Blog Nation and men in feminist cyberspace....

Fashionably late to the party, this week I went to a massively interesting liberal bloggers' event at the Guardian. It was fantastic to finally meet people I've spent so long sparring with online; that awkward shuffling when a roomful of geeky people who know each other well but haven't actually met and are trying, shyly, to match faces to cyberspace handles felt pleasingly zeitgeist as always. It was the second part of the evening, the panel on women's blogs, feminist blogs and their interaction with the rest of the blogsphere, that really got my hackles raised.

With a room full of big name bloggers from across the country, it's hardly surprising that the debate has already been written up all over the left blogsphere (jeez, but I utterly loathe that term). One particularly striking question, raised by a confused young man in the audience, was: what do you want from us? How are we supposed to respond when you're complaining both that more mainstream blogs ignore your comments and posts and that you're routinely taken advantage of online? How can you ask to be taken more seriously and not want to be pushed around or bullied? Or, as the clit-itchingly unreconstructed Mr Lee Griffin put it:

'I think it's an amazing feat to both be ignored and abused at the same time but even more complicated became the idea that feminists wanted more credit, and to be leaders of feminist issues...but while men were there to support the arguments in a debate where everyone is equal.'

I rarely indulge in the turf wars over topics like this, partly because Pennyred isn't solely a feminist blog but, rather, a plain old leftist blog, highly informed, as all liberal politics should be, by feminism. But the reactions of the men in the audience both at the event and after they'd got home, had their coffee and calmed down enough to type, were astounding. Let me make one thing clear:

In meatspace or in cyberspace, women should not have to choose between being ignored and being abused. Both are problems faced by women in online communities. The hypertextual, interactive nature of the internet, along with the anonymity afforded by avatars and handles, is just one reason that flourishing women's communities have sprung up across cyberspace, groundbreaking grass-roots activism and sisterly solidarity of a species never seen before - but the hostility feminist bloggers meet with outside dedicated feminist communities has to be encountered to be believed.

As a woman writing online, you come to expect a given amount of crass, rude, misogynist abuse in comments; you come to expect a certain amount of pointless lewdness and sexual bullying from posters using the anonymity of the internet as a chance to indulge their more tiresome and vindictive politics. You expect to be called a bitch and a slut, you expect to receive sexual threats and inappropriate propositions when you write about women's issues. I've had it, we've all had it. At the same time, Kate Belgrave and others expressed dismay that some of the key online feminist campaigns in recent months have been attributed to male bloggers, when females have put in much of the leg work. Whilst understanding that male feminists have an important contribution to make, this position is a far cry from table-thumping feminazism. Let me explain:

We need men in the feminist movement. We welcome their presence, and we value their contribution. What irks us is when men come into the movement and immediately expect to lead. We do not need leaders - what we need are allies. What we need are men who will listen to our experiences without presuming to tell us, first, what those experiences are. Anne Onne has a fantastic piece up at TheFWord this month:

'...The problem is, as a privileged group which isn’t used to hostility, it feels as if any criticism is personal. That anything directed at men means that we are criticising all men, no matter how wonderful they are. We are not, and every time you think this is the case, check yourself. Feminists have brothers, fathers, boyfriends and male friends and are sometimes even men. We know perfectly well that not all men are responsible for a problem. But we also know that if men don’t own their role in this, things won’t get better. In order to unravel privilege, you have to admit you have it, and admit that people may have a very real reason to fear people like you. Yes, it sucks that if you walk up to a strange woman in a deserted street, or are stuck in an empty lift with her, she will be nervous. But imagine what it’s like for her. Far worse.'

We need men who want to educate themselves in women's issues (for a crash-course you can do no better than a visit to Feminism101). We need men to support us and afford us the respect that we deserve. And we need men who are prepared to drop their weapons and come off the defensive, who understand that feminism and misandry aren't synonymous, that a rant against patriarchy does not constitute an personal attack on every Y-chromosomed individual out there in cyberspace. We need male feminists who will listen without wanting to lead. To call the feminist movement an unequal one because its women are anxious not to be drowned out is a feat of point-missage second only to the UK's Eurovision record.

And, guys? There will be times when you will get it wrong. You will make mistakes. You, too, are human. Don't mire yourselves in defensiveness for fear of making a mistake. We will make mistakes too, time and time again - we'll call you 'typically male' when we're tired and angry, we will even refer to you, when you've put in the effort to be kind and considerate at home, as 'well trained.' And when we display disgusting dregs of prejudice like this, we expect, respectfully, to be challenged. As we, in turn, will challenge you.

Set down this: the way that men, and male bloggers in particular, feel when trying to participate in the feminist movement is not dissimilar to the way that women feel when trying to participate in life. That cold tug on the solar plexus when you realise you're in a world that wasn't arranged for your benefit, where you didn't make the rules and where your voice might be less important purely because of your genital arrangement? Remember that feeling. Remember that feeling and imagine it applied to the rest of your life. Imagine not being able to shut down the computer and walk away.

After generations of struggle, we are still trying to build a better world, one where gender does not dictate behaviour and assumptions and opportunities. We would like you to share it with us. Online communities are one area where we're laying the foundations, and we would be immensely glad of your support, your energy and your ideas. We don't need your leadership and we don't want your bullying vendettas; all you need to do is bite down and try to understand and own your own privilege. It can be hard to swallow. But it's got to be done.

Monday night riot...

In the Metro today, a cheery little feature about a middle-aged woman coming to terms with her body-image by - shocker! - stripping off for the cameras. On the next page, an advert for this.

I'm bored of this. So sodding bored of this I could cry and kick things. I'm tired of reading endless hashes of this same sick social obsession, fat girls, thin girls, calories, body image, size zero. The eroticisation of the gruelling size-zero lifestyle, life as non-life, the nothing woman as pop idol. Taking a pair of calipers to the female sex and demanding less, less, less.

After so many miserable years of starving and vomiting and weighing and hating myself, I'm angry. Cheated, driven almost to total destruction, years of my youth for an adult world that wanted perfection at the same time as it demanded less.

You want less of me, mister? Let me shove these five extra pounds of human meat in your face. I'll smother you with it. You want less of me? Tough. Because everywhere you turn you're going to see more and more of me, more of us, unstoppable bitches, coming for your jobs and your sexual freedoms and everything stripped from us for so long. Like it or not, you're going to meet us. In the flesh.

Kill Patriarchy 3: Cleaners' strike

Whilst the Tories squeal and bicker over one working woman's pay-packet, let's talk about some practical feminism happening in London right now.

The cleaners of the London underground work through the night to keep the city's vascular system pumping and sanitary. Most of them are women with families. Many of them face abuse and sexual harassment every day from loutish travellers as a part of their work. On top of wiping up our vomit and newspapers and taking crap from our scum, they have to struggle with shockingly low pay, on-the-spot third party sackings, little to no sick pay and a measly 12 days' annual leave. And they've had enough.

RMT, the tube workers' union, will be striking on the 26th-27th July, and again on the 1st-2nd July 2008.
'The tube cleaners are an inspiring example of women fighting for their rights,' said Laura Schwartz, a representative of Feminist Fightback. 'London Transport must stop under-valuing so-called women's work such as cleaning and recognise that it is crucial to the smooth running of the Underground.'

These people are us. These are the people who clean up our muck. They have feelings, and they have families, and they have a level of baseline leverage that the Old Firm trembles to contemplate, and they're sick of being fucked with. This is feminism.

Let's make one thing crystal clear right now: we're not talking about the caring face of service privatisation here. Much of the abuse faced by these workers, most of whom are migrant women, does not just come from commuters. Clara Osagiede, a representative of the tube workers' union RMT, told me that it is extremely common for women to come to her complaining about serious sexual harasment from their male bosses- agency supervisors- but too afraid to make formal complaints. Male bosses take advantage of immigrant workers by threatening to expose them if they don't keep their mouths shut. This is the type of insidious patriarchal fist squeezing the breath out of the vulnerable women of this country every day.

