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    Why is there only men selected at the Cannes movie festival? An open letter by the feminist collective La Barbe, signed by more than a thousand actors: Is it not enough for women to aspire to be mistress of ceremonies one day, on the festival’s opening night? Bérénice Béjo in 2012, Mélanie Laurent in 2011, Kristin Scott-Thomas in 2010: women are perfect hostesses, who are perfectly happy with a simple, “you have beautiful eyes, you know”, or other flattering compliments. They become disturbing icons who you manage to leave where they belong: on display on the festival posters. This year, we celebrate Marilyn Monroe, in 2011 it was Juliette Binoche, in 2009 Monica Vitti, and in 1989 the republican Marianne . In 1976, the naked buttocks of a woman were honoured. What could our muses complain about? They are celebrated for their essential qualities: beauty, grace, lightness … Let us preserve them from the torments of bossing around a film crew, let us spare them the painful confrontation with the technical puzzles of a film set. Why allow them to bore themselves in the festival steering committee, where important decisions are made, where only male presidents have ruled since its creation? Let us go on only giving men the heavy load of onerous duties. Let us be even better than Hollywood, where men make up 77% of Oscar academy voters.

    Why is there only men selected at the Cannes movie festival?

    An open letter by the feminist collective La Barbe, signed by more than a thousand actors:

    Is it not enough for women to aspire to be mistress of ceremonies one day, on the festival’s opening night? Bérénice Béjo in 2012, Mélanie Laurent in 2011, Kristin Scott-Thomas in 2010: women are perfect hostesses, who are perfectly happy with a simple, “you have beautiful eyes, you know”, or other flattering compliments. They become disturbing icons who you manage to leave where they belong: on display on the festival posters. This year, we celebrate Marilyn Monroe, in 2011 it was Juliette Binoche, in 2009 Monica Vitti, and in 1989 the republican Marianne . In 1976, the naked buttocks of a woman were honoured. What could our muses complain about? They are celebrated for their essential qualities: beauty, grace, lightness … Let us preserve them from the torments of bossing around a film crew, let us spare them the painful confrontation with the technical puzzles of a film set. Why allow them to bore themselves in the festival steering committee, where important decisions are made, where only male presidents have ruled since its creation? Let us go on only giving men the heavy load of onerous duties. Let us be even better than Hollywood, where men make up 77% of Oscar academy voters.

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    Consumer society tantalises us. We then try within ourselves to control the needs that are being constantly stimulated. We value holding back and then assign to fat people the contempt we can feel for our own longings. It’s not unlike other forms of discrimination. Things we don’t like or discipline in ourselves we choose to see in others, and in another group. In this case, people who have nothing in common except for their size. Susie Orbach: ‘fat is a prejudice issue’

  3. Ladies: the case for stopping shaving

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    Emer O’Toole wrote a tongue in cheek Q&A about her I-am-not-shaving experiment.

    Here goes:

    I have conducted an 18-month experiment in body hair on your behalf and will now answer the questions people most commonly proffer when confronted with my prodigious manes of untamed womanhood.

    Don’t men find you physically repulsive?

    At first this was a problem. But then I starved myself to a skeletal size, had lumps of silicon surgically implanted into my chest and permanently tattooed black lines around my eyes.

    Just joking. The man I was going out with when the experiment began was a little apprehensive when I unveiled my innovative grooming plans, but when I actually grew the hair out he was proud of me. One evening, friends of ours asked him a variation of the above question, and he said: “If I was a girl, I wouldn’t shave my legs.” Because he is awesome. Then, in a completely un-hair-related twist, we broke up. So I did what single girls in London do, and had ALL the boyfriends. None of them minded (some of them liked it). And then one of the boyfriends turned out to be completely amazing so I made him the only boyfriend. He is also proud of me.

    Don’t you smell?

    I smell exactly the same as I did before – a bit like soap after showering, and a bit like Christmas cake first thing in the morning.

    Don’t people point and laugh at you in public?

    Yes. Sometimes people do look at you as if it is the 19th century and they have paid a ha’penny to attend a freak-show, saying: “Ha ha ha. Look at the hairy lady – just like Julia Roberts that time shelost the plot.” Note to tube users: if you whisper and giggle behind your hand while staring straight at a fellow passenger, she will probably know that you are talking about her. For a hand is not a massive opaque screen. It is a hand.

    Randomers point and laugh at my legs and armpits in public sometimes. But the problem isn’t my legs or armpits.

    Don’t small children run when they see you, fearing you will lure them to your gingerbread house?

