly written a long time ago. I think it was a reaction to something specific, but I'm not entirely sure what. I've come back to it several times, and only been able to finish it now because the experiences I've drawn on are more distant and less raw. I hope it's obvious, but I don't think counsellors and psychologists are bad people, and not all of my experiences with them have been negative.


There seems to be a perception out there that talking therapy is the 'good' treatment for mental health issues. Better then drugs. Not addictive, not side-effects. Not just a bandage or a crutch, but a real! solution! that will make you better forever. Yeah. Well. It works for some people. And for some people it's necessary. But when I see the instruction 'Just go get some therapy' it rubs me up the wrong way. It is not that simple.

Let's start with the basics - getting access to therapy in the first place. Obviously, this depends hugely on where you live and your financial circumstances. Luckily for me, therapy can be free on the NHS. Woot and yay. However, in most cases this does involve getting your GP to refer you. If your GP believes you, and takes mental health stuff seriously, then off you go. But that's not always the case. And it may involve a very long wait. Which is not a good thing if the mental health stuff is immediate. Not everyone's circumstances allow for them to stay in one place for long enough.


And that's just in a place where we have socialised healthcare. In places like the USA they are whole issues to do with convincing your insurance company to cover it, and if you're uninsured... Obviously I'm not an expert on this but I get the impression getting even obviously necessary healthcare can be difficult, and too often mental illness is dismissed as 'not real' or 'not urgent'.
The other issue here is that people in need of mental health treatment are often not in the best position to advocate for themselves, in terms of practical resources like time and money as well as the emotional resources needed, meaning that an additional hurdle, however small, can be a serious block to getting therapy.

All that's after someone has made up their mind to get therapy in the first place. Which is not necessarily an easy decision. Fear of it not helping, fear of having to talk about painful things, fear of being treated badly by a therapist, fear of the stigma associated with mental illness. None of these are irrational. None.

Therapy can work wonders. But it does put the patient in an incredibly vulnerable position. Psychodynamic and psychoanalytic type therapies ( the classic 'tell me about your father' kind) involve, by their very nature, revealing one's deepest secrets and insecurities. Of course, discussing those things openly can be incredibly helpful. But it means that if a therapist screws up they have the potential to do a heck of a lot of harm to an already vulnerable person. Therapists are human, and they will make mistakes sometimes. And it can be a rational, self-protective decision to not take that risk.


As well as being human, therapists have the same ingrained social prejudices as the rest of us. Which can be very worrying for those made most vulnerable under the kyriarchy, not incidentally those who are prone to mental health issues. It also means that they have expectations about how families and relationships and life in general are supposed to be.

Therapists are in a position of power over their patients - whether or not they are aware of it, whether or not they wish to be. To some extent, this is true of all medical professionals; there is a subtext of 'Do what I tell you or you will not get well'.

I have put with some complete nonsense because I genuinely believed, I had been led to believe, that if I did not go along with it I would never be happy again. At that point I had lived months at a time without happiness, and I had decided that I could not live years like that. The growing worry that the person to whom I had entrusted my mental health, and by implication my life, was incompetent was one of the most frightening feelings I have ever experienced.


So, yes, lots of people would probably benefit from therapy of some kind. But it is most certainly not without its risks or its drawbacks. It is not the superior option compared to medication, although of course also have problematic issues. The idea that therapy is an infallible cure for all mental illness that helps everyone is a myth, and a harmful one. It implies that mentally ill people have the choice of being well and are just refusing it, ignoring the very real boundaries to accessing counselling in the first place, and the risks involved.

New blog!

Hello! Not dead, I promise. And I have been blogging, just not here. At Teaspoon of Sugar, a 'happy feminism' blog.