MARCH 2023
FEATURING THE WORKS OF:
ALF KINGMAN
MADDIE WILLS
NELL SYDENHAM
CHLOE LAWRENCE
COURTNEY STEVENS
THEO ELDERFIELD
ANYA LAW
DAISY HADLEY
JULIETTE PETERSON-CAFFELL
NIAMH PAYNE
The issues that AI generated art and music raise are beginning to become criminal.
WRITTEN BY ALF KINGMAN
The ethics of AI creations is a complex and controversial topic. Some argue that AI systems should be held to the same ethical standards as human beings, while others argue that they should be treated differently due to their lack of consciousness and emotions. Additionally, there are concerns about the potential misuse of AI, such as in the development of autonomous weapons or the manipulation of people through targeted advertising. Ultimately, the ethical considerations surrounding AI will likely depend on the specific context in which the technology is used.
I did not write that paragraph. It was generated by an AI-based chatbot that will produce a realistic response to any statement or question you ask it. If I didn’t tell you that the piece of text was AIgenerated, would you have even known that it wasn’t written by a human? This is one of the main issues that AI generated media has brought about;
there is a significant degree of deception regarding AI generations as most people wouldn’t be able to tell if something had been created algorithmically or whether it was produced by a human. This doesn’t just apply to text, there are now AI tools to produce music and images too.
I have mentioned how AI generations can be morally precarious however, the issues that AI generated art and music raise are beginning to become criminal. For AI tools to be able to produce something new they have to learn about topics and images. These images may be subject to copyright however these systems don’t understand this. The Verge reported of a Disney illustrator who found that her art style had been copied following an experiment carried out by students in Canada. Hollie Mengert, the illustrator in question, said that
she didn’t give any written or verbal permission to have her art used by this generation tool. The Verge also reported that legally this is a very ambiguous area. They found that AI tools are definitely capable of infringing copyright but it is difficult to determine where culpability lies and as a result it may be difficult to prosecute.
Even if an artist’s work has been used without their permission there would be no way for the AI tool to give credit or any compensation. As part of my research for this article, I experimented with AI generated images using NightCafe Studio. Now, completely unbeknownst to me, I could be using images that are copying the theme of a preexisting artist; the images could be completely plagiarised but I would be unaware as NightCafe Studio doesn’t provide any additional information concerning how the images were created. The original artist could be missing out on royalties for using their image but the AI tool doesn’t communicate that to its users.
Being able to generate your own original art can be useful in many instances where you need to licence images to use them. Obtaining a licence to use certain images can be incredibly expensive so AI generation is a helpful solution to this. However, there are concerns about how easily people can upload their generated images to sites such as Getty Images and get them licensed for a considerable amount of money whilst possibly infringing copyright. Getty Images has taken action on this by banning the uploading of and distribution of AI generated images on the site. In an interview with The Verge, the CEO of Getty Images Craig Peters said that “There are real concerns with respect to the copyright of outputs from these models”. By preventing AI generations from being uploaded, it helps protect artists from having their original work monetised by someone else.
The sound designer and musician, Holly Herndom co-created the website ‘Have I Been Trained?’ It serves as a database of over 5.8 billion images, allowing users to upload their own original images to find out if their content has been used to train AI art generators. The website also allows users to opt-out of having their images used to train AI tools so that artist’s originality can be maintained and not plagiarised. As of March 2023, over 78 million images have been opted-out of AI training.
On the other side of AI generated images are deep fakes; hyper-realistic images or videos of humans.
There are different ways that deepfakes can be used in the media. One way is through comedy; ITVX recently launched a new show called “Deep Fake Neighbour Wars” in which deepfakes are used to create strange scenarios you would never see A-list celebrities in. In this instance, deepfakes are being used for lighthearted entertainment with appropriate warnings at the beginning of the show to ensure that the audience isn’t deceived.
However, there are more sinister ways that deepfakes can be used. In 2019, 96% of deepfakes on the internet were pornographic. Considering how easy it is to generate images and deepfakes, it is frighteningly easy to become a victim of nonconsensual explicit deepfakes. Furthermore, Dr Tim Stevens, the director of the Cyber Security Research Group at Kings College London, says that “there is potential for AI and deepfakes to affect national security.” He stresses that this innovative technology can cause significant distrust in democratic institutions and the media, with countries such as Russia using this technology to falsify statements in order to undermine our trust in society.
On top of the potential national security threats AI can present, AI image generators have the potential to produce illegal and graphic images based on pre-existing images. Vice reported that AI image generator tools such as Stable Diffusion are able to produce images from abhorrent prompts such as ISIS executions.
These images of extreme violence are not common as websites such as Stable Diffusion and DALL-E 2 have the means to automatically detect and filter words or phrases that have the potential to create harmful or illegal content. These protections prevent the user from knowingly generating these images, however these AI tools do still have capability to generate harmful content.
Artificial intelligence music (AIM) is another concept which has become contentious in recent years. Fabio Morreale, an academic researcher and lecturer at the University of Auckland, describes the issues surrounding AIM as “polarising.” One side of the argument views AIM as an exciting opportunity to explore people’s creativity, whereas the other believes its rise is the beginning of the end for human composers.
There is potential for AI and deepfakes to affect national security.
Dr Tim Stevens, Director of the Cyber Security Research
generate minutes-long pieces of music. MusicLM, the software in question, can even simulate ‘human’ vocals to sing lyrics generated for that specific song. This is the exact situation Morreale was discussing. In terms of innovation, this is a turning point as creating full songs, including vocals, simply from one text prompt is groundbreaking. Alternatively, this could be a dark day for the music industry as the software shows that it’s entirely possible to replace all humans in the production of music.
The current situation for artists on the music landscape is relatively bleak, with streaming becoming so dominant. Spotify pays out between $0.003 and $0.005 per stream which for smaller artists is not a sustainable source of income. With the rising prominence of AIM, smaller artists, and possibly even big names, could be pushed out of the music scene and replaced by music generated by AI. Morreale believes there will be substantial competition between human artists and AI tools that generate human-like sounds. This is because music is now becoming less about genre and albums and more about the mood of a song along with the function it can have in a playlist.
The AI tool ChatGPT can also be used to replicate a band’s lyrics and create an entirely new song. A widely reported instance of this happening is when a fan of Nick Cave instructed ChatGPT to create lyrics in the style of Cave’s song writing. Cave’s response to the lyrics produced was scathing, describing the newly created lyrics as “a grotesque mockery” and “a travesty”. When ChatGPT creates lyrics in the style of an artist, it could be considered insulting as lyrics can have a much deeper meaning than what an algorithm can arguably understand. When it comes to creating music, Cave says that “It’s a blood and guts business, here at my desk, that requires something of me to initiate the new and fresh idea. It requires my humanness.”
Björk, on the other hand, is an avant-garde musician that has embraced AI generated music. The eccentric artist teamed up with Microsoft in 2020 to create music that changes with the weather. By using music that Björk had archived over many years, a tool created by Microsoft tracks the weather at a specific location and will vary the music that is outputted accordingly. Bjork has always been an advocate and innovator of electronic and AI generated music. She has criticised those who say there is no passion in electronic music; famously arguing in 1997 “If
there’s no soul in the music, it’s because no one put it there, and it is not the tool’s fault.”
I have spoken in depth about the problems that AI generated media can cause across the culture sector. However, there are positives surrounding the innovation that AI brings into the community. Some examples of positives include time saving, cost effectiveness, increased efficiency, customisation, scalability and versatility (that list was even produced by ChatGPT).
With AI generation being fully automated, it can reduce the amount of time spent on tasks such as video and image editing. As well as this, AI can create images and text faster than any human can, so more time and resources can be put into different aspects of projects. The whole process is incredibly cost effective too; anyone is able to sign up to these AI tools for free so newly generated content can be created cheaply and efficiently.
Text generation tools such as ChatGPT are able to support people with disabilities who struggle to communicate. Speaking and typing might be difficult for some but ChatGPT enables people to use natural language commands which can support those who find it difficult to communicate using traditional methods. ChatGPT is also able to help with everyday tasks such as scheduling and setting reminders; this tool therefore is actively helping people with disabilities gain a greater sense of independence.
Due to the amount of discourse surrounding the prominence of AI, it may therefore be considered that we are now in the stage of a moral panic. Individuals are feeling threatened by these rapid technological advancements as the realisation hits that their industry can be replaced with AI. The European Commission has created basic outlines for the use of AI and how its influence should be dealt with.
They say that “AI systems are already having a positive impact commercially and societally” however there are concerns about how AI is both “transformative and disruptive.” They outline that trustworthy AI should have three components: “it should be lawful [...], it should be ethical [...] and it should be robust.” These systems may have good
intentions but it should be down to the creators to ensure that they don’t cause unintentional harm.
The rise of AI has sparked discussions and debates about its impact on society, including ethical and moral concerns. While some people may argue that the advancements in AI are causing a moral panic, others believe that the concerns are valid and need to be addressed proactively.
Would you have known this paragraph was written by ChatGPT?
Why is it that the average consumer is worried about the planet yet continues to give their money to the companies that cause environmental damage?
Amber Pottinger, Co-Curator Emma Rahmani/Canva
WRITTEN BY MADDIE WILLS
‘Trashion to Fashion’ is a new student-led exhibition dedicated to exploring how second-hand and repurposed fashion can be a part of the solution when combating the environmental and social damage made by the fast fashion industry. Held at Bath Spa Locksbrook Campus, the exhibition’s press release written by Amber Pottinger states that “the aim of the exhibition is to tackle the disconnect people have when buying clothes, encouraging consumers to think about the items they are purchasing and the companies they are supporting, while offering clear alternatives.”
As Lillian Cameron observes in ‘Curating Art Now’ (2022), curation is currently going through a process of being rethought in accordance with a rapidly changing present and future. As students enrolled in the Exhibitions and Public Audiences module, being tasked with creating our own group exhibitions, it is truly an exciting experience that stretches both our creative minds as well as practical skills. As a group of fashion students, we all have an internal conflict with how the industry we hope to be a part of post-graduation causes so much harm both environmentally and socially. However, we are also optimistic that the linear model of producing clothing can be altered to fit more circular economies. It is because of this hopeful nature that we have chosen to focus our exhibition on second-hand fashion.
Fashion is everywhere. Whether consciously or subconsciously, we as a collective are under the careful, watchful eye of the fashion gods (Miranda,
Devils Wears Prada, iykyk). The industry is based on tangible (and now intangible thanks to Meta) products, but marketing plays a huge role in determining which brand gets our business.
Harriet Posner said in her 2015 book Marketing Fashion, “fashion is by its very nature a marketing tool. Marketing is part of its DNA; it is inherent in its substance and spirit.” Fashion marketing can be so ever-present yet subtle in our lives, from the ads that pop up unannounced throughout an Instagram scroll, to the gigantic billboards that face us whilst waiting for the train on the daily commute. We’ve all heard of cases where ad campaigns have gone wrong and hit the headlines, but often if a good marketing campaign works, it is meant to simply seep into our subconscious and infiltrate our buying behaviours.
In the apparel world, fast fashion brands hold a huge amount of market share and harness the capacity for these big ad productions and distributions. Brands such as Boohoo and Pretty Little Thing work on such a fast timescale that we are constantly met with hundreds of new products a day, and a glossy ad campaign to match.
What these adverts do not address is the environmental and social impact that these ‘take, make, dispose’ businesses have on the world around us. Let’s take it back for a second...As defined by The Good Trade in 2023, “‘Fast Fashion’ is a design, manufacturing and marketing method focused on rapidly producing high volumes of
clothing.” Advancements of technology as a result of the 1800s Industrial Revolution aided in the shift from made-to-order clothing to ready-made.
Today, the fashion industry is labelled as the second largest global polluter, with the Environmental Audit Committee stating in 2019 that GHG emissions from the fashion industry surpass those of both international flights and maritime shipping combined. Although this cannot be fully accounted for by the emergence of fast fashion, a report published by the Business of Fashion in 2022 said that the linear model of fast fashion practices has accelerated so quickly that we are now recognising popular brands such as Shein as ultra-fast fashion. Even more worryingly, these brands are creeping their way into the top 20 most popular brands amongst Gen-Zers.
I’m sure that most of us are no strangers to recognising that yes, we have been told numerous times that these brands can have huge negative effects on water systems, soil degradation and GHG emissions as well as poor working environments for garment workers both domestically and overseas. HOWEVER, they continue to climb the ladder of success.
Not only this, in a report published by WGSN in 2021, it was found that “90% of the people surveyed said that the thought of a climate crisis made them feel uneasy about their future.” The recognition of eco-anxiety (‘a chronic feeling of worry about the impact of global warming rising’), simply does not correlate to the rising power and market share of brands that are associated with negative environmental and social impacts. As stated by Pottinger in the exhibition’s press release, “Why is it that the average consumer is worried about the planet yet continues to give their money to the companies that cause environmental damage?”
In a 2022 Channel 4 documentary named ‘Inside the Shein Machine: UNTOLD’, an expert marketing analyst peeked behind the digital curtain of the ultra-fast fashion brand’s website. From checkout countdowns that automatically reset with no consequence, to sophisticated algorithms that suggest more and more new items, it was suggested that the brand is “just layering and layering up on consumer’s emotion.” This brand is not alone in its creation of this pacy visual marketing strategy. As said by American Designer Tommy Hilfiger “The younger customer does
not want to wait any longer, they want to see it and wear it that day or the next day.” Inflicting this sense of ‘buy now or never again’ feeds into the brand’s financial success, as consumers are willing to receive this instant gratification when the shopping process is so cheap and fast; in the basket and to your door within 24 hours.
However, the timing of the Trashion to Fashion exhibition comes at the precipice of immense change within the industry. Big brands and their collaborations are fighting against the linear model and are marketing a second-hand, sustainable alternative to the young demographic that are targeted by fast fashion brands. Last summer, hugely popular ITV dating show, Love Island, partnered with second-hand resale site eBay to provide all the islanders with trendy clothing that had been sourced second-hand from the site. As a member of the Gen-Z population myself, this refreshing take on marketing second-hand clothing was incredibly impactful. The figures supported this feeling, with Euronews publishing in 2022 that e-commerce platform eBay reported a “700% increase in searches for ‘pre-loved fashion’”.
Campaigns such as this, marketed in the way they are, provide a line of communication that can resonate with a certain type of consumer group within the Gen-Z demographic. Demonstrating that second-hand fashion does not simply have to mean endless rummaging at charity shops or purchasing a ‘vintage New Look top’ from Depop shops for 10 times the amount it would’ve been sold for originally. The marketing move presented that second-hand, pre-loved and re-purposed clothing can be fun, fresh and accessible.
