This problem is all the more sinister because it is both “natural” and “rational”. Women are biologically responsible for childbirth; there is no social policy that could alter that inequality. And employers are profit maximizing by discriminating against women; to do otherwise would be to lower their expected returns from the employee. In a competitive marketplace, companies that refuse to follow the dictates of economic rationalism are likely to be competed out of business. Shareholders would never stand for it. Managers could never get away with it. It all smacks of an unnerving, incontestable determinism. It isn’t anyone’s fault, it’s just the way the world is. It is also, because we are all susceptible to naturalistic fallacy, the sort of thing people can say in polite company without appearing sexist. Perfect ammunition for the anti-feminist.

As with all instances of market failure, governments have the capacity and responsibility to intervene. The labour market is failing both at the level of efficiency by removing from the market some of the best employees, but more fundamentally it is failing at the level of equity, because it dictates that women are born into a situation where they are less rewarded than men simply because of the biological lottery. A fair society cannot accept a systematic bias against a sector of that society. What government action is appropriate? In the market for cars, one can regulate dealerships such that they cannot put lemons on the market. Such a mechanism cannot work here. So, what of the inverse? Enforcing paternity leave means that both men and women are equally likely to leave their job for child-rearing.

Some might argue that this has economically distortionary effects, by forcing workers out of the labour market. However, it should not increase the total number of labour hours lost. It might, of course, increase the number of labourers lost – as in more people going part-time, even if the number of hours lost remains the same. This would constitute a problem only if workers are subject to increasing returns – as in one full time worker is more than twice as productive as two part-time workers. There are reasons to believe this might be true – they could build greater expertise, experience etc – but also reasons to believe the inverse is true – that they grow less motivated after a large number of hours. Indeed, most economists assume that workers are subject to diminishing returns over time, not increasing returns. Either way, this point is at best contestable. Others might suggest that this represents an unfair restriction of freedom for families – what if women want to stay at home for longer, and men want to carry on working? This will inevitably be true in some cases. However, the restriction on freedom exists only in the short-term, since families could re-adjust to their preferred arrangements after the mandatory period is over. The hope, of course, is that they don’t and that men who initially believed that they didn’t want to look after kids might find it to be enjoyable, worthwhile and something they want to continue to do. In this sense, government is restricting freedom in order to break the unfreedom that results from socialized gender roles. Those men who otherwise would have been dissuaded by social expectation from staying at home to look after their kids might find a calling in life they find more fulfilling. Even under the highly implausible assumption that this never happens, however, the mandatory period still goes some way to levelling the expectational playing field between men and women.

I am not making any normative claims about the social worth of work versus that of family-raising. Indeed, there are good reasons to ensure the delinking of economic power and career, through for example a government paid wage for domestic labour or child-rearing. But, my claims apply to that subsection of women who desire to have careers; a (large) subsection of women that the market is systematically failing. A subsection of women who a fair society and a responsible government would ensure had the same economic and personal choice sets as those given to men.

Not having a female boat on the Thames every year is shocking. Some say there isn’t room given the tides, but there seems to be plenty of space for the men’s seconds.

Failing to provide a proper space for the women’s races damages sports at Oxbridge. The Thames gig is essential because it gets the media coverage that attracts the sponsorship deals to invest in talented rowers. Sponsorship is where the bulk of rowing funding comes from – the universities themselves actually provide very little.

Squeezed onto the smaller track at Henley, most of the funding for the women’s race comes from car parking and programme sales. Very often money is lost. Female rowers who want to represent their universities are often asked to pay £1,000 or more to cover the costs of coaches, boats and regatta entry fees. It’s hard for them to speak out against the present system, because they are often dependent on men’s clubs to borrow facilities and equipment they can’t afford themselves.

Meanwhile, in the hours of spiel before the Thames boat race, the commentators don’t even mention the female races the week before.

Such a system is embarrassing for Oxbridge, which is now supposed to be a place where women are treated equally to men. But it’s also embarrassing for the country. With the Olympics coming up in London in 2012, we can’t afford to stifle talent. Female rowers should be given the resources they deserve.

Linda Jaivin was interviewed for ‘Sexy Beijing’ an online TV show about love, lust, youth culture and street life in China’s capital. Credit: Sexy Beijing; Source: http://www.sexybeijing.tv/new/video.asp?id=105

Linda Jaivin says it’s nice to be my first. The first person to be interviewed for Agendered, that is…

A playwright, a refugee rights activist, the subtitle translator for major Chinese movies ‘Farewell My Concubine’ and ‘Hero’, Linda Jaivin is principally famous for her erotic novels. She’d be very intimidating if she wasn’t so very good at putting you at ease.

