Dr Anna Arrowsmith

5/28

As my first year living in Los Angeles comes to its conclusion in a couple of weeks, there are still a few yearly events that we as a couple have not encountered as yet. One such experience was attending an Oscars party at a friend’s house where everyone watches the full event and competes to win a small kitty by getting the most correct awards predictions. Coming from the UK, I had never actually seen the awards in full, only as the British press represented them in chunks the next day, due to the fact they happen in the middle of our night.

I was overall pleasantly surprised that they were not only as glamorous and lavish as expected but also that the awards process was less boring than I had imagined too. The British press give the impression, through their obsession with a Hollywood beauty ideal that everyone is trying desperately to turn back the hands of time via ever more obvious plastic surgery. In fact, I was surprised to see not only many industry professionals to appear their real age, but actually quite a lot of the talent did too. It just goes to show how bias often goes unnoticed until you see another culture’s take on the same thing. The same thing goes for living out here in LA, only a few are anything like the squeaky plastic stereotype they are assumed to be in the UK.

One thing that was very apparent however, was the obsession with how any female celebrity looked, something that was not equally true of the male stars. Without so much as a thought the presenters would ask a woman about her dress, complementing her on it usually, and then turn to her male co-celebrity and ask about any other number of subjects. Sigh. This to a gender specialist is rather galling, yet was also similarly irritating to my husband Tim who is a specialist in male tailoring and who would have loved to hear about the men’s clothes – which, unless you have someone pointing them out to you, really do remain neutral and begin to blur into each other. By the way, it is interesting how many of the men wore ill-fitting suits to The Oscars!

Thankfully the Mani Cam, which is a close up camera in which female celebrities are meant to proffer their hands for the world to judge their manicures, has been removed this year although the owners E! refuse to admit it is because female celebrities don’t want to do it. I’m glad it’s gone, it reminded me of a particularly skin-crawling adult show that ran for some time on a channel I used to work on from years ago called ECU, or Extreme Close Up where an old producer used to run his camera right up and down a young model’s body, inches away from her skin, pointing out any spots or imperfections. Ironically one of the softest shows – as in it didn’t include and hardcore acts or shots – it was in my opinion the most objectionable because of this old man’s pervy eye. Ugh.

Well, I have an answer to all of this. I can understand that celebrities are reluctant to annoy the media for fear of negative reprisals, so are unlikely to pick up individual journos on their racism, sexism, stereotyping, etc but there is a way to re-route the conversation and to use it to their own advantage (which is fair enough, if the journo insults the intelligence of the celeb, I think it is fair to say they open the door to a taking back of power by them).

Whilst studying film at St Martin’s in the late 1990’s I once attended a talk at the ICA by kitsch, Chilean film-maker Alejandro Jodorowsky, who had directed one of my favourite films of the time, Santa Sangre. He appeared in a very relaxed way, in a crumpled beige linen suit, reclining in his chair and answering at his leisure. He has a strong accent so took time to answer slowly. The serious looking interviewer pecked away, answering question after question from a long list he had and after the first few, Jodowosky began to answer non-relevantly, he didn’t actually answer the question he was asked. He did this a couple of times and of course we all thought he had misunderstood the question due to language issues. He was a witty and engaging interview anyway, so I don’t think anyone minded too much. By the time he had answered three questions in a non relevant manner, the interviewer remarked upon it, to which he answered: “When somebody asks me a question I do not like, I answer it with the answer to the question I wished I had been asked”.

What a brilliant idea!, I thought. I’m not sure if anyone else considered it as memorable as I did, it did raise a laugh, but this is exactly what people need to do when asked a crappy question. Go in to an interview situation armed with things you want to get across and should an interviewer take you down the path of mediocrity, shake it up by confusing the hell out of them. If everyone did this, I reckon we would quite quickly make the media shape up their act and I don’t think it would be met with anger, but with humour, so the risk would be far less than a direct confrontation. What do you think?