Because, for the benefit of the uninitiated, London isn't all fashion and finance, Kate Moss and cocaine. There are millions of people here living on the poverty line, doing hard, thankless jobs that they hate just to keep themselves and their families together. Most of those people are women. Feminism happens on the ground, it's not traded in bitumen between snarling academics, and it's a central and inextricable part of anti-capitalism.

Eat the rich. Demand decent pay and support those working to do so. We are entering a new strike economy and you, too, are likely to be inconvenienced in your daily habits at some point over the next few months. But not half as inconvenienced as we'll all be if we allow the Old Firm to kick workers' rights and women's rights to the bottom of the agenda.

'I dreamed I was getting finger fucked by Hilary Clinton...'

'I was in Seattle, and I'd just come back from yet another interview for a job I didn't get, when yet again I'd been told I was a stong candidate, that I was qualified, brilliant at what I do - I am brlliant at what I do - and named runner-up. Not one of those people I was beaten by was a person of colour, and not one of them was female. And that night I dreamed that I was in my hotel room, and in walked Hilary Clinton.

'Don't the Jungians say that you're meant to represent every person who appears in your dream? In walked Hilary Clinton, and she was a maid, too, like Jennifer Lopez in that movie, Maid in Manhattan. And I forced her to finger-fuck me. She wasn't enjoying it - I mean, I was practically raping her. It was like -'

At this point, Commie Girl makes a hand gesture that I can't quite bring myself to describe.

'....Anyway, I woke and thought, 'This is it. I'm always going to be getting fucked, I'll never be in charge, and I'll always get raped.'

The delectable Commie Girl and I are at a party full of wankers and hairdos in Regents' Park, talking about women and power and politics. And branding. And Barack Obama. And love, God, sex, drugs and rock and roll. Commie Girl, aka Rebecca Schoenkopf, is one of the most unique and inspiring journalists I've ever had the privilege to meet. A compilation of her columns has just been released by Verso books, the ostensible occasion for this interview, which passes in a haze of cigarette smoke with reasonable quantities of ranting and tears.

The complete interview will be up soon at Red Pepper. My, aren't I the saucy one.


*******

In other news, I've spent the week Building My CV, Networking and smoking furiously outside somebody else's office (I'll just come out and say it like a hussy: work experience) and have, as such, had no time for any independent thought. You can, however, read my first article in a national newspaper here - a scintillating, up-to-the minute piece of socio-political comment if ever there was one.

Scenes from Turnpike Lane station...

An hour ago, on emerging from the bowels of the Picadilly line as is my wont at half six on a Thursday, I was dismayed to see a wall of armoured police surrounding a pair of electronic weapons-detecting barriers through which the good residents of Wood Green were being made to walk. So I took it upon myself to engage a couple of members of Her Majesty's Constabulary in conversation.

'Why are the scanners up again?'

'It's a deterrent. You know, knife crime. You watch the news, don't you?'

'So what are they for?'

'Well, to see if anyone's carrying a knife.'

'Is it against the law to refuse to go through, then? Say, what would happen if I just walked right round the edge?'

'Well, you're not exactly carrying a knife, are you?!' Sner sner, oi lads look at the sweet little white girl in her cardie trying to be clever.

I tried a different tack. 'So, how do these barriers tell if you're carrying a knife rather than just, say, any old metal?'

'They don't. They're quite neanderthal really. They just flash red when someone's got metal.'

'But hang on. The lights are flashing red for every other person. Why aren't you stopping all those people?'

'Well...' indulgent little police-officer smile turns into get-rid-of-this-member-of-the-public grin 'look, we just use our judgement - say, if someone like your good self set off the buzzers, well,' looks me up and down 'you're clearly not the sort of person to be carrying a knife, are you?'

'So what sort of people would you stop and search, then?'

'Well, you watch the news.'

'Of course I watch the news. What sort of people would you stop?'

'You know, the sort of people who commit crimes. You watch the news.'

'You haven't answered my question.'

'Are you a journalist?'

'Absolutely.'

'My colleagues and I aren't trained for this. Bugger off and call the press office and go through those barriers while you're about it.'

Stunned, I marched through the ancient plastic barriers, the metal buckles on my boots winking.

And the lights flashed red.

And nobody stopped me.

Breaking news: violent rape of civil liberties takes place in Whitehall.

I never thought I would be in the House of Commons on the day Magna Carta was repealed. That's what Tony Benn was heard to spit a few hours ago as the people's party voted in an extension of the detainment time limit to 42 days without trial for under the Terrorism Act. This disgusting pyrrhic victory was passed by a measly nine votes, provided by a sullen and harrassed Democratic Unionists party, who know exactly what terrorism at home means and exactly why laws like this will mean so little. In a Pulitzer-worthy piece, Simon Hoggart reported that:

We saw the great lumbering figure of the old turtle, Ian Paisley, pad down the steps, pause, be nudged by his colleagues, and roll off with them into the "aye" lobby. So we knew that, in Austin Mitchell's words, Gordon Brown had been saved for the nation. But when the gossamer majority was announced, the Tories and Lib Dems erupted in an outburst of rage and hatred, swivelling round on the nine DUP members, waving and shaking their fingers, yelling "Shame!" "Traitors!" and "What were you paid?"

I never thought the government that promised so much in 1997 would sell us with such teeth-gritting ignorance down a river that will probably inevitably carry the Cameron regatta into Downing street in 2010. I never thought I'd see such a victory for spite and oninism in the Commons as the bullying and cajoling of MPs into voting in a law which would not even be necessary had the government listened to its people and its representatives and not gone to rattle sabres in the Gulf in the first place. What idiots. What limp-dicked cowards. And my god, what a debate.

Diane Abbott was bloody fantastic. She had become an MP, she said, her voice rising to angry shrillness, to defend the marginalised, the unpopular and those who were suspected. These were the very people parliament had to stand up for. And in the end, they hung back. They voted in favour of a law that will punish a small minority of already marginalised citizens who, whatever their politics, will almost certainly emerge from jail and interrogation ready to sign up for state-sabotage with the first nutter they meet.

None of those voting in favour of the bill have ever done time in British prisons. None of them know what it means to already feel alienated, emasculated and shunned in a country where your own government thinks you're a dangerous freak who needs to be locked up. They let us down for a stunt that started out as a PR move and ended up as a right royal tantrum from a Premier who doesn't know when to let go. All those hushed rumours about MPs Brown had never met previously met being harangued in person and by phone, stalwart back benchers having their pet causes dangled tantalisingly before them in return for support. The ugly spectacle of a Prime Minister yelling and in tears on the telephone. Brown is throwing all his toys out of the pram.

The fact that his latest little stunt is one blunt, rusty nail in the chest of his government's re-election hopes is patently obvious even to his supporters. So why has he done it? Why fight so viciously for a piece of fantastically uncouth legal repression when the incumbent law, even if it makes it through the Lords, will almost certainly do more harm to Brown and his supporters than good to national security? Why? Panic. Sheer, vicious, bloody-minded panic. Brown has always been a bully, but now he's a frightened bully in a corner. And suddenly he's showing his teeth.

I want to claim then there are no words to describe the let down. Given that I'm about to be a qualified journalist, that's not something I'm allowed to say anymore. Set down, then, a suitable amount of raw rage about this, along with a hefty measure of bewilderment and a chaser of neat despair. I don't know how this has happened, and I don't know why. My ancestors came to this country to escape persecution, poverty and violence, running from bombs and state terrorism and asking for nothing but the chance to work hard and educate their children in peace. Now that longed-for liberty is being sliced up and sold off piece by piece in the name of freedom, for the sake of a thuggish politician's pride and a bit of schmoozing to the tabloids.

