In defence of slutwalks

“Women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimised.”

These were the words uttered by a Toronto police representative in January, talking a group of students at a campus safety information session. He’s not the first. In 2009, androgynous pop singer La Roux said: ‘There’s far more ways to be sexy than to dress in a miniskirt and a tank top … I think you attract a certain kind of man by dressing like that. Women wonder why they get beaten up, or have relationships with arsehole men. Because you attracted one, you twat.”

I can’t be the only twenty one year old woman who is no stranger to these warped opinions. The stance is deeply rooted in the notion that a woman’s body is some kind of public property that must be owned (not by the woman herself, mind) and protected by those who seek to steal or defile it. It’s an almost ingrained attitude that finds itself wheedling into every crevice of our culture- for example, many women who experience street harassment find telling the pursuer that she has a boyfriend is an effective deterrent- ‘thanks for the attention, but I’m already owned by somebody else’.

Arguments that attempt to justify victim blaming often (if not always) equate women’s bodies to property, money, or food. All of these things are less than human. Women are none of those things. Victim blaming absolves those who sexually harass, assault, and rape of all responsibility, shifting the focus to the person they did it to. Additionally, it paints men as uncontrollable sex beasts who are lead entirely by their insatiable penises, devoid of morals, logic, and empathy. In short, victim blaming undermines us all.

False debate about women’s clothing is definitive of rape culture. It excuses abusers for the crimes they commit. Maybe we should stop asking women if our clothes make us more susceptible to sexual assault, and stop letting abusers off the hook.

Women’s bodies are dragged out into the public sphere over and over again. Right wing extremists attempt to legislate subjective sexual morality amongst the echelons of power, from Nadine Dorries in the UK to republicans in the United States. Whilst these people make decisions about how we should conduct our bodies, we are being dissected.

Nobody ever claimed that the slutwalk movement celebrates promiscuity in women. But even if it did- so what? For hundreds of years, woman’s virtue has been inexplicably linked with chastity. We are constantly being defined by what we don’t do. The virgin/whore dichotomy is nothing new. We live in a time when Tory MPs are sitting in parliament pushing regressive abstinence agendas that teach young women that sex isn’t something you participate in, it’s something that you give up. The hand wringing hysteria over assertive female sexuality sexual autonomy is both extremely archaic and very much alive.

All of this is why I welcome the slutwalk movement with open arms.

The movement’s website states: ‘With sexual assault already a significantly under-reported crime, survivors have now been given even less of a reason to go to the Police, for fear that they could be blamed. Being assaulted isn’t about what you wear; it’s not even about sex; but using a pejorative term to rationalize inexcusable behaviour creates an environment in which it’s okay to blame the victim.’

Basic feminism 101. So why the backlash? It seems the name of the movement has caused confusion- some more methodical than others. I used to respect the anti-pornography campaigner Gail Dines, but her problem with feminist activists organising without her permission is unnerving. I admit, I must have missed the memo that confirmed she was crowned Queen of Feminism, because her approach to the debate appears to be very much her way, or the highway. Gail, along with professor of sexual violence Wendy J Murphy, have voiced strong opposition to the idea of slutwalks, asserting that women should not be fighting for the right to be called sluts. Whilst I sympathise with their  reservations about the word, but I just can’t agree with the way they have let their concerns hijack the very real issue of victim blaming. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that the misinterpretation of the cause and the consequent Guardian article condemning the march has single handedly begun the avalanche of misinformed debate that is obscuring the original cause of the march. As for Gail’s continued worry that concentrating on slutwalks will deplete precious feminist resources- I’m confused. I didn’t realise every feminist activist ran out of feminist energy at the end of every month. Should we be calling Dines for a top up?

Yes, the word slut is a contentious and derogatory term, with its conception mired in slut shaming and victim blaming. However, I can’t help wonder if Gail Dines and Wendy Murphy are wilfully missing the point. Surely the name of the march is a direct response to the policeman’s comment. Why are they choosing to ignore this? With a mainstream culture that rarely challenges victim blaming, I’m not sure if we should be trying to pick apart a genuinely well-meaning movement in its infancy.

The subsequent backlash over reclaiming the word slut doesn’t just shove the original cause to the margins, it is also incredibly indicative of a repetitive cultural hysteria over women’s sexual autonomy. What does promiscuity mean anyway? In this context it seems to be that age old outrage about women enjoying and even pursuing (!) sex- otherwise known as slut shaming. I doubt these links are a coincidence.

