The R-Word

In a blandly pretentious Murukami nod, I thought about titling this post 'what I talk about when I talk about date rape'.

So an unspecified time ago, there was this guy, right, quite a bit older than me, and we went back to his room during a party to share a bottle of really quite nice rum. There was some snogging, and some toplessness, all of which had been anticipated pre-booze. Then, next thing I know, I'm coming to from an unspecified period of blackout, and penetrative sex was...happening, to me. And, and it really does make me cringe to write this, I felt sick and I didn't want to be rude, so I just lay there until it was over.

I actually can't give any more details than that, because I am still friends with this person, and we share mutual friends. Maybe I could have said more a year ago, but at the moment, for better or worse, I've got quite a large (and largely lovely) following of readers, and if I were to elaborate much more I could seriously inconvenience this man, who is on the whole a good guy.

Found out afterwards that he didn't use any protection. Had a serious STD scare, which entailed a fortnight of shaking in my bedroom at night feeling dirty, and ashamed, and scared, waiting for the results to arrive. Test negative, still felt cheap and used. Got into a bit of a downward spiral of drinking, anxiety attacks and one-night stands. Then, after a few months, I was alright again.

I'm finding this harder to write than I had anticipated. I don't think that I was criminally raped. Nor do I think I had consensual sex. What's in place here is a sliding scale of consent and domination, penned in by silence.

Penned in by silence. I still am, on this one. In the past few months, I've deliberately skipped out on a few big social events because of a worry that, now I've been thinking things over a bit, I'll lose my rag and start accusing this man in front of his friends.

Which is why it makes me so fucking angry, so very fucking angry that when a political party promises to lift court anonymity for victims of sexual assault, when a political party says 'innocent men who are falsely accused of rape have their lives ruined while their lying accusers cannot even be named', when a political party says those things *and is the BNP*, even then generally reasonable commenters let their paranoia overpower their common sense and start saying things like well some people do make it all up you know (for the record, 3% of reported rapes are false, same as for any other crime) and you're just trying to attack men, and what about the poor men who get accused of rape, have you thought about them for one single second you crazy feminazi bitch. That’s deeply upsetting. I've got an experience here which if you notice I haven't even categorised yet and I'm keeping my mouth shut. Partly out of personal shame; partly out of fear of social reprisals; mostly out of sheer consideration.

It may surprise you to know that I do not believe all men who have sex without another person’s permission to be irredeemably evil, violent abusers. I don't believe that all men who rape even know that that's what it is that they're doing. I think that sexual consent is a deeply fraught piece of semiotic territory in a real and ongoing ideological battle between the sexes, and – crucially – that sexual consent and non-consent takes place on a scale of abuse and trust that we currently just do not have the scale of legislation in place to deal with. Given that it’s only eighteen years since a man in this country could not be charged with raping his wife, our legal strategy for prosecuting rape – entirely separate from an acknowledged police and social bias against bringing cases to court at all – is manifestly not fit for purpose in today’s society. But that’s not the whole picture either.

Some political lobbies want to paint false rape accusation as a real, and widespread, social problem. It isn’t (I repeat, 3%). But it IS a real, and widespread, fear – and one that deserves to be acknowledged and understood, rather than simply dismissed. As a male friend of mine explained to me recently, ‘from the age of thirteen one of my biggest fears was that I would make a fool of myself in bed – that I’d in some way underperform, or disappoint her – and she would claim I’d raped her, and I’d go to jail, where I might be targeted and even killed. It’s still a fear that preoccupies me. I know there isn’t some clichéd conspiracy of women out to falsely accuse men of rape – that just isn’t happening. But it was, and is, a fear – I think it’s a natural, normal thing to worry about that.’

Men’s sexual vulnerability is not widely discussed – not in public, and not between men. A lot of the anxiety that’s expressed by right-wing lobbies over ‘lying women crying rape’ can be traced back not just to a creeping paranoia about female power, in the bedroom and out of it, but to genuine male sexual vulnerability as men find themselves without models of behaviour to draw upon in this new age of equality, where the old rulebooks for how to prove yourself a man have been roundly tossed away.

