Women's Views on News |
- Changes for women prisoners
- Beach rugby on a western isle
- Vote for your top female athletes of 2013
- Can the slasher film be feminist?
- UK falls behind in gender gap index
| Posted: 31 Oct 2013 08:32 AM PDT
Under reforms unveiled last week, all 12 women-only prisons in England will become "resettlement prisons", focused on rehabilitating offenders and ensuring they can maintain contact with family and friends. Women suffering from alcohol, drug and mental health problems will be given targeted help, both while they are in jail and for 12 months after their release. They will also be given advice on jobs and housing to aid their reintegration into society. Low-risk female offenders will even be offered employment opportunities prior to leaving prison. Vicky Pryce, the ex-wife of former cabinet minister Chris Huhne, has praised the government's plans. Pryce, who spent two months in jail for accepting her ex-husband's speeding points, told the Independent: "Keeping women close to their families is absolutely essential. Otherwise they can lose contact, their children are taken into care and the cost to society is enormous. "Getting into work again takes away the stigma of having been to jail and makes it easier to make the transition into public life and not be a drain on the public purse." The government aims to help women prisoners suffering from mental health issues by setting up four personality disorder treatment services. This comes as welcome news, since 53 per cent of women inmates were abused as children and nearly half, 49 per cent, have anxiety and depression. Justice Minister Lord McNally, who unveiled the government's plans, has high hopes for the initiative. "When a female offender walks out of the prison gates, I want to make sure she never returns," he said. "Keeping female prisoners as close as possible to their homes, and importantly their children, is vital if we are to help them break the pernicious cycle of reoffending. "And providing at least a year of support in the community, alongside the means to find employment on release, will give them the best possible chance to live productive, law-abiding lives." Lord McNally also outlined plans to develop an "open unit" at Styal women's prison in Cheshire. The unit, which will initially be run as a pilot project, will give inmates support and training to boost their chances of finding a job after they are released. If successful, the project will be introduced at other women's prisons in the UK. Not everyone, however, believes that the government's plans will stop prisoners reoffending. Rachel Halford, director of the support group Women in Prison, said that the proposals were "fantastic" in theory but asked how the government was going to get the women closer to home when there are only 12 prisons. Shadow Justice Secretary Sadiq Khan wants the government to focus instead on avoiding custodial sentences for "low-level offences". "The public want confidence that the criminal justice system is effectively punishing and reforming all those found guilty of committing crimes," he said. “But this government must do much more to stop women offending in the first place. "With only a small number of scattered women’s prisons, the concept of local resettlement is almost meaningless."  |
| Posted: 31 Oct 2013 08:00 AM PDT
For those of you that don’t already know, Islay, the famous whisky island on Scotland’s wild west coast, hosts a small and exclusive beach rugby tournament in the second weekend of June. Limited by tide and sand to only 32 teams (22 mens, 10 ladies), for those in the know, this is one of rugby’s most eagerly sought after invitations of the year. Hard fought, full contact, bare footed, physically demanding, but fun matches are played on a beach near the picturesque village of Port Ellen. And it is considered by some to be Scotland’s most enjoyable rugby event. That could of course be because of the Friday night beach barbeque and dance or the Saturday night open air rock concert, but mainly it is Islay, the rugby camaraderie and the craic. The 10th staging of the unique Islay Beach Rugby tournament took place in front of the White Hart Hotel in Port Ellen in glorious sunshine on 8 June this year. Over a thousand people gathered on the banking to enjoy fearsome competition from 22 men’s and eight women’s teams. Conditions were perfect, as the prolonged spell of dry weather beforehand meant there was deep, soft, powdery sand. While this means it is utterly exhausting to play on, it probably accounted for the lower injury count this year which is always welcome. The event is not billed as “Blood on the Beach” for nothing. Although the spectacle – of fast, furious, full contact rugby – makes for great entertainment with or without the sand changing colour. It is not quite the same as its winter cousin. Each team has ten players, with only five allowed on the pitch at any one time, and it is overall fitness, speed of thought, skill and technique which tends to prevail over sheer size and power. All the teams are guaranteed lots of games in the group stages. These are limited to five minutes a side. And because of the extreme physical effort involved, there are rolling substitutions. The Lassie Cup was won by Team 200 who were playing on Islay for the first time. They beat Melrose Ladies, a club that has been a long-term supporter of Islay Beach Rugby, showing a standard of rugby that was very, very high this year. The ‘hits’ in the ladies section have always been fierce, but this time round some of the passing movements from both sides in the final were mesmerisingly fast. And while the games are very competitive – some of the teams have current or former Scottish Internationals in their line up – it is also an important fun and social event on Islay. Various organisations use the day for charity fundraising and the Islay Pipe Band plays encouragingly. Islay Beach Rugby rules are quite straightforward. The pitch is 25 metres by 20 metres. Rugby