Friday, December 7, 2012

Women's Views on News

Women's Views on News

London Feminist Film Festival: ‘Herstories’

Posted: 06 Dec 2012 11:03 AM PST

And you too may have asked yourself where the hell are the women in film? Well, here, for a start.

Film undoubtedly serves as a mirror for the society we live in. It is no surprise then, that cinema often reflects a narrow view of women.

And with underrepresentation of women evident throughout the media in our society, it is no surprise that women are often absent from the film making industry.

It is for these reasons that the London Feminist Film Festival was set up this year.

And for these reasons, it was a refreshing and exciting event for those lucky enough to catch a screening.

I went in to see 'Herstories', a collection of ‘shorts’ – mostly documentaries – addressing important women's rights issues and starring brilliant female protagonists.

The first offering is Taxi Sister, produced by Theresa Traore Dahlberg and about a group of women in Dakar, Senegal, who have recently benefitted from a government programme enabling them to become – the first – female taxi drivers. A brilliant scheme. However there were 15,000 male taxi drivers in Dakar, and a mere 15 women.

The Taxi Sisters faced objections from the other taxi drivers as well as from the general public. The film focuses on Boury, a lively and powerful character and these qualities help her to confront the objections she faces.

Men insist that it is not safe for women to drive taxis; a fellow taxi driver tells Boury this is because her customers might want to sleep with her. Men physically drive into her taxi cab in anger – and she turns to the camera to tell us that she gives as good as she gets.

Her determination is relentless and she dreams of becoming the first woman in Dakar to own her own taxi company.

However, after the film, we find that the government has put an end to the programme that enabled her to become even a taxi driver.

Second comes 'As a Warrior', a work of fiction featuring both surreal and very realistic imagery, by Nadia Benedicto.

The film begins with Laura lying on a lilo in a pool and dreaming of fearlessly riding a horse through the desert.

Back in the real world (Argentina) she is a maid for a rich couple and their daughter Isabelle, and she spends her days in a black and white pinny, answering 'yes miss' to her wealthy employers.

Then a man arrives to the house late at night, screaming at the gates and refusing to leave without the maid – and it is at this point we realise that she is in an abusive relationship.

A security guard instructs the man to leave several times, but Laura tells him to open the gates and goes home with him.

The issue is covered cleverly by Benedicto: no abuse is seen but it is nevertheless evident; in the next scene, the woman is back at work, visibly injured and shaken and emotionally unable to continue with the day’s work.

It is then we return to the powerful images of our main character riding a beautiful horse, wearing chainmail and a fearless look upon her face. The woman on the horse is the powerful woman our protaganist dreams of being, if only she had the courage to leave her relationship.

But then Laura finds that courage and we see her going in to a police station. She has now become the warrior she dreamed she could be – and it is on this positive note that the film ends.

The director says she grew up in an environment where men took decisions and held the power:  ”I think As a Warrior is my first step to recover that voice, my own personal one and the one of all the women who live without [being able to] enforce their rights.”

The third film is Seating Code, by director Hong Yane Wang,which delves into a strange Chinese tradition.

Women are forbidden from sitting on camera boxes in China – in effect meaning that women are shut out of the film industry.

This two-minute film shows men and women giving their explanations and opinions on this rule.

From young, to old, they are all aware of the tradition, but explanations vary. One woman explains that Jackie Chan started it all by believing that women sitting on camera boxes would bring bad luck to a film.

‘It’s not clean,’ said one man. Another man: ‘Women have periods – they say a bloody disaster may happen’.

It is – almost – laughable.

‘It doesn’t look proper for a woman to sit on a camera box, men are working hard, women are not working’.

A girl says 'If girls sit on something phallic it will go limp,the focus could go soft’.

According to one man 'you cannot just abandon a tradition in China' and according to another: ‘Why would you?’ and ‘It’s not unfair, we’re already more civilised’.

Director Hong Yane Wang explains that in China, as a direct result of this tradition, there is only one female camera woman.

