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richmegavideo · 6 years ago

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#FanFiction: This Story Imagines What It Was Like When There Was Trouble In The Carter Household

Source: Kevin Mazur / Getty

Before Beyoncé‘s sixth studio album dropped back in 2016, it was considered treasonous to question her relationship with longtime love Jay-Z. Up until Lemonade, the pair had been intensely private about their marriage and family—but when the album dropped and featured songs like “Pray You Catch Me,” “Sorry,” and “Hold Up,” Bey let the world know that, at some point, there was trouble in paradise.

Then, on 4:44, a sort of response to Bey’s accusations…Jay apologized and said it took having kids for him to be able to see life through a woman’s eyes. I’ll f*ck up a good thing if you let me/Let me alone, Becky…

While the Carters let us in, there was still so much to know… for instance, who is Becky with the good hair? What was it like when they weren’t on the same page? Did our relationship goals nearly split and call it quits? We don’t have the details, but one Beyoncé fan page is imagining some of those moments for us…and we can’t. stop. reading.

Interpreting a photo of Jay-Z trying to pick Blue Ivy up as she cries and clings to her mother in Antibes, France, Joy Mechell writes…

“‘Go to daddy’ Bey whispered to her daughter. When Jay went to reach for her, Blue snatched away and buried her face in her mother’s neck.’Please,’ Bey asked. Eventually Blue let him take her but Bey could tell this was far from over. When they got to their hotel, Jay laid Blue down for her nap before he opening the door. ‘Where are you going?’ Bey asked. She honestly didn’t want them to be on bad terms right now, especially over something that happened over a year ago. He didn’t answer her but he didn’t leave either. Eventually he closed the door and mounted the bed, pulling Blue into his arms carefully as not to wake her from her peaceful slumber. Bey watched them interact, the guilt sinking in as she tried to keep her original reasoning. ‘You’re the reason she’s acting like this’ he said, breaking the silence. ‘I’m the reason? You’re lucky my child is sleeping or—’ ‘OUR child Bey. She’s our child and you took her from me,’ he says in a strained tone. ‘You act as if I wasn’t going to let you see her ever again, you know I would never do that’ Bey argued. ‘I don’t know you at all. Not after I came home to an empty house and y’all stuff missing. So when was I supposed to see her Bey? When you decided to stop ignoring my calls? Not telling me you were in a whole different country so I could find you?’ he asked trying to keep his voice down. ‘I needed a break Shawn! I deserved a break and no I wasn’t going to leave her behind. I’m sorry it seemed like I did it out of spite but in that moment I was just reacting. I didn’t even plan on staying long, I just couldn’t be around you after hearing that’ Bey said as she thought back onto the most painful time of her life. ‘I would never keep her from you, or any kids we might have, just because we’re fighting. Even if we divorce I—’ ‘We’re not getting a divorce,’Jay interrupted. Bey sighed as remembering to pick her battles. She couldn’t see them divorced either but she can’t say separation never crossed her mind. Jay was about to say something else when Blue squirmed, wrapping her arms tightly around him while he rocked her. He knew he messed up but he couldn’t imagine losing them.Those two weeks were the wake up call he needed. Straighten up or he’d lose his wife #fiction.”

How do you think it went down? Head to Joy’s page for more fan fiction about your unbreakable faves.

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viralhottopics · 8 years ago

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Madam president: are female leaders better for women?

Hillary Clinton would have done more for women than Trump, but less than Bernie Sanders. What is womens politics, anyway and who does it best?

This piece started with the assumption that in 2017 we would have a feminised global stage: thered be Hillary Clinton in the White House, Theresa May in Downing Street, Angela Merkel in the Bundeskanzleramt, and Marine Le Pen in a hollowed-out volcano. I wanted to know: what would such a spectrum of women in power, with their various viewpoints, tell us about womens politics? Is there such a thing? Is it a good thing? And how do you square a feminist desire for female leaders with the ascension of non-feminist ones? But it didnt quite turn out like that. Now, those questions seem peripheral.

When Donald Trump won, the notion of a broad, instinctive female solidarity was brutally exposed as myth: open misogyny in word, demeanour and the shape of a dozen sexual assault allegations deterred only a minority of women voters.

