The Autumn Statement and Spending Review was delivered to Parliament by Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, on Wednesday. Amongst the various budgetary announcements came the promise that the much-debated £15 million raised through the tampon tax – the VAT that must be paid on tampons due to their status as “luxury products” – will now be used to fund women’s charities. This includes domestic violence services and rape crisis centres.
The announcement was instantly met with negativity, with Labour MP Jess Phillips reportedly shouting: “You’re not paying it George: I am!” And online, the responses have been similar, with women throughout the country accusing Osborne and the Tory government of making it “women’s duty” to fund support for key services such as women’s mental health, domestic abuse and rape crisis centres. These services have recently been facing closures and budget issues due to funding cuts to local authorities, thanks to the Tory’s Austerity measures. Women are being turned away – and back into
the arms of danger. Sandra Horley CBE, chief executive of Refuge, says that since 2011 the organisation has experienced a reduction in funding across 80% of its service contracts.
Instead of being held accountable for the endangerment of vulnerable women, Osborne has instead passed the responsibility back to women. We bleed, we buy tampons, and the VAT pays for the services that we may one day need if we face domestic violence or sexual abuse, or suffer from a mental illness. It is a cycle – one that will now cause women to become reliant on the absurd VAT on menstrual products in order to keep our much-needed services alive. Why can’t VAT from men’s razors go to women’s shelters? Why not
any of the other products that are considered a luxury? To add insult to injury, in making this “ground-breaking” (yes – that’s an adjective that one newspaper actually used to describe this) announcement, Osborne compared using the tampon tax for women’s charities with the way fines paid by banks over the Libor scandal were handed to charities. So not only are we expected to pay for our own potentially life-saving services, the language being used to describe this process compares it to getting a fine, or paying a penalty.
I have no doubt that Osborne and the Tory government genuinely believed that they were doing women a favour by directing the tampon tax back into women’s services. But in being taxed for something so necessary for many women during their menstrual cycle, it is implies that we have control over our biology. Tampons being considered a luxury is more that ridiculous – it is offensive. Sweetening the deal by funding charities is not a move in the right direction; it is borderline victim-blaming.
Master of None’s flickering, musical openings set the stage for the artfully-lit lives of two attractive white people, whose mundane lives are destined to intertwine. The art-house feel of it all is a filmic feature too often followed by the aforementioned, but Master of None pairs this title sequence with a show that is anything but. Aziz Ansari – both the show’s co-creator and star – pulls no punches in his dissection of the lack of accurate on-screen racial representation, particularly in the show’s 4th episode ‘Indians on TV’. It’s worth noting that Master of None is revolutionary in itself with a South Asian male lead, a racial demographic that is, as the episode makes clear, so often tokenized.
“Indians just aren’t at that level yet. Yeah, there’s more Indians popping up every now and then, but we’re like set decoration. We’re not the ones doing the main stuff. We’re not fucking the girls and all that stuff. We’re just not there yet.”
In the episode Ansari’s character, an actor named Dev, struggles finding a role he can play with integrity as an person of colour: most are minor, stereotypical roles require him to put on a caricature of an accent. The plot really gets set in motion when Dev discovers he has been rejected from a more substantial role on the grounds of his ethnicity: the producers of a Friends-esque sitcom refuse to hire more than one South Asian lead. It is very clear that Ansari has crafted his own cast with diversity in mind, and is making a point about what network executives should be striving for. Denise (Lena Waithe) clearly the most savvy of Dev’s group, is a black lesbian woman, another under-represented demographic written in an entirely un-stereotypical way. Existing at the intersection of sex, race, and sexuality, Waithe’s character opens up a dialogue about social issues pertaining to these aspects of identity. Ansari has called Arnold (Eric Wareheim) Dev’s ‘token white friend’ while, as he jokes, he is a typically white part in being a fully rounded character. Brian (Kelvin Yu) is given the almost entirely unheard-of role of East Asian heartthrob: the treatment of men of colour, specifically Asian men, as attractive, sexual beings is perhaps my favourite aspect of the show simply because it is so rare while the emasculation of Asian men is rife in television.
This is not at all to say that the show is the pinnacle of progressiveness. Although Ansari has certainly worked to have it be so, many have noted a hypocrisy: the ironic lack of love interests who are people of colour. Dev’s main love interest, portrayed by biracial actress Noël Wells, is very clearly coded as white. The girl who is considered the most attractive girl Dev knows (Nina Arianda) is also white. And then there’s Claire Danes.
