Mind the Gap

The second podcast in the series of interviews with refugees and asylum seeking women is now online on our website.

In this podcast we hear from Yeukai, a young woman from Zimbabwe , innocent of any crime but locked up indefinitely with male ex-offenders and subjected to sexist taunts – not back home but shockingly here in the UK . ‘Everyone felt like prisoners and yet they were innocent people… I was innocent. I never committed any crime.’ she says.

Please visit our website to find out how to download this podcast featuring this moving and powerful account of Yeukai’s truly awful experience while being held in detention in the UK .

Listen to the Podcast here

Having read Abby O’Reilly’s Comment Is Free piece on marriage and surnames today, I’d like to make a couple of comments on the piece. I don’t want to add to the huge stream of fairly horrific comments she has already attracted – some of them can be put down to internet idiocy, but holy Christ! Some of those are pretty scary. I find it particularly interesting how often “oppressed” is taken as an insult – which is pretty convenient, really, and makes perfect sense in a world where everyone has absolute freedom of choice and there are consequently no inequalities. Maybe there were 100 years ago, or even in the 70s, but now? Hell no, we’re living in some kind of libertarian utopian paradise. If only everyone would just feel as liberated as they genuinely are! And anyone who questions this must have an incredibly warped mind, or be really unhappy, or else her vagina has had a very low penis population lately. This is probably quite similar to what reactions would have been 100 years ago, and is certainly reminiscent of the reactions a lot of feminist writers got in the 70s.

Besides, people, just because you have a choice between chopping off your head with a big fucking axe or diving head first into an elevator shaft, this does not mean you have freedom of choice. Whatever the fuck “freedom of choice” might mean. I’m inclined to think it’s just one of those bits of jabberwockie we use to feel better about our lives and general ideological position.

There are still a couple of things in Abby’s article that I disagree with. Although I found Cheryl Cole and Sarah Michelle Prinze’s gestures both pretty horrifying, taken on their own, I definitely disagree with two of the assumptions made here.

The first is that both gestures were made as a gesture of love to the women’s husbands. Call me cynical, but I would very much doubt that many celebrity matches were made out of “love” in the first place, rather than branding. So, as one commenter suggested, the decisions are merely rebranding. Although, of course, that doesn’t change what the gesture is supposed to mean, and Abby’s points still stand as far as that’s concerned. Also, I don’t get the impression she really believes these things were unequivocally done out of love. But perhaps the branding aspect should have been taken into account: these weren’t private gestures, they were meant for the general public to see.

The main point I take issue with, though, is the idea that these women are hugely successful, and that they are strong, independent women with successful careers, which of course they’re not. They might have a higher profile than their husbands, but this is largely to do with the fact that their job description is to be physically recognisable and looked at, and generally quite similar to a kind of prostitution to the general public. They’re basically mascots for the entertainment companies they work for. Just because Sarah Michelle Prinze played the part of an independent, butt-kicking woman doesn’t mean she ever was one herself, or that her behaviour should be judged on the basis of standards set by the fictional character she portrayed.

These two things kind of undermine the excellent points Abby makes, namely, stuff like

“Nothing says I love you like supplanting your identity with that of your spouse, apparently.”

Interesting, because what seems to have offended the commenters so much is the fact that their identity as educated liberals with complete freedom of choice was being called into question. Or

“Once a woman has a ring on her finger she is no longer an individual, but a wife. Her existence is defined by her husband. This is an archaic concept, but one that still stalks us like a dark spectre.”

The fact that couples officially have a choice in the matter nowadays doesn’t change much to the fact that this “dark spectre” still exists. It doesn’t go away just because it’s less enshrined in law. We still believe in sacrificing our identity in the name of romantic love, even if it doesn’t necessarily involve getting officially married. There are a number of places you could find obvious signs of creepy shit in relationships that’s just completely accepted, whether it’s the faintly menacing or submissive overtones in pop lyrics (depending on whether they’re sung by a man or a woman), or basically all over the media. I mean, on the one hand, you have Beyonce asking to “cater 2″ the man in her life, and of course the Spice Girls’ “2 become 1″, and on the other hand we have Bobby Valentino inviting a lady to get to know him better, presumably over a couple of jars of Rohypnol, in the following terms “Hey girl, I don’t really want to hurt you / I only want to get to know you”. Or something. It’s not scanning so I’ve probably left out a couple syllables. The point being, it’s almost word for word what every street casanova says to try and seduce random ladies in the streets. Why “I don’t really want to hurt you”? Did that ever come into the equation in relationships? Obviously, it did, and it must be quite fundamental or it couldn’t be out in the open like that and not make people angry.

