On Feminist Jokes

At the dinner table the other evening, we started telling jokes. I only have two in my repertoire, the first one being thus: An English man, Irish man and Australian man are sitting around a table having afternoon tea with their wives. The English man says to his wife, ‘Pass the sugar, sugar.’ The Irish man says to his wife, ‘Pass the honey, honey.’ And the Australian says to his wife, ‘Pass the tea, bag.’

I know, it’s side-splitting stuff.

My sister wanted to know the only other joke in my keeping. ‘Oh, the children won’t get it,’ I said. On being assured this didn’t matter, I told my second joke:

A female brain cell was implanted into a male brain. She looked around and found it very empty.

‘Hello,’ she called out, ‘is anybody here?’ There was no response.

She tried again. ‘Helloooo? Is anybody in here?’

Again no response, so she shouted, ‘Hello! Is anybody in here?’

Finally she heard a very tiny voice crying out, ‘We’re all down here!’

My sister started laughing and said, ‘Ah, that’s a very feminist joke.’  My niece, all of five, piped up, ‘What’s a feminist?’

‘Well,’ I began, exultant at being able to impart this vital piece of information so early on in Niece’s education, ‘a feminist is a person who believes in equal rights for men and women. That means both men and women should work, and men should help with the washing up, and bringing up the babies. But equality isn’t happening very fast, so we need feminists to help make change.’

Niece paused, then said, ‘Auntie Jess?’

‘Yes?’

‘Tell me another one.’

I just about wet myself laughing until Niece, who is frightened by excess, implored me to stop, and I duly did so.

Part the XVI: On the Hazards of Being a Deaf Woman

This afternoon, at the recommendation of a friend, I went to see Susan Hiller’s ‘The Last Silent Movie,’ a recording of extinct languages, because I’m writing about conversations with the dead and the gallery wasn’t far from where I live.  As it's summer at last, I put on one of my lovely floaty silk dresses that I bought in Thailand and haven’t yet worn, a pair of Muji thongs, a black sunhat and my don’t-fuck-with-me Prada sunglasses. The exhibition was interesting.  The audience sat in a dark room in front of a movie screen, but it remained blank except for white, written translations of the languages.  The translation was screened as the voices were broadcast.  My sister, to whom I’d spoken that morning, said there would be Aboriginal languages and sure enough there were two of them, although I recognised them from the context (the form of their stories and the talk of spears) rather than the sounds of the words.  My friend had said it was eerie to hear dead people speaking but it didn’t have much effect on me; it just seemed like any other recording.

Afterwards I read some of Hiller’s catalogues from old exhibitions, and she talked about Freud’s The Uncanny and Cixous’ "The Laugh of the Medusa" and pointed out that the unconscious, the unknown, was like the feminine and/or that which is repressed and undefined, although this didn’t mean that it was confined to women.  I liked that idea, and decided to incorporate it into my thesis.  I didn’t hang around because I a lot of work to do, and sauntered back out into the sunshine.

The route back home was through a largely Muslim community, and I run through it most weekends so I’ve never felt threatened.  In fact one of the things I like about where we live is that I feel much safer than I did in Hackney.  When I saw the group of young boys, about 11 or 12 years old, clustered at the top of a street I was, to use Johnny Howard’s fridge magnet phrase (which he thought would save us from the terrorists), ‘Alert, but not alarmed.’  Some of them were smoking and trying to look adult in the way that stupid boys do; as if anyone can’t see through the pretence.  I ignored them as I went by.

Then, halfway down the street, one of them suddenly grabbed my arse, and I shouted, ‘You fucking cunt!’  I whirled around and saw two of them running away.  I was enraged, and I was fucked if I was going to let them get away with that.  I put my foot back in my thong (I had lost it in my surprise) and strode back after them.  Seeing this, they began to run away.

