Women's Views on News |
- Sex education and consent
- ‘Battlestar Galactica’: The show where all of the women die
- Airlines must step out of the past
| Posted: 07 Feb 2014 07:18 AM PST
A survey of children and young people conducted by the Sex Education Forum, based at leading children's charity the National Children's Bureau, has found that almost one in three say they did not learn about consent at school. Children and young people were even less likely to have learnt 'what is good or bad in a relationship'; with only 43 per cent saying this had been covered in sex and relationships education classes at school, with many describing a complete absence of discussion about real-life relationship situations and what you would do 'should something happen'. Although findings showed that formal teaching about sexual consent was woefully lacking, many young people did demonstrate an understanding of the legal age of consent (96 per cent), and the law relating to sexual offences; with 93 per cent of respondents recognising there could be female sex offenders and 84 per cent understanding that men could be victims of rape. Despite this grasp of the law, the study revealed that a large proportion of young people are considerably less confident about where to get help when they need it; with 1 in 3 young people saying that they either 'didn't know' or were 'unsure' where to get help if they were sexually assaulted and 4 in 10 unsure where to find their local sexual health clinic. The survey results, released to coincide with the publication of a new resource for teachers on consent, showed that many young people did not know that under-16s are entitled to receive confidential contraceptive and STI treatment; with less than half confident that a 15 year-old could get a HIV test without a parent or carer being told, and only a third aware that a 14 year-old could get contraception confidentially. Lucy Emmerson, coordinator of the Sex Education Forum, said: "This survey confirms that the quality of sex education children receive is a lottery. "Young people are telling us very clearly that teaching is often too theoretical and fails to deal with the real-life practicalities of getting help and advice or building the skills for pleasurable, equal and safe relationships. "Learning about consent is integral to good quality sex and relationships education and every school should have a planned programme which includes content on bodily boundaries, gender and power, caring for one another, feelings and emotions and how to get help and advice. "We need to listen to the evidence and make high-quality sex and relationships education a guarantee across all schools." But peers recently rejected an amendment to the Children and Families Bill, which would have make sex education compulsory in state-funded primary and secondary schools by 209 to 142 votes. Speaking in the House of Commons, Children's Minister and Conservative MP Edward Timpson confirmed that Personal, Social, Health and Economic (PSHE) Education in England would remain a non-statutory subject. This although the Children's Commissioner has called for Relationships and Sex Education to be made compulsory to address boys' harmful use of pornography and abuse. The House of Lords voted No. The Department for Education then announced it would be working on "new advice produced by experts groups", which will be emailed to all headteachers to use in conjunction with the existing teaching materials. However, PHSE would remain a non-statutory subject. So where does that leave us – and our children? "We at Brook are disappointed but not deterred by the Lords' vote against statutory SRE," Brook’s chief executive Simon Blake said in a statement to PinkNews. "Brook is working with the PSHE Association and the Sex Education Forum to provide updated supplementary advice to the government's statutory guidance on SRE, which will be published shortly. "We were however greatly heartened to hear so many peers stand up and argue for the critical importance of comprehensive SRE, which includes teaching about consent, online safety, same-sex relationships, and abusive relationships, in schools and colleges. "In the longer term, we will not lose sight of our goal of making SRE statutory, which will help young people to make healthier choices around relationships and sex.  |
| ‘Battlestar Galactica’: The show where all of the women die Posted: 07 Feb 2014 04:03 AM PST
