Women, activism, anger, and other things I've been up to..

I write and publish a great deal these days, and sometimes, like this week, there'll be a publication run where pieces I'm reasonably proud of will come out almost every day. Not only do I not want the hard work I put into these articles to go to waste, you can get a better sense of where my politics are and what I'm interested in right now from looking at what I'm writing all in one place. So here are this week's offerings, which appear to be about feminism, trolling, the state of the left, personal and political revolution and Rush Limbaugh's terrible face.

So, it turns out that feminism is a CIA plot to undermine the left - blog for New Statesman. In which I encounter the American dudeleft and pull some strange faces in a New York bookshop. Video editing by Willie Osterweil.

Eating disorders and the White Strike - when youthful dissidence cannibalises itself - column for New Statesman. This was quite a personal piece and harder to write than I thought it would be. I could write a whole book on the topic, so getting to the point in 600 words was a good exercise.

A report from Occupy AIPAC - for The Independent. In which I go to Washington DC and watch peace activists pretend to be doing something new, and learn more about lobbying.

Sugar Daddies - for Salon.com. A report on the trend of older, rich men looking to pay financially desperate, 'non professional' women for sex, affection and maybe a bit of tidying. In which I troll the hell out of some creeps on the internet for fun and feminism.

Rush Limbaugh, Sexist Shit and the Art of the Decoy - a blog for New Statesman. Written mostly in a rage-fuge in the back of a friend's play, having just drunk some absinthe by accident (I can't have absinthe since that night in 2005 of which we do not speak). Features a metaphor about arses I'm quite pleased with.

Deeds, not Words: a column for International Women's Day 2012 - For the Independent. The effervescent Molly Crabapple did an illustration to go with this piece, which I am stupendously excited about, and you should all go to her Kickstarter and get involved in redefining gallery art for the 99% or some aesthetic revolution or other, I don't know, I'm all tuckered out after this week and should probably have more coffee absolutely right this minute.

Ciao, L

Speech on Body Image for International Women's Day.

I'm still up, so it's still International Women's day. Here's the speech I made at today's launch of the Real Women campaign in Portcullis house, alongside Susie Orbach, which was more than a little intimidating. The campaign aims to bring together people who are working on body image, beauty fashion and feminism into a broader political movement, and has specific policy objectives like kitemarking of heavily airbrushed images in advertising. I wrote this speech in about half an hour, but it came from the heart more than many things that I've had more time to think about.

Hope you enjoy - and Happy International Women's Day.

* * *

I understand that I've been invited here to speak to you today because of my experiences with anorexia nervosa when I was younger, and because of my ongoing struggle with Body Dysmorphic Disorder. And I welcome that sentiment - too much contemporary policymaking, even good feminist policymaking, talks about young women and to young women without listening to young women.

So, I could talk to you about the deep pain of stuggling to feed oneself. I could talk to you about the years and years I spent fighting the condition, the battle to overcome the cues that even very intelligent young women pick up from parents, peers and the overculture about how young women ought to look and behave. I could tell you about the deep gouges I had to physically slice into my personal paradigm to persuade myself, against every message I was recieving, that it was okay to take up space, that it was okay to have physical and personal flaws, that the actual weight of my humanity as a woman was not repulsive or aberrant, that I did not have to starve myself and punish myself in order to be acceptable. I could tell you how I almost died, how I jeopardised my future and my education, how I broke my family's heart and set an incredibly bad example for my two younger sisters. And I could tell you how a culture that assaults us at every turn with images of impossibly thin, impossibly perfect, impossibly white, impossibly beautiful women made that process of recovery harder and more painful at every turn.

But I don't want to talk about that to the exclusion of all else. You all know, because you've read melodramatic personal stories in the papers, about how anorexia, bulima and other eating disorders work, about the hurt they cause to young women, their families and friends. Much of the rhetoric around eating disorders and hyper-sexualisation seems to patronise or even fetishise young women as impossibly vain, helpless victims who can't even look at one picture of a stick-thin model without rushing to the nearest bog to vomit up their breakfast. It's not that simple, and sensationalisting the victims of this sick culture of airbrushed femininity risks watering down the real message. Focusing on our victimhood risks turning the focus away from where our political energies should be directed - at the narrow coffin of corporate womanhood and the way it inveigles itself into every aspect of our society, at the unassailable market logic of brutal, homogenised, white, heterosexual femininity pushed by as a political obstacle rather than as a fact of life.

Imagine if it were young men whose plasticised, airbrushed, blandly sexual images you saw everywhere around you, imagine if it were young men who were starving themselves, sicknening themselves, neglecting their futures and their studies, paying doctors to butcher their bodies, bleaching their skin to make themselves resemble the relentless consensus of white, hetoronormative corporate gender fascism. Imagine if it were young men who understood that in order to get and keep a job they had to starve and bleach and punish themselves into a sick image of perfection, to literally shrink every aspect of their personhood, imagine if it were men who the market were complicit in erasing. We would be filling the streets in protest. There would be speeches in the House of Commons every day until change came. We would have to acknowledge that this is an issue of political urgency, and not a secret, private shame.