There are minimal corners of the earth where fashion has not touched in one way or another. This can also be said on a more personal level too, specifically referring to fashion and our memory. Whether this is in the form of a visceral feeling of cringe when you think about the dress you strangely decided to wear to prom, or the comforting feeling you get just thinking about that one scarf that was knitted by your nan, fashion exceeds the boundaries of just a commercial industry.
However, this innate connection between the two topics has been boiling up within the world of marketing. Named by Quartz in 2022 as the “nostalgia economy”, it is said that this is “the most powerful trend in fashion since florals or trousers
We have all fallen victim to marketing from brands that seem to be more focussed on proft at the detriment of people and planet.
Wiktoria Kowalewska, Emma Rahmani/Canva Co-Curator
The
younger customer does not want to wait any longer, they want to see it and wear it that day or the next.
and is a reaction to what’s happening in the world.”
Reflecting on the COVID-19 pandemic and UK Cost of Living crisis, consumers are turning inwards to their wardrobes and garments to seek out a means of time-travel that provides a window back into some comforting memories of the past. As stated by publication Who What Wear in a 2020 article named ‘Why I Think Nostalgia Is the Future of the Fashion Industry’, “nostalgia is something that has been placed at odds with notions of youth and innovation” but it cannot be denied that we find a sense of calm familiarity in returning to the simple pleasures such as rewatching old TV shows again and again, labelling them as our ‘comfort show’. This can be extended to fashion marketing, as “nostalgia offers brands the opportunity to build new and profitable ways of working”.
The Trashion to Fashion exhibition hopes to provide a fun and interactive way to acknowledge that the feeling of instant gratification and cognitive dissonance from fast fashion purchases can be swapped out by cherishing the nostalgic nature of second-hand items, whether this is through hand me downs or repurposed clothing.
When delving deeper into how the curatorial team developed this concept and theme for the exhibition, co-curator Amber Pottinger mentioned that previous research throughout university studies had indicated that the topic of second-hand fashion and nostalgia could be spoken about more widely. Here Pottinger explained that:
“Research into the cycle of nostalgia as well as recycling brought the two concepts together. As well as the theory of cognitive dissonance, our entire reasoning behind ignoring the unsustainable production of clothing, is crucial to understanding our relationship with this type of consumerism as well as how to tackle it.”
The Locksbrook Campus location provides a light and bright space with a dynamic atmosphere, which hopes to attract a lot of viewers to the exhibition. “Locksbrook is where all the universities’ creativity courses are and as a location for our exhibition, I personally think that it fits the aesthetic that we are going for as well as that Lockbrook is completely open planned and is the most inviting building at the university” states co-curator Lauren Malone. Within this space, the exhibition seeks to resonate with a younger demographic of creatives
that have the potential to shape the future practices of the fashion industry, both in their professional careers in this field, and in their personal shopping habits. In a Business of Fashion report published in 2022, it was found that approximately 25% of the world’s population are classed as Gen-Z, and in the US alone the demographic has an estimated purchasing power of 360 billion dollars. This means that Gen-Z shoppers will heavily guide the trajectory of the fashion industry in years to come. When speaking to Charlotte Papuca, co-curator, she echoed these statistics:
“For us, it was clear that the audience for our exhibition was our generation, as we will be the creatives that the fashion industry falls into the hand of. Design, textile, photography and marketing students alike, they all play a huge role in bringing a product through the supply chain and to the consumer.”
Wiktoria Kowalewska, co-curator, spoke more personally about this decision:
“Although our choice of audience was logical given the more advanced and severe notes of our exhibition, like highlighting the devastation that waste can leave on the planet, we also felt that this would give us an avenue to really be personal within our decision-making for which pieces to exhibit, as we have all fallen victim to marketing from brands that seem to be more focussed on proft at the detriment of people and planet.”
As for exhibition features, “we’ve managed to organise exciting collaborations with several students from different year groups which really diversifies the set of artists we’ve got collaborating with us” says Wiktoria. The exhibition features original student creative material in the form of fashion photography. The work of second-hand fashion advocate and first year Bath Spa University student Filiz Moore will be showcased. Inspired by the potential for waste materials, the photography set named ‘Mono’ looks to demonstrate that upcycled fashion can create new and exciting items.
Being a student-led exhibition in a student location, collaboration was at the heart of the planning process of the exhibition curatorial team. Pottinger stated that “when discussing artistic mediums like fashion, it is important to work alongside relevant practising artists for the sake of authenticity and understanding.”
Collaboration doesn’t stop at Fashion Photography though; the exhibition will present a 2019 Feature Film titled ‘Waste’ directed by Hannah Oliver. Submitted to the Depicts & Encounters Film Festival, the film takes a unique and vibrant approach to displaying the effects of our consumption on the environment. “It’s great that we get to show this film, it’s in equal parts jarring, due to the topic, and visually fun, which we think suits our exhibition and its potential audience” says [Charlotte] Papuca.
Approachability was of huge importance when it came to the planning of the exhibition. When speaking to the curatorial team, they highlighted that sometimes this topic of conversation can be shut down quickly, often due to the cognitive dissonance that consumers can feel regarding fast fashion purchases. There are many discussions to be had surrounding the accessibility of sustainable fashion options, whether this be exclusivity or financially. However, the team felt strongly that the exhibition would provide a neutral space where viewers/participants can explore the topic of second-hand fashion and repurposed fashion as a part of the solution when combating the environmental and social damage made by the fast fashion industry, in a judgement-free and positive environment.
This atmosphere manifested in the decisionmaking regarding the mediums shown within the exhibition. For more visual content, photography will be exhibited alongside printed news articles and interactive QR codes which viewers can read through independently. The news articles will consist of current and up-to-date climate reports from reputable sources to provide a more academic outlet within the exhibition. The displayed, scannable QR codes will be directly linked to the ‘Good on You’ fashion website that provides sustainability scores and reports on many popular global fashion brands.
Additionally, the exhibition material will appeal to audio senses in the form of the previously mentioned ‘Waste’ Feature Film, as well as ambient music. Original tracks made by Bath Spa music students Jaya Bal, Tomos Harries and Benji Prosser-Powell hopes to encapsulate the aura of the environment, bringing in retro sounds to compliment the nostalgic feel to the exhibition in conjunction with modern mixes to appeal to the audience. As for participatory involvement, the exhibition plans to have a display a donation bin
in which attendees can donate unwanted clothing items in the knowledge that these will be given to local charity shops in the Bath area. To incentivise this circularity, participants will be entered into a raffle to win second-hand and sustainable prizes, some of which include a vintage Diesel baby-tee and hand designed tote bags.
[Wiktoria] Kowalewska stated that “we hope that the creative and stylistic choices we have made will add to the approachable vibe of the event, as fashion affects everyone and it should be something that everyone feels they can get involved with in one way or another”.
The Street at Bath Spa University Locksbrook Campus (Locksbrook Rd, Bath BA1 3EL)
For us, it was clear that the audience for our exhibition was our generation, as we will be the creatives that the fashion industry falls into the hand of.
Charlotte Papuca, Co-Curator
Emma Rahmani/Canva
where are we in 2023?
WRITTEN BY NELL SYDENHAM
The last year has seen a step backwards in terms of legal prejudices towards women. It is not a new argument that the legal frameworks we live in are no longer fit for purpose, or meet the targets of a contemporary feminist society:
‘On average women have just three quarters of the legal rights of men, and over 2.4 billion women still do not have equal economic rights, according to the World Bank’s Women, Business and the Law Report.’
Further proof can be seen in the wide scale political unrest as a result of Roe v Wade being overturned and the Bill of Rights Amendment being cited as a direct attack on women in the UK. These events have meant now more than ever the basic demands of the second wave feminist agenda are being ignored and rejected by those in power. Second wave feminism- or the women’s liberation movement focussed on fundamental themes of equality, discrimination and the problematic role of women as wives and child bearers. These issues are still dominating the popular media discourse
and are the subject of current UK Legislation. 2022 has been marred with economic instability. As the UK descends back into a period of recession, and a cost of living crisis, the result is the most vulnerable women in society are disproportionately feeling the strain - being noted as the ‘shock absorbers of poverty’ by the Women’s Budget Group. These legislations and their controversial nature highlight the increasing need to make change. Hence, now feels like an essential time to bring attention back to the fundamental issues within product taxation policy, and the argument for revised regulations in an era of contemporary feminism.
To understand the continual perpetuation of gender-based pricing, and how this affects female consumers, we must consider The Pink Tax. This can be described as an unofficial extra charge on products designed for female consumers- even if a similar or identical male equivalent is available. It also refers to the practice of women paying more for the same products as men due to advertising
gender biases, inherent gender performance and the need to conform to societal norms of female appearance. Taxes against female products are a long running feature of financial structures, yet knowledge of this topic and its prevalence comes in waves, each time with little meaningful change. A recent survey by Channel Mum found that 97% of parents want the Pink Tax to be eradicated. As we all aim to educate and make changes in this complicated time, an update to the discourse surrounding gender-based pricing and taxation biases is needed.
The most obvious example of this gender bias is the discrete element of sanitary product taxation or as it is commonly referred to The Tampon Tax, the history of which is complicated. When VAT or Value Added Tax was first introduced in the UK in 1973, sanitary products were classed as a luxury item and had a 17.5% level of taxation placed upon them in line with the EU standard.
‘For
a woman who started periods at 11, the result was a lifetime spend of £1549.55 on products, £73.79 of which is VAT.’ (BBC 2017)
As various political leanings came and went, this level of taxation became a subject of debate and after extensive lobbying from MP Dawn Primarolo, it eventually was lowered to 5% over 20 years later. Knowledge about how much women had unfairly contributed solely in VAT during this period is scarce. To try and provide some insight the BBC created a period spend calculator which generated a numerical value for this so-called luxury spending. The important caveat of this is the use of a flat rate of VAT, building in no consideration for the women who had faced the highest levy, meaning in reality it is even higher.
It is important to note the wider societal issues with the Value Added Tax structure. VAT is commonly referred to as regressive taxation, meaning it takes a disproportionally large amount from those on the lowest incomes. Examples can be seen across all areas of consumer spending. The obvious wealth divides within the UK class system mean the lower income earners pay an equal percentage to those within the upper echelons. Due to the current
economic landscape within the UK, consideration also needs to be given to the impact of recession. This also disproportionately affects those on lower incomes; with supermarkets now introducing budget friendly ranges to increase accessibility with some not able to cope with demand. Economic periods like this provide the most evidence for biases, and the argument for their legal regulation holds the most gravitas.
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The debate around the luxury status of sanitary wear was repeatedly protested throughout the 2010s as the world witnessed widespread period poverty. The extent of this issue became the topic of several high profile campaigns and news articles, although they were met with repeated dismissal from policy makers. Subsequent pressure mounted for national legislative change surrounding product VAT taxation. This had stood at 5% since 2000 the lowest amount allowed by European Law. Whether the VAT Directive would have allowed a renegotiation before the UK’s exit from the union is still subject to debate, although this didn’t stop knowledge about products currently untaxed being revealed across twitter, and in parliamentary debate. The limited options for change due to external bureaucracies generated heated backlash, including graphic blood-stained protesting. A subsequent petition was started by Laura Coryton-a leading British activist for women’s rights. She called for a zero percentage tax rate and gained over 300,000 signatures, resulting in chancellor George Osbourne’s committal to donating £15 million a year from the Tampon Tax Profits to charity. Although this demonstrated some commitment to change, it did little to provide real time support for those in need. It took until 2017 for Scotland to announce a trial programme in which, it provided 1000 girls from low income families with free sanitary products. This marked a groundbreaking change in the accessibility narrative and the necessity of schemes such as this.
The departure from the EU took significantly longer than anticipated but when Britain decidedly exited on the 1st of January 2021, the charge was abolished as repeatedly promised by the then chancellor Rishi Sunak. The government over the course of the 6 year pledge had donated over £90 million to ‘female focussed charities’, supporting those working in areas from miscarriage care to abuse victims. However, even this wasn’t without controversy - with one charity reported to have
anti-abortion agendas, and the funding of domestic abuse services including SafeLives through this taxation, arguably, reinforces it as a women’s issue.
Many other countries were ahead of the curve when it came to tax free periods. Kenya was the first country to introduce legislation back in 2004, with over 20 now following suit including: New Zealand, South Africa and several states in America. These international abolitions, newly enforced 0% taxes in the UK and a department for education accessibility scheme, have presented a major breakthrough. It is important to note the caveats here though.
Arguably, VAT reductions may not be visible in the price of products at a consumer level due to levels of consumption; those in a higher wealth bracket will see the most difference. Plus, there is now a deficit of money being donated to these charities. And there are still other issues. Genderbased pricing and taxation on a wider scale need addressing with increasing urgency, in a time of such economic instability.
Gendered products have been a key part of the feminist agenda for decades, being used as markers of conformity or rebellion to societal norms. Key symbols of masculinity such as short haircuts and male clothing styles were typical signs of protest for the first and second wave feminists- those early protestors fighting gender norms and the oppression of women’s rights to childcare, employment and originally the vote. It is unsurprising then that these gender markers are still an important part of the discussion, not used as a rebellious image but as evidence of inequality.
Although the definition of The Pink Tax is somewhat flexible, the evidence for it is concrete. A report published by the gender equality charity The Fawcett Society in 2016 specifically scrutinised supermarkets and their own brand products for toiletries and clothing, typically products subject to gender discrepancies. Using four products that could be classified as directly comparable, the supermarket with the biggest gender gap was Morrisons.
‘Those choosing female targeted products were paying 56% more for the basket. The resulting average across the four supermarkets was a 31% average price difference.’ (The Fawcett Society)
In the interest of fairness, the report did also examine the gender-neutral options available. This provided a more positive outcome: Waitrose marketed their own brand products as gender neutral across the board, and all four of the supermarkets included in the report do have gender neutral provisions of some kind, in most cases for shampoo and shower gel. These statistics were evidenced again in a comprehensive research report by the tax refund specialist RIFT in 2018. The report undertook comparisons for over 600 toiletry product prices from a selection of UK leading retailers. They stated on average:
A 250 ml deodorant was found to cost £2.08 for women and £1.91 for men –a disparity of 8.9%. A 50 ml of facial moisturiser cost on average £10.77 for women compared to just £8.02 for men creating a disparity of 34.28%.
The shopping habits of women have been the subject of stereotypes for decades- specifically their frivolity, and desire to constantly spend in excess. In reality the predetermined costs of being a woman are simply higher: for example in the US, the cost of the contraceptive pill if you don’t have medical insurance is over three times higher than a lifetime cost of condoms. If women in the UK can be attributed to over 85% of purchase decision making, whilst still earning on average 11.9% less than men, it comes as no surprise that companies are continuing to capitalise on gender bias. Examples of which are as recent as Pepsico’s 2018 plan to create a line of snacks dedicated to so-called women’s needs.
