Pirates of the Caribbean Disneyland: sex slave scene to be ditched

Artist's impression of the new ride scene. Image: Disney Imagineering

Who says protests about awful representations of women doesn't work? Walt Disney Imagineering is climbing down in its showing of sexual slavery as an entertainment.
Maybe that means customers' complaints hit corporation revenue, or just that moving with the times does happen, eventually.
At Paris's Disneyland the old banner at the 50-year old Mercado ride proclaiming "Auction, take a wench for a bride” is being changed on 24 July. It will become “Auction, Surrender yer loot.”
There will instead be an auction of valuables that were stolen from the townspeople.
And the bound, crying woman who was being sold off to pirates will soon be a pirate lady, bold and in charge.
In 2018 the other two Disneylands will rectify matters.

The old version. Photo Courtesy: mliu92/Flickr/CC BY-SA 2.0

Disney has moved, belatedly, with the times before.
In the 1990s the scene where pirates chase female victims was changed so around. women chase men and some hold food. I guess you could call that progress?

--
In reality women and men alike in ports sold women's sexual services to visiting seafarers. One of the most famous 'dealers' in the Caribbean was Rachel Pringle, a madam in Barbados. (See pic)
As for selling wenches as potential "wives", this is a euphemism, and a fantasy. Pirates were unlikely to want a bride, ie a permanent partner, because few women were allowed in busy ships. Also, supporting a marital home, in a place the man might never visit again, was obviously a poor use of money.

Piratical theatricals and 1970s feminism

Pic by Tristram Kenton.

This new play about women pirates (The Pirate Project, Oval House, London, May 20 - June 2 2012) is an expression of the way some (I'm sorry to say, rather naive) feminists like to think of women pirates: as swashbuckling heroines rather than as lower members of a hierarchical maritime workforce.

Some lines from Brecht's Galileo seem appropriate. 'Pity the land that hath no heroes' a pupil says to the great physicist. Galileo replies 'Pity the Land that hath need of them.'

When I wrote Bold in her Breeches: Women Pirates across the Ages a lot of film and stage companies got in touch with me about making productions based on such sassy interpretations. And I spent a lot of time trying to inject realism: 'I don't think piracy was that glamorous, really. Try thinking about them as a gang of minicab drivers or squaddies. They're not Tina Turners and Madonnas in dominatrice gear.' Yes, I enjoy strapping on my shoulder parrot and strutting with my cutlass at fancy dress parties. But it's not real.

And then, well over a decade later, real-life Somali pirates stepped in and disabused everyone, finally. Pirates were revealed in all their seedy thuggery: just macho crims side-stepping poverty, brutally, and much less privileged than all the high-level bankers engaging in heists with pin-striped chutzpah.

Two reviews of The Pirate Project sum up the problem of perceptions of historic women pirates. Sally Stott, in the Stage (21 May) wrote 'Like an assertiveness training session for women, the first show of Oval House’s OUTLAWS season suggests getting in touch with your inner pirate in order to find out who you really are, (sisters). However, despite plenty of self-conscious roaring and lines like “stop oppressing me with your patriarchal bullshit”, the realities of pirating and feminism are contradictory bedfellows. When being a pirate is essentially about violence and theft, how can it also be a part of aspirational modern womanhood?'

Quite. But also there's no evidence that women challenged these essentially patriarchal institutions, albeit outside the law and more communal than naval and merchant vessels. And although a few iconic stories suggest two or three pirate women spoke and acted boldly, I have to say that I suspect that most non-cross-dressed women on pirate vessels were more likely to have been gang-banged and systemically relegated to reheating the turtle stew (again).