In short, I don’t really see why the disappointment over Cheryl Cole and Sarah Michelle Prinze’s decisions, as they were probably just doing their jobs, but I definitely agree that the change of name in marriage is a sign of that “dark spectre” mentioned above. As to whether women should change their name, it probably depends what’s convenient to them to be honest. But in the case of celebrities, it’s definitely important to note, because it’s done very publically, and not for the same reasons as the various commenters’ relatives who did it and are “perfectly fine and not oppressed thank you very much”.

Still, maybe the general hostility to these kinds of ideas explains the fact that, elsewhere in the Guardian, Zoe Williams has taken a break from writing about how quirky and unusual it is to be a middle-class mum to write an article about whether wearing slimming underwear (corsets, basically), and silhouette-enhancing jeans, is feminist. Upon being asked, all her jeans could say was that they were “for real women with real curves” (kill ‘em, Centurion!). Although Ms Williams has made a good point, namely that just because something makes women feel good about themselves, that doesn’t make it feminist, although she does go into some quite apologetic twists and turns trying to explain why. Quite telling, really, that asking your corsets whether they’re feminists still ends up being more fruitful than asking celebrities. Which tells us a lot about how strong and independent these celebrities really are, and how shocked and horrified we should really be when they don’t have much to say about their feminist credentials.

Since it’s the international day to end violence against women, I thought I’d remain on topic and have a go at answering this question posed by Julie Bindel in the Guardian’s Comment Is Free section (via The F-Word). Even though it’s kind of crap to end up blogging about it rather than doing something, but to be honest I think the fact that we didn’t manage to agree on what to do, and that there isn’t any nationwide coordinated action on this aside from Reclaim the Night, kind of shows it might be a good idea to use these 16 days to have a good think about the issues surrounding sexual violence. So here’s the quote:

“Before you start having a go, telling me you have not been raped, or beaten by your partner, or sexually abused, or flashed, let me ask you (women) something. Can you honestly say, hand on heart, that you have never feared rape? Have you never modified your behaviour, even just a little, for fear of being attacked? Remember that time you took a minicab home, alone and drunk? Did you feel relieved the next day that nothing bad happened to you? Or when you walked through a park late at night alone? All women know that if we have not been raped, we are lucky. We are so accustomed to living with the constant, nagging fear of sexual violence that we rarely notice it is there half the time.”

It’s an interesting question, because most of us do go round with that fear of being attacked by strangers, or of going down dark alleys, or getting into a car with the wrong person. Sometimes it can be founded. I remember an incident when some guy in Strasbourg tried to get me to go into some bushes because he had “something to show me”. I don’t need to tell you that I was very apprehensive about having to walk past the same place on the way home again - although why I should have been afraid of him says a lot too. After all, he was shorter than me and kind of thin and flabby, so I wouldn’t have been in much danger if he had tried to force me to go into the bushes.

If somehow he’d succeeded, I think certainly being raped would have been unpleasant to say the least, but my main fear would have been being stabbed, as I know this happened to other women in that area. And I think it’s a similar situation in most cases for me. I’d be afraid of being attacked because I’m a woman and the attacker would quite like to rape me, but my main concern would be walking away alive and preferably unharmed.

