Mind the Gap

Next month’s discussion night is on pornography. When we talked about this, way back in the summer, the group decided they wanted to view some pornographic material and then discuss it together. They didn’t want to frame the discussion with any particular feminist perspective on pornography, they just wanted to watch some and then talk about it. Having set up the discussion nights to serve the feminist needs of our members, we readily agreed. Only recently did we realize that this event posed a few problems.

Problem: What pornography?

In the first instance, to what kind of pornography do we refer? After all, the world of porn is no more monolithic than any other form of cultural expression and there are many subcultures within the genre. What do we want to look at? Just hetero porn? If so, do we want low brow, cheap stuff or something flashy with Jenna Jameson in it? Do we want old or up-to-date, European or US? Do we risk watching something extremely disturbing? Do we want to consider BDSM porn? And, do we want to compare it with homo or lesbian porn? If so, we have the same set of problems. What kind of homo or lesbian porn exactly?

In the end, we decided to start with cheapish hetero porn of the kind probably viewed by young men and teenage boys. This, we think, is probably what most people watch. Then we decided to compare it with some middle-class “It’s not porn it’s art” type film, such as Emmanuelle or 9 1/2 weeks.

Lesbian and gay porn, we decided, is a separate issue and raises a different range of questions, so we’ll put that can of worms to one side for now. We will return to it later, however.

Problem: Anyone got any old porn?

Surprisingly, we soon discovered that feminists do not have large supplies of cheap hetero porn in their houses to bring to discussion nights (this doesn’t mean we have no erotic material), which opened the next problem of acquiring some. How do we lay our hands on some porn? While R and myself going in quest of porn in Cardiff sex shops would undoubtedly result in hilarious adventures to recount here, I wasn’t sure it was a good idea and, knowing our luck, we would surely run into people we knew and never be able to look them in the eye again (”Oh hello, we’re just getting pornography for our feminist discussion night… Of course, you just stumbled in here by accident, it happens all the time … Yes, it is a very clean shop isn’t it… Well, see you at the seminar next week”). Also, a quick scan on the web alerted me to the rather high price of porn DVD’s. In the end, I found an oldish film on DVD for £4.99. The title will be revealed when we write up the actual event (No it’s NOT Deep Throat). My friend who works at the library has offered to get us some middle-class erotica stuff, so I think we’re finally sorted.

Problem: Where can we hold the event?

We usually meet at the Quaker Meeting house in Cardiff. Do you think we can we view pornography there? No, it’s not really appropriate is it? So, we’re going to have to hold the discussion in someone’s house and, because it’s a woman-only event for obvious reasons, we’re going to have to eject the men in our lives (yes, some of us do have men in our lives) sharing the property, for the duration of the event: “Can you go out please because we’re having a group of feminists over to watch pornography? That’s great, thank you.”

Problem

Now people searching for porn on google will get this website listed on their results. Sorry to disappoint you but you have reached a feminist blog. Nothing to see here chaps … move along please.

I know I’m a little late with this post and we’re in the UK, but I wanted to contribute something to the discussion.

Having been raised a catholic I was active in the pro-life movement from the ages of 12 to 16. I went to a catholic school where such activities were strongly encouraged. I didn’t question it. I went to LIFE and SPUC events and took part in sponsored walks to raise money for these organisations. I always took the pro-life side in classroom debates. I wrote some of my GCSE coursework on pro-life thinking. I didn’t actually protest outside abortion clinics, but I might have done, given half the chance. We were told that life began at conception, that all life is sacred and so abortion is murder: period. No grey areas were admitted. It was an utterly ruthless morality. Every few months a man from SPUC came to the school to give us a talk on the subject. He brought slides to show us of late term abortions, usually from the 1970s: red and raw looking foetuses in buckets of blood, little half-developed arms and legs. We were not given a choice as to whether or not we viewed these images because choice was never a part of the picture. And I swallowed it all.

Then, when I was 16, this man came to the school and told us about a day he spent campaigning in a town, with the pictures of foetuses of course, and a woman came up to the stall. She looked at the pictures and began to cry. She told him that she’d had an abortion years ago and had never known what the foetus would have looked like. The man was smiling, triumphant - one up for the pro-life movement. Something went cold within me at that moment, because I realised that he didn’t care about that woman or her feelings or the reasons that drove her to make her difficult decision all those years ago, or the effect his pictures may have had on her life. He only cared about proving that abortion is bad. Then he moved on to his heroic rape victim story. While I never actually heard a pro lifer say that raped women should be forced to have the baby, they would change the subject when questioned and tell us the story of a woman who did and it all turned out well in the end. I was 16, pretty much a woman as far as I was concerned and, suddenly, I thought to myself, “Would I have the baby if I got pregnant from being raped?” and the answer came back a shockingly determined, angry “No.” Perhaps it was at this moment that I began to realise the implications of being a woman and imagined what it would actually be like to have pregnancy forced upon me. I remember it as a moment when I grew up a bit and, over the next few years, I slowly revised my thinking on abortion until I came to my current position.