Director Lucy Foster created a devised production (an Improbable Associate Artist Project). Stott writes that the play light-heartedly reworks (is that code for 'inauthentic' or 'fancifully trashes'?)real-life 17th and 18th-century pirates Annie Bonny, Mary Read and Ching Yih Shih.'By the final scene the cross-dressing heroines are denouncing killing and setting up an on-board creche... Performers... add their own life experiences to the mix, but the “it’s OK to be yourself” message is familiar and risks sounding condescending, despite good intentions.
... the play’s conclusion feels disappointingly traditional - a celebration of women who excel at multitasking, caring and being honest. It could be braver.'

Lyn Gardner, in the Guardian (20 May) asks 'Will learning to say "Haargh" very loudly like a pirate further the cause of feminism? The creators of this playful oddity clearly think it's a step in the right direction as they weigh anchor and invite us on "a journey of empowerment over an ocean of self-discovery to find the treasure buried within us".

'It's like a 1970s consciousness-raising meeting with added swashbuckling....In these stories of women who stepped outside the rules of conventional society, there's scope to explore why so many of us want to be good girls, conforming to ideas of how a woman must look and act. But that's never examined in any depth in this piece, which is intellectually and theatrically at half-mast. "A pirate doesn't ask permission, she just takes what she needs," we're told. Yes, so do many modern-day pirates, including Somali raiders and hedge-fund managers, but that doesn't make them good role models.

At the end there's back-tracking and a suggestion that we should all be touchy-feely sharing pirates. But the show isn't well thought-through and tries to disguise its lack of rigour with a messy DIY aesthetic. There are some filmed snippets (sometimes hard to hear) of older women talking about their lives and motherhood, and some acted-out scenes from 17th- and 18th-century women pirates' lives – even these have an oddly romantic gloss. A sadly wasted voyage.'

Piracy and tampons

Modern women have been appropriating the idea of piracy for several decades now. Scores of US female soccer and basketball teams have swashbuckling names, such as the Orange Coast College Pirates. The point is to stress the values of teamwork and bold courage.

But this witty product really takes such appropriation of piracy to a new level.I'm not sure it's for real.(found at http://withlovekommetjie.blogspot.com/2010_08_01_archive.html)

So some pirates do chivalry?

Two Somali pirates were sentenced to life terms in Virginia yesterday for killing four Americans yachters in February. Reports highlight that one pirate tried to urge that that the two women on the Quest should not be shot.

Associated Press reported that 'Burhan Abdirahman Yusuf’s attorney... said Yusuf had argued that Jean Adam and Phyllis Macay should be released. However, Yusuf was only a guard aboard the boat and was not considered a leader by the others.'

Well, 'he would say that, wouldn't he' as Christine Keeler famously said in court. Desperation can make us claim all sorts of things to protect ourselves. But let's suppose he really did try to give Jean Adam and Phyllis MacKay especial privileges.

For people interested in gender issues this is an interesting dilemma. Gallantry is by definition sexist and denigrating, however well-intentioned. The person doing the gallantry is positioning the recipient as automatically in need of his protection, not quite competent.

(Women are seldom said to gallant or chivalrous. Kind, yes, but that's not predicated on any gendered assumption that her recipient is frail and she herself is a 'gent').

So was Yusuf, presumably a Muslim, being sexist? If he was simply being kind, surely he would have argued that the two men should also be released.

But as with the many feminist debates over the last century about the Women and Children First policy when evacuating ships, shouldn't women be thankful when they are given an extra chance to live?

I think I'd be among those who argue that fair is fair. If we really support equal rights, then we have to accept equal rights to die, not preference based on presumed need.

The issue in this whole story is really another kind of unfairness: inequalities of wealth. Of course people from hard-pressed countries are going to seek ways to extract money- in this case a ransom - from those in wealthier countries. It's called trickle-down larceny. And how remarkable it is that sometimes they, as Yusuf apparently did, express humanity towards the privileged.

The irony is that Jean Adam, with her missionary ideals, might well have automatically been very kind to Yusuf.

Women pirates as widowed businesswomen?