This campaign to get advertisers to label airbrushing is of vital importance. As a socialist I instinctively distrust the politics of symbolism, but this campaign does more than just send a message - it creates a precedent that attacks on women's personhood are political, that body image and beauty fascism are political, and attempts to erase real women and our real lives are something that Westminster should be addressing. When the deputy leader of the party in government is ridiculed for her quite normal appearance in the press, when she is insulted by being nominated for the 'rear of the year' campaign, sending a message that even powerful women can be contextualised and dismissed within a framework of patriarchal sexual and physical judgement, it's time for women in politics to take a stand. It's time for women and men with seniority and influence to take a stand on behalf of the selfhood of the next generation of leaders, politicians, entrepreneurs, homemakers, mothers, athletes and artists. It's time to take a stand, and it starts right here, with a campaign to tell advertisers and others with financial clout that there are things that matter more than money.

Fighting the sick, damaging influence of the corporate imagining of womanhood on the lives of real women might seem like an impossible task. When I've talked about this campaign over the past few weeks, I've been met by a resigned cynicism - you'll never get advertisers to stop selling products off the back of this endless parade of diseased, plastic woman-meat, it would be nice if you could, but you can't fight the market. The autonomous logic of misogynist capitalism can only be resisted at a personal, private level, and if individual girls can't resist it, that means we're not strong enough. I say: bollocks to that. For three reasons.

The first is that we are living in a society which is beginning to analyse the unstoppable logic of free-market identity politics for the first time. Particularly for young people, the recession has allowed us to dare to imagine that the market can't solve all our problems, that it can and should be questioned, that something isn't great just because people are prepared to pay for it.

The second is that there is a new energy for feminist activity. Women are beginning to remember that our failure to have it all and be it all is not a private shame but a political statement- we are beginning to wake up and feel the weight of our chains, some old, some new, and imagine lines of resistance.

And the third reason is quite simple. This is International Women's Day. One hundred years ago, when the first International Women's Day took place, the socialists who convened the conference could not imagine a world where women would be allowed to vote and to participate at all levels of the economy, a world where women would not be the property of their husbands, where we would be able, in most civilised places in the world, to access abortion, contraception and sexual healthcare. Women have won incredible victories in the past century against impossible odds, and today of all days we should remember that those victories are possible. Today of all days we should honour the memories and achievements of our radical foremothers by remembering that it's okay to dream big, that it's okay to demand change that smaller, more frightened people wouldn't even dare to envision, because it's been done before and we can do it again.

That energy of feminist politics, inspired by the example of courageous women from previous decades, is what gave me the courage to recover from anorexia. Choosing to say fuck everything I'd been told about how good little girls should be, choosing to start to live again at the point of collapse, is the hardest thing I will ever have to do in my life, far harder than the small task of changing the world. The energy of feminist politics reminds us that women are powerful, that we are vital, that our political concerns have relevance at the highest levels of government, and that if we stay brave, and stay clever, and remember how far we have come, there's nothing we can't do.

Thank you.

*****

You're not really allowed to say 'Socialist' in the House of Commons, but other than that the speech went down fairly well. I'll be talking more about this campaign as it progresses. Exciting times are ahead :)

My oppression, your oppression

I have been stunned - truly shocked and appalled - at the level of hatred and wilful ignorance I've seen flooding the press and the internet over the past few days. Just look at the response to Amnesty International's campaign to end violence against women. A great deal of the comments, all of them from male avatars, claimed that Amnesty's statistic of 1 in 10 women experiencing rape or other violence was false, and that if it wasn't false it was irrelevant. That statistic is explained fully by Amnesty here, and I for one am happy to support it. But that's not the point. The point is that I've seen almost every debate around women's rights this week being derailed by a discussion of whether or not men have it worse, and whether or not feminism is therefore irrelevant.Jennie Rigg, as she so often does, put it best on LC yesterday:

You want to see a decrease in violence towards men? Why not campaign about it? Why derail every single fucking campaign about violence against women? You do see what I’m getting at, don’t you? I mean, you don’t see Save the Whale protestors derailing anti-seal cull protests, and you don’t see anti-seal-cull protesters at whale hunts shouting “but what about the SEALS??”

How about you support us, and we’ll support you? How about instead of rubbishing this campaign, why not say “great idea girls, and something I can fully support. No woman deserves to be beaten up and raped! Incidentally, I am supporting this other campaign, about male violence, fancy joining in?”