‘I believe that what most men and boys want, really want, is consensual sex,’ my friend tells me. ‘Yes, at my school like at any other, there were a number of boys who everyone knew would deliberately get girls drunk and rape them, and boast about it afterwards. Everyone hated them, and avoided them – because they were normally the same people who were vicious and inhuman in every social context. Some of these guys beat a friend of mine almost to death with iron bars,’ he said, non-committally.

Indisputably, a minority of men and boys are damaged enough by their culture and their upbringing that they are incapable of non-violent relations with any human being at all. I believe that there are men who hate women and hate their own lack of power enough to rape deliberately, premeditatedly, as punishment or revenge. And I believe that this happens hundreds of times every day in England alone. Violent rape, whether by strangers, friends or a partner, cannot and should not be excused, and nor should less violent rapes and assaults, whether or not the perpetrator was aware of his transgression. However, I believe that it is appropriate for the feminist movement to step away from absolute, categorical condemnation and try to understand why men rape. In a world where almost all sexual offences are committed by men, if we don’t try to understand the modern male sexual psyche, we cannot hope to legislate properly when its owners go feral.

I’m not trying to do a backdoor John Redwood here and suggest that we should prosecute on a ‘sliding scale’ of rape. I’m not suggesting that date rape is somehow not as bad as stranger rape, or that ANY rape is less damaging, less painful, less fucking insulting than any other. What I’m saying is that there are many, many instances of sexual assault, of non-consensual sex, which whilst damaging to their victims are simply unproveable in a court of law. What I’m saying is that we need, as a society, not only a more effective system for rape prosecution but a language for sexual consent that extends beyond the parameters of a courtroom. What I’m saying is that this is far more complicated than rape-or-not-rape; if it weren’t, men wouldn’t have to get so damn paranoid. As it is, with our limited grasp on the legal-rhetorical overlap, too many men , and women too, see rape purely in terms of whether or not something can be proved in a court of law.

What today’s young men need, and what we desperately need them to have, is some form of guidance on how not to become a rapist. Because this is something men and boys just do not have – and now, in a culture where non-consent can come in many forms and the rape epidemic is acknowledged as a problem, they need that knowledge, and we need them to have it. It doesn’t come from nowhere. On one side of these boys is an increasingly widespread expectation that they should instinctively know how a decent person behaves. On all other sides, young men are bombarded by a culture that glamorises sexual violence and objectifies women, a culture that makes it cool to treat sex as a competitive sport with women as the dumb racing animals, with lads’ mags, rapstars and rape played for laughs in Hollywood blockbusters, with rape-role-play video games and commercial fantasies of male sexual dominance leering at them from every billboard.

And I think it’s stunning that, even hemmed in by captain commercial’s xtended rape-o-rama culture jam, even with boys as young as 14 committing brutal gang-rapes in this very city, no teacher is obliged to sit down with a class of young boys and go through with them just how to tell if a girl (or boy) is too drunk to consent, or for that matter if they themselves are too drunk to consent; I think it’s stunning that noone thinks to ask young boys what they feel is appropriate force to use in persuading a girl to have sex with them. How in hell are they supposed to know, when the question is never raised?

We have allowed generations of men to grow up without giving them the tools to learn how a decent person behaves in the bedroom, in a culture that tells them that non-consensual sex is acceptable, even cool. This doesn't excuse rape, but it might occasionally, partially, sometimes explain it. And explanations deserve attention when there are problems to be solved and heads to bang together.

The language of consent and abuse is complex, and it is painful. I, for one, no longer want to live in a world in which men are encouraged to see sex with women as something they either do or do not ‘get away with’. More than anything, I want there to be real discussion of what rape is and why it happens. Only when girls and boys and men and women can have full and frank discussions about this, between themselves and with each other, will we come close to achieving real sexual and social maturity in this culture.

Rape, Raunch Culture and Girl Power.

'Every 10 to 15 years, feminism needs rebranding', says Katherine Townsend for the BBC.