I’ve no inclination to reclaim the word slut, but I do believe that we should start shouting about how the word is consistently used to shame and blame women. That’s why I’ll be going on the march, and you should too.

An interview with studentbeans.com

I’ve been interviewed by the nice people of studentbeans.com about this very blog! Find it here. 

Thanks, feminism

It’s the 100^th anniversary of International Women’s Day today! I’m feeling a bit emotional about it. In fact, I think I might like International Women’s Day more than I like Christmas day.

The women and girls of my generation often enjoy the achievements of feminism without really giving any credit to the women who fought for it. There are those who actively reject feminists of old, and those who tell me feminism is no longer relevant. They’re wrong.

I wrote this for IWD 2010 in the midst of my feminist awakening. Up until then I’d felt something strange was going on, sensed some injustice, but the concept of feminism was completely alien to me. The closest I’d ever come to it was girl power- false empowerment wrapped up in a capitalist bow.

It’s funny that just a year ago I was only vaguely dipping my toes into the ocean of activism that I soon discovered exists. Feminism is such a huge part of my life now that I couldn’t imagine me without it.

So, I’m going to dedicate this post to saying thanks to feminism.

Thanks, feminism- if it wasn’t for feminism, I wouldn’t be at university.

Thank you, first wave feminists, for fighting for my right to vote.

Thank you, second wave feminists, for freeing my generation from that restrictive, singular career choice of wife and mother. Thanks to feminism I am not consigned to a life of domesticity. And If I chose to be, that would be ok, because it would be my informed choice, not one thrust upon me.

If I choose to get married and my husband views my body as his instead of mine, I can report him to the police. Thanks for that, feminism.

Thank you feminism for fighting for me and every other little girl of my generation to have options past fulfilling and supporting men. Thanks for letting me know that it’s ok to be my own person and have my own dreams, that I don’t have to consign my life to the male gaze, and that marriage isn’t my only destiny. Thanks for assuring me that I can have and own sexual feelings without having to feel dirty or wrong.

Thank you feminism, for handing me control over my own uterus.

Thanks feminism, and your consequential activism, for introducing me to some rather awesome people this year.

Thanks to feminism I’m a lucky, lucky girl. When I speak to older feminists I hear horrific stories of blatant and overt discrimination, 20, 30, 40 years ago, based entirely on their gender, and for black feminists, also their race. It makes me sad. It makes me angry. But just because that misogyny isn’t as overt today (sweeping generalisation, it often is, and is disguised as ‘banter’ or justified with blind and dogged misogyny) doesn’t mean it’s disappeared. Misogyny is clever, it’s sophisticated and manipulative. Misogyny is in those images of impossible ideals marketed to young women that eventually makes impressionable minds ill. It’s in that anti-wrinkle cream that promises eternal youth and advocates that warped message that older women are no longer sexually attractive and therefore invisible. It lingers upon page three of The Sun and in those lads mags that make you feel uncomfortable when you pop into your local newsagents. It’s rife in porn, which seems to be serving increasingly as sex education and somehow dictating just how far women’s bodies can be brutalised, and just how much men can do to them.

So I’m eternally grateful to the feminists and womanists and women-who-didn’t-define-as-feminists-but-still-fought-for-equality of the past. I’m a 21 year old woman enjoying the achievements of their efforts, but despite this I still understand that there’s work to be done. Because as long as women’s bodies are still seen as public space, still used as insults, still used as a synonym for weak and pathetic, as long as women are beaten by their husbands; and as long as women and girls across the globe are denied access to education,  equal pay or just any work at all, as long as governments see fit to control women’s bodies, and as long as women are bought and sold in the name of objectification, as long as women’s genitals are sliced and stitched and mutilated for fake notions of chastity; as long as women have to suffer sexual shame, as long as single mothers are blamed for the ills of society, as long as a woman’s work is never done, and as long as women and girls are blamed for sexual assault and rape, as long as women internationally are confined to lives of domesticity and servitude, as long as women’s bodies are oiled up and dissected in music videos, as long as the female form is used to sell things, and as long as women are seen as subordinate to men;

That’s how long I’ll keep fighting the feminist cause. Solidarity.

America’s uterus police

I wrote a guest post for Education for Choice, which I shall also cross post here.

It must be very difficult to be a poor woman in the US right now. Rich, white, powerful men have spent the past few weeks in Congress making life changing decisions that will ultimately determine whether women will be granted control over their own bodies.

Unfortunately, it looks like Congress is winning.