So I think a good question to ask is: what is there to be afraid of? What makes rape seem so much more horrific to us than being stabbed or beaten up? Why is it the main thing we focus on when discussing violence against women, even though there are beatings, seclusions, and murders? Obviously, there’s something nasty about it. Having been on the receiving end of a fair number of indecent proposals (”come to the nearest toilet and I’ll fuck your brains out”, for instance, or persistent offers to deflower me in the back of a car), one count of some guy putting his hand under my skirt in an alley, and one attempt to “buy” my services for a fiver which was frankly baffling, it does make you feel completely horrible in a different way to anything else I’ve experienced, I can’t say worse for sure, but certainly grubbier. In the case of the alley incident, I never wore the clothes I was wearing that day again. I don’t even remember how I got away, I just recall noticing what was happening and then finding myself at the other end of the street, legging it back to school, with my attacker calling after me like a jilted lover. The striking thing was, though, that I felt completely disgusting, but didn’t remember much about the perpetrators at all. Similarly with the indecent proposals, it felt like being reduced to a vast pair of thighs with a hole between them. Even though the incidents in themselves were completely harmless, I have to come to the conclusion that it was the implied “you’re a filthy little slut and you like it!” that was so nasty. I also have to wonder, given how it altered how I felt about myself and how little I remember about my attackers, if there isn’t an undercurrent of women feeling that way about themselves anyway, that’s constantly drummed into us by our upbringing and the media.

There’s definitely an undercurrent of it in society. Etymologically, “rape” is something you do to a piece of land, to devalue it and render it barren. So the act of “rape” is to devalue a woman, and render her useless, maybe not barren literally, but certainly impure and incapable of producing good honest kids. It’s easy to see what would make it terrifying to our ancestors, because they would have been essentially dispossessed by it. It’s less easy to see what makes it so terrifying to us, because we’re not supposed to be thinking in those terms anymore. And in purely technical terms, having a cock in one’s vagina isn’t exactly the scariest thing that can happen to a woman, although an unwanted one is certainly unpleasant. Yet that narrative is still present today. For instance, when The Sun ran their own “stop rape” campaign, it was very much phrased in terms of swarthy, hairy beast-men leaping out of the shadows plundering Britain’s natural ressources, and how these women should be restored to their rightful owners, nice decent boyfriends or husbands. The onus also often seems to be on women to solve the problem: by not partying like you’re David Yow and it’s 1991 (i.e. getting mad sozzled and taking your clothes off and gargling with a microphone halfway down your throat), carrying your own rape-me-not map of the city so you can avoid high-rape areas when walking home alone at night, preferably not walking home alone at all and having your own retinue of chivalrous knights, carrying some tear-gas in your handbag, maybe taking some self-defence classes so you know where to kick any guys who dare make an attempt on your purity. And even after the fact, women’s need for help isn’t taken all that seriously, they’re supposed to sort themselves out psychologically, depending on how deserving they are. There’s also the issue of whether the woman consented, or an idea that some of us like it. Like, if someone spat in your face, you’d have no trouble proving you didn’t particularly enjoy it, but if someone jizzed all over your face - which is much worse - there would actually be a doubt.

There’s even an issue as to how justified these fears are. After all, statistically, we’re more likely to be attacked by spouses or boyfriends, and our idea of personal relationships still puts us in a lot more danger than just going down to the shops after dark. I can remember gallivanting about the woods constantly until about the age of 17 or 18, and the main thing I feared, honestly, wasn’t rapists, it was getting shot by hunters. But it only took a couple of talks about men in bushes to make me afraid to go in the forest alone. It’s a fear that’s been used to keep women in line for centuries, and there is a lot of stuff that would be incredibly liberating or just plain fun, that women just can’t do because of that fear. David Yow and Iggy Pop always come to mind actually - I always look at them and think I’ll never be able to experience that kind of total abandon.

I’m not saying anything new here. But I hope I’m saying it in a way that raises a few questions that might help us think about how we go about “stopping rape”. To be honest, I don’t think we’ll ever directly “stop rape”, short of the tactics mentioned by Ms Bindel in her article on Friday. But, with apologies to someone who’s achieved more activism than I ever have (and I think she’s right about the fact that you can’t be an armchair feminist), I think there’s something a little impotent about spray-painting threats of castration all over Yorkshire, or pouring cement down the toilets of porn theatres, although it must be cathartic to be doing something about it. I think more will be achieved by addressing the causes of violence against women, and by asking ourselves questions about how we react to it, and by making the subject a lot less taboo and emotionally fraught, and especially by trying not to carry those taboos and prejudices across into our activism, for instance by focusing on what the man gets out of it (sex), or by thinking of the woman as a piece of property and not a human being.

