feminism

If you were a feminist. by The Real Thunder Child

October 6, 2014

(Cross-posted from The Real Thunder Child)

If you were a feminist, you would not feel the need to tell us. Your actions and what you say to other males would mark you out.

If you were a feminist, you would see misogyny for what it is, everywhere it is, neither feeling personally hurt or blamed for the often unconscious actions and words of yourself, and other males. You’d be watchful,mindful. And try.

If you were a feminist you wouldn’t expect thanks for common courtesy, for simply not being a douche.

If you were a feminist you wouldn’t deify choice. Nor would you condemn it. You’d view the choices that women make through the prism of still overarching patriarchy. Whether it be prostitution, sex selective abortion, or the niqab, and question what forces that choice, rather than punishing women for the choices forced upon them by men , and that said overarching patriarchy.

If you were a feminist you’d realise that internalised misogyny is a thing. That females aren’t born hating other females or themselves. That this is a beyond Pavlovian defence mechanism. That this “competition” exists purely as control, with patriarchy handing out the prizes. Prizes such as “good marriages”, which in themselves are gilded cages. Control.
And you’d realise how you, even you, benefit from this, instead of using it as tool for attacking women.

If you were a feminist you’d rest the responsibility for sexual violence where it belongs, with the perpetrator.
You’d be mindful when opining how such violence could be avoided.
You’d realise that it can’t.
You’d know how “advice” on attire , for instance, quickly becomes “what was she wearing”, and why.

If you were a feminist You’d realise that females know it isn’t all men, but that the men who it is, don’t wear badges, so for us , it may as well be “all men”… And you wouldn’t take that personally. Furthermore, if you really are a “good guy”, you’d trust us to work it out for ourselves.

If you were a feminist you’d not question or discuss a female’s medical decisions. You’d know a female’s rights over her own medical decisions are for her and her conscience, and not within your gift to either discuss or endow.

If you were a feminist you’d not opine on her “empowerment”. You’d not require a willingness to comply with men’s fantasies as proof. You’d not regard refusing to as signs that a female is frigid, a prude, or lesbian.
You’d recognise true empowerment not as the obligation to say yes, but as the power to say no.

If you were a feminist you’d recognise that how you choose to live , what you wear, how you define yourself or shape your subjective reality, does not become an obligation for females to accept you.
You’d respect their fears as based on millennia of reality, not “hate speech”designed to deprive you of your “rights”.
You’d realise that being female isn’t a political or lifestyle choice, that being female isn’t an identity, or construct. But rather a material fact upon which the rest are attached, and upon which the oppression of females is excused.

If you were a feminist You’d recognise her sex veto, and not insist that the labels you give yourself, either define your feelings as reality or her sexuality as bigotry.
You’d not require her to affirm your feelings or identity, least of all by opening her legs.
Or accepting your catcalls, or enduring your gaze. Lower YOUR eyes, if needs must.

If you were a feminist you would not feel the need to explain to females how they’re thinking, what they feel , and why. You’d listen to them explaining that for themselves.
Neither would you expect females to educate you. If you truly wish to know, listen. Read. It’s out there, it’s neither obscure or arcane, or akin to “dabbling with the occult”.

This and so much more besides, you would, at least, try.
If you were a feminist.

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The Denounced by @CatEleven

October 3, 2014

(Cross-posted from One Woman’s Thoughts)

Sat in a pod
Or at a desk
A sofa
A lawn
Lying in bed
You scan with your code
And your algorithms of shame

Eyeballing for the sleights
The choice keywords
Juicy tidbits to wave under
The noses of your allies
Tracking
The allegiances formed
Through shared experiences

And you frighten
Condemn and denounce
These keyboard “aggressors”
You are known to us
You scream
From a page backlit
And we are watching you

Looking at your language
Looking for your hate
Avoid these scum
You warn
While actively searching them out
These women
With voices

These questioning
Inquisitive women
These thinking
Breathing
Challenging
Women
Reducing them to sound bites

Stereotypes
Privileged and hated
Ostracised
For expressing opinions
For naming their oppression
For questioning
For speaking

 

One Woman’s Thoughts: I am a feminist and this is my blog; a collection of perspectives, poetry and ideas. [@CatEleven]

Categories: Featured Blog, Poetry
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KIRSTIE ALLSOPP, CLASSISM, AND A DISTINCT LACK OF CHOICE by @boudledidge

October 1, 2014
(Cross-posted from We Mixed Our Drinks)

 

 

It was obvious what was going to happen yesterday when the media started putting its own spin on Kirstie Allsopp’s comments made in an interview with Bryony Gordon for the Telegraph, coming up with headlines such as “Kirstie Allsopp tells young women: ditch university and have a baby at 27“. As everyone who bothered to read the original article knows, that’s not the extent of what she said – but why let that get in the way of calling her stupid, accusing her of wanting to take women back to the 1950s, and telling her where to stick her overprivileged expectations about home ownership and marriage?

 

According to the law of how women talk about lifestyle choices and how it’s played out in the media, Allsopp has, of course, been positioned as some sort of spokesperson for womankind, judging everyone who doesn’t want to live their life the way she thinks they should. And in their reactions to her comments, many of those who don’t agree with her have fallen into the trap that’s so obviously laid for us all, every single time some vaguely high-profile woman has something to say about women’s lives. Yesterday’s ‘debate’ became a defence of education and careers (and why not? No-one’s going to deny that they’re important things to defend), against the spectre of smug, twee, wealthy motherhood and financial dependency on men.

 

No-one likes to feel patronised, especially by someone they perceive to be out of touch with what most women think and want. I don’t think it’s correct to say that women are unaware of fertility issues, or that they are never talked about. There’s enough discussion of it about for us to know roughly at what point conceiving a child does begin to become much more of a struggle – if, indeed, we were all that fertile to begin with. But the fact is, even as most women know what they’d do about becoming a mother, in an ideal world, and even as they laugh at scaremongering headlines about ‘career women leaving it too late’, the years pass by quickly – years of trying to find a suitable partner, trying to save money, trying to get a job, or a better job, or a job you actually like.

 

What Allsopp did touch on – which I believe is important here – is the pressure on middle-class women to have the various aspects of their lives sorted out and adhering to an ideal before children get factored in. The degree, the wedding, the ‘life experiences’, the career, the foot on the property ladder. It was noticeable yesterday just how many people I witnessed saying “But NO-ONE can afford to buy a house/have a baby in their 20s!” And it’s certainly true that for many people, saving up for a house deposit is a terrifying thought. Wondering how to pay the bills while on maternity leave or afford to pay childcare is a terrifying thought. But it’s also true that many, many people become parents in their 20s (and earlier). Many, many people who aren’t privileged and whose parents haven’t bought them a flat somehow manage to become parents and just get on with it. Yesterday’s ‘debate’ had a particularly narrowly-focused and classist side to it – one that needs to look beyond non-debates over the ‘right time’ to have children or go to university or get married and question instead the way UK society places expectation on women about the ‘right’ way to live their lives in a country that makes it so difficult for them to do so, sneering at both those who choose not to go along with it and those who are happy about having achieved it.