If you follow American politics, you may have noticed that there has been an unprecedented rise of right wing patriarchal traditionalism in recent months- a movement that is callously concentrated on keeping women in their subordinate place.

First came the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act. In this bill, speaker of the house John Boehner asserted that funding for abortions should only be provided to women who have been ‘forcibly raped’. With this phrasing, Boehner aspired to realign the definition of rape so that it fitted neatly with his own ideology. ‘Forcibly raped’ quite unsubtly suggests that women who don’t emerge from rape or sexual assault covered in bruises are somehow lying or disingenuous when they ask for help. It excludes victims of incest who are over 18. ‘Forcibly raped’ immediately eliminates those women who have been raped whilst drugged, raped whilst intoxicated, or manipulated and groomed.

Then, Congress voted to strip Planned Parenthood, America’s largest sexual and reproductive health provider of funding – effectively barring access to hundreds upon thousands of poor women across America who can’t afford healthcare.

Currently, South Dakota is considering a law that would make abortion providers guilty of a crime punishable by death.

And now, Republican Rep. Bobby Franklin is campaigning to classify abortion as murder, and wants to put policy in place that would require hospitals to report all spontaneous miscarriages so that women can be investigated for abortion. He’s joined Wisconsin Republican Governor Scott Walker in an all-out assault on abortion rights.

For too long now, the misconception that pro-choice means anti life has warped public debate about women’s reproductive rights. This mistaken logic leads to anti-choicers branding sexual health and abortion clinics as murder houses, which couldn’t be further from the truth. The same people campaigning to ban abortion are often those campaigning to restrict sex education, with the misguided belief that abstinence is the only way to curb teen pregnancy.  To assert that young women shouldn’t have sex if they don’t want to get pregnant is absurd. Take a look around at our hyper sexualised culture and you’ll notice one stark factor – the idea of pregnancy has been completely divorced from the concept of sex.

Educating young women about sex and relationships, as well as granting them access to contraception and the morning after pill are all key factors that are likely to reduce the rates of abortion.  Pro-choice means granting women the dignity to make their own decisions without governments interfering with and attempting to control their reproductive organs. Motherhood is glorious, but women aren’t baby machines. Much of the abortion debate has been fuelled by ideology; with those in government putting their own beliefs before the health and well-being of women in their own country. A recent US study found that 77% of anti-abortion leaders are men. 100% of them will never be pregnant.

It’s a funny paradox that the American republican right occupy themselves with. In the midst of all this passion to rescue potential life, they’ve forgotten actual life – the women having to make these difficult and devastating decisions. The women who own these bodies. In the middle of a recession, America’s republican men and women are more interested in policing women’s bodies instead of focusing on wider social, cultural and economic causes of a catastrophic financial crisis. It seems, in times of austerity, it’s easier to bully and belittle those with no power rather than address real issues. These false bastions of the family are currently channelling all their energy into making the world a harsher place for American women.

On things we are not allowed to say…

It’s always good fun to see white men pass big fat swathes of unfounded judgement on the black community- in particular, black women. I usually steer clear of conservative or right wing blogs as they tend to leave a nasty after-taste, but I was intrigued when Tim Montgomerie, editor of leading political blog Conservative Home, tweeted a link to a post from Graeme Archer. A ‘brilliant piece’, he tweeted, ‘on what we are and are not allowed to say’. I respect Montgomerie’s commentary, so I clicked, assuming a piece on state censorship, or freedom of information. What I got was a thinly veiled attack on the black community, our make-up, and a hand wringing lament on fatherless homes.

Last week, 20 year old aspiring hip hop dancer Claudia Seye Aderotimi tragically passed away after travelling abroad to receive silicone injections in her buttocks.

Archer’s post, entitled ‘Don’t Look Now’, ended with the gem ‘Why mustn’t you say these things? Oh come on, do I have to spell it out? You haven’t mentioned ethnicity once. But you will be called a racist.’

His knee-jerk desire to blame this tragic case entirely on the black community is really quite worrying.

Graeme Archer doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He blames Hip Hop when he should really be blaming the patriarchy. Hip Hop is predominately misogynistic because its control is in the hands of men, who regard women as little more than oiled up, jiggly, rotund decoration for their pleasure.

