Neelam Tailor

Originally published on GQ 27 Jan 2022.

“I’m the real superman here. Some really big scientists have to come and test me.”

From anyone else this might sound arrogant. But from Nirmal Purja — the climber and former Gurkha who squeezes in a trip to Everest’s summit like you squeeze in the monthly family video call — it’s true. The 38-year-old, who goes by Nims or Nimsdai, made relics of previous climbing records in 2019 when he conquered all 14 mountain peaks above 8,000 metres (lovingly named death-zone mountains) in six months and six days. The previous record was seven years, 11 months and 14 days, by South Korean climber Kim Chang-ho (who still holds the record for achieving this without the use of bottled oxygen). The fact that Purja used oxygen on his journey fuels a small number of people in the highly competitive climbing community to belittle Purja’s achievements. But he brushes this off as natural human jealousy. Many climbers have made careers out of summiting one 8,000-metre peak. Purja’s triumph, including being the first to reach the summits of Mount Everest, Lhotse and Makalu within 48 hours, makes their speaking tour a harder sell.

Alongside his team of elite Nepali climbers, Purja set out to change history and put the Nepalese people – the unsung heroes behind white Everest summiters throughout history – on the map as the best mountaineers in the world. He filmed every part of his ‘Project Possible’, and the world tuned in as his documentary, 14 Peaks: Nothing Is Impossible hit Netflix in November 2021. When he achieved his goal in 2019, Purja didn’t get the recognition he deserved. As he said in the film: “Let’s be honest, if this had been done by a European or western climber, the news would have been 10 times bigger.”

We speak days after Purja has returned from guiding a group to the top of Argentina’s highest mountain. Immediately before, he was in Antarctica climbing its highest peak Mount Vinson before skiing the Last Degree to the South Pole (the last 60 nautical miles to the most southerly point on Earth). Casual.

With ambitions to receive a BAFTA nomination, Purja plans to spend the next 11 months away from his home in Hampshire, climbing and cleaning the world’s highest peaks so it comes as no surprise that he doesn’t follow a typical fitness regimen…

14 Peaks Preparation

“Being brutally honest. I pretty much didn't do any fitness at all for almost a year,” was not the sentence I imagined Purja would say when asked about his fitness preparation for the biggest challenge of his life. “I was overweight,” he adds, explaining he spent all his time raising money for the expedition, constantly researching and reaching out to people. He set off on his project with only 15 per cent of the budget he needed, and that was after remortgaging his house.

Though 10kg heavier than he was a year before, Purja’s fitness had already been built up over the previous 20 years. At boarding school, aged 14 he would sneak out and run 30km every morning then climb back into bed and “wake up” with everyone else because he knew he wanted to become a Gurkha like his father. Purja knew his body intricately, and he knew that he would train his body while climbing the 14 peaks. “Annapurna was like my warm-up where I’m building my fitness, then I went up Dhaulagiri, still building that fitness.” Here, I remind myself that these are the tenth and seventh highest mountains in the world. “By Kangchenjunga [his third mountain], I was already at my peak.” Purja trained on the go, and this included many high-altitude military burpees which had formed a core part of his training during his 10 years in the UK special forces.

When training to enter the UK Special Boat Service, he would wake up at 1am, run 20km with a 75kg backpack before he started his normal military day as a Gurkha. Then he would do a personal training session with his fellow soldiers at 7am, followed by another 20km. “I always had to be at the front,” he laughs. After a physical day’s work as an engineer and plasterer, he would run back home, eat dinner, then cycle 64km, swim 100 laps, get home for 11pm, and do it all over again. Everyday. Six days a week. Then he began his six-month gruelling selection process for the special forces where they whittle down five or six from 200 of the strongest candidates. Purja became the first Gurkha to ever enter the UK special forces, before leaving in 2019 to fulfil his climbing ambitions.

Diet

Purja is not prescriptive with his diet. He grew up eating traditional Nepalese rice and curries and continues to do so. Lentil curry and rice, dal bhat is his favourite. “Honestly, I eat a lot of rice,” he laughs. "I don’t take any supplements like protein and all that stuff to be honest. I’m pretty much natural,” he says.

How much water is drinking each day? “Look, the advice is that you should be [drinking a lot of water each day],” he says. “When I climb an 8,000-metre peak, like Kangchenjunga, I only took one litre of hot water in a thermos.” He shovels snow into the thermos to create another litre or so while on the mountain, but he always returns to base camp with half a litre as a reserve. “I think it comes with understanding your body, loads of training, experience and knowledge.”

Play hard

One of the most surprising parts when you watch 14 Peaks is how much Purja and his team enjoyed a drink and party the night before climbing giant mountains. “I like gin and tonic,” Purja says. In the film, when they get to the base camp of Pakistan’s K2 mountain it’s clear that being able to let go and party was part of what made Project Possible a success, and he always knows his limits. “I drink, but for me I have to be able to perform. If I can't do that I will stop immediately.”

Before climbing Kanchenjunga, the group partied all night in Kathmandu, woke up, had breakfast, and then went straight up the mountain where most climbers usually stop at camp one to rest. With no sleep and a hangover, Purja began descending the mountain and tragically found a climber dying. Purja gave him his oxygen, a move that could have been fatal at that altitude. They found another two stranded climbers and his team began a rescue effort, managing to save two out of three climbers. Has anyone ever been more functional and resilient on a hangover, I wonder.

Current workout

These days, Purja guides people up the world’s highest mountains through his Elite Exped mountaineering company run alongside Mingma David Sherpa and Mingma Tenzi Sherpa. He’s also launched a project to clean up the world’s mountains. “It’s not only the rubbish on the mountains having an impact on the climate crisis, it’s also for safety,” Purja explains. “On K2, there are like 10 old ropes hanging, and if people clip onto those old ropes when they’re tired, then they fall.”

With this keeping him busy and out of the UK for 11 months straight, Purja works out on the go. “I don't have a typical gym session where people go and train chest today, and then biceps another day.” As a warm up, he does 30 reps of classic military burpees for five sets, followed by a full body workout using resistance bands. “Even when I’m in the mountains I have those bands and military burpees are a really good workout for your cardio, biceps, chest.”

Originally published on The Guardian 15 July, 2022.

Produced and edited film on Franziska Trautmann.

When it comes to the climate, each generation represents a different stage of grief.

In the 1960s, we ignored signs of climate change and steamed ahead with big energy. In the 1970s and 1980s, anger began to mount. Some scientists, like physicist Carl Sagan, raised red flags around a changing climate, while others, like the head of the UK Met Office John Mason, tried to debunk “alarmist US views”. Meanwhile, fossil fuel companies began investing in PR campaigns to amplify doubt about the climate crisis, a trend that continued well into the 1990s.

The 2000s saw the depression stage of grief. The science was undeniable and while many began to take action, the climate dread set in – something psychologists say is a big obstacle to taking action.

Enter Gen-Z. If you’ve spent much time on eco TikTok, you’ll know that they’re extraordinarily good at shaking off the climate dread and spreading climate optimism – perhaps it is the acceptance stage of grief. We spoke with a few of them to find out more.

Caulin Donaldson, 26, has been picking up trash from Florida’s beaches every day for more than 700 days

Trash Caulin (real name Caulin Donaldson) grew up in Tampa Bay, Florida, and has always loved the ocean. But the way some people behaved made him angry. “People would come up to me and they’re like, ‘this is my favorite beach in the world’, and then I would watch them leave all their trash right in the sand.”

“I was really mad about it. So I went to my first ever beach cleanup and the dude was like, ‘bro, all of us are mad, but you’ve got to fight this with positivity.’ I tried it and it did work – I was getting more reciprocation from the positive messages.”

Donaldson hasn’t looked back since and somehow makes picking up trash incredibly joyful. His 1.4m TikTok followers love watching his playful love of the planet, and high-energy personality.

Many of them have been inspired to pick up trash in their local areas: “People are like, ‘my kid loves watching you every day and now he’s out picking up trash’. I just got a comment saying ‘I was waiting for my friend’s track meet to end and I was really bored, so I just started picking up trash. I never would have thought to do that if I didn’t watch your videos.’ ”

An “anti-echo chamber” is how Caulin describes TikTok. “This is why TikTok has literally changed environmental activism,” he says. “The way the algorithm works is I can have 10 followers and go ‘hey guys, let’s recycle today’, and TikTok will put me in front of people who aren’t searching me and don’t know who I am”.

Climate activism is huge on the social media site – the hashtags #climatechange and #eco have 2.4bn and 1.6bn views respectively.

Franziska Trautmann, 24, turns glass into sand to save Louisiana’s eroding coastlines

“This is our planet too, and we don’t have time to wait for these old people to make decisions. We’re just doing it ourselves,” says Franziska Trautmann, AKA “that sand girl” on TikTok.

While sharing a bottle of wine with her friend Max Steitz in 2020, the 24-year-old reflected on the fact that her state, Louisiana, had no glass recycling facility. Her wine bottle was going to end up in landfill. “I wanted to work towards being a part of the solution instead of continuing to be a part of the problem,” she said. The US recycles only about a quarter of its glass. This pales in comparison with countries in Europe, which recycle between 60% and 80% of their glass.

Trautmann and Steitz founded Glass Half Full, Louisiana’s only glass recycling facility. The glass is turned into sand and used to restore the state’s eroding coastline. Louisiana loses an American football field’s worth of land every hour due to coastal erosion.

While studying at Tulane University in 2019, and with no money and growing student debt, the pair crowdfunded their first machine and began collecting bottles in the back garden of a frat house. They have diverted more than 2.2m pounds of glass from landfill since then, and have a huge recycling facility warehouse.

On TikTok, Trautmann answers questions from her audience with humility, without a hint of patronizing. Sand is the most exploited resource after water, and Trautmann regularly reminds her 260k TikTok followers that we’re in a global sand shortage. “You might be thinking: ‘what about the Sahara desert?’ Well, the sand we need for concrete and coastal restoration needs to be coarse and a bit angular, and desert sand is far too fine and rounded,” she says in one of her videos.

Glass Half Full caught the attention of the television host Mike Rowe. After filming what they thought was a documentary, Trautmann and Steitz were surprised with a $32,000 cheque on his show Returning the Favor. This allowed them to level up and buy a huge pulverizing machine.

Glass Half Full was awarded a National Science Foundation grant alongside scientists at Tulane University. Together with the scientists, Trautmann and Steitz have been conducting experiments with the glass sand looking for contaminants, and seeing how it works with native plants and marine wildlife. The results were so positive that the group just laid 15 tonnes of glass sand on the coast, and worked with the Pointe-au-Chien tribe to restore part of their land.

“My message to people is always to take my story as something that you can also do. So we saw an issue in our community, and instead of continuing to wait for someone else to solve it, we decided to just go for it. We didn’t have any money, any recycling knowledge, we didn’t know about glass and sand issues. We learned everything along the way. If you see a problem that you want to solve, just go for it.”

Zahra Biabani, 23, wants to displace the fast-fashion industry by founding the world’s first sustainable clothing rental company

She is just out of college and writing a book on the power of climate optimism, while also launching the world’s first sustainable fashion rental marketplace. She creates regular TikTok videos educating her audience on environmental issues. Oh, and she just did a TED Talk.

Zahra Biabani really makes you reflect on what’s possible to do as a 23-year-old.

The environmentalist from Houston, Texas, is about to launch In The Loop, her mission to make sustainable and ethical brands more accessible to young people.

Through research, she found that the main barriers for young people in renting clothes were cost, size exclusivity, and the lack of styles that people want to wear.

Biabani is bringing together a marketplace of eco-friendly brands with stringent entry requirements. “We make sure they pay a living wage, that 50% or more of their garments are made with intentionally sourced fabrics, and we also make sure that they offer public five- and 10-year sustainability goals,” she says.

For one-time renters, each piece of clothing is 75% cheaper to rent on her site than the retail price. You get the items for three and a half weeks, return them using the included returns label on the reusable shipping bags, and then In The Loop does the cleaning, restocking, and ships out the next month’s cycle. And this is all done from Biabani’s parents’ garage.

When Biabani learned that 56% of Gen Zers believe humanity is doomed, she started posting weekly positive climate news stories, which were met with a lot of gratitude. Climate optimism, Biabani says, isn’t about discrediting the trove of science and evidence that the climate crisis threatens our future on Earth – it’s a way to cultivate hope so people continue fighting.

“We’re not able to make change if we don’t believe change is possible. So climate optimism is just a framework for unlocking the full potentiality of climate solutions that we desperately need.”

Thomas Lawrence, 23, is building a sustainable marketplace to take on Amazon

“I think it’s time for Congress to be lobbied the other way. I’m not a blind optimist, but we also have to accept the world as it is. Money makes the world go round. I’m not saying I want it to be that way. But that’s the way it is,” says Thomas Lawrence, the founder of Good People Inc.

“If big oil, big meat and whatever else are going to lobby Congress in the US with their millions to keep their pockets heavy and to keep the world they want it to be, then why can’t we do the same thing? It’s time there was a bit more influence for the right side of history,” he says.

The 23-year-old entrepreneur is building a corporation that “only does good for the people and the planet.” Good People Inc wants to take on Amazon and give people an ethical, value-driven alternative. “They [Amazon] created a market that they’re now the only player in, and that’s the reason that lots of people can’t give up Amazon. The definition of a monopoly is that consumers don’t have another choice.”

Good People Inc is already providing more than 200 products to people in the UK and is growing each day; the US site has also just launched. The company was born from a frustration with the way marketing tricks us. “I hate all these brands that make people spend their hard earned money by making you feel inadequate, or like you need something when you don’t,” he says. “A big problem for consumers isn’t always that they can’t get their stuff, the issue is that they desire the stuff in the first place.”

‘Change is possible’: meet the Gen-Zers who embrace climate optimism

Caulin Donaldson picks up trash and inspires others to do the same.

Caulin Donaldson picks up trash and inspires others to do the same. Photograph: Caulin Donaldson

These people in their 20s decided to combat climate grief by taking on one small piece of the environmental crisis

Neelam Tailor

Fri 15 Jul 2022 08.00 BST

When it comes to the climate, each generation represents a different stage of grief.

In the 1960s, we ignored signs of climate change and steamed ahead with big energy. In the 1970s and 1980s, anger began to mount. Some scientists, like physicist Carl Sagan, raised red flags around a changing climate, while others, like the head of the UK Met Office John Mason, tried to debunk “alarmist US views”. Meanwhile, fossil fuel companies began investing in PR campaigns to amplify doubt about the climate crisis, a trend that continued well into the 1990s.

The 2000s saw the depression stage of grief. The science was undeniable and while many began to take action, the climate dread set in – something psychologists say is a big obstacle to taking action.

Enter Gen-Z. If you’ve spent much time on eco TikTok, you’ll know that they’re extraordinarily good at shaking off the climate dread and spreading climate optimism – perhaps it is the acceptance stage of grief. We spoke with a few of them to find out more.

Caulin Donaldson, 26, has been picking up trash from Florida’s beaches every day for more than 700 days

Trash Caulin (real name Caulin Donaldson) grew up in Tampa Bay, Florida, and has always loved the ocean. But the way some people behaved made him angry. “People would come up to me and they’re like, ‘this is my favorite beach in the world’, and then I would watch them leave all their trash right in the sand.”

Caulin Donaldson.

Caulin Donaldson, who has 1.4m followers on TikTok. Photograph: Caulin Donaldson

“I was really mad about it. So I went to my first ever beach cleanup and the dude was like, ‘bro, all of us are mad, but you’ve got to fight this with positivity.’ I tried it and it did work – I was getting more reciprocation from the positive messages.”

Donaldson hasn’t looked back since and somehow makes picking up trash incredibly joyful. His 1.4m TikTok followers love watching his playful love of the planet, and high-energy personality.

Many of them have been inspired to pick up trash in their local areas: “People are like, ‘my kid loves watching you every day and now he’s out picking up trash’. I just got a comment saying ‘I was waiting for my friend’s track meet to end and I was really bored, so I just started picking up trash. I never would have thought to do that if I didn’t watch your videos.’ ”

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An “anti-echo chamber” is how Caulin describes TikTok. “This is why TikTok has literally changed environmental activism,” he says. “The way the algorithm works is I can have 10 followers and go ‘hey guys, let’s recycle today’, and TikTok will put me in front of people who aren’t searching me and don’t know who I am”.

Climate activism is huge on the social media site – the hashtags #climatechange and #eco have 2.4bn and 1.6bn views respectively.

Franziska Trautmann, 24, turns glass into sand to save Louisiana’s eroding coastlines

“This is our planet too, and we don’t have time to wait for these old people to make decisions. We’re just doing it ourselves,” says Franziska Trautmann, AKA “that sand girl” on TikTok.

While sharing a bottle of wine with her friend Max Steitz in 2020, the 24-year-old reflected on the fact that her state, Louisiana, had no glass recycling facility. Her wine bottle was going to end up in landfill. “I wanted to work towards being a part of the solution instead of continuing to be a part of the problem,” she said. The US recycles only about a quarter of its glass. This pales in comparison with countries in Europe, which recycle between 60% and 80% of their glass.

Franziska and Max receiving the ‘returning the favor’ cheque.

Franziska and Max receiving the ‘returning the favor’ cheque. Photograph: Franziska Trautmann

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Trautmann and Steitz founded Glass Half Full, Louisiana’s only glass recycling facility. The glass is turned into sand and used to restore the state’s eroding coastline. Louisiana loses an American football field’s worth of land every hour due to coastal erosion.

While studying at Tulane University in 2019, and with no money and growing student debt, the pair crowdfunded their first machine and began collecting bottles in the back garden of a frat house. They have diverted more than 2.2m pounds of glass from landfill since then, and have a huge recycling facility warehouse.

On TikTok, Trautmann answers questions from her audience with humility, without a hint of patronizing. Sand is the most exploited resource after water, and Trautmann regularly reminds her 260k TikTok followers that we’re in a global sand shortage. “You might be thinking: ‘what about the Sahara desert?’ Well, the sand we need for concrete and coastal restoration needs to be coarse and a bit angular, and desert sand is far too fine and rounded,” she says in one of her videos.

Glass Half Full caught the attention of the television host Mike Rowe. After filming what they thought was a documentary, Trautmann and Steitz were surprised with a $32,000 cheque on his show Returning the Favor. This allowed them to level up and buy a huge pulverizing machine.

Wine bottles to sand: the TikToker trying to save our coastlines – video report

03:27

Wine bottles to sand: the TikToker trying to save our coastlines – video report

Glass Half Full was awarded a National Science Foundation grant alongside scientists at Tulane University. Together with the scientists, Trautmann and Steitz have been conducting experiments with the glass sand looking for contaminants, and seeing how it works with native plants and marine wildlife. The results were so positive that the group just laid 15 tonnes of glass sand on the coast, and worked with the Pointe-au-Chien tribe to restore part of their land.

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“My message to people is always to take my story as something that you can also do. So we saw an issue in our community, and instead of continuing to wait for someone else to solve it, we decided to just go for it. We didn’t have any money, any recycling knowledge, we didn’t know about glass and sand issues. We learned everything along the way. If you see a problem that you want to solve, just go for it.”

Zahra Biabani, 23, wants to displace the fast-fashion industry by founding the world’s first sustainable clothing rental company

She is just out of college and writing a book on the power of climate optimism, while also launching the world’s first sustainable fashion rental marketplace. She creates regular TikTok videos educating her audience on environmental issues. Oh, and she just did a TED Talk.

Zahra Biabani really makes you reflect on what’s possible to do as a 23-year-old.

Zahra Biabani wants to take on fast fashion.

Zahra Biabani wants to take on fast fashion. Photograph: Zahra Biabani

The environmentalist from Houston, Texas, is about to launch In The Loop, her mission to make sustainable and ethical brands more accessible to young people.

Through research, she found that the main barriers for young people in renting clothes were cost, size exclusivity, and the lack of styles that people want to wear.

Biabani is bringing together a marketplace of eco-friendly brands with stringent entry requirements. “We make sure they pay a living wage, that 50% or more of their garments are made with intentionally sourced fabrics, and we also make sure that they offer public five- and 10-year sustainability goals,” she says.

Advertisement

For one-time renters, each piece of clothing is 75% cheaper to rent on her site than the retail price. You get the items for three and a half weeks, return them using the included returns label on the reusable shipping bags, and then In The Loop does the cleaning, restocking, and ships out the next month’s cycle. And this is all done from Biabani’s parents’ garage.

When Biabani learned that 56% of Gen Zers believe humanity is doomed, she started posting weekly positive climate news stories, which were met with a lot of gratitude. Climate optimism, Biabani says, isn’t about discrediting the trove of science and evidence that the climate crisis threatens our future on Earth – it’s a way to cultivate hope so people continue fighting.

“We’re not able to make change if we don’t believe change is possible. So climate optimism is just a framework for unlocking the full potentiality of climate solutions that we desperately need.”

Thomas Lawrence, 23, is building a sustainable marketplace to take on Amazon

“I think it’s time for Congress to be lobbied the other way. I’m not a blind optimist, but we also have to accept the world as it is. Money makes the world go round. I’m not saying I want it to be that way. But that’s the way it is,” says Thomas Lawrence, the founder of Good People Inc.

“If big oil, big meat and whatever else are going to lobby Congress in the US with their millions to keep their pockets heavy and to keep the world they want it to be, then why can’t we do the same thing? It’s time there was a bit more influence for the right side of history,” he says.

The 23-year-old entrepreneur is building a corporation that “only does good for the people and the planet.” Good People Inc wants to take on Amazon and give people an ethical, value-driven alternative. “They [Amazon] created a market that they’re now the only player in, and that’s the reason that lots of people can’t give up Amazon. The definition of a monopoly is that consumers don’t have another choice.”

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Good People Inc is already providing more than 200 products to people in the UK and is growing each day; the US site has also just launched. The company was born from a frustration with the way marketing tricks us. “I hate all these brands that make people spend their hard earned money by making you feel inadequate, or like you need something when you don’t,” he says. “A big problem for consumers isn’t always that they can’t get their stuff, the issue is that they desire the stuff in the first place.”

In order to sell products on the marketplace, retailers have to pass a number of regulations that Lawrence has put in place, including zero waste packaging, no plastic use, transparency about the provenance of ingredients, and how staff are treated.

What is it about Gen-Z that is resulting in so much direct action and optimism? “I think that my generation and millennials are starting to realize they have to take the matter into their own hands, rather than waiting on the people that are currently in charge to help.”

If all goes to plan, Good People Inc will end up as a co-op, owned by those who work there, and will have the capital and power to take on corporations in their own playground.

Originally published on gal-dem April 11, 2022.

Think back to 2002. Spring has just arrived and you’re perfecting Shakira’s Whenever, Wherever choreo in front of The Hits TV channel on Saturdays, in between playing snake on your mum’s phone, making dens in the living room, and watching Tracy Beaker which has just launched on CBBC. But it was also a difficult time, not only because people were wearing ‘gypsy’ skirts over flared jeans, but the reverb of 9/11 was being felt around the world, and racism towards brown people was even palpable to children who were being treated differently in the playground, afraid to openly celebrate their culture. On this day, 20 years ago, Bend It Like Beckham made those third culture British kids feel less alone.