 

Let’s leave aside, for a moment, the fact that becoming a mother at a young age so often gets you labelled as a ‘scrounger’, a ‘waste of potential’, or a statistic for the right to sneer at, and the fact that being a relatively young middle-class stay at home mother gets you labelled as ‘smug’ and ‘irritating’, and being a childfree woman in your 30s gets you labelled as ‘sad’ or ‘selfish’ – because these things are important, but they’re not the most difficult things.

 

Not when a particular ‘route’ of university followed by the career ladder followed by ‘settling down’ when you’re financially secure and have ‘really lived your life’ is the ‘desired’ one. Not when the cost of attending university has skyrocketed and the housing market in London and the south-east is ridiculous and there’s so much competition for jobs that people despair of ever getting the job they want or feeling financially secure at all. Not when maternity discrimination is rife, maternity leave difficult to imagine for those in difficult financial circumstances, and childcare here is the second most expensive in Europe. Not when the burden of care and everything child-related is still seen as a woman’s domain. Not when the voices of women who have had children at a young age, and working class women who have never had the luxury of expecting to get all their ducks in a row before making big decisions about their lives go unheard, as feminists who are quick to sneer at the idea of having children in their 20s without thinking how that looks to their sisters who already have children and are doing just fine. For all the cries of “Shut up Kirstie, can’t you see it’s all about choice?!” it’s evident that most of the time, it’s really, emphatically, not.

 

Yesterday wasn’t the first time in the last couple of years that I’ve been reminded of this piece on women in Iceland that appeared in the Guardian in 2011. I remember being struck at the time by the idea that being a young mum at university could be seen as totally normal, rather than a ‘challenge’ or something worthy of a newspaper feature as it might be in the UK. Writes Kira Cochrane:

 

“Parents here talk strongly of community support, of collective care for children, and there is no sense that motherhood precludes work or study, which effectively changes the whole structure of women’s lives.”

 

One woman, who we’re told had her first child at the age of 19, is quoted saying: “You are not forced to organise your life in the ‘college-work-maybe children later’ way”. Another woman explains how couples in Iceland don’t tend to think of parenthood in ‘How many children can we afford?’ terms. And with full-time childcare, at the time of publication, costing single mothers £70 and couples £118 a month (as opposed to an average cost of more than £700 a month for full-time working couples in the UK – much higher in London), you can see why.

 

Feminists do enough shouting about the perceived egalitarian joys of Scandinavia and I’m aware that no country is perfect. The fact remains that women in the UK find themselves supposedly liberated yet also restricted by what we’ve constructed as the ‘right’ way to do things, the ‘right’ way to live the capitalist dream and the ‘right’ way to experience life. For many, it’s a bind and an enormous source of anxiety. For many more, it’s unattainable and unrealistic, and by doing things their way they end up being derided and devalued by Kirstie Allsopp’s cheerleaders and detractors alike.

 

 

We Mixed Our Drinks I write about feminism, politics, the media and Christianity, with the odd post about something else completely unrelated thrown in. My politics are left-wing, I happily call myself a feminist and am also an evangelical Christian (n.b. evangelicalism is not the same as fundamentalism, fact fans). Building a bridge between feminism and Christianity is important to me; people from both camps often view the other with suspicion although I firmly believe that the two are compatible. I am passionate about gender equality in the church [@boudledidge]

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Emma Watson, Feminism and Men by @hhbruichladdich

September 24, 2014

Emma Watson has given a speech to support the launch of UN “He for She” campaign. There has been considerable support, retweeting and endorsement of her speech and in particular the point at which she invites men to be part of the solution. Tweets like this: “Chaps out there. Sign up for @HeforShe and watch this moving speech. Thumbs up #EmmaWatson” (@evaliparova). There has also been some challenge and rejection to precisely this part of the speech. Tweets like this: “As far as I’m concerned, the liberation of women from male oppression will not be achieved by collusion” (@PlanetCath).

By the standards of much of feminist twitterati, her speech was quite tame. She calmly and quietly gave a very few examples along the lines of the most excellent “@everydaysexsim” such as being labelled bossy (age 8) for wanting to direct the play, noticing her classmates (age 15) falling away from sport as they were afraid that having muscles wasn’t feminine and sensitively noticing her male friends (ages 17 and 18) not feeling able to talk about their feelings.

Her approach was thereby as inclusive and caring as it could be. It recognized that gender norms and stereotypes harm men and boys as they do women. She did not even try to make a comparison as to who might have it worse as some of us would. She did not include statistics about males as predominantly perpetrators of violence against women and females as predominantly victims of male perpetrators as some of us would. She did try to challenge the silencing tactic that is used against feminists – that this means they are automatically man-hating. She went out of her way to support the “not all men” are violent and abusive line, indeed she went further and stressed how many fine and upstanding men and boys there were out there, as many of us would not.

This argument about the role of men in feminism has been doing the rounds for many years – it is not new. So many women do not want to be negative about their men – their sons, brothers, husbands, fathers, partners. Some of the refrains in support of working with men sound reasonable and include: They are part of the problem so they have to be part of the solution. We can’t do it without them. Most men are not abusers so we should work with those who can support us. We need their support, we shouldn’t alienate them. They are hurt by gender norms too, if they could be liberated from gender stereotypes, it will help us all. We are not fighting them, they are not the enemy, we just want equality.

The arguments against highlight the fact that what feminism is doing is challenging the power and the status quo. Those who have power and benefit from it in varying degrees generally do not cede it and share it – they protect and reinforce it. So it may be the case that men may find it harder to ask for help, may not visit health care so often, may find it hard to talk about their feelings – but they also benefit from being taken seriously, being respected and having higher status, receiving higher pay, being more likely to be in positions of power on boards, in companies and organisations, in governments etc. Consequently, women have no option but to try to wrest power away from those who hold it. Asking nicely just won’t cut it. So Emma’s approach was very unchallenging you would think. Nevertheless hackers have threatened to publish naked pictures of her in retaliation.

This too is not new. Whenever a woman takes up a public voice to speak on any matter of public policy but particularly one relating to women’s rights there is a backlash. The backlash usually consists of highly gendered abuse to put you back in your place – about your looks and your body, that you should be raped, that you are too ugly to rape, that you need to be taught a lesson and he’s the man to do it. I don’t need to retrace these here, Helen Lewis has admirably done so some while back.

While it may indeed be the case that men suffer from gender straitjacketing too, some of us would argue that we are entitled to demand our rights without apology, without reference to how this affects men, without sorting out all the men’s problems too. The anti-racism movement did not focus its energies on reassuring, including and prioritizing the needs of the white powers nor did it ask for their permission and guidance in how to overthrow them!

That is not to say there is no role for men, just not the role they are used to of leadership and power. Men are very welcome to say that they support us and to consult with us to see in what way they can be most useful to the cause and we will tell them.