Of course there were subsequent responses to the report, with a spokesperson for Boots arguing ‘The products quoted in this article are not like for like, based on ingredient, formulation and use, so can’t be compared on price.’ An ironic response when the items listed in the report needed a directly comparable male product as a prerequisite. Colloquially, they could be referred to as like for like, or essentially, they comprised of the same key ingredients, and could be swapped if chosen.
The result provided no other explanation for the price difference except gender bias. Something noted by RIFT’s managing director who stated ‘it is apparent that women are still facing more subtle inequalities in society through the amount they pay for health products’. The importance of recognition and allyship when fighting for these causes cannot
be underestimated, so responses like those seen above are frustrating. The problem is not that gendered products exist - it is the fact that choice of product comes with a cost imbalance, arguably due to the gender roles consumers adhere to.
After reading those statistics, questions can be raised, namely why is nothing being done to change this? The report by RIFT was published four years ago and yet there is no legal jurisdiction, or even proposal, to prevent advertising tactics that promote these consumer habits, but this is not for want of trying. MP Christine Jardine has submitted a motion for government legislation preventing gender-based pricing on two separate occasionsboth with rejection. The first was in 2017 and the motion got no further than a first reading, and a second attempt in 2019 was also tabled due to a complete lack of support from other MP’s, with just 17 of the 650 in total signing.
I approached Christine for her thoughts on these setbacks. She stated she was disappointed in the government’s lack of action, but she will continue to pursue change.
“It is ridiculous that things like basic toiletries and haircuts can cost significantly more for females…. I come from a family of three girls and looking at the 20 per cent price difference… I realise that for single mothers especially that could make a significant impact on their budget. It is one of the many inequalities which still exists within our society.” (Jardine 2022)
The lack of interest is contrary to the amount of discussion within popular culture and reporting. It is even in contrast to the transcript from the bill proposal which showcased support for research uncovering an issue ‘hiding in plain sight.’ This rejection is not just the case in the UK. Attempts have been made in the US to create a nationwide policy against gender-based pricing, similar to those already in place in California and New York.
Since 2015, Congresswoman Jackie Speier, has raised the possibility of a Pink Tax Repeal Act four times to Congress. Each individual time there was the same response: there is not enough evidence of prejudice to warrant legislation. However, evidence for the cause has been
populating literature for decades. Several reports undertook individual research into the reasoning behind price discrimination. The simple suggestion is companies make a bigger margin on women’s products- women will remain brand loyal if a price increases and fickle male consumers will choose something else.
Academia across the fields of gender studies, economics and consumer behaviour take a more nuanced view. Guittar, et al. (2022) argued it was due to an underlying need for consumers to perform gender identity tropes and adhere to social norms when purchasing goods, making gendered branding profitable. Duesterhaus et al (2011) investigated personal care practices, including dry cleaning and haircuts.
‘When businesses were questioned on why such pricing differences existed, excuses included: women’s needs are more complicated and time consuming, or simply that was the policy and they could shop elsewhere.’ (Duesterhaus et al. 2011)
It is important to be critical of this research stated above, it is extremely hard to argue the case for solely gender bias, there are other factors at play including geographic location that also need to be considered. However, these essentialist viewpoints are reinforcing a biological difference between men and women that is visualised in consumer retail practices. As advertising in the UK is legally pushed away from obvious heteronormativity, the habits of consumers are proving that the exact opposite is still working: women and those who choose female oriented products are doing so to purchase gender markers, help understanding and create gender performance.
From these arguments, it may seem that being less susceptible to gendered products is the answer, and that we should simply be savvier to these marketing tactics. But why should this be yet another burden for the consumer to carry simply because it costs more to ‘do’ female gender?
Businesses have previously stepped in to aid in the period poverty fight; large scale companies like Bodyform provided over 200,000 pads to homeless shelters. Perhaps similar steps need to be taken here. There needs to be greater protection within the retail sector and across advertising legislation
packages, to ensure the choice to purchase products marketed to women comes with no additional costs. The length of time this could take and what kind of enthusiasm there would be for such arguments remains to be seen.
Changes like the Tampon Tax abolition are undeniably a positive step in the ongoing battle for equality. They paved the way for positive conversations surrounding menstruation sick days within workplaces and even entire countries, with Spain becoming the first country in Europe to introduce such legislation. Further discussions surrounding accessibility of sanitary supplies within workplaces, schools and colleges have increased in frequency. My own University within the last few weeks announced it would be providing free sanitary products on all of its campuses, in a move to promote a period friendly environment. Yet, this also paints a vivid picture of the legislation that still has an inherent male bias within our society. Although we must acknowledge the wins as and where we can, it is important that they make space for the next discussion to be had, in this case: why choosing to purchase female advertised products comes with a levy out of our control.
As the cost-of-living crisis continues to develop with little sign of change, the UK government has a chance to introduce groundbreaking legal protection benefiting women at a time in which they are already being unfairly marginalised. It is simply a case of appetite; perhaps now is the time for allyship instead of competition within the legislative process, making the pink tax a little more purple.
of which is VAT.’
WRITTEN BY CHLOE LAWRENCE
WRITTEN BY NELL SYDENHAM
Since the latter part of 2021, UK households have been plagued by the cost of living crisis, an event that according to journalist Chris Giles, has seen UK inflation rise quicker than it has done for the past 40 years. The Office for National Statistics has stated that the Consumer Prices Index has risen by 10.1% between September 2021 and 2022, with the rising costs of food products being the biggest contributor to this inflation.
The disproportionate affect that the cost of living crisis is having on low-income households has dominated narratives disseminated from UK news outlets, and quite rightly so. Low-income households have experienced a higher inflation rate of 10.9%, compared to the 7.9% that those on the highest incomes have faced. This is due to what academic, Yvette Hartfree, describes as the ‘budgeting strategies’ many low income households use, such as the essential purchasing of groceries, gas and electricity shortly after their income is received.
the gender wealth gap.
There are endless ways in which the cost of living crisis will affect the wealth of working women, but most of them can be traced back to the gender wealth gap, a feminist issue as old as feminism itself. Although the gap has been slowly narrowing, it is set to remain prevalent until 2059. In 2019, The National Education Union stated that 22% of women had a persistent low income, compared to the 14% of low-income earning men, making it
more likely that a woman will be poor as opposed to a man, a fact that the Women’s Budget Group claims to be one of the main reasons the cost of living crisis can be considered gendered.
covid + furloughing scheme.
To understand the state of women’s finances in the current cost of living crisis, it’s important to consider the coronavirus pandemic, an event that had detrimental impacts to women’s incomes. The outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic acted as a direct hit to the UK economy, with Gross Domestic Product (GDP) falling by a record 19.4% between April and June of 2020. The stability of a woman’s financial situation became more precarious than ever, as the pre-existing gender pay gap put women at a significant disadvantage in the wake of an economic crisis. Researchers Lauren Stetz and Michele Mekel have described the disparities between incomes of men and women as increasing since the pandemic, with more than one million women leaving the labour force.
In March 2020, the UK Government introduced the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme, a grant that would allow workers to be furloughed and 80% of their wages paid whilst lockdown restrictions prevented them from working. Rishi Sunak, the chancellor at the time, claimed that this scheme would help millions of working people through ‘the challenging months ahead.’ However, what he neglected to mention was how a larger proportion of women compared to men would be eligible for
women are suffering at the hands of an economic disaster. the cost of living crisis is entirely a gendered issue.
pay them enough and watched cuts to their social security make them even poorer, the presumption would be that a woman could turn to her savings as a last resort. After all, more than a third of money savers are relying on their savings to survive the current cost of living crisis. However, as with many things in our society, a woman’s ability to turn to her savings is constrained, simply because the amount she has to use is considerably less than her male counterparts. Sociology Professor, Tracey Warren, identified gender as a ‘key variable’ in analysing the wealth gap between men and women, stating that without wealth to draw upon in times of financial need, women are devoid of a ‘financial cushion.’
Without money to fall back on during a time where the rise in inflation is unprecedented, it is only natural that women are falling into debt. Journalist, Alex Sims, has declared that 61% of people getting into debt from purchasing everyday necessities are women, a stunning statistic that shows the insolvency gender gap to be significant. And although the threat of falling into debt is present in many low-income women, this threat becomes even more prevalent if the woman is being subject to financial abuse.
Women’s Aid, a women’s charity that works to support women who are experiencing or have experienced any form of domestic abuse, have defined financial abuse as a form of ‘coercive control’ through which a perpetrator uses or misuses a partner’s money, limiting and controlling their future actions. In an article for The Telegraph Online, its Home Affairs editor, Charles Hymas, stated that survivors of economic abuse are left with debts of around £3,272 by ex-partners, with 60% of these survivors being women. That’s over £3,000 a woman could currently be using to feed herself, heat her house or provide for her children.
What’s worse is financial abuse is something that is very difficult for a survivor to recover from. Scholar, Laura Johnson, has found that the effects of this abuse are long-lasting, since the debts that a survivor’s partner has accumulated are likely to affect their credit score in the long run. This in turn affects the survivor’s ability to borrow money in the form of loans, mortgages and overdrafts.
unpaid work for women.
So, a woman’s in debt, she has a low-income job, and her social security is no longer supplementing her finances enough. The simple answer to this
problem would be for the woman to take on more hours at work in order to make ends meet. However, for many women this is not possible, as they perform a disproportionate amount of unpaid work compared to men, reducing the amount of hours they have to spend in paid quality employment. This work often consists of what academics, Soraya Seedat and Marta Rondon, describe as ‘repetitive, time consuming, and physically demanding’ tasks, the monotony of which endangers their mental wellbeing. This could then lead to work absences due to mental health issues or exhaustion, affecting the amount of money a woman is earning.
Globally, women perform 75% of unpaid work, dedicating around 4 and a half hours per day to direct and indirect care for her household which is approximately 3 times the amount that men dedicate to these tasks. A large proportion of these caring responsibilities revolve around caring for children or vulnerable and elderly relatives, deducting time from potential work hours. In an article for The Guardian, journalist, Donna Ferguson, stated that 3 out 5 women say their caring responsibilities prevent them from applying for jobs or promotions, making it evident that the disproportionate amount of unpaid care work a woman is expected to do has a significant impact on her income.
The lack of women embarking on career progression is largely due to the ever-increasing cost of childcare. Parents are paying over 35% the average family’s income for childcare, making the UK the second most expensive place for childcare in the world. In their annual childcare survey, the Coram Family and Childcare Trust found that childcare costs had risen above inflation, with a part-time nursery placement costing £138 a week, amounting to over £7,000 a year. In an article by Tarja K. Viitanen, it’s suggested that the high cost of childcare in the UK can be explained by the privatised nature of these services.
With rising childcare costs coinciding with the cost of living crisis, working mothers are having to make the decision between paying childcare they cannot afford and giving up their jobs so they can care for their children themselves with less expense. Of course this then means they have no income to cover any of the other rising costs. The ‘Pregnant then Screwed’ movement work towards ending
the motherhood penalty, with one of their core goals being to provide access to free childcare.
In October of this year, the movement organised the ‘March of the Mummies’ to protest against the cost of childcare that is becoming inaccessible to many households in the UK. Although the campaign has cause discussion within Parliament and has encouraged large amounts of social media engagement, any legislative action has yet to take place, leaving thousands of women to continue to struggle with rising childcare costs.
According to Sarah Cattan, of the Institutue for Fiscal Studies, there is evidence to suggest that the availability of publicly funded pre-school can encourage more mothers to work, and in countries, such as France and Germany, where universal preschool exists, this affect has lasted for several years. Not only does this emphasise how unaffordable childcare prevents women from earning a substantial income, it also suggests that simple policy changes could give women more financial stability.
When it comes to a woman’s finances, she is fighting a losing battle offset by the gender pay gap. Being paid less than men for the same job means women are already financially disadvantaged before they’ve even started the job, a fact that has only become truer since the coronavirus pandemic. As the country enters a period of what the Guardian’s economics correspondent, Richard Partington, describes as a ‘prolonged recession’, women are the least financially prepared. With the pandemic having pushed women out of their jobs before being pushed back into low-paying ones, their wages simply aren’t enough to sustain them throughout this time. With no savings to turn to, debts to pay and cuts to social security taking away any financial safety net a woman had, there is serious risk of thousands of women falling into poverty and destitution.
Of course, the risk of destitution becomes even greater for specific groups of women in our society. These include the one in five women pensioners who are already living in poverty, women with disabilities who can’t afford their necessary prescription medication, and Black women who will take the hit of the ethnicity pay gap becoming even wider as a result of the cost of living crisis. The list of ways in which all groups of women will be affected by the rise in cost of living is endless.
And with the obscene amount of unpaid work and caring responsibilities women are expected to fulfil, their opportunities to improve their financial situations become severely limited. For a woman in the UK, her financial situation is a never-ending vicious cycle of not earning enough to create stability for herself, and not having the time to dedicate to employment in order to do this.
As stated by the Women’s Budget Group, women are the ‘shock absorbers of poverty.’ With many women being the ones responsible for food and childcare costs within a household, it is them who are bearing the brunt of the rise of inflation. Having to buy more on lower wages seems like the definition of being financially disadvantaged as opposed to men.
When deciding whether the cost of living crisis is a gendered issue there are questions that need to be answered. Are women poorer than men? Yes. Are women in jobs that pay less than men? Yes. Do they lack a financial safety net? Yes. Do they have less time to dedicate to employment? Yes. Rather than ignore the facts, the Government should be doing more to ensure women can retain financial security throughout this economically challenging time. For starters, they could finally pay women the same as men. That’s the least they deserve.
Women are suffering at the hands of an economic disaster. The cost of living crisis is entirely a gendered issue.
Helpful Resources: https://www.womensaid.org.uk/ https://www.trusselltrust.org/ https://www.crisis.org.uk/about-us/how-we-work/ https://pregnantthenscrewed.com/ https://survivingeconomicabuse.org/about-us/ https://www.gov.uk/cost-of-living
3 out of 5 women say their caring responsibilities prevent them from applying for jobs and promotions.
WRITTEN BY COURTNEY STEVENS
Whose stories are told on screen? Children’s animation has routinely lacked diverse representations and this omission of images outside of heterocentric ideals leads to the exclusion of minority groups. For example, the LGBTQ+ community often has to resort to ‘queer reading’ to find representations in TV shows where they simply don’t exist otherwise.
In recent years, this phenomenon of ‘queer reading’ has slowly been replaced by instances of unapologetic LGBTQ+ representations that are usually only hinted at or completely overlooked in children’s animation. Series such as Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts (2020) and She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018-2020) feature unambiguous LGBTQ+ representations which are progressive in an age where queer baiting markets to an underrepresented minority audience without substantial representation.
