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
Sheila Jeffreys IS my sister. This is a post in response to this ridiculousness here. If you support Sheila Jeffreys and her wonderful work against the sexual exploitation of women in prostitution please copy this graphic and past it into your blogs. If you don’t have a blog come and share your love in the comments here. Let it be known that there are plenty of women (including women who have been prostituted) who love and support Sheila’s awesome, radical and powerful voice. Let it be known that she is our sister and we won’t let her be silenced.
Vandana Shiva is quite simply an incredible woman. Her life and her work are supremely inspirational. Her words have moved me, displaced me and changed my mind. Very, very few things that I read actually cause me to stop and look at the world from a completely different angle. Her work and her words are world-changing and mind-altering.
I read Ecofeminism (co-written with Maria Mies, another amazing eco-feminist) about a year ago and was just stunned by this woman, by the clarity of her thoughts and her insights. This woman is SMART. She cuts right clear down to the quick and turns the whole world and its crapitalist, male supremacist bullshit on its head.
Dams, mines, energy plants, military bases – these are the temples of the new religion called ‘development’, a religion that provides the rationale for the modernizing state, its bureaucracies and technocracies. What is sacrificed at the alter of this religion is nature’s life and people’s life. The sacraments of development are made of the ruins and desecration of other sacreds, especially sacred soils. They are based on the dismantling of society and community, on the uprooting of people and cultures. Since soil is the sacred mother, the womb of life in nature and society, its inviolability has been the organizing principle for societies which ‘development’ has declared backward and primitive. But these people are our contemporaries. They differ from us not in belonging to a bygone age but in having a different concept of what is sacred, what must be preserved. The sacred is the bond that connects the part to the whole. The sanctity of the soil must be sustained, limits must be set on human action. From the point of view of the managers of development, the high priests of the new religion, sacred bonds with the soil are impediments and hindrances to be shifted and sacrificed. Because people who hold the soil as sacred will not voluntarily allow themselves to be uprooted, ‘development’ requires a police state and terrorist tactics to wrench them away from their homes and homelands, and consign them as ecological and cultural refugees into the wasteland of industrial society. Bullets, as well as bulldozers, are often necessary to execute the development project.
In India, the magnitude of this sacrifice is only now becoming evident. Victims of progress have, of course, experienced their own uprooting and have resisted it. But both the victims and the state perceived each sacrifice as a small one for the larger ‘national interest’. Over 40 years of planned development, the planned destruction of nature and society no longer appears negligible; and the larger ‘national interest’ turns out to be embodied in an elite minority without roots. Fifteen million people have been uprooted from their homelands in India during the past four development decades. They and their links with the soil, have been sacrificed to accommodated mines, dams, factories, and wildlife parks.
‘Development’ has meant the ecological and cultural rupture of bonds with nature, and within society, it has meant the transformation of organic communities into groups of uprooted and alienated individuals searching for abstract identities.
Colonialism and capitalism transformed land and soil from being a source of life and a commons from which people draw sustenance, into private property to be bought and sold and conquered; development continued colonialism’s unfinished task. It transformed man from the role of guest to predator. In a sacred space, one can only be a guest, one cannot own it. This attitude to the soil and earth as a sacrilized home, not private property, is characteristic of most Third World societies.
In indigenous communities, individuals have no property rights, instead, the entire tribe is the trustee of the land it occupies, and the community or tribe includes not only the currently living members but also the ancestors and future generations.
Development has converted soil from sacred mother into disposable object – to be ravaged for minerals that lie below, or drowned beneath gigantic reservoirs. The soil’s children, too, have been made disposable: mines and dams leave behind wastelands and uprooted people. The desacrilization of the soil as sacred space was an essential part of colonialism then and of development now.
In effect, the process of development leads to turning away from the soil as a source of meaning and survival, and turning to the state and its resources for both. The destruction of organic links with the soil also leads to the destruction of organic links within society. Diverse communities, co-operating with each other and the land become different communities competing with each other for the conquest of the land. The homogenization processes of development do not fully eliminate differences. These persist, not in an integrating context of plurality, but in the fragmenting context of homogenization. Positive pluralities give way to negative dualities, each in competion with every ‘other’, contesting the scarce resources that define economic and political power. The project of development is propounded as a source of growth and abundance. Yet by destroying the abundance that comes from the soil and replacing it by the resources of the state, new scarcities and new conflicts for scarce resources are created. Scarcity, not abundance, characterizes situations where nothing is sacred and everything has a price.