4/28

In the last couple of weeks men from Azerbaijan and Turkey have taken to the streets wearing miniskirts to protest the death of 20 year old student Ozgecan Aslan who was abducted and clubbed to death by a bus driver who also had allegedly tried to rape her. This is part of a welcome change of tide in the discussion around sexism, one born out of the recent arguments for stopping rape culture, that is, instead of it being the responsibility to teach young women to keep themselves safe, we should be teaching men not to assault women. When I first came across the idea behind the reversal of focus in the discourse on rape, I remember how poignant was the realisation that we had got the perspective wrong and how powerful it felt to swap ends.

The image of a row of men standing shoulder to shoulder with bare legs is a welcome change in the dynamics of gender politics where women have been historically left responsible for changing men’s attitudes towards them. Long before Emma Watson’s UN “He For She” speech last year which urged men to take up the mantle and own their responsibility for remaining silent in the presence of other men’s sexism, there have been in recent years a number of examples of men taking the initiative to protest against sexism and it’s quotidian and insidious invisibility. For instance, Australian newsreader Karl Stefanovic wore the same suit to work for over a year to highlight the public and industry’s relative lack of attention to his appearance in contrast to other female presenters. He was right, nobody noticed. Other men have become more vocally supportive of campaigns like #everydaysexism and against sexism in gaming culture. This is a welcome change.

What I think is most interesting however, is how fresh these male led campaigns look and feel. Not only are the men actively campaigning in specific campaigns and therefore raising those campaigns’ profiles, but the very act of their involvement in the debates around gender is having the effect of queering up the whole scene. This is something only men and transgender people can do as we have got so used to seeing women campaign they have almost become invisible or at least a bore for some. How fresh to see men in skirts (and actually, how sexy) and how masculine to see a man take on a one man campaign to highlight the unfairness of his female colleagues’ issues. Surely these values are in line with the type of modern masculinity we strive to encourage, both strong and inclusive?

I believe we may be getting to a tipping point where men are beginning to be expected to stand up for women’s equality, to take it personally, to own up for their privilege and to learn about it. After some time out the wilderness of extended adolescence – the lads mags phenomena of the 1990’s for instance – where football, sex and beer were useful tools to take men’s attention away from their confusion about their changing gender roles, men are now being encouraged to grow up, and this is very good. As long as we can avoid falling back into the masculine stereotype of men ‘saving’ women (rather than standing by them) we could be about to witness a quite steep change of attitude, especially with millennials who have been found to hold more egalitarian attitudes and a inherent respect for how different aspects of a person intersect (gender, sexuality, race, able-bodiedness, etc) than previous generations.

Some feminists have historically been skeptical of pro-feminist men, assuming their interest to be based on retaining power in the face of women’s challenges to them. I can see this point and have certainly experienced some men who blithely tell you (especially if you happen to be a female porn director) what women need politically, and it usually resembles a Scandinavian type of leftist feminism that I find both deeply troubling and equally as restrictive as the supposed non-egalitarian status quo they are trying to improve upon. Indeed, I can remember my flatmate who was *literally* a Brazilian lap dancer that worked most nights at Stringfellow’s, London recalling the worst customer she had ever had. It was a Swedish guy who saw no hypocrisy in him sitting in a strip club drunkenly telling her she was disempowered and “in my country you wouldn’t have to resort to doing this”. Save us (especially those in the various sex industries) from those types of men, there is nothing more irritating than a man who has either consciously or unconsciously morphed himself into a progressive mold, whilst retaining his sense of superiority. And the shock of this is, it usually the highly educated men who make this mistake (because they think they have done the research or checked their privilege enough).

But, I think the more recent examples such as those in the media today point to a genuine realignment of men’s willingness to act on their progressive beliefs. This is especially relevant for middle eastern men who don’t usually represent a progressive type of masculinity in the West (for instance even this week the Turkish male government were seen to engage in fisticuffs). Let’s hope that feminists and more widely, women can respond with open minds and begin to let men into the debate around gender, I think they have a lot to offer and their novelty to the scene can be put to good use for all our sakes.

3/28

As I have said before, we are living in a very interesting time for gender politics. Every week it seems we are offered another titbit, usually involving celebrities or badly acting men to mull over as part of our unconscious working through of the quagmire that is gender politics at this time. This last week for instance, not one but two leaks of celebrities’ untouched fashion photographs hit the web causing quite a stir.

