Mind the Gap

The 54th Carnival of Feminists is up at In a Strange Land.

There’s going to be a feminist film night and fundraiser to get people to the Million Women Rise March in London:

7 - 10pm, Thursday 28th February at Butetown History and Arts Centre in Cardiff
Entrance is a suggested donation of £3.00.

5 Dock Chambers
Bute Street (opposite the Baltimore Arms)
Cardiff Bay
CF10 5AG
http://www.bhac.org/index.html

Please come!

A Welsh branch of the Feminist Coalition Against Prostitution is being set up.This is a UK wide group advocating a common approach to
prostitution for the whole of the UK

* We invite all Feminist individuals and groups, from all
backgrounds, to join this Coalition

* We are calling for the decriminalisation of all women, children
and men involved in prostitution - and demand that all criminal
records for loitering and/or soliciting be wiped so that survivors are
not barred from employment branded as ’sex offenders’

* We urge the UK Government, the Scottish Parliament and Welsh
Assembly to consider a Swedish style law to make buying sex illegal
and to invest money in exit services such as housing, education &
training, legal advice, welfare benefits and health care

*We believe that prostitution is not inevitable - end demand

If you’re interested in joining, drop us an email mindthegapcardiff(at)yahoo(dot)co(dot)uk and we’ll pass you on.

This group will be independent of Mind the Gap, but will be supported by the network.

Nectarine wants to start a UK group mental health blog focusing on feminist views of mental health/ feminist reactions to the way mental health is viewed and treated and ways of making things better for those who live with mental health issues.

The requirements would be:
you are female
you identify as a feminist
you have now or have had mental health issues and experiences with the mental heath system.

See her blog for more information.

I’m not usually one to comment on the kinds of search terms that lead people to this site. The majority of them seem to involve Marge Simpson and what people would like to do to her, and various suggestive things involving cartoon characters or dolls.

One search term has made me very curious though: “cock’s comb porn”. What the hell is it? I didn’t know such a thing existed. What does it involve?

 On second thoughts, maybe I don’t want to know.

 N.B. The above image was found by searching for ‘rooster’, not ‘cock’, although I’m sure it is considered a fine specimen by those who consider such things.

You’ll notice by the eclectic-looking title of this post that it’s a news roundup. I haven’t done one of these for a while, but was spurred into doing one by several factors, both positive and negative, the first among them being the fact that Joanna Moorhead of the Guardian has written an article about sky-diving grandmothers, a subject I can’t easily resist writing about.

Why is this noteworthy? Well, first off, she says that ‘many’ grandmothers are working high-powered jobs and travelling around the world, and generally living the high life. It’s unclear what she means by ‘many’, obviously she’s been careful not to claim that it’s a majority, which is wise of her, because the sample of women she has interviewed are clearly not very representative of most grandmothers, even UK grandmothers.

Her interviewees include “Jill Curtis, a psychotherapist, writer, and also a grandmother of seven”, “Writer and broadcaster Miriam Stoppard”, “Julie Cooper, 57” who runs “an events management company, so I might be organising a conference for 500 one day and a fashion show the next.” Meanwhile, “Tanya Hine, 65, is a graphic designer and president of the British Association of Women Entrepreneurs, and her work means she is constantly on the go. ‘I was in Monte Carlo last weekend, I’m off to St Petersburg in March and I’ll be in Florence in April’, she says.” And “Sally Greengross, Baroness Greengross of Notting Hill, has been in the House of Lords since 2000 and is chief executive of the International Longevity Centre. She has a frantic workload, and nine grandchildren ranging from two to 16.” In fact, the person with the most modest occupation is “Linda Price, 55, a former childminder”, but even she has “been all over the world - Mexico, Cuba, the US, Egypt, Africa, Greece and Malta. My husband and I can afford it, so we think, why not? And we often take the grandchildren along.”

And here comes the cruel part: the fact that these grandmothers are able to do all this makes them so much better at being grandmothers, because they have wonderful stuff to share with their grandchildren, and can afford to buy them stuff and take them on trips. So if you’re not a high-flying highly-paid professional grandma, your grandchildren are missing out. They all mention they missed out because their grandmothers weren’t able to do all that stuff with them. Really, they’re not fulfilled because of their age and the more enlightened times we live in. They’re fulfilled because they have lots and lots of money, and few family responsibilities – which will not be the case for a lot of older women who are getting sick, or caring for sick partners, babysitting grandchildren, and probably holding down a non-glamorous job too.