The unique thing about the patriarchy is that allows men from all cultures to band together and sneer at the women who go to great lengths to fit their arbitrary definitions of what’s acceptable, and what’s not. Archer is right when he describe the misogynistic nature of Hip Hop as ‘a machine which is used by its owners to enrich themselves, to set out their desired norms regarding female behaviour and appearance’. I blogged about that a few weeks ago. But he loses all equality points with his discriminatory stance on black women’s bodies and the black community as a whole.  His offhand comments about black women’s ‘over-inflated backsides’ reveal an ugly misogyny that he tries hard to disguise at the beginning of his piece. I’m a black woman, and I have news for him- some of us don’t undergo surgery to gain our big backsides- we are naturally shaped that way. It’s just that this body shape is now held up as the aspirational ideal- kind of like playboy bunnies and big breasts. And, as we have enough hassle from the extreme objectification of our bodies in these videos orchestrated by black men, we could do without the wrinkled nose disgust about black women’s body shapes from white men like him.

Personally, I miss the days when Hip Hop was like this, rather than the commercialised rubbish beamed out on MTV Base. The body fascist patriarchy manifests itself in all sorts of subcultures. Each hold different specifics but the crux of the message is the same- women, you have to be this body shape to be perfect.

Shame on you, Conservative Home. If you wanted astute analysis on this tragic case, plenty of black, female writers would have been happy to contribute. Maybe even a young, black, female writer- the unfortunate target audience of Hip Hop’s ugly machine. Perhaps then the post would have focused on the very real problem of body Hip Hop’s body facism, rather than descending into an arm flailing, wailing lament about ‘kids these days’ from an out of touch old fogey.

Archer’s comments on Hip Hop’s ugly, inhuman machine are entirely misappropriated. Its patriarchy’s machine we should be worrying about. Conveniently, he fails to mention any cases outside of Hip Hop culture that detail women undergoing cosmetic procedures with fatal results. This is a symptom of impossibly achievable ideals that are sold to women as aspirational. It’s horribly tragic, and the ideal doesn’t just exist in the black community. Maybe cosmetic surgery related deaths outside of hip hop culture probably doesn’t fit into Archer’s ‘self-destructive black community’ narrative that he’s so eager to promote. Instead, he makes disjointed connections about teenagers on the top decks of buses and fatherless homes. Graeme- I grew up in a black, fatherless home with plenty of boundaries- and those boundaries made me the person I am today. You can take your undiscerning, unfounded generalisations, and piss off.

Leave Aaron Porter alone!

People are saying that the student movement is dead. And I wish I could disagree fully, but this stupid factionalist infighting is getting us nowhere. To be clear- I don’t intend of making any sweeping generalisations about who belongs to what political party in this post. I’m not into lazy labelling. All of us in the student movement are fiercely opposed to cuts and higher fees, but the Porter hunt is getting in the way of that.

Today’s action in Glasgow just looks like intimidation and bullying tactics. The consequent laughter and jeering on twitter and facebook was embarrassingly vindictive. People comparing Porter to Hosni Mubarak is mind-bogglingly ridiculous. On the 29th, I was in Manchester when Porter was chased, and as the reports came in my heart sank because I knew those of us who were there but weren’t involved in it would be held to account by people who tar all students with the same brush.  NUS’ national conference is coming up in the next couple of months, which means those of us who are actually students can get elected to conference, represent our SUs and vote for the next NUS president. This ‘authentic’ student specification may seem an arbitrary binary, but, whatever you think of him, Porter was elected amongst the student population, not by the supporters of students. March, occupy and protest with us if you like, but the democratic process should really be left to students and students only.

I digress. One of the student movement’s brightest assets is also one of its biggest downfalls. We’re young; we’re determined, enthusiastic, and vibrant. But with youth often comes accusations of naivety, idealism, and- dare I say it- a lack of self-awareness. I don’t think this is true. I’ve been at organising meetings where students debate intensely about press coverage which is great. But the student movement isn’t centralised, there’s pockets of us planning all over the country, and whilst some care about how we appear from the outside, it looks like others don’t.

Reflection is important. Press coverage matters because public support is one of the key factors in orchestrating a successful campaign. Right now we all look like idiots squabbling amongst ourselves.

The student movement isn’t dead- and I have a feeling that various branches of the anti-cuts movement will gather together for one big fight back against the coalition’s cuts. But this Porter hunt is hindering us.

The Joy of Teen Sex?

I’ve written another piece for The Guardian’s Comment is Free, this time on Channel 4′s Joy of Teen Sex.

‘Society has always been reluctant to address teenage sex and its consequences, and the ongoing battle in parliament for compulsory sex and relationship education (SRE) in schools reflects this – Chris Bryant’s compulsory SRE bill is going through its second reading in the House of Commons. In any case, young people’s sex lives need to be debated further…’

Read the rest here!