Why is she so good at putting you at ease? Well, really getting under the skin of other people is her passion: according to her book ‘Confessions of an S&M Virgin’, she quit working as a journalist because she felt unconvinced by the idea of a journalists ‘objectivity’. She is much more happier getting into character and really exploring.

And explore she has. Originally from the US, she spent the ‘80s racing around Beijng on a bicycle with her hair dyed black, then took Australian citizenship and taught herself to love Vegemite. She also spent a significant amount of time convinced that she was ‘Baby Baby’ ‘alien sex fiend and wannabe rock star’ a character from one of her novels.

Agendered: I really love the honesty about sex in your book ‘Eat Me’. I hadn’t come across anything like it before! For example, the scene where the couple run away from their guide to have sex in the Summer Palace and the woman is really into it, but decides to fake orgasm so that they can wrap it up before they get caught! We have these ideas about the kind of sex we want to have, but in real life it’s this unco-ordinated performance art which can sometimes just be really funny.

Linda Jaivin: Exactly. Sex is often funny and awkward and even dishonest, and it’s the gap between what it’s supposed to be and what it actually is which interests me most. Much of the humour comes from that gap.

A: Do people write you thank you letters after reading your books?

LJ: I’ve had a few letters, it’s true. I think that in addition to the humour, what appeals to people is the idea of stories about sex and sexuality which allow for idiosyncrasy and mishaps. If some aspects of popular culture (including many traditional women’s magazines) give people the idea that they’re freaks or losers if they’re not having mind-blowing sex all the time then they’re not going to feel very happy about opening up on the subject. I don’t think it’s important or desirable for everyone to talk freely about their sex life. I don’t—‘Eat Me’ is a novel, not an autobiography. But I do think that it’s healthy for people to feel comfortable about who they are and what they do (or don’t or can’t do), and alternative erotic narratives such as those in ‘Eat Me’ gives readers permission to do that.

A: You’ve translated subtitles for a number of famous Chinese films ( incl. ‘Farewell my Concubine’) and recently published a book on China called ‘The Monkey and the Dragon’. Do people try to pigeon hole you as either an erotic writer or a China specialist?

LJ: …it’s true that I’ve written widely on China. So some people know me primarily as an erotic writer, others as a specialist writer on China or translator, and still others as a comic writer or refugee advocate. I think we are all composed of many parts, and it may surprise someone who knows me mainly for my China writing, for example, to realise that I have written erotica and vice versa but I don’t see it as inherently contradictory.

A: You seem to have put Chinese history and erotica together in your new book! (a novel about George Morrison, a correspondant living in China in the early 1900s and his relationship with an heiress, Mae Perkins).

LJ: I was reading a biography of ‘Chinese’ Morrison when I came upon a description of his 1904 affair with a wealthy young American woman, Mae Perkins, the daughter of a US Senator and became fascinated by the story. He was 42, a very influential and respected man, the doyen of the Peking correspondents, and a long term bachelor when he met her. She was 26, and not just sexually promiscuous but—and this fascinated me—completely honest about her sexuality. She told him about all the other men she was sleeping with—including a number of his acquaintances and friends—and he suffered awful jealousy as a result. But she was sufficiently enticing that he continued the affair for four months. It interested me on a number of levels—Queen Victoria had died two years earlier, and mores were changing, but not so quickly that what she was doing was not scandalous; Morrison was a classic ‘alpha male’ and yet he allowed her to put him in what was a fairly humiliating situation; and finally, he was obsessed with her lack of ‘morality’ while himself blithely boosting a large-scale war between Japan and Russia over control over part of China.

A: ‘A Most Immoral Woman’ seems to be pretty different to the average historical novel…

LJ: Perhaps it is—Mae is at the heart of it. I think that Mae is fascinating, brave and original. Many historical novels—and indeed many contemporary novels centering on a romance or affair—take as a given that the woman, at least, is hoping for a permanent and loving liaison, usually in the shape of marriage. Whether she gets it or not is another story. Mae was driven, so far as I could discover anyway, by the desire for sex, adventure and independence. She would not be controlled, and she did not seem overly interested in marriage…

A: You also added a lesbian character to the cast, and a definite focus on May’s sexual freedom—the kind of things that probably haven’t been written on much before…

LJ: Lesbian character… I’m not sure which one that is in ‘A Most Immoral Woman’. I think it’s safe to say that Mae, while primarily into men, was bisexual. It’s true that I’ve had lesbian characters in ‘Eat Me’, ‘Rock’n’Roll Babes from Outer Space’ and other works of fiction. I think that sexuality tends to be somewhat fluid and opportunistic—not for everyone, but for more people than would admit it.