The normalisation and authentic representation of LGBTQ+ identities are important in a societal context where 1.5 million (3.2%) people over 16 in England and Wales identify as LGB+. According to Stonewall, 42% of LGBTQ+ students had experienced bullying in 2016 which is double the number of non-LGBTQ+ pupils (21%) who had also been bullied. This worrying statistic highlights the need for LGBTQ+ representation in mainstream media so that children can grow up to accept these varying identities, prevent such discrimination in
schools, and allow young LGBTQ+ people to see themselves represented from a young age. Shows such as Heartstopper (2022-) and Young Royals (2021-) have contributed to combatting this issue, however, they are rated 12+ and 15+ respectively so younger children aren’t growing up with these examples of positive representation from an early age.
With this in mind, mainstream media distributors such as Disney- an entertainment and media conglomerate worth $286.99B- should be making more of an effort to keep up with the times since they are, to quote screen critic Rendy Jones, “a company that has been painfully slow to evolve.” With its large number of children’s television shows, it comes as no surprise that the company has had its fair share of performative allyship towards the LGBTQ+ community with a sum of unconvincing ‘firsts’ in regard to diverse representations.
Over the past few years, Disney has announced a multitude of ‘first’ gay characters in their works such as Onward (2020), Beauty and the Beast (2017) and Cruella (2021). These supposed portrayals of LGBTQ+ characters are often only seen in background characters or hinted at and never explicitly confirmed in their shows. For example, the animated series Star vs the Forces of Evil (2015-2019) pictures a same-sex couple kissing in the background of a scene that the majority of viewers are likely to miss. Despite its
improvement in recent years, Disney has been slow in comparison to other television companies in its inclusion of LGBTQ+ representations and often misses the mark when leaning into ‘progressive’ themes.
This leads me to Disney’s more recent representation of LGBTQ+ individuals: The Owl House. First aired in 2020, The Owl House follows the story of 14-year-old, Dominican-American girl Luz Noceda (Sarah-Nicole Robles) as she stumbles into a demon realm where she interacts with magical creatures in her pursuit to become the first human witch. Along her journey, she attends the magical school of Hexside where she befriends other witches, who aid Luz on her quest for magic. The show focuses heavily on the relationship between protagonists Luz and Amity (Mae Whitman) who are established as enemies in the third episode ‘I Was a Teenage Abomination’ and gradually become friends across several episodes.
As the first season progresses, so does their bond. Throughout, we’re given hints towards a potential ‘enemies to lovers’ romance between the two. In episode 16 ‘Enchanting Grom Fright’ we see that Amity was planning to ask Luz to the ‘Grom’ and throughout season one Amity often blushes around Luz. These hints throughout the first season foreshadow the events of season two. Here, the connection between the two becomes even more apparent with Amity kissing Luz on the cheek, an episode in which the two become an official couple and a scene in the episode ‘Clouds on the Horizon’ where they share a kiss. Due to these instantly recognisable portrayals of a same-sex relationship that are placed at the heart of the show, writer Mina Himlie states that “it’s representation that can’t be swept under the rug the way queer-coding can.” which is a huge step in LGBTQ+ representations in children’s animation.
In many earlier TV shows from the 2010s, LGBTQ+ representation is fairly ambiguous or ‘queer coded’ and is often present at the very end of the show to keep views high while still featuring some level of diversity, however small. For example, in the fantasy action and adventure animation The Legend of Korra (2012-2014) two female characters, Korra and Asami, are pictured holding hands and looking into each other’s eyes. If this was a scene between two opposite-sex characters the audience would
assume this to be a romantic gesture. However, same-sex relationships are often assumed to be platonic or are read ambiguously by a heterosexual audience. When the creators of The Legend of Korra announced that Korrasami was canon, a lot of fans expressed that the coupling was out of the blue and didn’t make sense. Creators responded by telling audiences to look closer at the previous seasons for their subtle hints. In contrast, oppositesex relationships are assumed to be romantic when there’s even a small connection or vague gesture shown between them. For example, audiences shipped Dipper Pines (Jason Ritter) and Pacifica Northwest (Jackie Buscarino) from Gravity Falls (2012-2016) despite them having little to no interaction and being enemies for most of the show. The Owl House has been a huge progression since Korrasami, as the Lumity relationship spans the majority of the show so far. The hints throughout the series that foreshadow Luz and Amity’s relationship are anything but subtle so that the audience wouldn’t be able to argue that the relationship was unexpected or out of the blue as with The Legend of Korra.
During its run, The Owl House has received lots of praise for its diverse representation of ethnicity, sexuality and gender with fans expressing their approval: “I can’t put into words how thankful I am for you in creating this show.” However, the writer Caitlin Keller notes that we shouldn’t be so quick to applaud Disney itself for these achievements. Representations in The Owl House and other shows are the product of “show creators who insist to see themselves reflected on-screen”, not the companies who produce and distribute them.
The creator of Gravity Falls, Alex Hirsch, claims that Disney ‘forbade’ him from featuring gay characters and that he had to fight to hint at two background characters being in a same-sex relationship at the end of the series. Similarly, the creator of The Owl House, Dana Terrace, states that she was “told by certain Disney leadership that [she] could NOT represent any bi or gay relationship on the channel.” This statement was part of a Tweet made by Terrace that has since been deleted, so we must rely on journalistic accounts and speculation for understanding Disney’s hesitancies. The president and chief creative officer of the Disney Channel, Gary Marsh, claimed that “[it’s] up to the audience to interpret” when asked about the queer-reading of some Disney characters. Writer and campaigner Renee Davidson reads this as Disney’s excuse for excluding LGBTQ+ identities in their characters
while having clear heterosexual ideals present in the canon relationships that have been shown onscreen since 1923. Presumably, this hesitation is due to the controversy surrounding openly LGBTQ+ relationships exemplified by the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill that Disney received backlash for staying silent about. The outcome of The Owl House and its coupling is very different to what we see in Hirsch and Terrace’s statements, so we can safely assume that the series creator fought her corner in order to successfully feature a same-sex couple in a Disney series.
In The Owl House, Luz is canonically bisexual. Terrace confirmed that she based the character on herself as a bisexual woman and expressed that the creation of The Owl House and its characters led her to come out in 2017. The show holds a similar level of importance to many other LGBTQ+ fans who rarely see themselves reflected on-screen, especially not in children’s animation as same-sex relationships seem to be reserved for adult dramas. This is reflected in the overwhelmingly positive response the community had towards supporting characters who are also LGBTQ+ such as Willow’s dads (Eric Bauza and Matt Chapman) and nonbinary character Raine Whispers (Avi Roque). The show’s distinct, diverse representations are what sets The Owl House apart from other series distributed by Disney and demonstrates how LGBTQ+ themes can be implemented successfully into children’s animation.
This leads us to the question: if the show was receiving so much praise, why did Disney cancel it? Back in 2020, before season one had even concluded, Disney decided that The Owl House was going to be cancelled and that season three would be shortened to 3 episodes of 44 minutes. With the effort that it took Terrace and her team to get the show on air in the first place, and Disney’s history of heteronormative representations, it’s easy to jump to conclusions. Many fans took the stance that Disney cut the show due to potential complaints about the LGBTQ+ representations that audience members, specifically parents, may have been against. Terrace, however, released a Reddit post following the announcement and explained Disney’s reasoning behind the beloved show’s cancellation. The reason she was given wasn’t the budget, ratings or its diverse representations, but the fact that the show “didn’t fit the [Disney] brand” as the audience “skews older” than other Disney
Representations in The Owl House and other shows are the product of “show creators who insist to see themselves refected on-screen”, not the companies who produce and distribute them.
Walt
Disney, Library of Congress
The Owl House is one of the first steps in normalising important queer representation for kids on television.
Dana Terrace, creator of The Owl House
Channel shows. A lot of emerging ‘children’s’ animation today appeals to teenagers and young adults, especially those in the LGBTQ+ community, as they can see the representations that weren’t around when they were younger. The cancellation of the show, then, was heavily focused on the idea of “who is the intended audience, and who is actually watching?”
The target audience for Disney Channel is 6-11 year-olds and “the demographic of those watching the channel [has] been getting younger.” Terrace originally created the show with teenagers in mind as the main character was supposed to be 16 years old and the plot has darker themes than other shows, such as demons, curses and possession, despite the original concept being lightened for younger viewers. Even Disney XD - a channel linked to Disney and marketed to an older target demographic - has a very similar audience which explains why it didn’t fit the Disney brand even after it was shifted to this channel. Cable Disney channels in general are designed for what YouTuber and Owl House Production Associate Rebecca Rose, describes as “kid forward episodic comedies”, which may have also affected The Owl House’s suitability as a serialised show. Unfortunately for the series, the decision to cancel came before the release of the Disney+ streaming platform that’s aimed at all ages and has a focus on serialised content just like The Owl House.
The company’s brand is more important for its survival than the continuation of a single show. Terrace mentions that many Disney show creators had to “tighten their belts” due to the theme parks closing because of Covid-19 and, therefore, had to cut back their budgets for the channel. The Owl House was hit the hardest according to Terrace as she wasn’t given the option for a season 4 when parks reopened and it was apparently very difficult to be approved for a shortened season 3. This presumably extends beyond questions of Covid’s financial impact, to broader risks of producing and distributing the show.
Most notably, due to the explicitly LGBTQ+ representations, many countries around the world, especially those in which being gay is illegal, edit out these scenes in order to, as Michael Caldwell reports, “[protect] children from controversial issues.” As the show progresses, the representation becomes more prominent to the story and less easy for scenes to be cut as they’re integral to understanding the series. Disney would then run
the risk of the show being completely banned in too many countries and therefore lose out on a considerable amount of money. Disney has recently seen this happen with its new film Lightyear (2022) which featured a same-sex kiss between two female side characters resulting in it being banned in over a dozen countries. The fact that the Disney Channel is a subscription channel is also relevant here as, despite it being targeted at children, parents would be the ones paying for it. If parents disagree with what their children are watching, they’d likely cancel their payments as they did during the Conservative #boycottDisney campaign in 2022. This would hit Disney financially after an already difficult period because of Covid.
Despite the explanation that Disney executives gave Terrace for The Owl House’s cancellation, we shouldn’t rule out the idea that the show’s LGBTQ+ relationship was part of the reason it got cancelled. Staff writer from Richland Student Media, Grey Schessler, expresses their view that “if Disney had simply taken the time to listen to the creator of the show, a lot of problems they created could’ve been avoided” and potentially the show would still be airing for a full season three. Terrace herself even revealed in her Reddit post that “[she] wasn’t allowed to be a part of any conversations until [she] was just... Told. Wasn’t even allowed to present [her] case.” Disney clearly didn’t realise the potential of The Owl House before it was too late.
Ultimately, The Owl House is an excellent example of progressive LGBTQ+ representations in children’s animation and gives us an insight into what the future of Disney and other television companies could look like. We’ve come a long way since the early 2000s when queer studies scholar Alex Doty expressed that “there is no need for queer canons that are marked as alternative or subcultural because queerness is everywhere.” Yes, queerness is everywhere, but that doesn’t mean that alternative representations aren’t important in our journey to normalise and celebrate LGBTQ+ identities.
Many fans have agreed that The Owl House is going to be remembered historically for its representations and will inevitably be the inspiration for future projects. Similarly, Terrace’s inspiration for the show came from series such as The Legend of Korra and Steven Universe (2013-2019), so who knows what new show idea The Owl House could
spark? There’s no doubt that the series has made a groundbreaking impact as the first representation of bisexuality and two lead female characters in a same-sex relationship on Disney Channel. Hopefully, this is just the beginning and Luz and Amity will have a place among many more future diverse characters.
As said by Bryan Konietzko, co-creator of The Legend of Korra and Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005-2008), “it is long overdue that our media (including children’s media) stops treating nonheterosexual people as non-existent, or as something merely to be mocked”. With the emergence of progressive children’s shows such as High School Musical: The Musical- The Series (2019-), Adventure Time (2010-2018) and many more, we’re moving closer to a more accepting world of children’s media.
Terrace’s contribution to the children’s animation shown on Disney Channel is revolutionary and, to quote Keller, “The Owl House is one of the first steps in normalizing important queer representation for kids on television.”
in a society where modern art acts as a glorified money laundering scheme, could there be artistic value in the teenage angst of 2010s tumblr? a group of students think so.
WRITTEN BY THEO ELDERFIELD
Ever since the invention of the humble message board, the internet has been a safe haven for niche communities. In the pre-digital age, word of mouth travelled slowly. As more people began adapting to life on the world-wide-web, online communities gained the potential to grow exponentially. There is no better example of this growth than the over 100 million Tumblr accounts active in 2014.
If you have never experienced coming home from school, excited to log on to Tumblr.com after a hard day of not only P.E. but double maths as well, I’ll set the scene for you:
You’re 15, over 6 feet tall with more spots on your face than Mr. Blobby. Cartoons have raised you better than your parents did, and you disowned them after they refused to buy an overpriced Lego set for your birthday just days after a global financial collapse. The only thing keeping you sane in your teenage years is your unhealthy obsession
with The 1975. You lie on your bed for hours staring at your laptop as a black and white image of Dr. Martens is reposted by your favourite Skins fan account. Good for you, you’ve become the first person to ever doomscroll.
Finally, you sit up and take a break from your screen. Looking around your bedroom, you notice your Gerard Way poster is about to fall off your wall. Simultaneously, the poster crashes onto your carpet, you receive a text from the cute guy you sit next to in English that he hates you, and your laptop overheats from sitting on your bedsheets for too long. Little do you know, your online activities could rival the most expensive and pretentious pieces of modern art.
Where has the splendour of art disappeared to? Strolling through the Louvre in Paris, you could bear witness to some of the most famous and prestigious paintings ever to be created. Just by
looking at the Mona Lisa, the story behind the work is formulated by your own imagination. The walls of the gallery fall away and there’s no longer a waist high rope keeping you 30 feet away from the masterpiece. Leonardo da Vinci is carefully applying the finishing touches to this beautiful depiction of an Italian noblewoman. She shifts slightly to the left prompting da Vinci to bite his lip in frustration. Until you turn away from the painting and return to the real world.
I dread to think the story your mind churns up after you look at “Comedian”, also known as a banana duct-taped to a plain, white wall. Arguably one of the most popular pieces of modern art, Maurizio Cattelan’s sticky fruit attracted a lot of attention at Art Basel in Miami and from online onlookers.
It would be futile to try and justify Comedian’s artistic value because the cultural value of modern art is almost always unquantifiable. Take two legendary oil paintings, the Mona Lisa and Edvard Munch’s Scream. Each depict a single subject in a simplistic background. It could be contended that the Mona Lisa is the more culturally valuable as the only major thing separating both pieces is around 100 years of historical significance. How does an art critic find cultural value in a modern art piece that has only been on display for a year? They don’t. They pull out their wallets instead.