Some have defended Ansari by naming Annie Chang’s character Caroline as a non-white love interest, despite her minimal airtime as a girl who turns out to be a set-up for a joke about online dating and a device to further Dev’s relationship with Claire Dane’s character. When questioned about the absence of WOC, Ansari has stated that there were no ethnic requirements in the casting: he cited his chemistry Wells for his decision to cast her, his friendship with and admiration of Claire Danes, and Nina Arianda’s Cartman impression. Although I’m side-eyeing him for this frankly run of the mill ‘we hired the best people’ excuse, I do appreciate the representation of white-POC interracial relationships, and his attention the cultural quirks that often accompany them. Ansari has even mentioned that he drew from his own relationship to inform Dev and Rachel’s romance.
But by far, the most controversial element of the series is Dev’s claim that:
“People don’t get that fired up about racist Asian or Indian stuff. I feel like you only risk starting a brouhaha if you say something bad about black people or gay people.”
In my opinion, Dev isn’t wrong. People aren’t hugely passionate about ‘racist Asian or Indian stuff’, but only because the media doesn’t really care about anything that isn’t white. ‘Black Girl Dangerous’ Mia Mckenzie puts it quite well, as she states in a recent podcast that the visibility of black people has been earned: “you have to mobilise for your community if you want white media to care, because they don’t and we know that and that’s why we mobilise.” Guest-host and blogger Cate Young added that, “people too often conflate hypervisibility with genuine care.” And it’s completely true.
A much more universal concept put forward by Ansari was portrayal of diasporic life seen in the episode ‘Parents’. In an extremely poignant scene, we see Dev and Brian treat their fathers with a level of disrespect equivalent to what they faced entering the country originally. The conversations between the generations are touching, convincing, and often, for watchers who are children of first-generation immigrants, indicative of a lack of appreciation for their own parents’ sacrifices. Other notable features of the series appear in ‘Ladies and Gentlemen’, or the ‘feminism episode’. Ansari draws a striking contrast between Dev’s comedic stroll home after dark and his female co-worker’s ominous horror movie-esque one, complete with an Entitled Nice Guy™. The episode even addresses frustration of not having your problems taken seriously as a woman, and the particular brand of disappointment felt when the disregard comes from a loved one. Once again, Dev and Rachel’s relationship proves itself to be realistic in its dynamics.
“Can you tuck me in before you leave?”
Dev doesn’t really concern himself with the trappings of masculinity, or, as those burdened by the aforementioned would say, he revels in his ‘metrosexuality’. There is much of Ansari himself infused throughout, including his love of food and cooking. Dev is a fully-fleshed out, complex, South Asian character. So Master of None is pretty self-involved: it deals with the casting of men of colour but fails to cast women of colour, it complains about the lack of Asian specific racial justice but ignores the complexities of anti-blackness. However it is expectedly so, that is the compromise it has to make for being so genuinely personal.
Radio lost its prominence in my life at around 14, when I stopped keeping track of the Top 40 — even then I wasn’t too interested in what anyone actually had to say. I’d never really grasped the appeal of a podcast either, until quite recently. Zuri Gordon (of Sad Girls Clüb) describes its charm aptly, as a “super accessible and informative” form of media: “They’re free, you can multitask while listening, you don’t need to be well read to understand them, and depending on what you want to hear about and who you want to hear it from, you can find a podcast that’s tailored to those interests.”
Zuri and Gwen begin each episode of Sad Girls Clüb with a particularly distinctive routine. They list what they’ve been reading, listening to, and watching, as well as, most notably, how the legacy of colonisation has impacted their lives this week – a treatment of imperialism I really appreciate; while racial micro-aggressions and the like are so insidious and pervasive, they are simultaneously entirely mundane. Often, when you try to discuss ideas about racial and sexual hierarchy in current society, it is hard to do so convincingly without using a considerable amount of sociological jargon and statistics. Podcasts like Sad Girls Clüb aim to get information across in a different way, speaking in a tone that is both informative and informal about topics that range from solemn current events to pop culture news — both are rightly given equal importance as social indicators.
“We really try to talk about these ideas in a way that our friends can understand without feeling alienated by our language. I think those concepts can seem really abstract or academic or just far removed from people’s lives, but they affect every person, and I’ve found the podcast as a way to talk and joke and theorize about stuff so that people understand how relevant it is to them. I also just appreciate the fact that there’s even room on the internet for our voices to be heard, especially by people who can’t or don’t want to read.”