We are likely to say stop being violent and abusive if you are and if you are not, then please challenge other men to discourage them from such behaviour as Karen Ingala Smith points out. We are particularly likely to say don’t try and take over our movement, don’t try and lead it, don’t try and distract us and others into talking about you, and certainly don’t presume to try to tell us we’re doing it wrong!

Categories: Featured Blog, Violence Against Women
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My Daughter’s Too-Round Tummy at Learner Mother

September 15, 2014

(Cross-posted from Learner Mother)

I knew it would happen, one day. Perhaps naively, I wasn’t expecting it for another few years. I remember it sweeping through my peer group at secondary school, when we were 14 or so, and I remember how ill one of my fellow pupils became as a result, unable to pull away as the rest of us did. I know that as a girl, my daughter runs a higher risk than her brothers of this becoming an issue. But I also knew – or thought I did – that as she has only just turned seven, I had a little while before I needed to worry.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

‘Mum, if I do lots of ex-tra-cise, will my tummy get smaller?’

‘What? Your tummy is fine as it is! Why on earth would you want it to be smaller?’

‘Well, it’s just that it looks a bit too round. You know. I’d like it not to stick out so much. So, should I do lots of ex-tra-cise? Or maybe just eat less?’

What the WHAT? Did I hear that right? It seems that I did. In fact she has actually broached this subject before, but in such a roundabout and convoluted way that I had managed to convince myself that I had misunderstood her meaning, and the conversation had turned to other things.

I’m gobsmacked. Though I am certainly guilty of passing on some of my own issues to my kids, weight loss and body shape has never featured highly on my worry list. I never, ever turn down food, or buy diet options. I am a member of a gym, and I run semi-regularly, but exercise for me is about keeping my mental health on track more than anything else. We don’t have a pair of scales in the house, not even because I think we shouldn’t, but because it wouldn’t occur to me to buy them!

I’m not unaware of the external influences surrounding her. The Weight Watchers ad that she saw in the cinema – before a screening of Moshi Monsters FFS. The fact that every time we go into a newsagent she can’t help but see magazine covers screaming out that some celeb or other has *shock* cellulite, or the latest way to a happy, healthy, THIN, you, is just inside these pages. The women she sees on TV – even on the kids’ channels – are all on the skinny side of healthy. She hears adults in her wider family talking about weight loss, she probably hears kids in the playground use the word ‘fat’ as an insult.

But I’d made the mistake of assuming that without any validation of all this tripe from us, she would disregard it. Big mistake. BIG mistake. I had completely underestimated just how pervasive the messages are. I mean, on an intellectual level, I know it. I’m aware of the cynicism which drives the ‘health’ food industry. I’m aware that women and their bodies are seen as public property, to be picked over and criticised in the drive to sell ever more magazines.  I’m aware of the media mis-representation of women and their shape. I know that the chance of me switching on the TV and seeing a woman larger than size 10 is pretty small. Even smaller if I’m hoping to see a woman larger than size 10 in a positive, aspirational role, as opposed to a downtrodden character in some soap or other.

I know all this, and yet I have ignored it. And worse, I have assumed that my daughter will be able to ignore it too, even though her childhood is surrounded by exponentially more of this shit than mine was, back in the in the days of only 3 TV channels, black and white newspapers and no internet.

It makes me absolutely furious that, short of locking her in a room for ever, I cannot protect her from any of this. I can hope that she follows my example of ignoring it all, I can say all the right things, I can give off the right messages, but it’s a tiny drop of sanity in seven seas of madness. And more to the point, I’m furious that I should have to protect her in the first place! Maternal instinct is supposed to kick in to save our young from real threats – presumably back in the day it came in useful when faced with a marauding woolly mammoth – imagine the reaction explaining this to our ancestral mothers now…

‘Right. So let me get this straight. WE gave birth in caves, foraged for food, killed animals with our bare hands, fought off predators, to rear our kids. YOU get to rear yours in a nice warm house, with no man-eating wild animals hanging around, and you don’t even need to catch your own food. WE worried about starvation. YOU are worrying about your daughter worrying about whether she is thin enough. PROGRESS, huh?’

How they would laugh. Because put like that, it sounds laughable. And you know what, it SHOULD be laughable. But the truth is, it’s not. It’s really not funny at all. It’s not funny when a seven year old pokes herself in the tummy because she thinks it is too round.

Not. Funny. At. All.

Learner Mother:  I blog about parenthood and a few other things (@learnermother) (Facebook) (Google +)

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TAKING ON THE ULTIMATE CLICHÉ OF THE HAIRY FEMINIST by @thewritinghalf

September 9, 2014
Cross-posted from: The Writing Half
Originally published: 03.09.14

Am I a bad feminist? For over a decade now I have been battling body hair with razors, creams, wax, tweezers, epilators and Intense Pulsed Light (IPL) treatments. Of course, hairy legs and armpits are the ultimate cliché of the 70’s feminist, a stereotype that still hangs around. The image works quite well for people who oppose or misunderstand the concept of feminism. It’s repulsive, or ‘unwomanly’, some would say. (An interesting argument, given that most women do have body hair naturally). So are my half-hearted efforts at body hair removal offensive to the Sisterhood?

It’s not like I haven’t thought it through. From a personal viewpoint, it’s time-consuming, expensive and, depending on the method used, painful. Equally, from a feminist perspective, it is sapping me of productive use of time and disposable income that a man would take for granted. I don’t want to think about how much I’ve spent on the thankless task of dissolving, ripping out from the roots, plucking and bleaching, only for the forest to spring up again overnight.

Now, I don’t want to distract you with a discussion on pornography here. I don’t personally object to it per se. I do, however, have some specific issues with its development on the internet over the last decade. One of these is that regular women are now expected to perform a porn star-level of personal grooming. The really annoying thing about this, aside from the associated crazy pain and expense, is that nobody even asked us if this was okay. As Caitlin Moran puts it: ‘It is now accepted that women will wax. We never had a debate about it.’ She makes a very good argument when she writes ‘I can’t believe we’ve got to a point where it’s basically costing us money to have a fanny… This is the money we should be spending on THE ELECTRICITY BILL’. It really is quite ludicrous.
Read more TAKING ON THE ULTIMATE CLICHÉ OF THE HAIRY FEMINIST by @thewritinghalf

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“The pen is mightier than the sword.” Burka Avenger fighting for women’s education

September 8, 2014

(cross-posted from Petal fall from my afro like Autumn)

MY MIND IS BLOWN…

burka avenger

Pakistani Pop Star Aaron Haroon Rashid, has created a new super hero: the Burka Avenger. Quite literally a burka-clad super hero who fights for girls right to education, punishing the bad guys with nothing more than books, pens, and inner peace. This anti-violence, pro-education icon is ‘creating quite an impression in a country where female literacy is estimated at a grim 12% and the Taliban are continuing a campaign which has seen hundreds of girls’ schools blown up in the north-west.’ the BBC tells us. As arguably the biggest weapon of the Arab Spring, social media is once again championing a peoples movement, although this time through animation instead of protests. Could this be a indicative of a move away from religious extremism and back to a cosmopolitan Pakistan where the levels and standards of education rise exponentially across the country, providing both male and female future thinkers, speakers and teachers of the world?