The first set of photos was of model Cindy Crawford’s shoot for Marie Clare magazine that shows her in glamourous underwear replete with the type of skin on her belly and thighs you might expect of someone at 48 years who has had children. Though heavily made up and styled, she showed quite a lot of sun and baby ‘damage’ to her body, which I have to admit shocked me. The story was that she had released them deliberately in order to show other women she was in fact not too dissimilar to them. The overall response was one of awe and respect for making such a brave move, and it was brave, that’s for sure, especially for someone whose sole income is derived from the way she looks.

The second set was of singer Beyonce, whose facial photos showed a slightly spotty complexion, really nothing out of the ordinary. The photos chosen were also less ‘perfect’ than Crawford’s in that these were never going to be the ones chosen, her expression being less than ideal, eyes slightly shut, etc. meaning these images were specifically chosen to make her look bad, leaving the better poses (the ones Crawford had) out. These, we were informed were a leak and the response ranged from disbelief at the Flawless singer’s normal skin (what were these people expecting?) or disbelief that such pictures even made the news.

In reality, both sets of images were leaks. It turns out that Crawford’s pictures were not part of a feminist message to women, rather she was the victim of someone else’s campaign. Still, people praised her as though this tiny little fact made no difference whatsoever to the meaning of the images. But it does. How does such a revelation change the meaning of the Crawford images exactly? Well, we can think of her as a victim – something not even offered to her black counterpart Beyonce – but that would ruin our feel good glow and make us feel guilty about devouring and desseminating the images. Yet, surely if Crawford did not want the images leaked she remains part of the problem, the media that sells women a lie in order to make them feel bad enough to consume cosmetics? If we are angry about the media’s use of female beauty we should be blaming her right? No, only black singer Beyonce is trying to cheat us, apparently…

What I really think is interesting though is the very recent use of leaking and faked leaking of images, real and staged that try to pull our feminist strings. Whether it is videos of a woman being cat called on the streets of New York, which was originally sold as a feminist made video aimed at highlighting men’s misogyny, but actually turned out to be staged, or fake hate campaigns like those against actress Emma Watson after her inaugural UN speech asking men to take the reigns in stopping male sexism, one thing is sure we now have to think twice before we believe anything about supposed feminist inspired stories in the press. Is it feminists or anti-feminists who make these campaigns? Is a campaign being unearthed as staged or untrue part of the design aimed at decreasing empathy for the subjects of them?

There was a time when those who campaigned on behalf of the under trodden were largely believed and therefore treated with impunity. Such people were motivated by good and could therefore could expect more lenience than the rest of the political world. One good thing to come out of the last twelve months or so, which has seen a number of supposed campaigners to be either naive in their falling for scams or found to be manipulating themselves, is that we are now beginning to question not only the individual campaigns but the overall epistemologies of those who claim to be doing good. Can they see the difference between true and false or right and wrong?

Such questioning is surely is an intelligent thing to do as there have been some horrendous abuses of trust by some groups, especially by NGOs or rescue industries, who are more motivated by their will to power than to genuinely help those they aim to save (Bono, for instance). The best example of this is the anti sex work campaigners who refuse to listen to women who do that very work, especially those that don’t want to be ‘saved’. Anti porn campaigners like Gail Dines and Shelley Lubben who refuse porn actresses’ agency are other examples.

The trouble is though, that not all campaigners are bad and we risk losing their voices too. Must we now always question awareness campaigns for their verity and if so what will be the long term effect of this? Surely we will become skeptical and eventually desensitised, choosing to save face and disbelieve rather than get wrapped up in something which turns out to be a red herring? I’m sure we have all felt the shame of forwarding a facebook hoax, or equivalent. I have thought a lot about this and I personally have decided to risk being gullible in such situations, it is the better evil of the two.

2/28

As part of my new-found dedication to blogging I went to see Fifty Shades of Grey this lunchtime. I did this rather hesitantly as I had planned to wait until it was free to air having only made it as far as reading the first third of the book when the clanging cliches and abysmal writing got the best of me. It seems I was not alone in this as the scriptwriter too spent two hours on exactly the same portion of the book. I can only imagine this was done for reasons of either censorship or a desire to focus on the emotional, rather than the sexual side of the story. In fact there were only a handful of sex scenes, only three of which were in any way influenced by the BDSM, which came as a surprise not only to me, but the group of five or so women behind me who had clearly read the whole book and were quite vocal in their disbelief at the abrupt ending. Up to this point I was left wondering if I had become too jaded a pornographer to appreciate the subtleties and might have missed them, so I was glad to hear the dismay of others. Having said this there were some sexy parts of the film and I think some evidence of genuine desire from the lead characters towards each other, which I think has been lost in all of the criticism.