‘So you’re fucking scared now?’ I jeered.  Then I raised my voice another decibel.  ‘Why don’t you learn to treat women nicely?’ To his credit, there was one small boy who stayed, and to him I delivered the brunt of my anger. ‘And you know what?’ I shouted, pointing at my ear.  ‘I’m fucking deaf!  I’m wearing a hearing aid.  I couldn’t hear them come up behind me.’ (This was a slight fabrication; I heard something but I couldn't tell how close they were).  The boy glanced at my hearing aid, looking worried now. Then another of them, taller and thinner, began to come back.  I couldn’t hear what he was saying but he gestured to the ones that had run off, and I assumed he was saying it was their fault. ‘Yeah?  They’re your mates!’ I said scornfully. There was no response to this, so I began to walk off.  I heard voices behind me and I turned again.  I wasn’t sure if they were talking amongst themselves or to me, so I shouted, ‘And don’t fucking talk to me because I can’t fucking hear you.’

By the time I got home I was shaking, but jubilant.  H said he was very impressed by my use of the C word, and I replied that they’d probably never heard it before.  Nor had they probably ever had a woman shout and swear at them, being used to submission.  He thought they might go home and say, ‘Mummy, what does cunt mean?’

So, not an entirely pleasant way of ending a Sunday afternoon.  But I’m not going to stop running through that area; I refuse to be intimidated, not least by a pack of 12-year-old twerps.

A Gloomy Start to my Morning

This morning at breakfast I read an incredibly dispiriting article about the discrimination women employees faced once they announced they were pregnant. One of the cases it highlighted was that of Ramona Jones, who worked in the human resources department of a county council, working her way upwards until she was a step away from a management position. Then she announced she was going to have her first baby. The promise of a move to a higher role disappeared and on her return from maternity leave she was shoved back into a boring role that she had held two years previously. By no means alone in this situation, she cited examples of women in senior positions who had been forced into a similar pattern or who, on arranging to work part-time, were expected to do their entire job in three days instead of five (can you imagine doing this with a new baby anyway?) and naturally floundered and were forced into redundancy.

It occurred to me as I read this article that the women were fine at their work – they did well and were rewarded for it – until the very point that their femininity became obvious. For what marks out a woman as a woman more clearly than her capacity to give birth? Women can be treated equally (though they are rarely paid equally, but that is another blog entry) as long as they act like men. As soon as their difference becomes obvious, they are penalised for it.

The thing that saddened me most was the colossal waste of talent that this practice encourages. The article ended with a comment from Ruth Holloway who was told to resign when she became pregnant and who, in trying to contest this, was forced to take a cheque and shut up rather than carry the case to a tribunal because she was so exhausted from fighting the company (and as a deaf woman who has to constantly stand up for my rights, I can totally empathise with this). Holloway said: ‘It’s great fun being at the school gates, and looking after my children full-time, but it’s not quite the same as the buzz that you get from running a massive team and being in charge of a £4bn budget. It’s not quite the same as leading a massive team project. If you’re the kind of person who can do that, then you enjoy it, and so I do miss it. I always will.’ The loss isn’t just Holloway’s, though, it’s also her company’s. Just from this comment you can see that the company has lost a bright, energetic and competent employee.

I recall a conversation I had with my father a while ago – one which didn’t, unusually, descend into a biting argument – in which he said that feminism had been around for thirty years and that good things had happened, but there were very few women in roles of power. He was of the opinion that women just weren’t cut out to lead. Actually I think the only reason why there wasn’t an argument was because I was still young at this point and hadn’t mustered enough ammunition to reply, so I let it drop. Now, however, I can see that at least one reason why there are so few female leaders: sexism is still rife and if it’s a choice between doing battle with a bunch of testosterone laden triceratops and looking after your baby, you’re obviously going to chose the latter, especially if it’s your first baby because you don’t really know what you’re doing and don’t want to fuck it up. This isn’t only detrimental to women, but to men as well: what if a man doesn’t want to spend hours at the office but wants to look after the baby too?