Haroon told the BBC “The Burka Avenger is a great role model. We lack those in Pakistan.” But what about, now author, activist, and international spokesperson Malala? A young Pakistani woman who was the victim of an assassination attempt as a child by the Taliban after blogging for the BBC about her life under Taliban rule, Malala survived a terrible headshot wound and now lives in Birmingham. She continues to campaign for education, and specifically the education of girls, but whilst she has become the champion of many human rights campaigns she is also hated by many people from her home country, not just Taliban supporters, some doubt the sincerity of her campaign, going so far as to claim that she is a CIA agent. Even people who knew her from her own village have called her attention seeking, stating that “Malala is spoiling Pakistan’s name around the world,” Leading me to the question: is this a peoples movement, is it what the people want?

The Burka Avenger shows-off obvious western influences, including a rap-theme tune ‘Don’t Mess with the Lady in Black’ by Haroon and Adil Omar which is sung in English. I was interested to see what responses had come out of a society with a currently anti-Western mood. As I suspected many of the comments agree that “Burkha Avenger” will be written off by many as just more Western propaganda,” And yet, as a U.K occupant myself, I think that this animation could have a tremendous effect on anti-muslim ignorance here in the West itself. Episode one introduces funny, likeable protagonists, not so different to the characters you might find in Dora The Explorer or even our very own Kim Possible which, in a fear-driven world that is increasingly alienating all and any aspects of muslim-culture (both assumed and literal) can only be a good thing right?

However this symbol of education emancipation for women (the message I have tattooed on my forehead) is wearing a burka, seen by many as a symbol of the oppression of women and has, in itself caused a fair amount of debate. “It is demeaning to those brave women in the conservative parts of Pakistan who have been fighting for women’s rights, education and justice, and who have said ‘no’ to this kind of stereotype.” Comments Islamabad-based journalist and human rights activist, Marvi Sirmed to the BBC, “…it says that you can only get power when you don a symbol of oppression,”. But the burka is not just a symbol of oppression. There are many muslim women both in the west and around the world who have spoken out against this stereotype.

hijab choice

I have read accounts that assert the Burka empowers women, allows them to walk the streets without being stared at by men in a derogatory way. I myself have experienced feeling so objectified by men all around me in the middle of an average street in London that I wished to become invisible, to give them nothing to look at. I would not equate this to covering my face as a symbol of my religion, but then, I am not dedicated to any religious body, so accept that such devotional practices are somewhat alien to me. Women also talk about modesty and state that men are also obliged by the Q’ran to cover themselves from neck to ankle in loose clothing. Women have insisted that that they are not forced to wear the Burka or Hijab by any men in their families, but wear it because they want to, and wear it with pride. A particularly concise comment I found on a polling website stated: “The burka is no more a symbol of oppression than the bra.” Well, you’ve got me there…

burqa_liberation

Whilst this really isn’t the image I  have in my head when I think of women’s liberation – neither is this –

nightclub

– a common occurrence in a seemingly ‘equal’ country…

So I’m afraid I stand a little on the fence with this one, and if this heroic, independent female-role model is fighting for literacy and education for women in a highly-oppressive society, how can we fault her? If she’s not offering me a feminist female president of Pakistan, isn’t she at least giving us a good start?

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School Uniforms: Reinforcing Patriarchal Norms? by @LK_Pennington

September 6, 2014

The streets in Scotland are full of children in navy blue, black and grey school uniforms trudging or skipping back to school. This week, schools in England and Wales return: with children in school uniforms that are very clearly gendered with lovely pleated skirts for girls and polo shirts for boys. Considering the increased awareness of the harm caused by gendered stereotypes as seen in the campaigns Let Girls be Girls and Let Toys be Toys , why are school uniforms still embraced? Is there really a difference between Lelli Kelli selling sparkly shoes for girls that come with make-up and Clarks selling school shoes for girls that you can’t play sports in, as per their recent advertising campaign?

I’m always perplexed by the obsession with school uniforms and the questionable defence of forcing children to attend school in clothing that are simply not designed to be played in. School uniforms may have worked in the halcyon days of the 1950s and 1960s when children were forced to sit in rows and learn by rote. Considering the amount of proof there is demonstrating that that is the least effective way of teaching, why on earth are we still obsessed with stuffing children in clothing which simply does not match current theories in childhood education?

Whenever I ask this question, there are two answers that always pop up: that children behave better in uniforms because they respect themselves and the educational environment and that it decreases bullying. I have yet to see evidence that supports either statement.

I have read studies which link increased performance of students in state exams to uniforms, but once you read the research it turns out that uniforms aren’t the only change in the school. Frequently, the implementation of uniforms follows a change in management or the discipline policy. These have actual measurable outcomes. Forcing six-year-olds to wear ties does not. The strictest uniform policy in the world will not compensate for poor management or poor teaching. Kids wearing jeans to a school where the staff and management respect one another and the children will do far better than children in ties in a school where staff are demoralised with poor management.

Many countries do not use school uniforms and have just as much good behaviour, bad behaviour and ‘results’ as schools in the UK. It must be noted that most schools will still have a uniform policy banning offensive t-shirts, non-existent skirts, branded sports clothing and, in certain areas, banning gang colours. You can have a dress code that requires children to be presentable that doesn’t involve cheap nylon pleated skirts or ties.

Let’s be honest here, a lot of school uniforms that are available are of poor quality, made by sweatshop labour and rip easily. It is more cost effective, especially for those on limited incomes, to buy a few pairs of jeans from Tesco or Asda that can be worn throughout the year, than it is to buy uniforms that are “seasonal”. This is without addressing the utter ridiculousness that is the price of school shoes or schools demanding children wear official uniform to gym class. Do children really play football better in shorts with the school logo on?

Another reason given for school uniforms is poverty; the theory being that if all the children are in the same outfit, then children won’t get bullied over clothing. Ten minutes in a school playground will demonstrate just how wrong this theory is. If your school has an expensive uniform available from only one shop, then parents on limited incomes will struggle to pay for it. Kids can also tell the difference between clothes from Tesco’s and clothes from John Lewis even in schools, which have generic cheap uniforms. They can tell the difference between boots bought from Clarks and knock-offs from ShoeZone. If they are bullied for clothing, they are just as likely to be bullied for wearing uniform as they are for wearing Tesco’s brand jeans.

This argument also fails to address the real issue of bullying. Bullies go after the weakest link. If it isn’t uniform, it will be something else. The problem is not that the children are dressed the same or not; the problem is that the school has a culture of bullying which is not being addressed effectively. That’s the definition of a bad school. Pretending that clothes will make it go away is naive and disrespectful to the children who are victimised by bullying. It makes them responsible for being bullied because they aren’t dressed appropriately rather than blaming the bullying on the school environment that allows bullying to continue without intervention.

