Foz Gets A Patreon

Hi there, readers! Do you enjoy this blog, and possibly also my tumblr? Do you like that thing I do, wherein I have opinions on the internet? Then please consider checking out my Patreon campaign and possibly supporting me. The writing I do here is a labour of love, and it would be super nice to have some form of predictable income associated with it, no matter how small. Either way, though, I’m hoping to produce more regular content in the coming months, and I’m looking forward to writing it.

An Open Letter To Mary Speakman, Headteacher At Altrincham Grammar School For Girls

Dear Mrs Speakman,

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I recently read in The Guardian about the efforts of one of your students to set up a Feminist Society within your school, and about the backlash she and her fellow students have suffered as a result of it. Almost as disheartening as the rampant misogyny of their detractors, however, was the response of the school itself, which was to require their work to be taken down from the internet.

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In your words (my emphasis), “We are committed to protecting the safety and welfare of our students, which extends to their safety online… As such, we will take steps to recommend students remove words or images that they place online that could compromise their safety or that of other students at the school.”

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Mrs Speakman, not only is this contradictory – you start out by saying that the school is committed to protecting its students, then place the onus of protection on the students themselves – it is perilously close to victim-blaming. Your girls have been viciously attacked for standing up for their rights, and your response has been to suggest that, by making a simple, courteous plea for equality, they have endangered themselves. The fact that this endangerment is itself the problem has apparently passed you by: in your rush to protect your students, you have done the opposite, effectively sanctioning the violence being directed against them by saying that, to all intents and purposes, they brought it on themselves.

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You have unambiguously told your students that only silence can protect them; that if they wish to be safe, then they should neither draw attention to themselves nor advocate for their rights. By withdrawing the school’s support, you have given power to their assailants and effectively punished the girls for being unquiet victims. You have taken away their voice, and you have told them it’s for their own good.

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Mrs Speakman, I am generally opposed to same-sex educational institutions. Whatever benefits can be derived by separating and teaching children by gender in our highly gender-sensitive society is, I feel, subsumed beneath the inescapable weight of the fact that real life is coed. But despite the learning environment you provide for them, your girls are acutely aware of this reality: in fact, they are actively dealing with its consequences, and thanks to you, they are doing so alone. Perhaps you feel that, as the threats being made against them are coming from outside Altrincham, the issue is out of your hands. Perhaps you feel you have no control over what outsiders say to your students, and are therefore simply trying to engage in damage control.

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But I wonder, Mrs Speakman – would your attitude still be the same if Altrincham were a coed school: if the tirade of racist, sexist, misogynist abuse being levelled at your girls was coming from their male classmates – boys whose actions did fall within your bailiwick? Would your reaction to that scenario have been the same? Knowing that you would be forced to face the consequences of doing so on a daily basis, would you still have told the girls that the price of their safety was silence, and that the best response to abuse at the hands of their male peers was never to speak out against it? I dearly hope not; but the point, Mrs Speakman, is that these boys are still learning from your actions. They might not be your students, but they are students of the world, and when they see you withdrawing support from your girls, they learn that sexism is correct: that the girls who made a fuss, rather than the boys who attacked them, are the ones at fault, and that they should be castigated accordingly.

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As well as emailing the school, I’m making this letter public – partly to increase the chances of your seeing it, but mostly because this is an issue I’m passionate about. You have made a bad decision, and in so doing have left your girls to deal with sexist vitriol in isolation. But it is not too late to change things. You can issue an apology; you can reaffirm your support. You can give them the confidence they need to continue advocating for their rights, not only while they’re at school, but once they’ve left its walls. Because while you might think that silence equals safety while they’re under your care, in an all-female environment, that won’t be true forever – if, indeed, it was ever true at all. One day soon, your girls will graduate, but until then, you have a choice: to support them in defending themselves, or to tell them to sit in silence.

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I hope you make the right one.

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Yours sincerely,

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Foz Meadows

Unconscious Bias On The Left Wing

Let me show you how it works:

1. A female, POC and/or LGBTQ politician/leader is appointed in your area. This is cause for celebration, because
2. while you aren’t sexist, racist or homophobic, you’re all too aware of the fact that other people – and, more specifically, The System – are frequently biased in those directions, making it harder for such candidates to be accepted regardless of their qualifications. Certainly, this new person is a definite a minority among their high-powered brethren, which suggests that
3. they must be exceptional in some way. Depending on the context, this specialness could be ascribed to any number of skills, passions or characteristics, but the most important thing is that
4. despite their gender, race and/or sexual orientation – or rather, despite the biases of less enlightened people who consider such things a handicap – the candidate has succeeded. But no matter how glad you are to see them installed, it’s important to remember that
5. the candidate did not succeed because of their gender, race and/or sexual orientation. Regardless of whether quotas and/or tokenism are a relevant in this instance (which depends entirely on the individual circumstances), it’s generally seen to be the job of obnoxious, right-wing objectors to claim, sneeringly, that so-and-so was only let in because of their gender, race and or/ sexual orientation, this being a basic means of undermining such a candidate’s qualifications from the get-go. Nonetheless,
6. it’s clear that their gender, race and/or sexual orientation is a relevant factor in terms of how they’ll be perceived in their role, no matter how irrelevant it might be to their actual portfolio. But even though these details only matter to you in terms of your being happy to see The System veer away from straight white male dominion,
7. should an instance arise (as it inevitably will) where the candidate is in a position to act (or not) on left-wing issues – and particularly where, either accurately or not, you perceive those issues to overlap with their own gender, racial and/or sexual identity – your natural expectation is for them to Do The Right Thing. And as you’ve already acknowledged that the candidate is special,
8. you’ve automatically set yourself up to hold them – albeit with the best of intentions – to a higher moral, social and political standard than their straight, white and/or male counterparts. Even if you can acknowledge that people in positions of authority must, of necessity, compromise their own values in order to maintain alliances, get work done in the long term and keep their position within the party/organisation, all that hopefulness about seeing a female, POC and/or LGBTQ candidate in the arena can turn swiftly to feelings of betrayal should they compromise on the issues you care about,
9. because they, of all possible candidates, should know better. But now they’ve gone and abused your trust; they’ve proved that they weren’t special after all – no better than their straight, white and/or male colleagues, really, and certainly worse in terms of causing you heartache, because of how they should have known better. And because you took their betrayal personally, rather than viewing it as a pragmatic (if irritating) function of their being a human in office, you can’t bear to support them any more. You’d feel like a hypocrite now, and anyway, keeping them in just to maintain diversity and at the expense of your principles would really be tokenism. And so you take the only remaining, logical course of action, and
10. vote them out of office. It’s a shame they couldn’t live up to your expectations, but maybe the next woman, POC and/or LGBTQ candidate to come along will be different. After all, is it really so unreasonable to expect that your chosen leader be a flawless paragon of virtue?

Congratulations! You have now succeeded in holding minority candidates to such an unreasonably high standard on the basis of their gender, race and/or sexual orientation that you’ve effectively recreated the same type of discrimination you were so angry about in the first place. Wash, rinse and repeat, until society collapses or insomniac authors die from an overdose of facepalm.

This tutorial/rant brought to you by politics, the internet and human nature.