Today, John Redwood has publicly declared that 'date rape' is different from 'stranger rape' and should be punished differently; effectively, yet another old white Tory telling us that we're asking for it. There is nothing new in this attitude, but such a respected politician saying it so unashamedly in so public a forum is very, very worrying indeed. Thank god Redwood never became Prime Minister.

Righteous indignation aside, the 'asking for it' attitude can be very pervasive. Even as a hardened, well-read feminist I still find it difficult to process my own experiences two years ago of date rape and subsequent venereal infection in anything other than those terms. We're persuaded that rape is something that, if we behave in a sexually forthright manner, we should practically expect - and expect to go unpunished. And this is one of the attitudes that allows endemic rape to be a continuing fact of our society.

Elsewhere in the patriarchy today, the Spice Girls' reunion tour has prompted lots of debate about changes in the nature of feminism over the past ten years - not that the mainstream press ever takes its cue from Red Pepper, of course.

I am a feminist who is both pro-porn and pro-sex. However, I'm completely in accordance with Ariel Levy and her fellow critics of what she terms 'raunch culture': the idea that, to be empowered, girls and young women must be 'sexy' above all else, must be in a constant state of hyper-pneumatic, barbie-doll faux-arousal, flashing our bodies for popular approval. Adverts on the underground promise us that breast enhancement surgery will make us 'more confident', that we do not deserve 'confidence' unless we appear constantly young, sexy, desirable and up for it. But this is not confidence. This is not empowering. This is not rebranding feminism: it's old-fashioned sexism re-packaged as something new. Young girls are being taught that sexuality is performative, not for their own enjoyment but for others to take advantage of - and how that's a great step forward from the sexual prudery of the 19th century, I don't understand.

So, on the one hand, young girls are taught that the only way to gain approval is to be 'sexy', to act, dress and behave in a raunchy manner in accordance with a mass media saturated with unreal images of vapid, nubile, 'sexy' examples of womanhood. On the other hand, we're still being told that if we do dress in such a way, we can expect to be raped and to have only ourselves to blame. That makes our culture one of assumed rape-privilege over women and girls compliant with the zeitgeist - and that's a terrifying thought.

The 'total coverage' effect of raunch culture should not be mistaken for anything other than misogyny. Just because we're assaulted by images of unreal naked women at every turn does not mean that the attitude of the patriarchy to women's bodies is any different: on the contrary, women's bodies are presented just as they are seen - as consumables belonging to the observer or purchaser rather than the woman herself, and as acceptable targets of violence and exploitation.

Girl power is more than a short skirt and an up-for-it attitude. I'm not suggesting that female sexual prudery is the path to personal emancipation - as a former burlesque dancer it would be rather hypocritical of me - but we must re-educate ourselves, our comrades and our children until there is an understanding that women's bodies are not for sale. We must teach our daughters that their sexuality is for their own enjoyment, and not only there to gain them approval from patriarchal consumer culture and from their peers. We must make it clear, once again, that our bodies are not free too be used by anyone without our consent - under any circumstances.

Bigots like Redwood are not going to disappear any time soon, but we can make them understand that we will not tolerate being treated in this way. Our 'confidence' does not depend on our commodity value, because we are not commodities - we are whole people, with complete say over how and for what our bodies are used. Nothing else can be acceptable.

Porn, Prudery and the Law: The Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

Since the first caveperson picked up a flint to hack an enormously bosomed gnome out of granite, pornography has been a fact of life. In July this year, in one of his first acts as prime minister, Gordon Brown tabled the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill, 2007. I'm going to be covering the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill that's due to come into force in 2008 in more detail. Here, though, is a separate little dip into one of the issues that needs a whole separate debate: the new anti-porn legislation.

Now, this new bill included legislation banning the downloading and possession of violent or ‘extreme’ pornography, in response to a large scale media reaction to the sexually-motivated killing of Jane Longhurst in 2004. Ignoring the widely accepted fact that there is little to no evidence to support a direct link between violent sexual crime and ‘extreme’ pornography, the state has leapt upon the opportunity to further police and to criminalise the sexual mores of its citizens.