Today is the International Day to Eliminate Violence Against Women and beginning of the 16 days of activism.

Sadly, we didn’t manage to hold an event this year, but we should be getting some pamphlets out during the next 16 days.

This is the basic outline of what we are going to be talking about at the next meeting on feminist activism.

What is feminist activism?

What is the relationship between feminist friendships and activism?

What can we learn about activism from older feminists?

Difference between group activism and individual activism?

How do we radicalise ourselves and others into activism?

What is the place of activism within feminism?

What does the group need to get more involved in activism

Please come if you possibly can: 7.30pm Wednesday 28th November.

Email us for venue details.
 

It’s this Saturday 24 November 2007.  Assemble in Trafalgar Square at 6pm.

The march is for women only, but will be followed by a mixed rally for men and women in the University of London Union with speakers, music and bands until late. More here

I apologise for yet another rant about the Guardian’s “sidelines” column, but I promise this is only the beginning. To be honest, I’d be wasting my time if I took a pop at every single item in “sidelines” that rubbed me up the wrong way. It would be like taking the weekly playlist and going “what??! Simply Red two spaces ahead of Fela Kuti??”. Pointless. Still, this time it’s for a reason. First of all I’m going to ask about the second item in today’s column, on the research about blondes making men dumber. Is it really necessary to react to every piece of crappy research that no one but feminists seems to care about? And does it have to be always the same reaction? If it’s good news, we wave some pompoms about and do a little “yay feminists!” Spice Girls dance routine, and if it’s bad news, well, first there’s the high-achieving power-woman counterexamples that are taken from such rarefied planes as to not be too relevant anyway. Hillary Clinton? Some baroness? Why not Empress Sissi while you’re at it? Then there’s the offended “hey, some of ‘us girls’ belong to that demographic I’ll have you know, perhaps you dare to suggest I’m stupid!”. Oh no, that would be a crime. Then there’s the sassy comeback speculating on whether some men related to the research might have had their cranial cavity filled with dirty socks at some point. I’m not stupid, you are! Yeah, way to go feminism, that’ll scare them almost as much as having Posh Spice pointing at them while making an “O” shape with her mouth. And anyway, there are a number of reasons why men might talk down to blondes, none of which have anything to do with either party being stupider than the other. This kind of kneejerk reaction isn’t helpful to anyone.

Then, in the next paragraph, there’s this:

“We have also commissioned one of four runners up, Wendy Roby, to write a piece she suggested about random acts of feminism. These are small, simple acts that allow us all to inject feminism into our daily lives, like turning over the lads mags in a newsagent so that the covers face the wall.”

Er, yeah, quite, that’ll also show ‘em (but what, exactly? That a feminist walked past and was offended?), and solve many problems, not least the problem of acting against lads’ mags. For a start, the places most likely to worry about being “family establishments” and not risk losing too much of a market by moving the lads’ mags and other explicit material to the top shelves are going to be large chains like WHSmiths – even though their current display resembles a battleship armed with silicone missiles - whereas small newsagents are more likely to suffer from losing out on their pornography and lads’ mag sales. And who does the most harm in the long run? A large chain which can afford to have dodgy labour practices and still retain its deathgrip on the high street, or a small, friendly family-run newsagent? In terms of “hear me roar” feminist activism, this is more reminiscent of the Marge Simpson grumble, which kind of makes sense, because if you really were making a noise you wouldn’t need to inform anyone.

Considering this is the way feminism is being represented nationally in the mainstream media, I think it’s very important to review the way we look at activism at the moment, and particularly the way we communicate.

It might seem redundant to have print media when we have the internet. But believe me it’s not. For a start, no internet media is truly DIY, you have to rely on services provided by Google or Myspace (owned by Rupert Murdoch) or some other large company.