Well, quite. Derailing feminist arguments to complain about the poor menz isn't constructive. The point of all that bitching and moaning clearly isn't to make things better for men - if it were it'd be organised somewhere besides response forms to worthy women's rights articles - but to obstruct feminist campaigns. Instead of pouring on the scorn, instead of trying to play oppression top trumps, why can't men organise themselves and their allies to resist, say, violence against men, which I think we can all acknowledge is a problem? Why can't men organise to campaign for better mental healthcare, since the 18-25 male suicide statistic is so often quoted as an example of institutional misandry? Until I see any of that, I'm afraid I'm just going to keep assuming that men attacking feminists is just...well, it's just men attacking feminists, really.

Sunny quoted me in the Guardian yesterday (the comments to that one are well worth a read), and I'm going to re-state why I believe that men need to stop acting out how threatened they feel by women's rights:

A crucial mistake that continues to be made is the fallacy that acknowledging male gender oppression somehow invalidates the whole concept behind feminism. It does not. However, across the debate sphere for decades the cry 'but men don't have it easy either!' has been taken as a direct attack on feminism – and sometimes it has even been meant as one. Otherwise perfectly intelligent commentators descend into petty fights over whose gender oppression trumps whose, not realising that everyone's gender oppression is equally valid, not understanding that the expression of someone's struggle is not an attack on everyone else's.

The truth is that any oppressed group struggling for equality and for full socio-political representation will meet with resistance from the overculture, and their efforts to organise against injustice and violence will meet with resistance - overt or covert - from that more privileged group. Part of the reason for this is that whilst equality battles are never an attack on the overculture, they always challenge it - they demand that it change its attitudes and its self-perception. That's what International Women's Day still does, by demanding that men and women across the world stop accepting violence against women as a fact of life.

So yes, guys, we are challenging you. We want you to see us as complete human beings, and we want you to be as outraged by physical and sexual attacks on us as you would be by physical and sexual attacks on members of your own group. We want you to unite with us to stop violence against women, without seeing that struggle as in some fucked-up way a threat to your own self-conception as men. Yes, we want you to change. Instead of shouting us down, stand up for your own rights alongside us, as allies.

And challenge us back: I guarantee that you will not find us wanting. Because, if you think about it, we all know what it's like to feel unsafe walking home alone at night. We all know what it's like to fear male violence. We know what it's like to be physically threatened, to be scared, to be cowed by the ubiquity of male aggression, especially if we're in some way weak, or feminine, or different. And we can all take a stand against that, without getting into these silly fucking scraps over whose oppression tastes best.

Misandry and Hypocrisy: transcript of speech for International Women's Day.

This is a transcript of a speech I gave at Sussex University on the 6th March, 2008, to tie in with International Women's Day. You're getting it in its unadulterated form, as halfway through a rather frightening beetle ran across my notes, putting me off my stride somewhat. Ever the professional, confident, non-table-standing-and-screaming young feminista, that's me.

I have an outrageous confession to make: I like men. In fact, some of my best friends are men. You may scoff, but I know several men who’ve worked hard right through school and university to better themselves, who are holding down steady jobs and making decent, honest contributions to society; I know men who are not violent thugs, or who seem at any rate to have the violent, thuggish impulses innate to their base, primitive natures. At any rate, they seem to be here to stay, much as we may wish to declare open session on the entire species.By now you’ll have seen where I’m heading with all of this. 21st-century feminism must rid itself of the ugly notion that men are born criminals.

Now, I would call myself a radical feminist, where radical implies getting to the root of the problem, picking through historical trends and working towards deep, systemic change to end gender oppression once and for all. But for years my feminism has run up against a stumbling block: I don’t believe that men are the root of our problem. I believe that patriarchal capitalism is the root of the problem, and I believe that men, individually and collectively, are an easy target, because they are the ones who nominally win out from the patriarchal capitalist gender equation. I say nominally, because men too suffer from being immersed from birth in a culture of male violence and thuggishness. Men, too, are conditioned to behave in any number of strict, gender-coded, heteronormative ways and punished or attacked if they deviate from that norm. I would lay money that most of you have a male friend who has been mugged or beaten up in the street, or knows a male who’s been a victim of ‘gay-bashing’.

Now, this march coming up at the weekend [London’s Million Women Rise march, 08/03/08] has a fantastic message. The vision of a future for women free of violence. Strength in unity. Brilliant. But why should men be excluded from that gentler future? Ending a culture that condones violence against women should not mean that we march around yelling ‘men off the streets!’ reinforcing every narrow-minded stereotype that’s ever been thrown at the feminist movement. Nor should it mean that we deny the many men that do support our cause the right to march alongside us. Martin Luther King thanked the white people who marched and were imprisoned in support of their black brothers and sisters; we should have the grace, the maturity and the strength of vision to welcome men to our cause in the same way.

