The Bleeding Heart Show

Via Jess McCabe at The F-Word, those intrepid terriers at The Telegraph delve into the real reasons for rebellion against Gordon Brown and discover that it’s just a cabal led by a bunch of women who are emotional, irrational, and probably having their periods. Here’s their expert analysis of Siobhain McDonagh:

She sounded like a woman facing an emotional crisis, not a government minister in the midst of knifing the Prime Minister.

Classy. Just in case you hadn’t noticed, conservatives are the new progressives….

After Sarah Campbell, aged 18, died from taking an overdose of sleeping pills in Styal prison – one of six women to die in that jail in 12 months – her mother vowed to fight against the harm done to vulnerable young women by the penal system. In the years that followed, Pauline Campbell tried to raise the profile of this issue by travelling the country and protesting outside an prison where a woman had died in custody. Tragically, just over two months ago she was found dead near her daughter’s grave, robbing the reform movement of one its most tireless, effective and high-profile voices. Of course, the fact you’ve probably never heard of her shows just pitifully low a profile this cause has.

The plight of women in our prisons makes grimacing reading. According to campaign group Women in Prison, of the 4,400+ currently in prison:

• 70% have mental health problems.
• 37% have attempted suicide.
• 20% have been in the care system as children compared to 2% of the general population.
• At least 50% report being victims of childhood abuse or domestic violence.

It’s a wretched state of affairs, made worse by the fact that so many don’t really need to be there. In 2004, the Prison Reform Trust reported that six out of ten women imprisoned while awaiting trial are subsequently acquitted or given a non-custodial sentence. Furthermore, the number of women being remanded into custody has more than trebled in a decade despite the fact that more than three quarters are charged with non-violent or minor offences. Few among the number of women prisoners pose a serious risk to society. As for the tired old question of whether any good comes out of their time in prison, Women in Prison also report that 65% go on to reoffend.

But statistics rarely reveal the full misery of life in prison, and so when this email appeared in my inbox promoting a book on the subject, I felt obliged to give it a plug:

Maggots in My Sweet Potatoes: Women Doing Time is the product of a 10-year quest by Susan Madden Lankford to reveal the personal despair, desperation, alienation, and fragile hopes of women behind bars. Lankford’s dramatic photos and vivid stories of life behind the concrete and steel facilities reveal an overcrowded, strained incarceration system increasingly unable to deal with the mental, emotional, and addiction problems women bring with them behind bars.

[...]

Her flesh- and-blood images of life behind the concrete and steel facilities that house these women present us with a cogent portrait of diffused lives, and a reflective glimpse of emotional and physical institutionalization. We hear not only the frank and graphic voices of both the jailed and the jailers, but also from rehabilitation counselors, attorneys, judges, medical professionals and psychiatrists. Their experiences and insights into the fastest growing segment of the U.S. prison population give new meaning to the slogan “No Child Left Behind.”

The book specifically looks at the lives of women in U.S. prisons, but when you read some of the material and look at the statistics, on this issue - as with many others - we share much more than just the same language. Let’s see if any of this sounds familiar:

• In the past 10 years, the number of female prisoners has increased 138 percent. This is speculated to be from harsher mandatory sentencing laws, and increased arrest rates due to the “war on crime” and “war on drugs.”
• Women prisoners spend on average 17 hours a day in their cells, with one hour outside for exercise. Compare to men prisoners, who spend, on average, 15 hours a day in their cells, with 1.5 hours outside.
• Nationally, more than 200,000 children have mothers in prison, and 64 percent of incarcerated women have minor children.
• Every single women’s facility in the U.S. is at least 160 percent above capacity, and on average 57 percent of women in State prisons claim physical or sexual abuse prior to incarceration.

Eerily, depressingly similar. You’ll find a fairly comprehensive overview of the injustices in the US prison system in this PDF by Amnesty, but if you want a set of vivid snapshots of life inside the system, this isn’t a a bad place to start.

More info here and here.

Some of my other posts on penal reform (or lack of it) can be found here.