Bugger this. I want a better world.

We Hate The Kids part 2: you’re spoiling the game.

On the cover of every magazine, young women are reminded of what will happen if we lose control. We will become fat and powerless and unloved, grotesque, overconsuming, binging on all the drink and drugs and digestives we can get our sweaty, unladylike paws on. We’ll stumble out of taxis way past our bedtimes, flashing our knickerless crotches at unsuspecting paparazzi and returning home to grind what’s left of modern morals into a fine powder and stuff it up our disintegrating post-feminist nostrils.

If your media world consists of The Hate, News of the World, Grazia and Closer magazine, you could be forgiven for thinking the country was being overrun by baying packs of young women ‘gone wild,’ ‘rebel mums,’ on the lash and the combined pill, vomiting helplessly into the gutters of taste and decency.

And leading the pack, grown monstrous on fame and fags and pap-dashes, Amy Jade Winehouse, the nightmare reanimated corpse of a fifties housewife, all beehive and bad behavior, cackling drug-smoke and beat poetry, brandishing a bottle of vodka and several confused baby mice in her terrible crack-stained fingers.

The spectre of young women’s imagined loss of control as cipher for social degeneration is a long established and tediously familiar one. As early as 1712, the Spectator of April 29 made explicit links between a number of ‘addictive’ substances and their dangerous effects on the adolescent female mind, warning its ‘fair Readers to be in a particular manner careful how they meddle with Romances, Chocolate, Novels and the like Inflamers; which I look upon as very dangerous to be made use of during this Carnival of Nature’.* TheFWord has run a great series of posts this week about the Hate and others’ effusely graphic concern for the mental, physical and moral health of young women stumbling through the streets of London, Glasgow and Birmingham at 4am with the lads. From a recent article:

‘The shocking increase in drunken loutishness by 'ladettes' - up more than 50 per cent across the country overall - is being blamed by police leaders on the Government's controversial 24-hour licensing reforms.

They said the figures were no surprise given the increasingly commonplace scenes of young women staggering helplessly around town centres, or collapsed amid pools of vomit.’

And this is posited as a ball-quivering social ill despite the fact that, as stated in the very same report, drink-related violence has fallen by a third in the UK since 1995. ‘Ladettes’ cause panic with their thoughtless appropriation of the cultural norms of the patriarchy, so all the more reason to frame girlish bad behaviour as a terrifying and preventable ‘loss of control’, drunken or otherwise.

And that loss of control comes back to the body, time and time again. Where the archetypal representation of male juvenile delinquency is the stalking hoodie, the active and malignant bourgeois nightmare, the image of female degeneracy is just that – an image. It’s not how we behave, it’s how we present – the ‘scenes’ we present, the flesh on show, the ‘helpless staggering’.

'Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves…' John Berger, Ways of Seeing

Self-control is presented as a physical property in just the same manner. The woman with perfect hair and make-up is in control. The dieting woman is in control. The woman with the gruelling exercise regime is in control, and maintaining that control is a constant struggle, since one violent, consuming fear in 21st century western culture seems to be the notion of western women really kicking loose, dumping that economy-serving physical self-martyrdom which represents successful womanhood for so many young women today. Not buying in. Spoiling the game.

Suddenly we’re not playing nicely anymore. The girls are staggering out of control, the boys seething with murderous intent. This is not, believe it or not, a permissive society, and to think otherwise is to entertain the notion that our parents' generation remained true to its ideals of tolerance and freedom. Britain and America are consumed by notions of shame, decorousness and a warped sexual economy desperate to bring young women, its key future consumer-base, to heel.

But we're spoiling the game. Spewing our non-conformity into the gutters of modern standards, the young women of this country, rich and poor but particularly poor, are rebelling in the traditional manner of any British underclass: we get ratarsed and we get rowdy. And what does that acheive, I hear you ask?

Well, it certainly scares the hell out of you. It's not much, but it's a start. In fact, tonight I might get the girls round for a night of loitering: we'll dye our hair pink like Lily and Amy, drink and get twisted and plan to end up with our skirts hitched under our armpits on a pavement in Shoreditch by midnight. If it frightens you, if it makes you sit up and think about what the hell happened to your dreams of a better world, then make mine a triple and down with standards.





*cited in Ballaster, Ros, ‘Addicted to Love? Women and/as Mass Culture,’ in Beyond the Pleasure Dome, Armstrong, Campbell & Armstrong (Sheffield, 1994).

Sugar nannies and the state.

Today in institutional misogyny: Tories apologise for nanny being paid from party expenses, disgraced woman MP sent to the parliamentary standards commissioner.

What, precisely, is the problem with a working mother paying another working woman to carry out childcare and admin duties that she doesn't have time for? Does the public worry that people who are 'only nannies' are unlikely to make good secretaries? Does a focus on childcare as a career mean one is unable to read, write, keep files and open post? Was the nanny found delinquently dancing on rooftops with rogue chimney sweeps? Or is the issue simply that childcare isn't seen as an important part of a politician's expenses, particularly if that politician is female? Excuse me whilst I remove my jacket: it's getting rather hot under this glass ceiling.

The Tories' staffing allowance is intended to meet the cost of assistants helping MPs with their parliamentary work, and is not meant to cover expenses incurred running their private lives. Well, here's a newsflash: in an integrated workforce those distinctions simply can't be drawn. Childcare is an essential expense for a great deal of MPs, and for female MPs in particular - as essential as secretaries or office interns. The security of reliable nannying is one of the things that allows women to continue to stand for parliamentary positions in an age where one often cannot rely on partners, extended family or other women to look after your children. I see no reason for arguing that reasonable childcare shouldn't be chalked up to official expenses; I see no reason that Ms Spelman's case shouldn't set a precedent for future arrangement of expenses. You never know, we might just see a few more female MPs in the Commons.

This case is in a totally different ballpark from Giles Chichester's sneaky 400-grand donation to his own company, also exposed this week. It's clear that Tina Haines' work, both in secretarial and childcare terms, was invaluable to Caroline Spelman in her first months as an MP. It's clear, also, that these women had a good working relationship in a difficult time which saw Spelman, who despite lacking pendulous Tory testicles is now party chair, working from home, listing her domestic residence as her constituency office, and bringing up three young children whilst attempting to serve her constituents and her country. Yes, this was an economic arrangement between two women potentially divided by class and income. Yes, I'm running dangerously close to defending a Tory MP's finance arrangements. But if one woman manages to combine a successful political career and motherhood whilst another receives more money and an added whack of parliamentary experience should she ever decide to change careers? Well, I call that sisterhood.

Which is, of course, precisely the Tories' objection to the use of their party funds - along with the fact that publicly acknowledged financial support for any working-class woman in a carer's role would be setting a dangerous precedent for the party. Next thing you know, it'll be tuppence for every penniless bird-feeding lady in London and the dons of Merril Lynch and PriceWaterhouseCoopers flying kites on Hampstead Heath - and then where would we be?

Reefer madness: an interlude.

Shock, horror, disaster! Call the riot boys, summon the G8! Get your placards out! Cannabis causes brain damage!

Well, sort of. Ish. We think. But it's been days since the last teen stabbing and it's a slow news morning, so let's have a moral panic anyway. Cue headlines splashed with the latest drug trials that prove next to nothing about the effects of marijuana on the human brain, as if that were the point.

Let's take an example: alcohol is our nation's biggest drug problem. Now, in tests that have been carried out so far, medium-to-low-level use of cannabis - a few joints a week for a few years, say - has been shown to display no correlation with changes in brain composition and chemistry. Likewise, there has been little evidence to show that a few units of alcohol a week does any permanent damage to one's system.