    A scene from my life:

    Small child: Why do you have hair under your arms?

    Me: Because when girls and boys grow up into women and men they grow hair under their arms.

    Small child: My mum doesn’t have hair under her arms.

    Me: She shaves it off.

    Small child: She doesn’t.

    Me: She does. Ask her.

    Small child: Mum, do you?

    Mother of small child: Yes.

    Small child: Why?

    Exactly, small child. Exactly.


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    There’s no stopping point for this competition; there’s no “you weigh this little” certificate of completion. There is only the never-ending cycle of getting skinnier than your friends until you all completely disappear. By which I mean potentially die Marianne Kirkby, in ‘Six weeks to OMG: The diet that will make you disappear.’ Read more here.

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    ‘Until we recognise the fact that sex workers are people, rhetoric won’t make much of a difference. And rankings of “beautiful girls” will only go on to obscure the real-life, systemic problems that “the girls” are living under.’ Natalia Antonova, in ‘Welcome to Kiev: city of beautiful women and a prospering sex industry.’ Read more here.

    ‘Until we recognise the fact that sex workers are people, rhetoric won’t make much of a difference. And rankings of “beautiful girls” will only go on to obscure the real-life, systemic problems that “the girls” are living under.’ , in ‘Welcome to Kiev: city of beautiful women and a prospering sex industry.’ Read more here.

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    Strange, that so many of us seem to be taking feminism up as a hobby. And I’m not talking about the kind of feminism-by-numbers that women’s magazines so frequently peddle, fraught with anxiety as regards to what you can and can’t do (can I propose to my boyfriend? Have sex on the first date? Shave my pubes?). The experiences of Dunham’s characters, where they languish in unpaid jobs and have emotionless, awkward sex in grotty flats with pretentious males resonate much more with my experience and that of my friends. Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett discusses the young feminist resurgence in ‘HBO’s Girls: please don’t quit your moaning.’ Read more here

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    In ‘Dieting brides v the custom-fitted tyrant of the wedding dress,’ Sarah Ditum discusses the extreme dieting measures many take in the run up to their big day. She says, “a wedding is just one day in a relationship – one day that’s heavy enough with symbolism to make the bride’s weight an irrelevance”. • Read more here Photograph: Lewis Whyld/AP

    In ‘Dieting brides v the custom-fitted tyrant of the wedding dress,’ Sarah Ditum discusses the extreme dieting measures many take in the run up to their big day. She says, “a wedding is just one day in a relationship – one day that’s heavy enough with symbolism to make the bride’s weight an irrelevance”.

    • Read more here

    Photograph: Lewis Whyld/AP

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    In this week’s Newsweek, Katie Roiphe has suggested that HBO’s new comedy Girls indicates a re-emergence of women’s perrenial compulsion to get bossed aroud in bed. In this CIF piece, Jaclyn Friedman debunks the theory that feminists hate spanking, and asks: “Has Roiphe been too busy hiding under the covers from her imaginary feminist bogeywomen to notice that we’re living in a time of profound backlash against women’s sexual and public agency?”

    In this week’s Newsweek, Katie Roiphe has suggested that HBO’s new comedy Girls indicates a re-emergence of women’s perrenial compulsion to get bossed aroud in bed. In this CIF piece, Jaclyn Friedman debunks the theory that feminists hate spanking, and asks: “Has Roiphe been too busy hiding under the covers from her imaginary feminist bogeywomen to notice that we’re living in a time of profound backlash against women’s sexual and public agency?”

  10. Uteruses, how do they work?

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    It was those great American evangelical poets, the Insane Clown Posse, who asked us once to contemplate the following existential question: “Fucking magnets, how do they work?” But in 2012, after decades of eschewing comprehensive sex education, and lambasting everything from intrauterine devices and birth control pills to emergency contraception, perhaps it’s time to admit that the most existential question of our time for religious conservatives to answer relates to women’s mysterious reproductive tracts.

    So, erm, how do they work?

    Sadly, religious instruction isn’t much help: between telling women that an aspirin between the knees or a phonebook on a man’s lap will prevent pregnancy, it’s perhaps unsurprising that strict adherents to a religion in which a primary article of faith is that a woman was impregnated without the benefit of vaginal penetration or male ejaculate have a few problems fully articulating how modern women can get (or keep from getting) pregnant without a little confusion … or at least elision.

