DUDE SPOTTED AT OCCUPY PERTH, WESTERN AUSTRALIA
When confronted (I took his picture and called him a fuckhead with all the venom I could muster), dude says, “Hey, you are being violent to me!!!” Poor little man attacked by nasty feminists for not doing anything at all! He valiantly tried to defend himself saying that his father bought him the t-shirt from Thailand! And the t-shirt WAS NOT VIOLENT in the slightest. Not like us nasty, mean feminists.
Misogyny? I’m loving it! Are you?
This is a speech I gave at Reclaim the Night Perth, 28th October 2011.
Women are a colonised people. Under male supremacy, our original selves are forcibly buried and we are reshaped, our Selves conditioned for use and abuse by the men who occupy us. And this is a truly encompassing occupation. They not only occupy our time and energy, they infiltrate and invade, they alter what it is we believe about ourselves, they construct our identities from birth into being for them.
Under male supremacy, rape and sexual violence is the fabric of the culture in which we live. Women’s purpose is shaped according to what men value about us. We are valued in accordance with our fuckability, our submissiveness, our conformity to their value system which posits women as whores. We are vulnerable, we are penetrable, we are for use and abuse, we are colonised and we are for men.
Men construct the world around this value system. They buy and sell women and girls as sex and call it prostitution. They create degraded images of women being hurt and fucked and raped and call it pornography. Women and girls survive this occupation. We see ourselves starving and trussed up in shop windows, on the sides of buses, on newsstands and in the grocery store. And we survive this. We see little girls wearing Playboy bracelets, young women and girls being branded by the sex industry, stamped as whores, stamped as being owned. And we are still surviving this.
Tonight we are reclaiming more than the night. We are reclaiming ourselves. We are saying, loudly and clearly, “no woman is a whore”. And we are standing with every woman who has been beaten, every woman who has been raped and we are reclaiming ourselves. Men have shaped our realities for far too long, it is time we take back what is ours.
see
that no matter what you have done
i am still here.
and it has made me dangerous, and wise.
and brother,
you cannot whore, perfume, and suppress me anymore.
i have my own business in this skin
and on this planet.
Gail Murray
The issue of abortion and contraception seems to be a straightforward one for most feminists. They are considered to be a fundamental right, and access to safe, legal and affordable contraception and abortion on demand is said to be necessary for women’s sexual freedom. I would argue that from a radical lesbian point of view, the reverse is actually true.
Now, I do not deny that access to contraception and abortion is absolutely necessary for women to have any semblance of control over their reproduction, right now… as we are living under male supremacy and women’s Selves and sexualities are fundamentally controlled by male ideas of women’s sexual function. Women’s sexual awareness is tightly controlled by the media, by the porn industry, by father’s, brother’s, husband’s, lover’s, son’s; and our function is clear: we are fuck objects, our function in sex is to be fucked.
Intercourse is central to sexual relations between men and women in our male supremacist society. Most of us do not question its primacy and its place in sexual intimacy… it just is. When men and women get together and have a relationship they are expected to fuck on a regular basis. If they are not fucking on a regular basis, something is considered to be wrong… the relationship is not functioning… sex is not occurring. For a detailed deconstruction of intercourse and the way that men and women are conditioned into coital sexuality read Anticlimax by Sheila Jeffries and Intercourse by Andrea Dworkin.
Anyways, centering abortion and contraception as necessary for women’s sexual freedom and as a fundamental human right presupposes that intercourse is a natural expression of women’s sexuality and that intercourse will continue to occur with the same frequency once women have complete control over their own bodies. Now I would argue that that is one hell of a presupposition.
The reality is that intercourse is the cause of unwanted pregnancy. Given that we know, as women and as radical feminists, the extent to which women are bullied, coerced and downright forced into allowing men access to their bodies… do we really think that intercourse will happen anywhere near as frequently as it does now, once women have actual sexual freedom? I personally doubt it.
While I agree that abortion and contraception are necessary at the moment, because we are living under male supremacy, women do not have any level of sexual freedom and intercourse is an unfortunate reality in many women’s lives… I am also looking forward to a time where abortion and contraception are no longer necessary. A time where women can engage freely, safely and lovingly in relations with other women, or in non-coital relationships with men.