But the most recent studies on THC, the active ingredient in cannabis, examine people who've been smoking five or more joints per day for upwards of ten years. That, my dears, is one significant fucking habit. It's the equivalent of major, long-term alcoholism. And both addictions, taken to extreme, cause brain damage along with a host of other symptoms. If you're at an equivalent stage of advanced alcoholism, your memory will be dodgy, your sleep patterns shot to hell and your stress levels all over the place, not to mention the fact that you've probably fried your liver and kidneys. Likewise, if you've been smoking five joints a day for ten years all by yourself, you may well have a slightly shrunken amygdala, but your biggest and most immediate problem is probably going to be lung damage.

So let's compare this to another damaging behavior: self-harm. If you carried out equivalent studies on groups of self harmers with a control group, one would probably find that the self-harmers as a whole displayed significantly higher levels of depression and medium- to high-level manic and schizophrenic symptoms than the non-self-harming teenagers. Does this mean that self-harm causes brain damage? Of course not.

Alcohol, self-harm, hard drug use, smoking, unsafe sex, smoking cannabis. All of these activities have been shown to be more prevalent amongst the depressed and emotionally disordered, and particularly amongst the depressed and emotionally disordered young. But they are aggravating symptoms, not the cause of the problem. It's only logical that chemical escapism, offered by these drugs and addictions in their extremes, is a resort likely to be most tempting to those who have most to escape from.

Which is not to say that it's a good idea to spend all of your time stoned. It's a very BAD idea to spend all of your time stoned, especially if you care at all about your lung capacity. But it's no worse for you than, say, mild alcoholism, and there's no reason for it to be criminalised when alcohol isn't. The effect of the continued criminalisation - and, now, of reclassification despite leading doctors' advice - of cannabis is simply to make users more financially and emotionally dependent on illegal drug-dealers, and less likely to seek help when , like young alcoholics, they recognise that their problems have superseded their control.

The trouble with the THC debate is that it tends to be polarised between subjective extremes. On the one hand, there are the hard-liners like Gordon Brown who just hate hippies, stoners and all their ilk; then there are parents understandably blinkered by fear for their children, and conservatives eager to jump on the latest bandwagon condemning the coping mechanisms of any social underclass. (Janine has a brilliant piece today commenting on the continued legality of alcohol at the Henley Regatta).

On the other hand, there are the producers of High Times and their mates, the great semi-washed, stoning masses who may or may not be otherwise useful members of society. Addicts frantic to defend their habit. Endless arguments over late-night spliffs that usually begin with a lazy generalised attack on NewLabour and end when someone starts quoting Bill Hicks. This isn't the whole story either.

The simple fact is that this country has a problem with drugs and drink: period. For Joe average dope fiend and Jill average booze hound, low-level use doesn't often present that much of a problem, particularly if you don't have a Facebook account. But there are heavy users, serious addicts, people who peddle away their lives to the drug, and they do have problems - problems that don't need in-depth psychiatric studies to demonstrate their urgency.

As a nation, we've fostered for several generations a serious weed habit that's growing to form a plausible second option to the nation's favourite hobby: boozing. We're a nation of alcoholics; we've been a nation of alcoholics for centuries. Alcohol is the drug of imperialism. It makes you rowdy, aggressive, navel-gazing, horny and insidious, strips you of humility and moderation, gives you a self-inflated sense of your own importance, psyches you up for a fuck and a fight. Alcohol is something the British have long internalised as a part of their cultural identity. Weed isn't. No stoner that we know of ever colonised Africa; violent stoners laying out gender hierarchies by beating their wives and children is another cultural norm that's yet to be identified. Weed saps away every hypercapitalist drive to improve oneself, to fight and conquer, to produce and to consume on ever more dizzying scales. Joint-in-hand, one is quite happy to spend another evening on the sofa chatting to your mates about the semiotics of 1980s cartoons. Not so the bottle. A drunken British public is something the system has come to accept, despite periodic media panics over the moral health of the nation, usually timed to coincede with periods of relative conservatism and economic slowdown.

We need to have an open and objective national conversation about weed. Marjunana is neither a panacaea nor about to tip us into an immediate cross-generational psychotic break, but it is a national health problem, a problem that needs to be understood and addressed. Increasing criminalisation, victimising the young and the mentally distressed and frantic media scaremongering add nothing useful to the TCH debate. Honest and balanced reportage in non-judgemental conversation with users, healthcare professionals and families alike might just take us one step closer to understanding the real scale of harm that this drug causes. So let's begin it.

We Hate the Kids pt1: the madness of young men.

Hypermasculinity, like hyperfemininity, is a pose of the powerless. There is a reason you don't see gangs of City bankers stalking Moorgate and Maylebone with long knives and hoods pulled down over their heads - and it's not because they've been better brought up.

It's because they've no need to. When you've got money and status and class and education and power, you don't need to act out physical prowess and aggression because it's not all you've got - although the hard-working ladies at Spearmint Rhino might well testify to the fact that city lads too are prone to the odd bout of gibbon-like strutting and howling.

Finer minds than mine have discussed this function of the culture of young male violence. The pronouncement of US anti-violence educator Jackson Katz on gang culture amongst young black males in the States can be applied equally to disenfranchised boys of every race in London:

“If you're a young man growing up in this culture and the culture is telling you that being a man means being powerful… but you don't have a lot of real power, one thing that you do have access to is your body and your ability to present yourself physically as somebody who's worthy of respect. And I think that's one of the things that accounts for a lot of the hypermasculine posturing by a lot of young men of color and a lot of working class white guys as well. Men who have more power, men who have financial power and workplace authority and forms of abstract power like that don't have to be as physically powerful because they can exert their power in other ways.”

So you're fifteen, and the whole world is against you. Teachers and pop songs tell you you can do anything, should be anything, anything you want to be, but poverty and class and race and prospects and precedent say different. Telly and magazines bleat trite nonsense about love lasting a lifetime when your family is bitter and broken and as poor and messed-up as you are; pills from the doctor and packets from your dealer are the only thing keeping all of you from despair, you've got no models for being a man without meanness and posturing, all you've got is raw, raging energy, your muscles and your mates.

Of course you want to fucking kill something.

Manhood. Sounds tough and meaty in the mouth, a word torn off with the teeth and lips. Promises something constructive from self-loathing. Just because nobody's carrying placards doesn't mean this isn't social rebellion. After all, nobody knows better than the British left how much easier it is to attack each other than to fight the system.

It may come as a surprise, but society is not a set of matched binaries. Although women incontestibly have it harder, it's not only girls but boys, too, who face discrimination on the basis of their gender and of their sex. The expectations and cruelties of western masculinity are not equal but equally devastating to the young people brought low by someone else's idea of identity. In this horrifyingly unequal culture, young men as well as young women can find themselves powerless, albeit in smaller numbers. And in exactly the same ways, the most visceral and primitive elements of the received gender role, the parts that afford the most personal power and pride in a world bereft of pleasure and opportunity, are the ones you seize on when you've got no other system left for self respect. For girls, that's often chauvinistic porn-culture; for boys, it's violence, posturing and gang-membership.

And it's been played out for years, in the suburbs and the backstreets of the richest and most glamorous cities in the world. But this month, two nice white kids have been killed: cue a moral panic and campaigns in the Hate and the Sun. And suddenly the biscuit-eating public is frightened again. Mums and dads of the baby boom generation: get real. Violent hypermasculinity doesn't happen in a vacuum, it's a symptom of poverty and desperation and hopelessness, and you made us.

