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By Strange Loop, on March 8th, 2010
I’m not quite sure what to make of tonight’s Libbers episode of the BBC Four programme Women.
I’m trying to figure out who the target audience is intended to be. For women familiar with the women’s liberation movement, there is potentially some interesting history and archive footage, but I can’t imagine what women unfamiliar with the politics and history of the movement might make of it.
As a history of the origins of the movement, it didn’t quite hit the mark, as it focussed on a few (famous, white, middle class) (mostly) writers: Robin Morgan, Kate Millett, Marilyn French, Germaine Greer, Sheila Rowbotham, Ann Oakley, Susan Brownmiller, and Lynn Alderson.
As an exploration of early influential feminist writings, it also didn’t quite work. For example, the programme gave varying amounts of background to Brownmiller’s Against Our Will, Greer’s The Female Eunuch and French’s The Women’s Room, but didn’t mention any of Rowbotham’s writings and gave short shrift to Millett’s Sexual Politics.
The writer/director Vanessa Engle seemed to have a checklist of things to question her subjects about, regardless of whether it arose naturally within the context of the interview — most bizarrely asking each of them if they had vaginal or clitoral orgasms. WTF?
By admin, on March 2nd, 2010
Joan Scanlon talks to Hannana Siddiqui from Southall Black Sisters about building alliances with other feminists.
Click to listen or right-click and save.
By Debbie Cameron, on February 26th, 2010
Last week BBC 2’s Friday night Review Show was entirely devoted to debating feminism: what was it, what did it achieve, is it dead and if so whose fault is that, you know the sort of thing. Doubtless we’ll be getting a lot more of this stuff in the media as we approach the 40th anniversary of the first British WLM conference, held at Ruskin College in Oxford in 1970. If this Review Show is a sign of things to come, I’m not sure how much more ‘celebration’ I can take.
The first rule of any media debate on feminism is that the participants should all be media celebrities and general-purpose pundits, with a maximum of one of them having any actual experience of or commitment to feminist politics. If there are three or more people on the panel then one should be male, and at least one (who may but need not be the token man) should hold provocatively anti-feminist views. On the Review Show the feminist slot was filled by Germaine Greer, the male/anti-feminist slot by Toby Young, and the other two guests were Rachel Johnson (editor of The Lady) and Zoe Margolis (who writes about sex from a female perspective). They reviewed Natasha Walter’s book Living Dolls, Martin Amis’s The Pregnant Widow (billed as a ‘feminist’ novel about the sexual/gender revolution, though the reviewers were sensibly not convinced), and a series of BBC 4 documentaries on women which will be shown during March (the clip they showed contained the astonishing revelation that men who describe their marital relationships as equal still don’t clean the bath).
The good news is that neither Rachel Johnson nor Zoe Margolis provided quite what one imagines the producers hoped they would (respectively a conservative and a sexual libertarian view). Zoe Margolis particularly impressed me by describing Martin Amis as ‘condescending’ and slapping down Toby Young when he suggested that since she wrote about sex, she must be in favour of promiscuity and porn. The not so good news is that the only person to offer any properly thought-out political analysis of anything was Germaine Greer. Actually, she was great. But her ability to make cogent arguments while her juniors floundered was slightly depressing: feminism, though not yet dead, appears to be travelling on a senior citizen’s bus pass.
Or maybe not. The only actual example of contemporary feminism with which this programme concerned itself was Natasha Walter’s book. And Natasha Walter’s book represents, among other things, a shift on the author’s part towards a more radical sexual politics than she espoused in her first book The New Feminism. Walter now believes that the liberal agenda she favoured in the past didn’t address some of the more unpalatable and less tractable aspects of unequal gender relations, like the sexual objectification and exploitation of women which is in many ways more intense now than it was 20 or indeed 40 years ago. Once the poster-girl for ‘the new feminism’, Walter is now saying things that sound a lot more like the old feminism; perhaps there is life in the old lady yet.