Fresh from the mind of trailblazing director Gurinder Chadha, OBE – who was the first-ever British-Asian woman to direct a full-length feature film with her 1993 Bhaji on the Beach – the hilarious film told the story of a young Punjabi girl name Jesminder “Jess” Bhamra in Hounslow, west London, who wanted to play football. It was a critical and commercial juggernaut. It stayed at number one in the UK for 13 weeks, and in the US went to number seven, competing with blockbuster Hollywood films with budgets way beyond the £3.7m it took to bring this canonical masterpiece to life.

But Bend It Like Beckham almost didn’t happen. It had been in the works for five years before it got made as Gurinder, Paul Mayeda Berges, and Guljit Bindra worked on finalising the script. At first Guljit, a big football fan had envisioned it as a story of a girl who was really into football and goes to play with a football team in Ireland before her father dies, and so she has to come home. That idea was shelved until the Euros in 2000 when Gurinder noticed Ian Wright running onto the pitch after an England match, shoulders draped with the Union Jack. While that had been a symbol of National Front racism and football hooliganism, it sparked an idea to use the world to unpack the relationship between sport, culture, race, and gender with an Indian woman “at its core”.

So to celebrate Bend It Like Beckham’s 20th anniversary, and its impact, we spoke with the amazing people who made the film, including iconic members of the film’s cast and crew and did a rare interview with director Gurinder, to reflect on the project two decades on.

The battle to get Bend It Like Beckham made

Gurinder Chadha: I pitched the idea of two sisters, one who is proper west London and was going to get married, and the other one is a bit of a tomboy who wanted to do things differently.

We kind of knew very quickly that we had something really great. But nobody else did. As soon as you pitch something and there’s an Indian in the lead or an Indian female in the lead, you suddenly get all these questions like ‘is it going to be commercial?’Is it going to appeal? Is it mainstream?’ Not much has changed sadly in 20 years. That’s evident. Look at how little similar content there is out there.

It was a big struggle and a lot of people passed on it. I kept going back to Channel 4 saying ‘you really should do it’. And they said ‘oh we’ve done East is East we don’t need to do it’. That was what I was sort of up against at that time.

I just kept pushing and pushing and then I submitted it to what is now called the lottery. A producer told me that they had seen a report on my script saying ‘don’t fund it’ because you will never find an Indian girl that can play football that can bend a ball like David Beckham. I was like, ‘what the fucking fuck?’ So then I called John Woodward who was about to be the new head of the Film Council. And actually, John was great, he asked me the issues and I said ‘they’re all bogus. It’s pure racism. Does this person think Harrison Ford jumps out of helicopters? What does he think happens in those situations?’ I caused a massive stink about it. Because at that point, I was fed up with being put on panels to talk about diversity, and how hard it is to make films with women and women of colour. And I was always very important on those panels. And I just said, ‘Right, that’s it. I’ve had enough. I’m going to expose everybody and I’m quitting’. And then John was like, ‘Calm down. You’re exactly the kind of filmmaker we want to support in the Film Council.’

I made a few minor changes to the script and he took it to the committee and said, ‘I don’t care what you finance. But you’re going to finance this one.’ That’s exactly what happened. They gave me £1.1 million and that’s the only reason the film got made.

How the stellar casting created a fun set

Shaznay Lewis (who played Mel): Gurinder and Paul, they reached out to me and asked if I’d be interested. They sent me the script and I just completely got it and was really up for being involved.

Shaheen Khan (who played Mrs Bhambra): At that time, a lot of Asian actors had all worked together in some way or the other. So it really that sort of element of the family was sort of there.

Ameet Chana (who played Tony): Every day on that set had something special about it. We had so much fun in that film: we got paid to play football and go to a wedding.

Gurinder Chadha: What was euphoric then was when we were in Hamburg at the very end, that was the last time they were all going to play as a team. And suddenly, Parminder and Keira were footballers. When we were shooting that scene, it suddenly became England versus Germany. I would say cut and they would carry on playing, I remember Keira coming up to me saying ‘oh please can we just play this, we’ve just got to get this goal. And I was like ‘uh it’s not a real football match you know’.

Shaznay Lewis: I discovered through doing that film that I run like bambi. That was pointed out to me. I don’t know if you’ve seen Friends and seen the episode with Phoebe. I’m a bit of a Phoebe runner. Simon, the guy who trained us in football pointed that out, so then what I tried to concentrate on whenever I was running during a scene, was not to run like Bambi which I found extremely difficult. They shot me from the waist up (laughs).

Preeya Kalidas (who played Monica):

We really just had fun with it during filming. I just remember that scene with the three of us on the bench commenting on the boys playing football. We were actually watching them, and we were all just messing around and having fun with it.

All that footage that you see at the wedding reception, we’re actually really having a good time. It just felt like we were actually at a wedding because – we’re talking about the early 2000s – There weren’t very many opportunities in terms of stories that were representing our community. So suddenly, we had our community on set together and we just had the best time.

Gurinder Chadha: I’d say cut and everyone would burst out laughing. And actually, I don’t mean to be mean, but [some of the crew] had just come off the Ali G movie and they were saying that wasn’t funny at all, but this one they were saying was absolutely hysterical.

Bend It Like Beckham was a family affair

Gurinder Chadha: I had lost my father in an accident two years before the film. So at that point, I was totally grieving. But I didn’t know at the time, it’s only now when I look back at the film, and I go ‘oh for fucks sake it’s so emotional and so raw’. I find it hard to watch the film to be honest with you because it reminds me of my dad, and my mum to some degree … everything the dad says is my dad. My mum’s one goal was that I had to make perfect Indian food: meat and veg. To this day, I don’t make chapatis … I’m traumatised.

Shaheen Khan (laughing): Half of the extras were [Gurinder’s] relatives. I just remember, people always get so excited that they’re going to be in a film, but they don’t realise what a slog it is.

Gurinder Chadha (laughing): There was a very funny moment when Jesminder hands a plate of barfi (Indian sweet) to everyone and none of [my family] say anything. They don’t talk, they don’t move because they’re scared and the cameras are there. So then I cut and in Punjabi, I said, ‘you all just have to be natural like, when you’re at a party and someone brings you barfi, what do you do? They said, ‘we say yeah, thank you.’ So I said ‘Exactly. So choose the bit you want and just say thank you and move on’. Then we did the second take. On that take, Jesminder stopped at my Bhuaji (aunty). And bhuaji decided this is her big moment. She took hold of the tray. And she said in Punjabi, ‘Oh, I’d love to have burfi but I can’t because I’m not allowed to have a lot of sugar. And it’s a real struggle for me because I love barfi and all this looks so nice’. So I said: ‘cut. Not that much!’.

The thinking behind the iconic soundtrack

Gurinder Chadha: Music is very important to me personally, in my life. Every single track in the movie was on an iPod playlist of mine. All songs that I love. But Move On Up was the one that I really, really wanted for the film, and Inner Smile was a song by Texas that I really loved. I just feel what is the right song and I know when it’s the wrong song as well.

Craig Preuss (composer): We used a lot of different sources. We used B52 songs, there was a Bally Sagoo song. This is the cultural brilliance of Bend it Like Beckham: that it wove a lot of contemporary Indian styles that Gurinder liked and artists she championed too, like Bally Sagoo. And she wove it into the soundtrack, it really gave it a good edge.

Gurinder Chadha: I mean Rail Gaddi [played during the final wedding scene] was classic. I couldn’t even resist getting in there during that scene and dancing to Rail Gaddi in the film.

That Keira Knightley top

Ralph Wheeler-Holes (Costume designer): There was a scene when they were in the nightclub in Germany Keira wore that silver handkerchief top. We just went out shopping and I saw it and Keira loved it. So we just bought it and put it among the other options. Anyway, the day of filming came, and Keira was adamant that that’s what she wanted to wear, so I had quite an interesting conversation with Gurinder, who at that time wasn’t quite sure it was right. I suppose she felt it might have been too much. But she did buy into it when we spoke to her. That’s the thing about Gurinder – she does listen. I think it was important for me and for Keira to see Jules as not just this kind of tomboyish masculine gangly teenager, but a teenager who has her sexuality going for her. She wanted to play football. She wanted to achieve things but equally, she wanted to be an attractive woman. So that little outfit kind of hopefully allowed us to hit that mark.

Gurinder Chadha: I’ve got it somewhere actually. I kept it because I thought it was so iconic. I didn’t know it was gonna be iconic at the time, but I kept it.

‘Jess, I’m Irish’ and the handling of race in the film

Gurinder Chadha: Well, when my parents first came to England in the 60s, People like them found it hard to rent accommodation. There were signs on the doors saying: No blacks. No Irish. No dogs. So that’s where that line comes from. And I grew up at a time when there was a lot of racism against the Irish. And still is to some degree. So we know particularly at the height of the troubles in Ireland, there was a lot of anti-Irish feeling in London, particularly, so it was really coming in on that. But if you go to Ireland, there is a real anti-British feeling because of what the empire did in Ireland.

Ameet Chana: The script is actually more clever than a lot of people give credit for because it addresses so many things that are still relevant today. I’ve always said the reason why the Irish and Asians get on is that they’ve been oppressed by English all their lives.

Shaznay Lewis: I think what I love about [Gurinder] most is probably just how she manages to find humour within her culture. And also give us all a bit of a taste into a culture as well. I adore her. When I’m around her I soak her up. She’s such a great female source of inspiration and strength. She’s major.

If you come from any kind of cultural background, Gurinder is such an advocate for acknowledging your roots, speaking your truth, and being such a force for your culture, whoever you are, whatever culture you’re from, and, and I love that. She didn’t dumb any of it down. She was in her truth. And we all got it and we all embraced and loved it.

Preeya Kalidas: It was probably one of the only few scripts that I’d read, that I was really excited about, just because of what it represented. I just felt it really resonated with my experience and upbringing in London. And the fact that you had the lead female was the protagonist who had a dream and had to deal with her adversities to get there and that’s kind of been my journey also.

My character Monica was one of those girls that I also knew. Because where I grew up in West London, I used to hang out with people in Hounslow west, so I’d see a lot of these girls who were all about looking good, attracting attention, and hanging out in the park.

It was so funny filming in the shoe shop in Southall because you’ve got these aunties who just wanted to come in and buy heels for their daughter’s wedding, and we’re saying ‘sorry you can’t come in, we’re filming’ and like these aunties just didn’t care.

Sexuality in Asian communities and men that ‘really like Beckham’

Gurinder Chadha: It’s such a shock when he says it. You’re not expecting it because there’s nothing about him that is effeminate or anything. That ‘I really like Beckham moment’ is iconic and very truthful, because I remember when an Asian person said that to me, and I said, ‘but oh my god you’re Indian.’ So much of the film is from my life.

Ameet Chana: When I look back now at that time, people’s mentality and approach to that kind of subject matter was so different, particularly within our communities. And I think it’s probably the main reason I wanted to do it because I think Gurinder and the team wrote him as a normal guy that just happened to be gay. Whereas at that time, when you’re watching films with gay characters, they’re always really stereotypical.

I had lots of great, positive reactions from the South Asian gay community. I think they felt like there was someone that kind of was flying the flag and saying ‘it’s okay, whatever it is you feel. There’s a Tony in you.’

The iconic lesbian romance that nearly was?

Gurinder Chadha: I think that it was made at a time when those boundaries were being blurred. We had Tony who was gay, the girls have a very close friendship that could have gone either way. And it is a love story in some ways. But it was also about innocence at the time when they’re still sort of figuring out who they are and what they are.

“Against all the odds we did it”

The film’s reception and legacy

Craig Preuss: On the night of the premiere, David Beckham had broken his foot, and the Daily Mail had a big headline that said ‘Mend It Like Beckham’. Of course, we were all accused of arranging that to help. It went straight to number one. It stayed there for weeks and weeks and weeks. It inspired a lot of sports in schools and there was a surge in numbers of women signing up to play soccer.

Gurinder Chadha: I don’t think anybody could have expected the success. I have a theory as to why it was so successful. I think it came at a time in Britain, when Britain needed a new narrative, but people didn’t quite know how to articulate that narrative. You’d have a lot of riots, you’d have a lot of young British people who were kids of our parents’ generation. So we were all negotiating our identities. But 9/11 had just happened while I was finishing the film. Here was a world that had been totally bruised by that. So here comes this film that is very open and accessible, and that talks about culture and race, and the pains of not fitting in, but also that sense of hope about moving forward and claiming your rights. And being bigger than just about race. Finding ways to unite the world through traditions, but also using football, a global language.

You were invited into the house of a west London Sikh family, and you were made to understand how the parents think, how the kids think, and how they are going to deal with shit. And that translated to everywhere.

The movie has one statistic that no other movie in the world shares: it is the only movie that has been officially distributed in every country in the world, including China and North Korea. That’s the amazing power of cinema, and the power of cultural exchange when it’s allowed to happen on pure, honest, truthful terms.

Ameet Chana: It’s amazing that that film got made 20 years ago. I don’t think anybody would make that film now. I still remember to this day when the film was coming out, the kind of pre-release spiel was a new British-Asian Film is coming out about a young girl who plays football. And then when it came out, the success of it was so huge that all of a sudden the ‘Asian’ was dropped, and it was a new British film. And suddenly we were accepted. Before it came out it was othered slightly, and then with its success, it was welcomed with open arms.

Gurinder Chadha: At the time I felt against all the odds we did it. I managed to pull it off. And the great thing for me is that that victory wasn’t mine. It was for every single person that the film has meant something to. Really not a day goes past where someone doesn’t come up to me and says how important that film was to them. Because I got into this business to tell stories about people like me, people who look like me, and stories about empowerment for women and girls. And that’s what that film achieved, and will forever I mean, it’s on the GCSE syllabus and is studied all over the world in different colleges. So it was a moment in time where I was able to say: ‘This is what it’s like for us. We don’t have to just be what you think we are, we can also be this.’

Originally published in The Guardian on 17th August 2020.

Note: this piece contains accounts that may be triggering for survivors of sexual assault

Watching Michaela Coel’s acclaimed drama I May Destroy You, Amanda Jones had a realisation, a sense of shock setting into her body. She turned to her husband and said: “I think I was raped.”

It has been nearly two months since many of us took a seat in Coel’s classroom, where she taught viewers – more clearly than any sex education class ever did – about consent, sexual assault and rape. Situated in a nuanced black British experience, the series follows twentysomething Twitter-star-turned-novelist Arabella Essiedu (Coel), who survives multiple sexual assaults while navigating beautifully flawed relationships with her two best mates, Terry (Weruche Opia) and Kwame (Paapa Essiedu).

The story is specific yet relatable, capturing the zeitgeist as our generation grapples with individual identities and collective experience. Arabella’s palpable shift in moods run parallel with her changing hairstyles to take us through an authentic story of processing and reporting rape, betrayals and toxic relationships, flecked with joy, dark humour – and period blood.

Jones, a writer, is giving the final push to her first novel about the #MeToo movement. Lockdown has been a time of motivational struggle for her, as many people have found, but she was also unexpectedly presented with what her therapist called delayed shock. “My limbs sort of turned to lead,” she says, describing her physical reaction to the programme. When she realised she was raped in her 20s after seeing Arabella become a victim of “stealthing” (non-consensual removal of a condom during sex) by the character Zain, she felt “really tired and heavy. I felt dizzy.”

The east Londoner remembers the discomfort and humiliation she felt as the man who stealthed her laughed at her anger. She buried the feelings, assuming they were part and parcel of sexual freedom in the 90s, paired with a healthy dose of Catholic guilt, she jokes.

“I think it must be really, really common,” Jones says. Indeed one study from a sexual health clinic in Melbourne, Australia, found that 32% of women and 19% of men who had had sex with men reported having experienced stealthing. The ambiguity around the incident, with no “villain”, made it gut-wrenchingly real for many viewers. “It was really brilliant how they portrayed [Zain] as a nice guy who she slept with again after that,” Jones says. “It’s those grey areas around rape and sexual assault that you almost brush off.” Jones’s final thought stayed with me: “A really nice person who you’re in a loving relationship with can rape you. And we all need to be aware of that.”

Considering that approximately 11 adults are raped or sexually assaulted by penetration every hour in the UK, and the National Sexual Hotline reports that there is a victim of sexual violence every 73 seconds in the US, I May Destroy You’s story was important. Faye White, 27, tells me of her harrowing experience of being raped in her sleep as she took a solo backpacking trip in Australia in 2015. She was also attacked during lockdown on her way home from work. “After watching I May Destroy You, I realised that it definitely triggered some feelings for me,” says White. “Although I had therapy five years ago, I’ve decided to have some more, which is something I never really thought I would do.”

The number of people convicted of rape is at its lowest on record, while reported cases have risen sharply, which some say effectively leads to decriminalisation. White, a journalist from Dorset, describes the scene where Arabella is in the police station and is told that there is nothing more they can do, as they hand back her belongings. “That happened to me twice and it was almost word-perfect. The disappointment in her face really hit home.”

It was the tumultuous final episode of the series that pushed White to get more therapy, with the audience seeing the different reactions Arabella might have to facing her attacker. White recalls the powerful imagined scene where Arabella’s rapist, David, is in bed with her and says: “I’m not going to go unless you tell me to.”

“It just made me think that I kind of sit with this and live with these feelings and these memories every day,” she says. “There isn’t a day where I don’t think about it. But I want to get to a place where I am happily living with it and alongside it, rather than being controlled by it.”

Liam Austen, a copywriter from London, found the experience of Kwame’s character to be a trigger. In episode four, he introduces a hesitant friend, Damon, to Malik, a stranger from Grindr, for a potential threesome. Damon leaves while Kwame has consensual sex with Malik. But as Kwame is going to leave the flat, he is raped in a harrowing scene that Papaa Essiedu has described as a historic moment for British TV.

Austen, 24, had a similar experience with an ex-boyfriend. “I didn’t truly realise how much shame, anger and hurt I was still carrying from that time,” he says. “Watching the fallout and how other characters approached it allowed me to step back and assess how I had been acting, while also making me feel much less ashamed. I felt like a weight was lifted after watching it, like I’d been released after not even realising I was trapped.”

The 12-part series not only supported people through past trauma, but also changed how some reacted. Having watched the show, Alice Bradshaw-Smith, a PR account director from Bristol, phoned the police in a situation she previously wouldn’t have. After a scary stand-off with a man who jumped out at her as she walked home from a friend’s house, Bradshaw-Smith chose to report the incident to the police because the show had empowered her to do so. “Whereas previously I might have thought I was making a big deal out of a situation, I reacted completely differently having seen a central character [report an incident to the police]. I completely respected her for that decision. It was a really brave one.”

Lex Kennedy, from Los Angeles, said the show made him rethink how he supported survivors of sexual assault. “I identify as a black trans masculine person and I recognise that within my community we don’t really step up for black women,” he says. “It’s always: ‘Well, what happened?’, qualify your trauma, qualify your pain, versus: ‘How can I be there for you?’” Kennedy passionately describes how Kwame’s demonstration of friendship to Arabella was a catalyst for his change. Referring to episode two, the 32-year-old film-maker says: “When Kwame finds out that Arabella had been harmed he just shows up. He’s there, waiting for Arabella to take the lead.”

The characters in I May Destroy You are inspiringly direct. Vague concepts become beautifully straightforward, something that motivated 27-year-old Kahar to be more open with the people he dates. After watching the show, he told his dates that he was seeing more than one person, and has started checking more actively about the use of contraception. “The shock in Arabella’s face really resonated with me, when she realised somebody had stealthed her and she wasn’t aware that that was illegal,” he explains.

This series resonated with so many precisely because it focused on the doubt that forms in many people’s minds around difficult, taboo themes. It concentrated on the assumptions, the space between consent and coercion, the thoughts we habitually suppress, and the nuance of experience rarely shown in a TV industry that so often focuses on society’s extremities. It has helped kickstart new conversations and behaviours. “Rather than just expecting things to be OK by default, I’m actually asking questions,” says Kahar.

Originally published on The Guardian 31 Dec 2021.

“I was coming down Mount Snowdon and in the far distance I thought I could see brown people, and I thought my eyes were kidding me. Then, as I descended and got closer, I realised they were women in hijabs. I was like ‘wow Muslim women on the mountain’, like ‘am I dreaming?’” Haroon Mota, the founder of Muslim Hikers, is remembering a walk he did around 15 years ago and, if you look at the statistics, his shock at seeing members of his own community out on the trails makes sense. Only 1% of national park visitors come from black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) backgrounds.

A 2021 report by the countryside charity CPRE reported data showing ethnic minorities have, on average, 11 times less access to green space than their white counterparts, and that only 20% of BAME children who visit natural environments go to the countryside, compared with 40% of white children.

The reasons for the racial imbalance outdoors is complicated, and Mota has his own opinions on what the major barriers are, but a diversity review commissioned by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) highlighted that despite people from ethnic minority backgrounds valuing the natural environment and pace of life in the countryside, they felt excluded and hyper-visible in what they see as an “exclusively English environment”.

Muslim Hikers is a community group set up by Mota to encourage Muslims to get outside, though anyone is welcome. Since launching the group in 2020, he’s received criticism from trolls for being “exclusionary” and “creating divisions”. Mota brushes those comments off, confident in his values and purpose. “It is what it says on the tin. There is a very clear under-representation and to overcome that, you’ve got to cater for that community. Everybody’s welcome. But our focus is to try and help the Muslim community and I think there’s nothing wrong with that.”

The group’s most recent walk was on Christmas day. One hundred walkers came from around the UK to hike up Mam Tor in the Peak District. After the hike, some of them excitedly shared photos of the trip to the Derbyshire and Peak District Walks Facebook group. It wasn’t long until some members of the group left “vile, racist comments”, says Mota.

“It’s like the migration of the wildebeests in the Serengeti, they just keep coming,” one white woman wrote underneath the images. While another said: “And I bet not 1 of the 100s help to repair the paths when they become damaged …absolute disgrace.”

Responding to the comments, Mota said: “It was such a shame seeing hateful comments ... It’s only a small minority of people who act like this but it sure does provide justification for calls to make the outdoors more diverse and inclusive. It won’t deter us one single bit.”

Mota says he has never experienced racism when he’s been hiking and finds the outdoors “a very welcoming space”, however he adds that many people within his hiking group have experienced racist remarks, staring and patronising comments.

The CPRE report echoed these attitudes when looking at the key barriers: “One barrier identified was a perception of rural communities as close-knit, white, privileged, older and more conservative than city people, and resistant to change. The associated feeling with this … is that of being unwelcome.”

When Mota saw the Muslim women on Snowdon, he excitedly chatted with the group who had travelled from Birmingham for the Islamic Relief charity hike. He exchanged details with the group’s leader and continued his descent. In years of hiking, this was the first time he’d seen brown people out on the hills. “I thought, our people just don’t go outside … I want to do something to try and maybe inspire and empower Muslim communities to get involved.”

Mota, who was the European kickboxing champion at 17, has a long history in sport and fitness. “It’s in my DNA,” he says. In his final year at Coventry University studying sport and exercise science, Mota began volunteering for Islamic Relief and his first charity hike was to Everest base camp where he raised £10,000. His passion and flair for fundraising quickly became apparent. “For me, charity is a huge part of my faith,” he says. He has volunteered as the leader on many of Islamic Relief’s charity hikes over the following years, including one to Peru.

