Why Jenji Kohan is using Taylor Schilling as her Trojan Horse, why a feminist magazine has become a members’ club, why the oppressed have become the oppressors, and why Rihanna should never be allowed to ‘design’ anything ever. again. 

1. I’M A FEMINIST – HERE’S MY FIRESTONE MEMBERSHIP CARD

Charlotte Raven, the Guardian journalist, is still fighting for her pet project – the feminist magazine Spare Rib Hip Bone Feminist Times. Legal problems with the name aside (as well as Emma Barnett at the Telegraph’s critique of the final title which called feminism ‘the f-bomb’, perhaps to encourage comparison with Voldemort and other unnameably threatening things), the magazine now has something more material to contend with: money. Pre-launch, they’re running a membership drive in which supporters can pledge monthly payments of anything from £5 to over £100 to pay writers and costs The amount you pledge corresponds to a membership title – ‘Firestone’ for the most expensive, ‘Barr’ for the lowest bracket, exclusively for ‘Students and Lo/Un waged.’ Some commentators have criticized this set-up as ‘elitist’, but perhaps it’s better than corporate sponsorship – members have no right to dictate content or editorial slant. Donate if you can!

2. THIS SHOW IS THE NEW BLACK

If you’re anything like me, you’ve got yourself a free trial at Netflix and have immediately become hooked on Orange is the New Black, a new show about a Gwyneth Paltrow-like blonde in her mid-thirties. Unspurprisingly, she is engaged, owns a line of unsuccessful ‘artisinal bath-products’ with her insanely irritating best friend, and loves trying new things – like lemon juice cleanses. More surprisingly, she gets sent to prison for a year for taking a suitcase of drug money to Europe while in a post-college lesbian relationship with an international drug baron.

It only takes 2 episodes for you to realise (to your delight, if you found Gwynnie-2 (Piper) as annoying as I did) that the pilot has tricked you. Each episode follows a few days among the inmates at the women’s prison where Piper is incarcerated, alongside storylines centered on life on the outside and flashbacks to life before prison. But each episode focuses on a different woman’s life, answering what is always the most awkward and fascinating of questions: “What did you to to get in here?” Some kind of screen-time analysis would, I’m sure, reveal that Piper gets less and less airtime throughout the season, and for this viewer at least, that’s nothing but a good thing. Every episode is a process of weighing up how much I desperately want to find out how you go from running a cleaning business to forty years in prison, but also feel like if I have to watch Piper bleat down the phone “Did you talk to Barneys yet about getting us on the shelves?” only for pregnant Poppy to make some tough-love comparison between having a baby while running a lame soap company and being in prison one more time I might just have to stop watching.

Jenji Kohen, the show’s creator, has as good as admitted that Piper was (ironically enough) a mule for sneaking in the stories of difficult, damaged women that she knew the networks wouldn’t go for otherwise. She told Fresh Air

“The girl next door…is a very easy access point. It’s useful. You’re not going to go into a network and sell a show on really fascinating tales of black women, and Latina women, and old women and criminals.” 

Sneaky. Making the main character by far the least complex and relatable element in the show may even allow Kohen to go beyond tricking networks and middle-aged LA women into getting behind her: it may actually cure people of classism and racism. Impressive work for a one-season prison drama named after dumb headlines in fashion magazines.

3. WORSE THINGS HAPPEN AT SEA

If being in the Navy involves wearing terrible, mass-produced clothes that were designed for men and fighting battles that you’re not sure it’s your business to be fighting, then Rihanna really was spot-on when she decided to call her fanbase her ‘Navy’. From her new collection for River Island, it seems clear that her current battle is for the right to wear nothing but underwear and jackets, and to arbitrarily crop things that probably don’t need to be cropped. Her full a/w collection is available to view now at Vogue and it is unrelentingly terrible. A personal highlight is the underwear range that seems to have been designed to look as much like men’s Calvin Klein briefs as possible (yes, even the bras). And the striped onesie. And the camouflage leather shorts. I could go on.

4. #SOLIDARITYISFORWHITEWOMEN? 

And then, overriding it all – race relations in hit shows, accusations of elitism within a feminist publication, terrible fashion choices – is the sudden fear that we might have been doing it all wrong. The hashtag #solidarityisforwhitewomen went viral this week, with a storm of input from women who felt that whatever feminism (and specifically, it seems, digital, twitter-based feminism) was, it wasn’t hearing their voices or representing their experiences.

What the hashtag produced, as its instigator, Mikki Kendall, noted in the Guardian, were responses from all kinds of groups – from women accusing white feminists of making hypocritical judgements about those who wear burkhas to accusing women of mistreating black nannies while fighting for womens’ rights in the workplace elsewhere in their lives.

The campaign highlighted the fact that it is both dangerous and unnecessary to believe that the five loudest voices in feminism represent it in its entirety, or even in part. It also showed that the more voices there are, the more productive the discussion – and that, for some reason, the campaign provoked responses from those who had not made themselves heard before (or perhaps no one was listening.) It did not, in my opinion, show that ‘Feminism is racist’, just as ‘Racial Equality’ could never be inherantly sexist in its rawest form. But feminism, as it is understood in practice today, lacks a diversity of voice that may be preventing it becoming as universally accepted as it should be. Feminism should never have become the ‘f-bomb’ that Emma Barnett believes it is today, but if it does need an overhaul then campaigns like #solidarityisforwhitewomen are invaluable in the challenges they represent to views that may never have been fully examined. ‘Check your privilege,’ as they say. You don’t have to be the patriarchy to oppress or exclude.