1. Making abstinence education ‘just for girls’ positions women as the gatekeepers of sex. It positions men as having no responsibility for decision making about sex, or for understanding consent. It also supports an idea of women having no desire, and mens’ desire being uncontrollable.
2. Existing Sex and Relationships Education in the UK is not statutory. That means that some schools, in particular academies, Free Schools and religious schools, are highly likely to not teach comprehensive Sex and Relationships Education, because they disagree with the apparently ‘unsavoury’ content. Therefore, if this bill passes, these schools could end up teaching only abstinence, and the biology of reproduction in science classes. I.e. not the useful bits of SRE.
3. Now, abstinence education on its own doesn’t work. It’s been proven not to reduce STIs or pregnancy. A review of American sex-abstinence programs involving over 15,000 people by Oxford University found that they do not stop risky sexual behavior, or help in the prevention of unwanted pregnancy.
4. The bill is heteronormative, assuming that the only sex likely to happen is between a male and a female.
5. Comprehensive Sex and Relationships Education already advises on the benefits of abstaining from sexual activity.

The more I read about Dorries, the more I learnt about her multiple attacks on womens’ rights, such as trying to make counselling for women seeking abortion compulsory (we apparently can’t be trusted to decide for ourselves), and provided by religious anti-choice organisations, and trying repeatedly to reduce the time limit on abortions. A few days after the first reading of her abstinence education bill, Dorries went on the Vanessa Show and claimed that “if more children were taught to ‘just say no’ there would be less sexual abuse.” Seriously, she said that, on TV. This is blatant victim blaming.

Let’s examine Dorries’ motivations for a minute. It is clear to me that Dorries’ attacks are founded on her capitalist, fundamentalist Christian, ideology.

Firstly, her religion teaches her that sex outside of marriage is a sin – it’s wrong and shameful. Knowledge about sex is also dangerous. Her religion teaches her that abortion is immoral. Not only does that explain her direct and explicit attacks on abortion rights, but is relevant to this abstinence education bill, because she (wrongly) believes that abstinence education will reduce sex outside of marriage and therefore reduce unwanted pregnancies, therefore reducing abortions.

Secondly, her capitalist ideology relies heavily on the traditional idea of a nuclear family. For the ruling class, the family is a vital social and economic institution. It means married (presumed to be heterosexual) women being stay-at-home mothers and carers whilst the husband goes out to work – i.e. women providing unpaid labour. Capitalists have historically depended on the institution of marriage and the monogamy of women within the rules of marriage, to control the paternity of children for the purposes of inheritance of money and property. Dorries believes that any sex outside of marriage will lead to either abortions or single mothers on benefits. And she certainly doesn’t want the state to support either of those. A major contradiction of capitalism though, is that employers refuse to pay working class people a family living wage to one working parent as a sole breadwinner, forcing families into poverty and exploitative working conditions.

Dorries’ proposals, and the actions of her party, have nothing to do with helping women. The conservatives are responsible for pushing through cuts which disproportionately affect women:

• As women represent 65 per cent of the public sector workforce, they will bear the brunt of the estimated 400,000 public sector job losses over the next four years.
• On average women working in the public sector earn almost 40 per cent more per hour than female employees in the private sector. So even if replacement jobs were available in the private sector (which they’re not), it would represent a pay cut.
• Cuts to welfare will affect women twice as much as men because on average one fifth of womens’ income comes from welfare, whilst for men it is one tenth.
• £280 million of funding for a ten-year Teenage Pregnancy Strategy has been scrapped.
• While one in five women is likely to suffer rape or sexual attack during their lifetime, Government cuts to domestic violence and rape crisis services are averaging at over 40%.
• Legal aid cuts will make women in violent relationships particularly vulnerable.
• Lone parents, 90 per cent of whom are female, will be hit hardest by the spending cuts, losing 18.5 per cent of their net household income.

We must fight each and every attack on our rights or they will be taken away from us. Equality cannot be won under capitalism, but while we fight to change the system, we can’t let the ruling class destroy what rights we have won so far. So, back to Dorries and her abstinence education bill…

Not finding any focused campaign against her newest attack, back in May, I decided to set up a Facebook campaign: Stop Dorries’ abstinence for girls sex education bill. After a bit of tweeting, in two days the campaign had over 500 supporters. We’ve now got over 1,900.

We will be demonstrating against the abstinence education bill on the 20th January outside the Houses of Parliament, at 10:30am, Old Palace Yard, Westminster. The Socialist Party, Youth Fight For Jobs and Education, the British Humanist Association, Feminist Fightback, Abortion Rights UK, Queers Against The Cuts, Parents & Carers for Sex & Relationships Education, Education for Choice, The National Secular Society, Bristol Feminist Network, Left Front Art and Liberal Conspiracy are all supporting the demo. More information and the Facebook event are at http://on.fb.me/stopdorriesdemo.

Disclaimer: a shortened version of this post was previously published on The F Word.

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And THEN, trying to sign up to eHarmony and am confronted with the choice – do I want a relationship with a Man or a Woman? Because you can’t choose ‘either’! What am I supposed to do, sign up twice?! Massive fail eHarmony. Seriously – non-homosexual queer people don’t want a relationship?

eHarmony - don't make me choose!

It might be harder work on your algorithms, but if you’re gonna make a dating/relationship site or any site with a personal profile, you seriously need someone with a basic understanding of identity politics to give it the once over. Until they sort this out, I’m boycotting eHarmony on principle.