Now Mota works for the Muslim charity Penny Appeal, arranging and leading charity treks around the world. Three years ago he took 18 British Muslim women to hike to Everest base camp. Shortly afterwards he ran the Berlin Marathon, led a group on a hike to Peru’s Machu Picchu, and another to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. He had many more plans in the pipeline but then Covid struck.

With a fundraising pledge to run four of the world’s six major marathons scuppered by lockdown, he chose to run the length of six marathons (260km) in his local area of Coventry instead. Not only did he run 10k a day, but he did it while fasting with no food or drink for 18 hours of the day during Ramadan. He raised over £50,000 for Penny Appeal which helps people in poverty around the world.

“I ran voluntarily, but refugees are fleeing war and extreme poverty every day and I ran for them,” Mota explains.

After seeing his inspirational resolve, Canadian outdoor brand Arc’teryx asked him to become an ambassador. With the backing of the brand, Mota’s first instinct was to try to invest in his own community and so in 2020, Muslim Hikers was born.

Now at nearly 9,000 followers, the group has done three official hikes and is planning more, potentially abroad. Many participants have said the events have been the best thing they’ve ever done, creating friendships for life and a sense of “safety in numbers” in the British outdoors.

Muslim Hikers’ second event, called High Chai, was similarly successful selling out in two hours – the group hiked through the Peak District and some of them stopped for afternoon tea at the only independent halal tea room in the area- Millies Tea Rooms, Chocolatier and Bed & Breakfast in Hayfield.

A big factor for wanting to get his community outdoors is for health reasons, Mota says. “It’s South Asian communities that suffer the greatest sort of health inequalities. We’re the ones that are dying of diabetes, heart disease and obesity. And then it’s not a coincidence that our physical activity levels are also the lowest - ​​it’s so important for us to encourage our communities to be more healthy.”

Mota’s hopes for the future are firmly rooted in community and creating a cultural shift. “We want to help other grassroots initiatives build infrastructure, so we can do more and create long, lasting, sustainable change.” He is already working with national parks to help them increase the diversity of visitors.

“When I started running marathons, I automatically became the ‘Muslim marathon man’. When I started climbing mountains, I automatically became the ‘Muslim mountain man’,” he says. Mota wants to change the underrepresentation so that Muslim people doing physical activities becomes the new norm.

Originally published on UNILAD in the wake of the Manchester Attacks on May 27, 2017, including documentary I produced.

In the wake of the harrowing Manchester attack, the fact that we have to even turn to the city’s Muslim community and ask for their response – as opposed to anyone else’s – highlights the misconception about terrorism and Islam.

When I sat down with six of Manchester’s local lads, some volunteers from Muslim Aid another the Vice President of the University of Manchester Islamic Society, never has the mainstream representation been so incorrect.

The boys, most of them in their teens, opened up about their anxieties regarding looming A-level exams, their wide-ranging career aspirations, and a love for Manchester United.

They are no different from any other Oldham guys you would meet in the street, but because they are Muslims, that label carries a heavy burden.

Especially after the heart-breaking and barbaric attack by an extremist in the name of Islam, the public lean towards alienating British Muslim’s out of fear that they are in some way associated with extremism.

Especially after the heart-breaking and barbaric attack by an extremist in the name of Islam, the public lean towards alienating British Muslim’s out of fear that they are in some way associated with extremism.

Amas, the Islamic society’s VP, quoted Tony Wilson, proudly exclaiming: “This is Manchester, we do things differently here.”

Amas said:

“Directly after the attack, we saw off duty taxi drivers coming out of their houses and going towards the scene, helping those who fleeing and helping them get home free of charge.

“We saw doctors working overtime throughout the night saving lives, we saw restaurants offering free food to emergency workers.

“The whole city united together at a pivotal moment in the city’s history and something to this scale had never happened before.

“Everyone came together and were unified and were able to get through it that evening.

“It struck a chord and shook a lot of us to the core, to happen in our home city of Manchester it is completely earth shattering.”

Manchester’s reaction has been an inspirational one, but there is clearly a need for more education and communication between all different communities.

The solution that consistently came up was education.

‘Hatred arises from fear’ was repeated by everyone I spoke to from the Muslim community.

Every week on Market Street in Manchester, Muslims Against Extremism set up a stand in order to educate the general public on the true teachings of their faith, making the point that radicals are not part of their religion.

18-year-old Beinhameen Hussain from Oldham said to UNILAD:

“From a Muslim point of view, you need to learn before you throw accusations. Come and speak to us, we’re an open community. Come to us, come to a mosque, a community centre, approach a Muslim in the street.

“If you have a single question, we’re happy to answer. With sharing and learning, people will stop hating.

“I feel like there is a block in communication, there is a ‘them and us’ culture, and non-Muslims think we’re closed off, but we’re not.”

After the Brexit referendum, over 14,000 hate crimes were recorded in the UK between July and September 2016.

There has been an overwhelmingly positive response since the Manchester attack, however a mosque in Oldham was set on fire, and Muslims were spat at during the vigil by members of the public.

Adnan, from Muslim Aid, was calling for all communities to come together:

“If the community is strong then this stuff wouldn’t happen because everyone would know what was going on.

“Now everyone has their singular life, they go to work, come home, no one communicates with anyone. Everyone is on social media, but no one talks in person.”

Nazmul Ahmed, who told me of his dreams to be a journalist, said:

“We may look different to people who are non-Muslim, we might talk a bit different, we might act a bit different, but we’re the same as everyone else.

“We’re citizens of Manchester, we’ve grown up here our whole lives and we’re people of this city. We love the city just as much as you do.

“If you don’t know about Islam, come and speak to us, do not fear. I feel like a lot of hatred comes from fear of the unknown. Often if you don’t know something, you hate it and you’re scared of it.

“We’re like you, we’re human, we’re not different because of religion. We feel happiness, sadness, anger as well.

“If we realise we can all connect as humans with the same emotions, then we can all get along.”

Amas was ‘utterly shocked’ at the racist response from public figures like Katie Hopkins, saying:

“Hatred arises from ignorance. Islam is not represented by this attacker. This attacker does not represent Islam in any way whatsoever.

“To take one person’s life is like taking the whole of mankind according to Islam. He doesn’t represent us. Those who were helping and giving afterward present true Islam.”

Take a second and think about what your preconceptions about Islam are. Where did they come from? What are they based on?

Those of us who feel we could understand better should do something about it – so let’s take action.

Attend Mosque open days, open up our communities so that the unknown becomes the known, speak to people who we don’t usually engage with.

The best way to fight extremist groups like IS is to come together. A unified, understanding and cohesive Britain is no good to them.

Choose love.

Originally published in The Guardian on 12th May 2021.

While many of us were still finding novelty in group Zoom calls last May, Demi Skipper decided she was going to get a house. But not using money. Instead, she was going to trade items.

Now the owner of one of only a few Chipotle celebrity cards in the world, and hoping to reach a house by the end of summer, the 29-year-old’s journey started where many voyages do: in a YouTube hole.

Sitting in the living room of her rented house in San Francisco, she had just finished watching a Ted Talk by Kyle MacDonald, also known as the red paperclip guy, who traded up 14 times to get from a red paperclip to a house in 2006.

MacDonald was a 26-year-old jobless Canadian who traded from a red paperclip to a fish-shaped pen, to a handmade doorknob, before trading it for a camping stove, then a generator, then a keg of beer and a neon sign, followed by a snowmobile, a trip to Yahk in British Columbia, a box truck, a music recording contract, a year’s rent in Arizona, to one afternoon with the rock band Alice Cooper. His strangest trade was then for a Kiss-themed motorized snow globe, which he swapped with snow globe fanatic and actor Corbin Bernsen for a role in a Hollywood film, before trading the movie role for a two-storey farmhouse in Kipling, Saskatchewan, Canada.

Skipper, a self-described “scrappy entrepreneurial type”, was up to the challenge.

“I can’t buy anything. I can’t use any money. And I can’t trade anyone I know,” she excitedly explains over a 7am video call. She’s used to early mornings as she’s been working 6am to 2.30pm as a product manager for BuzzFeed. “A lot of comments [about my project] are like, ‘You need to get a job’, and I’m like, Oh my gosh, if they knew I’m working like 12-hour days,” she gestures in disbelief.

Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist and Ebay are Skipper’s go-tos. She first posted an image of the bobby pin explaining her mission, and traded it for brand new earrings from a woman on Facebook who was excited to take part. People’s eagerness to get involved has been the most surprising thing. “I get probably 1,000 messages a day on Instagram. And a lot of them are like: I don’t have a trade but I live in this state and I’d be willing to drive your car from here to here, or I have a garage or a safe place where you could keep a trade.”

She left the earrings on the porch of a woman keen to get rid of four margarita glasses, which Skipper traded for a vacuum cleaner. Then she had to trade outside of her city to meet a couple who exchanged their kid’s old snowboard for a vacuum cleaner. The snowboard went for an Apple TV. It was the first branded item she received, which made it easier to trade. She then arranged to swap it for a pair of Bose headphones, before finding a man on the neighbourhood app Next Door to trade her for an old Apple MacBook.

A MacBook from a bobby pin: it was a landmark moment. Up until this point, her project, named Trade Me, wasn’t well-known. Now she had the eyes of thousands of people on her. “The next trade was really nerve-racking because it was the first one I had to ship. So I had to trust that the person I was trading with would send me the camera and lenses,” she explained.

The camera went for the first pair of collector sneakers she found. “I reached out and the guy really helped me understand how to tell if sneakers are real.” Skipper then went on to trade two more pairs of sneakers, which the first trader advised her on. Desperate to get out of the sneaker world, Skipper found a man who had been searching for those $1,000 trainers for a long time, and traded them for a brand new iPhone 11 Max.

A family of Trade Me fans offered her a red minivan for the iPhone. While it was the most surprising upgrade, Skipper remembers it as the most emotionally difficult. A couple were so inspired by the project, they drove the van 29 hours from Minnesota to San Francisco with their two kids.

The minivan broke down after its long journey, and Skipper posted this hiccup on her TikTok. What she didn’t foresee was the amount of hate the family soon got, including a lot of Islamophobia. “The worst parts of the internet came out,” she says.

With the minivan no longer working, and unable to spend money to fix it, she was forced to trade down for an electric skateboard which went for the latest MacBook. She swapped that for an electric bike food cart, followed by a Mini Cooper.

The next trade went downhill.

“Ah, the diamond necklace,” she says. She thought it was worth $20,000, but she was quickly told that although it was worth that amount when made, it would only be bought for $2,000. The necklace’s appraisal value was $20,000, but as she quickly learned, this is not the same as the resale value. “It was a soul-crushing moment. I’d just traded this really nice Mini Cooper that was probably worth like $8,000, and I pretty much cut that in a quarter.”

She again then traded down for a Peloton exercise bike. Next was an extremely run- down Mustang, followed by a Jeep, a tiny cabin, a Honda CRV and then three tractors.

Like Kyle Macdonald, Skipper has a large audience. Nearly 5 million people follow her on TikTok. Her most recent trade – the three tractors for a Chipotle celebrity card – was offered to her by the fast-food chain after she posted the video about the tractors. There are only about three in existence. (The owner of this celebrity card gets unlimited free Chipotle food for a year, plus a catered dinner for 50 people.)

Obviously they wouldn’t be so keen to get involved if it wasn’t for the millions of potential customers following Demi’s journey, but Skipper is adamant that anyone can do their own trading project. “There’s this 18-year-old guy in London who’s gotten really far, and he’s not even TikTok-famous, but he’s done it on his own, trading with people he knows,” she remembers.

While Skipper doesn’t spend any money on trades, she decided early on to pay for shipping. “It doesn’t feel right when you’re trading with someone and then you’re like, ‘Oh, can you pay for my shipping too?’” She’s spent about $4,000 on shipping so far.

Today’s world revolves around money, but cash in and of itself has no actual value. As a society, we’ve agreed on a story of what money is worth. We spend the majority of our time earning it or spending it, but that’s only been the case for the last 5,000 years. Before that, we would directly trade goods and services: I’ll fix your roof if you give me a bag of potatoes. “[You can] say: this is worth this many dollars. But part of trading up is to find the person who finds a different type of value in it,” says Skipper.

Skipper hopes more and more people will trade in this way. “Trading evens the playing field more, because everyone has that bobby pin or paperclip.” Thousands of TikTokers are now tagging her project in their own pursuits for anything from cars to college tuition.

“Honestly, I love that it’s a bit of an F U to capitalism.”

I produced and edited this film was originally published on The Guardian on 19th June 2020.

Statues of colonialists and brutal leaders have been toppled by protesters or removed by governments in recent weeks as campaigns to bring down monuments to historical figures tainted by racism and slavery spread around the world.

In Belgium, during Black Lives Matter protests, numerous statues of King Leopold II, whose brutal rule of Congo caused an estimated 10 million deaths through murder, starvation and disease, were defaced and covered in red paint. While in the UK, Oxford University’s Oriel College voted in favour of removing its statue of the Victorian imperialist Cecil Rhodes.

In response to the latest action, the historian David Olusoga looks at the significance of these statues and examines the impact they have had on the victims of colonialists and imperialists, as well as the cost borne by their descendants

Original video published in The Guardian on 16th March 2021.

Black and mixed-race people can face discrimination over the hair they were born with. Students are excluded from school, people report losing out on jobs, and others say they can feel ostracised at work.

At least 93% of black people with afro hair in the UK have experienced micro-aggressions related to their hair, according to a survey released last month for the haircare brand Pantene.

In 2019 California became the first state to legally prohibit discrimination based on hairstyles such as dreadlocks, cornlocks and afros. New Jersey, New York and Virginia later followed.

Activist Zina Alfa says hair discrimination is a 'conduit for racism' and explains why she believes similar legislation in the UK is critical to tackling the issue

Originally published in The Guardian on 15th December 2020.

Covid restrictions have left many of us feeling torn between seeing friends and family and staying safe this year. Meeting others in person can feel fraught, especially when not everyone is adhering to guidance and restrictions. Meanwhile, 7.4 million people in the UK say that “lockdown loneliness” has affected their wellbeing. According to psychologist and friendship expert Marisa Franco this can become a vicious cycle: “When we’re lonely, we are more critical of other people,” she says. “Evolutionarily, when we were lonely, we were separate from our tribe and in danger. Now, when we’re lonely, we’re not in the same kind of danger, but we still have that same physiological system where other people pose a threat of rejection.”

As we leave 2020, it is clear that coronavirus has made its mark on our relationships. But as the UK is no longer in lockdown, there may be more Covid-related confrontations to come – especially with friends who differ in their interpretation of or adherence to the rules imposed by the current tier system. But how do you deal with rule-breaking pals, or even just friends who have different Covid-related boundaries, without losing touch or causing offence?

Understand your own feelings first

If someone you care about does something that is at odds with your own boundaries, it is normal to feel strongly about it. “People try to suppress their feelings and then their feelings ambush them and leak out in ways that they are not in control of,” says Franco. Better to acknowledge these emotions before attempting to communicate them to the person in question. It might help to write your thoughts down or air them to a third party.

Start with questions

Consider why you believe your friend to be flouting the rules or acting irresponsibly. You may have seen a post on Instagram, or heard an offhand remark, but don’t assume you know the whole story. “You want to give them a chance to explain their side of things,” says Franco. Recognise that many people with good intentions may struggle to understand or stick to strict regulations. “Ask questions from a place of care about how they’re relating to the pandemic and its protocols.” Manhattan psychologist Joe Cilona says that “being extra-aware that not everyone is at their best, including you, can help foster a more realistic approach when addressing disagreements.”

Empathise

Is there a part of you that would love to break the rules and have a house party? Melanie Ross Mills, a relationship expert and host of The Life Bonds podcast, suggests taking a good hard look in the mirror before any confrontation. “Self-examining helps prevent hypocrisy, reduces a critical mindset, and produces compassion and empathy,” she says. Understanding that while your actions might be more restrained, your desires are similar, may make you reassess your feelings.

Don’t take it personally

“People who feel insecure and battle issues of self-worth will have a more difficult time not personalising other people’s boundaries and lifestyles in this pandemic,” says Franco. For example, if your friend is taking longer to reply to messages than usual, it could be because they are trying to minimise their screen time – but it’s easy to think their distance is a response to something you’ve done. Her advice is: “Lean on the default assumption that people like you, and they have other things going on in this very stressful time.”

At the same time, it is important to communicate your boundaries openly and honestly to your friends and family, even if you suspect they may be met with some resistance. “But when you do, I want you to use ‘I’ statements instead of ‘you’ statements,” says Franco. Swap accusatory language for authentic statements about your own experience. She suggests saying something along the lines of: “I would love to see you, but because of the ways that I’m relating to this pandemic, I’m not sure if I would feel comfortable seeing you in person.”

After you have set your boundaries, you can offer alternatives that you both feel comfortable with. This might be a socially distant walk with masks or baking a cake together via video call.

Stand firm

“Just because someone else is uncomfortable with your boundaries, doesn’t mean that you are wrong to set them in the first place,” says Franco. You may have been empathic and non-judgmental and still get a bad reaction from your friend. In this scenario, it is still important to “make an effort to stay in touch and continue to create memories and bond”, says Mills. “We need connection, now more than ever.”

Start planning for the future

You might not be able to get exact dates in the diary, but with the first vaccinations already taking place, a post-Covid world is on the horizon. Whether it is choosing a location for a beach holiday, perusing cottages for a weekend getaway with friends, or deciding your costume for your post-Covid celebration party, making plans for a later date can be a good way to stay connected with friends, and make clear that you are looking forward to seeing them in the future.

Originally published on The Guardian 8 Oct 2021.

“Important bit of history that,” a warm West Country voice says over my shoulder as we look at the plaque outside the Seven Stars pub, a 17th-century landmark of the abolition movement.

If you block out the posters for the band “Kunts” adorned with a large image of Boris Johnson, and instead focus on the cobbled streets and Georgian walls, you can imagine the secret meetings between abolitionists and slave ship sailors.

This particular plaque commemorates Thomas Clarkson, an anti-slavery activist who, with the help of Seven Stars landlord Thompson (his full name is not known), collected testimonies from sailors in 1787. Used as evidence in parliament, the testimonies helped to achieve the passing of the 1807 Slave Trade Act and eventually led to the end of the British slave trade.

Blue badge tour guide Rob Collin takes me around Bristol, guiding me through the city I grew up in, but whose history I was never taught. Last summer, protesters in the city toppled a statue of slave trader Edward Colston. Collin’s care and passion for representing the warts-and-all truth of Bristol’s involvement in the slave trade is unfaltering, even as our hands freeze around our umbrella handles in the rain.

“If all you’re going to portray to the outside world is that which is good … you’re rewriting history to your own agenda. That’s dangerous. The whole purpose of a walk like this is to try to understand the past, so we can understand the present,” he says.

As we stand at Colston’s plinth, on Colston Street, next to what was (until last year) Colston Hall and Colston Tower, we learn about the man. In 1680 he became a board member and then deputy governor of the Royal African Company (RAC), the most prolific slave-trading company in British history. During his time there (his involvement ended in 1692), it shipped an estimated 84,000 people from the coast of Africa to plantations in the new world. About 19,000 of them didn’t even complete the treacherous journey: they spent their last days chained to the ship’s decks before their bodies were thrown into the sea.

There aren’t many records of how much money Colston made from trading enslaved people, but there is plenty of information about his philanthropy afterwards. More than 100 years after his death, as Bristol’s harbour closed for commercial use, Colston was held up as a hero, and his slave-trading past was sanitised and ignored.

We head next to the Drawbridge pub, right in the centre, where the harbour was carved into the middle of the city. Now, it’s an elongated roundabout where traffic lights, locals and historical relics interlace with a recent fleet of pink e-scooters. A replica of the figurehead from the Demerara steamship stands above this pub as a reminder of Bristol’s long history importing sugar. The colourful statue wearing a red sash is meant to depict an indigenous chief, a spear in his left hand, and some greenery in his right representing the “bounty of the West Indies”.

In the 18th century, sugar quickly became Bristol’s most lucrative import and the city was a booming hub of the triangular trade. Arms, textiles and wine were shipped from Europe to Africa in return for enslaved people, who were shipped to the Americas to work on plantations to grow sugar, tobacco, cocoa and coffee, which were then shipped back to Europe.

Collin describes how the tentacles of the trade sprawled into all cities, through the snuff in Britons’ noses to the sugar in their tea, and how money made from slavery funded many of the UK’s universities, banks, bridges, schools and buildings.

“When trade and commerce dominate, the moral imperative will always be set aside,” says Collin. He dismisses the claim that everyone agreed with slavery during the height of its practice in Britain. Instead he says, “We understood the abhorrence of the slave trade, but because of the economic argument for slavery, we became indifferent to the abuse of Africans in the slave trade.”

In Bristol, money from the trade went into Clifton suspension bridge, Bristol Cathedral’s stained glass windows, and Bristol University’s main Wills Memorial Building, to name a few.

Standing in front of the cathedral, Collin begins explaining the slave trade remnants found inside. The most prominent window, beneath a gold clock in the north transept, is dedicated to Colston and features a tall dome of intricate cobalt, red and turquoise panels, with the initials EC picked out underneath the images of Jesus and the centurion. Also in the transept are stone memorial tablets of former plantation owners in the West Indies, including Abraham Cumberbatch (a direct relation of actor Benedict) who owned a sugar plantation in Barbados.

Outside as we look up Park street, the University of Bristol’s Wills Memorial Building towers over the city at the top of the hill. Students have protested to get the name of the building changed because they believe it celebrates the Wills family of tobacco magnates whose wealth also stemmed from slavery. But given that most of the funding for the university came from the Wills family, the university decided to keep the name.

Collin’s slave trade tour runs year-round, but he’s getting more interest now it’s Black History Month. Understanding the impact the past has on our present and future is vital, he says. “The absence of knowledge leaves people in polarised positions. But if history is used as a positive force, you develop empathy for other people, which can only impact our relationships positively.”

I was interviewed by Victoria Derbyshire on her BBC Breakfast show about my experience as a former porn user, and the government’s legislation to ban porn for under 18s.

https://twitter.com/NeelamTailor/status/1106233794590326790

Originally published on gal-dem on 15th July 2021.

After her surprise performance at the BET Awards last month, Cardi B broadcast her second pregnancy to the world on Instagram. The image is a side profile of the rapper standing majestically, wearing nothing but her tattoos, earrings and the pièce de résistance: a powder white breast and stomach plate to match her nails crafted by Misha Japanwala. It has since garnered nearly 14 million likes.

The white resin cast of her body is a beautiful piece of art by an on-the-rise Pakistani artist. It mixes rough edges with fine detail to make resin casts, which make wearers, like Cardi B and model Cindy Bruna posing for Spanish Vogue, look part-sculpture. Misha loves body casting because it shows every single pore and wrinkle: “I think it’s a beautiful thing to be able to create this piece, this exact replica of this part of your body, and to hang it up next to a painting on your wall and be like, that is a work of art.”

Within 48 hours of Cardi B’s stylist Kollin Carter calling Misha up with a mysterious high-profile pregnancy request, the 26-year-old designer had got on a flight from New York to LA and was working on the piece. Her intimate time rubbing silicon over Cardi B’s pregnant belly is top secret stuff and after signing an NDA, the most she can say is “it was an amazing experience”.