…is really just like any other day:

A TERRIFIED woman fled from her violent boyfriend by climbing between the balconies of a Huddersfield block of flats, a court heard yesterday.

Steven Davies, 34, was seen on CCTV equipment hitting Fiona Murphy in a lift as they made their way back to the fifth-floor flat they shared at Holme Park Court, Berry Brow, last August.

[...]

“Shortly after that the woman saw the complainant drop down on to her balcony from the flat above,” said Mr Newman. “When she was first seen, the complainant had blood on her clothing and her hands and was visibly distressed.”

In a later statement the complainant described how Davies had attacked her with a piece of wood in the flat and had threatened her with a knife. Mr Newman said: “In fear she had run on to the balcony and had attempted to climb down to escape from him.

“She said as she was just climbing down the defendant struck her left hand with a hammer.”

The court heard that the hammer had struck the complainant on the little finger, but as a result of the attack she had also suffered fractures to her left wrist and a small bone in her left hand. She also had a cut to her head, black eyes and other cuts, abrasions and swellings.

That’s not an easy climb at the best of times, and I don’t suppose being beaten, threatened with a knife and hit with a hammer would really qualify as ‘the best of times’. Get that descent wrong and you’ll fall & break something. If you’re lucky.

I know it doesn’t reflect well on me, but every once in a while I come across a story and think “oh, just pass me a musket and let me put ‘em out of their misery’.* Of what injustice do I speak? Follow the link. I’ll still be here when you get back.

Now, there could be any number of reasons why Ms Witkowski went on a violent rampage punched a fellow student in the face, but it’s not unreasonable to interpret that she might’ve been pissed at seeing her more slender, more conventionally attractive opponent being crowned the winner despite having been - to use the appropriate jargon - roundly whooped. At this stage we could easily reach into our directory of feminisms and condemn this boorish, male-heavy crowd for judging women on their attractiveness rather than their prowess at jelly-based wrestling.

Sure, we could say that, and we’d probably be right. But a little context is always handy:

Last Sunday’s jelly wrestling was part of a garden party organised by the Wyverns, an all-male Magdalene College drinking society, and part of a bigger tradition known as Suicide Sunday.

This year there was a blazers and bikini theme (that’s men in blazers, women in bikinis) and a jelly-filled paddling pool.

So if you’re going to attend an event organised by an all-boys club where the dress code is designed solely for these well-fed, leacherous little creeps to leer at bikini-clad undergrads, you’re not really in any position to feign outrage when the all-girl wrestling contest is judged on the basis of which competitor most successfully stirs their loins.

Sure, this might not have been the reason for Ms Witkowski’s punch-fest, but that’s beside the point. The point is that a ‘blazers and bikinis’ party which culminates in an all-girl wrestling competition epitomises the kind of cringeworthy sexism that’s still widespread at one of the ‘best universities in the world’ and that everyone who organised it, everyone who attended it and everyone who wanted to attend is a retrograde imbecile who should be barred from ever holding a position of power.

Of course, in 30 years time one of these tossers will probably become a Cabinet Minister, and give us many more reasons to want to reach for the musket.

*Disclaimer: The Bleeding Heart Show is a strictly non-violent blog and condemns the use of violence, particularly when using an inefficient rifle that became obselete in the late 19th century.

Sunny Hundal’s post about writing for the bearpit that is Comment is Free - and the attendant issues about the abuse slung at women and minorities - raises a lot of interesting points, most of which this white, Cambridge-educated Yorkshireman isn’t all that qualified to answer without sounding like a complete dilletante. Still, I’d like to think that there are one or two non-moronic observations I can make.