At the heart of it all is a glaring hypocrisy – the people who get to the top of a profession are often those who have been nurtured well. How can they then show such disregard for the job of parenting by keeping men at work away from their children, and by forcing intelligent women back into the home, where they may become bitter and bored (and looking after babies is incredibly boring, though few dare to admit it) and transmit that frustration to their children? And this is only one small aspect of the fallout from the poor treatment of female employees – I could go on for hours but I have a thesis to write.

The only hope I have is that gleaned from a newspaper I read a while ago, which said that companies will be forced to change to accommodate women because, as the population ages and the employment pool shrinks, companies won't be able to afford to lose their female employees. And it won’t, as my father thought, take thirty years. If, after three or four decades, sexism like this still exists, it will take generations to be rid of it.

Sally Clark

I found the book ‘Stolen Innocence’ on the shelves of the Law section a few months back, before I left for Oz I think. It then sat in my unstable Ikea bookcase at home until I came back from Austria and, having read two Daphnes (‘The Glass Blowers’ and ‘Frenchman’s Creek’, which bordered on bodice-ripper territory; it was so overwhelmingly romantic I wasn’t sure if I liked it) I thought that I would read something grittier. Well, I got something far more disturbing than I bargained for.

Sally Clark had 2 kids; one died when he was nearly three months old, the other at two months. The post-mortem of Harry, the second child, was performed by Alan Williams, a Home Office pathologist. The paediatrician on duty at the time of Harry’s death had recommended a paediactric pathologist, one who specialised in post-mortems on babies, but unfortunately this recommendation wasn’t taken up. If Alan Williams had been cut out of the equation, Sally Clarke would never have gone to jail on the conviction of killing both her children. There are many ‘if’s’ in her story, so many that it seems impossible to be true.

In the post-mortem Alan Williams identified retinal haemorrhages, which are a classic symptom of Shaken Baby Syndrome. He took the detective on the case to meet his friend, Michael Green, the Professor of Forensic Pathology at Sheffield University (and I was struck that they were friends; it suggested an accordance of mind, of one backing up the other’s suppositions). According to John Batt, the author of ‘Stolen Innocence,’ Green ‘teaches that many mothers murder their babies and pretend they are cot deaths’ (p. 2). Something that occurred to me when I read this line, and often throughout the rest of the book, was that the majority of the trials and investigations pertaining to Sally Clark were prevailed over by men. I couldn’t help but wonder if they understood how foreign it was for a woman to consider killing her child. Even the female prisoners in the prison to which Clark was eventually sent thought that child killers were the lowest of the low, and tormented her accordingly.

Because it seemed suspicious that both children had died, Clarke was taken to court. Initially it appeared that the case would be dismissed because there wasn’t enough evidence to prosecute her: the deaths of her children simply couldn’t be ascertained. However, the prosecution brought in Roy Meadow, editor of the ABC of Child Abuse, and an intimidating presence, not least because of his style which, according to Batt, was persuasive and forthright. Meadow produced the statistic that the probability of a two cot deaths in a family was 73 million to one. The chance of winning Lotto is 14 million to one; so the impact of the statistic on the jury was unavoidable. Later, it was revealed that other studies showed that this statistic was wildly incorrect, and that the chance was 214 to one, and that there may be familial factors which predispose children to cot death. In addition, because of the lack of evidence it was unknown if Clark’s children had even died of cot death, and therefore the statistic didn’t even apply.

It also became apparent that Green had misinterpreted the slides which supposedly indicated the retinal haemorrhages. The defence found another expert to look at the slides, and he concluded that the macrophages in the slides were due to the rapid delivery of the baby at birth, rather than Shaken Baby Syndrome. Green recanted, but Clark was still convicted. The public was also against her - perhaps swayed by Meadow’s erroneous statistic, and also because Clark dressed as she would for work, in her solicitor’s suit. Like Lindy Chamberlain, she didn’t seem the mothering, nurturing type. This kind of thing just shits me – a woman doesn’t have to be a fucking earth goddess in order to love her children. Christ, people can be just so fucking stupid.