*And yes, this is a race issue as well as a gender issue. It was a race issue long before the acronym-happy BNP GLA member posted this piece of filth on the Telegraph's new blog page. But the racial and gender prejudices inherent to this consuming fear of teenage violence can't be separated. Far be it from me to deny that Her Majesty's Constabulary does genuinely sometimes just like to beat up black kids, but that isn't the only issue here: black males, and especially young black males, are to many conservative whites the epitome of that terrifying, disenfranchised hypermasculinity lashing out because it has nowhere else to go.

Lesbian mums and the end of patriarchy

Medical technology is an awesome thing. It can save lives, cure terrible diseases, rebuild bodies. It can prolong and improve the lives of the chronically ill and disabled beyond the wildest dreams of sufferers even fifty years ago. It can reattach limbs, restore sight, cure depression, return the manic to health and sanity. But can it be used to give women control over whether and when they have children? Only if male doctors and MPs say so.

Whoever your parents are, they're going to fuck you up to some extent. I make no apologies for assuming that gay women and single women are just as likely to make good parents as anyone else, if not more so, as children conceived via the arduous process of IVF are slightly more likely to be wanted and treasured infants. For the purposes of this post we shall assume that one's sexual orientation has no bearing on one's likelihood of raising an unfucked-up child, nor on one's right to attempt to do so. With that one out the way, let's tuck in to a tasty breakfast of radical feminism with a gin chaser.

Throughout the wholesale technological reworking of the cultural landscape in the 20th and 21st centuries, laws remained in place to prevent new medical technologies and increased understanding liberating women’s reproductive choices. Even now, a woman must gain the permission of two doctors and undergo stringent ‘checks’ before she can access safe medical abortion. Until recently, women seeking IVF needed to declare a father and use a named man’s sperm despite the existence of plausible alternatives. But this week, in an impressive feat of anti-Luddism, MPs voted to allow single female parents and lesbian couples the right to reproductive self-determination: the right to have children, if they choose, without mandatory male interference.

‘Fathers are no longer needed!’ screamed the headlines as the Human Embryology and Fertilisation Bill passed through the commons on Tuesday. Well, we could have told you that. Millions of us grew up without fathers at home, without fathers at all. Millions more of us have loving and productive relationships with our fathers, but it is categorically not the case that any father at all is better than no father. The work of pregnancy, labour and the majority of childrearing still falls upon women, and it is inhumane to insist that that work be anything other than a sphere of self-determination. Men do not go through the physical trauma of conception, pregnancy and labour; men can have no right, as such, to insist upon any control over the process. It might be hard for individual men to swallow, but until medical technology enables them to conceive, incubate and bear children themselves, fatherhood will remain a privilege to be earned, rather than a right to be insisted on.

Reproductive rights campaigning goes far deeper than individual instances of choice. It’s a powerful cultural fascination, an issue that is woven into the very fabric of the stories that make us modern. From the rape of the Sabine women to Europa, ancient myth and precedent is obsessed by violent male control of feminine reproductive potential. From Brave New World to 1984 to the Culture, fables and fictions of the future are replete with paranoid speculation over the reorganisation of reproductive control.

The power to continue – or not to continue – the human race is quite simply the biggest social loaded gun on the planet. Since the dawn of patriarchy, male control over reproductive rights has been essential to the furtherance of patriarchal power, just as the ancient matriarchies ended when men’s involvement in human reproduction was realised.

This is why the rights of women to have children without ‘declaring the father’, to terminate pregnancy and to raise children alone, are such emotive and important legal sticking points. Women’s right to decide whether and when and how they have children is the ultimate threat to the rule of men, the ultimate insult to the divine supremacy of the father, and this week’s Commons vote is a milestone in the erosion of political patriarchy whose significance we will be debating for years to come.

Conservative MPs such as Ian Duncan Smith have made "impassioned pleas that the Government plan would "drive another nail into the coffin of the traditional family"" (DailyHate, 21.05.08). The assumption of the Tories is that the vacuous notion of the 'traditional family' ever had any relevance. The organisation of human love has little to do with how children are raised and everything to do with the maintenance of the bourgeois state - and excuse me for coughing communism onto this keyboard, I've got this little marxist tickle that just won't quit.

The Embryology Bill marks a turning point in the history of patriarchy, and all of us -men and women and transpeople, feminists and libertarians and trade unionists - can congratulate ourselves on beating back the tide of fundamentalist reactionism at extremely short notice. But, since this is a fight we're going to be called to again and again, we will have to spend the meantime coming to terms with the radical systemic social change that must be the end-point of our ideology. The rights of women to biological self-determination, the rights of mothers to bear or not to bear children without mandatory male interference, must remain fixed points on the agenda of the British left. Men have a right to stand alongside women, a right to care for their children, a right to take up the responsibilities of fatherhood once that privilege has been granted them. Fathers have their place. But that place is no longer at the head of the table.

YES!

FUCKING YES.

We did it.

Tomorrow, we can start the fight again. Tomorrow, we can pick up our tools and gather our resources and go back to battling patriarchy and injustice in whatever small ways we can. But today? Let's just sit back and have some well-deserved drinks and look at what we've acheived together, forty years after we made the first steps towards reproductive justice in this country.

The Fritzl case and media hypocrisy

This weekend has not been a good one for the dangerous freaks and dissenters among us. I spent it mostly in the garden under a scrap of boiling London sky, contemplating all the things I'm suddenly not allowed to do anymore. That, and reading the papers, most of which have spent the post-Boris comedown wanking grotesquely over the Fritzl case.

In case you've spent the past month hiding in a box, this is the big Austrian incest story that made headlines across the world when it emerged that a grandfather in his seventies had imprisoned his daughter in a custom-built dungeon under his house and fathered seven children by her whilst the rest of the family lived upstairs in complete ignorance. Horrific, utterly, stunningly horrific. And not something you'd ever see on these civilised islands, of course.

When was the last time you read a home-grown incest story in the British press? You can't remember, can you? There's a reason for that. No, it's not that they don't happen. It's that both the law of the land and the journalists' code of practice (PCC, ed.2006) expressly forbid the reporting of child sex cases and especially of incest cases. Here's the PCC:

Article 7. Children in sex cases

1. The press must not, even if legally free to do so, identify children under 16 who are victims or witnesses in cases involving sex offences.

2. In any press report of a case involving a sexual offence against a child, i) the child must not be identified; ii) the adult may be identified iii) the word 'incest' must not be used where a child victim might be identified; iv) care must be taken that nothing in the report implies the relationship between the accused and the child.


All jolly sensible stuff; thank you, the PCC. This law is specifically in place to prevent, just for example, the terrible feeding frenzy with which the British tabloids and dailies and even the broadsheets have descended on the hapless, vulnerable Fritzl children, ensuring that wherever they go in later life, they will be 'those kids from the cellar'. In the UK, a story like this simply would not have broken, or not in any matter which would have retained the human interest of this staggering piece of news. If Fritzl was identified, any sexual activity or abuse would have been omitted from the reports; if 'incest' was retained, reporters would have had to leave out everything else: a non-story. But because it happened in middle Europe, it's open season for the press, and no doubt the bones of this tragic story will be picked clean before the summer is out. That, after all, is what the British press are here for.

But that doesn't mean that it doesn't happen here, too. Incest happens in this country, every day. The sexual abuse of young girls and boys happens in this country, all the time, which is why gloating over something that happened in 'Hitler's homeland' makes for such teeth-itching cultural hypocrisy. Everywhere, sad men are getting their grizzled rocks off on sexual power-trips over the young and fragile. It happens.

