Sexual Assault Prevention Tips *Guaranteed* to Work

This has been doing the rounds in radfem blogging circles for some time, but for those of you with jobs. lives, etc.:

1. Don’t put drugs in people’s drinks in order to control their behavior.

2. When you see someone walking by themselves, leave them alone!

3. If you pull over to help someone with car problems, remember not to assault them!

4. NEVER open an unlocked door or window uninvited.

5. If you are in an elevator and someone else gets in, DON’T ASSAULT THEM!

6. Remember, people go to laundry to do their laundry, do not attempt to molest someone who is alone in a laundry room.

7. USE THE BUDDY SYSTEM! If you are not able to stop yourself from assaulting people, ask a friend to stay with you while you are in public.

8. Always be honest with people! Don’t pretend to be a caring friend in order to gain the trust of someone you want to assault. Consider telling them you plan to assault them. If you don’t communicate your intentions, the other person may take that as a sign that you do not plan to rape them.

9. Don’t forget: you can’t have sex with someone unless they are awake!

10. Carry a whistle! If you are worried you might assault someone “on accident” you can hand it to the person you are with, so they can blow it if you do.

(ripped from Nine Deuce)

Boris, keep your promise!

Funny the way politicans have a habit of mis-speaking before elections, isn’t it?

Take BoJo for example. Before he was elected Mayor of London in what could pessimistically be described as a laboratory for the nation after the next general election (it doesn’t need to happen, people! Vote Green!), he went on record as saying Ken Livingstone’s PR department was eating up far too much money from the public purse, and that if elected he would syphon off 20% of this amount to the woefully under-funded Rape Crisis Centres. For which budgetary breadcrumbs all feminists understandably rejoiced.

A year and a half later, the reality is that potential  and actual victims of rape who live in London have one solitary Rape Crisis Centre between them. Which, for the fact fans, is one small centre for 3.9 million people, and even the future of that centre is constantly in the balance. Yes that’s right, not even two Rape Crisis Centres to rub together, despite BoJo’s promise of £744,000 in extra funding. In our fair nation’s capital of all places.

All these good people are trying to do is get Boorish to keep his promise. You can support them by donating money, or checking out their YouTube video (which is worth it for the feminist eye/brain candy alone).

Feminism and comedy: the good news

To take away the unpleasant yet inexplicably popular new Carr smell, here‘s a slice of good news: Channel 4 has commissioned an all-female sketch show, to air next month. Members of this troupe include the comedic luminary Josie Long, and other people who I haven’t heard of but am assuming are brilliant by association.

Thank you, Channel 4. This almost makes up for ten years of Big Brother.

Feminism and comedy: the bad news

Right ladies, I won’t lie, the bad news is that Jimmy Carr has been opening his mouth near a microphone again. In this article in today’s Guardian he attempts a defense of one particular instance of his oh-so-dark, so-edgy-it’ll-cut-your-ears-like-a-hungover-barber, like-totally moronic ironic sense of humour. The joke which has rankled Middle Britain to its Daily Express-reading core (and believe me, such an offender would usually be awarded 5-star ally status) is about amputee soldiers making a good paralympics team, a punchline which apparently didn’t translate when some journalists rang the parents of the said soldiers and recited it down the phone. Funny, that. Carr’s defense essentially consists of ‘well I say plenty of other awful things and noone seems to mind’, and ‘I was trying to make people laugh’, the latter being a bit like the designer of the Titanic saying, ‘I was trying to build a ship.’

Carr does say plenty of other awful things, though. And now he’s been taken to task on offending the soldiers upholding his right to say them, the interviewer deigns to question him on another of his favourite jocular hot potatoes: rape. An example of his utter hilarity and rapier wit on this subject: ‘what’s the difference between football and rape? women don’t like football.’  Geddit? Geddit? Do you see what he did there? Yes that’s right – expose himself as a misogynist asshat! Not that the interviewer makes this intergalactic leap, though; he notes that because there are women in the queue for the after-show signing, no harm has been done. And Carr himself is even less troubled: ‘I do a lot of jokes about rape, but it’s not a discourse on rape. I do jokes for laughs.’  Call me a humourless hairy feminazi, but a joke that’s truly funny is one which could be recited by anyone with half a modicum of comic timing to an audience who want to laugh. Any joke where you have to hope a certain set of people aren’t in the room when it’s told is clearly based on somebody’s expense. Now ask yourself how many female comics would ever use that joke, either on stage, or even with friends. Now imagine Jimmy Carr doing that joke at a women’s refuge. Now imagine Jimmy Carr having a reverse-Midas problem whereby every microphone he ever touches melts into some sort of rancid liquid marshmallow and we’ll all be happy.