After sleepless nights working to get the cast just right, Misha sent it off to Kollin and, in fear of it getting pulled, suppressed her excitement. “I have this rule where we don’t celebrate until it’s published until we see it in print, or until we see the dollars in the checking account,” she smiles, with the eyes of someone who has learned the hard way. “That’s just the nature of working in fashion.” Of course, Misha had notifications on for Cardi B’s Instagram posts and, while perusing LA’s LACMA gallery, she felt her phone buzz: the rapper had posted a new photo. Misha could make out her work of art from the tiny image on the notifications page and let out a far-from-art-gallery-friendly gasp, before running over to her fiance. “We were walking past Picasso paintings just looking at our phones,” she says with so much joy, it’s as if she’s back in the moment.

Already on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia list, with an Instagram following of over 48k, and having had her work picked out by Gigi Hadid for a special edition of V Magazine, Misha has had her fair share of success. But Cardi B is her biggest career moment yet.

Sadly, she couldn’t just bask in the glory but had to prepare herself in equal measure for a steady stream of hate. Misha gets regular abuse, the majority of which is from Pakistani men, often calling her a “pervert”, “nipple devil”, “sex addict”, and a “shameful Muslim”. Sometimes she uses Urdu scripture on her drawings of the female body, like the word “azaadi”, meaning freedom, when making a point about autonomy. When Misha does this, she’s often told by Muslim commenters that she doesn’t have the right to use Urdu, despite it being her first language.

While the visual artist is criticised by both men and women, she says she always finds the latter more painful. “It’s a problem that women are seeing their own bodies as something that’s offensive – something that’s obscene – and are believing that they need to then police other women,” she adds.

The criticism does get to Misha, who admits she is a deeply emotional person and jokes that crying is “basically a hobby at this point”. Though she doesn’t let upsets deter her from making her art: “The hate I get shows me just how many people feel threatened by a woman simply speaking her mind, sharing her thoughts, and exercising her right to her own body. And that is something that needs to change. Women should have the freedom to express themselves without the fear of a reaction.”

Misha mostly publishes her work via Instagram, often accompanied by a detailed caption explaining her thought process, concerns for the world and what she hopes to provoke in her audience. A lot of artists just post images of their work without captions and let the audience interpret it, but Misha doesn’t and she’s not sure exactly why. “I think, maybe, it’s because I am a Pakistani woman that’s creating work depicting women nude and because of that, I feel like I do have to explain myself and defend myself because so many people think it’s not okay.”

Misha left what she describes as quite a “sheltered” and “privileged” life in Karachi at 19 to go to Parsons School of Design in New York. “Art school really throws you into the frickin’ deep end,” she says with wide eyes. Suddenly, being an immigrant was a core part of her identity, and that brought her experience as a Pakistani woman into sharp focus.

“I just thought that I would go to fashion school and then move back to Pakistan and make pretty lehengas [skirts] for brides.” Instead, in her final year, she found herself wanting to make a deeply personal collection with intersectional feminism at its core, and surrounded by casts of her naked body. As part of the process for deciding what her thesis fashion collection should look like, Misha collected newspaper clippings that jumped out to her. They were all about violence against women – honour killings, domestic abuse and especially violence in her home country.

Experiences of growing up in Pakistan, seeing newspapers telling stories of violence against women every morning, have shaped Misha’s work: “That was something that I felt needed to be addressed,” she says. At 16, when her boyfriend blanked her all night at a party because she was wearing a strapless top while other girls wore sleeves, the policing of her body lay the groundwork for her current passions. So did the fact that growing up, she wasn’t allowed to wear clothes that were a tight fit on her body – that she’s now chosen to design garments that couldn’t be a tighter fit is no coincidence.

“There’s a lot of anger in my work,” she explains with raw emotion. “How dare we have to face the battles we do, just because we were born into the body we were born into, you know what I mean?”

That’s the point of her work: to reframe women’s bodies as vessels, not sexual objects. Frustrated at the critique she often gets for equating nudity with freedom, Misha says: “I respect a woman’s choice to fully cover her body as much I respect another woman’s choice to fully expose hers. It’s not about equating liberation with nudity at all; it’s about recognising the fact that whether you are fully covered, or fully uncovered, your body is still seen as something that is incorrect by society. And that’s what I’m trying to get to.”

We laugh (so we don’t cry) at how South Asian parental pride is often unsaid and is only known through some sort of seventh sense. So it is a huge and affirming gesture when her dad, from a conservative Muslim Bohra family in Karachi, Pakistan, sends her press interviews to all his Whatsapp contacts. She’s quick to acknowledge the privilege she has as a Pakistani woman, creating this kind of art while staying safe and with the support of her family.

The fire within her is burning white and every comment calling her a “pervert” or a “disgrace to Islam” is like petrol. What is her next dream project? She giggles, “The downfall of the patriarchy is my dream project.”

Originally published on gal-dem on 27th May 2019.

Sympathies are being seriously misdirected this week. First, we have our Theresa May(be not) who laid down her first evidence of not being a cyborg as she shed a tear on camera as she resigned as PM. Somehow the world felt sorry for Theresa despite her inhumane treatment of women in Yarl’s Wood, the systematic breaches of people’s right to an abortion in Northern Ireland’s, not to mention the government’s grossly inadequate response to Grenfell, which she had the audacity to reference as part of her proud legacy. White women crying have always had a way of erasing the experience of people of colour.

Over 60,000 people also misdirected sympathy to Dr Keith Wolverson by signing an online petition to save his reputation after he asked a Muslim woman to remove her niqab when there was absolutely no need for her to do so. It wasn’t for necessary medical examination – the doctor was talking to the Muslim woman about her child’s health. Apparently, he wasn’t able to describe the child’s symptoms while she had her face covered. Since an investigation has been launched, Dr Keith said: “I asked a lady to remove her face veil for adequate communication, in the same way I’d ask a motorcyclist to remove a crash helmet.” 

Here’s what else went down in the past week:

Over a third of BAME employees told to adopt English name at work

Most of us who don’t have a white name have experienced the rarity of having our name pronounced correctly day to day. However, being asked to actually change your name at work to an English-sounding one is a new level of racist snub that over a third of BAME employees are forced to endure, new research has shown.

Irfan Ajmal, a Muslim author who was advised by publisher to change his name to an English one, told gal-dem: “It shocked me and also I did not consider it as an option for a second. My book is written from my experiences as a British-born Muslim. It’s from my heart, so changing my name would have been an act of dishonesty to myself and to my readers.” Ajmal did not want to go into any more detail for fear of further discrimination by publishers.

Our names are the anchor of our identity, often rooted in rich cultural history and meaning. People of colour are already deeply and systematically oppressed, and on top of that, we have to change our names in order for white people to more easily pronounce them. Rather than English people forcing their mouths around a few unfamiliar syllables, Parveen is changed to Pauline, and Hargovind to Harry (in my grandfather’s case). This statistic is a disgusting one that sends a message of ostracism.

‘There is an epidemic of violence targeting transgender women of colour’ say Human Rights Campaign

Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ organisation that reports on violence against the trans community, has expressed its concern for trans women of colour following the death of Muhlaysia Booker. The average life expectancy of a black trans woman is 35 years old, Muhlaysia was just 23. 

Speaking to gal-dem, Charlotte Clymer of Human Rights Campaign, said: “There is an epidemic of violence targeting the transgender community, particularly trans women of colour who live at the intersection of the toxic combination of transphobia, racism and misogyny.” 

Last year, advocates tracked the deaths of at least 26 trans people. In 2019, there have been five known cases of deadly violence against the trans community, all of whom were black trans women, including three deaths in one week in May.

This week we’ve seen misdirected sympathy for Theresa May and LGBTQI+ Muslims leading Birmingham Pride

By Neelam Tailor GAL-DEMNEWS 27th May 2019

Photography via Unmuted Birmingham / Twitter

Sympathies are being seriously misdirected this week. First, we have our Theresa May(be not) who laid down her first evidence of not being a cyborg as she shed a tear on camera as she resigned as PM. Somehow the world felt sorry for Theresa despite her inhumane treatment of women in Yarl’s Wood, the systematic breaches of people’s right to an abortion in Northern Ireland’s, not to mention the government’s grossly inadequate response to Grenfell, which she had the audacity to reference as part of her proud legacy. White women crying have always had a way of erasing the experience of people of colour.

Over 60,000 people also misdirected sympathy to Dr Keith Wolverson by signing an online petition to save his reputation after he asked a Muslim woman to remove her niqab when there was absolutely no need for her to do so. It wasn’t for necessary medical examination – the doctor was talking to the Muslim woman about her child’s health. Apparently, he wasn’t able to describe the child’s symptoms while she had her face covered. Since an investigation has been launched, Dr Keith said: “I asked a lady to remove her face veil for adequate communication, in the same way I’d ask a motorcyclist to remove a crash helmet.” 

Here’s what else went down in the past week:

Over a third of BAME employees told to adopt English name at work

Most of us who don’t have a white name have experienced the rarity of having our name pronounced correctly day to day. However, being asked to actually change your name at work to an English-sounding one is a new level of racist snub that over a third of BAME employees are forced to endure, new research has shown.

Irfan Ajmal, a Muslim author who was advised by publisher to change his name to an English one, told gal-dem: “It shocked me and also I did not consider it as an option for a second. My book is written from my experiences as a British-born Muslim. It’s from my heart, so changing my name would have been an act of dishonesty to myself and to my readers.” Ajmal did not want to go into any more detail for fear of further discrimination by publishers.

Our names are the anchor of our identity, often rooted in rich cultural history and meaning. People of colour are already deeply and systematically oppressed, and on top of that, we have to change our names in order for white people to more easily pronounce them. Rather than English people forcing their mouths around a few unfamiliar syllables, Parveen is changed to Pauline, and Hargovind to Harry (in my grandfather’s case). This statistic is a disgusting one that sends a message of ostracism.

‘There is an epidemic of violence targeting transgender women of colour’ say Human Rights Campaign

Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ organisation that reports on violence against the trans community, has expressed its concern for trans women of colour following the death of Muhlaysia Booker. The average life expectancy of a black trans woman is 35 years old, Muhlaysia was just 23. 

Speaking to gal-dem, Charlotte Clymer of Human Rights Campaign, said: “There is an epidemic of violence targeting the transgender community, particularly trans women of colour who live at the intersection of the toxic combination of transphobia, racism and misogyny.” 

Last year, advocates tracked the deaths of at least 26 trans people. In 2019, there have been five known cases of deadly violence against the trans community, all of whom were black trans women, including three deaths in one week in May.

Existing pernicious prejudices are met with political rhetoric and policies that dehumanise trans and black lives. This week, the Trump administration proposed repealing the rule that homeless shelters should admit people based on their gender self-identification, meaning trans homeless people could find it harder to access services.

His department for health and human services also proposed to change how non-discrimination protections define “sex”, meaning it would no longer include protections specifically for trans and gender non-conforming patients. Systemic and societal transphobia has become a life-threatening epidemic that needs urgent action.

ICYMI

• LGBTQI+ Muslims led their first pride march in Birmingham. This comes after homophobic protestors have staged additional protests outside Parkfield Community and Anderton Park primary schools.

• Gillette has featured the story of Samson Bonkeabantu Brown, a transgender man, shaving for the first time following his transition in their most recent advert for their razors.

• Game of Thrones star Nathalie Emmanuel has stood in solidarity with darker-skinned actresses by telling fans not to fancast her as Disney Princess Tiana, saying it should go to an “even more melanated sister”.

• Councillor Rakhia Ismail, the new mayor of Islington, becomes the UK’s first Somali-born woman mayor and is thought to be the first mayor to wear a hijab.

• Britain’s most senior black policeman, Chief Constable Michael Fuller, said football clubs failed their duty as employers by allowing players to be racially abused. During a talk at Hay Festival, Fuller also expressed concerns that no other black policemen had followed in his footsteps to climb the ranks in the force.

• As if the art world wasn’t already inaccessible enough for black people, students who were rewarded for excellent behaviour with a school trip to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, were left in tears after being racially profiled by museum employees, being closely followed around, shouted at, and told “no food, no drink, no watermelon”.

• The UK’s first longboard crew for women of colour, GirlDreamer, have started a crowdfund called Boarders Without Borders. Their aim is to use sport as a tool for social change and create more opportunities for women for colour.

•India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi secured another five-year term after winning a landslide victory in the general elections, gaining around 300 of the 543 seats in parliament.

•The Bravest Knight will be one of the first children’s animated series with an openly gay main character. Wanda Sykes and RuPaul are among those who have been voice cast for the Hulu series.

• Sadiq Khan’s policy suggestion to ban takeaway food shops within 400m of schools has been branded as “racist” by chef Anthony Warner, saying it serves to gentrify and cast off “unsightly businesses that people don’t like, like independently-owned chicken shops”, while places like McDonald’s and Burger King would be allowed to stay put.

• Self-help guru Tony Robbins was filmed repeatedly using the n-word and other racial slurs in shocking footage from the 80s.

• Brazil’s top court has voted in favour of making homophobia and transphobia crimes in the country.

Moment of the week

Issa Rae’s exciting new show A Black Lady Sketch Show, co-written with Robin Thede, will star Quinta Brunson, Gabrielle Dennis and Ashley Nicole Black. It is the first HBO show to be written by, directed by and starring black women.

Originally published on UNILAD.

At least one in 20 children in the UK are sexually abused while being emotionally manipulated, groomed, and silenced by paedophiles, often within the family home.

Typically men take around 25 years to speak out about the abuse they suffered as children whereas women take an average of five years.

This is due to a host of societal pressures and expectations placed on men which cause them to feel ashamed after being sexually abused to such a degree they struggle to reveal their experience to anyone.

Here is the full documentary.

Originally published on gal-dem on 20th May 2019.

It’s been a ghastly week of old white men throwing their weight around. In the UK, the worst BJ in the world, Boris Johnson, announced he was making his move to try and lead the Conservative party. The bumbling and devious tactician has been scheming his way to this role for decades, saying countless awful things along the way. Strangely, TV presenter (an Africa’s saviour) Stacey Dooley described him as trustworthy after describing slimy Nigel Farage as “transparent”. 

Over in the USA, the nation reacted to the news that 25 crusty white men voted to ban all abortions that take place after six weeks pregnancy in Alabama. We stand in solidarity with them, and with people facing similar difficulties closer to home in Northern Ireland. If you’re mad, contact your MP to apply pressure, or donate to groups like Abortion Support Network.

Here’s what else went down in the past week.

Taiwanese reacts to landmark ruling on same-sex marriage.
On May 17, Taiwan became the first Asian country to legalise same-sex marriage prompting huge celebration and hope for other countries to follow suit. The ruling has taken two years to come to fruition after a series of referendums which showed that the majority of voters in Taiwan rejected legalising same-sex marriage.

Tess Yu, a 42-year-old lesbian from Taiwan’s capital Taipei, who identifies as non-binary, told gal-dem they were “very happy” with the result. Despite the initial referendum results, they said they were not surprised that their country was the first in Asia to recognise same-sex marriages because “Taiwan is a place with a mix of many cultures”.

According to Tess, help for LGBTQ+ people in Taiwan was very limited 15 years ago, leaving them to seek education on homosexuality in a library. Now they are “relieved and confident because I know no matter who I love, our rights are protected.” Before this ruling, Tess heard many tragic stories of people being in love but when it comes to the legality, “they are like strangers”. 

Now activists are working towards improving the well being of the LGBT population via an association of trained people taking calls almost six days a week to offer emotional support.

Oh Polly-gy accepted? for creating a separate Instagram ghetto for black and plus size models

This might not come as a shock to you, but words like diversity and inclusivity have been diluted so much in corporate circles that they are now devoid of meaning. 

Case in point: Oh Polly, a fast fashion site that specialises in Insta thot wares, created another Instagram account called Oh Polly Inclusive. Unlike the main page, which is full of curvy bronzed white women, the “inclusive” page had women of varying shades and shapes. 

Not to point out the obvious, but if the company would truly like to be inclusive, they would just start posting those photos onto their regular feed. By segregating them it looks like they’re trying to keep their sun-kissed slim thick (or PAWG) image in tact but tap into the woke online spaces elsewhere.

Speaking to gal-dem, a representative from Oh Polly said: “Oh Polly made a serious error of judgement for which we take full responsibility and sincerely apologise. We established a new page with the specific aim of allowing our customers to discuss a wider range of issues. We have a close relationship with our customers around the world and always value their feedback.”

It continued: “Improving diversity remains an absolute priority for us across all of our channels. We promise to continue listening to everyone in the Oh Polly community and, most importantly, learn from this mistake.”

Interestingly, the main page really hasn’t become that much more inclusive since this whole debacle blew up.

This wasn’t the only fashion faux pas of the week, Gucci still hasn’t lived down the blackface jumper, but came under fire for putting selling a controversial £600 Indy Full Turban for sale on Nordstrom. Some in the sikh community called them out for culturally appropriating an item of clothing that is often worn as a symbol of unity and equality. The luxury price tag of this iteration makes it a little less accessible than the traditional headwrap.

ICYMI

Queen Latifah and Will Smith are producing a Hip-Hop Romeo & Juliet adaptation for Netflix and we are so here for it.

London’s “most inclusive and banging” night out, Pxssy Palace, have introduced tiered tickets to ensure their party remains centred towards womxn, non-binary, and trans people of colour.

Dutee Chand, India’s fastest female sprinter, is the country’s first sportsperson to speak openly about her same-sex relationship.

UK Black Pride’s Youth Engagement Officer, Tanya Compas, is offering free ASOS prom outfits for black and PoC students who identify as LGBTQ+, prioritising those who identify as trans and non-binary to make prom as accessible as possible. DM her on Twitter if you are interested.

AZ Magazine is championing an inclusive and accessible ticket-selling technique for its official UK Black Pride pre-party where people can buy ‘Pay It Forward’ tickets for a QTIBPoC that is unable to afford one.

An indigenous Amazonian tribe called the Waorani won a landmark court ruling that means half a million acres of forest land will be protected from being mined for oil drilling.

A charity named World Afro Day found that one in six children with afro-textured hair are having a bad or very bad experience at school, with school rules negatively affecting children with natural hair.

A children’s book featuring 50 inspiring South Asian women has been written by activist and lawyer Raj Kaur Khaira who wanted to “give girls a chance to write their own stories”, saying the mainstream depiction of South Asian women “is often limited and laced with harmful stereotypes.”

Bernie Sanders has announced a plan to fix the increasingly racially segregated American school systemwhere students of colour often end up in schools that have less money and experienced teachers.

The Guardian’s Afua Hirsch was put through another exhausting and soul-destroying panel ‘debate’ where she was forced to persuade a group of old white men, and one old white woman, of the prevalence of toxic racism, using the very discussion she was in as the perfect example of oppression. She tweeted saying “I’m not doing this again”.

Moment of the week

Tyler, the Creator’s surprise gig announcement shut down Peckham as crowds gathered at Bussey Building on Saturday. Eventually the mass hysteria led to the gig being cancelled for being “too rowdy”. 

Published in gal-dem: the secrets issue Oct 5, 2018.

Over a couple of months I interviewed a number of former Reno regulars in order to reignite the nightclub’s magical memories in the minds of the people of colour who found their place there in the 1970s.

Originally published on gal-dem on 10th March 2020.

Trigger warning: child sexual abuse and porn addiction

In the summer of 2010, I was 16 years old with a decade of masturbation and five years of avid porn-viewing under my belt. Being such a seasoned pleasure procurer, I thought securing my first proper boyfriend would mean this was my time to shine. I had learned about how bare my mons pubis ought to be, the moans I should make, and that doggy was the new missionary. I was ready. But when we actually got to it… I was dry as a bone.

But, why had my vagina betrayed me? Love was in the air and hormones were everywhere, but between the sheets I was having trouble, shall we say, moistening the runway. I couldn’t get anywhere near as wet as I did when perusing Pornhub and I was very confused. While lube was our best friend it was still masking the root of the problem.

The fact that I watched porn most days was my biggest shameful secret, I thought I was one of the only girls who did it. So instead of communicating with anyone, like any teen, I turned to the internet. Reddit had a thread named NoFap – a forum for people addicted to masturbation and porn that encourages them to quit – which seemed to mostly be an outlet for stories of erectile dysfunction, failed attempts to quit porn, and lessened libidos IRL. It primarily functions as a supportive space illustrated by NoFap’s official ‘Sober’ October where almost 500k members are encouraged to quit solo porn, masturbation, and orgasm (PMO) and document the journey.

However, the fact I didn’t 100% connect with NoFap is hinted to by the name. “Fap” is onomatopoeic, based on the sound a penis makes during masturbation, which is in itself alienating as a cis teenage girl. As well as NoFap being isolating as a space for me, some in the movement take an anti-sex work stance. The rhetoric around sex-work serves to increase shame on the people in the industry rather than supporting and respecting their right to sell sex as a service. Sometimes the strict beliefs within the NoFap ranks can make it a very isolating space for people who feel dysfunction in their own sex life, but also don’t feel the need to demonise porn, sex work and masturbation.

My real-life intimacy was number one for me, so I quit watching porn with immediate effect and haven’t looked back since (well, masturbation is healthy, so I still do that every once in a while).

Research suggests that adolescents who compulsively use porn have lower degrees of social integration, increases in conduct problems, delinquent behaviour, depressive symptoms, and decreased emotional bonding with caregivers. While, for adults, there are over 75 studies linking porn use to poorer sexual and relationship satisfaction, as well as negatively affecting our beliefs and attitudes towards women. Fight The New Drug, a website dedicated to researching porn’s effect on the brain, believes our brains are not designed to deal with the level of sexual stimulation that comes from porn.

Before you catastrophise over your own habits, there has been some resistance to the movements zero-tolerance attitude to porn and wanking. In 2016, neuroscientist Nicole Prause told The Guardian: “These online communities have whipped themselves into a frenzy when in the past men wouldn’t have been concerned. Then the next time they go to have sex they are causing themselves more distress.”

That being said, after around three to six months of quitting porn my body did recover from its dry spell, which was a huge relief. But, it turns out I’m not the only woman who has been on this journey. YouTuber Alana Parekh runs a women’s NoFap channel and describes our past issues as “super common”. Alana, 28, quit watching porn and masturbating two years ago, after first discovering it at the age of seven. As a young girl, flicking through the “softcore” adult TV channels in Chicago while her parents slept upstairs, she didn’t know what she was looking at. “I didn’t really get what it was. I thought that I was looking at this crazy adult world. I thought it was something all adults must do and I got the feeling that maybe it was something that I was supposed to do too when I became an adult,” she tells me over the phone. What started as curiosity developed into two to three hours of watching porn every day at its peak.

After nearly 20 years of porn addiction, Alana set herself a 90-day NoFap challenge. After a relapse or two, she managed to have her first-ever orgasm from sex and said her sensitivity to real-life beauty had increased, “all of a sudden the people around me started to appear more beautiful.” Depression that made her feel like a “zombie” seemingly vanished when she quit. She now helps others to work through their addictions, offering one-on-one Skype support as well as opening up about her experiences on her YouTube channel. “I feel super passionate about helping people overcome it now. Like just seeing how much it’s done for me in my life, I feel like I got my spirit back,” she excitedly says.