Bullying is part of the patriarchal structure of our society, which sets up everyone in a hierarchy of importance. It marginalises any child who does not ‘fit’ the mould. In many ways, school uniforms are outward emblems of social control designed to make children ‘others’. If you think of the work which requires uniforms, most are of low status and equally low pay: jobs which are frequently performed by women.

Clothing is the outward signifier of respect: those in power require these to make a clear distinction between those with power who have value and those who have neither. As a society, we are reaping serious social damage due to our lack of respect for our children.

The conformity encouraged by school uniforms is about maintaining hierarchical social control. It is misogynistic as well as classist: setting out a clear difference between those who are important and those who are not important.

Fundamentally, school uniforms only serve to reinforce Patriarchal norms at the expense of our children’s education and their self-respect.

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A Woman’s Work is Never Done by @marstrina

July 13, 2014

(Cross-posted with permission from It’s Not a Zero Sum Game)

On a recent visit to Stockholm, I was amused to encounter an exhibit in its excellent historical museum titled “The Bäckaskog woman”. This woman’s well preserved remains were excavated in 1943 and were found alongside grave goods such as fish hooks, carving blades and other paraphernalia indicative of a an active life of living off the land through hunting and fishing. The remains were immediately interpreted as those of a man and took pride of place among Sweden’s archaeological exhibits as “The Barum Fisherman”. It was not until 1970 (!) that some enterprising physical anthropologists thought to actually examine the skeleton in detail, whereupon they were staggered to discover that, based on the condition of the skeleton’s pelvis, the Barum ‘man’ had given birth to at least six children in ‘his’ life!

On the face of it, this is a familiar tale of sexist academics and their blinkered view on prehistoric gender roles; in fact I’ve written before about the illogic of most of our assumptions about who made the milestone innovations like the harnessing of fire, plant cultivation, pottery use and so on. But what especially intrigued me about the modern exhibit was that it is now named “The Bäckaskog woman”. Not “The Bäckaskog fisherwoman” or “The Bäckaskog huntress”, just… “Woman”. Even while being restored to her rightful identity, this long dead ancestress of the progressive Swedes is deprofessionalised, her survival activity subsumed and invisibilised within her gender identity. The status of the work this woman had undertaken in order to provide sustenance to herself and her children was lowered from that of a named occupation to the default activity we as a culture have always expected of women, and continue to expect of them today.

Other angles on this phenomenon abound. In The Human Condition Hannah Arendt writes of productive versus reproductive labour: speaking of the attitudes to political and intellectual involvement of citizens in the life of ancient Athens, she describes their division of activity into the private and the public. The private sphere contained the activities that were necessary to the sustenance and reproduction of the body. Food production, textile work and sexual services (as well as the provision of offspring both as heirs and as slaves) were tightly enclosed within that realm. It was only the person who could afford not to worry at all about these necessary activities, who was free to assume that they will be performed for him as his right, who could properly speaking be ‘free’ to engage in the (morally and intellectually superior) public activities of law making, philosophy, political debate and art. I’m sure I don’t need to pain you a picture about just how much choice the people relegated to the necessary drudge work of the private realm had in the matter, nor what gender they (if freeborn) exclusively were.

Before Arendt, the German thinker Thorstein Veblen in his seminal essay Conspicuous Consumption (on a side note, if you haven’t read it, it’s currently in print as part of Penguin’s ‘Great Ideas’ series, and is some of the most eye-opening 100 little pages I’ve read in a long time) lays out a theory of development of human societies from the earliest (as he sees it) hunter gatherer phase to the modern consumer society. There is much that we would dispute in Veblen’s description of human cultures as existing along a progressive developmental spectrum form the ‘primitive’ to the ‘modern’, but it is of high importance that he describes the gendered division of labour at each stage and provides a useful schema for thinking about how the gradual subjugation of women may have become embedded in human cultures. In particular Veblen distinguishes between what he calls ‘drudgery’ and ‘exploit’: the former, a form of activity or labour that acts on the self, on the bodies of human beings and on the bodies of live organisms with which we coexist in order to support and enable human survival; the latter, a form of activity that acts on the inanimate, inert objects around us in order to extract something – wealth, value, use – which is of no immediate necessity for survival. “[T]he distinction between exploit and drudgery” he writes “is an invidious distinction between employments. Those employments which are to be classed as exploit are worthy, honourable, noble; other employments, which do not contain this element of exploit … are unworthy, debasing, ignoble”.

Debasing, ignoble, secluded and unseen: these are some of the ideas that underpin our collective understanding of what work becomes when women do it. In practice the logic is circular: women do unworthy work because they are unworthy; work primarily down by women is unworthy because it is done by women. Under this condition it seems only fitting that the activities or employments of women remain hidden, unspoken of, unaccounted for.

Literally unaccounted for, in fact. In her January lecture at the LSE, “The Reproduction of People by Means of People”, Professor Nancy Folbre described what she sees as an accounting problem in modern economics: the fact that we have no means of accounting for the labour (which in economic language we would class as ‘transfers’ once it had been converted to a money value) performed within families, predominantly by women, in order to support the economic activities of the other family members. Feminist readers will be immediately put in mind of the bill for ten years of domestic service in marriage that Myra presented to her cheating husband upon their divorce in Marylin French’s classic The Women’s Room; but more prosaically we can think of a woman’s taking maternity leave and forgoing her full wage for (say) a year as a transfer of her lost wages to both the child she is taking care of and the husband who is not losing his wages in order to care for the child during the same period. Form an accounting point of view, and in a manner which is congenial to our economics obsessed intellectual landscape, child bearing and child rearing can be conceptualised as straightforward transfers of cash from women to men – but in fact our current economic models do not count them at all. They are, to us as a society, invisible.

To what is this rambling jaunt through history and economics tending? To the fact that the invisibility of women’s work is a key stumbling block even within feminism itself, let alone outside of it. I was moved and concerned today to read this piece about the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, and the fact that it is coming under attack these days. Now, any women’s space that is being threatened with annihilation should be of concern to feminists; we have seen, especially in the wake of the financial crisis and subsequent austerity policies, many women’s services, women’s book shops, libraries, mother’s groups, as well as refuges, rape crisis centres and homeless shelters disappear or seriously curtail their activities due to lack of funding. This is a trend that should be a worry to us all: our continued safety and the flourishing of our movement cannot be relied upon in the absence of physical places in which to congregate and share our knowledge, our skills and our vision.