She adds that nobody asks why this tradition continues, and the film brilliantly highlights the stupidity of such patriarchal traditions.

You can watch Seating Code in full here.

Quite the opposite story emerges in the next film, where the camera has been used to empower.

"The camera is like a weapon for us," explains a woman in Sari Stories, a film documenting pioneering female film reporters in Andhra Pradesh, in South East India.

Much like in our first film, the women have been empowered by the local government; in India it was through the charity ‘Video Volunteers’.

With the help and training of Video Volunteers, Indira, Vinodha, Latha and Parvati produce a monthly video magazine.

They have also used their cameras to document a subject close to their hearts: child marriage.

The film is a collection of three types of film: the Indian women's own footage, personal testaments filmed by the women themselves, and the film shot by producer Sue Sudbury, usually of the women filming.

The women share their personal experiences of child marriage. All but one of them are still married.

Latha tells us that women in India are often married after their first period – as young as 12. This is particularly common because men pay a cheaper price for younger girls.

Latha herself was sold for $3000.

‘One day he came in drunk and beat me so badly I didn’t know if I would live,’ she says. ‘There were days when my husband made me eat cow dung.’

The authorities often turn a blind eye to child marriage.

Tradition clearly plays a part. One of the film makers says ‘the differences God created between men and women still exist’.

The film work, though, has given these women increased confidence and the courage to continue with their often hard lives.

The camera is certainly a tool for these woman, the camera changing the dynamic of the husband-wife relationship.

The women ask their husbands questions they feel suddenly able to ask, when ‘hiding’ behind the camera.

Although men in Indian society are reluctant to give their wives independence, in such poor communities they cannot argue with the economics. Working in the fields the women would earn around 40 cents, but film making can earn them up to 5 dollars per day.

The complexities and dangers of their married lives are shocking. One woman says ‘Sometimes I think of divorcing my husband but he would only re-marry and then another woman would suffer’.

However, the film shows the positive impact of breaking traditional gender roles in rural India. Vinodha says this video training has changed her life.

Unfortunately, like the scheme in our first film, the project helping these women has now ended – a sad note to end the screening on.

You can watch Sari Stories through Al Jazeera here.

All in all, the screening is refreshing in its portrayal of women, and in its showcasing of female talent.

Other fims shown in the festival included a ‘feminist classic’ A Question of Silence, and ‘Fighting Back!’ – a selection of films on sexism and violence against women, as well as other - modern, as well as older – films.

All the screenings were followed by lively discussions with directors and commentators.

The film festival intends to run next year, too. I highly recommend you go along!

France reveals new gender equality laws

Posted: 06 Dec 2012 07:21 AM PST

The French government is to introduce major changes to the country’s sexual equality laws.

New draft laws proposed last week include tougher enforcement of equal pay laws and stronger measures on domestic violence.

Under these laws, employers will be inspected to ensure that men and women receive equal pay for equal work, and companies could be forced to raise salaries for women or lower them for men.

Courts will be granted greater powers to deal quickly with violent male partners, and women victimised by domestic violence will have access to free mobile phones to contact the police.

And from 2013, primary school children will receive lessons on the "ABC of gender equality", in an effort to combat gender stereotypes.

Women's rights minister Najat Vallaud-Belkacem has called the proposals "the third generation of equality legislation after women were given the right to vote in 1944 and abortion was legalised in 1975.”

The World Economic Forum's 2012 gender equality report (PDF) placed France 57th out of 135 countries in its gender gap index, which takes account of factors such as wage inequality, access to education and health care, and the percentage of women in politics. In terms of wage inequality, France was ranked 129th.

Despite the country's strong tradition of feminist protest and scholarship, traditional gender stereotypes are still particularly ingrained in French culture. Many young women reject feminism as being out of date and too aggressive towards men.

This thinking was exemplified this week when Carla Bruni, wife of former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, told Vogue that her generation "doesn't need feminism".

Vallaud-Belkacem spoke out strongly against Bruni's remarks, saying that “We need everyone to be a feminist. Feminism is the fight for the equality of sexes, not for the domination of one sex over another.”