Our regular cross-post from Bitchflicks. Um… spoilers for Battlestar Galactica. What Battlestar Galactica is: To recap for anyone who isn't familiar with the show but still wants to hear about death, Battlestar Galactica (2004) is a remake of the original series, in which humanity lives on a ragtag group of spaceships because robots are trying to kill everyone. The robots are called Cylons, and they look like human people, and it's a metaphor for how the Other is really the same as we are, and that's a lesson we need to learn to make peace. In practical terms, there are twelve models of humanoid Cylon and multiple copies of each. So, whenever a Cylon dies (with a few specific exceptions) he or she downloads into a new, identical body and gets to come back again. The main story line is about how the ragtag band of humans tries to find a mythical planet called Earth with the Cylons acting (mostly) as antagonists along the way. There's also a supernatural/religious element in which there are prophecies and angels, and God has a special plan to save both the humans and Cylons by making the most vile man in their number his prophet. Laura Roslin is the president, Kara "Starbuck" Thrace is the hotshot viper pilot, and there are videos on YouTube that recap the first three seasons if you want to know what happens. As other Bitch Flicks writers have previously discussed, there are a lot of really good, well-written, interesting female characters, human and Cylon alike. And almost every single one of them gets killed. Teach the Controversy: What We Mean When We Say "All of the Women Die" As the show was winding down in its final season, Slate ran an article by Juliet Lapidos called "Chauvinist Pigs in Space" that criticized several aspects of the way women are filmed and portrayed on Battlestar Galactica (BSG). Among other points, Lapidos argued that, "The main female characters are all dying, dead, or not human" and that this trend sent the unintentional message that "women…just can't hack it when the going gets rough." The piece prompted several responses, including this one from Slant, but Lapidos wasn't the only one saying it; similar comments were popping up on message boards and blogs (by which I mean Live Journal, because that's where we all hung out in 2009, amirite?), especially after the series finale aired, and both Starbuck and Roslin were down for the count. One common response to Lapidos' article, and to the more general complaint that so many women die on this show, is to either start listing all of the male characters who died – and, since the overall death toll on this series was high, it's a very long list, or to argue that, hey, there are still cylon women alive at the end of the show, and they're women, too, goddammit. The problem is that comparing the number of dead characters, or human versus Cylon characters, doesn't get at the real issue. A better way to ask the question is, "Who, of all the characters on the show, was able to survive four whole seasons without getting killed?" On the men's side, we've got all three of the leads (William Adama, Apollo, and Gaius Baltar), several important secondary characters (including Chief Tyrol, Colonel Tigh, and Helo), and a few other randoms who we never got to know that well. On the women's side, we've got more randoms and (probably) a minor character named Seelix who does not appear in the final episode. That's all. All of the non-Seelix women we know, including all of the lead female characters, have died. The human women are gone, and every Cylon woman left standing at the end died on screen earlier in the series. Tyrol and Tigh are also Cylons, and they didn't have to die ever. While I don't like her phrasing that much, I have to agree with Lapidos that there's a sense in which this doesn't sit well. A sense in which it seems like, intentionally or not, the show is telling us that capable women need to die, either as a warning to the rest of us ("the price for being good at things is that you won't survive"), or as a way of making the audience feel safe around them. Sort of like how you feel safe at the end of a monster movie when the monster gets swallowed by lava – like, don't be afraid! These women are not roaming the Earth, continuing to be really awesome. They're dead, like Xena, and the threat is contained. Um… spoilers for Xena: Warrior Princess. On a personal note, as a woman who's watching TV, it's also just kind of a downer. Taken in the larger scope of what's available, it's so rare to find a TV show with so many great parts for women, so many characters who are interesting and smart and competent and vital to the stories they live in – that it's kind of a bummer when all of them die. That said, I do think there's a case to be made for why this may not be a horrible choice, so… Why This May Not Be a Horrible Choice Like almost every TV show, Battlestar Galactica is a mixed bag when it comes to storytelling. Some of the women die stupid deaths, but some of them die pretty good ones that follow from actively participating in the world in which this story takes place. Starting on the Bad Death side, the main example that Lapidos focuses on is Chief Tyrol's wife, Cally, and how she gets murdered by Tyrol's Cylon mistress on her way to commit suicide. That's a fair death to focus on, because it's probably the worst, especially when paired with the mistress' murder (by Tyrol!) in the series finale, which was just a WTF moment that got buried in all of the other explosions and stories that came to a close. After she's married to Tyrol, Cally is almost completely defined by her relationship with him and, even before they get married, it sometimes feels like her only role in the story is be jealous because he's with someone else. Her death happens firstly as a surprise