The less radical TV reviewers didn’t care for this thought. They found Living Dolls too bleak, too preachy or too man-hating. Two of them also dismissed Natasha Walter as a middle class snob expressing high-minded distaste for the culture of working class women—as if Nuts and Spearmint Rhino were (a) as authentically proletarian as whippet-racing and brass bands, and (b) part of the culture of women of any group.
The programme was, all in all, a sort of Cook’s Tour of all the stupid, lazy, uninformed things you can say about feminism in 2010. As we get closer to British second-wave feminism’s 40th the tenor of the media coverage is something worth keeping an eye on: I hope other users of this site will contribute to this ‘media watch’.
By Strange Loop, on February 3rd, 2010
Colorlines reports on a law in New Orleans that was originally intended to target child sex abusers that is being used instead against prostitutes.
A conviction on this charge is a more serious felony offense rather than a misdemeanour, carries a longer sentence, and requires the prostitute to register as a sex offender.
Of the 861 sex offenders currently registered in New Orleans, 483 were convicted of a crime against nature, according to Doug Cain, a spokesperson with the Louisiana State Police. And of those convicted of a crime against nature, 78 percent are Black and almost all are women.
It is a complete outrage that the victims of prostitution are being prosecuted and forced to register as sex offenders for the crime of “unnatural copulation” (anal or oral sex). The article does not mention if johns are also being charged with this offense as co-participants in the acts, but I suspect not.
I’m rather rusty on my Mary Daly, but I think she would have called this a Patriarchal Reversal.
By Strange Loop, on November 25th, 2009
A Swiss court has agreed a £2.7 million bail deal for child-raping fugitive from justice Roman Polanski.
The Swiss government is deciding whether to appeal this decision, but if they don’t, Polanski will be free on bail.
Either the court is really stupid and figures money is going to deter Polanski from skipping town, or it is counting on him running away, so that he becomes another jurisdiction’s problem. I’m sure his art-loving friends will chip in to help him avoid any actual punishment for his crimes.
By Debbie Cameron, on November 19th, 2009
A couple of weeks ago at the university where I teach, I spoke at an event organized by socialist students to debate the future of women’s liberation. One woman in the audience said afterwards that it was a relief to hear something political about women. Recently she had gone to another talk which she thought was going to be about feminism, and found it was actually a pitch for the Women’s Institute.
My reaction was much the same as hers had been—incredulity. Why on earth would 18-21 year-old students be interested in joining the Women’s Institute? But a few days later I read a newspaper report which claimed that women students all over the country are setting up branches of the WI. Or at least, they are trying to. According to the report, some of them are running into difficulty because many students’ unions refuse, on grounds of gender equity, to recognize societies which do not allow both sexes to be members. And so it has come to pass that an organization founded during World War I, and long associated with a very traditional view of women’s role, now finds itself in the vanguard of a movement to reclaim women-only space on university campuses. What is a radical feminist supposed to think?
I have my own, not very positive, memories of the WI. In the early 1980s when I belonged to a rape crisis group, I sometimes gave talks to local women’s organizations like the WI, the Townswomen’s Guild and the Housewives’ Register. Invariably the WI women were the most conservative. They tended to be very keen on the law and order aspect—locking rapists up and throwing away the key—but what they understood by ‘rapists’ was monsters leaping out of the bushes to attack some innocent maiden on her way home from church. And it was always a bit surreal giving a talk about rape which was preceded by announcements about jam-making sessions and followed by a competition for the prettiest scarf or the most effective spring flower arrangement.
But it seems the WI has moved on. Today, the causes it supports include not only fairly uncontroversial ones like Fairtrade, and women’s development projects overseas, but also less comfortable things like the Campaign to End Violence Against Women.
If press stories are anything to go by, such political concerns are not high on the agenda for the new campus WI branches. Their reported activities have included tea-drinking, cake-baking and (allegedly) knitting iPod covers. But as retrograde as this might appear, I think there is something behind it that feminists would recognize and support.