Neither of our Indian parents broached the subjects of porn or sex with us in our teens, so we dangerously saw them as one and the same. We know that the average age that children first watch pornography is around 11 years old according to some sources, while others say it’s as young as eight, but how many children that age have been taught anything about it?

Watching porn without a critical lens or any education left Alana woefully misinformed: “I just grew up having this idea of what love was supposed to be like. It also affected my body image. I started to really pay attention to what the women looked like and I started to compare my own body to them and just kind of wondered what normal looked like, as a woman.” Mainstream porn shows women as little more than sexual objects via a male gaze: “It made me feel like a lot of my worth was going to be tied to what I could do sexually,” Alana says.

It’s important to draw a distinction between the fact that wanking is completely normal and healthy, and getting off to porn doesn’t always have to be a problem. Porn plays a positive role in many people’s lives and has been the spark for many women learning to cum by themselves – important given that 39% of women said they always orgasm during masturbation while 6% said they always orgasm during sex with a partner. Niche and fetish porn sites are so valuable for many people exploring their kinks, and there are also sex workers all over the world who feel empowered by their trade.

Still, some women lean on porn use as an escape from past trauma. Oghosa Ovienrioba, a British Nigerian blogger and YouTuber, was molested as a five-year-old. She reflects on how her porn use was rooted in her abuse that caused her to experience sexuality prematurely. “I was feeling sexual urges at a very young age. Obviously I didn’t speak to anyone about it, so it kind of just festered and that’s when I started watching porn,” she says as we speak on the phone. Oghosa saw porn as an “outlet” for escapism, and describes the “Stockholm Syndrome effect where I felt attached to my abuser and I felt attached to the way that I felt when I was being abused.”

When we speak on the phone, she has just got back from filming a YouTube video for her channel where she speaks about beauty, black feminism and her faith. Despite the fact that she watched around four hours of porn a day from the age of 14 to 20, when she became a born again Christian she quit watching adult films and masturbating altogether. She remembers crying in the bath and “praying to God saying, ‘If you’re real, just please don’t let me go back to this thing’. And I didn’t.”

“I definitely felt like a fetish,” Oghosa says as we talk about how the representation of black women in porn put her off. She continues, “Porn with black women in it is usually super aggressive, and it’s kind of scary. It is that thing of black women being animals and you can just do what you want with their bodies.” The racial categorisation in porn really serves to cement damaging stereotypes that already exist.

While porn is a reflection of society, with 1,000 visits to PornHub happening every second, its influence on people is undeniable. According to the sites 2019 review, there was an average of 115 million visits per day (equivalent of the populations of Canada, Australia, Poland and the Netherlands all visiting in one day), with racial categories like “Japanese”, “Korean” and “Ebony” topping the list for most searched terms.

Young women, especially those from religious communities, feel a deep shame about their habits. In the depths of NoFap’s women’s forum, I came across a 21-year-old Muslim woman from Germany who says she “prays five times a day” and is extremely addicted to masturbation. Though she wanted to remain anonymous she reveals she began at the age of 11, saying: “I was a depressed person at that time, I got bullied, so when I masturbated, it was just like releasing everything inside my body. I got the pleasure I needed in that moment, I forgot the pain inside my soul. I wanted to feel this feeling legit the whole time.”

After two years, her tastes moved towards BDSM: “I even learned how to tie up myself and also masturbate while being tied up. I punished myself in a painful way which was a huge pleasure for me.” While reaching out to the anonymous forum for support, she said she felt a huge amount of guilt and shame because her sexual desires were at odds with her faith. The reason she, like me, speaks about these experiences is to try and fight the shame and taboo, as it only serves to silence conversation and learning.

I empathise with the negative effects frequent porn use can have. But masturbation is a natural thing for men and women to do, so I was curious as to why so many people are quitting both. Oghosa’s journey was very much linked to her religious beliefs. As a Christian, she said she is “weighing it up and seeing what the Bible has to say about masturbation”.

Conversely, Alana has reasons that aren’t to do with spirituality in the traditional sense. “I think it just comes down to the reason why you’re masturbating. For me, I used to masturbate as a way to escape my problems,” she explains. “Also, there’s said to be a similar dopamine cycle in the brain when you take any hard drug to when you orgasm. So for the two weeks following the orgasm, you’re living in a dopamine deficit,” describes Alana, citing some of the studies she has researched. Lastly, and this is something I can relate to, she says quitting masturbation can make intimacy with a partner more passionate and exciting.

The UK government attempted to bring a ban on porn for under-18s last July, but it has been delayed. The age-verification system they want to bring in is easily circumvented in minutes because it’s the internet and the UK is a long way from being able to successfully police it. Banning porn shuts down conversations and increases taboo. It pays lip service to the issues young people face by pulling a curtain over it (which is easily lifted by anyone with a VPN), instead of teaching children how to think critically about what they are bound to see.

“Banning something is like putting a bandaid on it. It’s not really addressing the root of why people want to watch it in the first place,” Alana explains. She said our desire to watch porn is not inherent, but that “porn preys on a human need that we all have, which is the desire for connection, love, intimacy and sex”. She continues: “It’s like you’re given the illusion that you’re getting satisfied and then, over time it can really morph your sexuality and your perceptions in a really dark way.”

There are hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world who are struggling with their sexual habits and are reporting transformational results after quitting porn and masturbation. From talking to those who have done NoFap, it seems that masturbation becomes unhealthy when it is inextricable from porn. I now know plenty of women who learned this the hard way, even though 16-year-old me thought she was alone.

Originally published on Burnt Roti July 2, 2018

When I was 9, I used to tell people I was Spanish.

As a little brown girl growing up in Bristol, aside from at family gatherings for Diwali and raksha bandhan, I was usually in the racial minority in most rooms I entered on a day-to-day, and so learned to navigate white spaces from a young age.

Of course, I didn’t realise I was navigating white spaces, I simply learned that my home culture was alien to most of those around me and picked up that the more I assimilated, the more people would play with me at school (hence the Spanish lie).

So in 2001 when Bend It Like Beckham graced our screens, and I saw my internal balancing act between home life – where my mum was trying to teach me gujarati, make round rotis, and respect elders without question – and my school life, where I desperately wanted to replicate white Britishness around me, thrust onto a screen for everyone to see, I felt a strong sense of relief, but also nakedness.

The director with a difference, Gurinder Chadha, has a way of making me feel included in the film industry, from her Punjabi Sikh and British character of Jesminder Bhamra in Bend It, to casting Manjeeven Grewal as Ellen in Angus Thongs and Perfect Snogging, a character who wasn’t written as being South Asian in the book.

I was engrossed at the age of 9 to be watching a South Asian main character navigate her way through the difficulties of a traditional Sikh household while trying to follow her own football dreams and connect with the contrasting white household of her best friend Jules Paxton.

I cringed when Juliet’s mum told Jesminder about the ‘lovely curry’ she made and joked her mum was probably setting her up with a ‘nice handsome doctor’.

I empathised with the outrage Jess felt when her traditionally-minded Asian family made sweeping judgements based on little information or logic, like that Juliet was a boy because of her short hair, that playing football brought shame on her family, or many of the other moments of complete despair I related to with my own extended family.

This was all so important to me, because before Bend It Like Beckham, I thought I was on my own in this and that no one would ever understand the dilemma I felt with the very culture I was supposed to be proud of, but which was getting in my way of being English – or so I felt when I was a child. Now I have found ways to balance both, but the film showed me that there was a conversation to be had, and there were others I could have it with.

As well as raising issues of race and dual identities, the film tackles femininity and the perception of what that word means in different cultures. Jessminder’s sister Pinky, played by the iconic Archie Panjabi, represents a version of femininity her parents accepted as opposed to Jess’s more boyish style.

Despite Pinky having her flaws, it is the aesthetic external impression she gave to others which pleased Mrs Bhamra, and she made a point of asking Jess why she couldn’t just get with boys ‘behind mum and dad’s back like the rest of us’. As I grew older and further from traditional values, I related to this trope in the film more than ever. My Indian family makes a game of keeping up appearances and sweeping perceived shame under the carpet. I was 15 and I wanted to go and drink in a park with my white friends. Like Jesminder had to hide her football kit in the bush and pretend to be ill to avoid family gatherings, I also lied to my mum about going out so that I could take-part in the activities I thought she’d stop me doing. Even after I started being open about any antics I was involved in, there was very much an emphasis on appearing ‘acceptable’ to the family, particularly the elders, regardless of what you were actually doing.

Now, in my adult life, I am prouder than ever of my Indian and British culture, whilst also thinking critically about it and choosing the parts of it I want to keep, and the parts I’m happy to leave in the past. It is still difficult seeing more traditional members of my Indian family express damaging opinions of what being a modern British Indian woman should look like. Luckily we have a world of beautiful, strong, and powerful Asian women making their way into the media spotlight, with the help of Gurinder Chadha, that I can turn to for inspiration if I ever feel lost.

Academics argue that Bend It Like Beckham did little to challenge the structure of English society because it offers a version of multiculturalism based on assimilating to a utopian English norm.

There is definitely room for this argument. The film did after all require the Bhamras having to become more liberal and Western for a happy ending. However as a British Indian, seeing the struggles that I could barely articulate as a child being represented in mainstream film was indisputably a good thing.

Originally published on Burnt Roti on July 2, 2018

Originally posted on gal-dem on 23rd May 2019.

All women can squirt. Indian women are a fetish. It is my job to be submissive, and a man’s to be dominant. I should shave off all my pubes. All of these things I learned from porn when I started watching it at the age of 12, before event a hint of breast had developed on my chest. 

We know that the average age that children first watch pornography is around 11 years old. Without proper education, children are left to learn a lot about sex and intimacy from the porn they stumble across online. Anyone who has watched mainstream porn knows it is miles away from a true depiction of sex. It is designed to look good, not necessarily feel good. But, what choice do people have in a world where sex, porn and intimacy are still taboo? If everyone is watching it, perhaps porn could serve as a useful outlet.

Porn literacy is just the state of understanding what we’re really seeing when we watch porn, similar to the way in which the public need media literacy to distinguish fake news. Moving towards a model of porn literacy is crucial, Berlin-based porn performer Lina Bembe told gal-dem.

The 37-year-old from Mexico has dedicated part of her career to sex education for adults and believes banishing these conversations from shame and bias is the way forward. She is working with Sex School, a platform created by Anarella Martinez, who says she wanted to “give voice to the sex workers, because, who is gonna talk best about sex than us?”. It shows explicit sex education films by certified sex coaches and porn performers, the vast majority Lina describes as “unapologetically queer”. 

Lina thinks that mainstream sex education we have as a society is “inadequate” and that it needs to delve deeper than just anatomy, STDs and contraception. It should be more about mutual pleasure, sexual identity, consent, and conversations around dating and relationships. “There’s a large part of sex education that isn’t spoken about from a young age, which is where lots of abuse happens,” she says.

Over the weekend, the school showcased their unique education web series at a London-based event about art, porn, and activism, Uncensored Festival. It will soon be launched on their website. “When you’re uninformed about things, you take that into your own life, which also happens to adults,” she explains. “It’s very important to educate people about what pornography is and what pornography isn’t. We educate by not hiding things from people, but confronting these issues without shame or bias, giving them the tools for critical thinking.”

Berlin is a “complex environment” for sex workers, Lina says. But it provides a “visible space” for alternate forms of feeling pleasure, and is inclusive of diverse bodies and sexualities, which is what she was looking for. Her career began very simply, after she arranged a coffee with a director.

When asked if she thought porn had a generally negative presentation of sex, Lina’s approach is more nuanced than you’ll often hear. “I think that porn in so many ways is a reflection of our collective realities and how we collectively think about sex,” she says. “Because as a society we are flawed, as a reflection, porn has some flawed views on stuff. It can be excessively focused on white straight men, but because society is.” 

Sex School makes porn films that are as sensual as they are educational

By Neelam Tailor CULTUREGAL-DEMLIFE 23rd May 2019

Photography courtesy of Sex School

All women can squirt. Indian women are a fetish. It is my job to be submissive, and a man’s to be dominant. I should shave off all my pubes. All of these things I learned from porn when I started watching it at the age of 12, before event a hint of breast had developed on my chest. 

We know that the average age that children first watch pornography is around 11 years old. Without proper education, children are left to learn a lot about sex and intimacy from the porn they stumble across online. Anyone who has watched mainstream porn knows it is miles away from a true depiction of sex. It is designed to look good, not necessarily feel good. But, what choice do people have in a world where sex, porn and intimacy are still taboo? If everyone is watching it, perhaps porn could serve as a useful outlet.

Porn literacy is just the state of understanding what we’re really seeing when we watch porn, similar to the way in which the public need media literacy to distinguish fake news. Moving towards a model of porn literacy is crucial, Berlin-based porn performer Lina Bembe told gal-dem.

The 37-year-old from Mexico has dedicated part of her career to sex education for adults and believes banishing these conversations from shame and bias is the way forward. She is working with Sex School, a platform created by Anarella Martinez, who says she wanted to “give voice to the sex workers, because, who is gonna talk best about sex than us?”. It shows explicit sex education films by certified sex coaches and porn performers, the vast majority Lina describes as “unapologetically queer”. 

Lina thinks that mainstream sex education we have as a society is “inadequate” and that it needs to delve deeper than just anatomy, STDs and contraception. It should be more about mutual pleasure, sexual identity, consent, and conversations around dating and relationships. “There’s a large part of sex education that isn’t spoken about from a young age, which is where lots of abuse happens,” she says.

Over the weekend, the school showcased their unique education web series at a London-based event about art, porn, and activism, Uncensored Festival. It will soon be launched on their website. “When you’re uninformed about things, you take that into your own life, which also happens to adults,” she explains. “It’s very important to educate people about what pornography is and what pornography isn’t. We educate by not hiding things from people, but confronting these issues without shame or bias, giving them the tools for critical thinking.”

Photography courtesy of Sex School

Berlin is a “complex environment” for sex workers, Lina says. But it provides a “visible space” for alternate forms of feeling pleasure, and is inclusive of diverse bodies and sexualities, which is what she was looking for. Her career began very simply, after she arranged a coffee with a director.

When asked if she thought porn had a generally negative presentation of sex, Lina’s approach is more nuanced than you’ll often hear. “I think that porn in so many ways is a reflection of our collective realities and how we collectively think about sex,” she says. “Because as a society we are flawed, as a reflection, porn has some flawed views on stuff. It can be excessively focused on white straight men, but because society is.” 

“Because as a society we are flawed, as a reflection, porn is. It can be excessively focused on white straight men, but because society is too”

Lina Bembe

Taking all of this into consideration, Lina and the team at Sex School are keen to broaden sex education in a more representative way on-screen. Their pilot episode on threesomes begins with Lina, as well as her fellow porn performers and sex coaches, Bishop Black, Sadie Lune, and Parker Marx, discussing the emotional side of threesomes. This includes everything from respect, jealousy, and boundaries to self-reflection. Lina and Parker then flip a coin to decide who will join them in engaging in a threesome for the viewers to see them put their thoughts into practice. The educational porn that follows includes natural fumbling, vocal consent and boundary-checking – such as when Sadie asked Lina if she likes being penetrated with fingers. There’s even true-to-life orgasms, complete with cuddles and chatting at the end.

According to Lina, being on set at Sex School feels great compared to conventional porn because of the ethical and working chemistry between cast and crew, and the fact that it’s “not about tapping into a fantasy”. Instead, it’s about “delivering a performance based on things that could happen in real life in order to normalise and educate”. Using the threesome episode as an example, Lina explains: “When we’re shooting a threesome in porn, there is much less warming up, and it would look more flawless, edited to go straight into intense bits of the sex.” 

Sex School’s realistic depictions of sex have received positive feedback from their audience, as they guide their viewers through the most vulnerable moments of an encounter, like their in-depth episode on kissing. In this, they discuss what makes a good kiss, body language, power dynamics, and awkward moments. Spoiler: Lina reveals she chipped a tooth during a kiss once. A sensual montage of an array of people kissing in many different ways on a neon-lit dance floor ensues. Questions have also come in from those struggling with body image, self harm, and eating disorders. “People can’t enter proper relationships with themselves and even masturbate because they have difficult relationships with their own bodies. Questions like that are really important,” Lina explains.

Mainstream porn is obsessed with categories, and as a Latinx porn performer, Lina told me she found these categories problematic. “I’m very careful about what pornographic narratives I work in. I choose not to work with companies who will portray as within any sort of tags or categories that are stereotypical for people like me, like skin colour, that I’m Latin American, speaking Spanish, the colour of my nipples. I just keep myself away from that because I cannot tolerate that.” The host of Sex School’s XO Podcast, Bishop Black, is a prominent figure in Berlin’s alternative porn scene and talks about his difficulties with racial fetishisation as a black man in porn. “I think you need to decolonise sex education, you have to have this intersectional approach to sex education that takes into account racial biases,” Lina told us. 

It’s vital we come up with a new approach to sex education. How can we teach people about porn and sex in any meaningful way without teaching them about respect, love, relationships, consent, sexual identities, self-love, health, and diversity? With so many children watching porn from before they start puberty; it’s either denial or progress. Maybe it’s time we all went back to Sex School.

Originally published on gal-dem July 20, 2018

As Theresa May’s government collapses in on itself like her knees during her bow-legged curtsy, and the world’s worst BJ (Boris) continues to snake his way to the top, the only thing holding our nation together seemed to be Gareth Southgate, like the buttons on his exceedingly well-fitted waistcoat. But then that fell to shit too.

When Donald Trump landed it sparked a huge protests in the UK and over in Australia the Channel 7 news incited a hashtag #NotMyAustralia after they showed three-year-old footage in order to create a moral panic in Melbourne about African gangs.

Over in the US, the teen who had his Make America Great Again hat taken by a Whataburger employee is over the moon to have had it returned, but it perhaps shouldn’t be such a celebration, as far as Pusha T is concerned, the symbolic red MAGA cap ‘is this generation’s Ku Klux hood’.

Oh, and you can now add wearing socks in a pool to the list of things white people call the police on black people for.

Here’s what went down in the last week.

Muslim Teenage Girl Brutally Stripped and Slashed By Racist Attackers In Belgium

In Belgium, a 19-year-old Muslim woman was stripped and slashed on her upper body because she was wearing a headscarf.

Two men have been taken into custody in connection with the racist attack which took places in Anderlue, near Brussels on Monday July 2.

The men ripped off her headscarf and tore apart her shirt exposing her upper body while she tried to escape.

The victim was knocked to the ground and called a ‘filthy Arab’ before the attackers used a sharp object to cut her torso, stomach, and legs in the shape of a cross.

Mayor of Anderlues, Philippe Tison posted on Facebook: “As Belgium lives moments of pride and joy thanks to the exploits of our national team, we must recall that we are a country of tolerance and openness. Are our best scorers and heroes of the last few days not of foreign origin? They are the soul of our country and of Anderlues!

“We cannot allow some of our fellow citizens to be victims of racist attacks.”

News of this horrific crime has been fairly absent in mainstream media. It is an example of the increase in Islamophobia seen in Europe following the rise of far-right political parties.

The Shockingly Racist Tweets Of Mrs. Bill Shine, Wife Of Trump’s New Deputy Chief Of Staff

Trump’s recruitment team continues its dubious decision-making with its new Deputy Chief of Staff, Bill Shine, whose wife Dana has been the focus of the news recently.

Dana Shine’s offensive and prejudiced Twitter feed was screenshotted before she deleted, and the world has been hanging their heads in despair at how such an ignorant mind is being allowed anywhere near the White House.

As well as her discrediting of sexual harassment accusers against Fox News executives (her husband was co-president of the channel), Dana regularly tweeted the most shocking racist comments.

Just a few of the tweets, which look like they were written for a satire page, include ‘You really are a terrible President Barack Obama allowing our police officers to be gunned down like this’, ‘If white chicks can’t perm their hair, black chicks can’t go blonde”, “1 out of 10 black boys has autism”.

Dana, who has clearly never stepped foot in Africa, also tweeted a meme showing a photo of ‘Rome 2000 years ago’ with a photo of the colosseum, and ‘Africa Now’ showing a mud hut. This is just a small example of the calibre The President is bringing into his team.

ICYMI

Facebook’s algorithms ruled that parts of the US Declaration of Independence are racist and removed excerpts of them posted on the platform. A reference to ‘merciless Indian savages’ was removed and Facebook apologised for allowing a Texas community paper to post the ‘hate speech’, BBC reports.

US correction officer Thomas Jordan Driver, who along with two colleagues and Ku Klux Klan members conspired to kill a black inmate, will lose his state retirement benefits.

The Met Police are going to give women and ethnic minorities a £1000 leg up to help fund their pre-training course in order to encourage a more diverse force, hoping to fill an extra 3000 posts by April.

Netflix has launched its first original Indian TV series called Sacred Games, which sees Bollywood stars Saif Ali Khan and Radhika Apte as intelligence officers on the trail of a criminal kingpin. The eight-part series, filmed in Hindi, is the first of seven Indian series’ that Netflix has commissioned, and has received 100% on Rotten Tomatoes.

MOMENT OF THE WEEK

https://twitter.com/melgirm/status/1016421995993550848

A father cries watching the news that the war between Ethiopia and Eritrea is finally over after the two countries have been in a state of ‘no war, no peace’ since 2000 in which tens of thousands were killed.

Originally posted on UNILAD Jan 13, 2018.

Who is going to believe a porn star who says she was raped?

That question highlights the silence these women suffer from, which inevitably leads to a downfall in their mental health.

Four young porn performers have been found dead since November 2017, most recently 20-year-old Olivia Nova who was found dead in her Las Vegas home earlier this week, the cause of her death is still unconfirmed.

Nova had only begun her adult entertainment career in March 2017, but the young actress’ resume included films with Brazzers, Naughty America, FTV Girls, New Sensationsand Digital Sin.

Shyla Stylez, from Canada, died in November aged 35 when she died suddenly in her sleep.

23-year-old August Ames died on December 5. Ames, whose real name was Mercedes Grabowski, died from unknown causes, although a close friend told Hollywood Life that the star had taken her own life after a reported battle with depression.

Yuri Beltran died aged 31 less than two weeks after Ames, on December 14. She was found dead of an apparent drug overdose.

Mental health issues have always been a big problem in the porn world, but the recent spate of deaths of such young porn performers raises serious questions for how women are treated in the industry.

Steve McKeown, a psychoanalyst, founder of MindFixers and owner of The McKeown Clinic, told UNILAD:

“Nearly 90 per cent of women in the sex industry said they wanted to escape, but had no other means for survival and also experienced post traumatic stress disorder at rates of nearly 70 per cent equivalent to veterans of combat war.”

We spoke with Dr. Gail Dines, author of Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality, and Pornography: The Production and Consumption of Inequality, about why this is happening, and how we can stop it.

Here is Gail’s TED Talk where she talks about growing up in a ‘pornified’ culture:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=605qufO1n_U

Simply put, the current #MeToo campaign, though proving positive for women in other industries, silences women in the sex industry more than ever.