Then comes the really problematic bit: “Others feel it’s too ageing to be called granny. “Granny is a terrible word. It has negative connotations in our society,” says Jackie Groundsell, 60, who lives in Kent and has four grandchildren aged from eight to 16. “I’ve always been Nan, and I feel better being Nan than I would being Granny.”” But what’s so wrong with Granny? It’s just a contraction of ‘grandmother’. And while we’re at it, why is being an executive so much more fulfilling than gardening? A gardener grows things. An executive, well, depending on what kind, is just there to make more capital. Why is the most valuable occupation always the one that makes the most money? But mainly, why should being someone’s mother’s or father’s mother have negative connotations? It’s great if these women are staying fit and healthy and active into their 50s, 60s and 70s, but it is something that’s often a condition of their social status. But we also need to think about what’s being rejected here.

Meanwhile, at the F-Word, Jess McCabe has linked to a Daily Mail article which states that if women were paid, they would get around £30,000 a year, based on some recent research. Of course, the fact that it’s the Daily Mail kind of prevents the words ‘yay, the work of millions of women round the word is finally being appreciated!’ from bursting forth from my mouth, as I rush out for beer and cake to celebrate. Firstly, as Jess correctly points out, wouldn’t this put pressure on women to stay at home (because why would you want a job when you can get £8 per hour for sorting laundry)? Of course, as Jess further points out, it would imply a boss who would have to pay the wages: the woman’s partner, according to Jess (hence a not terribly egalitarian relationship), or the State, according to the Daily Mail’s comments page (oh no, socialism!). In light of the latter, it’s quite obvious that the Daily Mail aren’t suggesting implementing this scheme. In fact, judging by the job descriptions covered in the article – nanny, chambermaid, cleaner, etc… - what they’re really saying is that such lowly (and often foreign) workers get paid way, way too much, and poor under-appreciated mothers and wives wouldn’t even think of demanding a penny for their hard work (that’s right, you wouldn’t, wives and mothers, you weren’t even thinking about it!). This is what it’s really about: stop paying those money-grubbing, high-living nannies! They’ll only get knocked up and have several gazillion kids and taint our Great British, er… whatever.

Meanwhile, still at the F-Word, Charlotte Cooper hails the existence of FCAP as proof that feminists nationwide are finally united and have a single cause they all care about. Er, except I have a couple of problems with how she has worded it - that’s aside from her use of expressions such as ‘hard line’ and her advocacy of steps to ‘clean up the country’. Of course, prostitution is a big concern for feminists, since there is a huge amount of exploitation of women going on there, even if we disagree amongst ourselves as to whether it’s inherent to the profession or not, or indeed whether it is a profession at all. For the record, I’m for decriminalisation of prostitutes and legalisation to the extent that they have to be protected, although I’m a little wary of total legalisation, which could lead to such assertions as ‘She chose to do it, now she has to take the consequences’, which would be far from ideal. After all, you can only assume that anyone having to do that job violates a number of health and safety regulations, aside from anything else – like the fact that very few women choose to do it for entrepreneurial reasons, or indeed choose to do it at all.

Still, I have a bit of a problem with the way that Charlotte Cooper has declared that it’s finally something that all feminists agree on. Who can speak in the name of all feminists? Similarly, I have a really huge problem with the way she has summed up first and second-wave feminism. First wave wasn’t all about getting trampled under hooves, or all about suffrage, and the second wave was certainly in no way all about breaking the glass ceiling. Women are scattered across all cultures and all strata of society, and are never all going to have the same priorities or the same concerns at the same time. We’re not all going to be equally affected by the same things. That could be seen as the weakness of feminism, of course, in that we’re never going to agree on anything. But it’s also an incredible boon, and makes feminism a rich and vibrant movement. I get the impression that Ms Cooper is idealising previous generations of feminists a bit, suggesting that they were so much more united than us. And it is true that there’s not much now that would make us go on hunger strike or take the risks that the Suffragists did. Then again, they didn’t all agree either. Second wave feminists certainly didn’t. But wouldn’t it make us that much stronger to be able to be united in spite of differences, without the same people always getting to decide what the aims are and who gets to be a feminist?