But now that we are in the grip of strongman politics, it is impossible to give up on the notion of womens politics. We face a gender equality crisis. The sharp end of this is that any authoritarian politician, from President Trump to Ukips Paul Nuttall, tends to be anti-abortion, having correctly identified that the best way to dominate a woman is to take away her choice of when to be a mother. But thats just the beginning: big daddy politics seeks no consensus, brooks no resistance, acknowledges no pluralism. We no longer have the luxury of time, which means ditching nuanced debate in favour of action. But action how?

Already Trumps inauguration has generated one response, the thing people do when they must do something but dont know what: they take to the streets. Todays Womens March on Washington, planned by a woman named Bob Bland, references both the March on Washington of 1963 and the Million Woman March on Philadelphia in 1997; a UK version is also taking place in London.

When I spoke to the organiser, Emma McNally, a 47-year-old artist, I thought she was being evasive on the womens politics question. It wasnt evasion, she said, it was a resistance to oversimplification, which, she says infantilises us and makes us very malleable. If we know who we are, we know who we belong with, then we feel strong, we can act with certainty. In other words, you cant just meet the simplicity of the tough guy with the simplicity of the elemental woman.

Youll waste a lot of time if you get mired in a discussion of what womens values are cooperation, empathy, humanity, solidarity and whether or not one gender has a right to annex them. This is what Sophie Walker, leader of the new-ish Womens Equality Party (WEP), remembers of the unfeminist 90s. We were always being diverted into a conversation about what feminism was. We couldnt ever get to the point of what a feminist does, because we had to spend all that time talking about what one looks like. The challenge now, she says, is to look at all politics through the lens of gender, because thats the only way were going to build a country that functions properly, in which everybody is seen and everybody is heard.

When Donald Trump won, the notion of a broad, instinctive female solidarity was brutally exposed as myth. Photograph: John Gurzinski/AFP/Getty Images

Twenty-one years ago, a series of postcards appeared in the Body Shop, which in those days wasnt a way to kill time in a station, but rather the embodiment of progressive consumerism. Its founder, Anita Roddick, was a feminist and an environmentalist who, with activists Bernadette Vallely, Sue Tibballs and others, asked an open-ended question: what do women want?

Their methodology was not dissimilar to Shere Hites 1976 report on female sexuality: you could be anonymous or not, and the sample was whoever replies. The flaws in this approach basically, that it preselected women who could afford to arse about in the Body Shop, and could also afford a stamp have been exhaustively pointed out. The fact is, with 6,000 replies, containing 46,000 suggestions, it remains the biggest independent survey of women ever undertaken in the UK. At the end of 2015, Tibballs and others launched it again, and their What Women Want 2.0 is still in train; the Womens Equality party has been collecting some of the responses while canvassing.

I worked on the original report, in a very peripheral capacity, and not for the right reasons (I was chasing a guy; it was quite circuitous, but it worked). I didnt believe in the report, not at all: the language felt soft and victimy; it was all about childcare and maternity leave, which is not at all interesting when you havent got children; and violence against women, which is of course! vitally important, but couldnt harness or accommodate the politics of optimism that prevailed at the time. I was waiting for a world in which children werent a womens issue, given that half the bloody things are male (and half of the making is done by men). A recurring demand for a healthy planet and respect for our planetary resources seemed to imply that women, by our very natures, cared more about the future. Elsewhere in the report, a National Health Service with proper funding got rolled into support for positive and alternative health, as if socialising medicine and believing in homeopathy were one and the same.

I wasnt the only sceptic: famously, the 1990s saw a dip in the popularity of feminism. At the Evening Standard newspaper, where I then worked, it was not unusual to get letters from readers saying, Yes, I agree with equal pay and abortion rights. But would I call myself a feminist? No thanks!

Theresa May is she better or worse than Margaret Thatcher? Photograph: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP

Last October, at the south London office of the Womens Equality party, members of the What Women Want team sat down with party staff to compare the original 1996 responses with todays, and ask whats changed in 20 years. I expected to hear about newfangled concerns. Cybercrime, perhaps, or polyamory.

In fact, most things havent changed, and those that have have changed for the worse. Women still want decent childcare and equal wages, but now they also want to be able to afford the rent; they still want to feel safe in public spaces, but now they would also like, if you please, not to get death threats every time they go online and give a view; they still want environmental sustainability to come before profit, but global solidarity has largely slipped out of the language (though there are positive signs that its back again: the recent threat to limit abortion rights in Poland sparked the Black Umbrellas protests across Europe).