A single banana with a 30cm strip of duct-tape sold for $120,000. I don’t care how profound, satirical, unconventional, bizarre, or inspirational you think Comedian is; it is not worth $120,000. The couple who bought the un-peel-able banana claimed it “will become an iconic historical object.” They might not be as stupid as you’d assume, since the modest banana now has a home at the Guggenheim.
If modern art proves anything, it’s that art is truly subjective. Art is becoming harder and harder to define as modern art pushes boundaries critics never thought were possible. In the online world, any image or drawing could be considered high art. There’s no physical gallery where these works could be tastefully displayed and given the platform they might deserve. A beautiful photograph is no longer sold on the streets of London and Paris, it’s paraded across social media pages and judged on its like-to-dislike-ratio.
Any social media platform that displays primarily images stands out as a home for art. Instagram is, by far, the biggest image sharing app on the
planet. Searching Instagram using the “#art”, there are almost a billion posts ranging from hand drawn close ups of anthropomorphic feet to crochet bumble bees. Granted, none of these posts belong in the National Gallery, but they’re not any less artistic than Comedian.
Which brings me on to Tumblr, the precursor to Instagram. Unlike its Facebook-owned counterpart, Tumblr captivated a huge audience of teenagers and young people but could never break into those older generations. Everyone feels lonely or out of place during their teenage years, which could have been the reason behind Tumblr’s close community. The lack of a “friend” system and porn filter meant this corner of the internet became a champion for LGBTQ+ rights years before the rest of the mainstream. This freedom of expression combined with a non-judgmental community culminated in the world’s largest art exhibition, spanning 16 years and over a 100 million posts.
Looking at Tumblr in 2023, it’s not much different to any other social media platform. You have a never-ending timeline with text, images, and the occasional video covering similar topics to those you’d find on a brand new TikTok account. Tumblr is a shell of its former self. I was shocked to find colour when I logged in for the first time in 6 years. I thought everything was supposed to be black and white! What happened to the random pictures of breasts I would have to quickly scroll past on the family computer? What happened to the good old days of 2014? It’s hard to believe, but 2014 was nine years ago… Now you have recovered from your existential realisation of the relentless passing of time, I can continue.
Mid-2010s Tumblr was a completely different platform to how it looks now. Teenage angst was at an explosive level. If anything looked vaguely grunge, it was getting a black and white filter. The 1975, Arctic Monkeys and American Horror Story perfectly encapsulated the time when being a teenager sucked more than it ever had before. Many users took to photography, graphic design, or fiction writing to express themselves during that dark time everyone was trudging through together.
Most ex-Tumblr users, including myself, look back on their nights spent scrolling the platform with a great deal of embarrassment. It’s never easy judging yourself on your actions as an adolescent, especially when the digital footprint means it’ll be online forever. Fortunately, there’s a group of
university students who reminisce on their time on Tumblr with fondness. In their final year of university, the group of seven unlikely friends are holding an exhibition to celebrate everything “tumblrcore.”
Like myself, these students are currently studying at Bath Spa University. I first heard about their project when their TikTok account discussing Tumblr related topics appeared on my For You Page (the algorithm knows me too well). Group spokesperson, Christy, greets you with a smile and an adorable edit of her past Tumblr posts. It seems she hasn’t abandoned the Tumblr vibe completely, as she sits at her desk in an oversized lime green sweater talking into a glittery microphone. Very Lana Del Ray of you Christy, well done!
These TikTok posts blasted me back to the time of early YouTube. A girl, early 20s, softly speaking into a camera about makeup or, in this case, old Tumblr posts. It perfectly captured mid-2010s internet, when life was simpler and you’d come home from school to watch Joe Sugg’s daily vlog. Once I interviewed the group as a whole, it became clear that Christy wasn’t the only one still living in 2014.
It warms my heart that these students are living out the indie lifestyle we all dreamed of having as kids. Never had I seen so many sticker-covered laptops, baggy jeans, and chipped phone screens. I couldn’t wait to ask them about how they were single-handedly bringing back the Tumblr aesthetic: of course, I got the exact opposite response I was expecting. They all agreed tumblrcore never left the public eye. Courtney, who spent the interview sat with a quiet intelligence, pointed towards TikTok having a large fanbase of new emos, dubbed “alt.”
This new blood is keeping Tumblr alive on a new platform but won’t be the exhibition’s main subject. From what Christy told me, the showing will be “by the youth, for the youth.” Keen 5SOS fan Chloe chimed in and explained the disgust they had for formalised exhibitions. “We’re focusing on interactivity and fun”, she stated. Well, the event is taking place at a Student’s Union bar, so you can get pissed while listening to Sweater Weather if you really want to.
Sound is going to be a key element in the exhibition. How many galleries have you been to that have a karaoke machine and a DJ? Music was so important in Tumblr culture and I’m over the moon that it has been included in the group’s plans.
As well as raiding their old playlists, they’re also delving into their wardrobes. Mannequins will be dressed in fishnets and all manner of Tumblr-esque clothing for visitors to try on. In addition, there will be some semblance of Tumblr’s online nature. A projector will be displaying a rolling slideshow of submitted pictures to really hit that nostalgia brain cell.
The quality of artifacts present at the exhibition will be completely irrelevant. Every ex-Tumblr user longs for the simpler days of their youth so a gaudy £3 choker is going to be more appealing than an expensive one. Teenagers spend most of their time completely broke, so the cheaper the item, the more likely it will be displayed. The group hope the scratchy fishnets and snapped Life is Strange disk will trigger a collective nostalgia for everyone who attends.
Although, the meaning of Tumblr runs deeper than surface level nostalgia-bate. Chloe described her troubles with identity as a young teenager. “I was an emo girl who felt […] angsty and misunderstood”, she spoke. Tumblr had contributed to her “learning so much about social issues that matter to me, like feminism and LGBTQ+ representation”. “It shaped who I am now”, she said boldly. It became clear to me that the group carried a powerful emotional weight in this project. Nostalgia is going to draw in potential visitors. However, they might leave with the understanding that Tumblr was more than a cringy website for kids. It was a welcome space for the marginalised and underrepresented in modern society and touched the lives of young people everywhere.
For these students-cum-curators, it’s clear that nostalgia is still a driving factor behind their current Tumblr obsession. Personally, I believe we should always be looking for innovation and improvement as a society, rather than dwelling on our past. In reality, the wave of nostalgia is spreading from Millennials to Gen Z. Men in their 30s were collecting Pokémon cards two years ago; now Gen Z are wanting to curate their own Tumblr themed exhibition. Yet, as painful as it is to admit, I sometimes long for an easier time in my life when all that mattered was the current Skins storyline.
It’s wholly because of nostalgia that I’m beginning to question my own excitement for the Tumblr exhibition. How much can nostalgia cloud our own judgement of artistic value? My Dad can sit down
and watch Thunderbirds without batting an eyelid at the puppetry that’s laughably bad by modern standards. From the outside looking in, do I seem like my dad when I recall my days spent browsing American Horror Story fan theories?
With nostalgia being such a prominent factor in modern media, we need experts in the field like Krystine Batcho (a professor of psychology from Ohio State University). According to her, our brains long for feelings we associate with nostalgia, not the content itself. Every time I want to experience Tumblr as it was in 2014, I follow the same ritual as I did nine years ago. I search for the site on Google, log in, and scroll the never ending Matty Healy fan accounts. To ultimately see if Tumblr posts and trends had an artistic value, I will have to wait until I visit the exhibition and get to experience Tumblr outside of the nostalgia-triggering website.
In addition to Tumblr’s nostalgia factor, I have to question the authenticity of Tumblr’s trends. The debate has been raging since the 1800s: should true artists be allowed to follow trends or should they be setting them? Before social media, trends in art were known as a movement. Widely accepted as high art, these movements would often involve likeminded artists working collaboratively on a new artistic direction. Take the completely bizarre world of surrealism, for example. In the early 1900s, European painters were inspired by everyone’s favourite “motherfucker”, Sigmund Freud, and newly derived Marxism. They let their minds paint as freely as possible, resulting in some of the strangest subjects and shapes ever put to canvas.
There is a significant difference between social media trends and artistic movements. It was “trendy” to dye your hair until it looked like a scoop of mint-choc-chip ice cream, but you’re not following a specific Tumblr trend. Following a trend on Tumblr required the recreation, adaptation, or parody of an image. Mirror selfies can be traced back to 1913, well before the first iPhone. Exactly 100 years later, mirror selfies were all the rage on Tumblr as an easy way to show off your outfit and excessive eye shadow. Can a mirror selfie be artistic in any way if it has been done to death? If so, does this put every Tumblr trend at risk of becoming derivative and meaningless?
Cleverly, it seems the Tumblr exhibition is going to be avoiding unnecessary trends and memes from the mid-2010s era. Their focus is on the vibe,
aesthetic, lifestyle… whatever you want to call it. A pair of Dr. Martens is symbolic for that grungy side of Tumblr: there’s a noteworthy difference between legendary and uninspired.
In which category would you put Cattelan’s Comedian; legendary or uninspired? If, like me, you’d put it in the latter, what does that mean for its artistic value? Surely, a piece of art that’s sold for over $100,000 can’t be less culturally valuable than a kid showing off their vinyl collection. In art, are we diminishing Tumblr’s value to teenagers across the globe, or are we holding modern art to a standard it was never meant to reach?
Nostalgia is all-consuming. Anyone who experienced any form of media growing up is subject to this taste ignoring drug. However, Tumblr gave the youth more than a quick scroll and a comment. It’s impact on LGBTQ+ communities online is unmistakable. There’s no denying the platform helped people discovering themselves in an online age where anyone from Andrew Tate to Austin Jones can shape your impressionable personality for the worse. Tumblr culture is amusing to look back on, but it’s a lot more impactful than you’d think.
the exhibition on tumblr culture is taking place at bath spa student’s union on the 11th may with free entry.
"WHEN WoMEN, girls, ANd non-binary filmmakers are Better represented behind the scenes, they're better reflected on the screen."
In 2017, the resurgence of the #MeToo movement helped raise awareness and support for women who had faced sexual abuse and harassment, and brought to light gender inequality in the workplace, especially within the film industry. In 2022, five years after the movement’s attempts to reshape attitudes and treatment towards women, only 24% of behind-the-scenes roles in Hollywood were filled by women.
There has been little change in this number, increasing only by 7% since 1998 when data collection began. While the 2023 Oscar nominations do include various women, such as Mandy Walker for Best Cinematography (Elvis), Domee Shi’s Turning Red for Animated Feature Film, and Sarah Polley’s Women Talking for Best Picture, the balance between male and female nominees is far from equal, with no women being nominated in the category of Best Director. This begs the question as to why there has not been enough progress towards equality within the Hollywood film industry, and how can that improve?
The film industry’s gender divide has not always been so drastic, as women played a significant role in the origins of filmmaking. Alice Guy Blache
is a notable figure in the history of film, being the first female director and one of the first directors in history, creating the first film with a narrative, La Fee aux Choux, or The Cabbage Patch Fairy in 1895/96. She was well respected by the female actresses who worked on her films and admired her differing approach from male directors and her innovative techniques, such as adding colour to her films by hand painting each frame. Blache was not afraid to explore themes that male directors of the time ignored, with her film The Consequences of Feminism looking at a world in which gender roles were reversed.
Along with Blache, many early female makers were exploring themes such as abortions, birth control and adventurous women stepping away from domestic roles, drawing in a mass of female viewers. By the end of the 1920s, it is estimated that 80% of film audiences were female, proving that films made by women which explore the reality of being female were more appealing to women. However, throughout the 1930s, the male dominance of Hollywood began to solidify (Guevara).
The introduction of the Hays Code set regulations regarding nudity, violence, crime, costume, religion and ‘sexual perversions’ (code for LGBTQ+
representation). As a result, female filmmakers began to disappear from the industry, and their achievements began to vanish from history.
Unfortunately, we can still see the effects of this today, with female filmmakers failing to receive the recognition they deserve. This is most evident in the critical acclaim and canon creation of the film industry and its filmmakers. IMDb’s list of the top twenty five directors of all time are all white males, and includes filmmakers such as alleged abuser, Alfred Hitchcock and Roman Polanski, who in 1977 plead guilty to statutory rape, fled America, and continues his career to this day.
In actress Tippi Hedren’s 2016 memoir, she alleges that she was sexually assaulted by Hitchcock during the making of films The Birds (1963) and Marnie (1964). Although there are defenders of Hitchcock who dispute these claims such as Hitchcock experts John Russell Taylor and Tony Lee Moral, there are a number of women who have worked with the director, including Brigitte Auber (To Catch a Thief, 1955), who reported to her biographer Patrick McGilligan that he would often make sexual advances to his female colleagues.. These accounts suggest that there is no certainty to whether film sets are a safe environment for women, whether on and off screen, and highlights the misogynistic attitudes within the industry, choosing to celebrate and profit from a system of patriarchal dominance rather than recognise the talent of women filmmakers in their own right.
In 2022, the top twenty grossing films were all directed by men, with only 9% of the top one hundred having a female director. This number has decreased since 2020, when 15% of major theatrical releases were directed by women, the highest number on record. A 2023 study from USC Annenburg by Dr. Stacy L. Smith, Dr. Katherine Pieper and Sam Wheeler looks at the gender and ethnicity of the directors of the top 1600 films from 2007 to 2022. The study found that across sixteen years there was almost no difference in the Metacritic scores - a website displaying the ratings and reviews of film, TV, music and video games -between male directed (score: 55) and female directed (score: 57) films, highlighting that the inequality of male and female directors has nothing to do with the talent they display. Further evidence of this is the ‘Greatest Film of all Time’ poll by Sight and Sound magazine. The British film magazine
has been conducting this poll for seventy years, and for the first time in its history, a female directed film won: Chantel Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). However, despite this victory for female filmmakers, the lack of female representation in this list, with only four of the top twenty films having a female director, proves that recognition of talent is not equal.
So what is the reason for such extreme gender inequality in the film industry? Despite the attempts of the #MeToo movement to bring attention to the treatment of women, Hollywood continues to be a place in which women are oppressed, scrutinised and often threatened by the male dominated industry. It seems as though the only people who are able to change the way women are treated within the film industry are women themselves. It has been found that films that do include a female director also employ more women in other behind the scenes roles such as producers, editors and cinematographers compared to films with only male directors. Additionally, many women say they would prefer to watch films made and starring women (Forbes). Here, it is important that women know how they can take part in creating this change for the better.
There are a number of charities that intend to combat this problem of gendered inequality, the first example being Women In Film. Founded in 1973 by American film personality Tichi Wilkerson Kassel, WIF (Women In Film) aims to further the careers of women in the film industry “in front of and behind the camera, across all levels of experience—to achieve parity and transform culture.” In their most recent Annual Report, WIF states that “despite progress, systemic bias in the screen industries persists” and that raising awareness for this “systemic imbalance” is the only way to create change.