A: And now you’re working on an opera?

LJ: The opera is based on the story of Pan Jinlian, China’s own ‘most immoral woman’. It’s from a Ming Dynasty novel and has been told and retold many times over the years in many forms, including opera, but I’m hoping to give it a special twist of my own.

A: And finally, you’ve lived on three different continents ( the US, China, Australia) and are constantly engaged on new projects… Where do you get your energy from and what advice would you give to young writers?

LJ: My energy… I think I’m solar powered. It’s a blessing and a curse—I generally have to exercise at least once a day when I’m writing or I can’t sit still. Three pieces of advice for young writers: 1) read great books, 2) learn as much as you can about the world and 3) write, write, write.

Linda Jaivin’s most recent book ‘A Most Immoral Woman’ was published in 2009 by HarperCollins Australia. Her new opera will be performed in Beijing in September 2010.

Further reading:

Check out an extract from Jaivin’s first novel, ‘Eat me’ here: http://www.kxol.com.au/jaivin.htm

For more on Jaivin’s views on erotica, read her essay ‘Women Love Sex’: http://www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/0897/jaivin/essay.html

The theme of the next issue is ‘Masculinity’:

We’re looking for articles on things like ( but not restricted to):

• Politics: can men be feminists? profiles of various feminist men…
• Baby Daddies: the UK’s new paternity leave—how does it measure up to the Scandinavian countries’ paternity leave?
• Sex and Dating: dating guides’ models of ‘masculinity’—is the man from ‘The Rules’ the same as the man from ‘The Game’? Or is it a different sport entirely?
• Role Play: what do people who value ‘masculinity’ think about femininity?
• Oxford Rites of Passage: does ‘masculinity’ vary from place to place? Is there an Oxford specific model of ‘masculinity’?
• Mag Hags: ‘Men’s Health’ is now more popular than ‘FHM’—What’s going on?
• Beauty: Masculinity and the female gaze—a review of ‘Filament’ magazine

See http://www.agendered.com/category/articles for example of the last issue’s articles based on the theme of sexuality. Contact editor@agendered.com with article pitches and your previous writing experience. We look forward to hearing from you!

Credit: Barbara Kruger; Source: http://templeofhera.blogspot.com/2009/02/your-body-is-battleground.html

Many women are feminists. Most people have several feminist friends. For readers of this site, perhaps the vast majority of your friends are feminist. I probably know at least a dozen women who would self-identify as feminist. Yet, I don’t know a single one who doesn’t, at least sometimes, wear make-up. I suspect all of them shave their legs. Many, on occasion, wear high heels. They believe, sometimes stridently, in the social construction of gender—that there is no biologically determined reason for women to care more about their appearance than men. They probably, like I, loathe women’s (and men’s) magazines, support a ban on beauty product advertising and plastic surgery and believe that men and women should be subject to the same social standards. They recognize and deplore the message it sends to society that women have to physically alter their appearance in order to impress men (and other women), believe that it strips them of social agency, implies their worth is limited to the physical, and suggests that they should wait placidly for male attention. Collectively, they believe make-up is bad for women and society. Individually, they wear make-up.

This is not irrational. The imperative to wear make-up is what is known in economics as a collective action problem. Society is structured in such a way that social rewards accrue to those that conform to the roles expected of them. Most men are more attracted to women wearing make-up and high heels. Even many of those males who are avowedly feminist. Most men would find it peculiar and discomforting to realize that their girlfriend didn’t shave her legs, even though they themselves would never dream of such a practice. Employers might be less likely to offer jobs to women who “ignored their appearance” or dressed in a very atypical way. Judgemental people might casually start referring to such women as “weird”. Some might be less inclined to be friends with them. Who would bear these costs? Who would even risk them? I know I wouldn’t. Of course, some women do; they’re, to my mind, exceptionally brave and strong—they bear social costs, and sometimes are even so wilful and cool that they change the minds of those around them. But they are very much in the minority. Most women, quite rationally and reasonably, socially conform. Yet every time a woman conforms she re-enforces the social norm. She makes it stronger and harder for other women to resist. Individual rationality necessitates collective harm. If everyone could act collectively they could break these social norms. But any particular individual acting alone will have no effect. Just because a few “outsiders” ignore social rules doesn’t destroy or even weaken those rules. Ironically, it may even strengthen them by providing a public example of the costs of non-conformity. In economics, collective action failures require government intervention to solve. This comes with its own set of problems. How much do we trust governments to restrict the right things? What message does it send for the state to correct “women’s collective irrationality”? Is freedom too important a value to curb, especially when the harms are so difficult to measure?