In the 90s, women talked a lot about what they wanted from their boyfriends and partners: sometimes help with the chores, sometimes sex, sometimes recognition. Now, theres plenty about men en masse, how they should be educated about rape and consent; but in terms of the relationships that build their identity, women talk only about their children. This seems completely obvious to the women I speak to in their 20s. It would be so out of fashion now to hinge my identity as a feminist on my relationship with my partner, says Priscilla Mensah, members officer for the WEP. Hannah Peaker, the WEPs chief of staff, recalls one poignant response that struck her: One woman talking about the disappointment that moment, either when children come along, or youre trying to buy a house, when you realise that equality wasnt real, when you see how sexist things are underneath.

Peaker is savage on the way the rise of freelance work has impacted women. Theres been this really clever branding around women entrepreneurs. But if you look at the data, these are women who have been driven to working for themselves because they couldnt get the flexibility they needed. Theyre just doing the same jobs with no rights, no benefits, no maternity leave.

Pensions have about equal prominence in the original report and today, except that then the problem was that the system was based on the male-breadwinner model, and divorced pensioners lost out; now, the 2011 Pensions Act (which brought womens pensionable age into line with mens) means that all women born in the 1950s lose out. The responses were more or less exactly the same, almost word for word: Ive worked 44 years, and its completely unfair, says Mensah. There was a real sense of injustice. One cannot help wondering whether, if women pushing 60 were as large a part of the body politic as men, this change would have been sprung on them so blithely.

One striking similarity between the 90s and now is the complaints about media representation: the invisibility of older women; objectification; women described according to their looks rather than their achievements. There is no perceptible difference in the importance women place on safety from harassment, from violence although two decades ago there was more discussion around international security, the threat of war, the nuclear threat. Im struck, Tibballs says, by how safety is still such a big thing. Peaker tells us she has spoken to women, while campaigning, who say they probably spend about an hour extra a day planning around safety, without even thinking about it. One woman talked about it as a tax, the way she would have to get a taxi after 11pm, to avoid the walk home, or join a gym, because she couldnt run through a park in the winter.

Its such a foreign issue to men, says publicist Will Hill, who has been involved in the new survey. I did a focus group with young teenage girls in Brighton, asking what they wanted. I was expecting better access to music, tech, all that. And they all said, Street lighting.

Angela Merkel a way point as a leader. Photograph: Ullstein Bild via Getty Images

Alison Shergold was one of the original respondents, and at the time a fundraiser for Rape Crisis London: in 1996, she wanted statutory funding bodies for rape crisis centres throughout the UK. Now, she works in an upmarket commercial estate agent and says ruefully, Ive sold my soul to the corporate beast. She resists the urge to generalise about anything. I was in a lesbian relationship when I did the first survey, and my girlfriend was a separatist, very anti-men. I wasnt: I know some lovely men and some bitch women. Some things have got better, she thinks; others not. I dont think any of the goals were achieved. [Rape] conviction rates havent changed, or preventing it. I dont even want to change the world any more; I just want violence against women to stop, violence against everybody.

The projects cofounder Tibballs, meanwhile, takes a Kipling-esque approach to triumph and disaster, describing success and abject failure with the same cheerful straightforwardness. There is something intellectually wholesome, tireless and timeless about her, like a lady poet of the 30s or a Victorian explorer. The job that the project did, 20 years ago, was that it made it absolutely clear that you cannot, as a political party, not have a position on women and equality. Childcare wasnt in a single manifesto it wasnt part of the conversation. We put it on the agenda. And yet, she counters herself, Where the hell are we?

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Perhaps we shouldnt be defining womens issues or perspectives, but rather highlighting those that are distinctively male. For instance, since the financial crash of 2008, there has been a political fetish for hard work. Families are legitimised by the prefix hard-working; immigrants divided into net contributors to the taxing state, or beneficiaries of it. Citizens are weighed by their economic activity, with moral disapprobation attached to those who are inactive.

This is nonsensical, since we all know that everyone is economically inactive for some part of their lives, and often youre working a lot harder when youre not being paid (childcare in your prime; volunteering in retirement; caring when there is nobody else to care). Often that work brings more to society than its cash equivalent. Practically speaking, these are political or economic conditions that hit women in a particular way; to respond to them as individuals rather than as a group is foolish like a thousand atomised complaints about pollution from people who all live on the same A-road.