Anyway, what did I think? Well, my main observation was that cliches are far more easily swallowed in filmic rather than literary form. Much as the characters and plot line were almost entirely predictable, we would refer to them as the watered down descriptor ‘stereotypical’ rather than ‘cliched’ once in cinematic form and I think this is because we are so used to seeing cliches as the norm in cinema, especially gendered and sexual ones. This is probably due to the power structures and the economic forces behind an industry that doesn’t see anything to be broken with such dross. When you read about Anastasia’s blundering behaviour – which is contrasted to Christian’s cool persona – it really sticks at the back of the throat because the author’s chosen vocabulary is still apparent. Not so in the film, which like any good sex flick, edits around the accidental positives, cutting out the clanging edges caused by lack of talent.

Much as this is a stereotypical story of an inexperienced young virgin who gets swept off her feet by a knight in dark armour, there are some interesting bits. She is not such a simple submissive in the film and you get the impression that the scriptwriter and director wanted to push the feminist angle as far as they could. She certainly makes the decisions and, like is supposed to happen in the BDSM community (hint, it doesn’t always work this way) the submissive is in fact, paradoxically in control. After all she has the final say in the form of the safety word which can stop all play and gets to define exactly what she will and wont do in that she gets to chose an appropriate dominant to perform the acts that she likes. The saying goes that a real dominant would not choose to play with a submissive because they want the person to genuinely submit, which necessarily means ding so against their consent.

But this point, I think is the interesting part about power play in sex, either in the BDSM community or the wider porn industry. The focus, which is apparently on the pleasure of the dominant, is in fact (as Christian is at pains to point out) all about giving pleasure to the submissive. So who is really in control and therefore what does the words dominant or submissive mean in this context? As Lacan pointed out back in the 1960’s the definition of power is far from simple when one is talking about pleasure. His idea, which I have often chanted in defence of porn goes something like “whatever gives you pleasure gives you power”, meaning that the only real way to disempower yourself in such situations is to deny yourself access to pleasure (and the opportunity to learn and grow) for some other “proper” reason like it makes you look like a weak woman when you consider yourself to be a strong feminist (whilst denying yourself reward, again a paradox).

This is where I have issues with much of the discussion around the film. When some people say it glorifies domestic violence, they clearly don’t know the definition of such a thing because real life victims have nowhere near as much agency or choice as Anastasia is shown to have, nor are the abusers as concerned with their victim’s safety and pleasure as much as Christian. It remains true however, that taking a wide look at the porn or many of the other sexual industries, that female submission is over-represented, so what we now need is more inclusion of female domination and other angles. The irony being that, as sex workers will tell you, their boudoirs are filled with rich and powerful men who want to submit to a woman’s might (as indeed, did Christian historically).

So is 50 Shades a feminist text? It would be hard to say it is, not so much for the BDSM sex but because of the film’s central reliance on heteronormative romantic stereotypes, which I have often argued do women – but also as my research has more recently taught me, men too – a lot of harm (having said this it does go some way to complicating the role of gendered power, which is helpful to the discussion). Yet the idea that one goes out of one’s mind when one falls in love is a very unhelpful narrative to teach young women. It encourages you to fall involve with people you should just be fucking. It is therefore very apt that Beyonce reworked her submissive hit “Crazy in Love” for one of the sex scenes. This story and that song rely on a history of Mills and Boon romances as their scaffolding, all of which encourage women to be less agentic than they should be, which is why that song in particular grates me. The film has been discussed, torn apart and politicised, in contrast, the song just slipped under our culture’s heteronormative radar (something complicated by Beyonce’s claim to feminism). So much as Anastasia has been given some much needed self confidence in the film version, and that the film itself brings female erotic imagination into the mainstream (which is its greatest strength) I just wish there were a few less stereotypes and more experimentation. Right now it reads just like a teenage girl’s fantasy, a story from someone with little or no sexual experience (ironically not unlike the pick up artist fantasised masculine sexual performance, which is also often born out of a lack of sexual experience).