If anyone wonders what people in their 60s do online, here’s my folk’s online activity:

Last week my Dad joined Facebook. My Mum has been on Facebook for around a year. Now when you’re new to Facebook, you get a progress bar to encourage you to come back and do more:

• Dad does social bookmarking, once Furl now Diigo, as well as being an active member of MyLibraryThing. I tried to get him to use del.icio.us but I think he’s sticking to Diigo.
• My mum uses MSN but my Dad doesn’t. If I don’t respond immediately she thinks I’m ignoring her.
• My Dad is a Flickr Pro but my Mum isn’t. I bought him his first Flickr pro account because he was getting into photography and I was sick of getting huge images filling up my inbox all the time! Dad uploads photos that Mum takes too.
• My Mum started a blog recently, about living with Rheumatoid Arthritis, an Aspergic husband, and politics.
• My Dad prefers to microblog on Twitter, is on Last.FM and uses Spotify.

There must be something to the fact that each of them has favoured such different social channels through which to connect. Not sure how much is to do with gender and how much to do with their individual personalities, but Mum’s seem much more to do with communication (Facebook, blogging and MSN) whereas Dad’s seem more hobby specific and functional (Flickr, Diigo, MyLibraryThing, Last.FM).

After dinner, Julie Lerman gave a talk which began with her explaining how in the 80s she had felt the need to dress down in a professional context, because her previous feminine look had attracted the wrong kind of attention from male peers. She explained how more recently, she has been pleased to see young women at male-dominated geek events are able to dress ‘cute’ without (as much) damage to their reputation. Then she showed a picture of a conference speaker’s avatar/conference picture (which she had removed the head of to protect the woman’s identity) which was taken at a typical ‘MySpace angle’ and showed some cleavage. The woman clearly had no bra on and you could see some nipple points through her unbuttoned grey t-shirt. To me, it was an inspiring image. I thought, “Yeah, go on girl! You are proving that women can be hot and intelligent at the same time! You are breaking down that stereotype of an ugly butch geek girl by shoving your cleavage in everyone’s face.” However, Julie said that she found the image saddening and was upset that the reaction to her conference talks was often revolving around a discussion of her boobs rather than what she was talking about. Julie went on to show pictures of herself being herself and to say how important it was to present your ‘true self’. Julie said she wanted the session to be interactive, and for us to shout out when we liked… so I did.

I briefly said that to me, showing her true self might be exactly what the Cleavage Girl was doing. Julie responded saying that that might be true, and that as it is a complicated issue, that’s why she hadn’t said anything in person to this woman – Julie thought maybe it was a generational issue. Quickly, everyone had something to say. There were two very outspoken women – one who thought the same as me, and said that if women had shown their breasts in a context like that years ago we wouldn’t be having this conversation now. Basically, that Cleavage Girl is liberating us all instead of continuing to pretend that Geek Girls don’t have breasts.

The other woman appeared very upset, shouting out “No, no! You’ve got it all wrong! She is objectifying herself by using this highly sexualised image! You can be feminine without being sexual!”. This woman went on to explain that research by Stonewall had shown that when someone is allowed to express themselves how they choose, they are more effective in the workplace. To me, this was far to close to the anti-sex, anti-porn feminists of the 1970s. Why do we think that a woman’s sexuality is separate from her ‘true’ self – like a dirty secret she should keep in the closet? Insisting that a woman portray her professional, intelligent self in a desexualised manner means that we are positioning sexy women as unprofessional and unintelligent.

The general feel in the room was that there was a line between making yourself attractive in a professional context (e.g. putting on makeup) and being provocative – and apparently this woman had crossed it. But who are we to set this line for others? Maybe this woman thought that she had not crossed the line, for her, crossing the line might be going completely topless online. In other cultures, showing your hair is crossing the line, and many feel that those cultures are behind ours in terms of women’s liberation. How is this different?

Additionally, an Online Community Moderator said that it was in women’s best personal safety interests to not put pictures like this online. She had experienced people being stalked online as a result of posting personal pictures of this kind. I do get her point, but to me, this is too close to saying that women should not wear sexy clothes out at night because they are more likely to get raped. The fault is with the rapist, not with the woman for what she wore. Similarly, we should be protesting about the reaction Cleavage Girl got – we should be shunning those bloggers who sniggered and discredited her speaking online. It is the reaction that is the problem and should be stopped. Cleavage Girl in my opinion, is certainly not at fault.

I am tempted to create a Girl Geeks for Cleavage fanclub.

Radio buttons? With only two options and I have to choose one? And the default is Male? So I’m forced to declare myself as one or the other. How rubbish. Here’s a couple of suggestions for improvement:

Or even better:

Or even don’t bother asking in the first place! At least not in the initial sign up. You could let people enter this information about themselves by choice later on. So far Pownce is winning the gender game. I know I keep reporting on all the sign-up dialogues being crap for promoting gender diversity, but when I’ve seen enough of these I think I’ll make a table of winners and losers in gender awareness in sign ups / personal profile sites’ UI.

_____________EDIT______________

Aha! on logging in, turns out you can un-define your gender in your profile settings.  So that is a good thing, but you still shouldn’t have to choose one in the first place.  It’s a bit weird that you can choose ‘nothing’ later on, but not initially.  Also it’s still not perfect because you might want to define yourself as Transgendered or something else and because you can’t this is giving preferential treatment to males and females.

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