The charity runs a number of programs with this intention in mind, including For Your Consideration. Here WIF provides an extensive list of women, across ages and ethnicities, who work in all areas of film production, and asks that anyone looking for someone to fill one of these roles considers these women. Each one includes quotes from people they have previously worked with, highlighting their talents to potential employers. Another programme is Reframe, run by WIF and Sundance Institute, which has “developed a research-based action
In 2022,the top twenty grossing films were all directed by men.
plan to further gender parity in the media industry” (Annual Report, p.14). By working with various partner companies in film, TV and wider media, the programme is working towards “more diverse storytelling for expanded audiences around the globe.” In addition to their work in furthering the careers of women in the film industry, WIF also runs a help line (Monday-Friday, 9:00am-4:30pm PT) in order to support those who have faced sexual harassment within the entertainment industry, highlighting the issues raised by the #MeToo movement, of not only creating equality, but also a safe environment for women to work.
Other notable examples of charities and nonprofits creating equality in the film industry include Reel Stories and Bird’s Eye View. Reel Stories argue that: “When women, girls, and non-binary filmmakers are better represented behind the scenes, they’re better reflected on the screen.” The American non-profit was founded by Esther Pearl in 2013 after working in the film industry and noticing the lack of diversity. She discusses how “we all have to learn how to do many many things if we have been less represented in industries.”
The organisation looks at the ways films can shape views towards women, and the negative impact of the images seen by young people. Their work is aimed at young filmmakers, believing that more women and non-binary roles that are filled behind the scenes will allow for their stories to be told on screen and improve representation. Reel Stories aims to train the next generation of female filmmakers, providing camps, workshops, screenings, clubs and mentorships throughout the summer for both children and adults.
UK based organisation, Bird’s Eye View, similarly works to further the careers of female filmmakers. It does so by bringing together audiences to see films made by women and non-binary people, with some examples from 2022 including screenings of Queen of Glory (Nana Mensah) and I’m Fine (Thanks for Asking) (Kelley Kali and Angelique Molina). Their project, Reclaim The Frame, builds communities and audiences in fifteen cities across the UK by “developing safe and accessible spaces for conversation, promoting a de-patriarchal and de-colonised lens on the world, and advocating for social justice in all film spaces.” The charity also offers training and mentoring for filmmakers and distribution professionals in order to increase diversity within the industry as they battle against “misogyny, misogynoir, racism, homophobia,
transphobia, ageism, ableism, and class based discrimination.”
In order for Hollywood, and the film and media industries as a whole, to become more diverse in who they employ and what stories they tell, we need to start paying attention. We need to be more aware of who is making the films we are watching. As stated by Lillian Crawford for Little White Lies, “Hollywood studios have always catered to the assumed interests of Western audiences, leading to the dominance of cis white heterosexual narratives in film which continues today”, leaving little opportunity for female and minority filmmakers to tell their stories. ‘For women, POC and LGBT+ audiences, it’s only been relatively recently that critically-praised, award-winning cinema has represented them on screen.’ If it has been proven that there is no difference in the talent of male and female filmmakers, then we need to ask why the issue of inequality has not already been tackled.
Charities and organisations are doing their part to raise awareness for innovative and ambitious young female filmmakers, but it is the responsibility of the industry to act upon this and create the change we need. We need to create a safe workplace, in which women are able to share as many roles as men so that female filmmakers can tell the stories that need to be told.
In 2022, only 24% of behind-thescenes roles in Hollywood were filled by women.
The police and legal system must adopt a proactive, rather than reactive approach to the crime, before it is too late
WRITTEN BY DAISY HADLEY
Content Warning: Discussion of stalking and domestic violence. No graphic images included.
Since the beginning of time, women and girls alike are subject to emotional, psychological and physical abuse. But what remains underreported, underprosecuted and underfunded is the crime of stalking. Stalking is, statistically, a crime against women; with 80% of victims identifying as female and 70% of perpetrators identifying as male.
The crime situates itself firmly within contemporary discussions around gender inequality and fourthwave feminism which is characterised by digital activism due to its intrinsic links to online abuse. Described as a pattern of consistent behaviours that are fixated upon an individual that causes distress and alarm or threatens the physical and emotional wellbeing of the victim, it is a complex crime that is a manifestation of wider issues of patriarchy and misogyny within contemporary culture. In 80% of cases the victim is known to the perpetrator, which causes the crime to be lost within the wider behaviours of domestic violence cases; although both crimes overlap, they are entirely separate monolithic entities that should be prosecuted as such. With cases rising rapidly amidst the Covid-19 pandemic, contemporary fourth-wave feminists must initiate a call to action
immediately, whereby the law is altered and clarified to ensure long-term protection, funding is increased to deliver correct police training, and for its links to domestic violence to be globally understood. Above all, we must take inspiration from second-wave feminist agendas that aims to overthrow hindering patriarchal gender roles that maintain female subordination in both her private and professional life. Here, we can use second-wave feminism ideas and activism to reveal what stalking truly is; a crime against women.
Various organisations, activist groups, the police, and the law itself are currently engaged in a rather unproductive shouting match, whereby the definition of stalking is an all-around unachievable concept due to the crime’s heterogenous nature. When boiled down to the behaviour of the perpetrator alone, stalking is characterised by consistent unwanted communication. But when examined under the microscope, stalking consists of a vast range of behaviours that, when isolated, may appear entirely innocent.
Often the most widely recognised examples of stalking, behaviours such as following the victim, showering them with gifts and perusing them
‘100% of stalking cases involve invading the victims’ social media networks.’
online are only the tip of the iceberg, with the large majority of such crimes escalating into emotionally abusive behaviours with detrimental effects on the victims’ physical and mental wellbeing. In a digital age, the crime can consume every avenue of the victim’s life, with 100% of stalking cases invading the victims’ online spaces and social media networks.
The rate of stalking is growing fast. In 2007, it was reported that 1 in 14 women had been stalked in their lifetime. Cut to 2020, where the statistic has now rocketed to 1 in 5 women, enough to make any woman shut her curtains and delete all social media. The figures are continuing to creep up year by year with just under 100,000 cases reported to the police in 2021-2022, which appears minuscule when the British Crime Survey estimated in 2006 that around 5 million people experience some form of stalking every year. Stalking remains one of the most underreported crimes in the UK, and what makes this even more alarming, is the crimes escalating nature.
Stalking often progresses into physical violence and sexual abuse, and in 94% of homicide cases, stalking is a key element. The police and legal system must adopt a proactive, rather than reactive approach to the crime, before it is too late. The crime is one of the most common forms of abuse in the UK, often a pivotal characteristic of domestic abuse, which is often forgotten about, and muddied into other criminal behaviours when they come to a form of single criminal climax that the law recognises.
What current debate, and activists such as The Suzy Lamplugh Trust make the mistake of, is throwing around these (albeit) shocking figures without any connection to the identity of the victims themselves and run the risk of dehumanising the numbers. Despite the crimes prevalence, the legal system is still lagging behind and is failing to convict preparators.
The law has its own unique, but rather unhelpful interpretation of stalking. First recognised as a crime by law in the UK in 1997, the Protection from Harassment Act, consists of 6 very vague ‘acts or omissions’ that ‘in particular circumstances, are ones associated with stalking.’ A clarification of
such ‘circumstances’ is missing from the legislation, a legal document that is ultimately nothing more than an ignorant suggestion of what stalking should look like. Reviewed in 2012, The Protection of Freedoms act provided policy makers with an opportunity to improve and update the law to better protect stalking victims; an opportunity that was evidently missed. The act that is still used to prosecute cases today is without any legal definition of the crime.
Instead, we are left with the same six acts or omissions such as ‘following a person’ and ‘watching or spying’, which have serious legal overlap with the crime of harassment. Stalking is often charged as such, leaving victims dissatisfied and ultimately minimises the experience altogether.
What makes this so detrimental to conviction rates, is the power that legal language has to inform cultural attitudes and ideas. Without clear definitions that can be weaponized by women today, some do not know the difference between stalking, harassment, and domestic abuse. Activist group ‘Protection Against Stalking’ is devoted to raising awareness of stalking behaviours and developed their own definition of the crime to bring clarity to those women who are unsure how to label the behaviours of the preparator. Organisations such as this are crucial for empowering women with the knowledge to protect themselves from dangerous stalking behaviours.
The 2012 act introduced the division of the crime, either falling into Section 2A; behaviour that amounts to stalking, or section 4A; stalking involving fear or violence. Although this may be a step in the right direction towards clarifying the crime and recognising the role fear plays within it, dividing the experience into two sub-sections, one more serious than the other, works to diminish those cases that do not turn violent. Stalking is stalking, and such legislation points to the law’s reluctance to recognise the crimes severity, which is routed in patriarchal ideology that maintains the subordination of female suffering.
Although Justice Minister Sam Gyimah made strides in 2017 by extending the maximum sentence for stalking to 14 years in cases that are racially motivated, this is still not a proportional punishment to the suffering of their victims. For them, the crime is life-defining; rather than a crime that has a strict narrative of beginning, middle and end, stalking and its effects are never-ending.
British charity Supportline describes the ways in which stalking has detrimental impacts ‘upon feelings of safety’, and with 78% of victims suffering with PTSD, this account is all too true for the women who are persistently watched, hunted down and tormented by the perpetrators. The law continues to fail by awarding the majority of preparators with a reduced sentence for assisting with evidence and good behaviour behind bars; a standard legal formality that is inappropriate for criminals who are likely to reoffend. What remains evident is that the 2012 Protection of Freedoms Act is ineffective, with it carrying alarming rates of under prosecution.
The current prosecution rates for stalking are seriously alarming, and with only 1% of reports resulting in CPS prosecution, and only 11% of those cases ending in a custodial sentence under section 2A, and 9% under section 4A, it would not be an exaggeration to describe conviction rates as a ‘drop in the ocean.’ Just under half of these sentences are suspended, which leaves victims with no closure, and a return to the terror-stricken lifestyle that the law claims it can protect them from. Victims are actively discouraged from seeking legal action out of fear that it may aggravate the stalkers behaviours as women are faced with a double-edged sword whereby they are not only blamed for the crime in the first place, but are at fault for provoking the perpetrator. With this in mind, the dropout rates for criminal convictions are moving at a lightning speed; growing from 27% in 2015-2016 to a whopping 46% in 2019-2020.
For victims who reach out to the police in lifethreating circumstances, their response is in most cases inadequate and unacceptable as they often ward off legal action. Victims report that they were laughed away and not taken seriously, victim blamed, and told to take matters into their own hands by installing cameras and in some cases relocate all together. Women are being transformed into long-term victims that must not only learn to deal with the immense emotional repercussions, but actively go out of their way to prevent the crime from escalating. After experiencing the crime, 31 year-old Michelle Cook articulated the ways in which the crime altered not only her life but her children’s too.
Women are sacrificing their lives, identities and achievements in an attempt to provide
themselves with basic safety. The hidden economic consequences faced by the victims are yet another twist of the knife for women whose only option of physical relocation wipes them of their life savings.
Gender inequality and the neoliberalist ideology of self-interest is at play here; women are putting their hands into their own pockets and paying for their safety in bank-breaking sums; with a study in 2021 by the Crime Science journal identifying that the average victim spends a total £20,579.74 over the course of 14 months in order to protect themselves. What remains clear is the totality of this crime; every branch of the victim’s identity is altered.
A report from the Suzy Lamplugh trust recorded that 60% of victims found the police unhelpful, which points to larger gaps in police training whereby overlaps between stalking and harassment are not addressed or clarified. This lack of training results in police incorrectly recording incidents in isolated reports, which causes problems in the courts later down the line. Police only refer victims to support services in 15% of cases.
Government funded independent stalking advocates provide integral emotional support that has significant impact on the victims mental health. They guide victims through the legal proceedings which leads to a more likely guilty conviction. Despite statistics pointing towards the major victim benefits of stalking advocates, they are not being utilised due to serious underfunding; once again patriarchy dictates the price of women’s wellbeing.
On the flip side, the Multi Agency Stalking Intervention Programme (MASIP) adopts a proactive approach to the crime by examining potential preparators and their behaviours in aid of addressing them with a therapy-informed approach before they escalate. Preparators are, as UCL’s 2020 MASIP evaluation reports, equipped with ‘tools necessary to address their obsession and fixation in the future’, a much more effective approach than waiting for the victims to be attacked in a way that the law recognises. Like stalking advocates, the programme is seriously underfunded, with stakeholders not even batting an eyelid, in one case due to the programme ‘not fitting with their outcome of interests.’ What interests are those then? Interests that value women as second-class citizens underserving of protection?
The British judicial system is not fit for this type of crime that is ultimately founded on coercive control. A guilty sentencing can only be secured if it can be proved that the perpetrator acted with intent to cause serious distress or harm, and without any reasonable doubt. A conviction is, therefore, entirely based on perspective, and with traditional gender roles infecting the legal system and wider cultural understandings of the crime, judges and juries are continuing to dismiss the fear felt by women due to the expectations of traditional masculinity that permits and encourages men to dream, seek and secure a woman.
Within the framework of traditional gender roles, stalking maintains outdated ideology. Infiltrating romantic comedy genres on the silver screen, the insulting stereotype that dictates women to always be open to romance informs contemporary culture’s understanding of stalking. The dismissal and minimisation of the crime that is so often apparent in police response belongs to a wider discourse that equates ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ to ideal western femininity; to be a woman is to seek companionship with a man, no matter their behaviour. With marriage dominating the blueprint of quintessential womanhood, to be pursued by a man is often misconceived as romantic within the context of stalking.
Gender roles tell us that for a man to be fixated over a woman is a step towards happy-ever-after. As seen in Netflix’s smash hit drama ‘You’, outdated, romanticised stories of stalking continue to circulate within popular culture. Narratives misrepresent the crime as a display of dedication, which within a meritocratic society are not only admirable, but charming. It is no secret that the popular media crafts and cultivates values, norms and societal understandings, which subsequently inform political policy. No wonder victims are being ignored and told they should be ‘flattered’ when the gender roles tell us stalking behaviours are romantic.
The media continues to inaccurately portray the crime by framing the stalker as the stranger in the night, motivated by loneliness and social isolation. But what the figures point to is a link between stalking behaviours and domestic violence, whereby in 84% of cases, the perpetrator was known to the victim as an ex-romantic partner.
This victim – perpetrator relationship is marginalised by popular media, with a 2013 content-analysis study of films for the Western Journal of Communication, identifying that only 33% of the sample showcased narratives that saw the victim stalked by their ex-partners. Such disparity between reality and fantasy has alarming consequences; ex-partners are routinely perceived as less dangerous by the general public within the context of stalking, but the frightening reality remains that stalkers that are known to the victim cultivate higher levels of fear.