Gail told UNILAD:

“Just imagine everyone is telling their stories of rape and assault and being listened to, and you know full well that if you come forward, they’ll just say ‘what did you expect, you whore’.

“We live in a world where a woman’s consent, to what is often sexual torture, is being preserved from the paper contract she signed when she was 18-years-old.

As in any industry, there are different sides to the coin. Independent porn stars in Europe such as Harriet Sugarcookie own their own porn businesses, controlling every aspect of their porn performing and career.

However, the majority of the mainstream porn that you see on sites like Pornhub or Brazzers is created in studios controlled by male directors, where women are often sought from all over the world by pornography ‘suitcase pimps’, and exploited.

Gail goes on to reveal a harrowing fact, gathered from her interviews with porn performers, that one of the first things directors do when a new woman come to the set is contravene one of the rules put in place on her contract, as a way of breaking her.

Dr Gail Dine, Founder and President of Culture Reframed, told UNILAD:

“What I do know, because I’ve been doing this work for many years and worked with many women who are in the porn industry and have exited it, is that given the violence that happens to their bodies, given the diseases they get, they come away with PTSD because they’re raped regularly on the porn set.

“Just because they’ve signed a contract doesn’t mean they’re consenting to what goes on at the porn set. A lot of them are not prepared for what’s going to happen to them. A lot of them are young, they think they’re going to be a ‘pornstar’ like Jenna Jameson was. They’re not prepared for the violence.

“August Ames, Shyla Stylez, Yuri Beltran, and Olivia Nova all incredibly young talent. We must be kinder and look out for one another in this industry. Our Truth and Standing by one another is our only power.”

Gail made the point that most of the adult actresses should not be called ‘porn stars’, but instead ‘porn performers’, due to the fact that most of them never make it to the level of being a ‘star’ and are simply forced to perform, before ‘ending up in poverty’ and ‘lucky to leave the industry with the clothes on their backs’.

The well-oiled PR machine of the pornography industry paints a picture that most of the women in it are ’empowered’ and enjoy shooting porn, and maybe some of them do, but Gail made the point that ‘all porn actresses will say that’ while still involved in it.

Gail, a professor emerita at Wheelock College, Boston, explained:

“To have three men, one with his penis in your mouth sideways, one in your vagina, one in your anus, your two hands are jerking off two other guys, so you’ve got five guys surrounding you, your being rammed with viagra-strength penises, and then they ejaculate all over your face. How would you even get up after that off the floor? Think what it takes.

“You get up, you’re covered in five men’s semen, every single orifice is sore and red raw, and the next day you have to get up and do the same thing again, and you have to pretend you like it, and you know that men are jerking off to that image. It’s an unbearable emotional experience.

“If you interview any woman who is now working in the porn industry, she will always say she loves it.”

She explained that you have to speak to women who are out of the industry, because while they’re inside they’ll never tell you, ‘first of all because they’ll get fired, and emotionally, how are they going to acknowledge what’s going on if they’ve got to get up tomorrow and go to a porn shoot?’,

Gail continued:

“So many women I’ve spoken to have said to me ‘you know if you asked me two years ago, I would have given you the best story you’ve ever heard about how great it is and how empowered I felt’. It’s all bullsh*t. It’s a way to to protect yourself psychologically, from the violence that’s being done to you.”

Gail has been told by numerous porn performers that after they go to their first porn shoot ‘something changes in them’ – a response that she translated as meaning ‘they become a rape victim’.

These women are experiencing this constant emotional and physical trauma of sexual assault but are ‘forever silenced by virtue of some decision you made at 18 to go into the sex industry, not understanding the ramifications’.

Gail has created an informed consent form, highlighting the lack of transparency in the current contracts given to women starting out in the pornography industry.

They sign a contract that gives consent to the following:

Losing control of the most intimate part of your life for as long as you live and after (because the images will live on long after you die). Exposing your body to untold millions of porn consumers who will view you as a ‘slut’ or a ‘whore.’ You will never be able to regain control of these images and they will be owned and distributed by and across the porn industry. Should you decide that you no longer want the pornographic images circulating across multiple platforms, you will have limited to no legal recourse to prevent this, and most likely, you will make no money beyond the initial payment

The possibility of the following happening on the porn set: Anal/Vaginal/Throat rape, Vaginal or Anal Tears; Rectal Prolapse; Miscarriage if you are pregnant; Being forced to doing sex acts you clearly stated in your contract that you
would not do; Damage to surgically implanted breasts that could cause rupture and would need removing; Developing PTSD because of the ongoing abuse to body and soul.

Catching numerous STDs, many of which are antibiotic resistant.

Being attacked on social media by the pornographers if you sue to prevent further distribution of the images. There is a strong possibility that they will set their lawyers on you, dig into every part of your past and present life, smear you on social media as mentally unstable, a ‘slut’, a criminal, and so on.

If young women were given this sort of contract, do you think they would sign it?

Society struggles to digest the concept that though a woman is taking part in a pornography video, she is not consenting.

Gail challenges men to watch the video after you’ve ejaculated and when you’re not aroused. She challenges you took really watch it and look at the girl, and think if she actually wants to be there and what pain she is in.

The distinction made between women inside the sex industry and those outside is an issue that contributes to their isolation and silence.

Gail said:

“All women are potentially vulnerable to being pulled into the sex industry. We’re all one pimp away from the sex industry. As a society we like to think there’s a group of women who just happened to be different to the rest of us.

“They want to be fucked, anally, vaginally, orally, they want to be ejaculated on, gagged, eyes rolled back, they’re just a bunch of whores, sluts and cunts, they’re not like you. That is a complete lie.

“There was no woman ever born who should be separated off from the rest of us and be given all the creepiness and sexual violence that these men perpetrate.”

When you watch porn, you’re buying into an industry based on the mistreatment and sexual torture of a lot of women.

The current mainstream industry, as it exists now, is leading to a worrying decline in the mental health of women involved because they’re completely silenced.

We need a #MeToo campaign for women in the sex industry who currently have no one to bear witness to their pain.

Article originally published on Huffington Post 06/01/19

It’s always the same picture – someone’s bum is out, they’re lying on their bed, and the doors are open to the ocean.”

Becky Wixon, 25, and Simone Picknett, 27 giggle as they describe an average #vanlife image on Instagram – a picture-perfect lifestyle from which they couldn’t feel further removed. That despite the fact they’ve recently stepped off the urban conveyor belt themselves, ditching their jobs and home comforts to live on the road in a van called Snail. 

The newly-engaged couple, both musicians, are keen to banish the glamorous stereotype of the vanlife movement on social media. It’s a lifestyle that’s far more attainable than glossy Instagram photos would have you think, they argue.

“You can just buy a van and put a mattress in it and you can be doing your own van life. It doesn’t need to be this luxurious thing,” explains Wixon. “I think a lot of people do it because they want to get Instagram-famous. We did it because we wanted our time together to be creating, all the time. We’re not interested in getting our bums out.”

The couple were earning £25,000 and £27,000 in advertising and musical equipment repairs when they decided to jack it all in. In just five short months, they had saved up £14,000 by freelancing and selling almost all of their possessions. Now everything the couple owns fits on Snail’s back.

The offload was physically and mentally liberating. “We had a car boot sale and earned almost a grand for all our old stuff,” says Picknett. “We realised that actually we don’t need these things and we don’t miss anything.” 

When the couple first speak to HuffPost UK, they are in Amsterdam after a month and a half (and 3,500 miles) on the road, taking in Ireland, Scotland, Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg. “That time would have flashed by in our old lives, we wouldn’t even think about it,” says Wixon. “Now, it feels like we’re learning about life in a way we were never taught at work or school.”

She describes her “constant state of childlike wonderment” and being more in the moment, while Picknett speaks of the patience their new lifestyle teaches them and the revelation of just how much more sustainable van living is. 

The pair shower once every three to five days – Wixon is currently hiding her greasy hair under a beanie in the hope it will soon start self-washing – and they don’t buy new clothes, keeping their wardrobe piled up underneath a small hatch in the van (and their underwear in a waterproof bag in case of damp).

They’re also learning new skills to keep costs down, skills which the best of us could use to reduce our bills – like how to shower quickly. Wixon says she’s got washing and conditioning her hair down to less than two minutes.

Do they have a toilet? Yes, but “strictly for number ones,” says Picknett – they have to empty it everyday. “I used to be worried about going for a poo at work,” chips in Wixon. “Now I just shit in the woods.” One flush of a regular toilet uses the same amount of water they now get through in a week. They marvel at how much they previously wasted (and how unaware they were of doing so). 

“I eat my crusts,” says Wixon with a laugh. “I never used to eat my crusts.”

Everyday pleasures the rest of us take for granted are a treat. The pair look knowingly at each other as they reminisce. “When we were in Ireland we were sharing a pint of Guinness. Little sips here and there. We appreciate and remember that little pint whereas all our weekends of nights out used to blur into one before.”

There will be many who see vanlife as out of reach, financially or otherwise, and Wixon does acknowledge “there is privilege in having freedom”. Growing up 25 miles west of London, she spent most of her youth playing in bands and throwing herself into music. She did well at school, but was persuaded that her good grades ‘would be wasted’ on music: “So I ended up going to business school at King’s College London.”

Picknett, meanwhile, arrived in the UK from the Caribbean with her mum at a young age and moved schools often, struggling socially and academically as a result. ”I got kicked out of my house when I was 17, so I had to take myself to a youth hostel, put myself through uni, then got a job in music, and struggled hard. I was jumping trains because I couldn’t afford to get to work.”

Now, the pair live rent-free and even parking isn’t an issue, thanks to the van-dwellers before them who set up Park4night, an app that finds free parking all over Europe, saving them an average of £20 per night at a campsite. The couple’s joint monthly budget of £500 is half the £1000 they paid to live in Shadwell, east London, with seven other housemates... and a lot of mice.

Cabin fever is common enough among co-habiting couples, but Wixon and Picknett, who have been together five years, say they actually argue less since moving into the van and rarely crave ‘me time’. The head space opened up by escaping the daily grind has given them a greater understanding of each other, bringing them together and enabling them to deal with stress in a healthier way. 

For the moment, they are living off their hard-earned savings but they plan to sustain life on the road with their art and music – the van doubles up as a recording studio from which the former bandmates have started uploading their ‘van jams’ and, if it comes to it, they can busk on the streets. 

But what prompted them to make such a transformative decision? The pair realised things needed to change after writing a list of what they wanted in life: being together, living in nature, making music full-time, and seeing the world. Ultimately, they didn’t want to wait until retirement to enjoy freedom of body and mind – and they encourage anyone who feels the same to take the leap. 

With their £14,000 savings, the couple spent £5000 on their converted, 17-year-old van; £1000 on insurance, tax and breakdown cover; and £3000 on a new laptop and supplies. That left them with a budget of £5000 for their first eight months on the road. They now keep themselves on £10 each per day, which includes their petrol, electricity, food and water.

Wixon lovingly describes how the van, previously called Rusty due to its flaking exterior, got its new name. “We called her Snail because she’s slow and carrying our whole home on her back,” she says. “Also, I really like that she represents a slow way of life.”

Life in your twenties is very much about acceleration and progression, she says. “Getting that pay rise. Getting a name for yourself. We felt like we were in that bubble, balancing loads of plates: doing our jobs, our band, having our social life. It’s so stressful and there is so much going on all the time.” Now it’s not just the van moving slowly. “It takes 10 times longer to do something really simple like turn the tap on [because] we have to go and find water – we feel like time isn’t moving as fast anymore.” 

Asked their biggest fear for the future, they say: returning to their former lives. “When we go to cities, as well as being, like, ‘do we smell?’, we’re like: ‘wow, look at these people rushing to their jobs and running for the train – that used to be us.’” says Picknett. 

“I can’t believe I used to trade my time for money!” Wixon adds. ″You’re always thinking: ‘I’m comfortable, I’ve got my wage, I’ve got my job, I’ve got my comfortable house.’ Everything is very comfortable, everything is very safe. We had to become comfortable with the risk and ‘what ifs’.”

Certainly over Christmas, things became a little less comfortable: the pair found themselves stranded on a German lay-by following a minor crash in which Snail lost her “ear” (wing-mirror) and they were forced to spend Christmas in a rural French hotel waiting for a part to be delivered from the UK. Then the van broke down again. “Van life isn’t always sunshine and rainbows,” they email. ”But we’ve been rolling with the punches and despite our lack of control, we have a choice about how it makes us feel.” 

Ultimately, Becky and Simone have exchanged socialising, status and spending for worries about where to find the next bin, how to deal with that elusive hornet nest in the van and the question of whether there are bears in Scotland. Oh, and not shitting too close to each other in the woods. Bums out after all.

Originally published on gal-dem June 1, 2018

Yesterday I was on a train talking to a white person about race and I whispered the word ‘white’. I thought, why am I fearful of describing a white person by their skin colour? What am I scared of? Why do I feel physically silenced in conversations about race in public? In that moment of noticing my cautious proclivity, I thought of Reni Eddo-Lodge and her bold, momentous statement of exasperation and despair for white people’s wilful ignorance, which she turned into a book a year ago today.

The 28-year-old Black British Journalist put up a boundary for herself when she decided to stop talking to white people about race because she could “no longer engage with the gulf of an emotional disconnect that white people display when a person of colour articulates their experience”. It was only once she actively withdrew from the conversation that people turned to listen. Many were quick to label her exclusionary or racist, though her cry for change through a public silence largely prompted self-examination from all readers. Since it’s release, the book has received exceptional recognition, winning the Jhalak Prize and topping various polls.

Naturally, she’s done nothing but talk to white people about race since then, but putting up that boundary was a stark reminder to people of colour that it’s something they have the prerogative to do, and it also shone a spotlight on the famously ‘invisible’ whiteness to white people. As she pointed out, “We tell ourselves that good people can’t be racist. We seem to think that true racism only exists in the hearts of evil people”, and it is a fiction at the root of the problem.

When Emma Watson, a white modern feminist icon, acknowledged her white privilege and past ignorance towards it, in direct response to reading Reni’s book and encouraged the followers of Our Shared Shelf to do the same, it was a powerful moment in intersectional feminism. Why I’m No Longer was voted the most influential book written by a woman, over the likes of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, allowing the colour line that so often alienates BAME women from traditional feminism to be smudged.

After receiving her number one spot by public vote, Reni said: “What an honour! My book, less than a year old, is a baby compared to the titans and bonafide classics on this shortlist. In fact I think we need a few more years to really determine if it's really changed the world. However, I will respect this public vote.”

After a year, though it is difficult to track tangible change from the book, Reni has clearly brought race further into global conversation, getting white people to see their privilege while resonating with people of colour. Since her book, conversations are being had, fully black-cast films like Black Panther are smashing box office records, boundaries in intersectionality are being addressed, increased social consciousness meant government faced a Windrush backlash it wasn’t prepared for, Starbucks had to carry out racial bias training, and a black Bishop preached a political message followed by a gospel choir at the Royal Wedding.

Reni’s book is proof that people can be heard from a position of marginalisation - the Sunken Place - and she’s given readers the support they need to tackle injustice. It is becoming more difficult to palm off race issues to the US where it is more blatant and tangible. The UK has an ugly, underplayed kind of racism, hidden behind the excessive politeness we’re so famous for, and grown from cultural amnesia. There is no need to state the obvious that the fight for justice continues, but Reni has made a great step on this journey.

Originally published on gal-dem on June 1

Originally posted on UNILAD September 21, 2018.

It wouldn’t be ground-breaking, but in fact highly likely, if the exhilarating battle between Eminem and Machine Gun Kelly (MGK) turned out to be a big PR stunt.

What better way to engage the masses than with an old-school bars brawl between a rap veteran and a newby. They are the modern-day gladiators in an international colosseum, with the audience thirsty for the next retaliation.

Rumoured to be ignited when MGK called Eminem’s then-16-year-old daughter Hailie ‘hot as f*ck’ in a tweet, the pair have had a fall out since 2012, but Eminem has only chosen to bring it to light now in his new album Kamikaze.

MGK took aim at Eminem’s age and facial hair, saying ‘Somebody help your mans up (help). Knees weak of old age, the real Slim Shady can’t stand up!’ in Rap Devil. Eminem then came back with ‘Younger me? No, you’re the whack me, it’s funny but so true. I’d rather be 80-year-old me than 20-year-old you.’

You can be pretentious about it, but I think the whole exchange has been pretty witty, with some great burns.

Just as when Pusha T released his beautifully blind-siding Drake diss track The Story of Adidon earlier this year, Eminem and MGK’s recent rap feud has reignited a fire in the hip-hop scene that has been dwindling in the past decade.

As new-age hip-hop flaunts its extravagant wealth, women, and wheels, we’re missing the grittier days when the lyrics used to tell the unforgiving and unapologetic tales of the streets and African-American experiences.

That’s not to say hip-hop is dead, Nas definitely made that decree too early as we’ve seen Kendrick, Chance, Childish Gambino, Drake, Kanye, Jme, Giggs, Stormzy and many others create some inspiring art in recent years.

The first published hip-hop battle which gained mainstream notoriety centres on the legendary Bridge Wars. During the mid-80s to the early 90s, there was a feud between rappers from South Bronx’s Boogie Down Productions, led by KRS-One, and Marley Marl and MC Shan’s Juice Crew, representing Queensbridge. The debate? It was over the true birthplace of hip-hop, Bronx vs Queens. This feud was only laid to rest in 2007 when KRS-One and Marley Marl released their collaborative album Hip Hop Lives.

The rivalries of the 80s and 90s were anything but a PR stunt. They were unforgivingly authentic, often ending in tragic deaths, most notably the irreplaceable Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls who found themselves in the middle of a pivotal rivalry between the East and West Coast hip hop scenes.

Though it all began on the East, West Coast rappers, many from California, were making waves, and when the iconic N.W.A began releasing groundbreaking music to make you think, their anger at police attacks and crack cocaine epidemic in the ghetto was launched into the mainstream.

By the mid 90s, the West Coast had made a name for itself, headed by the likes of Dr Dre, Eazy-E, Ice Cube, Tupac, and Snoop Doggy Dogg. The East Coast renaissance fought back with Nas, the Wu-Tang Clan, Notorious B.I.G, and Jay Z.

There was a constant back and forth between the two coasts that resulted in genuine gang violence, so when these old-school battles are recreated, it isn’t done lightly. Every modern rap battle stands on the shoulders of a dark but rich hip-hop history with real consequences.

An essence of hip-hop is being the best MC there is, and in-turn verbally assassinating your fellow rappers in any way you can. Marshall Mathers himself highlighted the consequential nature of rap’s violent undertones in Like Toy Soldiers, where he attempted to calm the aggression in the community, citing the feud between 50 Cent and Ja Rule as particularly far gone, as well as his own feud with noted hip-hop publication The Source.

The war between the two white and blonde rappers has indisputably got everyone talking, with Twitter being awakened by the debate on who brutalised who the most. The fact that it is Eminem crafting lyrics for battle sparks huge nostalgia and drags anyone listening straight back to the 90s. Other rappers like Halsey and 50 Cent have also picked sides, trying to get a piece of the pie.

Pop culture is forever chasing authenticity. Our obsession with vintage vinyls and clothing, independent coffee shops, original and ‘real’ travel experiences, and artisan crafts is relentless. Anything that makes us feel like less like a cog. Lyrical battles like Eminem and MGK’s is just what hip-hop needs to feel more authentic. Whether it isauthentic is a different matter.

Eminem and MGK are both signed with different sub-labels within Interscope. That as well as the fact MGK’s ‘spontaneous’ Rap Devil was published six months ago on SoundCloud points heavily to the fact this is planned. But most old-school hip-hop heads are just pleased to see Eminem dropping some vintage diss tracks, though disappointed in them being a little lazy and laced with homophobia.

It’s also entertaining to see someone with negligible musical legacy taking on a hip-hop legend like this. Let’s hope for more quick-fire tracks instead of Instagram responses.

Seeing Slim fight his way back into relevance is a match I want front-row seats for, I just hope he decides to drop the designer stubble and dated hate speech while he’s at it.

Originally published in The Guardian on Feb 26, 2016.

The Conservative government proposed the setting up of privately run secure training centres in 1993. It was a controversial idea, and remains so today. Can private companies ever be trusted to look after and rehabilitate such vulnerable children when their priority is to turn a profit? Labour was against the establishment of STCs while in opposition.

In March 1993 the then shadow home secretary, Tony Blair, said: “It is far preferable to isolate young offenders from their own peer group and not put them in the company of 40 or 50 other persistent young offenders. What we need is schools of responsibility, not colleges of crime.”

But when Labour came to power in 1997 it carried through the setting up of STCs, arguing it would be too expensive to cancel the project.

Medway was the first to open, in April 1998. The cost was controversial: at £125,000 a year for each “trainee”, it was five times as much as sending a child to Eton. The centre would hold a maximum of 40 children, aged between 12 and 14. By January 1999, the centre was already in crisis – there had been a riot, and a report from the Social Services Inspectorate concluded that children were subject to “excessive use of force”, including neck and wrist restraints.

The blueprint for STCs had been drawn up by the senior civil servant Malcolm Stevens, who then agreed to join the security company Group 4 Rebound Ltd as operations director a year before Medway opened under its control. It was such a sensitive appointment that it had to be referred to the Cabinet Office for approval: Whitehall guidelines restrict senior civil servants jumping from the public to the private sector through the “revolving door”.

When his appointment was announced, the Guardian reported: 

“The job offer has caused raised eyebrows,” a Home Office source said yesterday. “His entire job in the Prison Service was to advise the Home Office and Department of Health about who should be placed in secure units. It is one thing to get information as a civil servant. It is another to use it for commercial advantage.” 

Stevens went on to become director of children’s services at G4S. On the business networking website LinkedIn, Stevens describes his “specialities” as “bid preparation, tenders, presentation, implementation, operational and contractual management of £500m+ PFI contracts”.

Today, Stevens says he doesn’t know what all the fuss about. “I have never understood whose eyebrows were raised! Most of my colleagues and ministers thought that my appointment was a good idea. This was because at the time there were so many revelations about malpractice in residential children’s homes run by local authorities, children’s charities and even by the government itself.

“I hold no regrets about joining Group 4. My intention was to ensure that Group 4’s STCs delivered the government’s 1993 commitment to parliament, namely, high standards of care, high standards of education, high standards of healthcare.”

Stevens is by no means the only one to have joined G4S after working for the government or vice versa. The politician John Reid became group consultant to G4S in 2008, a year after stepping down as home secretary. While the formerG4S head of care and justice David Banks now sits on the Youth Justice Board, which oversees the youth justice system in England and Wales. 

Sir Martin Narey, the former director general of the prison service of England and Wales, went on to become an adviser for G4S. After last year’s damning report of Rainsbrook STC by the prisons inspectorate, which found children had been subjected to degrading treatment and racist comments from staff, he produced his own favourable “independent” report commissioned by G4S. He was also appointed appointed non-executive board member at the Ministry of Justice in August 2015.

Narey insists there has never been anything inappropriate in his work for G4S. “I retired from the Home Office in 2005,” he said. “Despite many offers, I declined to take up any part-time advisory role with any body dealing with penal issues for more than five years. But yes, I have offered occasional consultancy advice to G4S over the past few years. I terminated that relationship in 2014 but agreed, exceptionally, to visit Rainsbrook after the critical Ofsted report and report my findings to G4S, the YJB and to [the justice secretary] Michael Gove. 