Every time you say ‘sex worker’, a fairy gets period pain.

The outcome of the Roman Polanski debacle showed us two of our more vomititious cultural mores:

1)  the law (specifically rape) is secondary to some indefinable and subjective notion of ‘art’;

2)   a) some celebrities are rape-excusing idiots;

b) the opinion of said celebrities makes the excusing of rape more valid than the legal obligations for it to be punished.

So we learn the power of celebrity, of selective justice, and the depressing fact that those who have platforms to be role models for young women are using such a privilege not to empower women by reminding them of their status as human beings, but instead to excuse forced sexual intercourse between an adult man and a drugged female minor as, y’know, ‘not rape rape‘. Whoopee.

I’m reheating the morning leftovers of this story not because it has lacked any media attention (though it didn’t receive the lambasting one would have hoped for), but in order to demonstrate how normalised we have become to rape culture, specifically when it comes to the rape of young girls by rich, powerful men. This wasn’t rape, some libertarians will imagine; this was the timeless erotic trope of a robustly nubile artist being hopelessly seduced by his Lolita. He just had to ignore the inconvenient bit where she said ‘no’ and drug her with Rohypnol first. Is it cynical to imagine that, had this been, say, a bishop and a young boy, the outcry would have taken quite a different turn, and that the flimsy exuses of ‘but he has suffered enough by having to live in Paris and make films’, or  ‘but he is a great artist’ (whatever that means), could then quite rightly go piss in the wind?

I bring up this story because the normalisation of rape culture matters. There isn’t a single female person who isn’t affected by it. If you’re lucky the worst you will get is the threat of violence from a pack of chest-beating sub-primates who have somehow comandeered a Vauxhall Nova and think it is their born privilege to slur vague sexual threats as they speed by with Daniel Beddingfield pounding out of their sub-woofers. If you have a little less luck than average, you’ll be asked or coerced by your partner into performing sexual acts in the same manner as people who are paid to pretend they are enjoying sex. If you’re pretty damn unlucky, you will be forced into sexual intercourse against your will by someone who thinks they are somehow entitled to your body.

At the very worst, you will have to endure the hellish, soul-destroying, downright dangerous ordeal of repeated industrial rape which is the reality of most prostituted women.

Besides being often the people in society who are the most marginalized and the most oppressed by poverty, drug dependence, mental illness, and other positions of social disempowerment, prostituted women are the people who pay the real price of rape culture. They are the ones on whose bodies the whole sick fantasy is acted out again and again, in ways too brutal for any of us who are lucky enough not to have resorted to prostitution can imagine. They face misogyny, violence, and hatred every day they work, and know that they will face the same again tomorrow, assuming, that is, that they’re not killed or don’t kill themselves first. It’s enough to make the lairy sexist boy racers suddenly seem like Stephen flipping Fry.

Last Saturday I was lucky enough to catch a talk by Rebecca Mott and others, who were sharing their experiences of prostitution. Anyone who thinks that prostition is a free choice, can be empowering, or just needs unionising to make it all alright, should read Rebecca’s blog and get the truth first hand. Then they should pass it on to the next misguided liberal intellectual type who, like, totally supports women’s rights to be sex objects, and then reel them back into planet Earth too. As Denise Marshall, Chief Executive of Eaves Housing for Women and speaker on the panel, pointed out: ‘prostitution can be considered a valid career choice the day it turns up on the careers list at Cheltenham Ladies’ College.’  Which, for any readers unfamiliar with the specific bastions of British privilege, will be when hell freezes over.