It would be remiss to ignore conventional politics in this. I asked the Labour MP Margaret Hodge how she thinks womens politics have changed during her near 25 years in Westminster. She related an argument shed had recently with Harriet Harman about whether Theresa May is better or worse than Margaret Thatcher. May has done some good stuff, stuff that doesnt really impinge on her, like [tackling] FGM, Hodge says. It doesnt cost her very much, politically, but I dont think Mrs T would have done it. Is a female prime minister who takes FGM seriously, but waves through an austerity programme that devastates more women than men better than one who actively avoids any solidarity with her sex?

If, as Hodge maintains, the Trump-Clinton contest showed that politicians always tend to have gender-specific approaches to their politics, this becomes like a puzzle: is it always better to have one woman than no women, regardless of whether she fights for women? Or is politics like a BBC panel show: one woman, described as a minimum, is functionally a maximum? A non-feminist woman is currently occupying a space that would be better filled, for women generally, by someone who went in to bat for us.

How does Hodge feel about the use of the word feminism? Im delighted that feminism is back. Ive called myself a feminist throughout my career when it was fashionable, when it was deeply unfashionable. Women over 35 identify themselves to one another this way, a shibboleth of authenticity, like loving the Pixies before they were cool: its all very well being a feminist today, but where were you in the 90s?

My own idiosyncratic political position in the 90s was nothing of the sort, but the meeting of two frontiers, which squeezed the feminist space until its pips squeaked. On the one hand, there was the overhang of Thatcherism; it was an ethos in which, as Hodge says, you proved your brilliance as a woman by beating men on their own terms. To raise womens issues was akin to pleading weakness. On the other, there was the 80s residue of career women who had toughed it out, either forgoing having children or returning to work after 10 days maternity leave; they were genuinely scornful of that side of the equality agenda. Hodge remembers terrible resentment against any concessions on childcare or maternity leave. They didnt want to see these changes: they felt theyd made these sacrifices, and why should we have it all? It was an era when solidarity itself had fallen out of fashion: and without it, what bonded women? Hoovering and childbirth? No, thanks!

Nicola Sturgeon takes a keen interest in low wages and the systems that create them. Photograph: Bloomberg via Getty Images

Thinking about it now, I am beset by a sense of failure. I ceded the language of solidarity in favour of individual rights. I took no pride in the womens movement and its history, and lost that organisational muscle memory. I was happy to argue the toss about whether environmentalism and childcare were female in essence, rather than saying, Who are you people who think profit is more important than the planet? Who thinks childcare isnt a group effort?

Meanwhile, this is the politics that was developing in tandem: the hyper-masculinist language of self-interest, tough talk, militarism, competitiveness and control, all now considered normal. The essential cooperative qualities that any society needs to be halfway functioning are currently considered not only unrealistic but wishy-washy, pass and rather niche. But I do not feel downhearted: this situation cant last because it is just too stupid.

I was looking in the wrong place for the value of the idea. It was never meant to be a coherent programme of female-friendly actions, to which all right-thinking women would subscribe. It may be that there is no such thing as a womens issue but still, on any given subject, there is always a distinct womens perspective, without which you will never meaningfully understand it. Feminism is always in the detail, in each granular answer, in every individual woman.

Having female leaders is clearly useful. But a woman at the top can never, even with feminist bona fides up the wazoo, bring the complete perspective of her gender. So much of this is about power: how a shrinking state throws its burdens back on to individuals; how those individuals are usually women; how this is ignored by the language of competition and self-interest.

Clinton would have been better for women than Trump, merely by maintaining Obamacare and not redistributing wealth upwards; but not as good as Bernie Sanders, with his more coherent vision for empowering the dispossessed. May is probably no better or worse for women than Cameron was, although her predecessor might have worked harder to keep an on-the-record misogynist (Philip Davies MP) off the committee for women and equalities. Angela Merkel is less good for her gender than Nicola Sturgeon, who takes a keener interest in low wages and the systems that create them.

In the end, all these leaders are way points, not end points. To wish they were better, gutsier, more harmonious feminists is a needless distraction: far better to wish them part of a bigger choir.