What struck me especially about Sara St. Martin Lynne’s essay, though, was the detailed, loving way in which she described the decades of hands-on, feet-wet elbow grease that has gone into sustaining the festival:

[MichFest] is a music festival that has repeatedly forgone corporate sponsors and still manages to provide the nutritious meals that are included in the price of a festival ticket for every single woman who attends. This all-inclusive ticket also entitles every woman on the land to community health care, childcare, emotional support, and workshops. ASL interpreters interpret every set of every single stage at Michfest. Every communal space is wheelchair accessible, made so by women who get on their hands and knees in the blazing sun (or pouring rain) and drive nails into the ground through upside down carpets. Great effort is taken to make sure that every woman on that land knows that she is wanted, that she is welcome and that she is precious among us. It continues to be a place that prioritizes the environment and care for the land that the festival is built on. Every single piece of garbage gets picked up by hand. In the months between festivals there is not a trace of festivity left behind. I almost resisted the urge to contrast this to some of the disgusting messes I have seen in the wake of some of our Dyke Marches and Pride Celebrations, but I will not. We take pride in cleaning up after ourselves. Yes, we have a great time in those woods, but oh how this community has worked and continues to do so. (emphasis mine)

Reading this passage put me in mind of the Occupy camp in Bristol in 2011: women in the kitchen, women laying out furniture, women taking notes, women creating a free coffee corner, women printing flyers. Men? From what I saw, lighting fires and posting YouTube videos of their thoughts, mostly. What thoughts would they have had to post if there had not been women there to make sure that the camp, as a physical thing in the world, was able to exist? And for that, women were raped, ridiculed online and to our faces, sexually harassed, ignored, belittled. Occupy was the Manarchists’ movement – and for that reason, it failed. (Parenthetically, one of the flyer-printing women that year was me, trying to get this very message through their thick skulls)

The theory of intersectionality has brought a lot into feminism in terms of how we conceptualise the lives and oppressions of women who are suffering under more than a single axis of domination. Gender interacts with race, sexuality, health and so on in unpredictable ways, creating specific and individual oppressions for the women positioned at their intersections. What has often been lacking from the intersectional conversation, however, is the issue of class. Clearly poor women experience gender oppression differently than well off women – but apart from the occasional nod in the direction of material poverty, I have rarely seen a strong engagement with the topic of economic class in intersectional writing. Partly this is an issue of the Left: class politics is out, identity politics (in the proper, and by no means pejorative, sense of the word) is in, and mentions of class smack of a Marxist universality that fails to take the relational particularities of colonialism, compulsory heterosexuality, physical ability etc. into account. This is in itself not an always unfair criticism; but it does leave a lacuna where a conversation about work ought by right to be being held.

The feminism of the 1970s and thereabouts is often described as overwhelmingly white and ‘Middle Class’ (almost the only time class comes up in intersectional discourse), its concerns the concerns of affluent women disaffected by being kept out of the most lucrative professions and most senior positions in the corporate hierarchy. As Laurie Penny once said, we talk about maternity leave for professional women, but what about the concerns of their cleaners and nannies? This is of course ahistorical: from the match girls to the Dagenham strikers, gender and labour politics have gone hand in hand throughout the 20th century. It is only now, having rhetorically separated them into non-interlocking realms under the atomising influence of neloliberalism, that we can look back at the seeming failure to explicitly link the two together and criticise it as lacking. In fact, the question would not have computed for your typical 60s radical: labour rights and gender rights were obviously interwoven, starting from Marx and Engels themselves, and onwards through the intellectual tradition of the Left.

If labour in general is invisible on the contemporary Left, then the labour of women is many times more so. As Natalia Cecire writes, “neoliberal exploitation succeeds by ramping up and extending the ways that women have typically been exploited under earlier forms of capitalism”; such is the extent of cooptation of women’s work that it might be harder than ever to see it for what it is – even if it is no longer confined to the inner, hidden spaces in of the home or the nunnery. We don’t have a language in which to praise the sore backs of MichFest volunteers or the long and diligent hours of planning, writing, chairing meeting, washing dishes, baking brownies, painting placards, printing flyers that goes in to the reproduction of the physical thing that is feminist activism. And having no language in which to praise them, we disparage them as frivolous, contemptible, disposable.

In fact the labour of women has always been disposable. In part this is inherent to the nature of reproductive labour, which in the end produces nothing more glamorous than the wastes of the body: mothers are the makers of corpses; farmers are the makers of shit. The hours of painstaking craft invested in a patchwork quilt, a meal, a baby, a music festival, do not ennoble any of these things. Women’s effort is not counted towards the value of women’s productions: the work is of no value in itself. Ignoring or at best denigrating women’s ignoble labour is the economic foundation of patriarchy; and in any case it’s not really work, because we do it as a natural, inescapable outcome of our base natures. Women are ‘caring’. We are ‘multitaskers’. We are ‘better at planning’. We are expected to perform the domestic, social, emotional and bodily labour that enables the current society not as an occupation but as an emanation. Like silkworms excrete silk, women excrete labour; therefore all our work is, literally, crap.

In turning a blind eye to the graft that women put in just to keep the world looking (never mind smelling) tomorrow the same as it does today, we are plugging in to a tradition that goes back millennia; so there is nothing progressive about wantonly destroying the labour of decades in closing down MichFest once and for all. Nothing enlightened in dismissing the diligence and tenacity of women working to safeguard other women form poverty or violence. Without a theory and practice of accounting for, appreciating and foregrounding women’s work, no feminism can be either possible or desirable. We need to start building such a theory, even when talking and thinking about the work of women we disagree with.

 

Not a Zero Sum Game: Angry feminist, naive idealist, dogless atheist, person.@Marstrina

Categories: Featured Blog, Women's History
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On Exercising Empathy by @CatEleven

July 11, 2014

(Cross-posted from One Woman’s Thoughts)

I would like to try a little exercise with you. I would like you to try on some shoes. Most of them won’t fit, they’ll be too small but putting aside practicalities for a moment we can metaphorically slip them on for our purposes today.

Ok, so they’re on? Done up? Good. Now I want you to close your eyes and picture a young girl, 14, maybe 15, it’s not all that important-she’s below the age of legal consent, that’s all you need to know. She’s wearing a pair of shorts, a vest, flip flops, she’s a little bit mouthy, did you just hear what she said to her mum? Typical teenager right? Now, see that man over there? To her right? That’s her dad’s mate from work. That’s the man that in about 20 minutes is going to rape her. It’s up to you whether you watch, I’d prefer it if you did, to see the act, put into context, not some words on a page.

Because the act of rape is what she’s about to experience, not a nebulous “assault” or “a situation that got out of hand” or a “sex game gone wrong”. Rape, forced entry, deadly and life changing. I’d like you to watch, but I’m not convinced you’d have the stomach.

Right, moving on, the purpose of this exercise is not to make you feel ill but if it rattles, if you’re feeling uncomfortable maybe it’s starting to get through. Maybe it will open your eyes, to get you to see that these attacks and assaults, these rapes and murders that happen to women every single day are not happening in a bubble. They are not happening to cardboard cut-outs, these are real human, flesh and blood women and girls. And EVERY SINGLE TIME that you hold those women and girls responsible for their attacks you’re saying the following;

• They deserved to be harmed
• The men who attacked were justified
• That men will be believed
• That women will not be believed
• That the traumatised victims are not worth our empathy
• That the traumatised victims do not deserve justice

Every time you caveat a tilted head at a headline with “yes but” you join the scores and scores of onlookers who help create an environment and culture that treats women as second class citizens whose voices are not considered and whose experiences of trauma do not generate empathy but derision and blame.

You cannot ever know what the words “I believe you” mean to a victim of abuse, rape, assault. If you’ve always had your word taken, if you’ve always been listened to no matter what the circumstance then I can understand entirely why that would be the case.

