Feminism should be a dialogue not a dogma

This one has sat in draft since February 2008.  I tried editing it to say the same things more crisply, but wanted to say slightly different things instead, so I’ve left it as it is.  I had been lurking the trans-phobic rad-fem Michigan Womyn’s Festival stooshie when I wrote this.

The world is changing around us all the time: the world of 10 years ago was surprisingly different from the world today, and the world of the late 1980s even more so.  So far, so obvious.   But this means that political absolutism is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms.  The world changes too much and too fast for any political or social dogma to last.   All political views are specific to the place and time in which they are held.  The ideas that last the longest either have a basis in scientific fact (racial equality) or else they are wishful thinking (the idea of human rights) . 

So what should feminism be like, if it’s a dialogue not a dogma?  Well undogmatic, for a start.  Sentences such as “all men are rapists” are meaningless.  So meaningless you’d think they would be impossible for an intelligent woman to utter, let alone for intelligent women, (sorry womyn) to listen to.  The idea that trans-women pollute spaces occupied by “womyn-born-womyn” is another spectacularly nasty piece of feminist dogma.  But the world is changing, including the space in the world that transssexuals can occupy and the way that children are raised, and unless one can demonstrate scientifically that all men are rapists, the statement is semantically void.  Unfortunately it’s got a snappy little ring to it, and appeals to a certain kind of self-righteous and vicious mind.

In fact, the example of science is an interesting one.  Science is just the sort of conversation that I would like feminism to be.  At the edges of science – where science is being done – are conversations.  Ideas are discussed with colleagues and turned into hypotheses, presented at conferences, tested experimentally, reformulated, restested, written up, peer-reviewed.    The world that science inhabits does not change physically (planets don’t start spinning backwards, the laws of physics don’t change in response to a new PM in Number 10), but the world that science inhabits moves onwards, as the boundary between what we know and what we don’t know changes.

Academic feminism goes through the  motions; I certainly get the impression that academic feminists like a good rant and love conferences.  But feminism lacks the rigour that science has, because it cannot test its ideas empirically.  But instead of recognising that the world it inhabits changes all the time, it seeks the reassuring solidity of fundamentalism.

Cupcakes (Not Safe for Work)

I ordered some cupcakes for a raffle, as a tie-in to a humorous talk on pelvic floor exercises by @gussiegrips – her website explains more about her work.

The cakes were made by Vanilla Kisses in Edinburgh @VKCupcakes

I am very grateful to Dawn for the fabulous photos.

The cupcakes stole the show.

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Thinking and feeling

Updating this blog has been a tour down memory lane.

The thing that strikes me most is how badly I write when I am angry and the NHS junior doctor recruitment debacle of 2007 made me very angry indeed. Those posts irritate me  six years on because so many of them lack information; too many are articulate emotional rants.  They communicate badly because the reader has no room to respond. I am irritated and repelled by my former self.

It’s partly to do with speed. Writing coherently takes time and the conversation was moving quickly. I was part of a community of bloggers and activists, very much swept up in the fight. There was a lot being said and little time for reflection. It shows.  (This lack of time to reflect combined with a permanent medium is the reason why I don’t use twitter much.)

I heard Maryam Namazie speak a year or so ago and was impressed by the calmness of her anger. Her anger is powerful but not loud. It fuels a clear and contained rationalism which I struggle for, instead I become enraged. She is calm but driven and focused, and this is what I now hope for when I write on subjects I feel passionate about.

A couple of years ago I did one of those courses which elucidate your working style. This one looked at your style when calm (mine is “analytical” and “thinking”) and compared it with your style under stress.  It was illuminatingly accurate. When I am stressed I become more emotional and less rational; I lose the ability to think.  Discovering this has given me permission to step back from fraught situations and wait until I can think clearly again. I am a more reliable colleague and I hope I am a less emotional blogger.

The NHS Reforms and Privatisation in a Nutshell

What has happened to the NHS in England is so shocking that it is impossible to believe it is true.

The Tory / Lib Dem coalition have brought in legislation which requires NHS services in England to be “outsourced” to private companies; this isn’t just ancillary services like the ambulance services, the 111 help-line (which used to be NHS Direct), and diagnostic and testing labs, it’s also clinical services like clinics, surgeries and hospitals. A single hospital will become a mish-mash of several different companies, all with different owners, all with different ways of making profits out of each other.

This is insane? Who benefits from this idea?

Good question.  Putting it bluntly, the 64 MPs and 142 members of the House of Lords who have financial links to “healthcare” companies and who were able to vote on the Health and Social Care Bill into law.