Vallaud-Belkacem's Ministry of Women's Rights was created by President François Hollande after his election win in May this year.

These new laws follow up on election promises to improve gender equality.

Is porn work good for women?

Posted: 06 Dec 2012 02:05 AM PST

From Another Angry Woman.

What conclusions can we draw from the "porn performers feel good about themselves" study?

It's been a while since I've got my teeth into a close reading of a paper, and this week has gifted me with a doozy: Pornography Actresses: an assessment of the damaged goods hypothesis [click through for pdf link]. The study was authored by psychology academics and former porn performer turned founder of a healthcare programme for porn performers.

The paper aimed to test the veracity of a set of beliefs surrounding women in porn. These attitudes were gleaned from a studies into attitudes towards porngraphy, finding that those with a negative attitude towards porn tended to believe that porn performers had low self-esteem, were drug addicts and had experienced sexual abuse in childhood. These attitudes, the authors point out, are also apparent in anti-porn feminist writing, which is backed up with little evidence. The authors also point out the distinct lack of quantitative research into the women in porn themselves, drawing attention to the fact that while there's a couple of qualitative studies about why women get into acting in porn, there's nothing quantitative.

So they decided to examine quality of life, self-esteem, attitudes towards sex, sexual behaviour and drug use in a sample of porn actresses. The headline findings were rather interesting: it turns out that the stereotypes aren't true. Comparing porn actresses to a sample of women matched by age, marital status and ethnicity, they found that the porn actresses actually had higher self-esteem than comparable women, were more likely to feel positive, felt they had better social support and were more spiritual. There was no difference in current drug use, apart from marijuana (porn actresses were more likely to get high), although the porn actresses reported more drug use in the past. There was also no difference in incidence of sexual abuse in childhood. And finally, the porn actresses reported greater levels of sexual satisfaction, were more likely to identify as bisexual, enjoyed sex more, were having more sex than the women who weren't in porn (sex as part of their work was not counted: this was entirely extracurricular sex), were more likely to be concerned about catching an STI, and had started having sex a little earlier.

Does this mean that the stereotypes about women in porn coming from some feminists and the general population can finally be put to bed? I'll get back to that after we've had a little look through a few criticisms of the paper.

The sample

The study used a clever sampling method for accessing porn actresses–a task which is usually rather difficult and goes some way to explaining why there is little, if any, quantitative examination of porn performers' lives. The porn industry requires that performers have regular STI tests, particularly for HIV, so participants were recruited from a clinic where they were tested. The comparison group were recruited from a college and an airport (annoyingly, it's not specified whether this airport and university were also in California). While it is not ideal that the porn actresses were all recruited from Los Angeles, which might not be representative and generalisable to the entire population of porn performers, it is not as bad as one might think: the authors were testing whether stereotypes about women in porn were true. The majority of porn distributed in the west comes from southern California, which shapes discussion and thought about porn by western people as about this group of porn actresses. They're not entirely representative of everyone in porn, but they're certainly the people about whom the stereotypes are formed, and therefore this is a reasonable sample to draw from.

Since the authors were also concerned about stereotypes about women in porn, it's also not a problem that men were not included in the study. The "damaged goods" stereotype that was being examined exists only about women!

One commenter on Jezebel (yes, I looked at a Jez discussion thread. Yes, I'm traumatised. No, I don't ever want to go back to Jez ever again) points out that the sample of porn actresses may differ from average in being slightly older and having worked in the industry for longer. However, this isn't actually backed up by a link to where she got this information from, and her comment is preceded by "I believe". This might be true, but I haven't been able to find this information anywhere, so can't comment on whether this is a problem for sampling. However, it is important to note that the women included in this study were those who were participating in above-board porn which was compliant with the regulations, and there might be differences in women who are working in grey or black market porn. Unfortunately, these women are even harder to access and study.

Ultimately, this was an impressively large sample for such a difficult-to-access group: data from 177 porn actresses were collected (and, of course, 177 women in the comparison group). Of course, in any quantitative study, no sample is going to be completely representative, but as far as things go, this was reasonably strong.