This, of course is also why internet paedophila is such a news fascination over here: as long as the story's not about actual sex with an actual child, we can break it gloriously, splashing snaps of picture-hoarding perverts across the tabloids, whilst actual pederasty - physical sexual interference with children rather than just sick appreciation thereof - remains practically unreported. But it happens. Violence against women and children happens. And whilst the law of this country protects young people from media scrutiny up to a point, we'd do well to remember the number of things we still don't adequately protect them from. Perhaps we're not quite as civilised as we think.


And that, frankly, is all I have to say on the matter. If anyone wants me, I'll be in the garden smoking a fat reefer the size of a baby's arm and watching zombie-porn. Come and join me, bring drinks.

24 reasons for 24 weeks: a pro-choice call to arms...

As part of her campaign to force the government to reduce the 24 week limit within which women can legally have abortions, the MP Nadine Dorries yesterday unveiled '20 reasons for 20 weeks'. Today, we publish 24 reasons for 24 weeks, as part of a larger campaign to fight for women’s rights to abortion. This was written by me in conjunction with Jess McCabe at TheFWord, and is backed by the London Feminist Network, Liberal Conspiracy, TheFWord, Abortion Rights, Red Pepper magazine and Feminist Fightback.

24 reasons for 24 weeks.

1. There has been no improvement in the survival rates of infants born before the 24-week time limit during the past decade, according to the British Medical Association.

2. Last autumn, the Commons Science and Technology Committee of MPs found no medical basis for a change in the law.

3. Research shows that lowering the time limit does nothing to lower the number of abortions taking place.

4. There are many far better ways to reduce the number of late-term abortions. People who object to late term abortions should be fighting to make early abortions easier to access, and to increase the availability of proper sex education and access to contraceptives.

5. No contraception is foolproof, and anyone can find themselves pregnant against their will; until foolproof contraception is available, legal pregnancy termination up to 24 weeks will remain necessary.

6. Some women need late-term abortions because severe abnormalities in pregnancy, such as Edward’s syndrome, are rarely identified until 20-21 weeks. Reducing the time limit would force some women to carry severely impaired or dying fetuses to term - an horrific experience.

7. Some vulnerable women need late-term abortions because an abrupt change in personal circumstances - such as domestic violence, which often escalates in pregnancy - leaves them unable to continue with the pregnancy.

8. Some women do not realise that they are pregnant until later in the pregnancy, because they are taking contraceptives, because they are menopausal, or because their periods do not stop. Young women in particular may also go into denial, a serious psychological phenomenon, before they find the courage to approach their GP.

9. Even taking these cases into account, only a tiny proportion (1.5%) of terminations take place after 20 weeks, and 90% of all abortions in the UK are carried out before 12 weeks.

10. Accessing an abortion is already difficult and traumatic enough. The UK does not have abortion on demand, unlike many European countries - it can take months for a woman to have a termination, and hostile doctors can make the process more difficult or delay women in the system until beyond 20 weeks, especially for Irish women who have crossed the sea to access
abortion services in the UK.

11. Only 15% of fetuses born before 23 weeks survive to leave their neo-natal units, and most will suffer severe health and/or physical problems. Babies born as prematurely as 21-22 weeks are nearly always born brain damaged and severely disabled - meaning that they may have very little quality of life to look forward to.

12. There is no option for ‘viable’ fetuses to be removed from the womb early, so women who carry unwanted pregnancies to term after 20 weeks are forced to carry the growing fetus in their body for months more and then undergo labour, causing permanent physical scars, pain and trauma.

13. When women have to carry unwanted pregnancies to term, they risk losing their jobs and damaging their long-term mental and physical health.

14. Fetuses cannot feel pain until much later in the pregnancy, according to experts. “The idea of fetal pain is an absurd and cruel one,” said Dr Stuart Derbyshire PhD, a researcher at Birmingham University.

15. Fetuses are never ‘alive’ after abortions: their brains are not developed enough to sense, think or feel pain.

16. Lowering the time limit to 20 weeks will create a black market trade in unsafe late-term abortions, endangering thousands of women’s lives. Eighty thousand women every year die from complications following backstreet abortions. We don’t want that to start happening in the UK.

17. Fetuses are not viable at 20 weeks: they cannot survive alone, and keeping them alive outside the womb requires complicated and expensive medical technology. Even with that technology few survive for long, causing incredible heartbreak to all involved. The idea that fetuses usually survive alone before 24 weeks is “a cruel deception for prospective parents with
premature babies,” according to Dr Evan Harris MP.

18. Safe, legal abortions at 20-24 weeks rarely have negative psychological effects - but the mental trauma of undergoing an unwanted pregnancy can last a lifetime.

19. In this country, we do not legislate over moral questions such as adultery, and abortion laws should not be the exception to that proud tradition. It is unacceptable to make laws on a moral question where there is any doubt. Pro-life campaigners are already free to make their views heard and to influence individual decisions.

20. The right of a woman to decide what happens to her own body should not be subject to the whims of changing public opinion.

21. Keeping late-term abortion legal will mean that abortions which are going to happen anyway will be carried out safely and hygenically. Many thousands of abortions up to and beyond 24 weeks happened annually before abortion was legalised in the UK in 1967. Those abortions were unsafe and many women died as a result. ‘We used to see women from the local community
bleeding to death in accident and emergency after backstreet abortions,’ said retired nurse Iris Fudge.

22. Seventy-six percent of the United Kingdom is pro-choice. The majority of women in the UK want their rights to safe, legal termination to be protected.

23. Those who are campaigning to reduce the time limit want to end legal abortion entirely - a dangerous and arcane concept. Reducing the time limit will bring them one step closer to their goals.

24. If faced with an unintended pregnancy, a woman in consultation with her doctor is the best person to decide on how to proceed.

What you can do:

*Use the Coalition for Choice website to get in touch with your MP and urge them to support the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill.

*Call or go to see your MP and make sure they turn up to vote on the day. Unless they're a frothing Tory, in which case tell them that all the cocaine in Glasgow is going to be free for one day only.

*If you have the time, please come to the crisis protest called by Abortion Rights:

Emergency Protest – as MPs vote on women’s abortion rights
Tuesday 20 May, 5.30pm
Outside Parliament, W1, London

What about women's rights, Mrs Dorries?

In the pages of the Daily Mail today, anti-choice poster-girl Mrs Nadine Dorries MP has been given a platform to put across her hateful, misogynist, reactionary views. She and a claimed 'coalition of 200' MPs are calling for a reduction in the time limit on legal abortion from 24 to 20 weeks, despite a lack of evidence that fetuses can survive outside the womb before that point and despite the fact that most women are against further reductions in the time limit.

First of all, we must recognise this duplicitous campaign for what it is: no more or less than a brazen attack upon women's rights. The fact that it's being spearheaded by a (privileged, rich, white, Tory) woman makes absolutely no difference: an attack on the time limit is an attack on the self-determination of all British women, everywhere. We live in an age without foolproof contraception, so this isn’t a case of ‘stupid women forgetting to take their pills’ – condoms break, hormones fail, and absolutely anyone can find themselves pregnant against their will.

Until the time when free and foolproof contraception is universally available, abortions up to at least 24 weeks will be a necessary medical service. To argue differently is to argue that women have no right to self-determine and that the choice of what to do with their own lives and bodies is better made for them by (normally male) doctors and Tory MPs. This latest attempt to whittle away our rights to choice has been tacked on to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, a bill which is otherwise fundamentally sound. The Bill tables for the second time on the 12th. Pro-choice MPS have, until now, been too timid to add their own amendments to the bill, and we remain on the back foot, fighting to save our basic rights to self-determination.

The anti-choice MPs' squeal of protest flies in the face of recommendations by the all-party Commons science and technology committee, which was specifically called last year to consider all the evidence, and concluded there was none to support a reduction in the upper time limit. But Mrs Dorries, who sits on the committee, and another member refused to back the report, as a result of which women in the UK are facing another serious threat to their reproductive rights.