So look, let’s take those shoes off and you’re free to walk on by. But next time, before nodding at the headlines, before agreeing with the reports, before questioning the tragically rare guilty verdicts I want you to think what you might say if you were sat right in front of those women and girls. Could you look them in the eyes and tell them they deserved it? If you were in the room with the attacks happening would you egg on the abuser, would you look away? If you were in the shoes of those women and girls can you think for one second what those headlines would do?

If you contain one ounce of empathy, I urge you to start exercising it.

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Motherhood is not for every woman by @LK_Pennington

June 29, 2014
Cross-posted from: Louise Pennington
Originally published: 22.06.14

Every single time I read this statement, I twitch. Because I do know what the author, in this case Melanie Holmes, means  but it’s inevitably from a place of privilege. I certainly agree with this statement:

Motherhood is not for every woman. And we shouldn’t assume that it is. It is unjust to view females’ lives through the lens of motherhood. Instead, we should view females through a wide‑angle lens.

Not all women want to be mothers, many become mothers by accident and some want to become mothers but are denied that through infertility or life. Not all mothers are “great” (however you want to define that) but most mothers are “good enough” – a statement which is as patronising as it can be true. Most mothers are doing their best whilst living in a culture which devalues and, frequently, hates women.

The problem I have with the “motherhood is not for every woman” rhetoric is encapsulated in Holmes’s concluding sentences:

When we speak about motherhood, let’s be realistic. No one can have it all. Some don’t want it all. And it doesn’t make them selfish, dysfunctional, or “less than.”

The problem is the phrase “have it all” is absolutely limited to  white, well-educated middle class women who are not disabled and nor do their children have disabilities who live in house free from domestic violence in an area where street violence is minimal and the schools and childcare are excellent. Many women living on this planet are working extreme hours living in absolute poverty with no access to education, healthcare or, in many cases, clean water. There is a vast chasm between white, ‘western’ women who have ‘it all’ (however you define that) and the reality of the lives of most women who become or want to become mothers.

It’s much easier to be a mother when you have money, healthcare, and sanitation. It is much easier to mother your children when they do not have profound disabilities in a culture with very little support for your child and basic access to education for your children, whilst guaranteed by law in the UK, rarely exists. It assumes that you have access to every single specialist that your child needs to support them. It ignores women who have disabilities themselves, who are most likely to be living in poverty. It ignores women living in poverty working 3 jobs to pay the rent whilst their child’s father refuses to pay child maintenance. It ignores the women who are experiencing domestic violence and are desperately trying to protect their children from a violent father and a social structure which blames the mother rather than holding the father responsible for his violence. It ignores women living in conflict zones: from gang-ridden areas of major cities to war zones across the world. Being a mother in an area where violence is the norm is incredibly difficult.

We’ve got to ensure that the “motherhood isn’t for everyone” and “motherhood isn’t the most difficult job in the world” rhetoric don’t end up silencing or erasing women for whom motherhood is indeed like being a soldier – esp when you live in a conflict zone from Iraq to any area where gang violence is endemic.

Motherhood would be easy if we didn’t live in a capitalist-patriarchy. It would be easy if male violence weren’t a real threat that all women live with. It would be easy if access to clean water were actually considered a basic human right and not a commodity to be sold. It would be easy if our government actually invested in our children with well-funded schools, libraries, parks, and healthcare instead of spending £3 billion year on nuclear submarines. It would be easy if mothering our children were valued.

The capitalist-patriarchy harms us all but it disproportionately affects Women of Colour, women with disabilities, and women living in poverty. Not all women want to be mothers, not all women can be mothers and not all women should be mothers. But, we need to recognise that mothering is made harder than it should be because of the culture in which we live.

We need to be realistic about the context in which we live.

Categories: Featured Blog, Feminist Mothering
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The importance of women-only spaces by Everyday Victim Blaming

December 14, 2013

This speech is cross-posted with permission from the campaign group Ending Victimisation and Blame [Everyday Victim Blaming]. The speech was given at the opening of a new rape crisis in Lincolnshire.

Good evening. My name is [redacted], co-founder of the training, consultancy and campaigning organisation Ending Victimisation & Blame.

I’m delighted to have been invited to speak at this event, launching a new Rape Crisis service in Lincolnshire. Thanks to Laura and her team for extending the invitation to our organisation.

I founded EVB in May 2013, both as a response to the media coverage of domestic & sexual violence and abuse, and to challenge the associated disbelief of those who disclose such abuse. Regardless of which professional service I have worked within, it had the threads of domestic & sexual violence woven through it. My experience in education, specifically pastoral support, found children and young people living with domestic abuse. My work with families in crisis via children’s services, found women with experiences of sexual violence as both an adult and a child, current domestic abuse and the after effects of all of these. My work with women and children who had experienced domestic abuse, found sexual violence woven through their experiences. In short, I have not been employed within a professional organisation that didn’t come into contact with Domestic & Sexual Violence.

I am also a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. When I disclosed my experience as a child, I was met with disbelief.  The perpetrator was believable. Much more believable than the ‘out of control’ teen I presented as. As a direct result of this, when I was raped as an adult, I didn’t tell anyone for over 17 years. The reason for this was that I didn’t expect to be  believed. I had consumed some alcohol (and incidentally have an overwhelming urge to say ‘But I wasn’t drunk!’), I knew my rapists. I had voluntarily got into the car with them, made choices that I knew would be questioned by the police. I’d grown up in local authority care, I wasn’t a ‘good victim’.  All of those things combined into a cycle of self blame that completely absolved the perpetrators of any responsibility.

At the time of my rape, I didn’t think rape crisis was for women like me. I had become politically active in the late 80’s and early 90’s, and I knew about Women’s Liberation, but in many of the activist groups I joined, women issues were considered marginal.  Almost as if we’d be sorted out after the revolution – which of course meant after the men. In the early 1990’s, I stumbled across ‘Surviving Sexual Violence’ by Professor Liz Kelly & it changed my life. Knowing that there were networks of services set up for women like me helped me to re-evaluate my experience. It didn’t help me to disclose, but it did help me to be kinder to myself and to know that I wasn’t the only one.

I could stand here all evening and talk about the benefits of the Rape Crisis network; instead, I’m going to pick out 2 benefits that I think are crucial, and why they matter.

The first is women only services. We know women make up the majority of those who experience sexual violence. It is important that we have designated services just for women and these services must be run by women. When we are talking about violence perpetrated by men, we should be naming it as such. We should not be derailed by comments such as ‘it happens to men too’. We know this. We also know that sexual violence against men is most often perpetrated by other men and that specialist services for men are important. But not at the expense of women’s.

In January 2013, the Ministry of Justice (MoJ), Office for National Statistics (ONS) and Home Office released its first ever joint Official Statistics bulletin on sexual violence, entitled An Overview of Sexual Offending in England and Wales.