I have a similar complaint with Robin Morgan’s article on Comment Is Free, particularly with the following quote:

“Surprise! Women exist in all opinions, pigmentations, ethnicities, abilities, sexual preferences and ages - not only African-American and European-American but Latina- and Native-American, Asian-American and Pacific Islanders, Arab-American and - hey, every group, because a group wouldn’t exist if we hadn’t given birth to it. A few non-racist countries may exist - but sexism is everywhere. “

Well, I don’t entirely disagree - though I don’t need Robin Morgan to tell me that women who aren’t white exist -, but Ms Morgan still manages to suggest that sexism takes precedence over racism, and thus women all over the world have more in common with each other than with men in their communities. This means that all women have something in common with – and will agree with – Robin Morgan, feminist activist, former child star, and former editrix of Ms Magazine. This would also mean that I have more in common with Paris Hilton than with all of my male friends, on the basis that we both have ovaries and menstruate, unless Ms Hilton takes a concoction of pearls in vinegar mixed with platinum shavings to spare her the inconvenience, of course. She also suggests, elsewhere in the article, that ‘we’ have all shared the experiences of rape, genital mutilation, and all kinds of other mortifications of the flesh. Well, sorry, but we haven’t all shared those experiences. And it would be kind of sad, in a way, if we had to prove to each other that we had before being able to empathise with women who had experienced these things.

Now, back to the Guardian Women’s Page with Kira Cochrane’s assertion that “To hear a Hollywood actor use the word “feminist” is always a pleasure”. Why, though? Why should we need validation from Hollywood? Because Hollywood is providing us all with role models? Shouldn’t it be enough to us that we use the word ‘feminist’?

Finally, since some of us were going to see the Mekons tonight, but the gig was sadly cancelled, here is a clip of Sally Timms at the Touch & Go 25th Anniversary gig. Enjoy!

This is the second in a series of posts offering readings in feminist theory. We hope that these posts will make some important feminist ideas more accessible to people who haven’t read much theory.

I have decided to discuss Patricia Hill Collins’s chapter ‘Black Feminist Thought in the Matrix of Domination’ from her book Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment, because it gives a very good explanation of intersectionality, a theory which I’m sure you’ve seen discussed on feminist blogs. ‘Intersectionality’ argues that we should focus on how different systems of oppression interlock. The chapter is quite long, dense and theoretical but I’ll try and pick out some points which have significant implications for feminism.

Collins begins by emphasising the importance of knowledge in empowering oppressed people. She proposes:

Afrocentric feminist thought offers two significant contributions toward furthering our understanding of the important connections among knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. First, Black feminist thought fosters a fundamental paradigmatic shift in how we think about oppression. By embracing a paradigm of race, class, and gender as interlocking systems of oppression, Black feminist thought reconceptualizes the social relations of domination and resistance. Second, Black feminist thought addresses ongoing epistemological debates in feminist theory and in the sociology of knowledge concerning ways of assessing “truth.” Offering subordinate groups new knowledge about their own experiences can be empowering. But revealing new ways of knowing that allow subordinate groups to define their own reality has far greater implications. [Emphasis mine]

I have put the sentence in bold because it’s fundamental to intersectionality as a way of thinking about oppression. Ok, you might say, but how does this ‘interlocking’ approach differ from the way white feminists have already conceptualised oppression? And why is it important to think like this?

Collins argues that, with respect to thinking about oppression, black feminist thought has fostered a ‘paradigmatic shift’ (which means a shift in thought patterns) because it ‘rejects additive approaches to oppression.’ This means that it does not start with gender and then add other variables such as race, class, sexual orientation, disability etc. It sees these distinctive systems of oppression as being part of one overarching structure of domination in which all these systems are dependent on one another. Instead of arguing about who experiences the worst oppression, intersectionality focuses attention on how these systems of oppression interconnect in different peoples’ lives. This approach rejects a phenomenon you may have heard called “oppression olympics” — endless, circular arguments in which the claiming of ‘most oppressed’ status appears to be at stake. It also therefore rejects grounding feminist theory in the idea that gender oppression is the oldest and most fundamental oppression upon which all the others are based.