To get to the ‘future of women’s liberation’ event, I had to fight my way through a college bar full of braying young men in what appeared to be fancy dress (they wore flat caps, plus fours and patterned socks, and some of them were carrying leather whips). On inquiring who they were, I was told that they were known as ‘hunters’, and that one of their recent exploits had been to organize a ‘hunt’ in which female ‘foxes’ were chased by male ‘hounds’. When one woman complained that this sort of thing was all too common, and that the students’ union had ‘a completely sexualized entertainments policy’, it was clear that her words struck a chord.
Women students today inhabit a culture where sexual objectification and predatory male behaviour are normalized, and it seems that quite a lot of them are angry about that. At the same time, they are reluctant to be labelled ‘feminists’ because of the social disapproval that would incur among their peers. If the WI provides such women with an alternative—an acceptable way to spend time with other women, and potentially a space in which to explore their feelings about the way women are treated elsewhere—then on balance I think I’m for it.
By Joan Scanlon, on November 11th, 2009
Clause 14 of the Policing and Crime bill passed through Report Stage unamended in the House of Lords last Tuesday 3rd November.
Clause 14 aims to protect vulnerable and exploited people by shifting the focus of the law onto those who create the demand for prostitution. The clause makes it an offence to pay for sex with someone who is subjected to force, deception or threats.
During the debate Baroness Scotland, the Government Minister in the Lords said “We are faced with a choice tonight: do we speak for the victims, do we stand up for those who have no voice for themselves, do we stand in the breach for them—or do we provide a cloak of anonymity and protection for those who do not wish to face what they do when they purchase sex from a woman or a man, quite often of tender years, who has been coerced or forced into that position?
I need to be clear that the Government’s view is that those who purchase sex from people in that position commit a wrong. They enable a situation that is avoidable to continue. We have a choice tonight to decide on which stand we will set our mark. Who will we support, and who will we defend?”
The succesful passage of this clause is a huge victory for women who have been exploited by the sex industry, especially given the amount of opposition to the clause and the totally unbalanced media coverage of the issues involved. But there is still a long way to go. Eaves Housing and OBJECT have orchestrated a campaign called Demand Change to challenge the legitimacy of the demand for prostitution.
By admin, on November 10th, 2009
Debbie Cameron and Joan Scanlon discuss radical feminism, Trouble & Strife and why they felt it was time to publish a collection of articles spanning the journal’s 20 year history.
Click to listen or right-click and save.
By Strange Loop, on November 8th, 2009
Among the list of people who signed the petition in support of Roman Polanski, one of the most disappointing was Emma Thompson. She has done some good work on trafficking, and her support for child-raping fugitive Polanski seemed inconsistent.
Happily, she has now pledged to withdraw her signature, as reported by the Independent on Sunday.
h/t: Shakesville
By Strange Loop, on November 4th, 2009
How’s that for a headline? Instead, in the Daily Mail yesterday, we get Bulgarian girl, 11, gives birth to her daughter… on her wedding day.
You see, a miracle happened. Or at least abuse-disguising language happened:
Kordeza – who fell pregnant within two weeks of her 11th birthday – spent the night in hospital with Violeta and then headed back to church for her wedding with 19-year-old Jeliazko Dimitrov.
Falling pregnant. Is that like falling asleep? Falling sick? Or could there be an actual male adult involved in the process?
Add another abuse-disguising term: “couple”.
The couple met when Jeliazko rescued Kordeza from bullies in the playground.
Note to all media: Stop referring to abused children and the adults who abuse them as “couples”.
Round off the article by letting the abuser spout some responsibility-denying, self-justification:
He added: ‘I was walking past the school when I saw some boys mocking her and I told them to leave her alone.
‘Then she arranged to meet me and asked me out on our first date. I thought she was 15. She didn’t tell me she was 11.’
Apparently, he didn’t find out she wasn’t 15 in the entire week it took to get her pregnant.
Nice one, Daily Mail; you hit all the child-blaming, rape-denying targets!
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