“As I make clear in the opening of that report, G4S paid me for my work but I reported frankly and honestly. I stand by my conclusion that children were treated overwhelmingly well. And the YJB monitor and the children’s advocate from Barnardo’s were both of that view.”

Lin Hinnigan, the chief executive of the Youth Justice Board, has dismissed concerns from critics that its relationship with G4S is too cosy. “The YJB does not have an unduly close relationship with G4S and has not favoured it over any other company. The YJB has held G4S to account on a number of occasions to address performance issues. ”

Stevens recruited Paul Cook to run Rainsbrook along with John Parker in 1999 from St John’s, a children’s home in Northamptonshire. In 2003, Cook was made director of children’s services for G4S and Parker was promoted to director of Rainsbrook. A year later STCs became front-page news when a boy died after being physically restrained. By then Stevens had left G4S.

Fifteen-year-old Gareth Myatt, 1.47m tall (4ft 10in) and 40kg (90lb), was restrained after complaining he had wrongly been locked in his room as a punishment for failing to clean a sandwich toaster he said other children had used. He died of positional asphyxia at Rainsbrook STC in April 2004.

Myatt repeatedly told the officers he could not breathe while they had him bent over in a “double-seated embrace” – a restraint that was subsequently banned by the YJB. One of the three guards who restrained him, David Beadnall, was more than 1.83m tall and weighed at least 225kg. He was later promoted to health and safety manager at G4S.

At the 2007 inquest, Parker said that he had not read the Physical Control in Care manual, and wasn’t aware of the risks involved. It was also revealed that two years before Myatt’s death, David Tuck, the YJB’s monitor – said to be the “eyes and ears of the Home Office” – had raised concerns about the restraint techniques used by guards at the STCs, and at Rainsbrook in particular. In a letter written to managers in June 2002, Tuck warned of the dangers of young people vomiting while being restrained. More than a year later he wrote again, saying children were complaining their heads were being pushed down into their groins, doubling them up and cutting off air supplies.

Although accidental death was recorded at Myatt’s inquest, the coroner, Judge Richard Pollard, wrote to then justice secretary, Jack Straw, to highlight the failure of G4S’s management to act on reports of abuses. “Inadequacy in the monitoring of the use of Physical Control in Care at Rainsbrook by Rebound management caused or contributed to Gareth’s death,” Pollard wrote.

The Guardian’s investigation, and the leaked letter by Prof John Pitts alleging staff and management abuses, suggests G4S could have learned vital, possibly life-saving lessons in 2003.

The experiences of Lela Xhemajli and Roni Moss in Medway suggest the secure training centre was still failing some children in 2010-11, and its behaviour was inadequately checked by the relevant monitoring bodies.

G4S has defended its record on restraints and reporting abusive staff. “In the period 2010-15, 166 allegations were referred from Medway STC to Medway children’s services – which would include, but is not limited to, allegations of unnecessary and inappropriate restraint,” a spokesman said. “These were all fully investigated and appropriate action taken. Disciplinary action was the result in 23 cases over the period. Inspection reports from the period also characterise a centre where relationships between staff and children are positive.”

The former Labour MP for Northamptonshire North Sally Keeble, who has campaigned against the closed culture and dangerous restraints in STCs for 12 years, told the Guardian she was appalled that the relevant authorities failed to engage adequately with Pitts’ allegations about Medway STC in 2003, but was not entirely surprised.

“This is all of a piece,” she said. “Everything points to a culture of violence that resulted in one young boy dead and many injured. And there were plenty of warnings – delivered in parliament, in print and in person. For over a decade there has been a complete failure at a political and administrative level to take action to stop the violence.

“This is a huge scandal that should have been dealt with and wasn’t. It’s absolutely at the door of the government, and a complete failure of management from top to bottom.”

Additional reporting Neelam Tailor and James Dawson

This article was amended on 29 February 2016. It originally stated that the Youth Justice Board decides which companies win the contracts to run STCs. In fact, it is the Ministry of Justice, which sponsors the YJB, that makes these decisions in accordance with government procurement regulations.

Originally posted on UNILAD Oct 13, 2018. Including Skype interview with Tyler.

23-year-old Tyler has the energy, humour, and dreams of any able-bodied twenty-something, but he has the rare condition of spinal muscular atrophy (SMA).

Despite not being able to move around on his own or lift anything that weighs more than three ounces, the resilient guy from Omaha, Nebraska, is eager to not let the degenerative motor neurone disorder get in the way of his aspirations.

Tyler’s SMA means that his armpit touches his hip, and he describes his body as a ‘boomerang’ due to how his spine and ribs are bent.

SMA is a genetic rare neuromuscular disorder characterised by loss of motor neurons and progressive muscle wasting.

As well as suffering with this disease, Tyler had an incident where he died for six minutes.

Explaining the situation, Tyler said to UNILAD:

“It was a very odd situation, we went to hospital and they said ‘you’re very nauseous, there is a black liquid in your stomach, we’re going to have to pump that out’, and I said okay.

“As they were doing that, I blacked out, and I woke up four days later and the room was full of people.

“I was like ‘well, this isn’t good’, and yeah so the next day my aunt asked me if my chest hurt, and I said ‘yeah, how do you know?’ and she said ‘well, you had CPR’.

“I was like ‘what now?’ I said for ‘how long?’ and when she told me six minutes I was like ‘HUH?’.

“I wasn’t aware of it, but I was having some very odd visualisations and they made a little bit more sense as I was told that.”

Tyler has turned this traumatic situation into a really strong example of his resilience.

He said:

“The fact that a 65 pound 20-year-old endured CPR for six minutes and is still living.

“I think that is a testament to how stubborn people with disabilities can be. How resilient they are.”

As well as being physically resilient, Tyler’s mindset is inspiringly positive.

He explained that he feels he was blessed with a “‘If I can’t fix it, why be upset about it?’ kind of attitude” which has served him well.

After losing a bet with a friend, he actually ended up doing a stand-up comedy show and enjoyed every second.

Stand-up comedy is a terrifying thing, but Tyler explained:

“It was a dare at first, my friend said ‘you’ve got social anxiety haven’t you?’ and I said ‘yeah’, and they said ‘why don’t you do comedy?’.

“So I did it and honestly loved it. The fact that I can take something so negative and make people laugh about it.

“I think it’s a classic cry or laugh situation.”

He explained how comedy is his way of fight public misconceptions about disability:

“The public mostly has misconceptions about disability in general. They just kind of look at you and dismiss your cognitive abilities because of your physical ones.

“Now that I’m in comedy, it’s fantastic because I get to be all creative with them and point it out in various ways and make people embarrassed.

“In terms of a reaction to my comedy, I get everything from ‘Oh my god, why did you say that?’ to people laughing.

“People don’t know if they can laugh at my comedy show. It’s like ‘no why are you guys saying aww, I’m on a stage’.”

The main concern about Tyler’s health is that his lungs are okay, but his diaphragm is affected so what the doctors worry about is the muscle responsible for controlling his breathing will get worse.

Though the condition is degenerative, Tyler’s type two has the largest age range. He recalled knowing someone who passed away younger than him, but also someone who was 20 years his senior.

Looking to the future, he dreams of continuing comedy, but also starting a non-profit organisation to create a transportation device for disabled people that goes the extra mile.

He explained his idea:

“There’s a dream non-profit that I’m going to start, I just need to have the right ears and eyes on it, because once I start it, I want to make sure it’s effective.

“What I want to do is create a transportation for the disabled that doesn’t just restrict them to going to a doctor appointment or the grocery store, but independence beyond that.

“24/7 operation, because as is now in the States, you’re subjected to public transit times.

“It’s like being told ‘hey at 9pm you can no longer use your legs’. When you get to a certain age, your life becomes more than just school and doctor’s appointments.”

The heart-breaking fact about Tyler’s degenerative condition is that there is a treatment to halt muscle deterioration, but it costs well over a million dollars.

Tyler explained that for the first year of seven shots of Spinraza, a treatment that addresses the underlying cause of motor neurone loss, costs an outrageous $750,000.

Once again the unjust pharmaceutical companies are allowed to charge extortionate prices that most people simply can’t afford.

That is only for the first year, you then need three shots in the spine per year, costing a whopping $125,000 per shot.

Hopefully they make treatment more affordable for inspiring people like Tyler.

The aspiring NPO-owner also said he’d be looking for any business advice and guidance to help him.

Originally posted on UNILAD Feb 8, 2018.

If your face was realistically photoshopped into in an adult film, would you find it an embarrassing and distressing violation?

The past couple of weeks has seen fake AI-generated ‘deepfakes’ increase in prominence, prompting Pornhub to ban them from its platform.

Deepfakes are a more realistic and technically advanced version of the celebrity fakes that have been around since the dial up era. It is the level of realism that has brought the morality of the editing into question.

It is non-consensual to put the face of someone who has not consented onto the body of someone else who has not consented to it. But the broad defence of the practice is that it’s not real. It’s fabricated from thousands of photos of each person’s face.

Corey Price, VP at Pornhub told UNILAD:

“Regarding deepfakes, users have started to flag content like this and we are taking it down as soon as we encounter the flags. We encourage anyone who encounters this issue to visit our content removal page so they can officially make a request.

“Content that is flagged on Pornhub that directly violates our Terms of Service is removed as soon as we are made aware of it; this includes non-consensual content.

“To further ensure the safety of all our fans, we officially took a hard stance against revenge porn, which we believe is a form of sexual assault, and introduced a submission form for the easy removal of non-consensual content.”

Above is a still from an unsettling deepfake video which superimposed Natalie Portman’s face onto footage of a porn performer stripping for a photographer.

A video like this is particularly disturbing because it gives a fake yet convincing window into a very private aspect of a celebrity’s life we would never get to see.

One deepfakes creator from Reddit explained to UNILAD why there is such a curiosity around celebrities:

“Celebrities have an unusual relationship with the audience, people go see their movies and listen to their music even though it’s only one sided a feeling of familiarity is born given them some sort of ‘girl next door’ status, given that they would probably not do porn ever we all have at least once had the question ‘how would Becky look like naked’ popped in our minds at least once, that’s when the technology comes in handy.”

A government factsheet defines revenge porn as: ‘the sharing of private, sexual materials, either photos or videos, of another person without their consent and with the purpose of causing embarrassment or distress.’

It is easy to understand why the creation and publishing of deepfakes is being compared to revenge porn. Though it is not technically real, the violation is alike because of the lack of consent over the use of identity.

A deepfakes creator told UNILAD about his ‘cognitive dissonance’ surrounding the morality of making them:

“I don’t know how other people are trying to justify it in their heads, but I know I have some major cognitive dissonance going on surrounding the whole thing.

“I could never do this to someone I knew in real life. It just feels like a gross violation of boundaries. I feel creepy even thinking about it. I don’t get that reaction from celebrities at all.

“I don’t know anything about these people other than which movies I’ve seen them in and that they’re super attractive. It feels completely detached somehow.”

It was interesting to hear him talk about how the idea of a celebrity ‘being distressed because of a video I threw together in a few hours while half paying attention’ was ‘ridiculous, even though I know there’s at least a small possibility that it could actually happen’.

Because of the detachment from the individuals involved empathy for the human whose identity they’ve used is seemingly absent.

The coding for creating the fake videos was released on the specific subreddit /r/deepfakes which grew by tens of thousands in recent weeks.

They are called ‘deepfakes’ after the Reddit user’s name who’s credited with the original creation of Gal Gadot’s video.

Due to the increased publicity and negativity surrounding deepfakes, Pornhub, Reddit, and Twitter have cracked down and banned them from their platforms.

After speaking to numerous deepfakes creators however, it has been claimed that the reasoning behind the ban is not as virtuous as the corporations claim.

Some of the porn creators were quick to point out that it was likely to be a stunt for PR purposes and to save themselves a legal headache in copyright issues.

One deepfakes creator who wishes to stay anonymous told UNILAD:

“It makes sense that they are doing it as most source porn videos have copyright protection, besides even though fakes had been around for ages media will probably blow it out of proportion (no offense), and it’s a smart move to try to stay out of the backlash … for now.

“I’m sure as they realise it is exactly the same as photoshop fakes they will turn a little soft on the matter, provided that they can monetise on it and resolve the copyright issues, which in my opinion is the main reason for the ban.”

Another anonymous creator explained:

“I think Pornhub banning it right off the bat was a good PR move on their part. The algorithm had been gaining a lot of negative attention in the media, and a lot of the content being produced was being hosted on their platform, and they didn’t want to appear to be implicitly supporting it.

“Regardless, I don’t think they really had a choice. If they kept the videos up, they’d be gaining advertiser money off the likenesses of celebrities which I’m sure would have been a legal headache for them.”

I spoke to another creator who said he was in it purely for the technological intrigue. The college student, who got to the top of the subreddit with his creation, expressed his difficulty in attracting attention to his AI work when he posted SFW (safe for work) content, pushing him towards fake pornography.

When asked if they would continue making the deepfakes, a creator told me ‘there is a disturbing lack of Chloe Grace Moretz, but when I finish that one I will probably lose interest’.

The same creator went on to tell me that ‘something that is not real can not be private’, and it is not the same as revenge due to the fake porn only making ‘them appear as victims’ so it’s ‘not actually revenge’.

If the technology allows these deepfakes to become increasingly realistic and high quality, the argument that they’re ethically sound because they’re not technically real becomes void.

If they look real and they sound real, the only person who knows they’re not real is the victim, meaning the images bring as much embarrassment and distress as if it were an authentic leak.

Regardless of whether Pornhub and other platforms have banned deepfakes for reasons based on morality, capitalism or legality, it has encouraged the valid debate on when AI face-swapping crosses a line into non-consensual identity use and misuse.

Originally posted on UNILAD Feb 4, 2018.

The millennium gave birth to a beautiful and addictive baby when EA released The Sims18 years ago today.

Yep, the wonderful life simulation that allowed us to play God for hours on end is finally an adult.

You’d think that disappearing into an alternate yet true-to-life universe would be bad for us, but it turns out it can actually be pretty healthy.

Compared to hard drugs, alcoholism, gambling addiction and other common forms of escapism, life simulation games like The Sims are a productive way to disengage from your own life for a bit.

Steve McKeown, Psychoanalyst, founder of MindFixers and owner of The McKeown Clinic, told UNILAD:

“Life Simulation games such as The Sims may replace the reality that we know and live in, when internet speeds become fast enough.

“The suggestion that we may spend more time in a virtual world than the physical one has been developing speedily over the years and has fast become a way in which we can live an alternative life in exactly the way we want.

“The Sims can allow a person to escape social normality, its pressures and chronic stresses that are so prevalent in the real world, it allows the gamer to create a perfect reality in which they play the main character and have full control over the outcome.”

You can choose when to shower, eat, work, make love, make babies, and with the myriad of cheats available,  you could even make the gut-wrenching decision to take your Sim’s life.

The choices are endless, but the real consequences negligible, making it a great way to exercise your creativity and imagination without boundaries.

McKeown continued:

“It is important to remember that immersing yourself in your imagination periodically is actually a very positive form of escapism and is considered important for our brain functions as it can expands our creativity. It allows the gamer to express a part of their personality that may not have known if they hadn’t played.

“Albert Einstein once said ‘creativity is intelligence having fun’.

“Our consciousness is very adaptable and allows us to create an opening to different paradigms of reality every time we focus on alternate versions of life through our thoughts. With the assistance of life simulation games such as Sims we can enhance our inner experience.

“Without escapism we would simply burn out. It’s the main reason why we dream at night when we sleep as it’s our minds way of disengaging from the state of conscious living.”

Technology companies are working hard to fulfil people’s desire for realistic and effective escapism.

Mark Zuckerberg has made a commitment to employing virtual reality and is making fascinating-bordering-on-creepy headway with his Oculus Rift collaboration.

Facebook Spaces has taken The Sims to the next level.

Using virtual reality headsets, it encourages us to actual immerse ourselves in the virtual world but also integrate it into our real life through our social media profile.

This trend, which looks like something from the dark mind of Charlie Brooker, is a worrying one.

Escaping reality to the extent that we rarely choose to experience only what is authentic and existent can be very negative for the increasingly atomised society we live in.

The technology aims to ‘connect’ people better, while actually separating them and normalising e-intimacy over a genuine connection.

McKeown explained:

“Those who tend overdo escapism are escaping real-life partly because reality doesn’t stand up to their expectations due to stresses and strains of 21st century living.

“Through history this has indeed been the case as you find many people have used substances like alcohol, drugs to escape but as a society we are progressing and technology is allowing us to escape in other ways and not necessarily for the greater good.

“The more we escape the real world and spend more time in a world of fantasy the less we engage in actual social interaction.

“Social interaction is a huge indicator to being able to live a happy long life. We are not talking about strong tied relationships (family, friends etc) that may be part of your FB space but those weaker tied relationships (the shop assistant, the barista, work colleagues etc) whereby you meet people on occasion, these indeed are what actually make us happier and indicator to a longer life!”

McKeown talked about how escapism ‘can create lack of productivity’ as ‘living in dream land removes focus on real life situations hence becoming less productive in work scenarios’ because you’re ‘distracted by fantasy situations and never living in the real world’.

Whether or not you think the desire for escapism is healthy, it’s important to question why we look for any opportunity to disconnect from our own real lives.

Is the desire to escape reality innate, and we were simply held back in terms of technology before now?

Are traditional forms of escapism like the UK weekly ritual of Thirsty Thursdays (and Fridays, and Saturdays) healthier than virtual life simulations because they’re still set within our own reality?

We’re probably all living in a simulation anyway.

Originally posted on UNILAD Sep 16, 2017.

Boys discover porn aged just 10, on average, yet most start puberty at 12 years old.

This means millions of guys across the globe are beginning their sexual journeys in an online world, so far from real-life intimacy, that by the time they become sexually active their brains have already been warped. And how would they know any better?

Since the advent of high speed, free streaming porn in 2006, men and boys have taken to online forums with unexplained erectile dysfunction and low libido.

Other key effects of porn overuse include delayed ejaculation, morphed sexual tastes, poor working memory, social anxiety, decreased motivation, and difficulty sleeping.

You may be quick to dismiss the idea that your porn use has any effect on your brain or body, but Gary Wilson, the author of Your Brain On Porn, has a great metaphor to explain how hard it is to step back from your own situation.

During his eye-opening TED talk, Gary explains that asking how guys thought porn affected them was like asking a fish what it thinks of water.

If you’re surrounded by something for so long, you’re unlikely to notice it, and might not remember what you were like before.

Speaking to UNILAD, Gary Wilson said:

“Eating junk food is normalised, just as smoking was once. It takes decades to fully understand the risks of these normalised phenomena. We are just seeing the front edge of the results of growing up streaming unlimited sexual novelty, and the potential to escalate to increasingly extreme material.

“No one fully knows the effects yet. Interestingly, there’s a large and growing international movement of (largely) non-religious young men eliminating porn because of the benefits their peers report.”

I spoke to former porn addict and YouTuber Gabe Deem who makes videos supporting others trying to ‘reboot’ their brains from porn overuse.

Gabe explained porn’s potential to rewire the brain’s arousal circuitry in terms of desire, causing it to become aroused by pixels on a screen as opposed to real people.

This can be compared to the famous experiment by Ivan Pavlov in which he conditioned his dog to salivate for food at the sound of a bell. Only here men become sexually conditioned to think their phones and computers mean sex, and eventually may not become as excited or aroused by the real thing.

In terms of Pavlov’s dog, in Gabe’s words, ‘the guy just ejaculates into a napkin with his pants around his ankles’.

Gabe told UNILAD:

“The physical symptoms that can arise from porn use are: erectile dysfunction, where your penis works with porn, but not with a real person; delayed ejaculation, where it takes a guy forever to cum, or it is impossible, and he has to finish himself off with his own hand, or may have to think about porn to climax. If you’re no longer pitching a tent in the morning that could be a red flag that you’re developing a problem.

“Mental effects include: morphing sexual tastes (escalating into new, more extreme genres to achieve the same neurochemical high), brain fog (poor working memory), difficulty concentrating, lethargy/low motivation, increased social anxiety, difficulty sleeping.”

The scientific phenomenon of the Coolidge effect is at play when it comes to male porn overuse: male animals exhibit renewed sexual interest when presented with a brand new sexual partner as opposed to his dwindling sexual excitement for sex multiple times with the same partner.

When you’re watching porn, there can be countless videos under countless tabs. A seemingly bottomless pit of erotic sensory overload ranging in their extremity.

How can one real-life person even come close that level of dopamine release?

In his TED Talk, Gary explains the chemical change that takes place in the brain when someone is addicted to anything, including porn.

First there are dopamine surges that come from excess consumption, followed by the accumulation of brain chemical Delta-FosB (important in the formation of addictions) which promotes a cycle of binging and craving.

If the binging continues, then the Delta FosB builds up and can lead to brain changes seen in all addicts including a numbed pleasure response, hyper-reactivity to porn (where everything else in life seems boring, but porn is extremely exciting), and will-power erosion.

Some sources suggest the Delta FosB build up declines around the sixth to eighth week of abstinence from porn which makes sense to why a lot of men see big improvements once they get to the eight week mark.

Porn overuse creates the same physical changes in the brain as food, heroin, or any other addiction.

It’s difficult to know how much is too much because excess consumption of porn is something that is dependent on an individual’s tolerance and brain chemistry.

The best way to find out if (and how) it is affecting you is to try cutting it out for a few months and observing any changes.

Recovery from the symptoms of porn overuse takes about five to seven months for young men, or as little as two months for older men. Men in their early twenties aren’t regaining their erectile health as quickly as older guys because they started watching high-speed porn when their brains were at peak dopamine production and neuroplasticity, while older men were exposed to it at a later stage of life.

Gary told UNILAD:

“Honestly, no chronic porn user knows how it’s affecting him until he gives it up for a substantial period of time. A 25-year old who has been masturbating every day to porn since age 12 may never know what he would have been like without it. Others may not be much affected at all.

“Don’t wait for experts to tell you the effects of internet porn use. As with smoking, it may be
decades before those effects are accurately known. If you think you may be affected, make your own experiment by eliminating porn use for a few months.

“If you’re not sure your sexual function has been affected because you aren’t having partnered sex, try masturbating with porn, and on another occasion try masturbating without porn, porn substitutes, or recalling porn. If your erection and arousal are not there on the second occasion, you may be developing a problem.”

For many guys, the effect of porn on their life only comes into question when a deteriorating personal relationship forces them to reflect.

While interviewing the experts, it became obvious that people are becoming too dependent on porn to be able to function sexually, taking away from real-life intimacy, and putting a big strain on relationships.

In addition to the physical effects on men, there are important social and mental consequences that come from modern porn.

How often have you seen heterosexual porn that is focused on female pleasure?

Internet addiction specialist and psychotherapist Todd L. Love explains:

“Beyond the argument of addiction, it seems undeniable that regular viewing of porn creates unrealistic expectations for their performance abilities, the other person’s role (assuming hetero, the female body), and what are ‘normal’ activities, as well as their own bodies (all guys have huge penises).