Handing control of pornography to the state is never going to end well. Conveniently, since the legislation was introduced to the Bill in 2004, the government’s definition of ‘extreme’ pornography has been expanded to include some kinds of homosexual porn. Giving the state license to say what is and is not criminal pornography gives it license to suddenly decide that the tastes and interests of any non-mainstream group should be penalised – to decide, for example, that whilst it’s no longer a crime to be gay, it is a crime to download certain pictures of men having intercourse with other men.

How old were you when you took your first illicit peek at an older kind’s dirty pictures – 13, 14? Quite possibly younger if you’re male, since ogling forbidden filth remains practically a rite of passage in schoolboy culture. Censoring pornography does not work. Even in the UK, arguably the most restrictive of English-speaking cultures in terms of anti-porn legislation, pornography is everywhere. It’s on the top shelves of newsagents, splashed across the front pages of Nuts, Zoo and Loaded. It’s widely available on most high-streets, in adult shops up and down the land, in the ‘explicit’ sections of every bookshop and print-store, and, most of all, it’s on the internet.

Censorship of pornography is also illogical. Since when did forbidding something fun do anything other than increase its illicit appeal, make it more enticing to the public, and cause an explosion in rates of crime associated with the new contraband? . During Prohibition in America, for example, not only did national alcohol consumption actually increase between 1920 and Repeal in 1933, but the result was a massive upsurge in violent and organised crime in connection with alcohol. Stricter legislation on pornography is likely, moreover, to drive the producers of ‘extreme’ pornography underground, depriving participants of legal safeguards and making working conditions considerably more unsafe for porn models, actors and actresses. Legislation to increase pornographic censorship would be immeasurably socially damaging.


Fundamentally, porn itself – the explicit representation of the human body or sexual activity with the goal of sexual arousal and/or sexual relief –is not harmful. What grates is that so much of the porn that is being produced and disseminated is so very, very dire.
Much of the contemporary porn available is tacky, limited, demeaning, badly executed, badly scripted and – often, but by no means always – exploitative to those that participate in its production and consumption. It is the type of pornography that is saturating our culture that is harmful, not porn itself.
Supply dictates demand, and if what is being supplied is countless images of women being demeaned, humiliated and, most of all, made voiceless sex objects, then this will be taken as the baseline for desirable sexual activity by young men and women who – despite legislation that is already in place – grow up watching this abominable, tragically limited trite. Our cultural sex-narrative has gone wrong. Our response to this should not be to criminalise sexual images, but to radically re-think the way in which we explore sexual desire.
What I’d like to see is pornography with a plot: pornography in which grown men and women are equal players, in which sex is joyful, playful, soulful, awkward even, and never abusive. I’d like to put that most dangerous and illicit of things, tenderness, back into scripts, screenplays and directives. I’d like pornography to be beautiful. I’d like it to be made by producers, models and actresses who are enjoying what they are doing and who are union-protected. I’d like my porn to be artistic, I’d like it to play with fantasy and desire whilst keeping within the boundaries of non-harmful sexual and emotional exploration. Then, I’d like this kind of pornography to be government-subsidised, and to be distributed freely online and in schools as part of a validated PHSE curriculum, so that growing children and teenagers can explore enriching, non-abusive sexual desire in an open, positive manner.

Finally, in this sexual utopia, I would restrict so-called ‘extreme’ pornography – pornography that includes, for example, violent BDSM games, rape and abuse fantasy or necrophilia – to over eighteens, who would hopefully be adult enough to explore valid kinks in a mature way that would ensure that they remain fantasy. A pornographic market overflowing with widely available, quality, joyfully explicit plot- and character-driven, sexually equal pornography would both benefit the sexual and emotional health of the next generation and reduce people’s drive to indulge abusive kinks at vulnerable, impressionable ages.
If we really want to reduce violent and sexual crime against women, only a radical re-think of our attitude to pornography, encompassing a long, hard look at our social and sexual mores, will cut it. A warped, limited and misogynist cultural sex-narrative is the problem, but censorship is definitively not the answer.