switcheroo for the audience, and secondly as a way to complicate Tyrol's relationship with his boring, boring mistress who was never that great of a character, either. The show does this last minute thing where it tries to take us inside Cally's experience when she finds out her husband's a Cylon, but it's really too little, too late. Also in the not-such-a-great-death category are popular secondary characters Dualla (who shoots herself in the head out of nowhere during the final season) and Kat, who gets a very special, very manipulative episode all about her, so that we can learn about her backstory and feel bad when she gets radiation poisoning, which she gets by addressing a problem that also only exists in that one episode. In fairness to the show, though, there are plenty of pointless, annoying, cannon fodder, and/or emotionally manipulative deaths to go around for both men and women. Starbuck has a dead boyfriend who exists only to create tension between her and Apollo, and she's lost some male pilots just so she'll feel bad about what a crap teacher she was. Roslin's sidekick Billy gets offed pretty randomly when he no longer serves the story, and the whole point of his death is to show us that Dualla and Apollo were mean to him on the last day that he was alive (and he was too gentle to live in this world, or something). That said, because all of the women die, it makes sense that viewers would take a more critical attitude to examining how they die and to what purpose in the story. And that's where it starts to seem like it might not be a horrible choice because, while some of the women die stupidly, a lot of them die because women are the do-ers of Battlestar Galactica. They're making things happen; they're driving the story, and, when the supernatural element rears its head, they're the prophesized saviors of the human and Cylon race. Like a lot of militaristic stories, Battlestar Galactica measures its characters' heroism partly through their capacity to suffer, both physically and emotionally. And unlike a lot of stories, BSG splits its heroic suffering pretty evenly between its male and female characters. Starbuck is the action hero of the story – she goes on the dangerous missions, she gets the crap kicked out of her by robots, she has a tragic backstory with a dead boyfriend and an abusive mother, and she has a special destiny that requires her to sacrifice herself to save the people she loves. Roslin finds out that she has terminal cancer on the same day that she becomes President, and in order to lead, she has to overcome the fear that she feels for herself. During the last season, her body is falling apart just like the Galactica is falling apart, like tenuous hopes for the future are falling apart, and the question is whether any of those things will hold together long enough to find Earth. She and the beat-up old spaceship are both trying to complete their final missions by bringing the people to Earth. Starbuck and Roslin are two of the most important characters on the show, and one could make the argument that, along with Gaius Baltar, they make up a trinity of the most important characters on the show, in terms of moving the primary story line forward. They die in the process, but it's part the heroic journey. Even some of the other, more perfunctory deaths come from a pretty strong place. Admiral Cain is there for three episodes before she bites it, but her character is right at the center of everything and killed as a direct result of the choices she makes as a leader (to place revenge above everything else). Athena, a Cylon, has her husband kill her so that she can download into another body on a Cylon ship and rescue her kidnapped baby – it's pretty badass. Ellen Tigh gets murdered for betraying the humans to the Cylons. D'Anna Biers dies multiple times while investigating the identities of the final five Cylons (who are unknown to the remaining seven). The list goes on. In a universe where lots of people die as the product of doing, many female characters die because they do something that affects the story. This is one of those instances where everyone's a little bit right. It's legitimately kind of annoying that, in a story full of strong, well-written women, none of them but (probably) Seelix can manage to survive. The television landscape being what it is, it makes you wonder what's going on there. At the same time, and without this cancelling out the annoyance, a lot of the women died because they were such good characters and because the show was fairly egalitarian in determining who would drive the story. Personally, I wish that in those last, sweeping shots of the surviving characters standing on Earth, we had seen Cally, or Dualla, or Kat, or someone we cared about who was female and lived for four years. I wish that it seemed possible, in the BSG universe, to be female and live for four years. And that feeling exists side-by-side with my joy at having such great characters to begin with. Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer and couch potato who yells about movies and TV on her blog.  |