What happens to collective action problems that are not solved by the government? In these situations, the only solution is for individual to make individually irrational choices, in the hope that every other individual also makes this choice. Sometimes this is successful. For example, it is individually irrational to vote in an election (since almost never is an election swung by your vote) but most people still do and the collective harm is avoided. But, in that example, unlike in the case of make-up, the costs of unilateral action are relatively low—a few hours at the voting booth. When the costs are higher, most people fail to act. Climate change and vegetarianism are perhaps the two best analogies to the make-up problem. With climate change, each individual would be harmed by restricting their carbon output but their sacrifice would have a negligible effect on society. Similarly, people who don’t eat meat have almost no effect on the meat industry, yet collectively the meat industry wouldn’t exist if each of those individuals didn’t eat meat.

Yet, although neither climate change reduction nor vegetarianism are social movements that have been entirely successful, far more people adhere to self-enforced rules in those situations than they do with make-up. Why? I suspect it is because people have convinced themselves that each individual instance of riding a plane or eating a steak is, in itself, immoral. This implicates a separate question: the morality of wearing make-up as disconnected from its rationality. This question turns on the distinction between causal responsibility and causal contribution. To take an example: an innocent individual is in front of a firing squad of forty people; each bullet will hit the individual simultaneously and one bullet is enough to kill the person. No one in the firing squad is causally responsible, since if that person did not shoot, the victim would still die. But each person causally contributes, by being 1/40^th the cause of the person’s death. Most people, I think, would say that each individual in the firing squad was doing something immoral. Much like, if animals have rights, those of us who eat meat are doing something immoral, and, if the planet is in danger, those of us who ride planes are doing something immoral. On this view, each individual act of wearing make-up is immoral, even if it doesn’t lead to negative consequences.

However, I suspect vegetarians and environmentalists get an easier ride than those who reject make-up. A culture which cultivates a female appearance obsession is pervasive across economic and social life, and the costs of rejecting it are considerably higher than having to eat lentils or not driving as much.

So, how do we solve the collective action problem of social conformity? Either we trust governments to intervene in our personal lives or we use the moral autonomy granted to us by those governments to make hard personal choices. There is, of course, no easy answer. But, it might be time to start asking the question.

Samir Deger-Sen is a D. Phil. student in International Relations at Balliol College. He has been part of the competitive debating circuit for 8 years and, in 2008, won the World Universities Debating Championship. Naomi Wolf’s ‘The Beauty Myth’ was the first book that he read about feminism.

I love feminism because she’s the rebel of the class, the one that makes a farce of all those sexists seeking stars.

     Whilst teacher Liberalism stands preaching untoward, scratching black and white messages on his 2D board, feminism swings on her chair and raises her hand, a girl full of questions she can’t understand.

     “What do you mean she chose to shave her legs, to sleep with him for dregs, to pursue beauty by eating only the white bits of eggs?” The X-chromosomed rebel relentlessly asks, popping sticky pink bubbles rather than completing her tasks.

     “There is a personal sphere and a private sphere, and no third party can cross the line dear” the Liberal teacher drones, bored and boxed and sick to death of her moans.

     She laughs at his pains as she throws paper planes, “But my values are made in public, by the slogans on my screens, they’re built by barbies in my bedroom and mini skirts marketed pre-teens!”  

     I love this lady’s disregard for silence; the way her eyes flash with triumph at her questions of defiance.

     No school can expel her, no Liberal can remove her (not even the school cleaner with a hoover). This rebellious lady fighter won’t grow old or tired or lighter - she’ll just burn brighter. She’ll pass her questions to her daughters, and each girl will add her tone, until a hundred thousand daughters have all the answers of their own. 

Fine state of affairs, huh? For eight years family planning services laboured under Bush’s woman-hating ‘global gag rule’ that forbade them offering information about abortions (much less actual abortions). Now, the other side of the coin:

Documented cases in Namibia where HIV-positive women minutes from giving birth were encouraged to sign consent forms to prevent them from having more children. Jennifer Gatsi-Mallet, [ICW's] co-ordinator in the country, said: “They were in pain, they were told to sign, they didn’t know what it was.