I like the leather, I like the whips and chains...

Some people think
Little girls should be seen and not heard
But I think -
Oh, bondage! Up yours!
Ah-one-two-three-four!
X-Ray Specs.

This weekend, London goes fetish-mad. Following the opening of Club Antichrist (link NSFW) tonight, it's the 10th annual Erotica show, a huge retail extravaganza with tie-in events headlined by none other than Dita Von Teese. Being a kinky little fuck doctor of journalism, I of course have my best shiny pvc mini-dress and party bondage gear ready for action.

Fetish. Erotica. What does it mean? Any sex-act is subversive, reminding us as it does of an essential humanity that can't be charged to a credit card; any sex-act that deviates substantially from standard heterosexual, heteronormative social models of normal shagging is that much more subversive. The UK fetish scene plays into all of these deviances, so it attracts - and influences - many who find themselves outside the 'hetero-normal' bracket, whether gay, straight, bi, trans, gender-queer, teenage or middle-aged. It's a subculture that's intensely, gorgeously performative, with many clubs and events blurring the boundaries between sex and theatre. Fetish is fun.


Playing with power.

It's also a subculture that's intensely respectful - almost definitively so, since power-play and BDSM are amongst the main thrusts (sic.) of the scene. The feminism - or feminisms - of BDSM are a minefield of fascinating cultural specificity, since by their very nature power-play fetishes operate beyond the sphere of existing power agendas, and are worked out for themselves, between consenting adults both of whom are gaining from the power transaction. That's not to say that some people - both male and female fetishists - take other, personal socio-political agendas into the bedroom, but it's very far from the norm. You'll find men who are sociopathically domineering at home or at work begging to be straight-jacketed, chained and flogged by tiny women in ridiculous shoes; you'll find women who love to be laced into corsets and spanked until they scream on the boards of companies or on the frontlines of feminist rallies. In fact, the mere act of playing with power in the bedroom can change one's response to the imposition of power in other, more clothed arenas of life.


Cash for Kinks.

The only problem I have with the scene - and it's a big problem - is the high cost of entry. Sexual subversion is a powerful force for social change; one of the only ways to defuse it is to twist its emphasis into line with the dominant status quo. In Western domestic society, capitalist participation and acquisition- shopping - is the dominant status quo, so it's hardly surprising that one of the main activities of the fetish crowd seems to be buying stuff. That shopping is a central part of the fetish experience is less surprising still in the light of the intense performativity of the scene - in which both voyeurism and exhibitionism are major parts of the participatory experience. The scene is partly about showing off; showing off one's eccentricities, kinks and physical assets, however, becomes less playfully shallow when it necessarily also involves a display of one's disposable income. The lifestyle is expensive, from bondage gear, toys, equipment and outfits to tie-in objects d'art, all of which need to be specially and carefully made, and all of which are costly. Unfortunately, although members of the scene are generally co-operative types, the nature of many of the toys means that sharing isn't an option. What all of this means is that vulnerable members of society - the young, those on lower incomes or without the disposable cash required - find themselves excluded from the very sexual underworld that could do most to expand the horizons of the naive and under-privileged. In a very Marxist sense, the fetishism of the scene extends to the commodity as well as to the sex-act.

That said, though, at one point, whilst living with a Domme and her sub, I made them a present of a washed length of black inner-tubing from a car engine that had been abandoned in the road near my college. Bondage games, and sex-fetish play in its broader sense, need not be prohibitively expensive.Moreover, the fetish subculture is one of the closest things to an anarchic, self-perpetuating mini-economy that the UK, along with other states, can boast: most fetish products are made by small, independent businesses and craftspeople for a dedicated market. Few people become multi-millionaires through fetish business, and those who participate do so for love of the craft and love of the scene, since profit margins for bespoke items and products made from, for example, rubber and worked leather, are so low - 'an average of 5% across the industry', according to one insider. Finally, most of those involved in selling to the scene are scene members themselves; there's a certain, elegant simplicity in the economic lives of a group who make a living selling chic couture sex-play gear only to finance the purchase of more of the stuff for their own play.