Patients will not benefit because the companies running healthcare services are more interested in profit than safety.  There is a myth that Private Medicine is “better” than the NHS. However, we already know that private hospitals cut corners wherever they can; for example they do not have Intensive Therapy Units so if an operation goes wrong they have to transfer their emergency cases to the local NHS provider.   Private is not safer, though it may be “nicer”.  Here is a story about “chaotic and dangerous care at hospital run by BMI Healthcare“.

In fairness, I should say that privatised NHS hospitals should still have the ancillary services like path labs, ITU, and so on, but they may be run by different companies with different and conflicting service targets.

Why haven’t I heard about this?

The government knew that this would be unpopular so this was not in their manifesto. It has been under-reported in the news because the story was too complicated to understand. It has also been under-reported by the state-owned BBC.

The government brought in the necessary legislation piece-meal over several years and avoided debating the key pieces in Parliament. This started with structures put in place by the Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and the final piece, called Section 75, was hammered into place early in 2013 by the Coalition.

So how did this happen?

This flowchart from the National Health Action party shows how:

What is actually happening?

They key bit is called Section 75 which requires a commercial tendering process; this means the decision will based on money, not expertise or quality of service.  The wording was changed following (some) protest, but it’s been made so complicated that the Clinical Commissioning Groups (ie the local GPs) can be sued if they decide not to put something out to tender, so of course they will take the safe option and put things out to commercial tender.

It’s hard to believe that it might affect clinics,  hospitals and even GP practices, though it’s easy enough to see how G4S might provide an “ambulance” service. But if we compare this with “outsourcing” in other workplaces, it’s clear enough how it could work. If you work in an office you may be aware that your cleaners don’t work for the same company you do but are “outsourced” to a “facilities management company”.  The same may be true for your IT department.  This approach is being applied to all parts of the NHS where the existing job contracts are being sold lock, stock and barrel over the heads of the employees to “service providers”.

But the NHS will still be free to patients, right?

I don’t know. This worries me:

David Cameron’s … new health adviser … advocated … charges to see a family doctor.

And the NHS will always be there, won’t it?

The short asnwer is that it has already gone in England; it is not National and it’s not a Service. The NHS brand will be around for a while but it will just be a brand covering many different companies.   And think about NHS dentistrry: NHS dental services are “there”, but not everywhere. The same could happen to NHS medical services.  Hospitals are being closed all over the place, in particular expensive services like A & E.

The insurance companies are already scaremongering, to profit from the easy work.

You should not need a health insurer to pay your surgeon’s fees.  That is what National Insurance and other contributory taxes are for.

Who is fighting this?

Lots of different groups are fighting this.  The National Health Action Party hope to have parliamentary candidates in key marginal seats in the next general election in 2015. The healthcare unions are fighting it. So are senior doctors and scientists.  So are various petition groups such as 38 Degrees. But the Labour party aren’t.

Unfortunately,  it may already be too late.

But can’t this be undone?

No. Or not easily.  This is being done to ”harmonise trade” between the EU and the US,  in other words to enable American healthcare companies to run the NHS. The MPs and others who benefit from this do not want it to be possible to roll the clock back after the next election.  This means  long-term contracts will include such large penalty clauses it will be impossible to buy the service back in.

Surely there MUST be something I can do?

1. Sign this petition  if you have not signed it already.  It is to require the government to ensure the NHS is exempted from the US/EU Free Trade Agreement as a condition of the UK’s agreeing to participate.
2. Join the National Health Action Party so they have the funds to do more.
3. Like the National Health Action Party on Facebook and check their page regularly so you keep up to date and fully informed.
4. Follow the advice on how to make a difference locally in this post in the False Economy blog.
5. Join the marches and other events planned for this summer.
6. Sign any other relevant petitions you see.
7. Follow CCG Watch who provide information and action on the Clinical Commissioning Groups and anything threatening a truly public NHS.
8. Write to your MP or visit their surgery.
9. Keep informed by setting up a Google News search for NHS Reforms
10. TELL PEOPLE.
11. Vote in the next election – abstianing is not seen as a protest, it is seen as consent.
12. Stay well.

Other links

White writing this, I found other links you might like to follow.  (I have not read these in detail, and I cannot vouch for their politics or their accuracy).