There is an avalanche of bullshit from both the right and the left on the issue of prostitution, to navigate through which would require one to have more free time than the whole staff of the Gary Glitter fanline. The cultural assumptions propping up the whole sorry affair are that women’s bodies are a commodity which can be bought and sold, and that men have some kind of fundamental right to sex which women, as members of the sex class, do not possess (translated: if a man is too odious to succeed in getting laid, he can expect the ‘right’ to go out and pay for sex; if a woman is too odious to succeed in getting laid, she can go buy a vibrator and…er, that’s it. Not bother, exploit, or pay to rape anyone.) We need to strip society of the illusion that the ‘right’ to sex – and the ‘right’ to buy it – are somehow fundamental. In short, we need to get the men who would use prostitited women wanking back into their socks.

When we as a society excuse rapists like Polanski, or anyone else who violates another human being against their will, we are actively enabling rape culture and denouncing the seriousness – and indeed the criminality – of the act (and with conviction rates already lower than a snake with vertigo, that is hardly a state to be desired). We are also allowing the privilege of our indifference to be paid for by every prostituted woman who has to face the real, painful, bodily consequences of  a social system which tells her she is no better than property, with no agency of her own. Anyone who thinks that the exchange of coins either provides full agency, or proves that the women enter this trade fair and square, would do well to spend a night in Soho talking to the 9 out of 10 prostituted women who can prove otherwise, or to their pimps.

All of which is roughly why so-called ‘liberal’ newspapers like the Guardian who use the term ‘sex work’ and ‘sex workers’  in a bid to show how edgily cool and accepting they are can sit and swivel. ‘Sex work’ is to ‘prostitution’ what ‘collateral damage’ is to ‘dead citizens’; a contrivedly neutral reconfiguration of a term, which has been sanitised to protect the interests of a party who you can bet is someone other than its referee. Without pornification and rape culture to keep women in the habit of being viewed as sex objects and not fully valid human beings, the workforce for prostitution would haemhorrage away, and so, in an ideal world, would its clientele. It’s time we listened to the experiences of people who have endured the daily abuses of prostitution and declare finally that enough is enough. To those who argue that men will and should always objectify women, on account of being from Mars and having ten heads, I offer the humble suggestion that they go and perform some ‘hand work’ in a sock.

Alpha Mummy

Just take a moment and brace yourself against the realisation that this is not a post concerning another impending and wholly implausible Hollywood blockbuster starring Brendan Fraser, but rather the utterly disgusting title for The Times’ new blog-child.  One must say, although it is simply “not done”, that this baby is hideous.  Visiting the site for my weekly leeching of the infamous Women’s Section, I noticed that Alpha Mummy is now wedged between dating and fashion (which is, after all, woman’s place, aka The Home) on the menu bar.

Astonished, I tottered, taking my first steps towards the shiny new object, then puked adorably as I reached it.  Meet Alpha Mummy’s “team”:  Jennifer Howze, mother of one and stepmother of one, is Lifestyle editor of Times Online.  Eleanor Mills, mother of two, is the Saturday editor of the Times.  Caitlin Moran, mother of two, is a columnist for The Times.  Sarah Vine, mother of two, is a columnist for The Times.  It reads like episodic propaganda from Francoist Spain.  Children give you worth, women.

Apparently, Alpha Mummy, ‘is the blog for mums and dads who work, used to work, or want to go back to work one day (as if looking after children isn’t work enough),’ but its content ostensibly deviates from this goal, with these mythical father figures making occasional and brief appearances.  Surely the title similarly promotes exclusivity?  ‘[C]onversations on the blog aren’t restricted to parenthood and playtime,’ but deal with diverse other topics such as sex and dating.  However, one is reassured that bloggers ‘talk about everything that affects our lives as grown-ups with families, careers and intellects,’ none of which appear to have done the writers any favours.

‘In early September,’ the “team” asked their readership about ‘experiences [they] had with sexism, and the results were surprising’ in that, at least in my humble opinion, they somehow managed to overlook the woolly mammoth in the room which goes by the name Alpha Mummy.  Seemingly, the belief is that they have in some way embarked upon an empowering mission, when in reality their endeavour can never exceed its own limitations.  In principle, a sensible  site for parents with young children could facilitate liberal education, but whilst such arenas are restricted to the likes of Alpha Mummy, the sexist values they propagate remain engrained.  Alpha Mummy’s ‘strategy,’ when approaching the inevitable moment at which a child begins to curse, ‘is low-key “correction”,’ stating that such ‘words are for grown-ups and they’re not very nice to use.’  Well, perhaps everyone should implement their advice in not misusing words, like sexism, that are for adults, and should be used sensibly.