But my remaining memory will be that the role of perspective was the most interesting part. That the same act could be seen from two different people so differently went beyond the usual mantra of heterosexual sex that of “opposites attract”. You were aware of the very real flipping nature of power throughout, which I found genuinely interesting. As Hegel argued, submission can be very powerful and domination a bond that demands performance and therefore can decrease pleasure. Now let’s see someone write that film.

Historically frustrated with my own blogging procrastination I have become inspired by The Curious Creative’s campaign to get people blogging regularly as a creative and promotional tool as well as one that encourages the blogger overcome the need for perfection. So, I am going to blog everyday for the next 28 days, a post that will take no longer than 28 minutes to write. The subjects will be varied but are usually linked by an interest on gender or sexuality. Let’s see how far I can get and how I will have changed at the end of the month.

Day 1 – Feminine v Feminist Aesthetics.

For those interested in gender and sexuality, we live in an interesting time. Never before (or at least, not since the 70’s) has the gender debate been more regularly fought out between interested parties, right there in the mainstream. Whether it be feminism, men’s rights, pick up artistry, masculinities, transgenderism, everyday sexism, female sexuality or women’s representation, it would seem we are living right in the centre of an eye of a gendered storm which is rewriting the rules of gender engagement everyday, and I for one find it fascinating to see it unfurl.

One focus of the debate regards women’s representation in the media, especially the arguments for and against Photoshop retouching of images of women’s physiques and how such images effect the wider female population. My particular take on this is torn between my acknowledgements that such images really do hurt women and my appreciation of aesthetics born out of my arts education.

I myself have battled with body esteem issues since I was a child, one of my foremost memories being me sitting crossed legged for daily assembly at junior school, probably aged 5 or 6 and looking on in horror that my thighs were fatter than the other girls in my row. I thought that I was the only girl who worried about such things. Growing up, I continued to have a split relationship with my appearance, between shame and occasional pride, (thankfully interspersed with times of neutrality) even though others rarely criticised my looks, indeed they often praised them, this made relatively little difference to me as I could not shake my negative self image. This is still the case – ask my long-suffering husband Tim. You will hear the same sentiments coming from thousands of women, including celebrities, confessing their anxieties throughout the media. One waits for a tipping point…

Even now I know I would pay a decent chunk of money to be able to lose that last stone overnight. Growing up as a feminist in my teenage years onwards, I learned to blame my anxieties on the sexist media industries that produced the images that ‘indoctrinated’ me and wished that women were more open about their anger towards them. So it is with great pleasure that I see we are finally having a discussion around this and can now see instances of women taking the lead and re-writing the rules of aesthetics.

I remember reading Naomi Wolf’s (1989) book The Beauty Myth that argued women undertake a ‘third shift’ – after their daily work and their second shift of taking care of the family – in keeping themselves attractive (something she also correctly predicted would happen to men eventually). Such a shift was rightly blamed for keeping women underdeveloped in other areas of potential in their lives,

For a while Wolf’s argument felt supportive, I could look in the mirror and say to myself “I refuse to do the third shift”, I could try to retrain myself to think of other areas of interest when doubts arose, “I’m an artist…a thinker”. I even recommend the book to female students at university debates, whom also found it useful. But eventually like any argument that requires mirror training the effect waned and I was left with my pre-Wolf self.

One thing that remained was the realisation that it is now more accurate to say that these days women are pulled between two poles, between the continuous beauty industry mantra that tells you how you should look, and a feminist one that says you shouldn’t be worried about such trivial/harmful ideals. It’s like having a bird pecking at each ear, giving you no rest; one undermines your physical reality, the other your intelligence/maturity. I have always felt torn this way, first by an aesthetic argument, a drive to consume images of beauty and then a political one, one that calls for gender equality. A doubling up of guilt. The question then arises that maybe I could rid myself of one of these I might be happier, and it looks like the political one might just be the easier limpet to shift.