Replacing additive models of oppression with interlocking ones creates possibilities for new paradigms. The significance of seeing race, class, and gender as interlocking systems of oppression is that such an approach fosters a paradigmatic shift of thinking inclusively about other oppressions, such as age, sexual orientation, religion, and ethnicity.

Ok, that’s not too difficult to acknowledge, but:

Placing African-American women and other excluded groups in the center of analysis opens up possibilities for a both/and conceptual stance, one in which all groups possess varying amounts of penalty and privilege in one historically created system. In this system, for example, white women are penalized by their gender but privileged by their race. Depending on the context, an individual may be an oppressor, a member of an oppressed group, or simultaneously oppressor and oppressed [Emphasis mine].

This is important and much more challenging. Collins continues:

Although most individuals have little difficulty identifying their own victimization within some major system of oppression–whether it be by race, social class, religion, physical ability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, age or gender–they typically fail to see how their thoughts and actions uphold someone else’s subordination … In essence, each group identifies the oppression with which it feels most comfortable as being fundamental and classifies all others as being of lesser importance. Oppression is filled with such contradictions because these approaches fail to recognize that a matrix of domination contains few pure victims or oppressors. Each individual derives varying amounts of penalty and privilege from the multiple systems of oppression which frame everyone’s lives.

Of course it’s much easier to think of ourselves as oppressed than it is to think about the ways in which we are invested in systems of oppression.  For example, as a lesbian and a woman I have experienced homophobic and sexist oppression in my family, in school, the workplace, on the streets etc.  However, I am also white, not disabled, and from a middle-class background which means I have access to enormous privileges and advantages that working-class, disabled people and people of colour are routinely denied. I am not subject to racism or ableism and I have had the advantages of a middle-class upbringing, one of the greatest benefits of which is probably my sense of entitlement to high quality education and well-paid jobs. So, while I am oppressed in certain ways, my identity is invested and perhaps even socially constructed, in relation to the systems which oppress people of colour, disabled people and working-class people, because I am benefitting from those systems of oppression in various ways. This doesn’t mean that I’m a bad person, or that my own oppression is any less serious, but it means that I need to de-center my experience of oppression and stop seeing it as the most important or as universal.

Johnella Butler claims that new methodologies growing from this new paradigm would be “non-hierarchical” and would “refuse primacy to either race, class, gender, or ethnicity, demanding instead a recognition of their matrix-like interaction.” Race, class, and gender may not be the most fundamental or important systems of oppression, but they have most profoundly affected African-American women. One significant dimension of Black feminist thought is its potential to reveal insights about the social relations of domination organized along other axes such as religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and age. Investigating Black women’s particular experiences thus promises to reveal much about the more universal process of domination.

A theory which looks at how systems of oppression interlock differently in different peoples’ lives is also very important in helping us to understand why feminism has become so divided. A person’s experience of the ‘matrix of domination’ will be very different depending on who they are, so this approach rejects the idea of an essential female experience to which we can turn for feminist analysis.

If you haven’t already, I would recommend that you read Sojurner Truth’s speech Ain’t I a Woman?. Here, back in 1851, we have a woman of colour brilliantly deconstructing the notion of essential female experience upon which the contemporary conversation about women’s rights was based:

That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man - when I could get it - and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?

Truth draws attention to the nonsense of talking about “women” as if there is a universal female experience and, perhaps more importantly, makes it clear that the concept of “woman” is itself tied up with race and class ideology.

Each individual has a unique personal biography made up of concrete experiences, values, motivations, and emotions. No two individuals occupy the same social space; thus no two biographies are identical. Human ties can be freeing and empowering, as is the case with Black women’s heterosexual love relationships or in the power of motherhood in African-American families and communities.

The same situation can look quite different depending on the consciousness one brings to interpret it.

I’ll try and give a few examples of where the lack of an intersectional approach has caused problems for feminism. White, middle-class, Eurocentric feminists can be extremely disparaging of the family and organised religion, but women of colour and poor women often find the strength to survive and fight racism and classism in their families and churches. There is a very anti-child and anti-motherhood trend within feminism which women from communities of colour in which motherhood is viewed as empowering find very painful and impossible to relate to.  Moreover, when it comes to reproductive rights, the dominant feminist discourse often tends to focus entirely on abortion because, historically, white, middle-class women are the ones most likely to be denied abortion and they tend to be the ones with the loudest voices in mainstream feminism.  But women of colour, poor women and disabled women may have very different perspectives on this issue because, historically, they have been forced into abortions and sterilisations, or had their children removed by the state because they are not trusted as mothers, or because their children are not considered as desirable as the children of white, middle-class women.

Right now, we have black women in the US being told by white feminists that they should vote for Hilary Clinton because she’s a woman and it’s more important that a woman, rather than a black man, becomes president. This totally ignores black women’s experience of racism and abrogates responsibility for the role white women have played in perpetuating racism. Why should black women necessarily trust a white woman to represent their interests?  

If this is difficult to understand, please read this post by Karnythia at The Angry Black Woman blog. Here’s an extract:

I’m a black woman. I’m a feminist that’s voting for Obama. I was on the verge of ceasing to call myself a feminist since it’s become quite obvious that many white feminists think I’m too stupid to notice them saying nigger under their breath after every call for sisterhood. But then it occurred to me that there’s no reason to let them be the face of the feminist movement. So if you want to vote for Hillary because her values align with yours? That’s great. But don’t you dare try to tell WOC how to vote while insinuating that they’re too stupid to think for themselves. And since I know there are young white feminists that can see the elephant in the room? Let me say that I don’t think a vote for Hillary is a vote for racism. But, I do think insisting that a black woman shouldn’t vote for a black man because he’s got a penis is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard in my life. If it’s admirable to vote for Hillary based on gender; what’s wrong with voting for Obama based on race? As for the young white women voting for Obama? Don’t let anyone tell you that you have to vote for a woman you disagree with in order to be a “true” feminist.

These are only a few examples of how lacking an interconnected approach to oppression can damage feminism. There are many, many more.

Collins emphasises the importance for oppressed groups of rejecting ‘dimensions of knowledge, whether personal, cultural or institutional, that perpetuate objectification and dehumanization.’

The overarching matrix of domination houses multiple groups, each with varying experiences with penalty and privilege that produce corresponding partial perspectives, situated knowledges, and, for clearly identifiable subordinate groups, subjugated knowledges. No one group has a clear angle of vision. No one group possesses the theory or methodology that allows it to discover the absolute “truth” or, worse yet, proclaim its theories and methodologies as the universal norm evaluating other groups’ experiences. Given that groups are unequal in power in making themselves heard, dominant groups have a vested interest in suppressing the knowledge produced by subordinate group

Sometimes feminists from more dominant groups do have vested interests in suppressing the knowledge produced by subordinate groups. And sometimes they don’t want to listen to what women who have different experiences of oppression are saying because it might challenge their thinking or force a change in feminist priorities.

Ok, so how do we deal with all these competing truths?  Collins rejects the relativist approach of arguing that each group’s thought is equally valid. Instead, she proposes:

Each group speaks from its own standpoint and shares its own partial, situated knowledge. But because each group perceives its own truth as partial, its knowledge is unfinished. Each group becomes better able to consider other groups’ standpoints without relinquishing the uniqueness of its own standpoint or suppressing other groups’ partial perspectives.

This means that we must all learn to see our experiences as partial, situated in specific contexts, and unfinished.

It also means that no one is always placed at the centre of the analysis or gets to speak for all women.

The 53rd Carnival of Feminists is up at Uncool.

You might be familiar with the video that Sudy (of A Womyn’s Ecdysis) made a while back, showcasing a collection of comments by self-identified feminists in people’s comments threads, some of which are pretty horrifying.

I have a bit of a problem with the Vlog format – basically, it has the problems of a blog, times one hundred. Still, I think Sudy did some good work here, and raised some fundamental questions. As feminists, we engage with race, class, gender, and sexuality issues all the time, and we all have internalised prejudice in all of those areas, and we’re going to come out with some pretty gnarly statements sometimes, which isn’t a crime. The only possible crime is failing to question your attitudes, and rationalising your prejudices as important parts of your feminism. In fact, I think it’s deeply feminist to face your prejudices and work through the reasons why you might hold those views, realising that it’s not a crime not to be a perfect feminist, especially as women are supposed to be perfect and eager to please at all times. And the trouble with prejudice is that often we use it to try and justify our privilege, and absolutely want to keep it, because calling it into question would be very uncomfortable indeed.

Two comments stood out for me, this one:

Stupid people all over the world tend to have too many kids. It’s going to prove to be one of the issues of our day if nothing is done to prevent the wanton, reckless procreation of the world’s have-nots, who only succeed in passing on their poverty to subsequent generations, and thus drag us all down with them. Not pretty, but it’s obviously what is happening. Soft-headed, well-meaning but cosmically misguided “welfare” practises only exacerbate the problem.

and this one:

I’m saying this as a women of color, which is a stupid term anyway. My color is only skin deep and I don’t define myself by it. White women are no more privileged than any others. Feminism is the great equalizer, and frankly, these women of color need to get a fucking grip.

They stand out for me for two reasons. First, they’re pretty terrible – the first one is a contender for worst thing to say ever. Secondly, they’re both views I’ve held, and indeed shared loudly in public places before, quite a few years ago (I was a teenager), but still, I can’t deny it, my current socialism and feminism started there.

What changed? Well, I had some pretty convincing first-hand evidence that the second statement, at least, was 150% pure horseshit, which led to questioning the first one pretty strongly. It wasn’t just having a lot of African acquaintances in university – it’s perfectly possible to have lots of Black friends and remain racist as fuck, you simply see your friends as the exceptions. And it’s perfectly possible to be racist while rationally thinking of yourself as anti-racist as well. That’s why it’s called phobic behaviour: it’s not rational.

Anyway, inspired by a recent post on male privilege here, I think it might be a good idea to make a few similar points on white privilege, based on the personal experience of some of my friends and acquaintances. Some of these points might not occur to us that easily. After all, one of the things about privilege is that, the more privileged you are, the more confident you feel that you don’t have to question your privilege. So, here are a few points, which I hope will be as much of a wake-up call to you as they were for me.

1. When I speak to people in a foreign language, with a heavy accent, I can be fairly sure they’ll think I’m an exchange student or a tourist or something. Because I have a thick French accent (except when I speak English), and white skin, rather than an African accent and black skin, they won’t assume I’m stupid, or make me repeat things several times.

2. Generally, people won’t assume I’m illiterate with eight kids, lots of dirty habits, and have probably tried to do my laundry in the toilet at some point.

3. When I go to see the doctor, he might recommend that I go on the Pill. But he won’t try to force me to agree to it, and when I refuse, say ‘Don’t come crying to me when you get pregnant’.

4. Similarly, the doctor won’t refer me to gynaecologist without consulting me first, and the gynaecologist won’t spend fifteen minutes trying to force stuff through my hymen before chastising me for not letting her know I was a virgin.

5. When I go to the ophthalmologist, he won’t try to fob me off with the wrong prescription, and in fact chastise me for wasting his time at all, and then try to convince me that I only think I can’t see out of the glasses because I’ve never worn glasses before.

6. If I take a job as a cleaner, I won’t have to quit because I moved a penny from the table to the mantelpiece, and had to explain to my employers where I’d put it, because their immediate assumption was that I’d stolen it, and I’m worried that if they lose something bigger, well, the cops are going to listen to them rather than me.

7. If I choose to join a local Church (highly unlikely, but you never know), I won’t have parishioners offering to help me by driving me various places, only to have their children ask ‘what’s that weird smell?’ when I get into the car.

8.Generally, people don’t talk to me as though I’m a three-year-old child. And especially, they will never lecture me, in that tone of voice, on gratefulness towards God and other people for putting up with me.

9. In my place of study, I won’t be confused with someone in the same room who is a completely different height and build to me, a different skin colour, and wears a nun’s habit, or chastised when I don’t answer to her name.

10. My lecturers won’t deliberately speak a language I don’t understand (Alsatian, in my friend’s case) just because they don’t think Black people should be in universities, then chastise me for not doing the work properly at the end of the class.

11. In my place of work, I will never get hit over the head with a walking stick by patients as I try to help them because ‘every time I ring this bell they send me another lazy nigger’.

12. I will never have to share a room with someone who infers lack of hygiene from my skin colour, and constantly reminds me of this. In fact, people never have and will never associate my skin colour with dirt. It’s pretty basic, but you’d be surprised.

13. If I’m ever in a position to need welfare or help from a social worker, they won’t assume that my predicament is due to my failure to abandon the weirdy, foreign, ‘not like us’ ways that come with my background, culture and entire history.

14. People will not randomly walk up to me in the street and insult me for being ‘no good’ on the basis of my skin colour.

15. When thumbing through a clothes catalogue with friends, I will never have to listen to one of them express surprise that Black women can look attractive without make-up, because usually they need tons of it before they look half-decent.

16. Finally, I will never be asked by anyone whether in my country we eat lions or live in huts. Well, I did get asked if the water in France was safe to drink once. But I was able to safely give a short, sharp reply to that question, which I would probably have thought twice about doing, had I not been White.

It’s not all good, though, because

17. I will never be able to jump the queue in the supermarket by telling the old ladies ahead of me that, where I come from, we eat people. Although technically, that one was a case of male privilege.

These are all various people’s real experiences - and the list is by no means exhaustive - and as you can see, they’re all things we pretty much take for granted – our rights to health care, education, and even assumptions about our personal hygiene. It might not occur to us that any of those privileges are anything special. In fact, they shouldn’t be privileges at all. But for millions of people, going through the day without experiencing any of this kind of discrimination is a relief.

I haven’t seen feminists make many of these assumptions, but I have seen a couple of them made on a depressingly regular basis. For instance, point 14 might sound familiar to a lot of people, since a lot of feminists do assume that ethnic minority women shouldn’t join their groups if they don’t abandon

the weirdy, foreign, ‘not like us’ ways that come with their background, culture and entire history

even if it’s phrased a bit differently.

Generally, if I’m honest, I’m very worried because these kinds of statements from feminists seem to be accepted without question from other feminists, on the basis that feminism is supposed to be an egalitarian movement, so we’re all fabulously egalitarian, right? Well, no, we’re not. It takes constant work, constant questioning, and it’s a constant learning experience. At no point do we get to stop learning and start teaching everyone else.

Another thing I’m worried about, if I’m completely honest, is the number of very ambitious young women in feminism. I don’t think ambition is a bad thing, necessarily. But personal ambition within a political movement can be. After all, to advance your career, you need two things: to maintain the status quo that has given you the chance to start your career in the first place, and to impress the right people, that is to say, the ones who are more privileged than you, who have even more of an interest in maintaining the status quo. To be blunt, I feel that these people are being given a very loud voice indeed, often to the detriment of the majority of women. As for ethnic minority women, I have observed a tendency to allow enough of them a voice so as not to be called racist, but no more than that, and the symbolic gestures often mean that racist undercurrents within feminism go unquestioned. Or maybe I’m being too cynical, but the fact remains, a lot of women are being left out of feminism, despite their huge involvement at local community level.

On a more general level, it seems that a minority of middle-class women with ambitions to be great names in feminism are denying the majority of women a part in feminism, on the basis that they can’t be trusted not to be too oppressed or to represent the interests of ‘their men’ (read: their community, which might have different interests to ours). For instance, in today’s Guardian, it is actually suggested that it might be appropriate for feminists to ‘boo’ a female scriptwriter because she used to be a stripper:

Hurray, surely, for Diablo Cody, the (female) Bafta-winning scriptwriter. But boo to the fact that she used to be a stripper? Sisters, it’s complicated.

Yeah, Sisters, if we can’t work that one out, maybe we’d best stay in the sewing room. Actually, that kind of thing has been going down since the Suffragist movement tried to attract more sophisticated women, and interestingly, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst get statues (not to denigrate most of their achievements) while Sylvia is considered to be an extremist.

But that’s the thing: if we still haven’t worked that one out, how can we be sure that there isn’t something at the core of feminism that’s very rotten indeed? In that case, surely it’s our job to carry on the work of previous generations of feminists, and try to work out what it is.

There’s a new feminist group in town: South Coast Feminists