Misandrist feminism, feminism that is pro-woman but anti-men, is massively out of date. The feminism of the 1960s and 1970s was a political movement which was vital for its time but which is proving dated, anodyne and inappropriate 40 years on. In fact, Sixties and Seventies ‘second wave’ feminism, having won the most important of its battles years ago, retains only the most questionable and paranoid of its objectives: fostering an anti-men sentiment amongst middle-class women, objecting to genuine gender subversion, and shoring up the remnants of a model of elitist ‘sisterhood’ to which no men and few women are invited. A violently anti-male sentiment was incredibly useful as a pincer in the initial pro-woman assault, but as a long-term political strategy it is worse than irrelevant; it actively damages the ideals of gender equality, tolerance and freedom from violence that we have fought so hard to uphold.

The rigid, unforgiving approach to gender espoused by old-fashioned feminism all too often involves serious prejudice against queer and transpeople. Modern gender fascists such as Julie Bindel take issue with the transvestite, transsexual, transgendered, intersex, androgynous and ambi-gendered, because their very existence flies in the face of the tired binary by which misandrist feminists have defined themselves. This is the binary whereby all men are genetically predisposed oppressors, and all women fundamentally social underdogs, justified to select any and all male people for their kicking sticks. Anything that goes against that paradigm of two genders, one downtrodden and righteous, one violent and evil, sticks in the throat of conservatism.

Marching down the Tottenham Court Road with my comrades and sisters during the November Reclaim The Night march, I met a shy and pretty transwoman in her early twenties. She carried a tiny, home-made placard held together with sellotape, bearing the legend ‘transpeople against violence’. She explained to me how alienated she felt by the ‘men off the streets’ message of the march, and how she had personally lobbied one of the organising bodies to get Bindel, famed for her intolerance of all those not born female, relegated from her position as keyline speaker. Unfortunately, Julie Bindel is such a ‘big name’ feminist that the authority and celebrity her prescence brought to the rally won out over principle. Quite simply, Bindel was too famous to turn down on the small grounds that this sort of intolerance is no longer relevant or useful to modern feminism.

Men are not the problem. Patriarchal capitalism is the problem. A culture of male-perpetrated violence is part of the problem, but most men are not thugs. Men in the West grow up in a culture that teaches them that masculinity is expected to be violent; some respond by becoming perpetrators of violence, and the rest of them remain, like everyone else, cowed by the threat of violence. Men, like women, are worked over every day by the deeply disturbed gender attitudes of their society. All of us, male, female, straight, gay, bisexual, transsexual, kinky or vanilla, we are worked over every day by the treatment of gender in Western culture. Creating aggressive divisions within this paradigm is hugely counterproductive.

More and more, young feminists are kicking against tradition and embracing men as part of the solution, rather than the problem. Six months ago I gave a talk at the second Feminist Fightback conference. Speaking about feminism, socialism and the future of the left at the end of a long day, it was heartening to see that about a third of the sizeable attendance was male. The enthusiastic friends and boyfriends of female attendees, along with male student representatives from all over the country, had come to show their support. Moreover, I’ve been organising a post-march party to allow friends from outside London to attend Million Women Rise, and I’ve had to let down four or five male friends who wanted to join us, either to support their friends, lovers and sisters or because they wanted themselves to walk, for once, through the streets of the capital at without fear of assault. The country is flooded with men who are sick and tired of being worked over by their gender, of being categorised and criminalised on the basis of their genital arrangement, just like us; and more and more men are proud to call themselves pro-woman. Just look at the success of movements like the White Ribbon campaign, or Men Can Stop Rape. We cannot and should not do this alone.

Having the men and boys of the 21st century on side will make an immeasurable difference to the future of the feminist movement. If we carry on treating men like the enemy, some of them will see no reason to stop behaving like our enemies. Men must see that it is both their right and their duty to involve themselves in feminist discussion, and to fight with us to change the massive gender prejudices that still exist in our society. In turn, we must welcome them into the fold.

Anger, hatred and violence are not appropriate or constructive responses to anger, hatred and violence, not once you're out of training bras. Contemporary feminism needs to welcome as many men as possible into its ranks: to do otherwise is plain hypocrisy.

When I march alongside my comrades on Saturday, I will be marching with pride, and what I will be marching against is the culture of gender-based violence that has evolved from patriarchal capitalism. I will be marching for an end to gender-based and sexual violence against everyone, and I will be marching for solidarity with those brave young men and women of the 21st century with the vision to call themselves gender activists. Over-simplistic, sexist anti-male sentiment has no place in contemporary feminism. It is for this reason that the men and women of the young feminist left must take a stand against the uncompromising bigotry of our forebears, and forge a new feminism for the complexities of our own generation.