The first is this post by a stand-in on Megan McArdle’s blog:

Bloggers write about their lives, their interests, their cities, their friends. On many blogs, the author’s life becomes part of the story — you read these bloggers as much for who they are as for what they have to say. This is what accounts for the sense one sometimes gets that one “knows” the blogger. Blogs serve as running commentary on the world at large (or some part of it), yes, but also as extensions of the lives of their authors. To become a regular reader is to share and take part in that life, and that’s a large part of the blogosphere’s appeal. It’s also a function of both the frantic pace and pressure of the professional blogosphere: The easiest content to produce is that which is inspired by what’s nearest to you

For me, this reveals a large part of what is wrong with Comment Is Free - too many wannabe Op-Eds, not enough bloggers. Regardless of gender, ethnicity, sexuality or ideology, CiF garners a large number of spiteful comments, and I wonder whether this might be, in part, due to the fact that readers are subjected to an endless stream of opinions without ever getting to know the opinion-makers. There are too many hit-and-run posts, and even those posters who stop to contribute in the comments are defined entirely by argument and counter-argument. If you take a look at the Atlantic stable McArdle belongs to, you’ll find a host of authors (Sullivan, Yglesias, Ambinder, Douthat, McArdle herself) who post several times a day and about a variety of topics - some personal, some political. In the process you begin to get a sense of the personal and political life of the authors, and for regular readers this makes them far less inclined to subject the author to a stream of personal attacks, and more likely to engage in constructive dialogue.

Of course, none of this answers the question of how to counteract the abuse faced by women & minorities who try to blog. In light of some of the ghastly anecdotes made during this discussion, in which I learnt that one of my Favourite Writers and 2nd Favourite Feminist Blogger (here’s Number One, in case you’re interested) is frequently subjected to abhorrent, gender-based attacks, it’s clear that having safe places for women and minority groups to congregate is absolutely necessary. However, for them to engage in more mainstream sites like CiF, there is an obligation on those of us who object to racist, sexist & homophobic comments not just to wait before a moderator bans some bigot who speaks the worst impulses of humankind. Whether or not we agree with someone’s argument, those of us who believe in decency and equality have a duty to help shut down those who would tear down marginalised voices.

As pro-choicers rightly bask in the knowledge that a woman’s right to choose won’t be eroded for at least the duration of this government, now is probably the best possible moment to warn against complacency. At Comment is Free, Mary Kenny argues that this debate has become far more complicated than those had during the ’60s and ’70s, with advanced photography of the reproductive process making the emotive case for restricting abortion seem stronger, even amongst those who’re sympathetic to a woman’s right to chose.

Then there’s the question of whether this issue will return to Parliament with a vengence if/when the Conservatives win the next election. There’s a strong likelihood that if it did re-emerge (and god knows Nadine Dorries hasn’t got much else to do with her time), the restrictionists would finally prevail:

The abortion time limit could be cut if the Conservatives win the next general election, according to an analysis of yesterday’s votes.

According to Philip Cowley of the University of Nottingham, a large influx of Tory MPs into parliament could lead to a reduction in the upper time limit of 24 weeks.

[...]

Cowley told guardian.co.uk: “I can’t see 24 weeks surviving a large Conservative intake at the next election. It’s one of the underlying truths that so-called free votes are not as non-party as people think.

“The majority of Conservative MPs voted for a reduction in the abortion time limit and the majority of Labour MPs voted against. The maths are pretty straightforward when there’s a large Conservative intake.”

He added: “One of the problems for the Tories’ position is that once you state the argument for viability of the child and science, the abortion time limit will only go down. It’s never going to go up again.”

Here’s a dilemma that’s got ‘Bleeding Heart’ written all over it: how do we understand the not-so-shocking fact that rather than just being simpering, sugar & spice sweethearts, women are just as capable (though far less likely) of committing crime as men?

Whilst he doesn’t make any earth-shattering insights (this is Comment is Free, after all), Ally Fogg at least makes an honourable attempt at it. Fogg’s main argument is that whilst there are some easily-identifyable facts about gender & crime - (a) we live in a patriarchal society, (b) men commit the most crime & the most violence and (c) women are more likely to be victims of male agression than vice versa - female criminality shouldn’t be reduced to just a symptom of these problems.