    And so it is that we American women find ourselves being told by legislators in Arizona – those benighted do-gooders behind the anti-Latino “show us your papers” law and the anti-Obama “show us your circumcision” – that, in fact, pregnancy will no longer begin at conception. Instead, we’re told, we’ll soon be legally considered pregnant in the state of Arizona as of the date of our last period, which, as that silly godless “science” tells us, is usually about two weeks before we ovulate. It is true that some medical professionals use a pregnant woman’s last period to estimate a gestational age in the absence of other data – like the actual date of conception which is, when one is not the Virgin Mary, actually not beyond a woman’s capacity to know or recall or a doctor’s capacity to determine. But a legal mandate forcing them to even when other diagnostic tools are more available or appropriate is simply a way to reduce their scientific and professional discretion for the purpose of limiting abortions in ways unimagined by the standards of Roe v Wade and in a manner that is not based on the way women’s supposedly unknowable reproductive tracts work.

    • Megan Carpentier takes down the Arizona law pushing for women to be legally considered pregnant as of the date of their last period [read the rest here]

  12. [Trigger warning: sexual violence] Will the death of Oksana Makar be in vain?

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    On 9 March, Ukrainian Oksana Makar was raped, strangled and left for dead at a construction site, her body having been set on fire. She spent 10 hours with her body slowly burning, calling for help, until she was discovered. Two of the three men who committed the crime were initially let go. According to news reports, they are well-connected – but a wave of public anger in Ukraine caused the police to “rethink” the situation, and all have been placed in custody. Now that Makar is dead, they are being charged with murder.

    This is a video (be warned – it’s extremely upsetting) of Makar that her mother shot in the hospital. She is in obvious pain, being pestered by her mother to make some sort of statement. The girl says her assailants need to have “their balls torn off”. She’s angry and defiant, showing where her arm was amputated, waving the bloody stump.

    “Tell them, I’ll live while I’m alive,” the mother urges.

    “I’ll live while I’m alive,” Oksana repeats.

    • Natalia Antonova on the horrific rape and murder of a 18 year old in Ukraine - and how “until Ukraine has a proper civil society in place, well-connected men will still assume that they can destroy another human being and likely get away with it”. Read the entire piece here.

    An awfully sad and disheartening read, but an important one.

  13. Here’s a new way to stand up to the anti-abortion bullies

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    Sometimes there’s no obvious way to tackle bullying or harassment. The 40 Days For Life US-based anti-abortion group has set up in the UK, and is picketing abortion clinics across the country. In particular it is targeting a site run by the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), which offers family planning counselling to thousands of women a year, and is the UK’s largest independent provider of abortion care.

    Staff and patients at the clinics have complained of intimidation from the protestors, who’ve also been accused of filming staff members and women using the clinic’s services, though the group says those filming were not affiliated with their protest.

    There are legitimate ways to campaign against abortion, but intimidating women outside clinics – deliberately or otherwise – is not one of them.

    But how can such aggressive tactics be stopped? Simply launching a counter-protest outside the clinic in London’s Bedford Square might make things worse: the atmosphere for women trying to use these services in private would become still more charged, and the abortion clinic door risks being legitimised as a place of protest.

    A group of us had a different idea: turning the anti-abortion vigils into a fundraising exercise for BPAS.

    We asked people to donate money for each day the 40 days for Life vigils continue, whether it’s 50p, £1 or £5 per day. The longer the anti-abortionists’ campaign, the more money a worthwhile pro-choice charity receives.

    The response was fantastic, raising £1,000 in just two hours and nearly £2,000 by the end of the first day – all from small donations. Comments from donors were amazing, and touching:

    “Here’s my tiny contribution to say thank you to BPAS, who supported my own difficult decision four years ago,” said one. “I only hope these thugs who so lack in compassion and empathy do not stop the amazing work that BPAS do every day.”

    Another wrote: “The protesters do not have a right to harass these women who are already undergoing a terribly stressful time. Awful conduct.”

    The best reaction, however, came from BPAS staff themselves: “The whole thing has actually reduced some of us to reaching for tissues! I guess it’s a bit novel for people to be so spontaneously generous to us,” BPAS chief executive Ann Furedi wrote on the donation page. “It sends a lovely message to all our staff.”

    There’s more than one way to stand up to a bully.

    • You can donate to the campaign here.

    • Photograph: Andrew Winning/Reuters

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    First, why did any judge grant bail to a man charged with six counts of raping his wife? Vera Baird on the very upsetting story of a UK woman who has been sent to jail for retracting, under family pressure, her statement against her violent husband who raped her repeteadly. Click to read the entire story; trigger warning.

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