Facebook holds a unique place in western culture. With nearly 1.5 billion users – about half the total number of people who use the internet and more that 1/7 of the world’s total population.
So ubiquitous has Facebook become, that many of us forget that it is not a free service provided by the internet gods, it is a business, staffed by humans not robots and set up to make a profit, which means minimising costs.
This puts Facebook in an invidious position. It cannot possibly monitor every interaction, ever post, every message sent with analytical human brains. It has to rely on automated processes, which seek out particular words and actions, and removes them from the public feed.
Is this a good thing?
Anne Summer’s book Damned Whores and God’s Police was released 40 years ago. To celebrate that anniversary Summers has organised a conference in Sydney. A forum to discuss the issues raised in the book and how things have (or haven’t) changed over four decades.
It sounds like a great few days, I am deeply disappointed I can’t make it, but however fabulous the conference might be, Facebook blocked Summers attempt to promote her post inviting people to attend.
Summers said she wasn’t sure if the block was caused by the title of the conference or the content of the post, which included this quote from Julia Gillard:
As a woman wielding power, with all the complexities of modern politics, I was never going to be portrayed as a good woman. So I must be the bad woman, a scheming shrew, a heartless harridan or a lying bitch.
Is it better for the Facebook bots to block this post, or to allow someone to boost a post in which they call Summers a whore, harridan, shrew and a bitch? Because if they allowed someone to pay to boost such a post they would incite howls of outrage. As it should. The idea of allowing wealth to enable the transmission of vitriol is abhorrent.
But what is the alternative?
I use Facebook a lot, some might even say too much. It’s a news curator, a light entertainment channel, a brilliant way to stay in touch with people I don’t have the time or ability to see as often as I would like, an incredibly useful business tool and a means of turning my alleged dog into his own little internet meme. What’s not to love?
But where in all of this is Facebook’s obligation to tailor its services to my specific requirements? Who should bear the cost of having a person – because bots still can’t recognise the complex variations of human interactions – deciding when it’s ok to use bitch and whore in a promoted post and when it isn’t? I enjoy Facebook, but I certainly don’t want to pay them to monitor my feed that closely.
I understand Summer’s frustration with the process, and the irony of the title of her book or the Julia Gillard quote being the subject of censorship, because it might cause offence, is not lost on me.
But I don’t think it’s fair to say Facebook is to blame. What else could they reasonably have done?
Also, as an aside, when I was researching this piece I came across a few interesting things about the book and its history that made me even more disappointed I can’t get to the conference. It’s Friday and we all need something to stare at on our screens so it looks like we’re working, so I thought I’d add them in.
Phillip Adams interviewed Summers on Late Night Live, to talk about the book, the conference and the last 40 years. Given that they only had 20 minutes they managed pretty well.
Summers said that the book came first and was later turned into a PhD. It’s interesting that the publishers had no problem with the title, but the university did. They wanted her to change it before submitting it as a thesis. She said no and it was with some reluctance that the university agreed to accept it.
The book started out as a history of female mateship in Australia, the working title, God’s Police, was a quote from Caroline Chisolm who promoted female immigration to Australia because she thought “virtuous women” would have a civilising effect on Australian culture.
She added “Damned Whores” to the title as her research gave her more insight into the way transported women were treated. It was an Australia version of the Madonna/Whore dichotomy.
From the 1975 edition:
The social and economic conditions of the first fifty years of white settlement in Australia fostered whores rather than wives. The traditional Judeo-Christian notion that all women could be categorised as being exclusively either good or evil – with the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene being the prototypes of each kind – was brought to Australia with the First Fleet. But its application to the women in this country was totally lop-sided. From 1788 until the 1840s almost all women were categorised as whores – or ‘damned whores’ as Lieutenant Ralph Clark called them. This categorisation was initially based on the fact that virtually all of the white women to come here in the first two decades of colonisation were transported convicts, but it was constantly reinforced by the social structure which evolved in the penal colony. Thus even female convicts who had served their sentences had little chance of having their status redefined and the stereotype came to be applied to many other women in the colony who had not been transported.
Successive generations of women, it will be argued later, have collaborated in perpetuating this existential straitjacket but these women have been victims of circumstances which provided them with a fixed choice. Denied economic independence, unable to control their fertility adequately, and always aware of the reprobation which awaits the rebel, none but a handful of Australian women has had the opportunity to do any more than submit to living out their lives as dutiful wives and bountiful mothers; and having no alternatives and wanting some share of human happiness, they have accepted and enjoyed this as best they could.
One of the things that Summers is so pleased about with the conference is that it can celebrate what she sees as a recent resurgence in activism, “reminded of the activism of the 70s”, where young women are confronted by ongoing sexism and are unhesitatingly fighting back.
It was also interesting hearing Anne Summers, of all people, describing how early 70s feminists rejected word feminist, “we couldn’t see any connection between what we thought feminists were and what we thought we were”.
Plus ça change.
On the other hand, as she pointed out, the book never uses terms like date rape, domestic violence, sexual harassment or glass ceiling. Not because such things didn’t exist 40 years ago – of course they did – but because they were not named, understood and part of public conversation as they are now.
That change, in large part, is because of women like Anne Summers and the work they did to change the way we talk about women and their place in society. That ongoing conversation benefits us all, and even if Facebook won’t promote her conference, I will.