When the feminist revolution is done, when every girl is raised to have high self- esteem and empowered by society to say “No,” when all young people receive proper sex education, when everyone has access to free and safe contraception, when men take equal responsibility for preventing pregnancy with women, when there is no stigma attached to single motherhood, when every woman who does get pregnant unexpectedly has a real choice because having the baby will not cause her to lose her degree or job or house or ruin her life in any other way because women are always fully supported when they have unplanned children, when no woman is ever raped, on that day perhaps we will be pleased to find that the need for abortion is limited. Until that day, access to safe, legal abortion for all women is essential and must be defended because history has already shown us that a world with enforced childbirth does not represent a “culture of life.”

New poster created to advertise our monthly discussion nights.

The intention is to be slightly provocative.

By Siberian Falls  

It has been a while since I have thought about why I become a feminist. I’m not sure that I ever really ‘became a feminist’. It was more like I was able to put a name to what I had felt for a long time.

One of my earliest memories is from when I was six or seven and I was in infant school. During playtime the boys played football and so the girls were kept on the periphery of the playground and we were told off if we strayed. Of couse I thought this was horribly unjust and led a group of my friends across the middle of the playground ‘because it’s not fair!!’ I got a football kicked at me for my trouble and ended up breaking one of my milk teeth and losing what I thought was a frightening amount of blood from my mouth. When I got back from the hospital I was told that had lunchtime detention the next day. In many ways I feel my feminism peaked as a six year old. That was before I even knew what feminism meant!

The first feminist book I read was ‘the Whole Woman’ by Germaine Greer. This was the book I gave to Naiades when we had our first conversations about feminism. ‘The Whole Woman’ hooked me by the end of the introduction and I suppose the rest is history. It was when I got to university that I was able to meet up with other likeminded people and make some of my closest friends like Naiades and Winter.

At the moment I feel like other areas of my life have taken so much of my time that I have neglected feminism more than I would have liked. I am also more unsure now about my feelings for different types of feminism and how I think feminism should achieve its goals. Perhaps as you get older the problems and solutions seem less as less straight forward. But this is no reason to give up! Naiades post has inspired me to think about feminism more and so now it is my turn to thank her!

Siberian

I’ve been ruminating on this post for a while so apologies for my recent drought in posts, although the lovely winter woods has more than amply held the fort on that respect. I wanted to write something on what being a feminist means to me personally and so I’ve spent some time over Christmas and New Year trying to gather up my thoughts on what can be, at times, a fairly non-descript feeling. Sometimes I find being a feminist can be fairly depressing as more and more young girls hold glamour models up as serious role models and the reproductive rights and freedoms of our friends in America comes under threat. I know that poverty, inequality, violence against women and men, and oppression means there is a desperate need for feminism and these play no small part in my calling my self a feminist. The wonderful Gender Geeks (I spelled in right this time!!) had this fabulous post just before Christmas and for me this was a great summation of many of the reasons why everyone should be a feminist. But in this post I wanted to get at what does being a feminist mean to me. So here goes.

I’ve been a feminist for three years now and came to feminism under the careful guidance of Siberian Falls (Thank you). Becoming a feminist has given me a lot of confidence, but it has also opened my eyes to the world around me and how depressing the state of affairs can be. I fell that once you have fem-vision, you can’t switch it off , you se inequality and sexist messages for what they are and you can no longer just laugh it off when people check out your breasts before listening to what you have to say. As someone who studies the psychology of persuasion and attitude change, I’ve begun to see these messages everywhere, and I find them difficult to ignore, how sneaky they sometimes are, how underhand and hidden some of the adverts can be. This may sound that my experience of feminism is a negative one, but that is not at all true. Feminism has given me confidence in my self and that’s just for starters.