In this sense he’s absolutely right; crime can’t be understood by focusing exclusively on gender any more than it can understood by focusing exclusively on age, race, family background, economic circumstances, mental health, physical health or whether they like to drive around virtual cities running over pedestrians. To understand crime you need to look at a plurality of causes, and whilst you can prioritise some over others, it’s foolish to dismiss them for not fitting your preconceptions.

That said, I really can’t sign up to this:

To draw a distinction between male and female violence is often, I believe, simply bad science.

Notice there’s enough equivocation in that sentence to allow him to wriggle out of it if challenged. There is absolutely a need to distinguish between male and female violence, if only to account for the fact that it isn’t women who’re responsible for the vast majority of the rapings, the ‘honour’ killings and the genital mutilations on the planet. These are overwhelmingly male crimes and should be distinguished as such; failure to do so leads to the rather icky implication that capability & responsibility are somehow shared between the sexes.

Perhaps this didn’t fit with the argument he was trying to make, but I also think Fogg’s post would’ve had greater relevance if he’d talked about trends in female crime rather than just focusing on a few headline-making examples. Last week, the Youth Justice Board reported that crimes committed by girls aged 10 to 17 rose a whopping 25% between 2003/4 & 2006/07; the most commonly-committed were theft, violent attack, criminal damage and public order offences.

So yes, girls are committing more crimes and becoming more violent; they’re stealing and happy-slapping, vandalising and getting hammered. But when you look at the types of crimes being committed, you’ll notice how depressingly familiar they are to people from socially & economically deprived backgrounds. In areas with drugs and crime and antisocial behaviour kids have to be tough to survive, and this can certainly - though not inevitably - lead towards criminal, violent or otherwise ‘deviant’ behaviour whether they happen to be male or female. For me, it’s not that the problem of female violence is getting out of control, but that it’s rising to reflect the circumstances around them.

This perhaps supports Fogg’s general point that by viewing female crime solely through the blinkers of gender relations, you’ll get only a small slice of the myriad motivations and mitigations that drive women (and, indeed, men) to commit violent crime. But either way, we need to be a lot less freaked out by such incidents and a lot more focused on how they can be prevented.

Whilst there’s still not an awful lot of evidence to prove that a foetus can exist outside the womb after 20 weeks, Nadine Dorries and her merry band of restrictionists are happy to take a few astonishing cases and construct a law around them. Dorries is proposing an amendment to the Human Fertilisation & Embryology Bill (yeah, I thought that’d finally disappeared, too) which would slash the legal time limit on abortions from 24 to 20 weeks.

Now, I can’t make an argument about abortion law without sounding like an utter dilettante. I can, however, provide links to people who do know what they’re talking about - like Unity, Laurie Penny and the cast of The F-Word - and I can link to this new-fangled Coalition for Choice website, which gives more information and instructions on how to take action.

Well, it seems I’ve grasped a nettle on this topic. Following my earlier contention that men can’t be feminists and the subsequent rebuttal from a passing commenter, David Semple, whose blog is never anything less than a cradle of eloquence, adds his own criticisms. It’s an excellent post that I’d encourage you to read in its entirety, and it reminded me of an argument I’d forgotten to include in either of my two posts.

I think the main difference between us is summed-up by this paragraph towards the end:

My conclusion is that definitions of feminism cannot be based simply on the subjectivity of direct experience. This is not to deny how important that can be in shaping the political and feminist consciousnesses of women, it is simply to say that there is a greater, more universally available, objective reality. It is to say that this objective reality serves just as well to condition men in such a way as to render them feminists. When engaged in real struggle, feminism finds itself subsumed into other issues and we all become feminists.

But definitions of feminism are inevitably formed on the subjectivity of direct experience, not least by women who call themselves feminists. Sure, there are many easily-available objective truths about women’s oppression (forced marriages, genital mutilation, the idiocy of ‘abstinence only’, unequal pay etc) and those truths can inspire a rallying cry for change voiced by people of both genders that becomes larger than the movement from whence it came. At the same time, objective reality is still received, understood and interpreted subjectively and with an infinite number outcomes.