Exclusively using the internet for activism is also harmful to feminist activism in other ways. I’ve thought this for a long time, but several things recently have kind of confirmed it. We all know how easy it is to blog. You see something you don’t like, or you have a brainwave, and you start furiously typing away and hit post, and then someone in Akron, Ohio comes and points out to you that you have an incorrect attitude to breast size and should really get it sorted. And there you go.

However, producing the same content in zine or newsletter form is a much more difficult exercise: you need several people to provide content, agree on how big or small the zine or newsletter should be, set it out, print out copies, and of course distribute them, which is a whole other headache. That’s a lot more work, so why not just use the internet? Well, for quite a lot of reasons, the main one being that all that hard work forces you to work together, which is obviously a very important part of feminist activism, or any activism I should think. After all, one of the most liberating things for women a few decades ago was being able to go to work, partly because they could be financially independent, but mostly because it gave them a professional life, some independence, and made them less disenfranchised. They were taking part in world events, in a small way. They counted for something. Hard work for its own sake is just as political as the actual finished product. After all, women working together isn’t something that’s widely acknowledged: in the mainstream media, you read a lot about individual women facing problems within their family unit, but nothing about volunteers working together for charities for instance, or even the kind of solidarity you get in the workplace, which I’ve noticed between often quite right-wing women who would never call themselves feminists, in fact a lot of feminists could have learned from them.

And of course, if you use the internet for activism, you take that away. For a start, you’re not producing an actual physical object that you’re going to be handing to someone, so there’s less quality control. You also end up blowing off all the energy you could be using to good effect. Then there’s the issues around wanting the whole internet to know how cool you are. But worst of all, everyone’s isolated in their own bedroom, sitting on their bums like I am now, and it just turns into one huge “bitch ‘n can’t be arsed to stitch” event where nothing really matters, because it’s all part of one huge baying mass of opinion. It’s easy to feel like you’re doing something, but nothing you do ends up really mattering, not least because your audience is going to be other people sitting at their computers, with internet access and time to waste, which really reduces the demographic quite a lot.

A good example is how easy it is to organise a blogathon, as opposed to an actual demo. There are always calls to “blog against sexual violence” or “blog against racism”, and people join in and type away. But when you try to organise a demonstration, it’s much harder to organise it effectively or to get people motivated to join in. I really think this shows how important it is to put, oh, about 95% of the energy we put into blogging into producing print media of various kinds, not as an alternative to mainstream media, but because it would be hard work, and would get us out and about meeting and networking with other feminists. I think the lack of this kind of thing at the moment is what is causing us to passively accept being misrepresented and used by the mainstream media: we’re taking their voice into account, and not speaking for ourselves enough.

(Image is the cover of the brilliant Ulysses Speaks zine, created by Washington D.C. punks Nation of Ulysses. You can read it here)

The 48th Carnival of Feminists is up at Feminist Fire.

Well done to Debs for putting it all together.

By now you’re probably sick of seeing feminists compared to born-again Christians all the time, something I’ve largely tried to steer clear of up until now. After all, neither of those groups like each other very much, so it could turn into one of those spurious deductions along the lines of “Christians have noses! Feminists have noses! Therefore feminists are Christians!”. Still, I think it’s relevant to compare the two, precisely because they’re so diametrically opposed, which probably means they have things in common, so I’m going to carry on that comparison for a bit, as having spent some time a few years ago hanging out with Evangelists, I’m seeing quite a few things in common.

Usually it’s the radical feminists you see compared to Christians. I’m actually seeing more similarities with more liberal feminism, as mostly seen in the mainstream media, though I don’t want to single out any kind of feminism for abuse. If anything, there is a new trend appearing which for the purposes of this post I’ll call “evangelical feminism”, although I’d be grateful if anyone reading didn’t perpetuate the term, because I don’t want to be the originator of some dipshit piece of terminology originating on a website, thanks.