This is an attack on women, pure and simple: if it wasn't, Tory debate wouldn't be focused so much on the spectre of the 'unborn child', it would be focused on the rights of children who have already been born, millions of whom live in abject poverty minutes from Mrs Dorries' own front door. Not to besmirch Mrs Dorries's credentials as a bleeding-heart tory, but more children die on the roads every year than are the 'victims' of late-term abortions.

Mrs Dorries' attack is an unsubtly pitched mash-up of truth manipulations and outright lies. Yes, some infants can feel pain after 18 weeks in the womb - but the press coverage neatly neglects to mention that it's standard practice to use anaesthetic when carrying out late-term abortions. The notion that 2/3 of the British public are calling for a reduction in the time limit is flatly refuted by research carried out by Abortion Rights UK.

Dr Evan Harris MP and numerous other spokespeople are adamant that reducing the time limit would hit out against the most vulnerable of women - the young, the poor and the mentally ill - but that's not going to stop Mrs Dorries, who has never been poor and believes that young, poor, unstable and/or immigrant women are moral sinkholes who need to be saved from themselves. The words used in one report were 'protecting the unborn child from the whims of the mother'.

And don't even get me started on the tie-in lobby '20 reasons for 20 weeks.' Amongst the most ludicrous are: 'Few UK graduates willing to perform abortions beyond 16 weeks and most who do so are from overseas' - Right. So now it's all the fault of those pesky foreign doctors who should keep their filthy foreign hands off our British babies. A nice piece of incidental racism from the Hate, completely ignoring the fact that without medical graduates from overseas the entire NHS would instantly collapse. An unsupported opinion which smacks of 'well, my aunt's neighbor's daughter had a late term abortion and, you know, it was one of those foreign doctors that did it.' Crass, mindless bigotry. What’s next?

'Mental illness link to late-term abortions' - absolutely. And this is because it's difficult not to notice or to accept that you're pregnant until 21 weeks unless you have serious mental problems in the first place, problems which won't go away after an abortion, but which you can bet your life would get a damn sight worse after carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term. In Tory Utopia there will be only a bare minimum of support for you and your unwanted child, you'll have to deal with the vaguaries of 'care in the community' if you get any help at all, you and your child will start off poor and damaged and you will remain poor and damaged and you will probably die poor and damaged. And these are the pregnancies that Mrs Dorries is so keen to ensure are carried to term.

Mrs Dorries and her followers claim that '2,500 lives' will be saved every year if the time limit is cut - neglecting to see the obvious parallel that for every 'life saved' when an unwanted pregnancy is carried to term, another life - that of the mother - is ruined. But Mrs Dorries doesn't care, because Mrs Dorries doesn't like other women, particularly poor women, immigrant women, young women and women who have suffered psychic traumas, who make up the majority of requests for late-term abortions. Mrs Dorries does not like other women, and believes that they are sluts who can't be bothered to take pills and should be punished by forcing them through traumatic unwanted pregnancies. Fortunately, I've got a brilliant idea to solve this problem.

The next, ooh, let's say four babies put up for adoption by mothers who missed the termination time limit should be shipped out to Mid Bedfordshire and deposited on Mrs Dorries' doorstep. She's got a great big heart, so she'll be just thrilled to look after them. Of course, she wants to be in line with the experiences of her constituents, so she'll have to give up her high-profile parliamentary job in order to burp, feed and wipe the bottoms of her new brood morning, noon and night. And she'll be only too happy to take on an equivalent cut in wages and go on state benefits. No more prime minister's question time for you, Mrs Dorries - you'll be down at mothercare with the rest of us worrying about whether you can afford a new pair of booties for Child 4, and you'll goddamn like it.

Feminist Fightback, the newly-established Coalition For Choice and Red Pepper Magazine urge committee MPs to help us throw out this reactionary, misognynist amendment, by voting it out of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill. We’re counting on you.

Oh, god.

Did anyone else feel like staying in bed this weekend? Did anyone else struggle with basic tasks like shaving and making the tea? Did anyone hesitate before opening the papers or firing up the net?
It was so fragile. Just for a little while longer, we could pretend that it had all been a dreadful booze-fuelled nightmare and all we needed was a quiet day with the curtains closed and we'd be fine. But it's Monday morning, now, and the Tories have still got the councils. There's still a fucking BNP member on the London Assembly. And by 140,000 votes, smug Tory clown Alexander Boris Johnson is now Duke of London and spoilt Prince of the underground. We start this clammy May week in a country that has lurched drunkenly to the right: get the resolve from the cupboard. It's going to be one hell of a hangover.

Look at him. Look at his terrible pink face. On the BBC's post-victory interview, the BNP's second-choice candidate began to reveal his true colours. No more the bumbling, Bertie Wooster-esque gaffe-happy clown, oh no. Someone's been training him. Only his eyes and mouth moved, lizardlike, apart from occasional forays into the tantrumish rage of a small toddler when the BBC interviewer asked if he could call him 'Boris'.

He was obtuse, he interrupted, was massively self-satisfied and oozed privilege. He repeated over and over again 'how much he had wanted to win,' and now that the Blond has squealed and cajoled us into giving him what he wanted, we're about to find out if he really has any useful policies beyond 'Boris for Mayor'.

The BNP back the Blond for some very good reasons: he is uncomplicatedly racist, a misognyist, a snob, an elitist and a hard-line right-winger who supported the Iraq war from bloodshed to bloodshed and condemns gay marriage in the press. His reactionary and disgusting views are indulged because apparently he's a cheeky old diamond in the rough, a people's politician who's not afraid to speak his mind. Festering bollocks to that one. Those who remember Enoch Powell and his rivers of blood will recall that just because someone's openly racist and sexist does not mean they're not a swindling, duplicitous bigot.

Enough of this. We KNOW all this. What we don't know yet is what we're going to do about it. We've got years of struggle ahead of us without the reassurance of the Labour back benchers when we criticise our government. We may not have a decent and dignified left-wing politician in charge of the capital. We may be terrified at the prospect of our country slipping slowly and inexorably towards the right, but this is what happens when people lose faith in democracy. We use it to self-sabotage, to elect bigoted leaders greedy for control and we roll over to call the fuckers 'uncle'. And it's not that they don't believe in equality, of course, but some politicians - politicians like Boris - believe that some animals are more equal than others.

On this clutch of islands, we do not stand and applaud when party leaders enter the room, but Alexander Boris De Pfeffel Johnson, who has Prime Ministerial ambitions, almost certainly sees himself as that sort of politician. He wants to be in charge, and his own power is his highest political ideal. I remain on bloody tenterhooks to see what the hell he's going to do with that power now he's got it, but for whatever it's worth, be assured that my comrades and I will be keeping a very close eye on City Hall over the coming months. Look forward to exciting and relevant new blogs, city-wide activism in the face of the Forward Intelligence Team's bullying, anti-capitalist drunken ranting and possibly an album of radical folk songs. Goshdemnit, but we're going down shouting.

Election feverdreams....

London on election night. You could knife the air, and not just because I live with drug fiends. The BBC have no exit polls. Sky have no exit polls. 'Neutral' news sites are sensationalising with vox pop polls and rabid speculation. Selective members of the insomniac left are fretting and snarking at one another, having devoured all online content and gone shocking like the little robot in the Short Circuit films.

Input....? Input....?Input.....?

It's the eye of the storm, and I don't like it; my Jewish half longs to shrug and toss it all in, my Catholic half is waiting for a stained-glass miracle, and my lizard brain just wants to get under its rock. At least, it seems, the votes are being counted under the supervision of nice, normal people who sleep nice, normal hours. They're starting after breakfast at 9, reckoning that the count will take nine hours; including breaks for elevenses and afternoon tea, we should know in time to douse ourselves in valedictory booze before the pubs shut. I'm going to a party in Hackney with pagans, bisexuals and the variously depraved, and if Johnson wins I may not come back.