I'll be talking about women pirates at a Pirates study day, at the Museum of London, Docklands. It's on Saturday 24 Sept 2011 from 10.30am–5pm. The title is Delve deeper into Pirates: The Captain Kidd Story.

No, Captain Kidd, wasn't secretly a woman, but gender is on the agenda.Come and find out whether pirate life was anything like this picture:Captain Kidd in New York Harbor.

It's by Leon Gerome Ferris (1863–1930)from the series The Pageant of a Nation. This is a a postcard published by The Foundation Press in 1932 and portrays a very fanciful amount of fancy women, for a working pirate vessel.But at least it makes the realistic point that many male seafarers seek female company when they dock.

My session is Women pirates: heroines and hell vixens, or victims and boss's wives?

I'll be arguing that female buccaneers such as Anne Bonney have become modern icons of girl power, not least thanks to Geena Davis in Cutthroat Island. But were they actually admirable heroines?

This talk proposes that we think more deeply about women seafarers’ place in shipboard society. Could they be re-seen as, like lads, targets of cruelty? Could some have been simply widows who had to keep the family business going?

Leading academics will be discussing the history and cultural resonance of pirates and piracy. They include David Cordingly, Hilary Davidson,Ed Fox,Angus Konstam and Tom Wareham.

Topics include pirates' life and organisation; the mythology; Henry Avery; Blackbeard;and Captain Kidd himself.

Book in advance £20 (concs £15, Friends £12.50)includes tea, coffee and exhibition entry. www.museumoflondon.org.uk/docklands, tel: 020 7001 9844.

Retired woman dentist is latest victim of piracy

Two US women and their partners have been kidnapped from their yacht s/v Quest by Somali pirates. Jean and Scott Adam of Los Angeles are named; the other couple aboard have not yet been named. Jean is a retired dentist interested in biological sciences.

They were hijacked in the Indian Ocean off the Somali coast, yesterday (Friday).The Los Angeles Times says that Jean and Scott distribute Bibles internationally.So how is this Christian philanthropy going to go down with the Somali pirates, who tend to be Moslem?

Mariners such as the Adams have been repeatedly told to stay out of pirates' range. Did the Adams believe God was on their side, or did they not need warnings?

The Adams have been sailing around the world since 2004 and had planned to do so for eight to ten years. This winter they were travelling from India to the Mediterranean via the Arabian and Red seas. They had been planning to make Crete by April, before sailing on to Istanbul, according to their website, www.svquest.com.

The issue here is not gender or religion but simply global inequalities of wealth. Piracy arises because men - young poor men in underdeveloped countries - seek this way out of poverty. Anyone - however innocuous, and female or not - can be a victim.

Recent estimates were that about 29 ships and 660 hostages are being held by pirates. There is already a 20-month, EU-funded anti-piracy programmes in place, which includes a digital fingerprint identification system. At least 100 Somali pirates are in custody in Kenya and the Seychelles.

Tunbridge Wells couple Rachel and Paul Chandler were similarly kidnapped by pirates and only released last November (2010). After a year of captivity, a ransom of over £500,000 was paid. Piracy experts warned then that paying ransoms would only encourage more hijackings. It seems they were right.

Marry a pirate and live to regret it.?

Somali women want to marry pirates. Or at least they think they do, according to an The Korea Herald - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX report of Jan 28, 2011: 'Somali pirates are the most sought-after [bride]groom[s] among Somali women'[January 28, 2011] http://satellite.tmcnet.com/news/2011/01/28/5275018.htm

My blog of 13.10.2010 shows what a mistake it can be to say 'I do' to a modern swashbuckler. Accoding to Shukria Dini’s findings such marriages can be nightmares, not fun-filled eternal bliss with a Johnny Depp-substitute.

Certainly marrying a high-flying pirate can bring (limited and temporary) access to wealth beyond the earning power of most women in impoverished countries. The article quotes a Financial Times report that the average ransom a gang of Somali pirates gets is $5,4m.