I cannot in good conscience jump on the abortion/contraception is great for women bandwagon. In my opinion it has done as much damage as good. In reality, it gives men another crowbar with which to wedge open women’s legs. Yes, it gives *some* women, *some* level of control but it is a very, very far cry from actual liberation.
What does real freedom look like? Well, I have never had to take any unnecessary hormone pills for one thing. I have had lots of wonderful, messy, lusty, loud, sexually intimate moments with my last partner and I have never had to run to the chemist for a morning after pill, never had to buy condoms… or any of the other weird paraphernalia of heterosexual relations. Lesbianism is a 100% effective, safe and affordable contraceptive.
To summarise: intercourse causes unwanted pregnancy. Intercourse is totally unnecessary for women’s sexual pleasure. Access to abortion and contraception has not delivered either sexual or reproductive freedom for women. Demand for abortion would decrease dramatically once women have control over their physical integrity, and once our sexualities are no longer conditioned and controlled by men.
Basically, I don’t think that either contraception or abortion is the ‘solution’ to women’s reproductive rights even though I fully support women’s right to access free, safe and legal contraception and abortion.
At the moment Australia is a little bit upset because yet another football team has been going around gang raping women. They are calling this ‘event’ (as if it only happened one time) a ‘sex scandal’ (as if sex had anything to do with it, unless sex is rape, which, you know, a case could be made for that point). In any case the women who are being raped and seriously harmed by the violence of these men are being sidelined. It is the reputation of the club/player/institution that is being tarnished. It is the sad ruination of a career, the mussing up of a happy family (yeah, like the wife and kids aren’t getting raped as well), etc, etc. My heart bleeds.
What I don’t get is why this is ‘shocking’ news. Men rape women. The more power a man has access to, the more women he has access to rape. Men gang rape women. They coerce, intimidate and force women into sexual submission. Football players are men. Football players have access to a lot of power and hence a lot of women. Football players, like all men, are powerfully attracted to other football players. They see women as their inferiors. As women could never be seen as, or treated as equals, these men primarily bond with each other and their homoerotic games are obvious to anyone who has eyes. Football is just a socially approved way that men show off their love for one another. Gang rape is the sexual extension of men’s homoerotic desire for one another.
So footie players gang-rape teenage girls, well duh!! Of course they do. No one is surprised that they do, in fact they are expected to do so. How else can they express their homosexual desires for each other? How else can they prove their manliness to their team-mates?
Last weekend I flew from Perth to Sydney. It was a 4 and a half hour flight. As I was getting on the plane I noticed a bunch of hulking brutes, all wearing identical t-shirts, standing in the queue to board the flight. From their appearance, I guessed they were a football team. I couldn’t believe the unluck of the situation. The grotesque men had porn magazines stuffed under their arms. Disgusting creatures. I was so worried when boarding that flight. I dreaded that I would be seated next to or near the fuckers and I had no idea how I could deal with that situation. Four and a half hours sitting near a bunch of serial gang rapists.
Thankfully, though I was seated near the gross, disgusting, misshapen creatures, they must have been tired, or too busy group masturbating into their porn mags to make much noise. But the situation really pissed me off. Surely women should have the right to board a plane that does not contain probable rapists. Why do I have to be assaulted by the presence of rapist men, who are blatantly affirming their exulted status as rapists, by carrying around pornographic magazines? This is fucked up, women.
I think there is a very simple solution to the ‘problem’ of the team sport of gang-raping that is so popular as a form of gay male bonding between football players. Mandatory castration of all men who play football and all men who watch football. This would be a quick and easy solution. The violent, woman-hating ‘sport’ will disappear overnight and women will be a little bit safer in this fucked up and dangerous world, full of fucked up and seriously dangerous men.
Football would not exist in a world where women are free and liberated. Nor would the gang rape of teenage girls. Goddess, how I wish, hope, rant, plead and pray for such a world. To all of the many, many women and girls out there who have been raped by football players and their fans, I love you. Thank you for speaking out, for surviving. I hold you in my heart. Your courage is immeasurable. Don’t give up. There are many, many women out here who believe you, who respect you. You are not nothing. You will never be nothing. They are the ones who are nothing.