• The National Health Action Party – http://www.nationalhealthaction.org.uk/
• Keep our NHS Public – http://www.keepournhspublic.com/index.php
• A Better NHS – http://abetternhs.wordpress.com/
• NHS Reality – http://nhsreality.wordpress.com/
• Google News search for NHS Reforms
• Open Democracy: Our NHS

Videos with Lucy Reynolds who is well informed and scarily accurate where she explains the Section 75 regulations clearly and in detail

• A short video showing an interview with Dr Lucy Reynolds explains the Reform Bill
• The full length interview with Dr Lucy Reynolds
• Follow-up interview with Dr Lucy Reynolds explaining that there is almost no change to the Section 75 regulations

See my other posts on the NHS Privatisation.

I aten’t dead

I was touched by this. 

Somewhere to escape to

I’m struck that we don’t have a folk-memory of women escaping from domestic captivity in the way that Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight have escaped in Cleveland, and Elizabeth Fritzl and her siblings, and Jaycee Dugard, Elizabeth Smart, Shawn Hornbeck and Natascha Kampusch escaped before them.

The stories of these escapes are new.

Women being captured is not new, it’s not even specific to our species. At a recent Skeptics in the Pub Talk, Dr Alison Craig told us about “coercive consortship” in dolphins.

Women running away isn’t new either. Allegedly, Wilkie Collins took the title for his book “The Woman in White” from his first meeting with Caroline Graves, the woman who became his mistress. Collins was walking through London one night past a suburban villa when

“the iron gate leading to the garden was dashed open, and from it came the figure of a young and very beautiful woman” ….  she had been imprisoned at the villa under the mesmeric influence of an unnamed suburbanite.

What appears to be new, is that the escapes are successful, they are reported, and the victims are reunited with their families.   Today Caroline Graves’ story would be international news. But in the 19th century it was not told by the men who witnessed her escape. (Of course, it may not be true).

There are so many possible reasons for this change.

It is finally clear that a man who prevents a woman leaving him is committing a crime not exercising a right.  A line has emerged between a consensual domestic relationship on one side, and imprisonment on the other.  This is new. In the 19th century and before, you would have happy love-matches on the one hand, pragmatic civil contracts and arranged marriages in the middle, and who knows what hells of captivity and servitude at the far end.  Then, as now, a good marriage could go bad. But how many young women were kidnapped in a world where the neighbours all assumed they were wives not prisoners?

Women are free to leave in a way they weren’t before. Divorce gave women the the legal freedom to leave. Before divorce was available, women were chattels in a very literal way. I was checking references for the Mayor of Casterbridge auctioning his wife and  I found a Wikipedia entry about Wife Selling, which  apparently took place as recently as 1913. Later, women gained the cultural freedom to leave. However, in living memory in the 1970s and 1980s what went on behind closed doors stayed behind closed doors and the police would not intervene.  Putting it bluntly, if a woman runs away now, whether she is a wife or a kidnap victim, she will be listened to.  There is somewhere to escape to now.

But I think there’s more to it than that. We see the victims as unambiguously innocent and wronged. When there is no religious fundamentalism or misogyny at work we do not see them as someone whose moral worth has been destroyed. However, Elizabeth Smart said:

… she “felt so dirty and so filthy” after she was raped by her captor, and she understands why someone wouldn’t run “because of that alone.” …

I have tried to find out more about Smart’s upbringing in Salt Lake City to discover if it was particularly religious. She certainly expresses herself powerfully:

“I thought, ‘Oh, my gosh, I’m that chewed up piece of gum, nobody re-chews a piece of gum, you throw it away.’”

Smart felt worthless as a result of her repeated rapes but we see her as a victim not as “damaged goods” and  we celebrate when a kidnap victim escapes.  And if we have not yet managed to stop blaming the victims of rape we have at least progressed  beyond flogging them, stoning them or forcing them to marry their rapists.

So I am encouraged by the fact  that when victims of kidnap and imprisonment escape they now do so into the relative safety of a supportive and rejoicing world.

Two into one

I’ve combined all my blog-posts into a single site, the musings here range  from knitting moebius scarves to the NHS, with a side salad of business process modelling.  All my public posts are now here in one place, including the ones from Facebook.

I am a skeptic and a blogger but I blog about too many things to count as a Skeptical Blogger though I may discuss skeptical matters more now that I’ve got a single place to post things.

Blogging takes me longer now than it used to; my standards are higher and I know more about writing so I no longer blog-as-therapy. In fact I find it less enjoyable now, than I did back in 2006 when I started. 

So no promises on frequency, but good intentions on quality and a resigned acceptance that I’ll tackle any topic which interests me, the shinier the better.

In the meantime, since this is the internet, here is a cat listening to pawdcasts.

iCat