“Young guys may go into counselling feeling confused and guilty about having engaged in some of the more physically aggressive ‘techniques’ they regularly viewed in porn (choking, gagging, or otherwise being sexually aggressive with their girlfriends). But they did it because that’s what they grew up watching, not necessarily because they are inherently angry with females.

“Similarly, young women are going into counselling feeling confused about what they have done, or feel that they are required to do, in order to please their boyfriends. Many are intuitively aware that some of the actions are not ‘normal’ sex acts, but nobody has told them so, so they engaged at their own physical and emotional discomfort.”

A study from the University of Nebraska reads: ‘They found those who saw porn young were most likely to agree with statements that asserted male dominance, such as things tend to be better when men are in charge’.

There is a NoFap community of ‘Fapstronauts‘ and pages and pages of reboot stories. One 24-year-old who has been porn-free for six months explains that despite experiencing highs and lows, he has improved clarity of mind, freedom from guilt and shame, increased confidence, motivation, self worth, emotional wealth, creativity, and arousal.

Advice for those who want to quit porn is to exercise, socialise, meditate, and seek support from others who are attempting the same.

Further benefits of giving up porn, reported by those who have succeeded include: remission of sexual problems, increased energy, reduced social anxiety, improved mood, reduced depression, viewing women more positively, and a greater desire to be in a loving relationship.

Porn essentially takes the natural human desire and drive for sexual pleasure and intimacy away from people, and directs it at a screen.

For some, porn use won’t hugely affect your life, but if you’re going to spend hours of your life doing something, it’s worth educating yourself about it.

Porn addiction awareness is on the rise, even if you’re not. Visit Porn Help, Reboot Nation, or NoFap for more information and support.

Originally published on gal-dem July 2018

Immigration is a dirty word right now. The idea that people with a range of skill sets and abilities, from other lands and cultures might actually be OK for the UK, is often eschewed for the narrative that foreigners are a pest.

Across the pond, America celebrated Independence Day, but the symbolism of the holiday is not lost on campaigners from RISE AND RESIST. For many, the Statue of Liberty and the July 4th tablet she holds were the first things they saw as they arrived in the United States looking for the American Dream. But between the reinforcement of the deplorable Muslim Ban and a new move to seperate children from their parents at the south-west border, current immigration policies seem like they’ve been lifted out of a dystopian novel.

On the public holiday (Wednesday) a Congolese woman named Therese Okoumou scaled the statue causing tourists to be evacuated from the area. She reportedly told police she wouldn’t come down until “all the children are released”.

Recently, we saw the 70th anniversary of the arrival of the first members of the Windrush generation, marking the pivotal day when around 500 Caribbeans disembarked at Tilbury Docks in 1948. They helped prop up post-war Britain and shape social, cultural, and political life. The gal-dem team curated an exhibition at City Hall to celebrate the impact of Caribbean women on this country which saw artworks of Diane Abbott, Doreen Lawrence, and more. The timing of this milestone – just after the heartbreaking Home Office Windrush scandal – is something that can’t go unmentioned. Yet The Independent reported that the UK Home Office has been found putting similar practices in place to that of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). At least 170 children have been separated from their families as part of its immigration detention regime – “in some cases forcing them into care in breach of government policy”.

Even in trashy pop culture news it was found that Ellie Jones from Love Island (Jack’s ex) supports EDL founder Tommy Robinson. Here’s what else you might have missed in the last week.

Sheffield’s mayor says “wasteman” Trump not welcome in his city

Sheffield's breath of fresh mayor, Magid Magid, has put his foot down, banning Donald Trump from the city whilst wearing a “Donald Trump is a wasteman” t-shirt and donning a Sombrero.

The South Yorkshire city’s British Somali Lord Mayor, as of May 2018, decreed on Twitter “I Magid Magid, Lord Mayor & first citizen of this city hereby declare that not only is Donald J Trump (@realDonaldTrump) a WASTEMAN, but he is also henceforth banned from the great city of Sheffield! I further declare July 13th to be Mexico Solidarity Day!”.

The 28-year-old’s reasons for banning the US President is for issuing the racist “Muslim ban”, “stupidly withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement”, “mindlessly moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem”, “enforcing imprisonment of children at borders”, and “defending violence and actions of white supremacist”.

He continued: “I am proud to be the Lord Mayor of a city where there is an amazingly culture of diversity. Where we don’t tolerate racism and xenophobia; where we not only celebrate all our differences but also unite on the things we have in common.”

Trump is set to step foot in the UK for his state visit on July 13 despite numerous petitions by the public to stop him coming.

‘Get Out’ actor Lakeith Stanfield posts homophobic rap on Instagram

What should you do if your alter ego is homophobic? Get Out and Atlanta fans are in despair after Lakeith Stanfield posted homophobic rap on Instagram.

The actor, who has had roles in socially prominent film and TV, can be seen referring to women as ‘bitches’ and using the word ‘fag’ in a recent video. To see him champion the experience of ethnic minorities while discriminating against another has angered fans,

He presented a larger issue of of people in marginalised communities who ‘throw other marginalised people under the bus’.

Stanfield posted the video captioned ‘Offensive freestyle (not for the easily offended)’, as if that pre-warning somehow justified the content. The video has since been taken down and he tweeted a video apologising, saying he was playing a character and was not homophobic.

ICYMI

Indian sex workers have lost the Sangini bank that allowed them to open an account with just a photo. The bank, in Mumbai’s red light district, had more than 5000 customers but has gone out of business because of a lack of funds. According to the BBC, it allowed the women to keep their money safe and save as they can not access mainstream banks due to lack of documentation.

Rapper Akon is building a futuristic Wakanda-inspired “Crypto city” in Senegal, which will trade exclusively in a digital currency called AKoin, on 2000 acres of land gifted to him by the President of Senegal, Page Six reports.

A California woman was caught on video shouting racist insults at a landscape gardener and his mother. The Guardian reports she was telling them to “go back to Mexico” and that they were all “rapists” and “drug dealers”.

Former Morrissey fans are planning an anti-racism party to coincide with his forthcoming gig in Manchester in protest of his support of far-right leader Tommy Robinson, according to The Guardian.

Kenyan priest, Father Ogalo, has been suspended by the Catholic church for rapping his sermons in an attempt to “bring youth closer to the church”, CNN reports.

Japanese princess Ayako has become the second Japanese princess to marry a commoner, which will remove her from royal status. Cosmopolitan reports she has announced she is engaged to marry a shipping employee she met and will be required to leave the family once she exchanges vows.

If you’re lacking inspiration, then 14-year-old Izzy Weall is sure to put life into perspective for you with her tremendous mindset and positivity.

Izzy, from Derby, is a quadruple amputee and a trampolining champion, being crowned national champion last year.

At the age of just seven, Izzy caught meningitis and her parents were suddenly warned that she had just hours to live.

Here is the full documentary.

Originally published on gal-dem May 19, 2018.

The phrase “bread and circuses” has summed up how easy it is to distract people for around two millennia. In its essence, it describes how it takes nothing more than a satiated appetite, so “bread”, and entertainment – “circuses” – to distract the masses from their political responsibility or the negative actions of government.

In 2018, pop culture is both the circus and the sustenance we crave for. A fresh Kim Kardashian controversy around appetite-suppressing lollipops is a loaf, the contestants on Love Island are the dancing elephants. Last week, Donald Glover perfectly displayed the dichotomy between life’s dangers and distractions in his powerful visual for ‘This is America’. Fittingly, this week a white woman then tried to distract us from its racially charged message with a cheap and reductive parody entitled ‘women’s edit’, in which she rapped about breastfeeding and date rape.

Meanwhile, actors at Cannes are trying to use the world’s idle gaze to make bold statements about the dark political mood, but a new audio internet mystery has been trending instead. It’s both Laurel and Yanny by the way. And as Royal Wedding feverkicks in, the streets have been cleared of the homeless, and there’s probably a lot of news you haven’t seen.

PROTESTS HIT THE CANNES RED CARPET

On Monday we were all looking at the shiny outfits that graced Cannes Film Festival’s red carpet, or Ivanka Trump’s smile as she opened the new US embassy in Jerusalem. US and Israeli leaders hailed the embassy move as a sign of the enduring relationship between the two countries, while American officials said it could create an honest foundation for an eventual peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians.

However, as many as 60 Palestinians were killed by the Israeli army while they protested the contentious American presence. More than 2700 people were injured after troops opened fire on demonstrators along the 40-mile border. Hollywood actor Benicio del Toro demonstrated at Palestinian pavillion, while Palestinian filmmaker, Annemarie Jacir, addressed a crowd saying: “Today, we stand here in solidarity with the people who have lost their lives and loved ones. I want everyone to hold hands and show that we have a human connection with each other and resist being dehumanised and silenced.”

This is just one of the powerful protests at the film festival so far. On Saturday, Cate Blanchett led 82 Hollywood stars, women directors, producers and scriptwriters to demand equal pay and status in the industry. Similarly, Wednesday saw 16 black and mixed race actresses take to the carpet to denounce everyday racism in the French industry, and the prejudice they have suffered from directors and casting agents.

NO JUSTICE FOR RACE RELATIONS OFFICER TASERED IN THE FACE BY ANOTHER OFFICER

There are no words. 64-year-old Judah Adunbi who worked as a race relations officer for Bristol police was tasered in the face by a police sergeant from the same force. Claire Boddie, 47, has been cleared of unlawfully tasering him after she claimed she mistook him for a suspect and acted in self defense.

During the encounter, Boddie told Adunbi he looked “familiar”. There was a scuffle and Mr Adunbi fell to the floor after the Taser bar hit him in the jaw. He was a member of the force’s independent advisory group which raises policing matters which could cause the public concern.

She said the suspect she had been looking for had a warning for violence and weapons, so was concerned Adunbi had keys in his hand. Adunbi has actually been mistaken for this man before and after the altercation.

ICYMI

US State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is being hailed the #MeToo “movement’s biggest betrayal” after Harvard-educated activist writer Tanya Selvaratnam, of Sri Lankan heritage, spoke out about how he used to call her his “brown slave” and slap her until she called him “master”. Schneiderman is New York State’s highest-ranking law-enforcement officer and has taken an active role in the #MeToo movement against sexual harassment, suing Harvey Weinstein.

Guns N’ Roses have removed the song ‘One in a Million’ from a forthcoming reissue of their album Appetite for Destruction because of the racist and homophobic lyrics. It features the lyrics: “Police and niggers, that’s right / Get outta my way / Don’t need to buy none of your gold chains today.”

The Conservative party are under pressure to take action over councillor Rosemary Carroll’s racist Facebook post where she compared an Asian man to a dog

The effect of US police violence on people of colour is becoming evermore tangible after a new study estimates more than 100,000 years of life were lost in 2015 and 2016.

Originally posted on UNILAD June 22, 2018.

In news worryingly reminiscent of South Africa’s apartheid, a Barcelona club night has been accused of racist door policies.

A group of black British guys had booked tickets to an ANTS club night at Barcelona’s Plaza de Toros Monumental on June 16, but when they showed up they were stopped, along with many other black people, while their white counterparts walked in with no issue.

At first they didn’t think anything of it, but the colour line across the door to the venue became overwhelmingly obvious, and when they asked for an explanation, they were reportedly told, there were to be ‘no black Muslims or black Arabs’ allowed in.

Speaking to UNILAD, one of the guys who filmed the shocking situation, Josh Orie, said:

“On entry into the venue, either side of us were groups of two to four black lads, standing in frustration on the left and right hand side of the queue, but I didn’t think anything of it until we got closer to the front.

“On entry into the club there was four of us, three black lads and one white. My white friend was the first to walk past security, no problem.

“Then we followed right behind him until we got told to stand to the side for no reason, and someone would come and tell us the reason why we can’t enter – but my white friend had no problem.

“After standing around waiting for an explanation, we started to see a similar pattern of the type of people they weren’t letting in, and it was people of colour, mainly black people.”

When Josh and his friends asked security for reasons as to why they were refused entry, they were allegedly told there were to be ‘no black Muslims or black Arabs’.

They were also allegedly told: ‘you don’t fit our profile because you have tattoos’, this is despite hearing others being told: ‘you guys can enter because you don’t look black’.

Josh also remembered a security guard sniggering while searching a ‘big athletic black man’, saying, ‘I’m surprised no knife’, racially profiling him with prejudiced stereotypes.

Josh continued to UNILAD:

One security guard even said his boss doesn’t want us in the venue, and that none of us are deemed the right of entry except the white people.

You could tell the Spanish people were mocking us, with their language, their mannerisms and how they would approach us – which was aggressively.

I felt more shocked than surprised at how they did it so causally. It was like what they were doing was normal and not a problem.

After waiting for an hour, watching dozens of black people get turned away, Josh and his friends were offered a refund and left feeling extremely uncomfortable and mistreated.

Josh attempted to reach out to ANTS events, which describes itself as ‘an underground movement originating from Ibiza’, but is still waiting for answers.

In a statement given to UNILAD, ANTS events said:

“ANTS are aware of the alleged treatment of guests at a show at La Monumental on 16th June, where an externally promoted event was taking place.

“We take claims of this nature very seriously, and the welfare of customers is our number one priority.

“We are in contact with the promoter and their security and door staff to investigate this further, and have been made aware that the promoter allocated refunds to those that were affected, as well as a “hoja de reclamaciones” complaint form to those wanting to provide a statement about the situation.

“We do not condone any form of discrimination whatsoever, and always seek to unify partygoers without prejudice.”

Unofficial racist nightclub entry policies have been prevalent in the news recently.

London’s Park Lane Drama night club was recently accused of charging black girls double the entry price of their white counterparts.

Until 1965, it was legal to turn away black people from pubs or clubs simply because of their skin colour. For this to still be an issue in 2018 is concerning and extremely important to note.

Hopefully in this case, the people responsible are aware a refund is the very least they can do and in no way makes up for any alleged discrimination and prejudice.

Originally posted on gal-dem 09/01/19

The Lifetime six-part documentary, Surviving R. Kelly, details the harrowing personal accounts of the R&B legend’s alleged sex slaves. It’s upsetting. It’s disgusting. Yet, if there is one thing that is obvious from the documentary it’s that his manipulation and the molestation was so explicit, those around him must have seen something. So why did it take until now for investigators to reopen the case? It goes some way to making you think that the prejudice against young black women is what helped protect him for so long and that ultimately the police and his supporters believed that young black girls don’t need protecting.

The world seems ready to call a spade a spade: R. Kelly is toxic. And, newsflash, Donald Trump is a racist. New democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has said there is “no question” about that in an interview with CBS News. The outspoken congresswoman has just been sworn in as the youngest ever, and she’s already established herself as a force to be reckoned with – in politics and dance. Seeing a politician express actual joy was refreshing and made me realise sometimes good things happen. Like Sandra Oh becoming the first Asian woman in over 40 years to receive a major TV award at the Golden Globes, or Cyntoia Brown, an alleged sex trafficking victim from Tennessee being granted clemency after being jailed for 15 years for the murder of her sexual abuser.

Here’s all the race-related news you might have missed this week.

Beijing furthers campaign to ‘sinicize’ ethnic Muslims with new law

China’s aggressive campaign against Uyghur Muslims in the country continues as a new law is passed dictating the way Islam can be practised. China’s most popular English newspaper, The Global Times, writes that the legal measure has been enacted “to guide Islam to be compatible with socialism and implement measures to Sinicize the religion”. To Sinicize means to make Chinese in character or form. The new report regarding the law does not detail how it will be implemented, but China’s government-backed Islamic Association is developing a five-year plan for the sinicization of Islam. The plan will focus on requiring mosques to uphold “core values of socialism, traditional culture, laws, and regulations”, the association’s president Yang Faming said.

There have been continued harrowing reports of the “re-education camps” where roughly a million Uyghurs are allegedly forced and tortured. It seems it is not only the Uyghur Muslims being targeted by the government as Hui Muslims, but China’s largest Muslim population are also now being attacked. Last month Chinese authorities in the province of Yunnan forcibly evicted Hui Muslims from three mosques. Beijing is allowing “cultural genocide” to take place, as described by U.S.-based Muslim student activist Sulaiman Gu, using the threat from Islamic extremism and separatism as its excuse. It looks as if the Chinese government is not going to stop at Islam either. Beijing demands control over all faiths practised in its country.

White drug dealers spared jail because of their perfect ‘spelling and grammar’

Blatant bias ruling rears its white middle-class head in UK courts this week as a pair of drug dealers avoid jail due to their impressive “spelling and grammar” in text messages arranging weed deals. Sounds about white. It’s very unlikely that this would happen if they were black. Yet, 19-year-old Luke Rance and 21-year-old Brandon Kerrison walk free out of court, and a compliment.

The Welsh drug dealers were found with several bags of weed and a small amount of cocaine, and police reportedly uncovered over £1,200 worth of weed from Rance’s bedroom. They both appeared at Swansea Crown Court this week where Judge David Hale examined texts between the dealers and customers, remarking that their “grammar and punctuation” was a higher standard than most drug dealers.

“Spelling and grammar” is a code-word for the privilege. They’ve had the right kind of education, they have talents outside of crime, so he decided they are undeserving of punishment.

As their freedom was being granted, it’s painful to think about the number of black and brown men of the same age and potential who are being sent to jail for the same crimes. They’re at least twice as likely as their white counterparts to be charged for possession of weed, as we know from LSE’s significant 2013 report. It really brings into question whether anyone should be prosecuted for dealing weed at all.”

ICYMI

Anti-racism campaigners held a vigil in Kent welcoming refugees to the UK in response to the hyperbolically-named “immigration crisis” we are experiencing.

Lil Pump removes racist lyrics from Butterfly Doors which read:  “They call me Yao Ming, cause my eyes real low, ching chong.”

Parents of mixed race children in Bristol have created a community initiative to exchange hair-tips for those who don’t know how to manage mixed race hair.

Continuing issues of racism in football are clear as former Inter and Sampdoria striker Samuel Eto’o claimed black coaches are put off because they’re viewed as “second class citizens”. Before Christmas, Napoli’s Kalidou Koulibaly was recently subjected to monkey chants against Inter.

A black family-of-four who were racially profiled and mistreated by police in a Canadian suburb south of Montreal should be paid $86k in compensation, Quebec human rights commission says.

A Canadian barber shop that was vandalised with graffiti saying “Kill Muslims” and “Kill Lebs” along with a swastika is holding a community event to unite against racism. Owner Jesse Lipscombe said: “Barbershops, in general, are the place where you go and talk about everything from politics to family, the kids, the dogs and you want to keep that same feel.”

Originally posted on UNILAD Oct 13, 2017.

Vivian Nouri was born into a Syrian refugee camp after a bomb destroyed her home in Northern Iraq during the Kurdish uprising, and now she has burst into Hollywood as a singer for an upcoming Christmas film.

Now she is rubbing shoulders with the likes of Diplo and Chance the Rapper, but the talented 24-year-old hasn’t always lived in luxury as she is one of six siblings born to a heroic mother who made the perilous journey to Iran in 1991 along with about two million other Kurds fleeing the violence.

After making it by foot to Iran, Vivian’s two elder sisters and her mother were sent to a Syrian refugee camp where Vivian was born and lived for her first two years.

The family were granted refugee status in New Zealand in 1995, where they have called home ever since.

Vivian’s 27-year-old sister Jennifer told UNILAD:

“In 1991 after the gulf war and during the Kurdish uprising in Northern Iraq our house was destroyed by a bomb and so my mother fled with me and my eldest sister at the time.

“After the house was destroyed by a bomb and we fled, my mum said a lot of people died of hypothermia or starvation because it was a long trip to Iran. It was snowing in the mountains at the time, so we had to walk through the mountains. We did the whole journey by foot .I was seven months at the time so our mother carried us.

“About two million Kurds went towards Turkey and the other half went towards Iran and subsequently we were living in a refugee camp and that’s where Viv was born in 1993.

“She grew up in a Syrian refugee camp. What I remember about it is that we lived in a tent and my mum would walk a long way everyday to fetch water with one of us with her. That’s how much I remember of it. She’s our main inspiration. We’ve all gone on to do big things and it’s all thanks to her.

“We were there until 1995 when were granted refugee status in New Zealand because I needed medical attention, so it was on those grounds we were granted the status. We have been here ever since and call New Zealand our home now.”

Vivian has gone from the refugee camp where she famously used to graze on ants, to singing on the big screen.

From a very young age, Vivian sang and she recollected the standing ovation she received at the school talent show which confirmed her dreams of being a singer.

Speaking to UNILAD, Vivian said:

“At the beginning of the year I made the decision to drop everything in New Zealand quit my job in IT. I was studying IT as well at the time and only had a year left on that but I just needed to put it on hold so I could go to the States and see if I could do it. I only went knowing one person out there, Brian Kennedy. I sent my video of Close To You by Rihanna which is a song he produced and he really loved it.

“I quit my job, went over at the beginning of February this year and I was going to go for a month, but while I was there they wanted me to extend it because we had so much stuff to record. At the time it was Grammy season so Brian would take me to all these pre-Grammy parties and events where I would get to meet more people. Through that I met Jason, the Music Supervisor at Paramount Records.

“I couldn’t believe the people I was around. At the party, Diplo was there, Chance the Rapper was just walking around so casually. I was in the right place at the right time.”

Vivian told me how Fifth Harmony were her favourite celebrities to meet because when she met them at the studio she was the only girl around and ‘they were so welcoming and really friendly and they stayed with me the whole time’.

Having uploaded videos of her singing to Youtube and trying to gain contacts, Vivian sent her video to Brian… and it resulted in her getting a call from Paramount Studios asking her if she could try recording a song.

Instantly she agreed, learnt the song in an hour and sung it at the studio in LA.

Vivian spoke about how she got the opportunity to work for the film:

“This one morning Jason rang me and asked if I would be able to sing a song. He sent it to my email and before I even listened to it I just said yes and then learned it in an hour and then met him at the studio.

“The studio that we were at, the engineer showed me photos of where Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie had recorded albums. I just felt like it was crazy and it really got me in the mood.

“The Christmas song they gave me had an Amy Winehouse kind of vibe so I warmed up with an Amy song and then sang the song and they loved it. Then a week later I got an email saying the song was locked into the movie.

“My fingers couldn’t even type because I was so excited. It’s just crazy because I’m not signed under a label and don’t have any management or anything like that, so I’m completely independent. I’ve been told by so many people that for something like that to happen to someone with nobody behind them, it’s really rare.”

The singer’s big break is a Christmas song featuring on the a big Hollywood film soundtrack, which is set to be released in the US on November 10 this year.

The movie stars Hollywood heavyweights Will Ferrell, Mark Wahlberg, John Cena, John Lithgow, Mel Gibson and now the vocal talents of Kiwi Vivian Nouri.

Vivian explained how her background is humbling:

“Being from my refugee background and coming to Hollywood is really humbling. Coming from where I come from, I don’t think you could ever not be humble. That’s what drives me to want it even more, you’ve got people who say bad things, but I really don’t give a shit. I’m in a good place and I know the right people, and I’m very humbled to be in this position.”

Vivian isn’t signed to any label and is her own manager. She is a completely independent artist and said that her refugee background is extremely humbling everyday.

All of her siblings have gone onto great things, crediting their incredible mother as their inspiration.