Feminist futures

I love futuristic / sci-fi movies but I am getting rather tired of the same scenarios. Dystopian futures tend towards violent settings, dominated by men, where women's roles are either possessions or whores, and usually both. There is an occasional toughie woman but she still needs to be saved by the hard guy in the end. I wonder if this is some sort of fantasy scenario for male writers/actors/directors.

It's time for some feminist future films, which imagine alternative scenarios. They can still be dystopian, but let's liberate women to have more autonomy. To be sharp and resourceful, tough and resilient, to get themselves out of predicaments, not necessarily with strength but with canniness. But not using their bodies as tools, using their minds.

All this talk of rape

I am trying to decide how I feel about all this talk of rape at the moment. There is Justice Minister, Kenneth Clarke's unfortunate wording and Head of IMF, Strauss-Kahn's quite shocking incident in a hotel in New York. Then there is WikiLeaks Julian Assange's casual treatment of women supporters, who he seems to treat as sexual teddy bears, available for his personal pleasure when he stops over for a night.

I also can't help thinking that TV series coming out of Hollywood are somehow related, with really quite graphic scenes of sex and violence e.g. Spartacus, Game of Thrones. Spartacus disturbingly wraps sex and violence together by interspersing battle scenes where people slice each other with swords, with sex scenes where slaves have not quite consensual sex with their masters. Are these shows depicting metaphorical rape?

Then there is this whole wave of films coming out where murders are not just a gunshot, like back in the days when Hitchcock explored violent acts with a camera shot of a knife and then a dead person.. His most graphic scene that I ever saw was the struggle in North by North West where the intention of the scene is to show just how hard it is to kill a man. Last week I watched London Boulevard thinking it was a romcom and ended up watching murder after murder with hammers, knives, all sorts. What to do when you like a good yarn but all the good stories out there seem to be full of violence?

At the same time however, I have long had the view that if people live out their violent urges on screen, perhaps they don't live them out in real life. Is one of the reasons why we don't have as much violence in our streets because we see the goriness of it on screen? Could it be that the current extreme vocalisation of rape is a good thing? That it is a necessary outing of the issues that raises sufficient awareness of it for women to feel ok about reporting it and the number of prosecutions go up.

Perhaps Slutwalk and the Clarke and Strauss-Kahn situations are all part of the same progression forward, bringing the issues of rape right out into the open, onto the front pages, to be discussed and thought about. After all, the biggest surprise for me with the Strauss-Kahn attack was that people believed the maid quickly enough that Strauss-Kahn could be stopped and arrested shortly afterwards, as he fled to the airport. Now he has lost his job, before he has even been convicted. That's a pretty clear message.

When a juror is contemplating a rape case in the context of what has happened over the past few weeks. When they are asked to consider a woman's outfit as part of the defense - will they now have the courage to say, who cares what she was wearing, who cares what time of day it was, who cares that she had sex with him the previous week. If the answer is no, it is no. End of.

I'm all for women getting awards and accolades, the more the better, but I can't help wondering why people love Miranda so much. This is a BBC sitcom about a character called Miranda, "It doesn't matter what Miranda attempts in life, whether it's dating or simply dealing with her overbearing mother, she always seems to fall flat, quite literally". Why can't we have a comedy where the women are strong, powerful and funny, like the men are in The Thick of It. In The Thick of It, the best character goes around being absolutely monstrous to people, and everyone loves it. I wonder if that character would work as a woman, or are we only funny when we are being inept? As usual Channel 4 has the much more edgy female led show in Morgana. At times quite uncomfortable viewing, as you try and work out whether the joke is actually offensive, Morgana's comedy is sharper and insightful. I particularly like her drunk American lady who constantly belittles her husband while making a fool of herself. Maybe it's just that I connect with her more than with the inept ladies... Still, the BBC has my taxpayers money and I want more feisty women on please.

I am now 67 and I have done my time as a worker. I am a mother of children in their 30s and one 40 year old as well as a youngster of 25. By theolder ones' ages, I was a full-time working mother living in London with no family support as I had come to London in my 30s. The marriage suffered and divorce came after 20 years of marriage and 6 years in London so I was then a single working mother. How did I survive? How did the children go? I can honestly say I have no idea how I did it. In my view the children suffered from lack of family and friends contact. But they are now adults and they live their own lives and work out their own solutions. This blog is about feminism and here are my views from the viewpoint of the information above. I am very disappointed and surprised at the way women of today seem to be no different to the women of my early years. There still seemed to be, in the workplace where I was at least, a lack of self-confidence in the women when they discussed work with their male colleagues. The young women of my working acquaintance still seemed to talk with men as though they, the women, were privileged to be where they were in the working pecking order rather than they were there by right. Because of this they did not often challenge the status quo of male promotion to higher ranks that occurred regularly. To those of you who are women and who are in your 30's and who work in a male-dominated environment I ask these question. Why do you think this is? Do you challenge the way men think of themselves as superior to women or do you just accept it as part of your working life and think that it is of no consequence because you have made it up the ladder on a par with the men? I look forward to hearing from you. Mary Symons

An email comes round with best pictures of the decade. The pictures depict war, environmental destruction and, incongruously, celebrities. But the most stark impression from these pictures is the general absence of women. The men fight, die and celebrate football. In the few pictures of women, they collect water, pose and grieve./Headlines in the Guardian, Child Sex Trafficking on the rise. An abused child describes how she kept hoping that one of her abusers would rescue her rather than abuse her. As women, we are taught to stand on the sidelines and watch. Watch our brother play rugby, watch men play football, watch men make decisions on our future in government and in business. They also watch other women focus on their appearance, pretty dresses, worrying about boyfriends and relationships. While we have come so far over the past 50 years with women in the business world now, in government, playing a role in making the wheels of capitalism turn rather than at home raising kids, it seems like we are still on the sidelines watching. It's just that our vantage point is a bit closer to the action. How do we encourage women to get more engaged, to take ownership of their future, of our present. Feminists over a century have fought really really hard to get us to where we are today. We are in a position now where we can take control. It is there for us. British society accepts women as leaders, as agents of change. Sure we need to work out the childcare issue, but the battle for the minds is over. But we hesitate. We step back. We let men jump into the limelight. Why? Because they want it so much more than we do. Am I bovvered? It is stressful, being at the top, taking charge, taking the flak when things go wrong. It takes a special kind of person to stand up and at the moment they are mainly men. So why is this? How are we raising girls differently so that they do not hunger after responsibility and status like men seem to? Is this a biological issue? Testosterone? It seems to me that this last hurdle needs to be tackled urgently, otherwise we may slip back into the supporting role again. Remember that equality for women is historically a very recent phenomenon and distinctly Western. We need to be vigilant to keep our status in place. So let's go for it. Find some cahones and push at that final frontier. Starting with football.