The feminist week in bullshit (part 2)

After a slightly nitpicky beginning to the feminist week in bullshit, it would be rude not to mention this spectacular steaming coil of misogyny and pseudo-science, which appeared in newspapers across the board (oh Grauniad, what were you thinking?). It’s hard to know where to even begin with a ‘study’ that didn’t think to analyse any statistics about the presence or absence of fathers before making its sweeping conclusions about family life, conclusions which essentially boil down to the fact that some women must be so cripplingly poor that they see no other option but to resort to having an autonomous identity and sense of individual worth by getting a job and earning their own wage. And when they are forced into such unnatural and unimaginable horror scenarios, their poor confused offspring are left with no choice but to numb the pain by gorging themselves until they burst with sausage roll and crisp sandwiches (on WHITE BREAD), before drowning their hopelessly emasculated sorrows with a molotov cocktail of Fanta and Sunny D, then being driven to school by their heartless (not even wholemeal-)breadwinning  matriarch, if she remembers, on her way to the stinking pit of vice and iniquity which is the workplace for a female parent in the 21st century.

You can practically hear the screech of centuries reversing.

And yet, if people don’t complain loudly enough, this is what the face of (esp. free internet) journalism will ultimately become. Flimsily-concealed agenda-driven ‘scientific’ ‘studies’ attempting to convince us that the dominant paradigm of oppression, greed, capitalism, or another form of gross injustice, is natural and good and we shouldn’t any of us worry our pretty little heads trying to detangle the reality from the immense web of bullshit in which this is all tangled up.

It’s enough to make you want to start paying for papers.

The feminist week in bullshit (part 1)

It’s a shame to be reporting this story under the heading of ‘The Feminist Week In Bullshit’, when the addition of a single pronoun could have earnt it the full-on respectful doffing of the feminist cap, but nonetheless behold the story of enigmatic French photographer/graffiti artist JR, who this week has covered the entire circumference of Ile Saint-Louis in the river Seine with photographs of women’s eyes. Not just any women, that is, but specifically eyes belonging to women from a range of disadvantaged and oppressed backgrounds in the developing world, from poverty-stricken single mothers, to rape victims, to the carers trying to help the legions of hungry, needy, and war-wearied. All staring out unflinchingly at the affluent Parisians as they sashay past en route to the boulot or perhaps to le MacDo. All exposed to the world in giant, unescapable detail, their many tragic stories writ large along the Seine.

Surely this is not the stuff of feminist bullshit? Not in a world full of plastic surgery, pay gaps, porn culture, rape, prostitution, and Richard Littlejohn? Isn’t this actually a celebration of women and a refreshingly relevant and pro-feminist political statement from a (male) artist? Shouldn’t I be all over this like David Cameron in Rupert Murdoch’s bathtub?

Answer: yes. And I am. Or at least, I very much would be, were it not for the well-meaning but unfortunate title given to the project: Women Are Heroes. See that? That’s a thoughtful and pro-feminist project, immediately scuppered by the flipside of the more usual manifestation of the virgin/whore dichotomy. That’s to say, the romanticization of women as a class is as pernicious as the defamation of women as a class. It’s no different from the chivalric code venerating women in exchange for their own sovereignty; assigning a certain set of values (positive, in this case) to a class of people which then forces them to transcend their status as human beings. It’s simple really. Women as a class are neither heroes nor villains. They’re  members of the race homo sapiens, meaning they contain within them the DNA formed slowly over billions of evolutionary years like slow-roasted primordial soup, which DNA allows or causes them (the jury is out, or at least pending publication of the next book by Richard Dawkins) to be decent souls, or dickheads, often both. Just like men, oddly enough. I had hoped that in the 21st century we would be past the whole shackle-rustingly medieval trope of women as visions of moral perfection (when not living embodiments of stinking carnal hellfire filth).

The women whose eyes are currently blazoned across the Ile Saint-Louis are without doubt heroic human beings; had JR only entitled his work These Women Are Heroes, a very different response would have been called for. Such is the power of pronouns. JR take note: one only has to look here to see how annoyingly unheroic women can be.

Yeah but be honest, there are no funny women stand-ups, are there?

