Mind the Gap

[Edit: Permanent Revolution said 'the anti-choicers and Mind the Gap, not the anti-choicers at Mind The Gap as I originally read. Still, this does suggest we are in league with anti-choicers. Or at least, we have given them comfort. In this, we are clearly in league with those nefarious Enemies of the People of the International Tea, Biscuits, Pillows and Bath Salts Distribution Consortium. To prove our allegiance to our Brothers and Sisters of the Left, we must picket this evil axis forthwith! They have the Hobnobs, but we have the Power!]

Your regular pro-choice service will resume shortly.

Seriously now, following discussion on the pro-choice demonstration on 4^th March, there are a few things I’d like to address.  First of all, I’ve noticed that we at Mind the Gap are now anti-choicers, according to the people at Permanent Revolution. Actually, I’m pretty scandalised that abortion isn’t available on demand in the UK and largely depends on the doctor’s willingness to perform it. It should be available to anyone who has decided she wants one, as it is in most of Europe. In fact, having moved to the UK quite recently, I wasn’t aware that it wasn’t until a few weeks ago. I thought I made my position abundantly clear in my previous post here.   

But the good opinion of Permanent Revolution isn’t my main concern here. There are a few responses in the comment thread over at Nectarine’s blog that I find pretty interesting.  Firstly, there’s the characterisation of the protesters. I expressed my disapproval of the term ‘codgers’. Actually, my concern is less with the choice of terminology, and more with the attitude that it’s okay to shove people about and intimidate them, because they’re only a bunch of old people. That’s pretty disturbing, along with the idea that you can’t get through to ‘these people’ because they’re somehow less able to think for themselves than the rest of us.  

But something else is disturbing me a lot more. There seems to be an idea that the meeting posed an imminent threat to our freedoms, and that this kind of ‘direct action’ was somehow necessary. But in that case, why picket a talk given by a private citizen to other private citizens, which wasn’t a threat to us at all? It’s not like a law was being passed in that building, since most of the people there have no political power whatsoever, or no more than the rest of us. Do we actually want them to have less political power than us on the grounds that we find their views objectionable?  

None of it makes any sense, until you look at some of the rhetoric involved. First, there’s the rallying cries of ‘Sisters!’. Now, it’s a whole other post, and I sometimes find it nice when feminists sign their letters ‘in sisterhood’ or whatever. But in this case, I get a definite feeling that these people are just performing. Why? Because there’s all these references to being prepared to lay down your life for the beautiful cause. Rose E. Knell actually mentions ‘our Muslim sisters’ who are prepared to be martyrs for their freedoms. Call me naïve, but I don’t think a group of people going into a building to listen to some speakers exactly calls for self-immolation. Oh no, someone inside that building is wrong. Get the lighter fuel and matches! Kafwoosh! But it gets better, because Rose isn’t suggesting we lay down our lives, just that we endanger the safety of (or at least intimidate) ‘a few has-beens’ instead. People are prepared to die for their freedoms, so we should be prepared to push Grandma down the stairs for ours? Pretty convenient, isn’t it: you get to play ten-pin-bowling using old people as pins at no harm to yourself, and go home feeling like a political firebrand.

Fantastic!  

She then asks a very good question: if they were going to a harmless meeting, why were people wasting their time protesting? Well, quite. That’s actually what I’m wondering too: why picket a perfectly harmless meeting, when there’s plenty out there that’s actually worth demonstrating about, if demonstrating is the useful thing to do in that case. Another commenter mentioned the chant which apparently may have originated at a previous protest in the States which was pretty horrific by the sounds of it. And you know, that’s a bit fucking disturbing. Here we have a bunch of people defending themselves against a completely imaginary threat by using slogans from a previous protest by people who were being threatened. In my previous post I mentioned protest had turned into a playground for middle-class people sowing their wild oats, and considering the reports I’m hearing from this particular protest, I think I can stand by that: it’s looking more and more like a historical re-enactment society. 

I have other grounds for thinking this. Activism is an important part of being involved in politics. But not activism for its own sake. Sure, the historical figures we remember protested and got arrested, and people demonstrated outside the jail until they got released, but that wasn’t the full extent of their work. That was just the surface of it, they did lots more than that. For instance, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti let a 15,000-strong march for the rights of women traders, but that was the end product of years of work, and she certainly didn’t know it would lead to that when she first set up a women’s society. She was also very active in the Nigerian Teacher’s Union, and her work as a teacher and educating her children was conducted with the same passion and energy that went into her political work. Then there’s Sylvia Pankhurst, who set up a non-profit toy factory during World War I just so she could pay as many women as possible a living wage. And of course there’s Mary Wollstonecraft who set up a school which was staffed by her, her friend and two of her sisters. We remember Emily Davison for throwing herself under a horse, but we don’t so much remember her years of work with the W.S.P.U. Then there are the various groups of women who set up services for victims of abuse, like the Southall Black Sisters for instance, or the people who campaigned for Rape Crisis Centres. In each case, it’s a question of identifying a problem, and working for a solution. It wasn’t a question of wanting to be political protestors, and then finding a reason to protest.  

So, why did last Tuesday’s protest turn out that way? Well, I’ll hazard a few guesses. I think a lot of us have seen pictures from protests in the past, and wish we’d been there. And you know, that makes me slightly worried about our motives when we remember ‘our’ history, which is quite often the history of the American labour movement, or the American anti-Vietnam movement, or the French May ’68 protests, the Civil Rights movement, or mainly American 60s and 70s feminism, judging by the imagery used. And we do seem fascinated by those images, and legitimately so, because those people campaigned in all different countries for rights that are similar to the ones we take for granted now, and are sometimes even the same ones. But sometimes it seems we’re trying to pose for the same pictures, and maybe that’s not too healthy.

For instance, a while back, I read a post by a young feminist who was incensed that Kelis had declared herself ‘not a feminist’. I was puzzled as to why this young woman thought Kelis was a feminist in the first place, but put it down to Kelis being a ‘strong woman’. Then, a few weeks later, I happened to see the video for Caught Out There, and I understood, because it’s full of images of protesting women. What they’re protesting about is apparently immaterial (in this case, their men ‘not coming home’ to them), what counts is that they’re marching, with banners and stylish-looking 60s-style coats.  

It’s like the culmination of hours and hours of discussing our feminist identities, what kind of ladyshave we don’t use, or what magazines we don’t read. Or for you gents out there, how to achieve the lustrous brilliance and heroic bushiness of Karl Marx’s beard, or find a good commie girl who has read Karl Marx and knits a mean balaclava.  You might think, fine, if that’s what they want.

But this play-acting and posturing is incredibly thoughtless and destructive. Why? Because it stifles debate. I and some of my Mind the Gap colleagues thought the methods used at the demonstration were wrong. Not the pro-choice position itself, but the methods used to promote it; both Nectarine and myself are strongly pro-choice. Yet since expressing strong doubts as to the methods used, we’ve been either ignored or called ‘timid’ by pro-choicers, I’ve been called anti-choice, and someone who thought she agreed with me in the comments thread did so in the following terms: 

“We need to keep calm as many of us accept that a man should be head of the home and guide us in our main role of wife and mother.”

 Fantastic! So if you’re pro-choice, but don’t agree with everything that all other pro-choice people do, you’re in the other camp. It’s that black and white, an all-or-nothing attitude that will be familiar to those of you who have been in close contact with the kind of born-again fundamentalist Evangelists you assume all pro-lifers must be.  But if we’re all supposed to care about it so much, how the hell can you people afford to be so cartoonish about it?