jerseys must be worn by all players. No footwear of any kind is allowed. Each team shall consist of a maximum of 10 players named on a team sheet; the team sheet shall be handed to the organisers before the team's first game and no player shall be named on more than one team sheet. Teams shall field 5 players at any one time from the team sheet for each game but players may be substituted for whatever reason during the game. There are no line-outs, or scrums or ball-kicking. The game is (re)started by a tap-off. If a grounded ball is not cleared within 3 seconds it is given to the defending team. A try is worth one point and must be scored by touching the ball down. After a try is scored, the conceding team will restart the game at the pitch centre. Games will be 4 minutes each way; the final will be 7 minutes each way. Half time is 2 minutes. The highest scoring team will be declared the winner in the event of a preliminary round tie. A tie in the semi-final or final will be determined by a 'sudden death' try score. Player Sanctions: sin bin (2 minute), expulsion from game, expulsion from tournament. The decision of the tournament director is final. Easy. So there you are, now you know; and you have a few months to get team together, learn to play, contact the organisers and plan your trip. Just remember to call it ‘Isle – a’ not ‘Is lay’ when you are trying to book transport tickets…  |
| Vote for your top female athletes of 2013 Posted: 31 Oct 2013 06:00 AM PDT
For the first time in their 26-year history, the awards will be broadcast live on Sky on December 5. Nominations close on November 4, and to give you a bit of inspiration, here are our picks in a few of the categories. Sportswoman of the Year: Non Stanford Wales' Non Stanford was fourth in the triathlon World Series standings when she took a heavy fall in the sixth race in Hamburg in July, breaking her arm. Five weeks later, she won the penultimate race in Stockholm, and went on to win the series. If that doesn't deserve an award, I don't know what does. Stanford was incredibly consistent throughout the series, finishing on the podium in five of the eight races. But, broken arm aside, her road to victory was not without its obstacles. In the grand final in London in September, she had to overcome a 15 second penalty for not placing her wetsuit inside the box in the first transition zone. But she was able to build up enough of a lead during the run to take the race, and become the third British woman to win the title. Young Sportswoman of the Year: Laura Trott Laura Trott is so dominant in track cycling that it's hard to believe that she still qualifies for the young sportswoman category, but the double Olympic gold medal winner only turned 21 in April. She won the team award last year as part of the world-record breaking pursuit team, along with Dani King and Joanna Rowsell. However, her own achievements on the track more than justify her taking an individual award. Since winning team pursuit and omnium gold at the London Olympics, Trott has become team pursuit world champion alongside King, Rowsell and Elinor Barker. She also came second in the omnium at the world championships. At the British track championships last month, she took a clean sweep of gold medals, winning the team and individual pursuits, the points race and the madison to consolidate her position as Britain's best rider. She is also arguably Europe's best – her two gold medals at the European track championships took her total of European titles to five, making her the most successful rider, male or female, in the history of the championships. For years, Victoria Pendleton was practically the only British female track cyclist, but since her retirement, Trott is leading the charge of a new generation of young British women. Long may they reign. Team of the Year: England Women's Cricket It was a tough decision between the England women's cricket team and the European Solheim Cup team, but we voted for the former in tribute to their astounding, thrilling turnaround during the Ashes series this summer. Your WVoN sports correspondents spent an anxious day at Lords in August, watching the team allow what should have been a decisive lead slip away. We left incredulous, and hardly full of hope for the rest of the series. But somehow, England managed to turn it around, winning the next four games to retain the Ashes with one game to spare. But they weren't content with that; nothing less than a resounding win would do, and they duly beat the Aussies with four overs to spare at the last match on August 30. Lifetime Achievement Award: Paula Radcliffe Paula Radcliffe has won the Sportswoman of the Year award twice in the past, in 1999 and 2002. But after a frustrating few seasons struggling with various injuries, she admitted earlier this year that her racing career may be over. So what better time to pay tribute to the achievements of an athlete who has been at the top level almost continuously for more than 15 years? After all, it is not often that a Brit is acclaimed as the best of all time, particularly in long distance running, usually dominated by east African athletes. Although her Olympic career never lived up to the promise of her talent, her record at other championships is formidable. Since she first competed as a senior in 1993, she has won world championship gold in the half marathon, cross country and the marathon, and European gold in the 10,000m and cross country. But it is her record in the big city marathons which really stands out. In her debut year as a marathon runner, she won in both London and Chicago. She went on to win London twice more, and New York three times. Her world record time of 2 hours, 15 minutes and 25 seconds, set in London in 2003 still stands; no one has come close to beating it. At the end of her career, Radcliffe surely deserves this recognition.  |
| Can the slasher film be feminist? Posted: 31 Oct 2013 05:16 AM PDT