As observed in cases of domestic violence, to close the door on the relationship does not always close the door on the abuse that came with it, and for stalkers who target their victim from a previous relationship, the patterns of behaviours are likely to last double the time they would if they had not known them prior. The police, once again, seem to endorse these incorrect discourses that are distributed within popular media by often refusing to take ex-partner stalking cases seriously. There is a gap in police knowledge that needs to be addressed, whereby cases of ex-partner stalking must be treated the same as, if not more seriously than victims that are not known to the perpetrators.
When the world grinded to a halt in 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic created circumstances that supported stalking behaviours. Figures show that 2020 alone saw a 200% increase of stalking cases in the UK, as victims declared they felt as though they were ‘sitting ducks.’ The government’s strategy that equated safety with staying in the home was not entirely universal and was in fact paradoxical for the victims of stalking. Whilst the majority of the nation used their own homes as a source of protection, stalking victims were trapped in a place of immense danger and vulnerability.
Staying at home meant victims were easier to locate, the reliance of digital communication opened new networks of infiltration to the preparator, and the track and trace system virtually laughed in the face of vulnerable victims. Trends of increasing domestic violence climbed to the forefront of popular media, and even caught the government’s attention as they announced a £2million donation in April of 2020 for domestic violence helplines. Where was the support for stalking? The pandemic shed light on gaps in knowledge and pre-conceived ideas about stalking,
that render the crime less serious than similar forms of coercive control like domestic abuse.
Expanding the perspective from national to international, stalking is without a doubt a worldwide issue. In a world where only 70 out of 195 countries have stalking laws (whether or not these are effective is a different conversation altogether), it is religious and cultural ideological differences that inform the legislation of those countries that neglect the legal protection of stalking victims. An academic study for the Journal of Interpersonal Violence in 2021 concluded that stalking rates are higher in collectivist societies that value traditional gendered hierarchies, and that these women are not equipped with the knowledge to understand, let alone identify stalking behaviours.
The painfully low rates of stalking prosecution point to a larger problem of national misogyny in the UK, let alone across the globe. The legal justice system and its supporting bodies continue to mock the goals of second-wave feminism, which sought to challenge the ways structural patriarchy constructs women as objects for male consumption and domination at the price of female safety. Changing the law will not in-turn change the outdated attitudes surrounding stalking that come with it, and to address the legal inequalities that leave women vulnerable, feminism must hark back to the secondwave dynamic characterised by sisterhood that aimed to overthrow oppressive gendered power dynamics and marry it with the discourses of fourth wave digital activism and campaign for a new legal definition of stalking to subsequently increase convictions.
To contribute to the possibility of change, feminists must call for more funding, better police training, and an introduction of stalking registers within the UK. Above all, in a world where knowledge is power, we must confidently push for an improved raised awareness of stalking. I therefore urge you to sign the Stalker Register petition that is still grossly under supported on change.org, and be part of the change you wish to see in the world.
Helpful resources:
https://www.womensaid.org.uk https://www.paladinservice.co.uk
https://www.suzylamplugh.org/refer-someone-to-us
car crashes are the number 1 cause of foetal death related to maternal trauma.
the heightened risk of a woman dying behind the wheel has always been avoidable. a
dive into the gendered data gap in car crash testing.
WRITTEN BY JULIETTE PETERSON-CAFFELL
Content Warning: Some readers may find the contents of this article to be disturbing. Contains discussion of car accidents, sexism and injury descriptions.
When I was eighteen, I survived a serious car crash. Having just passed my driving test a week earlier, I had insisted on driving myself into college for my A level exam that day. I had left home in good time, driving down a nearby lane at a more than sensible 30 miles per hour. But alas, after a surprise from another driver on a blind corner, I lost control of my car and skidded into a stony Cornish hedge. Darkness.
When I woke up, I was being pulled from my car by another driver who had heard the impact. I had been knocked out by my airbag, which had hit me directly in the throat and chin, and I was left with a cocktail of painful injuries; a fractured hip, broken ribs and whiplash. If it had been a high-speed crash on a motorway, my chances of survival would’ve been slim. Recovery took months: for the first
week I was unable to get up the stairs, I had severe bruising on my neck and stomach, painful whiplash, had lost my voice completely and had difficulty breathing due to my impacted ribs. It took me months to get back behind the wheel.
Although my accident was four years ago now, I still often struggle with being on my feet for more than a few minutes, and I can’t even run without getting numbness and pain in my impacted leg. I find it heart-breaking that as a young person who loves being active, especially ocean sports, I now have to be incredibly careful of my limits or could risk getting into serious danger.
Speaking to others with similar experiences after my recovery, despite knowing more men than women who had been in similar accidents, my male counterparts’ injuries had generally been far less severe. I couldn’t understand why I had been through so much pain when many of the men I knew had just experienced some bruising and mild whiplash at a push. It didn’t seem fair.
However, it all became glaringly obvious after looking into the current car safety testing practices. In a society where being a male is the automatic standard for testing and equipment, there is a huge data gap on the impact an accident can have on the female body. Some have proposed that vehicle choice and size may be a factor in the higher likelihood of female deaths - as data by the IIHS indicates that women are more likely to choose a smaller vehicle. However, there is another incredibly important factor that has seemingly been overlooked for far too long. It’s not essential for car manufacturers to use an accurately sized female crash test dummy. Instead, many companies have opted to use a scaled down version of a male dummy. While the most frequently used ‘50th percentile’ male dummy weighs 76kg and is 1.77m, this scaled down version is described as the ‘5th percentile dummy’, but weighing in at only 48kg and with a height of 1.44m, it is more commonly compared to the size of a twelve-year-old girl.
Sadly, it is only since 2015 that companies have even been required by the Euro NCAP to use this 5th percentile dummy in the driver’s seat for the ‘full width frontal impact test’, but there is no legal requirement to use anything but the ‘50th percentile’ dummy for rear impact collisions. These decisions are justified by some with the statistics that men are twice as likely to cause car accidents. However, when a woman is involved in a crash, she is nearly 37% more likely to have damage to her abdomen, 45% more likely to suffer whiplash injuries to the neck, and most shockingly, 80% more likely to have injuries to the legs. She is also over 17% more likely to die as a result of a crash.
When Euro NCAP’s technical director, Richard Schram, was interviewed about this choice in 2020 by Autotrader, he stated that “ the underlying structure of the dummy isn’t biased towards male or female” and that “biologically, females are slightly weaker, and women sitting closer to the steering wheel can be an issue”. This contradictory statement, particularly the comment on seating position, feels laced with implications that the blame lies on women.
This type of narrative relies on preconceived notions that women are less comfortable behind the wheel, leaning on the popular stereotype that women are bad drivers that has endured since the 1920s, and is severely outdated. As stated by the automotive historian Michael L. Berger in Women Drivers! The emergence of folklore and stereotypic
opinions concerning feminine automotive behavior, this stereotype was not seen as frequently before this time period, due to cars being largely reserved for the upper classes only. However, World War One provided many women with the chance to learn to drive when their husbands left to fight. When the price of cars decreased and became more available to wider society - particularly the middle classesthis increased accessibility marked the birth of the stereotype that women are bad drivers. As women were gaining more freedom outside of the home, these sexist narratives inherently stemmed from fears of disruption to the ‘status quo’ of the time period, and somewhat shockingly have stood the test of time for the last 100 years.
An example of this is a 1958 article by Carl Stelling discussing the introduction of highways in the USA, where he describes female drivers as “timid, panicky, pastel-lovers” and suggests that driving lanes of the future will be made wider to “allowing women greater margin of error in their manoeuvrings.” In popular media, female drivers have been the subject of comedy through the years, with sketches in shows such as The Jetsons (1962), with a whole episode titled ‘Jane’s Driving Lesson’ that ends with a robber begging to be placed in jail rather than enduring any more of Jane Jetson’s driving. However, recent research conducted into driver safety tells a totally different story. Contradicting this ideology is a 2017 study on driver distraction, published in Frontiers in Psychology, that actually found women to be significantly safer and less distracted drivers than their male counterparts, with older women being the least at risk of distraction, and young men being the most at-risk group.
It is also worth mentioning that this increased risk factor for men is possibly rooted in the patriarchal pressures and norms faced by men in western societies. According to the APA, traditional masculinity is characterised by ‘stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression.’
Men who are socialised in a traditionally masculine setting are more likely to engage in violent or risky behaviours, such as speeding. This is one of the reasons that the life expectancy of a man is 4.9 years less than their female counterparts. When black box company, Insurethebox, released their findings from 5.5 billion miles worth of driving data, men drove faster than women in almost every age category, with the highest difference being in the youngest demographic as 17 year old boys were 130% more likely to speed than their
me to this interest in the dire need for improving car safety for women, but also to being a more cautious driver myself. My hope is that the information that I’ve shared will empower more women to be more vocal and knowledgeable about their own safety needs when selecting a car in the future, as well as continuing to lead the way as safe drivers that truly understand the increased risks posed for us when something does go wrong behind the wheel. Although an accurate female crash test model isn’t yet approved, the research is being forwarded thanks to the efforts of Dr Linder and her team.
The BBC states that The UN ‘is examining’ changing its crash testing regulations to better suit all types of drivers but no decision has yet been reached, and in the US, a spokesperson for The Auto Alliance told Consumer Report in 2019 that due to the average American woman being close in height and weight of the 50th percentile male dummy, they didn’t feel a female version would be useful. Therefore, one of the best methods is to lobby these policy makers through our purse power. We can do this by only supporting brands like Volvo and Toyota who are leading the way in making car safety more equal for all, as well as campaigning for change on social media and through protests.
The heart-breaking statistics on the heightened dangers faced by female drivers are proof that this issue should tackled through inclusive safety testing requirements. Sadly, the policy makers that continue to assert this clear bias against 50% of the population are truly proving to be the dummies.
when a woman is involved in a crash, shockingly, she is over 17% more likely to die as a result of a crash.
WRITTEN BY NIAMH PAYNE
We’ve all grown up being fed the idea that girls and boys need to play with very gender-specific toys; girls must play with dolls and tea sets and dresses while boys have to play with action figures, cars and dinosaurs.
As my Maimeó’s only granddaughter, I was given a lot of traditional ‘girl’ toys, and my first toy was a white teddy bear in a pink dress called Fiona. I was also given dolls and their accessories, many of which I ended up not playing with. I was a Scout through and through, preferring to play sports outside than dress-up inside, and as I got older I became interested in motorsports and horror games such as Five Nights at Freddy’s. I still went through a Disney Princess phase, although I wasn’t really into dress-up, and I found dolls creepy- a testament I keep to this day.
With that being said, why do girls and boys feel they have to play with specific toys? And why are such gender binaries assigned and enforced from infancy? The answer is relatively simple; marketing is based on traditional values.
Toys marketed towards girls are often enshrined with pink, covered in glitter, and, in most recent years, usually feature unicorns or mermaids. The most famous example of pink marketing towards girls is the iconic Barbie; a dress-up doll
introduced to the United States in 1959. Barbie dolls became a staple toy for young girls since their introduction, despite the controversies surrounding the toy. Barbie has been criticised for perpetuating gender stereotypes; for its lack of diversity and, to quote health professor Zali Yager, representing a ‘completely unattainable figure for adult women.’ The recalled, and much satirised, Teen Talk range of the doll, released in 1992, spoke one of four randomly selected phrases, including: “Math class is tough”, “Will we ever have enough clothes?”, and “Let’s plan our dream wedding!” The brand has notably moved the toy into the modern era, such as giving the original Barbie doll different professions, such as pilot, vet, astronaut and game developer, and introducing a more inclusive range of dolls, including characters with prosthetics and wheelchair users, a doll with vitiligo, and a wider range of skin tones.
In comparison, toys marketed towards boys are usually blue or green in colour and have a much blockier shape compared to the glossy features of a doll. Despite their 2021 pledge to remove gender bias from their toys, LEGO bricks are commonly associated with boys - save for the pink and purple ‘LEGO Friends’ range introduced specifically for girls- and famously have sharper edges that replicate that of a real-life brick. Compared to the much smoother edges of a toy such as Gabby’s Dollhouse Kitty Fairy’s Garden Treehouse or the Melissa & Doug Wooden Ice Cream Counter, we
can easily see that toys aimed at boys are built to be more robust, with pointed edges and less-styled designs while toys aimed at girls are soft or highly polished. Toys aimed at boys also usually have an action-based function, such as a vehicle or a gun.
Much like Barbie was ‘the’ toy marketed towards girls, Action Man was ‘the’ toy for boys. Action Man debuted in 1966, and as the name suggests, Action Man was indeed a man of action; with figures based off different branches of the armed forces - Action Soldier for the army, Action Sailor for the navy and Action Pilot for the air force. The action figure reinforces the stereotype that boys are inherently violent; and nothing screams ‘violence’ more than the military. Unlike Barbie, however, Action Man was discontinued in the 2000s and despite a few attempted relaunches, it has never reached the same height of popularity it had in its early years. In a sense, both Barbie and Action Man are weirdly similar in their gendered marketing and reinforcement of gender roles. What is even stranger is that, when I looked for equivalent studies on gender stereotypes for Action Man there was only one. How funny is it that all the blame for pushing children’s gender stereotypes has gone into the toys marketed towards girls, yet researchers seem to ignore the ones targeted towards boys?
It’s also worth highlighting that toys marketed towards boys are typically based on more practical skills such as STEM and construction, or play into a science-fiction element, such as robotic toys and super-hero action figures and costumes. Consequently, children’s science kits are also typically aimed at primary-school-aged boys, such as the Wild Science CSI Forensic Science Lab and Experimake Chemistry Chaos. Whilst kits such as Experimake Lipsticks and Lip Gloss kit and Wild Science Bath Bomb Factory are clearly targeted at girls, with their pink packaging, and focus on cosmetics. Despite the push to include girls and women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths), the fact that girls’ science kits still revolve around the same stereotypes now as they did back in the early 2000s when I was a child, suggests that women in STEM are still not taken seriously and that girls are not being encouraged to pursue a science career unless it’s connected to more ‘feminine’ things such as make-up development, or beauty-related.
Taking The Entertainer website as an example, in the ‘Home Role Play Toys’ section, though most
of the toys now appear more gender-neutral, the shop still offer the Disney Minnie Mouse Sparkle and Clean Playset and the Dolu Unicorn Pink Washing Machine and Accessories. Both of which are (unsurprisingly) pink and are targeted towards young girls, featuring Mickey’s girlfriend Minnie Mouse- and (again unsurprisingly) unicorns. In the carousel pictures, both toys show only girls playing with the product, continuing the stereotype that girls’ toys should get them ready for the ‘domestic sphere’ when they grow up. Once again, this continues to enforce gender binaries for children -girls are shown playing with fake cleaning toys, while boys get to dress up and pretend to save the day as their favourite superhero - which is certainly more enjoyable compared to cleaning!