Err, in short, yes there are, fool! And here are the videos to prove it. I’m overlooking the proliferation of idiotic comments that inevitably get left after any clip of a woman comedian, which generally take one of two themes: a) it hasn’t got a penis so I won’t laugh at it, or b) it hasn’t got a penis but, luckily for it, I quite fancy lending it mine.

Consider this a cheat sheet for the next time you meet a comedy neanderthal whose idea of an amusing act is some prick taking the piss out of an accountant in the front row for half an hour before engaging in a series of poorly-constructed stories whose raison d’etre is some sort of wank mime.

Or worse, Jimmy Carr.

Ava Vidal

Hils Barker

Josie Long

Liz Bentley

Shappi Khorsandi

Sarah Millican

Kerry Godliman

Isy Suttie

*** update: more funny women (a history lesson) (thanks Rich) ***

Josie Lawrence

Victoria Wood

Phyllis Diller

Jo Brand

Smack the Pony

Choose the best of the worst… in the name of Pankhurst

A strangely unmusical posting for a Tuesday this may be, but with the June 4th elections mere days away, those on the fence vis-a-vis where to place their feminist cross in the ballot box may appreciate the following rigorously cut-and-paste job in answer to the question on everyone’s lips: which party is the best for women’s rights?

Labour

Their website says: [They] introduced the National Minimum Wage – two thirds of the beneficiaries are women and it has played a part in narrowing the pay gap. Some unsubstantiated guff about ‘delivering a cultural change to ensure equality for all’, and the aim of ’empowering black and ethnic minority women to build cohesion within their communities and as a bridge between communities’.

EYS says: there’s no arguing that the Labour party are at least superficially committed to the equality of women, with a relatively high proportion of prominent female MPs and members of cabinet. Their track record on LGBT rights is also commendable (civil unions, anyone?). Unfortunately, hailing the fact that so many women are now on minimum wage doesn’t really cut it as a feminist triumph; their vague gestures towards ‘cultural change’ appear completely unsubstantiated; and their re-election after the expenses scandal/illegal war/creation of spin culture is about as likely as hen’s teeth.

Conservatives

Their wesbite says: a great deal more than Labour’s, unfortunately. The Conservatives lay out a 5-point plan on women’s rights, namely women in the workplace, vulnerable women, women in their communities, women and ethnicity, and women in international development, with at least an outline of relevant policy. There is also a link to the Conservatives’ equal pay campaign.

EYS says: David Cameron has certainly paid someone to tick the right boxes. The Conservatives have a rather odd relationship to women’s rights, their social policies being traditionally an unlikely refuge of the feminist, but being at the same time the only party to produce a female prime minister. It’s also noteworthy that the Tories have repeatedly voted against equal rights for lesbian mothers, which suggests there’s still a wolf lurking amongst the shiny new paddock.

Liberal Democrats

Their website says: nothing about women that I could find on the toolbar. A search on the site for ‘women’ resulted in a page brings back a message saying ‘we’re sorry, but something went wrong’.

EYS hopes: that isn’t their actual policy.

Green Party

Their website says: the most about their vision for the equality of women. In fact, they have a website dedicated to women’s issues in the Green party. Plans for action include increasing the number of women in Westminster and Brussels, as well as ensuring a 40% female presence on the boards of major companies. The Greens would carry out pay audits to monitor and regulate the pay gap, and introduce a ‘citizen’s income’ for women who choose to stay at home and bring up children.

EYS says: an impressive amount of detail, but much depends on your opinion of positive discrimination. Personally, I’d prefer a society in which companies weren’t forced to hire women to managerial posts; however, it may be worth it purely for the hope that the Daily Mail combusts itself to cinders with rage. Another policy of the Greens which smacks of well-meaning but ultimately misguided liberalism is their controversial plan to decriminalise prostitution; those feminists worth their radical salt will be concerned with the message which this sends out re: the normalisation of rape culture and the commodification of the female body in mainstream society.

I won’t even give the BNP the oxygen of publicity, since they have thieved enough actual oxygen already; suffice to say their London leader has been quoted as saying that rape is “simply sex”, and since “women like sex”, rape is only as bad as “force-feeding someone chocolate cake”. Oh the irony that this bunch of asswipes bang on about deporting ‘foreigners’ back to their ‘home countries’ when clearly they themselves should be returned with all haste back to the Planet of the fucking Apes.