    It reported that:

  • Approximately 85,000 women are raped on average in England and Wales every year

  • Over 400,000 women are sexually assaulted each year

  • 1 in 5 women (aged 16 – 59) has experienced some form of sexual violence since the age of 16.

These women deserve a service that will help them to feel safe.

The ‘Why women only spaces?’ Research published by the Women’s Resource Centre in 2006 tells us that women want women only spaces. If they have been a victim of sexual violence perpetrated by men, they need a safe space to heal. When reading the research, one comment stood out for me: The Latin American Women’s Rights Services stated: ‘We provide this service for women to come here and feel safe… in addition to this, it’s very important for women to see women doing this, and thinking they can do something like that in the future’. So women only space has a multitude of benefits. Helping women to feel safe and recover from sexual violence, and supporting their aspirations. All of the women that I have spoken to when preparing for this speech were positive about women only spaces, and how they should be protected.

The second benefit that stands out for me when looking at the service provided by Lincolnshire Rape Crisis is how this is a Feminist space. Why is this important? Do we need to identify as feminists in order to provision an appropriate service for women who have experienced sexual violence? Do we need feminism at all? The answer to this is a resounding ‘yes’! Feminism is the liberation of women from oppression, and the prevalence of sexual violence shows a clear need for feminism. The position of women in society contributes to the rate of sexual violence. Women being considered objects, lesser value and the property of men, leads to violence against women and girls. If we think of violence against women and girls as the trunk of a tree*, its roots are patriarchy.  Patriarchy upholds other oppressions, such as homophobia, class inequality, disability discrimination and racism.  The ‘branches’ of our Violence Against Women Tree are rape, sexual exploitation, sexual abuse, domestic violence, stalking, trafficking, FGM, so-called honour based violence and gang related violence. We have to be able to name the problem of men’s violence in order to solve it.

Research confirms that men silence women just by their presence. Dale Spender did an experiment to find out just how this happens. She published her results in Man Made Language – which is a very interesting read. This is a summary of what she found:

    Present at the discussion, which was a workshop on sexism and education in London, were thirty-two women and five men. Apart from the fact that the tape revealed that the men talked for over 50 per cent of the time, it also revealed that what the men wanted to talk about – and the way in which they wanted to talk – was given precedence.

    […]

    There is no doubt in my mind that in this context at least (and I do not think it was an atypical one) it was the five males and not the thirty-two females who were defining the parameters of the talk. I suspect that neither the women nor the men were conscious of this. There was no overt hostility displayed towards the females who ‘strayed from the point’, but considerable pressure was applied by the males – and accepted without comment from the females – to confine the discussion to the male definition of the topic.

So what does this say? Men set the agenda. Men often talk over women, sometimes without any awareness that they’ve even done so. Women need space within which to discuss their oppression and manage their activism.  That space does not need to include men. If men wish to talk about feminism and the oppression of women, they do not need to be in women’s spaces in order to do this – men can use the space they have in the rest of the world, and make it more feminist.

In preparation for this speech, I did an unscientific straw poll of some of my women friends, all of whom identify as feminists. I asked them to sum up why we need feminist women only spaces in one or two sentences. These are the responses:

“Because of the sheer volume of women who’ve suffered at the hands of men, in many differing ways.  Women need a safe space to trust.”

“Without a feminist understanding, all we have are myths and excuses for men’s violence – all of which disempower women.”

“Because women need to feel totally safe.  That isn’t possible when men are around.”

“Men’s presence means they will be prioritised. Our shared consciousness is important.”

“Because men talk over us, undermine us, and attack us. We need the women running the services to understand how this is systemic.”

Recent research published by Ruth Lewis & Elizabeth Sharp following the North East Feminist Gathering in 2012 adds gravitas to the unscientific straw poll I’ve completed! Women said that being released from having to defend their feminist politics:

“enabled deep discussions. In this safe space, women explored their potential rather than censoring themselves. Safety fostered confidence to speak, to share, to explore one’s skills and talents as well as to be emotionally expressive.”

Defending ourselves from the everyday sexism experienced by all women takes up space that women should be free to use to free ourselves from oppression. Defending our politics is often exhausting. Understanding the roots of the ‘hairy man hating lesbian’ or ‘angry feminist’ tropes as homophobic and misogynistic gives us the freedom to challenge these concepts outside of feminist women only spaces. We should not need to explain what we do, or don’t do, with our body hair. Nor explain our sexuality. Being angry gets things done – we should be angry. Women make up almost 52% of the worlds population, and yet own less than 1% of the worlds property. In the UK, less that 16% of high court judges are women. This should make us all angry, not just those of us who identify as feminist. When a billion of us on the planet are exposed to men’s violence; when the atrocity of rape affects so many of us; when our internal risk assessments become completely normalised – we are right to be angry.

So how does EVB link with Rape Crisis? One of the most significant things we have in common with those services within the Rape Crisis network is that we believe women. When they disclose their experiences of sexual violence, we do not question what they did to ‘provoke’ the abuse. We do not suggest that they should have behaved differently in order to avoid abuse. We do not hold them responsible for the choices men make. And we use that word ‘choices’ deliberately. We do not believe that men are hardwired to be abusive. We know that they make a calculated choice to behave in that way; and that not all of them do so. Questioning a woman’s choices, what she was wearing, why she consumed alcohol, asking why she doesn’t leave, telling women how to avoid abuse, making women responsible for men’s choices – all of these contribute to the expectation that if women changed their behaviour, men would not abuse them.

In the few short months that we have been set up, many women have told us that we are the first people they have disclosed their experiences to. Our supporters said :

“Since finding your site, I can’t tell you how much it has changed my life. I finally felt safe enough to disclose all of the sexual violence I had experienced to my Rape Crisis counsellor. You told me that she’d believe me, and she did. Without your service, I might have taken that information to my grave”

“Thank you. Thank you for all that you do. When I found your site, I didn’t think my experiences were bad enough to be considered sexual violence. I decided to look at the support services you list on your site, and call my local Rape Crisis anyway. They helped me to see that there isn’t such a thing as ‘bad enough’, as we all have different experiences. I couldn’t have done this without you, knowing that you are there for all of us, regardless of how ‘bad’ our experience is considered to be.”

Comments such as these give us hope that we can challenge the institutional disbelief that affects so many survivors. Together, we can support women and say “we believe you and know it wasn’t your fault”.

(*Thanks to Imkaan for the Violence Against Women & Girls tree analogy)

Ending Victimisation and Blame [Everyday Victim Blaming]: This campaign is about changing the culture and language around violence against women and children.  We aim to challenge the view that men cannot help being violent and abusive towards women and children.  We want to challenge the view that women should attempt to ‘avoid’ abuse in order to not become a victim of it.  We challenge media reports of cases of violence against women and children where there is an almost wilful avoidance of the actual reasons for these acts.  Power, control, women and children being considered ‘possessions’ of men, and avoidance of personal responsibility all contribute to a societal structure that colludes with abusers and facilitates a safe space in which they can operate. This is what we are campaigning to change.

You can find more about Ending Victimisation and Blame‘s campaign on their website, Twitter, and Facebook.

 

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