As I’ve said previously, there are many different feminisms. Feminism is far from a monolithic movement, and when we move beyond the rather basic no-brainer issues cited earlier, we find debates in which there are many competing arguments: the question of whether a feminist should abide by pornography, legal prostitution or strip clubs, how far they should oppose clothing like the hijab, whether state-endorsed mysogeny was a strong enough reason to support the war in Afghanistan, whether women should campaign for a ban on Page 3 or mysogenistic video games. On all of these issues you’ll find women who hold different points of view as part of a feminism which is often deeply personal, subjective and drawn from experiences men can’t claim equally. On these issues, at least, interjecting into debates by ’speaking as a male feminist’ isn’t particularly helpful.

What I think this boils down to, and what my posts didn’t clearly articulate, is probably a squabble over semantics. In the sense of political activism - a movement with a clearly-defined and universally agreed-upon set of objective goals and principles - men can be feminists in the same sense as white people can be anti-racist. But as a means of understanding the world that inevitably leads to an infinite number of subjective interpretations, I think we’re much better off as pro-feminists; deferent supporters of women whose experiences play a role in forming their feminism, and from whom we can learn a great deal.

Is it too strong to proclaim that men can’t be feminists? A commenter suggests it might:

Can’t is rather a strong proclamation in this context, don’t you think? It would make more sense to say “Most men who claim to be feminists are not” or “I have not yet met a self-proclaimed male feminist who actually is one.”

After all, if you can judge that men aren’t feminists based on their behavior, doesn’t it follow that a different behavior would mean they could be feminists?

I don’t want to deign to call myself a feminist here on your blog, since I don’t want to get in a semantics battle over the word feminist. I, too, cringe (whether the speaker is male or female) when I hear people say “I’m a feminist, but…” And I don’t think feminism is a club you should seek membership in, but neither is it a club from which you should exclude people. It isn’t a club at all.

The one thing I will agree with is that men should cheer women from the sidelines and focus on modeling nonsexist behavior and attitudes for other men. I was vexed, for example, when men insisted at one of my college’s Take Back the Night marches that they be allowed to speak, too. The leaders of the event said it’d be okay as long as the men speaking were survivors themselves. Did it end up that way? No. The men who spoke at that event basically said the equivalent of “Be careful out there. If you get raped, it’s at least partially your fault” instead of “I was raped too.”

Just as I wouldn’t want white Americans leading an antiracist movement full of people of color, I can understand why women feminists wouldn’t want men being too outspoken and bossy within an antisexism movement. On the other hand, I would never entertain the notion that white Americans cannot be antiracist the way some feminists have tried to say that men cannot be feminists.

I agree with much of what’s written here, but I would also contend that the rationale for this post wasn’t based solely on the behaviour of some men; it was also based on our deficit of experience.

All the pro-feminist posts on this blog are drawn in some way from the opinions of other women, the experiences of other women. However good our intentions are, however balanced and nuanced we are when contributing to debates, however hard we might try to quote from the book of ‘right-on!’, it remains the case that we simply don’t have the experience of living in a patriarchal world. When we lack that experience we also lack authenticity. To that end, men would be much better off as enthusiastic but also deferent supporters.

That said, if a man were to call himself a feminist, I wouldn’t turn around and say “no you’re not”; I’d be more likely to salute him for even giving a shit. Only a fool would turn down a helping hand.

The road to ridicule is paved with the best of intentions. This week, probably inspired by the collosal number of comments on Cath Elliott’s post about whether men can be feminists, Khaled Diab waded into the row armed with his most potent ‘I feel your pain’ platitudes. His piece was coherent and well-written. Empathetic and urbane. If I was going to write a post arguing why men should be allowed to call themselves feminists without any scoffing or sarcasm from any of the feminist women of the world, this was the article I’d write.

So it shows how futile an exercise it is that despite his best efforts, he still deserved this searing bit of snark:

Moreover, chides the sentimental Diab, chicks can be chauvinist pigs, too! Men “don’t have a monopoly on being domineering.” Seriously. Men wouldn’t dominate “the movement” any more than “obnoxious female feminists” do; remember, men are so remarkably imaginative and empathetic (hey, I know! The men could protect the nice feminists from the obnoxious ones.).