The key difference with the sexual-fiscal economy of the fetish subculture is this: the sex is the point. The sex is the point and the shopping is subsidiary to it, whereas in mainstream, heteronormative advertising culture, the shopping is the point, and sex just a means of upping sales.

So, tonight I'm putting a leash on an obliging boy, packing some whips and bondage tape and heading to a club for some investigative journalism. The fetish culture negotiates a minefield of capitalist moral quicksand and power-games; I want to know if it's retained its subversive soul. Goshdamn, but I hope so. ;)

Fucking like a Feminist

Stop the press, hold everything! Recent studies have found that feminists do it better: that, contrary to traditional stereotypes, feminism and romance are not incompatible, and that both women and men have healthier relationships with feminist partners. Thank you, Rudman and Phelan: we knew this already, but it's nice to have an official seal of U.S academic approval, nonetheless.

The study worked on the hypothesis that 'if feminist stereotypes are accurate, then feminist women should be more likely to report themselves as being single, lesbian, or sexually unattractive, compared with non-feminist women.'

Not only was this proved categorically untrue, but 'healthier relationships' and better sex lives were reported all round by feminists and those who loved them.

So: Feminism in Being Good For Everyone Shocker. The reasoning behind the Rudman/Phelan report's findings isn't too taxing to get our flexible little heads around: sex between two partners who see each other as human beings, and not as 'means to an end', is going to be better sex than any encounter in which one or both partners are made to feel guilty, ashamed, incomplete, or in which one person's pleasure is privileged over the other. Men who see women as the rounded, complete people we are - not as little-girls, as baby-makers, porn stars, fragile domestic goddesses, two-dimensional helpmeets, as property, as status symbols or as 'compliments' to male dominion - are going to be much more fun to be around, and are going to enjoy our company much more when we eventually demonstrate that we have hearts and brains as well as tits and cunts.

What's truly shocking is that an article on the study which came out this week on the Guardian's Comment is Free page - a netspace that hardly springs to mind as a hang-out for right-wing shit-stirrers - prompted hundreds of righteously indignant comments from men, and some women, who did not concur that fucking like a feminist is good for the nation's sexual and emotional wellbeing. This is just one more indictment of how far we have to go before we get our sexual attitudes sorted out in this messed-up consumer society. Even on this blog, I've had comments telling me that the idea of men giving to women in bed is ridiculous, that I should learn to give better head and plug my outsized feminist gob with something useful whilst I'm about it.

So, let me tell you a few things about feminism, sex and socialism.

Fucking like a Feminist

1) The concept is not all that different from Screwing Like a Socialist, the basic principle being that the other person is not there to be consumed, except possibly with whipped cream. The person or persons in your bed are not products, and you're there for their pleasure as well as for your own. Even in bondage/kink/role-play situations, the agreement is the same: respect my desires and I'll respect yours. Treat me like a human being and I'll treat you like a human being. Get me off and I'll get you off. Sex negotiated on terms other than these, sex which is abusive, destructive or lacking in mutual respect, isn't good sex, except for very sad people with serious self-esteem problems.

2)Sex is not a bodily transaction with orgasm for one or both partners as the desired end product. Sex is a physical and mental exploration of pleasure and its possibilities. The mainstream model of heteronormative, heterosexual sex -whereby penile penetration is the main event, with the man eventually achieving orgasm and, ideally, bringing the woman/girl to orgasm as well by thrusting into her with his penis - is limited and outdated. Challenging received gender roles in the bedroom means more experimentation, more emotional risk-taking, and more fun for everyone.