Whaaat? Isn’t that self-defacing, aren’t I advocating giving in to the media? Well, yes and no. The trouble is I believe there is one aspect of this argument that is not being had and that is an argument of including female beauty within a broader appreciation of aesthetics. Much as there are clear reasons why women’s beauty has been politicised, there should also be clear reasons why we should retain a sense of our wider aesthetic appreciations too. To keep both in balance as it were.

Those that prioritise aesthetics, for instance those that put fashion first, rarely engage in this political (feminist) sphere, they just get on with making and consuming images, with little political concern it would seem. So their point of view is rarely incorporated, neither are the words of those who study the wider aesthetics like art. My problem is this. If we are happy to accept that there is such a thing as beauty, as a visual entity that although ultimately relative – as in you wont get everyone to agree, and that it necessarily encourages an ‘anti’ or rebellious response too – we can and most often do concur on what it is.

For instance compare an industrial location to one of cascading hills in countryside, or a utilitarian object to one that is made to be visually enjoyed. Do we not say that it is not only morally right to appreciate and support ‘beauty’ (lest we lose the taste) but also that it makes sense? There are parallels between a historic broadening of what is labelled beautiful yes, (Brutalist architecture, for instance) with an argument for a greater inclusion of different bodies in the acceptable range of female forms, but the argument remains, if there isn’t a taste for it, it can’t be politically born. Just like I don’t make porn ‘for’ women, but ‘from’ a (my) female perspective, the risk would be to make something right-on yet unpopular, that rings hollow.

I’m not comparing myself or any other woman to an industrial location, but I am posing the question of whether it is ever going to be possible to rid ourselves of our love of symmetry, colour, light, design etc. and that this might be a reason why women are beating themselves up about their appearance. Women are both objects of, and consumers of female beauty. If we don’t fit the industries’ ideal, we should keep in mind, that ideal is one many women share and I don’t believe it is so easy to say which came first, the chicken or the egg. Women’s magazines don’t have to put images of women on the front – they could use images of men – they do so because we wouldn’t buy them if they did (I tried this once with the front of a porn DVD I made called Uniform Behaviour, it didn’t sell to either sex until I changed it to include a woman prominently on the cover).

In other words, much as I dislike it, I know I would be happier, more confident and as a corollary, probably more successful if I just lost both that stone and the feminist bird on my shoulder. Sorry. Question is, does such a realisation make me weaker (giving into the media) or stronger (knowing more about, and respecting my aesthetic eye). Hmmm…I’m glad the 28 mins ran out.

Having read an article in today’s Huffington Post about a set of 12 year old conjoined twin boys from India called Shivanath and Shivram Sahu it got me thinking about how we perceive normality both in physical and gendered terms. The twin boys who share a set of legs have learned to live a life in harmony and even though experts say they could be separated, they and their father (and their mother?, any idea what she thinks journalists?) are adamant that they wish to remain conjoined. The twins came from an impoverished Indian background and one wonders if, in a more affluent Western environment whether they would have had the opportunity to live such a different life.

The article and associated video piece pivot around the idea that individuality is at least desirable if not ultimately a necessity once these boys hit puberty and want to have children of their own (for one brother at least). This is the undertone of the piece, even when surgical separation would result in leaving one of them without any legs and therefore wheelchair bound and reliant entirely on lifelong care. It is argued by medical professionals this is preferable in order that they can fall in love and marry as individual men, such being the centralised notion of the importance of marriage and procreation in ours and India’s society. But at least in this article we are also being asked to consider their position and to change ours away from what the doctor advises, it focuses on the boys’ and the father’s words.

This reminded me of a few other instances recently where some cemented ideas of physical normalcy has been challenged. A friend of mine had a baby a few months ago which was intersex, the first time I (or she) had experienced such a rare phenomenon in anything other than in representations in the media. My heart went out to her, she seemed a very attentive mother of her first born and clearly loved her intersex child very much, yet it was very important to her and the medical profession to ascertain the child’s sex as soon as possible. I thought it was important that I bring to her attention the studies and writings I had come across during my gender PhD that shows that intersex adults often wish their parents had left their bodies alone as they can face serious physical and emotional repercussions and may require lifelong medication. So I messaged her even though I felt I was intruding (and so did my husband for that matter!) because I think we need to fight the silence more than anything. My friend was unlikely to know anyone else who had spent so long learning about the socially constructed nature of gender and if I didn’t fight my English middle class woman’s tendency to keep quiet under the proviso that ‘parents and/or doctors know best’, then she was possibly not going to hear it from anyone.