So why are young girls being shown using cleaning toys? Because they will be expected to perform unpaid domestic labour when they are older, something they have likely seen their own mum do, and are being encouraged to mimic her. Society has not yet moved past the ‘women belong in the house’ mentality yet, and as such, children are still being raised on the ‘girls are to be seen and not heard’ and ‘boys are just loud’ ideals.
The website further shows the splits between girls’ and boys’ toys in its presentation of dolls versus ‘action toys.’ Boys’ ‘Action Toys’, show an (almost entirely male) range of superhero-based toys on its first page, compared to the Dolls page which displays baby-style dolls or dress-up dolls. The use of superheroes for boys versus babydolls for the girls indicates the enduring expectations on the genders; boys are expected to be active and more career-based while girls are still expected to look after the children and the home, and these ideals are being taught through the toys they are given.
Shirley R. Steinberg, a scholar in pedagogy and children’s studies, wrote in the 2011 book Kinderculture, ‘advertising for girls’ toys has changed little since the 1950s- missing are the allusions to how well the toy stoves provide training for home economics and the demands of motherhood’, adding that ‘similarly, toy ads for boys have witnessed only minor alterations in the past forty years.’ Similarly, lecturers Cordelia Fine, from the University of Melbourne, and Emma Rush, from Charles Sturt University, wrote in their 2018 article “Why Does all the Girls have to Buy Pink Stuff?” The Ethics and Science of the Gendered Toy Marketing Debate’ that ‘‘Boy toys’ (transportation and construction toys, action figures and weapons)
facilitate physicality, competition, dominance and construction, while ‘girl toys’ (dolls, beauty- and domestic-themed toys) facilitate domesticity, concern with appearance and nurturance’. Fine and Rush referenced the 2005 article ‘Characteristics of Boys’ and Girls’ Toys’ by Judith E. Owen Blakemore and Renee E. Centers from Indiana University – Purdue University Fort Wayne, who wrote, “We found that girls’ toys were associated with physical attractiveness, nurturance, and domestic skill, whereas boys’ toys were rated as violent, competitive, exciting, and somewhat dangerous.”
Childhood is a time when children should be encouraged to explore and create their own identities, not have a sociallyapproved one forced upon them. For all society’s vinegar about children not being able to consent to things, it doesn’t take into its own impact on children’s mental health.
There have been moves to stop the gendering in toys and across advertisements in general. In 2022, Spain banned toy manufacturers from using gender stereotypes in their adverts, so companies would no longer ‘be allowed to use blue or pink colours to imply that their products are intended for boys or girls’, and in the UK, the Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) banned gender stereotypes in adverts back in 2019, which explains why parents can see more mixed-sex adverts on the modern screen. There are still adverts, however, that scream ‘gender difference’; two that have stood out to me are RoboAlive, which features two boys playing with robotic snakes and lizards, and Zoomer’s Enchanted Unicorn, which features a girl playing with a purple, dancing unicorn toy on wheels. Both of the adverts play into their gender conventionsRoboAlive’s advert has a harsh, almost shouty over voice, who constantly refers to the lizard and snake as “he”, indicating that the toys are also meant to be gendered.
Two girls practising yoga in the garden serve as victims of the boys’ toy prank-screaming in stereotypical fright at the sight of the RoboAlives. The advert also places heavy emphasis on the robotic nature of the toy, again reinforcing the belief that boys are more interested in the mechanical side of the toy, alongside a focus on rough and domineering play, whilst girls’ interests are purely aesthetic. In parallel, Zoomer’s advert is narrated by a girl, and like the animals of RoboAlive, the unicorn is gendered as ‘she.’ The version of childhood play
presented here consists of the little girl brushing the toy’s ‘hair’ with a tiny plastic hairbrush and kissing it on the nose. On top of that, she is wearing a pink t-shirt and has a pink glittery bow in her hair, to really sell that this toy is ‘girly’ and is only meant for girls. There are no other people shown in this advert, suggesting that the Enchanted Unicorn is for much more solitary playtime than the RoboAlive animals, and while the girl is seen smiling, she is not running around and laughing the way the boys in the RoboAlive advert did, further reinforcing the idea that boys are loud and noisy during play while girls are quieter and will happily brush any toy that has hair, or a hair substitute.
The gender split isn’t just found in television advertisements, anyone who has ever been in a toyshop will know of the stark differences between what is considered a ‘girl’s’ toy and what is considered a ‘boy’s’ toy. Toy shops are engineered to conform to the gender binary, with the girls’ aisles looking like the colour pink had vomited all over the shelves while the boys’ aisles are packed with action toys, superhero costumes and chemistry sets.
Society has not yet moved past the ‘women belong in the house’ mentality yet, and as such, children are still being raised on the ‘girls are to be seen and not heard’ and ‘boys are just loud’ ideals.
There are pushes to make toy stores more genderneutral, however; the US state of California released a new law in 2021 stating that all large retailers must have a separate, gender-neutral section, alongside any ‘girls’ and ‘boys’ aisles in the shop, and companies can be fined $250 (£180) for the first violation and $500 (£368) for further issues. In Sweden, several large toy stores have been gender-neutral since 2013, where ‘play kitchens stand opposite train sets; baby strollers are piled beside a stack of toy guns; My Little Pony stares at swords and ninja costumes; princess dresses brush up against firefighter outfits.’ As a child, I always gravitated to the soft toy animals at the back of the store, but I remember walking down aisle upon aisle of Barbie dolls and BRATZ dolls, dolls that you could ‘feed’ a fake bottle to - not to mention the accessories for the dolls; the buggies and fake nappy bags and clothes. It was a bit much, and to some children, it could be damaging. Emma Lawrence from One World Education writes ‘gendered advertising towards children needs to be stopped since it puts pressure on families to
fill society’s rigid gender binary, it limits children’s future occupational opportunities, and despite this, it is only becoming more common’ (2017). Despite the article being six years out of date, Lawrence’s statement still holds up; with more of a focus on women’s and LGBTQ+ rights in recent years, we are sadly still seeing gender stereotypes in children’s media.
Despite showrunners today advertising their shows as unisex, there are persistent gender stereotypes and biases in children’s television shows as well. In a 2011 index of the Care Bears, which lists the Care Bears from their earliest group in 1981 up to those added in the 2000s, there appears to be a fairly even split between male and female Care Bears, however, some of the names jump out rather starkly. For example, ‘Share Bear’, ‘Harmony Bear’, ‘True Heart Bear’, ‘Sweet Dreams Bear’ and ‘Lovea-Lot Bear’ are listed as female, while ‘Grumpy Bear’, ‘Play-a-Lot Bear’, ‘Messy Bear’, ‘Too Loud Bear’ and ‘Do Your Best Bear’ are listed as male. There is also a male bear called ‘Amigo Bear’‘Amigo’ being the Spanish word for a male friend; the female equivalent is ‘amiga. As of 2011, there is no ‘Amiga Care Bear’ to balance out the bias.
While there are some bears that have names which subvert the gender stereotypes - ‘Tenderheart Bear’ being male, and ‘Laugh-a-Lot Bear’ being female, on the whole, the ‘active’ names tend to be given to the male bears, enforcing that boys are more ‘action’-based, much like the toys that are marketed to them. Overall, these names appear to try and convince children certain personality traits are more ‘female’ and others are ‘male’, rather than traits that are fluid and interchangeable. Much like many other toy brands, Care Bears has been adapted for screen, spawning several films and TV shows, the most recent being 2019’s Unlock the Magic series. Toys for the show were created, and while not all will be explicitly advertised, parents and children will see them on store shelves or online and will buy them.
A more contemporary example of this gendered bias is in the Nickelodeon show PAW Patrol (2013-present). The show currently has nine seasons, one released theatrical film and a sequel film in the works. It also has several mini-series, such as Sea Patrol, Mighty Pups, Mission: PAW and Ready, Race Rescue, as well as a spin-off show called Rubble & Crew, released in February 2023.
The series is massively popular, especially with children and has a huge amount of merchandise, however, parents and academics are not taken with the show, with many parents complaining about the show, with Dani Di Placido from Forbes writing, ‘Paw Patrol [is] incredibly annoying, repetitive show, with a theme tune that invades the brain’ and ‘Paw Patrol doesn’t care to show its characters navigate the treacherous landscape of friendship; it just wants to sell toys to your children.’
In the main seven pups that make up the PAW Patrol - Chase, Marshall, Skye, Rocky, Rubble and Zuma- there is only one female; Skye. While other female members were added in later seasons, notably Everest and Liberty, Skye was the only female pup for the first series of the show. Within the show, each pup has what is called a ‘pup-tag’, bearing their specific colour. For some pups, such as Marshall, their colour is directly tied to their roleMarshall being the fire pup, so his colour is red. Skye, however, was given the colour pink. Coupled with her being the only female main pup character for a while, it could be argued that there was a bias towards the boys watching the show.
There are, of course, TV shows that challenge the gender binary and include gender non-conforming characters, such a BMO, an agender robot in the show Adventure Time and Stevonnie, an intersex/ non-binary character in the show Steven Universe. There are also shows featuring LGBTQ+ representation, the fan-favourite Disney Channel show The Owl House showed its first same-sex kiss on the channel in season two of the show, and in 2022 Peppa Pig, a long-running children’s show that I watched growing up in the mid-2000s, introduced its first same-sex couple.
In 2020, The Children’s Society published its 2019 Good Childhood Report and backed up the report’s findings in blog posts throughout the year. On the page titled ‘How gender roles and stereotypes affect young people’, the society writes “gender roles in society can create certain expectations, and the pressure of gender stereotypes can often get ugly”, coming to the conclusion that “it’s clear that gender roles and stereotypes are engrained in children’s lives from a young age and accordingly forced to fit in with society’s expectations of them.”
It does not surprise me that since I last watched a toy advert as a child myself, the way toys and shows are marketed towards children have not changed and continue to play into
gender stereotypes. In her 2014 report ‘Gender representations in children’s media and their influence’, Isabella Steyer, a lecturer from the Department of English and American Studies at Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz, writes ‘traditional portrayals of females are also still the norm in these media that children are daily faced with. Alarming trends regarding the representations of males have also been found.’ The following year, the Australian Senate held an inquiry into the way toys were marketed towards children and large toy retailers such as Toys’ R’ Us removed their ‘for girls’ and ‘for boys’ marketing.
Shivani Govindia, a reporter for Shout Out UK, wrote in her 2021 article ‘Let’s Stop the Gender Grooming: There’s No Such Thing as a ‘Girl’ or ‘Boy’ Toy’ that ‘having overly gendered toys can be harmful to children in the long term, discouraging them from trying out other things.’ Childhood is a time when children should be encouraged to explore and create their own identities, not have a socially-approved one forced upon them. For all society’s vinegar about children not being able to consent to things, it doesn’t take into its own impact on children’s mental health.
Despite a push towards gender-neutral marketing, to both reduce the effect of dangerous stereotyping on children, but also to appeal to gender nonconforming children, the marketing world continues to use the same stereotypes in their advertisements, and certain toys and costumes continue to be marketed towards certain genders. In 2012, the campaign Let Toys Be Toys launched in response to these concerns. Their website describes the campaign as ‘a grassroots campaign, which brought together parents frustrated by the increase in marketing to children that pushed narrow stereotypes, especially ‘girls’ and ‘boys’ signs in the toy aisles’.
Since their inception a decade ago, things have begun to change. In 2019, Hasbro released an advert for their Baby Alive dolls that featured boys playing with the doll, sending the message that girls and boys alike can play with dolls.
In 2014, a sister campaign to Let Toys Be Toys was started called Let Books Be Books, ‘asking publishers to stop labelling story and activity books as ‘for girls’ or ‘for boys.’’ Gendered books aren’t just limited to fiction, such as Rainbow Magic or
Beast Quest, but are also common in sticker books with titles such as ‘Over 2001 Pretty Stickers for Girls’ featuring stickers of fairies and princesses, while the ‘Over 2001 Ultimate Stickers for Boys’ book featured cars, trucks, dinosaurs and spiders. Despite the campaign’s success in getting a number of publishers and retailers to remove or cease producing gendered books, any parent who has been in the children’s aisle of any book or stationary store would be able to confirm there is still a gender split.
Like with toys and children’s programming, there has been a push to remove the gender bias in children’s books, with books such as Pink is For Boys by Robb Pearlman and Eda Kaban (2018), Dolls and Trucks are for Everyone by Robb Pearlman and Eda Kaban (2021), Tough Guys Have Feelings Too by Keith Negley (2015), Teddy’s Favourite Toy by Christian Trimmer and Madeline Valentine (2018), Are You a Boy Or Are You a Girl? by Sarah Savage and Fox Fisher (2017) and Julián Is a Mermaid by Jessica Love (2018). Maria Isabel Sanchez Vegara and Anke Weckmann’s Little People, Big Dreams series of books has childfriendly publications on famous historical figures such as Greta Thunberg and Charles Darwin, which promote positive role models for all genders.
Until we can live in a
For all the campaigning and arguing parents, teachers and children themselves have done, marketers, publishers and showrunners continue to feed into the binary gender split between boys and girls. In what is still a very sexist, homophobic world, any boy who likes something that is considered ‘girly’ by society is labelled ‘gay’, while girls who like ‘boy’ things are told it’s ‘unladylike’ and are shunned for enjoying motor racing by females and gender society where males, being told ‘you don’t understand it.’ A 2021 report from The Guardian stated that ‘more than 100 schools have been named on a website set up non-conforming people are seen as to expose misogyny, harassment and assault.’’ A poll by NASUWT- the teacher’s union- found that equal, there will always 72% of female teachers have faced misogyny in their school, and 60% faced misogyny from be a gender gap in children’s media, pupils. In 2022, the BBC reported that homophobic comments was “not unusual” in Welsh primary and it will continue schools and that homophobic bullying was homophobic, scared to serve the sexist, common in secondary schools. Another BBC report, from 2019, stated that ‘13% of children are bullied because of their sexuality.’ Whilst, Stonewall reports that 64% of trans students have society we live in. experienced bullying for being trans.
Children will grow up with these ideals in mind, which can develop into a more toxic mindset, as evidenced by the rise in popularity of Andrew Tate with younger teens. Multiple studies have shown the dangers of gender-specific advertising, and parents constantly bring up gender bias in children’s shows. But, until we can live in a society where males, females and gender non-conforming people are seen as equal, there will always be a gender gap in children’s media, and it will continue to serve the sexist, homophobic, scared society we live in.
Learn the skills to succeed across the ever-growing communications industries.
Reimagine how you use media to communicate to audiences ethically and progressivel y.
Work alongside The Studio, the University's new city-centre innovation hub for creative media technology.
Course contact: Conrad Moriarty-Cole
Email: c.moriartycole@bathspa.ac.uk
Instagram: @mediacommsbsu
Bath Spa University Newton St Loe Bath, Somerset BA2 9BN