Vandana mentions the Chipko women’s movement in this vid. You can find out more about them here.
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.
Well, it has been a year since I have been in my new home, here at wordpress. It has been a pretty eventful year for my blogging career what with the Whedonites and the MRAs all descending on my little blog like flies to honey. Thanks to their wonderful linkage skills I’ve had close to 100 000 hits this year. :p
But it has been a really wonderful year as well. I’ve met so many wonderful, inspiring women. You internet sisters enrich my life. Thanks for all of your wonderful support, love and enthusiasm. I have learnt so much from the comments that you have made here. I have learnt so much from reading the writing of the women on my blogroll… and elsewhere. You have all touched me and changed me, in so many different, brilliant ways.
So here is to another year of radical lesbian feminism allecto style. Here is to another year of change. Because I am young and foolish enough to believe and dream that a woman-centred, matrifocal world is possible. If only here, in the beautiful, lushious radical feminist blogosphere. And I am going to do my best to keep those dreams alive.
The Human Rights Film Festival is touring Australia with many great films and documentaries about women. Unfortunately, as is often the case, most of the ones I’d really like to see are only being shown in Melbourne. These are the ones I’m going to see.
Behind Forgotten Eyes
Reel Change (short films about Climate Change) which includes Sisters on the Planet:
Ursula is a traditional owner of one of the Carteret Islands, off the coast of Papua New Guinea. Against a ticking clock, Ursula is working to relocate thousands of Islanders forced to uproot their lives due to rising sea levels which will leave their island home submerged and uninhabitable in just a matter of years.
Sisters on the Planet hones in on the tragic effects of climate change and those most startlingly affected.
and An Uncertain Future:
An Uncertain Future tells the story of the 2000-strong community living in the Cartaret Islands who will soon become the world’s first climate change refugees.
Made by a group of young Cartaret Islanders who had never before touched a camera, computer or MP3 player, this film poetically captures the views and reflections of the people as they prepare to relocate to the mainland due to rises in sea level which will make their Pacific island home disappear in a matter of years.
Screen Dreaming: Indigenous Shorts Session, which includes Backseat:
Inspired by Pauline Whyman’s own experience, Back Seat tells the story of a young Aboriginal girl Janine who goes with her foster parents to meet her biological family for the first time. From the back seat of her foster parent’s car, Janine watches as her blood family come into view and then recede into the distance.
Nana:
Nana’s granddaughter thinks Nana’s pretty special. She loves her Nana because she helps the old people, she’s a good painter and other people love her too. Nana’s got everyone under control.
Following the 2007 release of the Little Children Are Sacred report – which exposed a worrying prevalence of child abuse in indigenous communities – the Howard government responded by bringing in emergency legislation known as ‘The Intervention’. This new policy generated public outcry and upturned the lives of the Northern Territory’s indigenous population.
Based on 40 interviews from a cross section of the aboriginal community living in and around Alice Springs, Intervention discusses town camps, quarantine laws, ration cards, alcoholism and the shame and disempowerment that has ensued as a consequence of governmental intrusion.
Lamberti, who has lived in Alice Springs since 2005, creates an intimate forum, straight from the community’s mouth. The end result is a rich dialogue of stories and viewpoints rarely found in mainstream media. The people whose lives have been affected since the implementation of the policy in 2007, were never given the chance to have their say. This is their voice.
Our Voices Matter (OVM) is a new, grassroots, online project being launched to bring to the forefront the voices of individuals who have been harmed by prostitution, pornography, and/or trafficking. OVM seeks to provide a safe space for survivors to give voice to how prostitution, pornography, and trafficking have impacted their lives.
Our Voices Matter aims to shatter silences, create healing, raise awareness and incite action. OVM seeks to gather the pain, hurt, abuse, and horrors of survivors into a loud, overwhelming, and hopeful outcry that can and will be heard. OVM is an assertion that women and children matter; that the quest for a day when women and children are not bought and sold is worth fighting for; and that real social change is imperative to actualizing this goal.
Please help spread the word.
Go visit this new site. It is brilliant.
Sign the petition. Because Black women matter.
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Gorgon Poisons 