Anyway, calming down now:

Clark’s first appeal was dismissed, but she was finally released on the basis of medical evidence which indicated that Harry had died from staphylococcal septicaemia (blood poisoning which had given rise to meningitis). A forensic pathologist, Professor Byard, stated that that if this bacteria, Staphylococcus aureus, was found in two sites in a body, ‘I know I have a probable cause of death; if I find it in three, I have an actual cause of death’ (p. 425). Prof. Byard found it in eight sites in Harry’s body.

In addition (yet again), it was found that Williams knew about these results but had failed to disclose them.

Due to the incompetence of the supposed ‘professionals’ involved in this case (and I have refrained from using their titles of Sir, QC, Dr and so forth for these people because I don’t believe they deserve them), Sally Clark spent more than three years in prison. She had another child before she was taken to court, but had to leave him in the care of a foster family while the case was being heard. Eventually her husband was able to get custody of the baby but by this time Clark was in prison.

Clark ought to have been allowed to grieve in peace, but was instead forced to endure three and a half years away from her husband and son in a gaol. Her husband was similarly denied the chance to grieve. He sold their house to pay for the court costs and to be close to the prison and his wife, and in this move he also gave up his partnership in his law firm and consequently moved five years down the ladder of promotion. His devotion to his wife seemed to belong to the realm of fiction, it was so strong and magical; I didn’t know that men like that existed.

My rage, while reading this book, was insurmountable. Halfway through it, I read in the newspaper that Clark had died (I think from natural causes; it hasn’t yet been made clear) and, knowing that, the book became one of the most difficult things I have ever read – I had to force myself to get to the end. When talking to A- (a lawyer) about the case, she said this kind of thing happened all the time, and for that reason it was lucky that we don’t have the death sentence here. Yet it was a death sentence for Clark, as John Batt wrote:

The shame and daily degradation of nearly three and a half years in prison does serious psychological damage to any innocent woman. It is impossible to forecast how long it will take Sally to recover fully from what she has suffered. The successive hammer blows of the death of her mother, the deaths of Christopher and then Harry, her arrest and conviction as a serial baby-murderer and the rejection of her first appeal, followed by three and a half years of a life sentence as the ‘lowest of the low’, do terrible damage to the psyche.
I fear she may still be in prison, in her head. No sum of money can compensate her for what she went through.

It was just a tragic waste of a life, for what shone through these pages was Clark’s courage, her pluck in prison, her intelligence and her overwhelming love for her husband and children. All I can think of is King Lear, ‘bound/upon a wheel of fire’ (IV, vii), and of whom the soldiers said, after he’d died:

Vex not his ghost: O, let him pass! he hates him much
That would upon the rack of this tough world
Stretch him out longer (V, iii).

As a coda, I’ll leave you with an incident that shows the character of one of the people responsible for prosecuting Clark:

Michael Green … watches as police carry in a baby’s bouncy chair; it is an exhibit.
“I didn’t realise that we were short of chairs,” he says in a loud voice, looking for a laugh.
Sally hears, as do Mackey and Kelsey Fry and Spencer. Steve also hears — and will never forget — the joke made about the bouncy chair in which his baby son Harry died (p. 113).

For more information, go to www.sallyclark.org

'Must be a chick thing.'

Thus spake the numbskull in ‘Alien Resurrection’ after Ripley had blown to bits the tanks full of attempts at recreating her self from a bit of DNA left on a piece of ice in the last film (I know that was a bad sentence, but I can’t be bothered to fix it). Or rather, the idiot who wrote that stupid line and ruined the whole scene.