Horror films are as much a part of the Halloween ‘tradition’ as pumpkins and badly applied costume make-up - from the Netflix ‘top ten’ listings through to the opportunistic TV scheduling of a film from a bloated slasher franchise. The slasher film, featuring ‘Halloween’ (1978), ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ (1974), ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’ (1984) and ‘Friday the 13th’ (1980) amongst its dubious roll call, probably best exemplifies this concept of ‘tradition’. For these films, in their original incarnations, are a relic of a particular time and type of film-making. They are to our twenty-first century eyes visually and thematically distinct; low budget, amateurish, stilted in dialogue and consequently short on realism. Despite being narratively and thematically problematic, they are sufficiently ‘not of this time’ to enable, for some, passage into innocuity. And after all, October 31st is not meant to be frightening in any real sense, but rather a glorious theatre of recognised tropes and a carnivalesque joy of the grotesque. As such, the degraded quality of the film stock, the proliferation of 1970s fashion and the established iconography – Freddy’s glove or Michael Myers’ mask – mean these films can be enjoyed and ritualised into tradition in a way that contemporary ‘torture porn’ such as Saw, Hostel and A Serbian Film cannot. Yet we can still, 35 years after the release of Halloween, legitimately ask how as feminists we both interpret – and enjoy – the slasher genre. On the face of it, slasher films both fetishise and glorify male violence against women. Horror’s repeated tropes of bloody female bodies, gaping (read: axe) wounds and gratuitously revealed inner and outer flesh are traditionally seen to represent the abjection and fear of, largely reproductive, femininity. The inevitably phallic objects of the kill, coupled with the ‘penetration’ scenes in which we watch in terror as the crazed killer slashes his way through the female’s hiding place, legitimise Carol Clover’s view that ‘horror and pornography are the only two genres specifically devoted to the arousal of bodily sensation’. In pornography this may often be sexual; in the slasher genre it is a blend of the sexual, the masochistic and the terrifying in a world where fear of sexual or violent attack is a potential threat for most women. Men are invariably killed off swiftly and relatively bloodlessly while women are chased by a lone male killer through interminably long sequences. We have only to think of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the final sequence of the film in which we watch lone survivor Sally, dirty and sticky with blood, flee from the chainsaw-wielding Leatherface. This sequence is often held up as a masterclass in visual cinema, the benchmark for horror films everywhere. Yet there is no escaping the fact that we are forced to watch and hear – for thirty minutes - a pursued woman fight for her life, as female terror is centralised and we quite literally have no choice but to watch. Laura Mulvey’s seminal essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ suggests that the ‘gaze’ of the film camera, and thus the viewer, is identified as male, rendering the female as objectified, fetishised and watched. Using psychoanalytic theory, Mulvey argued that "Woman…stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman." Then, with Clover's 1992 Men, Women and Chainsaws, a new, feminist interpretation of the slasher film was born. In Clover’s reading, the slasher film does, in the end, celebrate female agency and allows for more fluid gender boundaries in audience identification than conventional film theory allowed for. Clover formulated what became known as the ‘Final Girl Theory‘. She noticed that the only character to have any psychological depth and resourcefulness was the one still alive at the end. And this character was always female. Clover also suggested that often the names of these final girls – Stretch, Laurie, Terry, Stevie, Will – rendered them ‘boyish’ and gave a clue to their position as the hero of the film; a hero both male and female audiences ultimately identify with and root for. As Diablo Cody, writer of Juno and the slasher horror Jennifer’s Body has said: "When I watched movies like The Goonies and E.T., it was boys having adventures. When I watched Nightmare on Elm Street, it was Nancy beating up Freddy. It was that simple.” Clover’s theories have been misinterpreted somewhat and are often seen as an unequivocally ‘feminist’ championing of the genre at the expense of its more obviously problematic features. Yet her book explains that ‘to applaud the final girl as a feminist development…is a particularly grotesque expression of wishful thinking’. Clover is simply positing a new reading of the genre, and a reading that loosens the categories of gender, ‘or at least the equation of sex = gender’. Carol Clover’s take, however, still does not explain why so many women watch and enjoy horror films. Rather than see the slasher genre as solidifying victimhood in women, playing on a tired ‘damsel in distress‘ trope and allowing men the vicarious, sadomasochistic pleasure of watching violence against women, Isabel Pinedo gives a different interpretation. In ‘Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror’, Pinedo saw the agency of the final girl as expressing very real female anxieties about male violence and the ‘cultural need to express rage and terror’ against this. The final girl is expressive of women fighting back in a world that demands their silence and their acquiescence to a culture in which male violence against women is both celebrated and ignored. In an industry that constantly projects women as the ‘done to’ the symbolism of a woman fighting back, and winning, cannot be ignored. However, just how we got to a situation in which managing not to get brutally raped and murdered is seen as a triumph for womanhood is an altogether more knotty issue. We can, of course, also take a modern-day viewpoint; that