It adds up to the same thing. Women’s bodies don’t really belong to them. That goes double for the poor, women of colour and any other group that society can single out as less than “normal”. The plight of HIV positive African women may seem a remote concern, but it is only a few steps further along the spectrum of disrespect.

Check out the ICW website for more information.

It might seem like a harmless effort to ‘humanise’ these beauties, but it smacks of something meaner and more insidious. First, it says that no matter how beautiful and desireable a woman is there is still something wrong with her. Second, it reinforces the notion that women are ultimately defined by their phsyical traits rather than their talents. You don’t read interviews with male celebrities whinging about their toes or ears, so why should this nonsense be a staple of writing about women?

St Anne’s College has just voted in a “white hetrosexual male rep” to serve on their formal student body. Andrew Lowe stood on a platform that would replace the college creche with a finishing school, ban women from the library and save money by getting female students to serve in halls instead of kitchen staff. The other gems in his manifesto include extra funding for “middle class activities” and preventing college authorities from banning “any act succeeded by the word lad or banter”.

As a feminist, I know I’ll be criticized with the classic “can’t you take a joke” line. Don’t get me wrong - I’m all for taking the piss out of the PC agenda - but let me explain why there are three reasons why this action is simply not funny.

Most obviously (and I can’t believe I even have to write this), sexist and discriminatory “jokes” like this run the risk of isolating the unrepresentatively low numbers of women, ethnic minorities and working class Oxbridge students. Actions like this show that some members of the white male middle class student population have precisely zero sense of empathy – born on the top to inherit the top, they can’t understand what it might feel like to be intimidated at the bottom.

Second, stories like these put off unconventional applicants. Since I’ve left Oxford I’ve regularly gone back to my state school to encourage students to apply. Next week I’m meeting a  young woman to try and convince her that Oxbridge is worth going for, despite her fears of snobbery. What am I supposed to tell these 6^th formers now?

Finally, actions like these make a mockery of the college student committee. JCRs aren’t jokey forums to mess with. In the past they have done great political campaigning for the rights of female, homosexual and ethnic minority students. To reduce them to the play-thing of middle class lads is insulting, and undermines their credibility to do more good work.

At a time when the far right are getting into power and a lot of women are leaving politics, actions like this are unforgivable. The St Anne’s “lads” need to wake up and distinguish the difference between a light-hearted piss-take, and dangerous immaturity.

I’m past caring what the last week has done to Gordon Brown and the Labour Party. But I’m terrified about what it’s done to women in politics. The last seven days have seen four female ministers resign from the cabinet, leaving Westminster’s most powerful inner-circle grossly unrepresentative. Worries deepened when Caroline Flint broke her resignation with a tirade of allegations of sexism at the heart of government. In today’s Observer, she said that Brown “used” women as little more than a “smokescreen”; a “way of making it look like you’ve got a lot of women round the table”. The reality for women in cabinet, she said, is one of “constant pressure” and “negative bullying.”

But it’s not just what’s been happening inside Westminster that’s so terrible; it’s how it’s been covered outside it too. Across the media, Flint has been portrayed in starkly sexist terms. She’s “flounced out” of the cabinet in a “hissy fit”, throwing “a stiletto in the heart of government”. Even the broadsheets’ coverage was irresponsible – the Guardian’s decision to use Flint’s red dress photo shoot to accompany such a grave set of allegations wasn’t just objectifying; it was belittling the serious points she was making.

Think what you will of Flint’s resignation – but don’t put your criticisms (or your photos) in gender-loaded terms. Personally I think Flint’s resignation was opportunistic, badly orchestrated and ultimately self-defeating; but I don’t think it was a “silly woman” losing her head because of oestrogen and an X chromosome. When James Purnell resigned he was criticised, but he was never accused of living up to “macho” stereotypes in the same way. When a woman makes a serious feminist argument, she shouldn’t be dismissed in a sea of sexist stereotypes, she should be listened to and challenged with the respect shown to her male colleagues.

After the expenses scandal, the public wants to see a politics that is more representative of the people, not less. I worry that the events of the past week will make this less likely. The political female role models we had weren’t exactly inspirational; now they’re also disillusioned, demonised and out of office. If we’re going to fix our broken politics, we’ll need to utilise the best talents of our women as well as our men. Neither our government nor our media can afford to reduce them to “window dressing”.