This kind of feminism is incredibly keen to appear cool and appealing to attract new people, so it actively encourages women to be feminine so as not to scare people away, and doesn’t want lesbians on the poster, in a similar way to the way Evangelists use comics, fashionably-dressed teenagers, and general happy-clappy stuff to deny the image of the old stuffy religious person. Note, before you leap down my throat and assert your right to wear lipstick (I wear the stuff too), that by “being feminine” I don’t mean wearing make-up and skirts and things, I mean believing in the idea of a feminine essence which is essential to women and unnatural for women to deny it in themselves. Of course, that kind of femininity is incompatible with feminism by definition, because feminism means that you believe in a socially-constructed “feminine” that causes discrimination against women. So this goes to show exactly how much you can distort a set of ideas just by being overly keen to promote it.

So far so many people with noses, but that’s not the only way the basic premise of feminism is distorted by evangelical feminism. I recall the missionary kids I used to know talked in terms of “Christian” and “non-Christian”, and their first question about anyone was whether they were “saved”. They based their entire relationships with people and decided who they trusted entirely based on that. Their book cases were divided into Christian and non-Christian books. I often heard them say that you either serve God or the Devil. I’m seeing a similar trend with evangelical feminism. Before you’re allowed to like something, you have to prove it’s feminist. You have to speak in terms of feminist culture and non-feminist culture, and anything non-feminist has to be relegated to the realm of guilty pleasures, as though anyone non-feminist couldn’t possibly have anything valuable to say, and has to be treated with a mixture of fear (of dangerous and possibly infectious ideas) and disdain, because anyone non-feminist just has to be stupid. This is very similar to the way evangelical Christians treat someone like Frank Zappa - obviously, he was a stupid man despite ample proof of the contrary because he was into Satanic silly little boy things, like pop music and fart jokes. Then there’s all the discussion around whether or not stuff like stripping, pole-dancing, wearing dresses, embroidering flowers on your underwear, etc. ad nauseam, are feminist acts, which gets turned into “can a feminist do this? If not, don’t! And hand in your Flaming Vagina insignia and copy of The Beauty Myth on the way out!”. Which of course is nonsense. You’re perfectly free to do things that aren’t feminist, and if you’re committed to activism and you have something to bring to the table I’ll be delighted to have you in my activist group (theoretically speaking, I haven’t engineered a coup and taken over Mind the Gap – yet!). This also sometimes leads to feminists being distinctly sexist and characterising all men as hairdos with wallets and trouser snakes located somewhere South thereof, individually incapable of anything but total oppression. Of course, feminism was originally about breaking down binary oppositions, not creating more. Although, of course, it’s a hard habit to get out of. I’m probably doing it right now. So are you. It’s just something to be aware of and avoid enshrining as some kind of feminism.

Possibly the most striking resemblance of all between evangelical feminism and christianity is in the actual act of “becoming saved”. It’s striking, and I blogged about it at the time, that when you read an article by someone like Jessica Valenti, for instance – though I don’t want to just focus on her because others in the mainstream media and out of it are equally guilty-, that as soon as you become a feminist your entire life gets better, you have more fun, you dance and laugh, you’re no longer afraid of being opinionated and you stop being ashamed of your body. In fact, this vision of feminism could quite easily be illustrated with photos of euphoric teenagers from Evangelical literature: cool and trendy, having fun and staying up after 10 for pizza and lemonade and giggly sleepovers, but modestly dressed as women are no longer pressured to look attractive to men. Calling yourself a feminist is the crucial part: once you’ve done that, you’re liberated, you just need to focus on liberating other women (by making them call themselves feminists) and enlightening the men. There isn’t a specific instruction not to do any activism, but there’s no need for one, because the entirety of feminist activism in the past has been either forgotten or disowned. Still, this is very reminiscent of the emphasis of evangelical Christians on becoming “saved” being the important part: that’s when you start to feel better in yourself, almost instantly, and automatically start acting correctly, whatever you do, even handing a tract to a homeless person in lieu of spare change or selling your friend a peanut (hey, just talking from experience). If you talk to an evangelical Christian about working for a charity (or the ones I knew anyway), they will caution you against “good works” and remind you that faith is the important part for getting into Heaven, and spreading the message regarding faith. Feminists have yet to say that the afterlife is more important than this life, but then again, the ideal of femininity is a little like living death or self-embalming because of the emphasis on identity and appearances over doing something with your life – see Betty Friedan and Simone de Beauvoir among others for details – and they’re essentially consigning women to this by emphasising the adoption of a new identity over the act of liberating oneself. You distinctly get the impression that if women were liberated tomorrow and there was no more need for feminism, a lot of people would lose a substantial part of their identity, and in fact miss the oppression. And of course, in the Western middle-classes we’re among the least oppressed women in the world. In fact, for the most part, we get the little perks that come with oppression more than the oppression itself, so it’s quite easy to identify as oppressed without actually being aware of what the oppression truly entails – for instance, how often have you seen feminists embrace eating tons of chocolate, or most obviously, pole-dancing and stripping, as feminist acts, without taking into account the history and subtext of these things. From there to becoming essentially submissive, there isn’t a huge distance.