*This is a thought-provoking guest post written by my sisterfriend Amazon Mancrusher.*
Why lesbian has become a dirty word
You would think the word lesbian would have gotten less radical rather than more radical since the 1970’s but that doesn’t seem to be the case. These days, fewer young women seem to be identifying as lesbian, choosing instead to use queer, gay or pan to describe who they have relationships with and how they feel about their sexuality and political identity. This article will explore why young women who have intimate relationships with other women have rejected the term lesbian.
The word lesbian originates from the island of Lesbos in Greece, where a poet called Sappho lived. The people of Lesbos have historically been known as lesbians. Sappho wrote love poems to other women, many of which were destroyed by religious fundamentalists and the term lesbian became known as a term to describe women who love other women.
In the 1970’s, many women organised a feminist women’s liberation movement, in which lesbianism become a highly politicised and revolutionary concept. Many lesbians broke away from the gay liberation movement in favour of the women’s movement after making the analysis that they had more in common with straight women than gay men. They believed that gay men still benefitted from the gender hierarchy, know as patriarchy, in which the needs and human rights of women are invisible or secondary to the needs of men and where men dominate women through sexual and domestic violence. Their analysis showed that this still applied in the gay and lesbian community, where the political and social focus often focused on gay men and silenced the needs of lesbians.
Lesbians became highly visible in the 1970’s women’s liberation movement and many women who had previously seen themselves as heterosexual made choices based on their feminist politics to become lesbians, claiming that intimate relationships and sexuality are not biologically determined, but rather politically influenced. Feminists argued that heterosexuality was the cornerstone of male domination, because men are brought up to think that through heterosexual power relations, they have automatic sexual rights to women’s bodies. Feminists pointed out that the sexual power that men are granted encourages them to see the bodies of women as property or a commodity. This concept is backed up by society’s historical and cultural social structures through the laws of marriage and the culture of prostitution.
During this time, heterosexuality was ‘outed’ as something that was politically and socially compulsory rather than natural. Many feminists engaged in the women’s movement soon realised that there was a different choice and they chose lesbianism. For many women this was a choice of political resistance against compulsory heterosexuality, marriage and all other forms of male domination and gender hierarchy. Women also realised that they could make different decisions about what clothes to wear and whether to shave or wear makeup and many chose to reject feminine stereotypes. Sexual violence was finally theorised as stemming from power relations and male political domination, rather than a by-product of the ‘natural’ sex drive of men that they cannot control. This analysis meant that sexual relationships had to be politicised and the term ‘the personal is political’ became a well known feminist slogan relating to personal relationships.
Unfortunately, revolutionary lesbian resistance did not come with money and societal power and men with power in society, who control the media and finances, soon drove a powerful backlash campaign against lesbians that remains so toxic that it still poisons the lesbian community to this day. Worldwide media ran articles and news stories inflicting hatred upon women who rejected heterosexuality or rejected femininity, and claimed that lesbianism is ugly and that the rejection of femininity is inadequate for the physical desires of men. Another type of backlash against lesbians involved the depiction of women having sex with each other in pornography. These depictions were created by men who felt threatened by lesbian’s rejection of heterosexuality and wanted to place male needs back in the centre of the lives of lesbians and to recreate lesbianism in a way that they could control. Attitudes in society and the media continue to perpetuate the myth that lesbians are monstrous, revolting, unsightly beasts and lesbianism, especially in pornography is frequently represented as existing for titillation of heterosexual men.
So is it any wonder that women are rejecting this identity?
Lesbians themselves, especially those growing up in the backlash, have had little choice but to internalise this plethora of hatred and look for more palatable ways to survive and become more acceptable to their male peers and heterosexual friends. As a consequence, during the 90’s, lesbians increasingly withdrew from the women’s movement and returned to the gay liberation movement to seek political support from gay men. Many lesbians began to call themselves gay because it felt more palatable and less confrontational to their male friends.
Feminists have and continue to acknowledge that lesbians and gay men both face hatred for rejecting heterosexuality, and that a commonality exists but they also argue that the needs of lesbians and gay men are very different and that when they politically become a homogenous (same) group, that the needs will default to gay men, because as men, gay men have more economic and societal power.