Typically gangs are small and as BBC Somalia analyst Mohamed Mohamed reports,consist of three different types of member:
# ex-fishermen: the strategic brains behind the business
# ex-militiamen: provide muscle, and presumably access to arms
# technical experts: computer people who can operate GPS, military hardware etc.

From that it's easy to see why women are excluded from the action end of this industry.

In an interview with the BBC Abdi Farah Juha, a resident in a regional capital of Somalia, said most of the pirates are aged between 20 and 35 years and in the piracy business for money. 'They wed the most beautiful girls; they are building big houses; they have new cars; new guns.'

Yes. And they ditch those wives for newer models, spend the dosh on dope, and die young. Not the best of prospects. So don't put your daughter in the piracy marriage market, Mrs Worthington. Get her an independent career of her own.

Piracy's impact on women

Any discussion that explores the gender relations round piracy is welcome. And google alerts have just brought to my attention Shukria Dini’s very interesting article: The Implications of Piracy for Modern Women: http://www.sidint.net/docs/SDpaper2.pdf

The piece grew from findings when she was researching another subject in Somalia in 2005-6. There she came to understand piracy as a third world activity develop mainly in response to the poverty caused by aggressive and unpoliced foreign fishing in depleted Somali waters.

In summary, I see her main arguments as being about extremely wealthy men - as pirates briefly become – and what that means:
• men have great power to exploit vulnerable women and create conditions that breed prostitution
• men may spend the money on themselves (including on the drug qat) and not on the family
• they may take new wives and so divert resources from their main families
• they may lure young impoverished women into chatteldom, the sex industry or unwise marriages – which may socially mark them forever and blamed for their connection to piracy
• wealth is only temporary and will not bring bliss and secure futures
• poor, non-pirate young men cannot compete for wives
• when tensions rise between warring factions, women can be hindered from going to the market where they win the family bread
• pirate wealth increase the price of local goods and services, making life still more economically difficult for the lower-waged

Having studied piracy and gender for 15 years now, I think the article could go further, so that is specifically about piracy rather than the problem of men suddenly having wealth from any sort of work, say fishing or working away on oil rigs. The particular features of piracy work anywhere, as I see it, are that:
1. it is violent
2. it necessities itinerant temporary labour
3. it is done in all-male teams with a culture that valorises macho ruthlessness.
4. it’s criminal, meaning such workers live outside the law and can neither be constructive members of society not constructively resistant challengers of it.

So, for example, let’s look at the implications of violence, for women. Shukria only points that in a marriage where the man takes up arms the wife can be left husbandless (killed doing his work), meaning that she becomes economically deprived.

But a really important problem is surely the damage that is done to everyone, including mentally, by living in a family/society where violence has become normal in one member’s working life. And violence produces ripples, and brutalisation. All pirates are not psychopaths. Many are just impoverished young men caught up in struggle to survive. But surely living by the gun cannot make for harmonious personal lives.

It would be good to some comparative analyses how piracy impacts on women. There are bigger questions too: How can piracy be stopped, but what happens to women in less developed economies if it is halted? And if women were involved in pirate action (not just in support work) what difference, if any, would that make?

Pirate hunters - artistes - do it in saunas

I became interested in pirate hunters because of having researched and written about women pirates. (By the way, my book on them - Bold in her Breeches: Women Pirates Across the Ages - is still in print as a hardback. It's just that the paperback has now gone out of print).

Associated Press has just posted a fascinating article by Katherine Houreld about the pirate hunters now on the Swedish ship Carlskrona,at http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hDrcS1YqnperiOOFms1DzuOndyYAD9FUG0EO0.

Yes, there are women aboard: twenty per cent of the crew are women, and they live in non-segregated quarters. But the thing I love is the luxury in which they all live. In between sorties to find Somali pirates they enjoy saunas, massage, and four types of freshly baked bread each day, with wholegrains and syrup (see pic). And among the DVDs they watch is Pirates of the Caribbean. Of course!