I urged her to allow her child time to choose its own gender, to give it a gender neutral name, toys, clothes etc., and to actively give the child space. I added that in 16 years time if the child wants to change sex, the operations will be far more advanced. Meaning that if her child wanted to have a male body for instance, he would be far more likely to get a penis that works well in every sense by then (they can grow vaginas in the lab already), and this needed weighing up against a perceived idea of her child passing in an assigned sex whilst young (which I don’t think would be achievable anyway, kids are very perceptive to difference).

I knew encouraging someone to accept their child was different and to resist the need to conform was a big ask, especially as she wasn’t the anti establishment type, and I knew that it might well be perceived as interfering but to her credit she thanked me for my advice and has done since on other occasions too. However, the first thing the doctors did was to undertake blood tests, which showed the child was ‘really’ a boy, and so he has been channeled. I since heard that ‘he’ was going in for genital surgery, which although she said was more about his ability to urinate rather than to assign gender, I wasn’t so sure and I really felt I could no longer sit by and watch, so I have since ceased contact, it just made me very angry that the child was not consenting, not just to the surgery but also to being labelled a boy.

I have written before about my beliefs about gender being an arbitrary performance assigned to us at birth and it seems according to a recent article by a a intersex person called Claudia, I am not alone in arguing for an understanding of gender as something we should all consciously choose, this being especially crucial for intersex people. It frustrates me to see the countless examples of how we police gender and sexuality, whilst still believing ourselves to be liberal. Yet I can understand why we do it, not least that it took a PhD to learn about how we nudge each other into acceptable social places in invisible ways, and to stop feeling the abject horror of seeing someone different, myself. Even after many years of reading both gender and more generally, philosophy (that challenges the way we perceive most things as givens) I still had to consciously make the jump to viewing transgender, intersex and physically disabled people as ‘one of us’, simply because I thought it politically and ethically necessary. I’m glad to say like all types of learning, it soon becomes second nature but at first it felt really odd, a feeling that contradicts my beliefs in equality and therefore something I don’t like to admit to.

We are not truly encouraged to see similarity in others across gender, sexuality, etc. yet at the same time we are encouraged to be politically correct in assigning equal rights. People are different but equal is the mantra. Yes, on the face of it that is true but surely we have more overlap than exclusivity in what we share across all human manifestations? As Judith Butler points out, it is a political act to chose to focus on the ways men and women differ (genitals, breasts, etc.) when physically 90-95% of our bodies are the same.

This brings us back to the dreaded (in feminism, anyway) ‘human’ of the Enlightenment, the unpoliticised white, rich heterosexual male that spoke for all, without any sense of contradiction. It was assumed that women were the same but different, right up until the likes of Mary Wollstonecraft began to argue otherwise in 1792. Indeed we are different, and feminism has quite rightly explored women’s differences. But sometimes it feels like our focus on difference only serves to make us intolerant, precisely because we cant see similarities between ‘us’ and ‘them’. There is an underlying similarity in the way we all approach The Other, whether they be transgender, intersex, conjoined or any other manifestation of the human kind. We approach it with fear, that is until we are exposed to more difference and we can incorporate such people into a wider sense of what it is to be human, just as we have historically done across sexuality lines with homosexual people. Shivanath and Shivram’s body teaches us that we may invest too much in an ideal of autonomy (it is interesting that they should come from a culture that is less focused on individuality than the West) and Claudia can show us that we need to chill out about ‘saving’ intersex children from themselves. Maybe its us they all need saving from after all.