I love Aliens. Once I was so infatuated with Ripley (during my anorexic adolescence when I found her leanness so very appealing) that I thought that, if I had a daughter, I would call her Sigourney. Then a friend asked, ‘So what would you do for her nickname? Call her Siggy?’ and I admitted that perhaps it wasn’t such a good idea after all. But on that note, I like the themes of motherhood, pregnancy and hosts that ripple through the stories, especially in the last film, where the boundaries between alien and human began to break down, and you can't tell what a mother isanymore, because the doctoring of DNA has become motherhood. Which is why that line shat me, because it pointed so obviously to what was there, that it assumed the viewers were dumb.

But what I like most of all about the movies is that Ripley is such a ball-breaker. She’s as tough as nails, smart and has satisfyingly sarcastic one-liners. I said to A- that, sadly, I didn’t think they made movies with strong female characters like that anymore and A- replied, ‘I don’t think they have ever!’ (She also said, in a discussion we had with H about whether it was the blood or the Alien’s saliva that was acidic, and H said it was the blood, and A- said, ‘I hope she doesn’t menstruate,’ and I said, ‘I bet they didn’t even think of that.’)

Yet I found it unnerving that it was still a resurrection, because although I was glad Ripley had come back to life, it was still upsetting that she wasn’t completely the same. It was like in the Dune novels, by Brian Herbert, when Duncan Idaho was replicated each time, but always changed some way. I loved that character, and I was disappointed that he never lived as he originally had.

Anyway I like these ideas about perpetuating love and life, and I dimly recall Sue Woolfe saying, in an interview, that someone like Ada Lovelace had invented the computer so she could find some way of extending the life of a person she loved, who was dying. It’s for the same reason that I’m interested in memory, and in the question of how you can bring back someone who you’ve irrevocably lost through the process of remembering them. And I’m wondering if I’ll ever be good enough to write something science fictiony, and have it work as well as well as Aliens.

But maybe it was a chick thing, on Friday, to burst into tears after spending an hour and a half getting to the British Library (there was an incident of some sort, so the police had cordoned off half the street so I had to walk to St Pancras from halfway down City Road, in very high red heels), only to discover that I’d left my card behind and couldn’t get into the reading room. I was already overwrought because it had taken so long to leave that house that I felt like I was living out my recurring nightmare of never getting anywhere because of having so much stuff to pack. So I went to the membership desk and asked if there was anyway of getting a temporary membership card and the man said yes, there was, if I paid £5 and provided proof of address and identity. Since I can’t even afford to pick up my dry cleaning, let alone pay £5, and since I’m not in the habit of carrying around my latest gas bill, there was no way out of it, and in despair I rushed into the ladies’ and started howling. Naturally it would have been more efficacious to cry in front of the man at the reception desk but unfortunately I hate crying in front of other people. There was nothing for it but to get on the bus and go back home. I did, however, see a man in a suit playing a guitar in a parking lot and, tossed onto the top of a bus shelter, a potato that had been spraypainted blue and jabbed full of red toothpicks.

Meanwhile, I am going mental (just in case it wasn't obvious from the abovementioned incident) because I haven’t been writing. I think the instability also has something with the fact that my baby (so to speak) of seven years has left me and now I need something else to fill the space. Stories keep welling up in me, bursting to be written down, and I just can’t seem to find the time.

At least now I’m writing in notebooks again, which I haven’t done for years, and I’m using the chocolate brown one that C sent me after we’d had a fight. I’m writing down my dreams, because A- said she’d had a dream that she, H and I had moved to a house by the beach, and I said I never had happy dreams, so I’m logging my dreams for a month to see what they’re like. So far I’ve had my only other recurring nightmare – about marrying a man I don’t love, and having a less-than-perfect wedding – and a dream about being frustrated with H because he was having a dinner party and it wasn’t organised, as usual.

And I have, at last, found an author who inspires me – Marguerite Duras. I’ve just finished ‘The War’ and for a day I was slightly stunned by the potency of her words. I read ‘The Lover’ last year, but I found the film far better than the book. Naturally, this had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Tony Leung was stark naked in it, but all the same I think I’ll go back to that book and try it again. And I might watch the film again too.