The design

This study used a matched pair design: data collected from each porn actress was matched with data collected from a woman the same age, ethnicity and marital status. This is a fairly robust design when comparing groups, and means that differences cannot be attributed to these variables. I am even more impressed at the sample size with the researchers using this type of design, as it's notoriously difficult to collect data for these designs, being massively time- and resource-intensive.

I have beef with the matching criteria, though. While the authors were right in selecting these, particularly as their sample of porn actresses were far more likely to be single than the general population, there's an important thing missing that wasn't measured at all and probably should have been controlled for. Socioeconomic status–class–was never measured, so we don't know at all whether the porn actresses were better-off or worse-off than the comparison group, and if so, whether it was this that was the cause of their general feeling a bit better about life. Perhaps a way of establishing a better comparison group would be to compare porn actresses with TV or film actresses of the same age, ethnicity and marital status. This would likely control for a lot of the noise, although it would be an absolute arse to research.

Rather irritatingly, the authors never mentioned if they asked the women in the comparison group if they had ever worked in porn (or, indeed, if they were currently porn actresses who happened to be at college or at an airport that day). Since the likelihood of them being porn actresses is fairly low, this probably doesn't pose much of a problem, I'm just a pedant.

The statistics

Feel free to skip this bit, as it will get a little technical, and is mostly minor statistical nitpicking. The biggest statistical elephant in the room is that this study ran a lot of statistical tests. A metric fuckton, to use the accepted statistical term. The researchers conducted an awful lot of T-tests, which is a statistical test used to check if one thing significantly differs from another: in this case, whether porn actresses differed significantly from women who weren't porn actresses on number of sexual partners, or alcohol use, or any of the other eleventy bazillion variables which were being measured.

When one conducts a metric fuckton of statistical tests, one increases the likelihood of encountering a Type I error: a "false positive". Purely by chance, one of the tests came up as significant, when in fact there isn't really a difference there. This can be controlled for, although the authors didn't. Luckily, there was enough data present for me to do this task for them. I did a Bonferroni correction, where the threshold for significance is revised based on how many tests are being performed. It's pretty easy to do. You take the generally-accepted significance threshold, which is p=0.05 (or, a 5% probability that the results are entirely down to chance and you're seeing an effect that isn't really there), and divide it by the number of tests performed (in this study, 19 t-tests were performed). So, the significance threshold for the tests should actually be p=0.0026.

All of the p-values reported came up as less than 0.001, which means they're still significant even with the Bonferroni correction, with the exception of sexual satisfaction, positive feelings and social support. However, enjoyment of sex was still significant, so it looks like our porn actress sample were enjoying sex significantly more than the non-porn actress sample anyway.

What wasn't examined (and I wish it had been)

I've already mentioned how I wished the authors had controlled for class, but there's a few more things I'd love to have seen addressed in this paper. Firstly, how the variables related to each other. Given that the porn actresses had had a lot more sex than those who weren't in porn, could this be the reason they seem generally happier and with higher self-esteem? I have no idea, because the authors didn't check this, and it would certainly be interesting to find out if this was the driving factor, or even just mediated the relationship.

The other thing missing, I feel, was the type of porn the women were performing in, and how that related to the variables. Were the participants who identified as bisexual more likely to be appearing in lesbian or bisexual porn? Do certain types of porn affect the self-esteem of the performers? Again, no fucking idea, I wish it had been measured, and I seriously hope future research addresses such questions.

Feel free to add more interesting questions you'd like to see addressed in the comments!

So what does it all mean?

Ultimately, from a single study, we can never conclude anything concrete, but it is a good thing to see these questions being addressed systematically, and I hope that it leads to future research. Too often, the experiences of those involved in porn or sex work are ignored, and it is genuinely refreshing to see research attempting to examine their experiences and feelings. This study provides a foundation for further examination and to build upon its flaws so we can better understand what it's like for women in porn and replace the stereotypes with solid evidence.

Find Another Angry Woman here.