3) Choice, variety, equality, respect. Feminists - by which I mean male and female feminists - sleep with men, with, women, or with both. Feminists have sex both within and outside of long term relationships. Some feminists are kinky, or polyamorous, or have rare fetishes; some aren't, and don't, and that's alright too. Some feminists are dominant in bed; equally, some feminists like nothing more than to be bent over an armchair and spanked silly, and that's alright, too. Some feminists love cock to distraction; some feminists are rampant, unstoppable lesbians with a string of satisfied girlfriends; and some feminists really don't like to have sex at all. And that's alright, too; any sexual proclivity is feminist, in fact, if it is approached with equal respect for both partners' needs and desires and rights as human beings.

4) Feminists see their sexuality - however it may manifest - as an important facet of their personality, but only one facet nonetheless. Sex is important. Sex is delicious. Sex can't be ignored or evaded or made irrelevant, especially in a capitalist society which uses it to sell products on every billboard and street corner. Sex is also only one factor in the myriad concerns which make up women's complex lives, and men's, for that matter: reducing your partner, or yourself, to the level of a purely sexual animal, is degrading, sexist and ultimately demeaning to both partners.

5) Feminists have fun and respect each other. Feminists are sexually brave, which is not incompatible with sexual shyness. Feminists are not afraid to ask for what they want in bed - or to accomodate their partners' desires. Feminists are gay, straight, bisexual, transsexual, genderqueer, kinky, vanillla, radically romantic, in myriad changing combinations. Feminists are fun, in and out of bed : period.

6) What feminists don't do, however, is sleep with men (or women) with entitlement complexes; men who think of women as lesser creatures, accessories, there to provide sexual satisfaction for men and to be used and dominated without their consent. It's not that feminists think men are the enemy: it's that feminists have enough self-resepect, generally speaking, not to sleep with bigoted arseholes. Let me leap to conclusions here, but I think we may have found the basis for objection of many blog-trolls, bullies and boors with an inflated sense of their own Right to Rut: hot, self-aware feminists simply won't sleep with them.
And doesn't that just make them hopping mad?

What the volume of opposition to the findings of the Rudman/Phelan study (and to what enlightened women have known all along) demonstrates is simply the impotent, cross-patch flailing of bigots and bullies who realise that they might not be able carry on using treating their partners as sex-toys and expect to get laid anymore. It's the frustration of men, usually young men or the privileged, moneyed middle-aged, encountering the fallacy that women aren't sex-objects, whores, or pneumatic blank-slates, that good sex involves an encounter with a partner's heart, mind and soul as well as their tits, cunt and arse. It's the rage that heralds the stripping of unearned sexual privilege, and we must not give it space. Once they've shaped up enough to get a taste of feminist fucking, they'll never look back

Urgh.

Take That's sellout reunion tour provides a jolly pop-precis of the state of political power today!

The erstwhile 'fab five' - sorry, four - started by delivering 'The Take That Manifesto'....

...whilst the choreography for their next number says more about gendered politics than any academic tract I've read in months.

I think I just threw up a little bit in my mouth.

Thoughts after an assault.

This post was going to be an update to the last; I still have a lot of exciting porn links to give you all, and those are on their way. However, on Friday night, I was sexually assaulted on the Camden road.

It was four thirty in the morning, and I was coming home from a rave. I was not alone. I was tired, burnt-out from a great night, glassy-eyed and in desperate need of a cup of tea. I was wearing a short, fluffy pink dress which would have fallen squarely into the police-statement ‘asking for it’ category had it not be accessorised by a huge, black man’s army jacket and equally huge, spiky bovver boots. Two minutes’ walk from my front door, a tall,scrawny chap wearing denims and a drunken grin stumbled into the sodium-orange light on the road ahead of us.

After a few minutes’ friendly, if annoyingly exuberant banter, which prevented us from walking on, he suddenly grabbed me hard, and started humping me enthusiastically, shouting that I was ‘his friend, his friend, his best friend.’ I was pressed against his chest and, despite how much I struggled and slapped him, could not break free. My horrified boyfriend, who, although noticeably disabled (he takes his crutch with him on nights out) is really quite built, couldn’t pull him off either. After a few minutes he appeared to lose interest, we kicked him away and walked on hurriedly; he tailed us back along the street and started doing it again. Eventually, we shook the fucker and made it home.