Diab complains that having “direct experience” of sex-based oppression shouldn’t really be the deal-breaker that those 17 or 18 feminists make it out to be. But. If we insist: it turns out men do have direct experience! Which Diab defines as the impact on the dominant class when people of lower status get screwed over. Clearly the male experience of “anger and frustration” on his wife’s behalf is qualitatively identical to enduring the persistent threat of violence that every woman suffers whenever she leaves the house (and often even when she doesn’t), or the fact that white dudes own several of her internal organs, or living in poverty with 3 kids and no healthcare.

As the same artist (yes, the words on this blog will be considered as art) has described, even the most well-meaning male ‘feminists’ can be laughably, cringe-worthily bad at living up to their title. We have a habit of imposing our perceptions on others, of citing anecdotal evidence to prove a tendentious point, of discrediting the feminism of another woman when it doesn’t easily cohabitate with our own views.

In my online voyages, I’ve become wearily familiar with men spewing something along the lines of “I’m a feminist, but…” in their arguments, and every time they do so it cheapens what the word means, what the movement means. You can see it in debates about the sex industry, in questions of whether we ought to allow Hooters into our high streets or topless women on the third page of our tabloids, in debates about gender roles and the role of women in the work place. In so many of these debates, I’ve seen men interjecting and claiming to be equally worthy of the feminist mantle when in every single substantive way we have no fucking clue what it’s like.

So no, fella, you can’t be a feminist, but then John Stuart Mill isn’t considered a Suffragette and no one doubts that his writings played a role in supporting the suffrage movement. Feminism requires inclusivity to be successful and that means persuading as many men as possible, but for men to seek membership of this group reeks a little bit of the Pulp song about the rich girl who wants to live like Common People.

Feminism shouldn’t be a club you seek membership to; it’s a way of responding to the horrors visited upon women. Since we men have no earthly idea of what it’s really like, there’s no shame in prioritising their experiences and cheering from the sideline.

In a stirring victory for feminists and aesthetes alike, this lovely little development:

Will no longer be spoiled by this godawful crime against common decency.

Now I can get back to trying to persaude people that Sheffield is the best city in Britain. I’ll certainly have more joy than those poor fuckers in Nottingham.

Photo by Flickr user egoboss (Creative Commons)

…All have more protection from abuse than women. File this one under ‘Oh good grief‘:

The British public gives more to a Devon-based donkey sanctuary than the most prominent charities trying to combat violence and abuse against women, a report released today by a leading philanthropy watchdog reveals.

New Philanthropy Capital (NPC) has calculated that more than 7 million women have been affected by domestic violence but found that Refuge, the Women’s Aid Federation and Eaves Housing for Women have a combined annual income of just £17m. By contrast the Donkey Sanctuary, which has looked after 12,000 donkeys, received £20m in 2006.

Of course, no one would begrudge donkeys their £20m annual care package; when you’ve spent your working life hauling fidgety kids up and down Britain’s beaches for no other reward than some heavy-handed petting, you deserve a decent retirement home.

But seriously, £17m in funds when 7 million women are affected by domestic violence? Unless my maths hasn’t improved much since GCSE, that works out as something like £2.50 per victim - barely enough to buy her a bus ticket.

Given the scale of the problem (the same report states that every year 1.5 million women experience domestic abuse at least once, 800,000 are sexually assaulted and 100,000 raped) you would’ve thought the charities who campaign against violence and provide refuge to its victims might be a little closer to more fashionable charities raising money for cancer research, animal welfare, child protection etc. The size of the funding deficit is quite extraordinary.

Think that revelation was bad enough? Well, then there’s this:

 ”A third of men think that domestic violence is acceptable if their partner has been nagging them.”

And this:

Today’s report references an ICM poll which found that more people would call the police if someone was mistreating their dog than if someone was mistreating their partner.