Another more veteran podcast I’d like to mention is Two Brown Girls (known colloquially as 2BG), consisting of Fariha Róisín and Zeba Blay. Both women are well-established on the internet as writers, and their fluency is unmistakeable throughout the 100-odd episodes they’ve recorded so far. Often iconoclastic, Zeba and Fariha are unapologetic in their feminism and, like Gwen and Zuri, their discussions welcome you in a way that makes you feel part of the conversation.
The appeal for me is not just the winning combination of current cultural events with esteemed intersectional feminist theory, but it’s having your existence reaffirmed as a woman of colour. Having your opinions about the injustices you witness daily developed and validated on a bi-weekly (well, monthly) basis is a lovely experience, so I for one certainly appreciate intelligent, funny women chatting in my earbuds all day.
Sexual danger in the Youtube community has been a hot topic ever since Sam Pepper’s infamous ‘social experiment’ in 2014 brought to light the sexual assault and harassment of dozens of fans from a number of male Youtubers: Sam Pepper, Alex Day, Tom Milsom, Ed Blann, Mike Lombardo, the list (unfortunately) goes on and on and on.
The Youtube community banded together to crack down on the exploitation of their platform, and to make fans – particularly young girls – aware of the dangers of interacting with their male idols. There was a huge emphasis put on the power dynamic between Youtuber and subscriber; Youtubers have a certain amount of influence over their fans, whether or not they’re aware of it, and it could make sexual relationships with fans a bit of a minefield. How far is a fan’s consent coerced by the awe-inspiring presence of their obsession? But there’s a flipside to this relationship; Shannon Harris, or Shaaanxo on Youtube, recently addressed this in several of her vlogs. The most recent is titled, very clearly, “STOP TOUCHING MY BOOBS”.
Shannon, a beauty Youtuber with over 2 million subscribers to her main channel, first brought up the topic of sexual harassment in her 98th vlog. She never refers to the behaviour as sexual harassment, and shows obvious discomfort in even discussing it. Skip to 2:41 to hear her story.
So this is the problem. Young fans have a sense of entitlement to their idols’ lives. It’s no surprise, when many Youtubers (including Shaaanxo) post daily vlogs in which you can follow their everyday activities, but that doesn’t make it even remotely okay. Fans can develop a false sense of friendship with their favourite Youtubers; on the one hand, this can make them vulnerable to abuse, but on the other hand, this might make them feel justified in grabbing and groping someone they don’t know, as has been the case for Shannon. A few searches on Youtube don’t yield many results on this topic. While there has (rightfully) been a lot of discussion about the responsibility of Youtubers, there isn’t nearly so much about the responsibility of fans. And perhaps this is partly because of the strange position Youtubers find themselves in – they aren’t exactly celebrities (and most seem very uncomfortable with calling themselves so) but they still have thousands, if not millions, of loyal viewers. It might be time to consider that the fans of Youtubers can be as inappropriate and fanatical as the fans of the biggest boyband of the moment.
It’s hard to imagine that Shaaanxo wants to be the face of this campaign. It’s an uncomfortable topic, and many people will argue that invasions of privacy come with the territory of being famous. Which is why this needs to be discussed, not just in terms of a few particular incidents in a nightclub in Wellington, but in terms of the threat any fan could pose to their favourite Youtuber, especially if that Youtuber is a woman. Male Youtubers face their own brand of bizarre behaviour from fans, but it is female Youtubers who seem to get the brunt of sexual harassment from viewers.
This is a message to anyone that feels this is unfair: if you meet a Youtuber you love, remember that to them, you’re a stranger. Grabbing someone’s boobs, or butt, or anywhere else, without their permission is 100% inappropriate. It doesn’t matter if you’ve seen their friends do it in their videos, or if they talk openly about their body (Shaaanxo cited her breast enhancement vlog series as the reason fans feel so comfortable groping
her boobs in public). It’s unacceptable. Your favourite Youtuber isn’t your best friend, and even your best friend has to give permission before you grab at bits of their body.
The Youtube community has proven itself capable of affecting cultural change, and sparking productive conversations across social media. Hopefully Shaaanxo’s openness will make other Youtubers sit up and think: it’s time to change the conversation about sexual harassment.
Parallel Magazine 