Now, a lot of white, middle-class people these days are of the opinion that feminism, at least in the UK, has run its course. That we’ve achieved everything we need to and should now be quiet and do our homework and take our desk jobs and have babies in our mid-twenties like good little girls. A lot of these same people think that, instead of focussing on problems at home, ‘we’ - which entails, in practice, anyone but us - should be addressing worldwide injustice against women: the epidemic of violent rape in the Congo, the adultery and divorce laws of Iran, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, honour killings.

There is, unquestionably, a great deal more work to be done in violent regimes where it is women, children and homosexuals who immediately come off worst (350 gay Iraqis were lynched, tortured or burned to death last year. A huge proportion the asylum seekers who come to Britain from the Carribean are fleeing because their sexuality puts them at risk of assault, torture, rape and murder.). However, there is no question of ‘instead.’ Just because women’s physical safety is more assured in most areas and social divisions of the West than in many other countries does not mean that there isn’t still a great deal of work to do in making the world a better and safer place for women. Neither does it imply that the work we have left to do cannot be instigated on a truly global scale.

In the UK, we have developed a reasonably workable system where women - most notably middle-class women - can function with more equality in a man’s world, so long as they don’t shout about it too much. I for one am not satisfied with this. I want exponentially better childcare rights and provision; I want motherhood and ‘women’s work’ respected as they are in other countries (often, sadly, the same countries in which women suffer higher levels of rape and abuse). I want a higher rape conviction rate; higher than, say, 5%. I want full and immediate access to all elements of reproduction control that are technologically possible, rather than grudging, judging, unpredictable access whose security is constantly being eroded under our noses. I want to live in a culture where women’s bodies - a category into which the body I inhabit falls - are not reduced to objects of national, self-digusted fetishisation. I want people like the drunken bastard who humped me so violently and mindlessly in the street on Friday night to be stripped of the entitlement complex that led him to do so.

There is still a LOT of work to do.

What we are fighting is male-pattern dominance and male-pattern violence. Elements of these underly a leviathan proportion of the human injustice, cruelty and violence in the world. I do not mean to imply only ‘violence against women’, but violence against male and female victims, including strains of anti-woman violence. I do not mean ‘violence as perpetrated by men’: women can sometimes be abusers too, although it is true that most male-pattern violence is male-instigated. Neither do I mean to imply that all men are, at root, violent beasts: I have the misfortune to be a straight girl and to have more male than female close friends, and most of the finest men I know abhor both violence and the pathologies that cause some men to enact violence and abuse.

What I mean, quite simply, is the violence that has infested Western and other societies with the impulse to dominate, to conquer, to control - to hurt. Were I to list all the different manifestations in which this male-pattern violence appears across the world, I’d be here until all of us got bored, and besides, I’ve homework to do. Besides, I’m sure you can think of examples in your own life, in your friends’ and families’ lives, where male violence has obstructed, blighted the lives of or simply scared the bejeezus out of its victims.

Both my boyfriend, who I shall call A., and my best friend (also male) have arrived at their non-violent philosophies as a result of suffering horribly under the clammy hands of male violence. In a similar way, the attack on Friday night was as much an attack on A. as it was on me: our assailant made several drunken comments about what a ‘big man’ my boy was (he’s a jitsu champion, and certainly much more muscled than the attacker); when he saw that A was crippled and did not pose as much of a physical threat, he started sexually assaulting his girlfriend: amongst other things, a simple, primitively violent territory stake: a statementof dominance. That, as much as the attack itself, made me sick to the stomach.

Feminism is a multivalent movement of deep significance that is intrinsically linked to even broader global struggles against cruelty and injustice. Whilst women, children and homosexuals are unfree and abused, all members of society are lessened. The eradication of male-pattern violence and entitlement pathologies and the slow introduction of more traditionally ‘feminine’ principles - tolerance, kindness, listening, sharing, allowing others space, making our voices heard and respected without aggression - into our social philosophies will not just benefit women, but every human being. There is a great deal of work to do, at home and abroad. Take my hand; let’s get started.