Mind the Gap

So, this chain of pretty sub-optimal restaurants is coming to the UK, where the waitresses have to agree in their contracts to being probed and poked by male customers, the ‘off’ status of whose ‘rocks’ seems to be the main selling point of the restaurants in question (unless they do fantastic burgers as well, I can see that argument coming up actually, ‘bitches choose to work there, besides their triple cheeseburger with butter sticks is dee-fucking-licious’).

So far, so sexist. But there is one more complaint about this sort of establishment I would like to see come up a little more often.

Of course, on the one hand, yes, employees do sign contracts, some might even enjoy the prospect of working there, who knows, but a lot will be driven by the necessity of taking any paid employment.

And, first problem, this is a fairly mainstream chain of restaurants, so it will be harder for out-of-work women to refuse to work there on the grounds that it’s, well, a bit of an affront to their dignity, not to mention their mental health, to have to endure that amount of sexism all day long. And I’m sure it wears thin. Although I am positive that waitresses have to put up with that shit all the time anyway, a friend of mine who worked as a waitress used to get her bum pinched by customers all the time.

So there needs to be a wider debate about how women occupying female-dominated posts are sexualised to a certain amount, without even having to agree to it by contract first. I had a boss once who definitely got off on upsetting his secretaries, for instance.

But the main thing we need to focus on here isn’t that some wankers get their rocks off (or at least pleasantly poised to go off at any moment) in these establishments. Indeed, it’s questionable whether they do or not, it’s more likely to be a social thing of being seen to have rocks in the first place. A dead-end, future-less job is being created specifically for women, completely CV-killing, and unlike other waitress positions, without any opportunity to progress to manager or any other higher-up post. This is a blatant case of women’s economic independence being severely hampered. This is what we should be complaining extremely loudly about - not the angle of the customers’ dangle, or indeed the heat of their meat.

I have just totally fucking been abundantly shat on by a seagull.

Judging by the little wanker’s over-confident demeanour and bright plumage, I am guessing it was a male seagull. If I could catch the little terror right now, I would totally chop off his male doo doo. Yeah, I’d be saying ‘Kwaaaarp!?’ too right now if I was you, you little feathered sea-rat.

 So, which one of you has been socialising male seagulls to perpetrate sexist attacks on innocent pedestrians? Own up!

 Argh. Fucking glorified long-distance-flying chicken!

And remember, next time you see one of those little fuckers soaring majestically through the skies, this is what they think of you:

Sudy of A Womyn’s Ecdysis is making it very hard for me to be cynical about blogging. This is a woman who regularly uses the words ‘womyn’ and ‘herstory’, takes the feminist blogosphere very seriously, and generally does stuff that should make me shake my fist at the computer screen. But it’s hard to shake your fist at that amount of right-on-ness and enthusiasm, especially with posts like this.  

Among other things:

 money/power-driven economics is the darkest shadow of the proverbial “Women’s Movement,” that celebrates icons instead communities, marketing instead of distribution, and trends instead of justice.

Yes! I like to see lots of descriptions of what it is to be ‘radical’, because I’m not really satisfied with what I find on the blogosphere in terms of what radical feminism means.

I also like the honesty with which she has covered that conference - the conference itself not being anything I am remotely connected to, although I would go to stuff like that if it was in Cardiff, certainly. I like the way she has reported the good with the bad. I often feel when such events take place in the UK, the tone of the reporting, beyond the ‘Yay we’re all sisters united by our wonderful opinions!’ (problematic in itself and different from what Sudy has done here), there is a definite undertone of ‘Shut up! It was great, really! If you think otherwise, you’re just a grumpy counter-revolutionary idiot!’. It might be expressed with a few more flowers, rainbows, and gleefully hopping bunnies around the edges, but it’s very alienating and frustrating. Why is it so important for everything about an event to be 100% perfect and awesome anyway? We learn from mistakes, mistakes and criticism are good, so, what, we don’t want to learn anything new now?

Come on now. Are we rabbits, or are we women?

The 56th Carnival of Feminists is up at Redemption Blues. And it’s huuuuuuuuge!

As you probably know, Lina of Uncool has pioneered a new initiative, the Feminist Carnival of Sexual Freedom and Autonomy.

I have my problems with the sex-positive identification (but by no means with a lot of ideas contained in it), and some of the implications of the carnival title - does it imply that those of us who don’t identify as sex-positive are against sexual freedom and autonomy? I detect a certain defensiveness there. Plus, I did solemnly promise Winter that Mind the Gap would not turn into a pole-dancing troupe while she is away on holiday (Drat! All those funds spent on solid diamond nipple tassles!), but Lina is an excellent blogger -heh, see what I mean about what I was saying before, how else can you describe someone whose writing you like in this format?- , as are a lot of her allies, so I’m sure it will make for an interesting read.

 With that in mind (and my various problems with the ’freak’ identity - namely that being able to ‘reclaim your monstrosity’ past the age of 19 or so often implies quite a large amount of class privilege), this looks like an interesting project (from Belledame at Fetch Me My Axe).

And while we’re on gender and sexuality, I’d like to address, briefly, the idea that if you happen to be attracted to both women and men, you’re attracted to the person not the gender.

Being in that position myself, gender does play a huge role in it. Personally, I tend to be attracted to either the very feminine or the very masculine, which of course aren’t that different from each other in the long run. It’s not even about enjoying a larger variety. It just happens to be a little more complex than what cut of steak you enjoy (as it happens, I’m not picky there at all, as long as it’s nearly raw).

 In case you were wondering, yeah, I got bored at work.

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.