My husband Tim and I moved to Los Angeles as of this Monday and much as I am over the moon about emigrating (it took over 14 months and a decent amount of money to get a visa), I’m really sad to have missed the industry led campaign outside of the Stop Porn Culture conference as run by anti-porn feminists Gail Dines and Julie Bindell yesterday in London. Industry professionals Renee Richards and Jerry Barnett at Sex and Censorship led a strong team of over 50 industry (adult and sex work) folk to counter the message being argued by the conference that porn is necessarily pernicious and damaging to women. The message was clear, the only people women in the industries need saving from are the sex negative feminists. This was a message I had heard many times at the Sex Worker Open University.  Much as people envision sex workers, particularly, needing saving from dangerous customers, in fact the obverse is more true, no one is more dangerous to them (or pornstars) than those employees and supporters of the rescue industries.

So, to those in the industry, sorry I couldn’t be there (I’m also in the final two weeks of my PhD) but you have my full support and I am really pleased to see that different sex industries (in this case sex workers and porn industry folk) are beginning to join together to fight the common enemy. I have always argued at We Consent, that this is what we need to do to realise the similarities between the various anti sex industry moral panics, and to beat them.

I am very proud to announce that I won a Services to the Industry award called the Palm Phwoar at Thursday night’s Shaftas. I had originally been up for Best Girl/Girl Series but lost out to Lynsey Dawn McKenzie (who must have loads more fans on social media than me, so I should have seen that coming…) and thought that was that, then to my, and everyone’s complete surprise they announced a special award just for me!

This is the first time my campaigning on behalf of the porn industry since 2000 has been formally recognised in the industry (apart form an Erotic Award in 2010, which was specifically for standing in the election). I was and am, genuinely chuffed at this award and want to give a big thanks out to Television X who awarded it to me. Also, a big thanks to all who voted for me for the Girl/Girl award even though I didn’t win I appreciate the support.

The awards ceremony was Television X’s coming of age party as it turned 18 years old. It was really fun as there were a lot of faces I had not seen since I worked there in the late nineties and early noughties like producers Shag and Mutt, as well as porn star Rebekka Jordan (who now has a couple of kids and lives what she called a ‘normal life’ on the south coast) as well as old work colleagues like my long-term friend Giles Harding who worked as an editor until he sadly had a car crash and became wheelchair bound 12 years ago. It was great to see him there in amongst the revellers. Angel Long won a few awards, which was great because she was one of the first porn stars I filmed many moons ago and it’s always great to see porn stars careers progress.

I was interviewed for the Channel by Tanya Tate, who was very nice and also keen to agree that women in the industry like us choose our jobs over others and are as much professional business owners as women in other industries. US porn megastar Jesse Jane presented an award too, which was a nice surprise. All in all a great night all round in London’s Leicester Square!

I am very proud to have been nominated for best girl/girl series at this year’s Shaftas for my 13 part series Planet Nadia, which was shot in 2000. I decided to direct this series in a completely unique way.  Instead of just shooting Nadia meeting a different woman each week and basically doing the same sort of acts but just in a different suburban room with a different model, as is the usual format for a girl/girl series, I shot a mini soap opera.  We followed Nadia over 13 weeks as her life developed. She went for a job interview, became homeless, got a job and got a new home across the span of the series.  I also referenced my other series Majella Mates and Eat Me/Keep Me (a la Knott’s Landing/Dallas) as she mentioned in conversation about meeting her friends and having fun with them, which we had witnessed in the other series.  Overall, I built an environment where Nadia existed as a real woman, which resulted in it becoming a bit of a cult series for British Porn fans.

Not only was I at the top of my game but so was Nadia, easily one of the best (if not the best) porn stars I have ever filmed. I also reinvented porn aesthetics by dressing the porn stars in trendy art student’s clothes and placing them in bohemian surroundings. Nadia was perfect for this because she was fashion conscious herself.  In one scene she had sex with Layla Jade in a cluttered kitchen sink and in another she slept with Amelia in a derelict Brixton squat replete with a massive hole in the ceiling and a rusty motorbike in the front room, all with the stars wearing funky clothes and agent provocateur underwear.  I say underwear, actually I couldn’t afford the bras so I deliberately chose flat chested women to film, so I only need buy the underpants.

Anyway, it would mean the world to me to finally be appreciated for this genre changing series so please vote for me here.  You will go through some other awards first (just choose the name you like the most if you don’t know them). I’m up for girl/girl series a few pages in, under Anna Span/Planet Nadia. But hurry it closes very soon!

Thanks very much, Anna x