| Airlines must step out of the past Posted: 07 Feb 2014 01:09 AM PST
In an episode of ‘How I Met Your Mother’, serial womaniser Barney Stinson goes on a monologue about "hot" professions. Air stewardesses, he insists, no longer hold this dubious honour. Instead, the prize belongs to pharmaceutical reps. Yet everywhere you look, from Britney Spears in Toxic to TV drama Pam Am, the role of female flight attendants continues to be surrounded by sex and myth. This week, it emerged that British Airways may face action from union members over their uniform policy, which requires new female recruits to wear skirts. A poll of BA staff in 2004 had revealed that 70 per cent would prefer to have a choice between trousers and skirts. How did we get to a stage where, in 2014, it can still be part of a role requirement that women wear skirts? Particularly for a role that, at its root, is about the safety of passengers rather than the dishing out of drinks. British Airways is very far from the worst offender when it comes to uniforms. China Spring Air have their cabin crew dress up as butlers and maids. Last year, staff from Qantas Airways complained that their new uniforms – unveiled and modelled by Victoria's Secrets’ Miranda Kerr – were too sexy, too tight and too impractical. Ever since women started working as air stewards in the 1930s, the role has been a glamorous one linked to many notions of femininity – that of caregiver, hostess and perfect wife-to-be – from the 1930s through to the 1960s. Yet even if a mystical aura had always surrounded air stewards, it was from the 1960s that this role began to be overtly sexualised. Airlines began to commodify female flight attendants in their advertisements, selling them as part of the product. Braniff Airlines’ 'air strip' advertisement featured a woman taking off layers of clothes in a striptease style. The infamous 'fly me' campaign in 1971 saw National Airlines' display their female flight attendants as their number one commodity, with posters featuring attractive staff and the tagline "I'm Cheryl. Fly me". National Airlines even encouraged their staff to wear 'fly me' buttons. Some staff resisted by wearing 'Go fly yourself' badges instead. And in order for reality to reflect the myth they were selling, airlines gave their stewardesses sexy uniforms too. Southern Airlines had their female attendants wear go-go boots and hotpants. British Airways female cabin crew flying from New York to the Caribbean in the 1960s wore thin paper dresses, which a recent in-flight magazine delightfully referred to as adding 'to the in-flight entertainment'. These advertisements continued even as female flight attendants successfully fought against discrimination, for instance in the US overturning rules about having retire at the age of 32. Then in the 1980s and 1990s advertisements began to shift away from the beauty of the cabin crew towards the modernity of the airline's fleet. Fast-forward to today, though, and it feels we may have taken a couple steps back. Not only are strict uniform policies still in place for several airlines, but some recent advertisements make the 1960s look positively feminist. In 2012, Ryan Air launched their 'Red Hot Fares and Crew' advertising campaign, featuring scantily-clad and provocatively posed flight attendants. Following a number of complaints, the advertisement was banned by the Advertisement Standards Authority as it 'linked female cabin crew with sexual behaviour'. The less said about this bikini atrocity by Russian airline Avianova the better. In 2010 Virgin Airways, hardly a stranger to questionable advertisements, released a reality TV show, 'Fly Girls', which followed air stewardesses as they worked and travelled through the USA. According to the Washington Post, the show seemed 'determined to fulfil a set of demeaning, outdated stereotypes centred on stewardess fantasies'. We're talking about a job sector where in 2005 one in five women reported having experienced sexual harassment; these kind of advertisements were not and continued not being a bit of harmless fun. According to the Secretary of the Flight Attendants Association of Australia, Jo-Ann Davidson, speaking out in 2010, they put cabin crew at risk of sexual harassment and abuse. In the face of all this, the argument around British Airways's new recruits not being permitted to wear trousers may seem trivial, and of course it pales in comparison to the behaviour of other airlines. Nevertheless, the insistence on skirts and sheer tights is part and parcel of perpetuating the sexualised myth around female flight attendants. The corporate branding of most airlines is built around glamour. That's fair enough – but does glamour necessarily have to equate with skirts? Haven't we moved on to a stage where trousers can also be glamorous and fashionable? Air flight has changed – it is no longer the preserve of businessmen or some elite. And attitudes have changed – it is no longer acceptable to force women into skirts. In short, times have changed; and it's time for airlines to step out of the past.  |
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