The 1990’s also saw the rising influence of neo-liberalism and post-modernism, which both reject an analysis of social structures of oppression in favour of the analysis of individual power. Post-modern theorists claim that power is like a toy that can be played with by anyone, regardless of gender, race and class. Queer politics stemmed from post-modern theory, and argues that gender and sexuality can be performed and played with like a game. Adopting a queer identity became a way that lesbians could reject gender but remain palatable to gay men at the same time. Terms such as queer and pan have become used as a way of blurring the boundaries of gender. Many feminists claim that some post-modern and queer perspectives were harmful because they distort the reality of people’s day to day lives and deny the lived experience of women under patriarchy. Women living in domestic violence relationships or surviving rape are harmed by real violence stemming from real power structures. They ask how queer performance will ever help women around the world surviving rape, trafficking and domestic violence.
Queer politics proposes that if women play with their gender and do drag performances and reject the identity of woman then they will gain power. This technique has been used in recent events in the lesbian community with theme nights like Playboy where women were encouraged to dress up as Hugh Hefner in order to subvert the power dynamics. What queer politics does not tend to explore, is if these notions of male power are in fact positive in the first place and if women should claiming or subverting them will not just in reality just continue our gender binaries, albeit in a more performative way. Interestingly, queer politics has not been used by any other group to challenge hierarchy. Aboriginal people do not have colonial theme nights and dress up as white imperialists in order to distort racism and I have never heard of Jewish people coping with memories of the holocaust by holding a Nazi theme parties and playing with the role of being a Nazi. Any attempt to organise such an event would be met with confusion and probably outrage, but feminists and survivors of violence who criticize such notions of so called ‘subversion’ seem to be taken much less seriously.
To conclude, the backlash against women’s liberation has made it acceptable for the real lived experiences of women to be denied and almost impossible for lesbians to hang onto lesbianism as an alternative to a world where men’s needs dominate. It is easier, more palatable and less confrontational to be known as queer, gay or any other identity that decentres the needs of women.
by Amazon Mancrusher
Awe-inspiring, radical, charismatic, lesbian feminist Sheila Jeffreys has written a new book called The Industrial Vagina: The Political Economy of the Global Sex Trade. It looks like it will be a really eye-opening and well-researched book (as are all books written by Sheila Jeffreys). Radio National interviewed Sheila about the book. You can find the interview here Go listen. Sheila is awesome!
Caroline Norma in response to this article by Helen Razer.
Lessons in internet pornography Helen Razer is lucky she doesn’t live in China. The Chinese government last week shut down 244 pornography sites in a rolling campaign that it declares will be ‘no flash in the pan’. The Chinese government has made a bold public commitment to follow though on a promise to monitor and suppress the distribution of pornography, not just through the internet, but also via ‘mobile phone games, online novels and radio programs’ (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28752383/).
How would Razer fare as a Chinese woman living under a government that restricts the ability of its citizens to see pictures of men sexually penetrating women in a thousand different ways, using a thousand different implements? Razer is already worried that the Rudd government’s plan to suppress the distribution of child pornography will interfere with her pornography consumption. Imagine if Australia followed China’s lead and even suppressed pornography made out of women. Imagine the constraints that this would impose on Razer’s life!
Read the whole article on the STOP Australia blog. It is totally worth the read.