On his blog Alexander Martin of La Jolla names this as his all-time favourite article on piracy. He's skipper of the US Force Platoon attached to a MEU that is just about to go pirate hunting to Africa. And he gives a really good picture of his reality.

As part of the Marine Expeditionary Force’s Force Reconnaissance Company he's one of 'a small band of sharply trained professionals who see their trade as an art form. They see their work as special, not themselves.

'The first thing that everyone should know about hunting pirates is that it is not as sexy as it sounds. ...we have been training to kill pirates for an entire year. Which is also not as sexy as it sounds. It's plain hard.'

See his witty blog War & Women (note that order of words) at http://warandwomen.blogspot.com/2010/05/pirate-chronicles-virtue-of-god-country.html

What appeals to me about all this? It's the contrast with silly myths about piracy.

It's not a sexy business for pirates, nor for their hunters.

And modern pirate hunters are not pompous aristocratic gents in frilly shirts and gold braid as in Errol Flynn movies. They're women (and men)workers with high-level skills, who sometimes get to enjoy a bit of pampering ...that feels ironic in the circumstances.

And the odds are that some of these piracy hunters - and the catering workers who suppor them - are LGBT people too, as they were in piracy's golden age 300 years ago. What an enjoyable contrast it all is to the macho and heterosexual myths.

The Pirate Woman, a trashy delight

I've just found that Project Gutenberg has made an EBook out of the gorgeously trashy novel that led me to write my - perhaps less gorgeous - book about women pirates: Bold in Her Breeches: Women Pirates across the ages.

The Pirate Woman, by Aylward Edward Dingle, was originally serialised in four installments in All-Story Weekly magazine from November 2 -23, 1918.

It was this wonderful cover image that triggered my first explorings into women's piracy. At the time I was studying more prosaic women seafarers: matrons and stewardesses.

I was excited by this cover and Dingle's book. It made me think there had to be a REAL story too, of women who actually worked with pirates. At that stage, 1992, I didn't even know that there had been female buccaneers, although as a kid I'd enjoyed the movie Anne of the Indies.

Dingle's heroine is Dolores. She's a total fantasy - but an interesting one: bold, sexy, tough and of course beautiful. You can read about her for free at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/30057/30057-h/30057-h.htm

women pirates - interest endures via HerStoria

A new - and very attractively accessible - women's history magazine is now out: HerStoria. I hope it's going to succeed. Because the format is so popular it deserves to hit the bookstalls and not just be subscription-based. I'm in the launch issue, writing about women pirates. Although my book about female buccaneers came out 13 years ago and I thought they'd been done to death, there turns out to still be a surprising amount of interest. Many people have written to me from all over the world: wanting to know more; saying, for example, it's on their university book list for a crime, gender and society module.

In the article, The trouble with women pirates…, I reflect on image, reality and the process of writing ‘outsider’ history. It's often been fun - as the photo (right) shows: me playing with fake pirates at the Liverpool Tall Ships festival in 2007.

The article begins:

'What could be sassier, you might think, than a bold, sexy buccaneer? Slightly dykey, and into a light-hearted touch of woman-led bondage. Brandishing—but with a beautiful smile—a long whip to go with that lethal cutlass. And mmmmm, swashbuckling along the deck in those sea-washed, thigh-high leather boots. She could shiver any one’s timbers. Geena Davis as Morgan Adams in Cutthroat Island, (1995) is a scintillating example of the genre. Keira Knightly in The Pirates of the Caribbean (2003-2007) could also wield a sword with lethal prettiness.

'The (interesting) trouble is that such images of women pirates are a fantasy. Exploring such a fantasy not only requires—but also reveals—a broader knowledge of just why it is that the sea is popularly seen as a ruggedly masculine space in which real seawomen have only small, strictly prescribed, walk-on parts....'

Read on in the HerStoria issue 1, at http://www.herstoria.com/