these films are so coded in the ‘not-real’ – from the obviously fake blood to the aforementioned distancing of time – that we can enjoy them for what they are. Fiction. If we, as women, deploy our willing suspension of disbelief and use our rational and logical minds to see life outside of the text as separate from life within, can we enjoy these films not as some masochistic pleasure of the eroticisation of violence against women but as a suspended moment of terrorised thrill-seeking? We have certainly learned the conventions of the slasher genre, and the post-modern interpretations of the ‘Scream’ franchise probably helped to dismantle any further ‘serious’ interpretations of these films, or our capacity to see them as anything other than a set of conventions and tired-looking iconography. The question of whether we can have a truly feminist slasher film has as yet been unanswered. But to know the conventions is not enough; metatextual readings written and directed by women do not automatically escape the problems inherent in the genre; to know is not necessarily to overcome. The 1982 film ‘Slumber Party Massacre’ which knowingly used all of the tropes of the genre, enhancing female agency and writing large the male fear of castration, possibly came close. It’s just a shame it wasn’t a very good film. The threat of male violence is just as important an issue for women today as it was during the slasher heyday of the 1970s and 1980s. As is the gratuitous use of female flesh, the eroticisation of sexual violence and the lack of female agency in film. We can suggest that the slasher film is so steeped in tradition and now almost creaky in its evocation of violence that we can enjoy it as a frozen moment in cinematic time, much in the same way an appreciation of film noir need not be hampered by the inherently sexist notion of the femme fatale. However, this does not let the recent crop of remakes off the hook. ‘Halloween’ (2007), ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’ (2010), ‘Friday the 13th’ (2009), ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ (2003) and ‘Prom Night’ (2008) have all, as it were, come back to haunt us in recent years. Aside from the fact that re-makes rarely, if ever, capture what made the original so good, we have been surrounded by misogynistic depictions and treatments of women since the birth of film. To replicate an existing and problematic genre such as this is lazy, retrogressive and pointless. Still, the original A Nightmare on Elm Street is as much a part of my October 31st, as are sticky sweets and green food colouring; ultimately bad for me but inexplicably pleasurable while it lasts.  |
| UK falls behind in gender gap index Posted: 31 Oct 2013 02:09 AM PDT
For the second year running, the UK ranks 18th out of 136 countries based on health, access to education, economic equality and political engagement. This follows a fall from ninth place in 2006. Iceland has been named as the most equal country for the fifth year in a row, followed by Finland, Norway, Sweden and the Philippines. Chad, Pakistan and Yemen take the bottom three places. Since the index was compiled in 2006, 80 per cent of countries have improved their ranking, which suggests that the gender gap is narrowing in most parts of the world. However, as the report founder and co-author Saadia Zahidi pointed out to the BBC, it is "worrying" that "20 per cent of countries have made no progress or are falling behind". Zahidi added: "Women make up one half of the human capital available to any economy and any company; if that talent isn’t integrated, that is going to be a loss for both women and men." The report, which was published on 24 October, revealed that the UK is falling behind in several areas. Britain scored highly for educational attainment, but came 49th for wage equality and 70th for the number of female professional and technical workers. The UK ranks 97th for healthy life expectancy for women. It was placed 54th for a disappointing ratio of males to females in parliament at 78 to 23 – and the ratio of males to females in ministerial positions in the UK is even lower at 17 to 83. According to the four pillars that were used to determine overall ranking, the UK was placed 92nd for health, 31st for access to education, 35th for economic equality and 29th for political participation. The World Economic Forum believes that these results highlight ‘some important points that the UK must address’ if it is to truly tackle its gender gap, as ‘there are worrisome points across all four pillars’. A number of less affluent countries ranked higher than the UK, including Cuba, Lesotho and South Africa. This is thought to be because many women participate in the workforce of developing countries. The high ranking of Nordic countries has been attributed to their investment in people. Zahidi explained: "They are small economies with small populations; they recognise that talent matters, and that talent has to be men and women." According to Zahidi, who heads the World Economic Forum's Women Leaders and Gender Parity programme, investment is vital for a country to achieve gender equality. She said: "Both within countries and between countries are two distinct tracks to economic gender equality, with education serving as the accelerator. "For countries that provide this basic investment, women's integration in the workforce is the next frontier of change. "For those that haven't invested in women's education, addressing this obstacle is critical to women's lives as well as the strength of economies." Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, agreed, saying: "Countries will need to start thinking of human capital very differently – including how they integrate women into leadership roles. "This shift in mindset and practice is not a goal for the future, it is an imperative today," he observed.  |
| You are subscribed to email updates from Women's Views on News To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |