Mind the Gap

I’ve decided I want to blog quite a lot less, for several reasons.

One is that it takes up so much time and energy, that could be going into other projects. All the energy that is spent on giving a fuck about who’s fighting who in the feminist blogosphere, or even what George Galloway or Peter Tatchell has said lately, could be far better spent on other stuff. And by that I don’t mean engaging with the local lefty-libertarian blowhards.

It’s also frustrating that blogging is about building your own personal brand above anything else. Whenever you write something, it doesn’t matter what it is, what matters is who wrote it. When I’ve posted something, I care about whether it was a good post, and whether I can re-read it without cringing. That makes me question how honest my writing is, because for me that’s not the point of writing at all.

The feminist blogosphere isn’t somewhere I particularly want to be completely honest about my political opinions or anything else. I am honest as far as I can be, but I adjust what I post about to who I think might be reading it, who I might piss off, or who might actually like it. I’m not interested in being a blogging superstar, or even a good blogger, or even a blogger. I’m interested in writing, and in feminism.

And to be honest, this blog is far too much all about me. It’s not representative of the group as a whole, and I feel that I’m misrepresenting the group.  

I also think the feminist blogosphere has some pretty big flaws, if the biggest thing people fight over is their identity as feminists. It’s pretty stupid. Why do you care who said you weren’t a feminist? How old are you? Whenever I link to something I actually care about, I feel like I’m raping it by involving it in this clusterfuck.

Likewise, I find it very, very stupid when people equate ‘troll’ with ’male’ and ‘anti-feminist’. For a start, quite a lot of trolls are female, and I should know, I’ve done it before. I don’t mean the ‘let’s argue with a *insert political stripe here* and win’ type of trolling, I mean the posting lots of nonsense that’s deliberately engineered to piss people off kind of trolling. It’s something to do when you’re bored. There are LOLs to be had in it. However much time trolls spend doing their stuff, they take it a lot less seriously and invest a lot less in it than the people they’re trolling. That’s why it works, because people react, go and find them, and try to defend themselves when they could have just ignored it. And it’s not ’abuse’ or whatever, because people can turn off their computers at any time if they want and fuck off outside.

The internet is a bunch of servers run by a bunch of libertarian businessmen and businesswomen. It’s not an arena of free political expression at all, and we should stop treating it as such. Cybernetic woman, my arse. Women from all over the world communicating with each other on an equal basis, triply my arse, for many blindingly obvious reasons. Radical? Too many my arses to mention. It’s a business opportunity for a bunch of rich people. For that reason alone, I feel like an idiot using it to communicate political opinions. And to whom? All those wonderful people out there in the dark?

If anything, blogging atrophies feminism, because whenever something pisses us off, we go and blog about it and feel like we’ve done something. You know, with the Google logo right there at the top of our  posts, or whatever. What’s worse is that ‘feminist infighting’ gets reduced to internet infighting, and we see the trolls or the anti-feminists or whatever as our political opponents, when for a start they don’t give a fuck about what you think. You know, how do we smash ‘patriarchy’ (another word I never used before coming to the blogosphere), if even ruining someone’s internet seems too naughty?  You know, whereas physically shouting at and shoving OAPs about for having a wrong opinion seems absolutely fine?

Seriously, if you give a shit about feminism - and I naively believe a lot of you do - think about all of this.

As for me, I’ll probably be blogging again by next week just by virtue of being bored at work. But there are so many feelings and alarm bells I have to suppress to do this, I really don’t know if it’s a good idea to continue.

I’ve made the odd post on how I’m annoyed when the entirety of a country’s popular culture gets dismissed as being horribly sexist, or when we even exclaim over one single film, manga or video game. Actually, this goes for any assumptions about the sexism, or lack thereof, of anything in particular.  Here are a couple of examples.

Around this time last year, I wrote a post on the female characters in Akira, and one commenter said she thought that the attempted rape of Kaori in the movie seemed like ‘some kind of horrible fan service’. At the time, I protested that this was making some pretty uncharitable assumptions about the fans. But really, how can either of us possibly know? Similarly, when Nintendo puts out a particularly ‘sexist’ game, like Cooking Mama for instance. Feminists over here took offence, but tons of Japanese games involve cooking, fishing, gardening, and so on, done by men and women. The recent Atlus RPG Contact (okay, not too recent in gaming terms) had a trendy, quite macho young teenager learning how to cook as though it was the coolest thing ever. Warioware is full of cooking-related minigames.  

It’s probably pointless to come up with anymore examples at the moment. Although a different one might be the way feminists in the UK have embraced Miyazaki so whole-heartedly. And I’m a fan too, I’ve just read five volumes of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (volume 6 is out of print and costs £8,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, drat!), and I’m incredibly impressed by the depth of the female characters. But it might be sexist in ways I can’t even distinguish. We can probably assume that the Rapeman anime isn’t particularly feminist – thinking in two-dimensional terms of sexist vs feminist for the sake of this particular point – but even then we can’t know. After all, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is often considered feminist, and what does she do? She constantly has to kick the crap out of creatures who are all about sex, then they bite you and become your father. Could be seen as feminist, could also be seen as incredibly neurotic. Then again, accurate portrayal of this kind of neurosis could be seen as feminist. And on one count, the female characters in Rapeman meet some feminist criteria – they’re strong women, they’re as big as their attacker, with massive biceps, and they defend themselves. Also, the hero is portrayed in the same way as some feminists tend to portray rapists: he’s single-minded and predatory. But, does the narrative condemn what he does? Does it accept it as natural? Is it humourous? It’s hard to say.  

For a start, the Japanese language alone is completely different from European languages. Sure, there are words adopted from English, but that means nothing. The structure of the language is so different it’s incredibly hard to translate – there might be hidden depths in the handful of manga I’ve read, and there might not. Possibly not, as they’re kind of visual. Still, Japanese is gendered in ways you probably hadn’t even thought of – and then un-gendered in the ways you’d expect it to be gendered. And that’s just the language. Next to that, there’s all the other stuff. It’s possible to piss each other off with incorrect idiom and body language even within one country. So imagine the stuff you can’t possibly even notice when watching cartoon characters speak a completely alien language all the way across the world. What you take to be horribly sexist, or wonderfully empowering, could be meant completely differently. It should also be taken into account that, when something is sexist or violent, different things about violence or sexism will be emphasized, so it will seem more shocking to us.  

What this means is that, of course, you can interpret these films, books, and games however you want to. They can be whatever you want them to be. So what we say about them quite often reflects our prejudice about the country where they originate. And actually, I have quite often read quite categorical assertions on feminist blogs that sexist bastards are at it in Japan again, and those guys are always sniffing panties for fun. But it’s not only Japan, and it’s not always negative stereotypes. Think of the adoption of Buddhism by Hollywood stars, for instance. For one, the religious texts are in a language which is going to be alien to them even if they can read it a bit. Then there’s all the cultural stuff besides the language that you’re not going to get. So in the end, Buddhism can be whatever you want it to be. Like for Otto in A Fish Called Wanda, the central principle of Buddhism is ‘Every man for himself’. That’s a caricature out of a not-terribly-subtle comedy, of course, but it’s still striking how easily a complex philosophy that takes years of study can be turned into a tourist brochure, a sales pitch for silk prayer cushions, or a blockbuster movie poster. Let’s face it, we fuck up with feminism, according to the Feminist Majority Foundation being a feminist means being whoever you are – oh yeah, and A is A, guys, and that smoke coming out of the tip of your cigarette really shows how hard you’re thinking*. So imagine what being a Buddhist means, to the spiritual equivalent of the Feminist Majority Foundation? It probably also means being whoever you are. And collecting little statues of cross-legged fat dudes to grow your plants out of. And having great tonsisticity** in your day to day relationships.  

Sure, there is a good argument against cultural relativism, when people are actually hurt by it. We shouldn’t abandon women who are getting hurt, locked up or killed or harmed in any way just because ‘it’s their culture’, because that’s deeply racist. But that really has absolutely fuck all to do with anything when you’re reviewing video games. Doesn’t it say something that the further removed from us a culture is, the less we’re able to tell the difference between designing computer games and killing people? It’s like these people and countries don’t exist outside of our fantasies, in certain cases even when we’ve actually been there. After all, colonialism was a vast exercise in dehumanising whole races just to justify some convenient prejudices about them, so they could be exploited as being less than human.  

As the descendents of those colonial powers, we still tend to think that way. We also have a certain sense of entitlement that means when we think ‘oh, that’s terrible!’, we instantly jump to ‘that’s objectively bad!’. With that comes the assumption that we know everything, or at least what we do know is the important bit. It’s like the book described in the recent Zoe Williams article, about French women  (one of the rare cases of a Zoe Williams article not causing much Marge Simpson grumbling from me). It’s irrelevant that the author of the book doesn’t know all French women, she can make generalisations because she knows the important ones, the ones who matter. And she also knows what matters about them, since she’s such a connoisseur. This is similar to the attitude of feminists bashing women of colour for supporting Obama over Clinton, or saying that in general gender trumps colour in terms of oppression. What they’re basically saying is that their oppression is the relevant one, and what they know about it is all there is to know.  

[And on a side note, Hilary Clinton isn’t a feminist in any shape or form, unless you think a feminist is a woman who became successful in a patriarchal society. Which amounts to trying to sell the bootstrap argument to all the women who haven’t. Which is pretty anti-feminist if you ask me.]

 I realise that I’ve reinvented the wheel somewhat in this post, but given the largely blindingly white, middle-class nature of the UK blogosphere, all this is well worth bearing in mind.      

*Ayn Rand really thought that smoking was deeply symbolic of being a great intellectual, and was pretty pissed off to get lung cancer as a result of being such a great mind 

**made-up word

Yesterday was the 97th anniversary of the Triangle Factory Fire. I didn’t have a chance to blog yesterday, but would recommend this post by Brownfemipower, and the Triangle Factory website she linked to (and I linked to here). They have lots of interesting testimonies from factory workers, and other cool stuff. Well, ‘cool’ is possibly the wrong word since they’re commemorating the death of 150 people.

It might be a good time also to think of the working conditions of immigrant workers today, which aren’t that much better (if at all).

Feminist Avatar at An Open Letter by a Feminist has a very interesting post up on the women-only-spaces debate, from a post-modernist point of view. I don’t agree with everything she says, but certainly a fair bit of it:

I would like to question the notion that I was born a woman, because as that famous second-wave feminist Simone de Beauvoir: ‘One is not born, but becomes a woman’.

I see postmodernism as potentially revolutionary, although just like not all people are feminists, neither are all postmodernists. But post-modernists feminists are feminist and they are revolutionary. For me being post-modernist is about recognising that all experience is viewed through a lens that shapes how we interpret it. It does not deny physical experience. It does not deny that women are raped; that their bodies bleed; that the live in a world where they suffer pain and horror. It says that the meaning placed on that experience is entirely socially-constructed. It says there is no ’truth’ or ‘nature’ that defines who you are or what you will become. It says that who you are is a product of your society and culture and that even your physical experience is given meaning by the social.

Women-only spaces reinforce gender distinctions by their very nature. For the postmodernist in me, this is problematic. We need to work towards a world where gender distinctions are removed and so we need to be very careful of how and why we use such spaces. But, we do live in a world where women are hurt and abused and need to regroup and plan for change. In this time of war, we need women-only spaces.

However, as a post-modernist feminist, I think we need to be very careful how we use them. Women-only spaces not only reinforce gender distinctions, that we are trying to overcome, but can act to privilege certain groups and exclude others, and, by doing so, they are re-enacting the same male behaviour that has been happening for hundreds of years. Defining women by their genitals is essentialist and it is what men do to us every day when they treat us badly and exclude us. There has to be a place within the feminist movement for transwomen, because otherwise we are just another privileged group telling other women what they are or are not.

Feminism does not need to have absolutes, rights or wrongs in all and every circumstances. That is a lie fed to us by philosophy that relies on essentialist notions of gender; that sees a ‘true’ and a ‘false’, a weak and a strong, a powerful and a powerless. Context is everything.

 

Feminist Avatar also has a great (fairly old) post entitled An Open Letter to Anne Widdecombe. It’s good to see some of my own sentiments echoed elsewhere:

I hope your visit to Glasgow University (23/01/0 to promote your anti-abortion campaign was enjoyable. As a feminist, I believe that it is important that all women’s voices are heard and I welcome your input into the debate. While I think you have every right to share your pro-life beliefs with other women, I think you should seriously reconsider your position on campaigning to change abortion legislation.

Wheeeew! I was getting worried about this bizarro-world where only women who agree with us (the monolythic block that we are as feminists) were allowed to talk.

Elsewhere, Sudy of A Womyn’s Ecdysis has posted a great essay on being a bi-cultural Pinay. Being bi-cultural myself (though, totally different cultures, totally different relationships to each other), I can certainly relate to some of it, like growing up short, stocky and Irish-looking in a country full of generally slender people. It wasn’t until I went to Ireland at the age of 25 that I understood why I look this way. It’s no big deal, considering there wasn’t a racial difference or anything, but you do notice that stuff even when it’s that slight, and it does leave you feeling a little odd.

EDIT new link: Lady S at the House of Rotating Knives has a post on her thoughts about Million Women Rise, and the state of mainstream feminism in general:

The more I look at Feminism in Britain and the extremism that is mainstream and the uncritical acceptence of middle-class whiteness as The Experience for everyone.
And how that ties in with my own orgins and the stuff I’ve not had to face:
You know there was all that stuff about Maragaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood in America and its eugenicist history a while back?
Nice to keep it as an American problem. Not relevant to Britain at all.
Except not. As the above paper tells me Marie Stopes’ project was orginially ‘the Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress’. And she was a commited eugenicist. This society now works worldwide. Funny how most of what you read on her omits this and how she campaigned against the ‘wrong’ type of woman.

When you get down to it, there is very little that seems to be included in the ‘right’ type of woman who deserves rights and a voice. Non-white women? well, only if they deny their own experiences in order to fit in with certain theories on appearence and economics. Poor women, trafficked women, exploited women are all voiceless victims. Sex workers aren’t women; they’re collaborators. Trans people are most definitely not women at all it seems. If you like certain sexual practices or think the war on porn is terribly mainstream and puritain, then forget it. Lesbians it seems also have only a tenuous inclusion in this definition of ‘woman’.

Laurie Penny at Penny Red has an interesting post on the decriminalisation of prostitution. Once again, I don’t agree with her 150%, but certainly agree on the more fundamental aspects (Oh, yeah, and before you click, in case you’re at work, the article is illustrated with a large picture of a very young-looking woman with a practically bare arse and the post is entitled ‘barely legal’, just so you’re forewarned) :

If the British Government really wanted to do something about prostitution, there’s one blindingly obvious step that they could take and aren’t: ensure that poor and desperate women have other viable choices. Provide a genuine living minimum wage which
allows the poorest members of society a decent, legally-obtainable standard of living. This is the bottom line for anti-prostitution campaigners both within and outside Westminster. John McDonnel MP supported this pro-worker sentiment, declaring to the Safety First Coalition last week, “I welcome the government’s announcement and hope that it signals a future approach towards prostitution underlined by welfare measures rather than criminalisation, putting the needs and safety of sex workers above the desire for moral condemnation.”

Finally, over at WOC Phd, Prof Black Woman urges us to embrace the spirit of Easter in troubled times:

Both its “pagan” foundation and its Christian “overlay” celebrate the rebirth or renewal of life and the chance to begin again washed clean. Where the former sees this promise in the earth and the season of Spring and the latter in the resurrection of the Saviour and His Grace, both call to us to embrace life anew and to be better people in the process… Whether you look to the Lord or inside yourself for strength and hope, look today and then walk boldly into the coming dark days.

I found this article via Louise Livesey’s F-Word post on it. Louise was annoyed at Peter Tatchell’s dismissal of the current feminist movement, and I think - though I disagree with the way she worded it in a way that was a bit historically inaccurate - rightly so.

I have to take issue with another part of Mr Tatchell’s article though:

“If Sylvia was alive now, I suspect she’d be leading a left-wing feminist movement, WomenRage! They’d be occupying business headquarters and government offices to demand equal pay for women (it is still only four-fifths of men’s income), free nursery places for every child, and equal representation for women in all leadership positions.

To this end, she would probably endorse the call for electoral reform to create two-member constituencies, where every electorate would be required to vote for a male and a female MP. It is the only sure way to end women’s under-representation in parliament.

Because of her commitment to internationalism, Sylvia would also be prominent in the green, anti-war, human rights and anti-globalisation movements, and support the campaign to cancel Third World debt.”

Whoa, whooooaaa there, hang on a minute, calm down. Sylvia Pankhurst is not Socialist deodorant. You don’t get to wear Sylvia. You probably shouldn’t claim that if she were alive today she’d agree with you or be a prominent member of your organisations. We all love Sylvia very much. However, I don’t think it’s fair to hoard her all to yourself, or for us all to split her into little bits. Sylvia didn’t belong to anyone, she did her work when she was alive - and fine work it was too -, she left a legacy and a responsibility to remember the work she did and try not to shit - or indeed, jizz - all over it. I think we should respect that, don’t you?

I’m unhappy with a lot of major feminist events, but there are a lot of women doing lots of fantastic work locally that just get completely ignored, and to be honest from this I don’t get the impression Peter Tatchell will be happy with them until they recognise all the good he’s done for them and join his organisations.

You know, cause if they don’t, obviously they’re just being silly and unreasonable - a bit of a recurrent subtext in a lot of left-wing groups, I find. I mean, yawn, 40 years ago just called, it wants its debate back. Can we progress a little now please?

There are obviously some very serious issues around street protests at the moment. There are conflicting reports coming back from most of the major ones, even though they are being reported in the most high-profile blogs as wildly successful feminist love-ins where solidarity and unity descend into every single person and cause them to dance hand in hand like Polyphonic Spree members with banners (remember them? Oh, you probably don’t want to).

But there are some very serious problems going on here. To start with the least of them, I didn’t like the way my decision not to go to the pro-choice demo in Cardiff is somehow seen to have invalidated anything I have to say about it. But I had excellent reasons not to go, which were basically that I had reservations about what I thought was likely to turn into an opportunity to intimidate people going into a private meeting. According to my friends from Mind The Gap who did go, it turns out that did indeed happen. I have no reason to disbelieve them, since they went there feeling positive about the event and expecting a peaceful protest, and came back having witnessed something very different. Yet the reports are very conflicted: the F-Word reported it as a largely positive event in spite of the unhelpful nature of the slogans and the fact that that precious megaphone was denied a pro-life speaker, and it would have been nice to hear what he had to say. Cardiff Permanent Revolution thought the event was positive because they got to party like it was 1967 and the elderly people going into the talk were in fact blocking pregnant women’s access to an abortion clinic by throwing aborted cow foetusses at them - which is the kind of place the slogans were coming from. Abortion Rights UK claim that no-one misbehaved and it all went off very smoothly, which, well, all I can say is I want to believe that’s how it looked from where they were standing.

On a personal level, I’m a little concerned that some of the reactions from feminist allies to my concerns about the protest were, I thought, a bit sexist. Not overtly, but it was generally thought that my opinion on the matter was just bizarre rambling and that I was, well, a little hysterical. People, if you’re holding feminist demonstrations and several feminists are either disappointed with the event, or chose to have nothing to do with it, you should listen. I was also a little concerned with the fact that my view was taken to represent that of Mind The Gap. In fact, in his devastatingly witty rebuttals, my esteemed opponent (hey, if we’re gonna play-act, you know) referred to Mind The Gap as being one person, me. I don’t have the time to point out how many things are wrong with that.

I don’t know what the reporting was like at the other abortion rights demos, but Laura Woodhouse did mention (a little further down the comments thread here) that, at the Sheffield one, she was uncomfortable with shouting slogans at elderly people, and one of her friends had to hold back some of the protesters to allow a disabled woman to get inside the building.

I’m noticing a similar pattern with Million Women Rise. The more high-profile reports mention a largely positive event, yet stuff went on there that really should be making more of a noise in the blogosphere, particularly as we spend so much time on schoolyard bickering.

["You've got privilege! No, you've got privilege! Well you've got not being slapped by me privilege! Well, your mother was a hamster and your father belongs to the stonecutters! So there!" Oh for pete's sake people, how old are you?]

So, we’re hearing from Sokari at Black Looks (linked from the Carnival of Feminists at Pennyred and mentioned by Sudy in her latest episode of Femwatch) that Terisa Mackay of the Solidarity First Coalition to Decriminalise Prostitution and TGWU was refused the right to speak at the last minute, and someone speaking up in her defence got called a ‘black bitch’. In the comments thread to that post, one of the volunteer security guards also reports being abused and spat on, although she isn’t being believed - but why would she lie about it? There’s no reason to disbelieve that ugly stuff went down, tempers flared, and people were spat on.

So, why was Terisa Mackay prevented from speaking? According to Socialist Unity’s report on the event:

“Because in her speech (she sent it to the organisers beforehand) she had mentioned Ipswich and decriminalising prostitution. And the fact she submitted her speech before the rally shows how controlling the organisers are. It was the “decriminalising prostitution” that got her gagged. All the woman had proposed in her speech that there should be a discussion around discriminalising prostitution. Organisations like IUSW, Global Women’s Strike, Safety First Coalition and the English Collective of Prostitutes and other individuals, including myself, went to the organisers to complain. No real explanation was given why this TU woman couldn’t speak or who actually made the decision.”

Several people linked to this story. Hell, it was linked from the 55th Carnival of Feminists. So why isn’t there more of a clamour around it? Or, even better than a clamour, an attempt to stop and listen, and radically rethink our reasons for protesting in the first place, or at least to analyse why this happened?

I’m (that is just me, not the Voice of the Mind The Gap Network, and not the madwoman in the attic either) starting to have serious doubts about why people want to protest. I want to believe that one of these events will turn out to be a largely positive thing, but I’m not seeing any evidence of it whatsoever. There needs to be debate, and I think a certain amount of anger, around the issue of violence against women. We should, at the very least, be on the ball regarding any threats to our abortion rights. But there is so much wrong here.

First of all, from the pictures of these events, they seem to be largely young, white and middle-class - not entirely, but largely. There are specific Black groups participating too by the looks of things. But you know, there’s already a bit of a segregation there that’s a little suspect - why these clumps of Black women in a sea of white people? Maybe it’s just bad photography, but whatever. The mainstream press didn’t touch many of these events, and the UK feminist blogosphere is 99.99999999999% white and middle-class. But surely, we still think someone being called a ‘black bitch’ at a feminist demonstration is out of line and we want to find out what went wrong, right?

But why do these things happen in the first place? Million Women Rise was supposed to be a march against gendered violence, yet a speaker who was going to talk about sex workers - one of the groups who are at the most risk for this type of thing - was silenced. So, I think we definitely have to wonder whether we are concerned about violence against women, or just ourselves.

I am more generally concerned, for all these events, that they seem like middle-class demonstrations against working-class men, or healthy, able-bodied people against the elderly. They don’t appear to set out that way. But that’s how they pan out. The anti-abortion demos were largely middle-class students and activists demonstrating against elderly people, and as for the discourse around violence against women, there is a disturbing trend of vilifying working-class men - Nuts readers (not the highly-paid graduates who actually make the thing, mind, a lot of whom are women), builders - you know, the guys who built that building you’re sitting in right now, not to mention the road you took to get there - , cab drivers, retail workers, and so on. We’re outraged - rightly so - that women are still being abused for being women, but we don’t want to know why men abuse women, we assume they just do - like, for genetic reasons, maybe?

Middle-class women being afraid of working-class men is nothing new, and it’s not particularly feminist either. But when the voices of working-class women, Black and Asian women are largely not heard, and when people speaking for the rights of sex-workers are silenced, there’s a huge problem. And to be honest, I do think the loudest voices in feminism are the ones who are trying to make the world more like Turnbridge Wells.

The reason I’m not turning up for any of these events is that I don’t want anything to do with them. Politically I feel they’re diametrically opposed to my feminism. Or not so much diametrically opposed, because that would imply that they bore any relation to what I think of as feminism. They don’t. My experience of feminist politics has been, within Mind the Gap, hugely positive. I have been to some events which I found hugely positive too, for instance the International Women’s Day event at the University of Glamorgan, which was great.

I want to believe there is something positive about all these national protests, but from what I’ve seen, I can’t. They just seem like advertising that feminists exist, and that we’re fabulous, and then that we have these concerns we’re angry about. The fact that the ‘We’re feminists goddammit!’ comes first is already cause for alarm. And then we expect to be respected on the same level as our feminist foremothers, just because we wear the badge and strike the pose?

Look, at the very least, before protesting, let’s sit down and discuss, not only how to organise the thing - which I appreciate takes a lot of work - but why we’re doing it, and whether it’s needed, or whether it’s the best way to go about it. And refuse to let a few vociferous people tell everyone what to do, as well.

And especially, listen to the dissenters. Don’t ignore them. And particularly, don’t berate them for being un-sisterly, because that’s just downright creepy as fuck.

In conclusion, I don’t think the title of this post is over-dramatic. From the reports of protests I’ve heard, and from the discussion surrounding them that I have participated in, I think they do come across more as historical re-enactment societies, or funeral marches for dead protest movements. There is abundant proof of this. One proof is that protest within the protests is silenced, another is that they seem to be organised largely as proof that protest is still alive. Well, the reasons to protest are certainly still alive. But the people who have the most reason to, aren’t protesting. They’re being told to stfu by the people with the least reason, and the most time, to protest.

I’ve been seeing a lot of debate around the blogosphere around the term ‘cis-gendered’, mainly from women objecting to having the word applied to them. The debate hasn’t always been very constructive or helpful, in fact some of it has been downright jaw-droppingly disrespectful, but I won’t get into that here.

I do have a couple of things to say about gender though. First of all, I think we can all agree that terminology like ‘cis-gendered’ isn’t meant to be perfect, it’s a work in progress as it were. There are problems with it in that it creates a whole lot of binaries, where it should be helping to solve them, but you know, aside from these problems, it’s just one more useful word in certain contexts.

It’s also something that’s relative. Of course, you don’t go around feeling cis-gendered all the time, just like you don’t go round feeling white all the time - mainly because it’s considered the default way to be. You would definitely notice if you weren’t cis-gendered though, particularly if you were un-cis-gendered to the point of being prepared to go to sleep on an operating table and wake up with a totally different set of genitals. Think about that.

The final thing I want to bring up here is the question of the existence of gender. We can agree it’s performative to a large extent, but we all still have gender performance. Even (especially) if you think of yourself as a gender abolitionist - and, to be honest, there are problems inherent in summing up a hugely complex political position in one, neat label, ‘I’m a gender abolitionist, so I think that… - , it’s important to remember that you don’t just abolish the effects of your upbringing, entire social background, and several hundred years of history, just like that overnight, and that’s assuming you think of gender as purely a social construct that’s imposed on us to keep us in check, and not something that goes a little deeper than that, psychologically - which it does, hell things don’t even need to exist to do that.

Why is this so important? Well, because if you think you no longer have a gender, you’ll attribute all of your remaining gendered behaviour to the fact that you’re a woman. See what you did there? And so you will have gone full circle, one step further up the spiral for sure, but still, you need to keep the fuck going.

Oh, and this just coming in from our guest speaker Morbo:

PHOBIA DON’T WORK THAT WAY!

… which consists in punching women rather hard while wearing a bear suit.

Okay so I’m a little late on this one, but the Wicker Man remake seems hilariously terrible.

Here is a version cut down to the most relevant bits.

At least we can be satisfied that he gets punished for throwing women across rooms with a single punch thanks to THE BEES! THE BEES! AAAUGH MY EYES!

And remember, if you see this man, GIVE HIM THE BIKE! THE BIKE! No questions asked, or he might pull his gun on you and make you laugh yourself to death with his terrible acting.

Seriously though, this punchathon seems a little strange, not to mention a little gratuitous, considering the original is pretty great on the whole.

(Image of the amazing Christopher Lee from the original, much better, movie. Unfortunately, the world didn’t hear from him again. But you knew I was going to say that.)

You’ve probably seen it already, but Jess McCabe and Laura Woodhouse of the F-Word are looking for sex-educational material so that they can compile a resource.

It’s an initiative I can only applaud. I got most of my sex-ed from reading Bravo! Girl and other teenage magazines, and grew up thinking that female ejaculate was in fact pee - I recall a reader’s letter worrying about the small amount of liquid that came out during sex and the response was that, yes, that sometimes happens, and it’s pee, and such women are called femmes fontaine (”fountain women”, I kid you not).

So yeah, sex education and more openness about these matters are generally a good thing.

There are many reasons why history is important for feminism. The one that’s most often mentioned is that we need to know where our rights come from, and we need to be grateful to people who came before us, and remember our feminist history.

There is another reason though. How many right-wing pundits’ complaints about feminism contain the phrase ’since times immemorial’ in them? You can find a great example of this way of thinking in this article by David Gelernter posted on the F-Word a while ago (and yes, that’s me getting my hair off in the comments thread, I’m not too proud, but terms like ’street lingo’ really make me fuming mad). The bit I’m interested in is this:

“Who can afford to allow a virtual feminist to elbow her way like a noisy drunk into that inner mental circle where all your faculties (such as they are) are laboring to produce decent prose? Bargaining over the next word, shaping each phrase, netting and vetting the countless images that drift through the mind like butterflies in a summer garden, mounting some and releasing others—and keeping the trajectory and target always in mind?”

So, let me get this straight, David, you were sitting in a beautiful garden where it’s always summer, enjoying the wonderful ballet of the butterflies, when all of a sudden KABOOM drunk lesbians with machine guns leapt out of the bushes and destroyed your ability to form an English sentence?

What’s interesting here is that language, of course, is all about people, yet Gelernter’s fantasy is completely devoid of them, he’s all by himself in a garden. The other interesting thing is that it’s a summer garden, i.e. always the same season. There’s no history here, just a mythical land of ‘the way it’s always been’. Historical figures are mentioned, but they’re just these mythical great men and great women whose greatness ‘transcended time’ anyway. But Gelernter himself is outside of all that, in his summer garden.

In a case like this, history is incredibly useful to feminists, because we can say, hang on, it wasn’t always like that at all, rigid spelling and grammar conventions are actually incredibly recent, and for centuries there were only very loose rules that mainly revolved around making things easy to read when they’d been hand-written by monks with severe writer’s cramp - it might be useful here to mention that I miserably failed Old English because I couldn’t be arsed to do the work or buy any of the books, but my point still stands.

Etymology is often considered to be the enemy of feminists, just because of douchebags like Gelernter or downright cryptofascists like William Safire. We’re supposed to be inventing new words for stuff all the time, and since we’re all enlightened 21st- century women now, what’s important is the way language is used now, and if you bring up language history, you’re untrustworthy and probably anti-feminist. But that tends to piss me off just as much as the right-wing position. Why? Because it erases history just as much, and in much the same way - we’re all enlightened now and this word is used this way so shut up. It also denies how important language truly is, which is pretty damn important since it is, like, the stuff we use to communicate with each other. Oh, that stuff.

When taken out of the hands of right-wing pundits - and let’s face it, they don’t really have a clue what to do with it - etymology isn’t at all about establishing the original, ‘correct’ meaning of a word. Because that would be utterly, completely and devastatingly stupid, not to mention impossible. But it is incredibly useful to find out about the history of a word, and what meanings it still carries with it today. I always go on about the history of the word ‘rape’, for instance, not because I think the original meaning (yeah, which one?) is correct, but because we’re still using the language of a time when women were men’s private property a lot more so than now, and maybe we need to rethink that. In fact, it’s interesting when you see expressions like ‘the rape of the English language’, because it’s clear that someone like Gelernter is treating language in a very territorial way - the summer garden- but he’s also feminising it somewhat, putting it on a pedestal and demanding that it be treated passively, admired like a beautiful thing, and respected at all times.

Other things, like ‘he’ as a neutral pronoun, are definitely worth thinking about, in light of the fact that men are often considered to be the default human beings and women the modified ones. So, I haven’t really had a chance to look it up to see if it was at any point, but I certainly don’t find the idea too far-fetched or offensive.

I do have a huge problem with fucking about with language without getting to know it first. That’s because language is something incredibly valuable. It’s something that gets banned when countries are conquered. You feel that if you go to Wales, or Ireland, so god knows what it must be like in Africa, Asia or Australia. Not to mention America, where so many languages were completely lost through the people who spoke them being systematically killed off or adopted into the invaders’ society. People did, and still do, get arrested, beaten, or killed, for speaking their language. That’s how powerful language is.

All I’m trying to say is, language is incredibly important and needs to be treasured. Don’t leave that to ignorant overpaid right-wing pundits, do it yourself.