The following passages are lyrics to songs that some of the eight and nine year old girls that I work with bring in to listen and dance to. We have a CD player that the girls can grab whenever they want to listen to music. I’ve been dancing with them to these songs all year, not paying any attention to the lyrics. But yesterday I caught the word ‘pornography’ in one of the songs and I was like what the fuck!!? So I came home and did a search of a couple of these songs. This is what I found (***WARNING: could be triggering for survivors of prostitution and/or pornography***):
Low
[Verse 1:]
I ain’t never seen nuthin that’ll make me go,
This crazy all night spendin my dough
Had a million dollar vibe and a bottle to go
Dem birthday cakes, they stole the show
So sexual, she was flexible
Professional, drinkin X and ooo
Hold up wait a minute, do I see what I think I
Whoa
Did I think I seen shorty get low
Ain’t the same when it’s up that close
Make it rain, I’m makin it snow
Work the pole, I got the bank roll
Imma say that I prefer them no clothes
I’m into that, I love women exposed
She threw it back at me, I gave her more
Cash ain’t a problem, I know where it goesShe had them
[Chorus:]
Apple Bottom Jeans [Jeans]
Boots with the fur [With the fur]
The whole club was lookin at her
She hit the flo [She hit the flo]
Next thing you know
Shawty got low low low low low low low lowThem baggy sweat pants
And the Reeboks with the straps [With the straps]
She turned around and gave that big booty a smack
[Ayy]
She hit the flo [She hit the flo]
Next thing you know
Shawty got low low low low low low low low[Verse 2:]
Hey
Shawty what I gotta do to get you home
My jeans full of gwap
And they ready for Shones
Cadillacs Maybachs for the sexy grown
Patrone on the rocks that’ll make you moanOne stack (come on)
Two stacks (come on)
Three stacks (come on, now that’s three grand)What you think I’m playin baby girl
I’m the man, I’ll bend the rubber bandsThat’s what I told her, her legs on my shoulder
I knew it was ova, that Henny and Cola
Got me like a Soldier
She ready for Rover, I couldn’t control her
So lucky oo me, I was just like a clover
Shorty was hot like a toaster
Sorry but I had to fold her,
Like a pornography poster
She showed herChorus
[Verse 3:]
Whoa
Shawty
Yea she was worth the money
Lil mama took my cash,
And I ain’t want it back,
The way she bit that rag,
Got her them paper stacks,
Tattoo Above her crack,
I had to handle that,I was on it, sexy woman, let me shownin
They be want it two in the mornin
I’m zonin in them rosay bottles foamin
She wouldn’t stop, made it drop
Shorty did that pop and lock,
Had to break her off that gwap
Gah it was fly just like my glockChorus
Soulja Boy
Chorus:
Soulja Boy Off In This Hoe
Watch Me Crank It
Watch Me Roll
Watch Me Crank Dat Soulja Boy
Then Super Man Dat Hoe
Now Watch Me Do
(Crank Dat Soulja Boy)Soulja Boy Off In This Hoe
Watch Me Crank It
Watch Me Roll
Watch Me Crank Dat Soulja Boy
Then Super Man Dat Hoe
Now Watch Me Do
(Crank Dat Soulja Boy)Verse 1:
Soulja Boy Off In This Hoe
Watch Me Lean And Watch Me Rock
Super Man Dat Hoe
Then Watch Me Crank Dat Robocop
Super Fresh, Now Watch Me Jock
Jocking On Them Haterz Man
When I Do Dat Soulja Boy
I Lean To The Left And Crank Dat Thang
(Now You)
I’m Jocking On Yo Bitch Ass
And If We Get The Fightin
Then I’m Cocking On Your Bitch
You Catch Me At Yo Local Party
Yes I Crank It Everyday
Haterz Get Mad Cuz
“I Got Me Some Bathin Apes”Chorus
Verse 2:
I’m Bouncin On My Toe
Watch Me Super Soak Dat Hoe
I’ma Pass It To Arab
Then He Gon Pass It To The Low (Low)
Haterz Wanna Be Me
Soulja Boy, I’m The Man
They Be Lookin At My Neck
Sayin Its The Rubberband Man (Man)
Watch Me Do It (Watch Me Do It)
Dance (Dance)
Let Get To It (Let Get To It)
Nope, You Can’t Do It Like Me
Hoe, So Don’t Do It Like Me
Folk, I See You Tryna Do It Like Me
Man That Shit Was UglyChorus
Hook:
Im to freah off in this hoe
Watch me crank it
Watch me roll
Watch me crank that roosavelt
And super soak that Hoe
And super soak that hoe
and super soak that hoe
and super soak that hoe
and super soak that hoe
Im to fresh up in this bitch
Watch me shuffle
Watch me jig
Watch me crank my shoulder work
Super man
Do it
So all year girls as young as 5 have been dancing along to this shit. I can’t really describe how sickened I am by this. I can’t believe that the parents of the girls who bring this stuff in to listen to haven’t cottoned on to these lyrics. Do they know what these songs are saying? Do they care?
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