Maybe we could bring Rolf Harris out of retirement…

(Hat Tip)

I won’t be around much today on account of yet another pilgrimage across the Pennines to fill my gut with chips and cheap beer and attend another protracted war of attrition between two of the country’s two biggest football clubs.

But I didn’t want to leave without voicing my support for this campaign by Southall Black Sisters. Here’s the lowdown:

Every year, hundreds of black and migrant women face domestic violence from their husbands and families in the UK. For many, their insecure immigration status renders them extremely vulnerable to abusive partners who exploit their position by subjecting them to often extreme forms of violence, imprisonment and domestic servitude, usually with impunity. Many abusers know that these women cannot report them to the authorities for fear of being sent back to their countries of origin where, as a divorced or separated women, they are likely to face persecution from the state and society.

In 2002, following immense pressure, the government introduced the ‘domestic violence rule’ in immigration law, which states that if a person married or living with a settled partner can provide specific evidence to demonstrate that she/he is a victim of domestic violence and meet other conditions, she/he can remain in the UK indefinitely. But for a significant number of women, the existence of the ‘no recourse to public funds’ requirement in immigration and welfare law, prevents them from making use of the domestic violence rule because they cannot access safe housing or benefits to escape domestic violence. The result is that they are faced with a stark choice, leave and face destitution or stay and risk their lives.

The ‘no recourse’ requirement bars anyone entering the UK on the basis of marriage from relying on public housing or benefits until their immigration position is regularised. This forces women into positions of economic dependency on the settled spouse or partner. The result is sheer desperation on the part of the individual and their advisors (emphasis mine).

There’s no doubt that abolising ‘no recourse’ would ease the hardship of a great number of society’s most vulnerable people. There’s a protest planned for tomorrow, the details of which I found via Sunny at Pickled Politics and Jess McCabe at The F Word:

The plan for the Day of Action is to assemble at 11.00am for a demonstration at 11.30-12.30 on the Embankment opposite Portcullis House, Westminster, London (nearest tube Westminster) we were not able to get permission to gather in Parliament Square. A big, bold and beautiful banner is being made by an Amnesty artist. Please wear black on the day.

The public meeting will begin at 1pm in Portcullis House, details of the speakers will follow shortly.

Leopold Square is a brand-spanking-new business development in the heart of Sheffield  city centre. Architecturally, at least, it’s one of the finest developments in the city, incorporating tasteful modern designs alongside refurbished industrial-era buildings that had seen better days. Up until now, the square was filled with upmarket bars and restaurants for the city’s wealthier clientelle, but it seems you can’t keep an area looking pretty for very long before some bad-intentioned neighbour arrives and makes the place look a tip. Of whom do I refer? The U.S. premier flesh-market franchise, Hooters. What’s more, they’re coming to a town near you. Today’s Guardian gives us the low-down:

On a cold night in Nottingham, I am dining with a companion in a converted warehouse, its walls covered in laminated photographs of large-breasted women. We are greeted by a friendly waitress who tugs uncomfortably at her hotpants as she serves us, handing over a menu featuring a picture of a grinning blonde woman next to a description of the Key Lime Pie. Plasma TVs show clips of testosterone-driven sports - wrestling, basketball and darts - and in the open-plan kitchen, a sticker above the deep-fat fryer offers the motto “No fat chicks”.

[...]

If all goes according to plan, there will be a Hooters restaurant in a further 36 locations around the UK by 2012.

Oh goody!

There’s a petition and a Facebook group for those who’d like to protest the arrival of this sleazezone. I know there’s some ambivelance amongst both men and women about Hooters. After all, if women apply to work there, they should know what they’re getting into, right? Well, there’s a good summary of the arguments against at The F-Word, but if that still doesn’t convince, surely we can all agree that a place that serves food like this:

Isn’t really deserving of prime location in our city’s classiest new development. Or will we be too busy staring at breasts to notice the mess they’ve made?

Photos: Top by Flickr user sheffdave, Bottom by thornmonkey (both Creative Commons)