Feminism means many things to many people but the most important aspect for me is that it requires that you take responsibility for your own actions and decisions, and to recognise when the situation requires you to stand up for your self. This may seem paradoxical to some of the commentators we have had on this blog, and who comment on feminist blogs in general, who quite often imply that feminists blame men for their problems. I think feminism teaches you to do just the opposite. While feminism exposes injustice and oppression it also motivates you to actually do something about those injustices. Feminism is about being an active member of society and acting to improve that society. It’s not about a bunch of women sitting around drinking tea and whinging (well not all the time), it’s bring, vibrant women getting out there and changing the world so that it is more inclusive for everyone (yes, men too). Feminism can change passive consumers of life into active participants who think about their choices and take responsibility for them, even the bad ones. For me feminism is about women having confidence, about behaving confidently as a woman, not by taking on the stereotyped behaviours of men. When women get involved with business, with politics, with practically anything they bring to these areas new ideas and new strategies to solve problems and generally improve things. Feminism is about those ideas and strategies being respected for the good ideas that they are, and about the women who have them being respected for the intelligent, creative beings that they are, not just written off because they have different anatomy.

So, that’s a small taste about what feminism means to me, I’m sure I will continue this theme in the future. Now I’d really like to know what does feminism mean to you?

You may have noticed that I’m interested in anti-feminist rhetoric; if you are too, go check out this post from Heo Cwaeth.

via Ancrene Wiseass.

The Mind the Gap blog is now just over 7 months old, and the actual feminist group it represents is about 15 months old. If I remember correctly, it was August 2004 when L (Siberian Fall), for it was she, convinced R and myself to resurrect the old Cardiff university women’s group with a more openly feminist agenda. Since then, we’ve come a long way in a relatively short space of time.

We spent much of that first year almost getting killed by Cardiff Students’ Union bureaucracy, but we did make some good contacts and we started this blog - one morning in June on a bit of a whim I might add. It turned out to be one of the best whims we’ve had. Taking part in the feminist blogging community has inspired and encouraged us to carry on in difficult times and we’ve made some truly wonderful friends. Here’s our first post, complete with R’s first encounter with a couple of commentators. Here’s my first post and R’s first post. Eventually, after the dropping of a few hints, L got in on the act with this lovely debut. One of the things I like about our blog is the fact that the 3 of us have very different interests and takes on feminism. In 2006 I hope you will begin to hear some of the other voices on our contributors’ list and perhaps even from the rest of the group.

On leaving the Students’ union in September 2005 we rather feared that Mind the Gap would die, but re-inventing ourselves as a community group actually proved to be the turning point. We now have several active core members and others who come regulary to events and discussion nights. We realised that our identity as a student group was putting people off and this year we need to consolidate and expand membership further.

We have found that some people are more interested in the intellectual side of feminism and others want to get on with grassroots campaigning, so we have tried to cover and link both areas together. The monthly discussion nights have proved a success. So far we have begun to explore global feminism, the representation of female sexuality in advertising, rape and eco feminism. The topics might seem a little random, but they are decided by the members in a rather ad hoc fashion in response to their interests. The discussions are very useful and form part of an ongoing process of self-education for us as feminists. They push us to do that reading we otherwise just keep putting off in our busy lives. We still have notes to write up on some of the talks which we’ll post here in time.

This autumn we finally kicked off a campaign around the issue of violence against women. Our petition is still running and we plan to present it to the Welsh Assembly government. More about that soon. I was also very pleased with our poster campaign, although we did run into some problems with getting them up because most of the group were not happy about putting them up illegally. It is amazing how few places there are to put posters legally, especially challenging posters of battered women . I put some up in my department and they were pulled down within a couple of days much to my annoyance.

However, in my opinion, one of our most important achievements has been the fostering of feminist friendships. Every time someone says to me “I’ve been looking for a feminist group for ages!” I feel we’re doing something worthwhile, providing relief from the isolation many younger feminists seem to feel these days.

In 2006 we’re going to continue the discussion nights with pornography, eating disorders, post feminism and socialist feminism penciled in for the next 4 months. I intend to learn a lot. I am also determined to get the long delayed body image zine done soon. One of our biggest problems now is the website; we need to create one asap, but we lack someone with the appropriate website making abilities at the moment. This spring we’re going to run a campaign to reclaim and promote feminism - a kick it to the backlash kind of campaign. It’s going to be fun. Yes, I said fun. We want it to be playful and humorous as well as challenging. Speaking of challenging and fun, one of our members wants to start a feminist band. We lack a bassist and a drummer, but so far possible names include “The She-Ras” and “Feministique.” It has been suggested to me recently that perhaps we should build some bridges and get in touch with the new Cardiff university women’s officer. Perhaps I will drop her a line. It would also be nice to expand our male membership a bit. We have one man officially in the group and one honoury member who’s been adopted, whether he likes it or not, and who’s support has been very important to us. Thank you K!

We also intend to support the development of Subtext feminist magazine and how about a group trip to the Reclaim the Night march in London next Autumn?

That’s probably enough to keep us busy for now, so here’s to feminist activism in 2006 in Cardiff and around the world.