Then last but not least there’s the fact that Evangelical Christianity is on very shaky theological ground, mainly because it rejects most theology. For instance, there’s a kind of personification of God as an all-knowing, omnipresent father figure who you can talk to about your problems and who will always see you as his child, rather than a concept or a kind of more disembodied entity. And of course, we have the Patriarchy. Though we have a different relationship to this father figure, namely that of a rebellious teenager, we still seem keen to erect Him and take Him into account at all times. I mean, otherwise we wouldn’t practically incarnate him into a giant walking cock and consult Him every time we choose our wardrobe. And actually, a lot of evangelical feminism seems keen on approval from some father figure somewhere as much as it also wishes to displease it, witness the emphasis on young women achieving great things, and the emphasis on the fact that different kinds of women “can be beautiful”, not on the fact that they should be able to function without the assurance of being beautiful in the first place. It’s still proving to someone, somewhere - mainly naysayers- that we’re beautiful and eager to do well. Otherwise we wouldn’t shout about it and make lists. And much like Evangelical Christianity has done away with most of theology, evangelical feminism has done away – I feel the need to emphasise this – with most of our history, feminist theory, and the need for any activism.

All this to show that it’s very important to be aware of the risk of adopting the very oppressive system we’re trying to get rid of. What’s the point of feminism if it just means women rising to the top of the patriarchy (social system, not your daddy) so that they may have more power and oppress more of their own gender? This takes on particularly creepy Freudian overtones when patriarchy is personified in the way that it so often is. This is why it’s so important to know what feminism means, and to define what it means. And I’m sorry, but it doesn’t just mean equality, although equality would be a consequence of a feminist revolution, ideally, and it’s also something to strive for in the short term. Feminism doesn’t just concern women – I say this because I’ve yet to see the Guardian ask Russel bleeding Crowe, Phil Mitchell or the editor of Loaded if they’re feminists. Still waiting, guys. Actually, on reflection, please don’t. Although this would seem particularly relevant when discussing violence perpetrated against women for being women, especially if it’s perpetrated by men, as it statistically tends to be. What, so now the people wielding the clubs / cricket bats / penises aren’t concerned by the problem, and it’s just something for women to discuss with their girlfriends at a tupperware meeting and deal with somehow?

Finally, however important it is to be inclusive of different viewpoints and different types of feminism (although, it is feminism, not jelly bellies, mind), feminism isn’t whatever you want it to be, and it isn’t there just to fulfil your wildest fantasies. Otherwise there’s no point in having it in the first place. Just get that negligee on and sit on your bed pretending you’re Nicole Kidman. Go ahead, you might as well, it probably feels just as good. Or alternatively, as Robert Johnson’s dad used to say, you could “get behind the mule each day and plow“. Yeah, so that’s a glaring binary opposition, but you know what I mean.

The Refugee Council is the largest organisation in the UK working with asylum seekers and refugees. We offer direct help and support and work with asylum seekers and refugees to ensure their needs and concerns are addressed.This Christmas we aim to highlight our work with vulnerable women. We want to bring to light some poignant stories of refugee and asylum seeking women who told us in their own words about the most unspeakable journeys they have suffered. Their personal accounts are truly moving and powerful, so much that we have decided to release them as podcasts over the next 4 weeks.

Please visit the website Here you can listen to each episode and help us spread the message from women who, despite months, sometimes years of fear and abuse, have kept their dignity intact to rebuild their life.