Which is a lie, of course. I love this city and would love it even mismanaged by a racist Tory clown; I'm here to stay, and if the GLA lurches to the right I'll be there among the hundreds standing in its way. Let's get a good night's sleep. We might need it.

Mayday Socialist Feminist stomp!

A very merry M'aidez to you all. I was asked to give a speech, yesterday, at the Housmans Bookshop in London. This is an extract from what I said, and my thoughts have been formed by a detailed debate over at my personal blog.

********************

A sea-change is taking place in contemporary feminism, particularly in the cities. Feminism is moving out of the universities and back onto the streets, as women of all backgrounds realise that practical action, class agitation and the rights of ordinary, working women are, and always have been, the future of the movement.
Midway through writing this article on Monday, I had a pregnancy scare. My period was a couple of days late, I was spotting but not cramping, I was off my food… I panicked.
It didn’t take me long to decide that I would want to terminate the pregnancy, and that meant a litmus test for my socialism: should I spend my limited savings, money that could be going towards vital schooling, on a quick, safe, private abortion, or should I go through the stress and psycho-physical trauma of asking for an abortion on the NHS?Fortunately I got the familiar fisting cramps that night and was soon happily curled around a hot water bottle, but by that time I’d learned two things: one, that abortion and reproductive rights, like so many other feminist concerns, are primarily questions of class and economics. Two, that when you’ve had a pregnancy scare, ‘Alien 2′ is not the film to watch to calm yourself down.

Abortion is a class issue. My organisation, Feminist Fightback, is currently lobbying and demonstrating in protest at the abortion rights retractions currently on the Commons table as part of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, which would cut the time-limit on later-term abortions.
This will not affect rich women, who have always been able to access abortions when they wanted them. It will affect vulnerable women who have no choice but to throw themselves on the mercies of the NHS postcode lottery and pray that they get a short waiting list and two pro-choice doctors.
Germaine Greer said, in her introduction to the Female Eunuch, that she could only speak about women of her own age, class and background. Very worthy, one might think, apart from the small fact that it was a blinkered, heinous and lazy approach that meant that one of the most influential political books of the decade only mentioned middle-class, educated, white women with prospects similar to Ms Greer’s.
Young feminists today are realising that in order to further our cause we must look beyond our own experiences. An extremely bright young working-class woman told me yesterday: “Rightly or wrongly, I regard feminism as it exists today as the territory of university-educated middle-class women with the privilege of spending some of their time debating privilege.”
While I would never dream of arguing that feminist theory, feminist blogging, etc is anything but worthwhile, to somebody whose concerns, through economic necessity, are more about finding and maintaining a job that will support them it cannot help but seem alien, or even irrelevant. The mainstream feminist collective appears not to care particularly about the realities of life as a working-class woman ‘
That, thanks to the oversights of Greer and her ilk, really is how feminism has come to be seen in many circles, despite the fact that it is fundamentally a socialist issue that transcends class. But that is changing, and I don’t think it’s an accident that it’s changing now.
Young women today, whatever their background, are finding themselves more socially and financially unstable than they have been for generations. As well as being more independent, we’re more likely to enter adulthood with massive amounts of debt, we face more pressure and competition to do well, our options and finances are more precarious, and we are more likely, whatever our level of education, to end up in hard graft, minimum wage jobs, as opposed to the glittering careers and model family lives so many of us were told to aim for.
This is part of what puts us in a position to empathise and share concerns with working women more than, perhaps, our mothers did. We are also aware, as 21st-century women, what it means to overwork for little reward within a patriarchal capitalist system that is fundamentally opposed to feminine needs.
After the social mobility of the mid-century, young women are finally coming to realise once more that the simple fact of being female puts our work, our capital value, on a different semiotic scale from that of our male classmates. For all of these reasons and more, feminism is turning again towards socialism as its natural counterpart, spearheaded by enterprising new groups like Feminist Fightback making links with workers organisations and trying to join forces with the dispossessed.
This isn’t about posh girls flirting with communism because they don’t want to pay their taxes.
We have no right to take control of someone else’s issue, no right to stomp into a territory we might not fully understand with our big mostly-white middle class feet. What it is about is people who’ve been lucky enough to have greater social opportunities and a platform using those opportunities and that platform to advance the cause of working women and to recognise that as women and as workers our goals are the same.
And then - crucially - it’s about making space on that platform and space in that debate for working-class women, women who may be bringing up kids alone, who may be working too many hours on minimum wage and may not have time or energy to blog or to organise direct action.
This is going to mean that middle-class feminists face the daunting task of working for change without the moral high ground, which is something that we are traditionally bad at. But we do not need the moral high ground to be agitators. Instead of ignoring our privilege, and by definition the concerns of the less privileged, we need to start using the advantages we’ve been given to form links, pursue local action and work for change, without necessarily expecting to be thanked and lavished with praise.
Like the men who helped push women’s suffrage through parliament 80 years ago, like the whites who marched with Luther King in the sixties, we have a duty to give help where we can, and then to step aside.

Binge nation pt 2: a scuffling retraction....

My, what a can of worms. If I’m not willing to admit I’ve messed up occasionally, then this blog and all of my journalism is just wanking; so, my last post, which was accused of ableism and fat-bashing, was poorly explained and based partly on navel-gazing personal experiences of bulimia and anorexia, and has been duly edited down. Now, let me try to explain better:

Eating disorders are mental illnesses generated by personal and, to some extent, political disempowerment. They are reactions against an erroneously-perceived inner grotesquery: a feeling of being out-of-control, shameful, ugly, powerless and ‘fat’ as a cipher for all of those feelings.
It is fascinating, therefore, that a white, rich, middle-aged man who has held a high-profile public office and is famous – pretty much the defininition of empowerment in western culture – has suffered in relative silence from the same disorder for twenty years. Prescott represents and embodies a violent, headily consumerist political overculture – not because of his weight, but because of his conduct – and even he is suffering undeservedly.

It was this passage that drew the most criticism:

‘John Prescott represents everything every eating disordered person is frightened that they are personally: grotesque, violent, out-of-control, self-indulgent saddled with enormous responsibilities that they did not earn, and as if to symbolise it all, obese. Every bulimic, anorexic and bulimarexic thinks that this is what they are like on the inside.’

Yes, the language is vile. This is because the concept is vile. This vileness is what obesity symbolises for the eating disordered, and it’s a violent, painful way of turning that horror inwards. I have been deep down into the bulimic mindset and that feeling of inner foulness and grotesquery is despicable, choking, so deeply fucked-up that even now, three years later, I’m sitting at my rickety kitchen table with snotty tears rolling down my face. Bulimia, all eating disorders, are dreadful, and I reacted with aggreived consideration against a cultural sickness that I once internalised like so many others, and now see everywhere around me.

I can’t help but see a link between the feelings of grotesquery associated with eating disorders and the literal grotesquery of corrupt officials and white male consumerist hegemony. The medical profession is fairly unanimous that sufferers of eating disorders and other addictions are responding to external pressures and frustrations – both individual and cultural pressures. Unable to control their personal and political circumstances, bulimics turn that controlling impulse inwards. It is therefore highly indicative that a man like Prescott, who seems to embody that violent overculture, also has to fall back on disordered and dreadful coping mechanisms to deal with himself and with his job.

I have known so many fine, beautiful, thoughtful, talented young men and women cut down by eating disorders: confused, disenfranchised, bewildered by the ridiculous demands of a grotesque and hostile hypercapitalist culture, many of them –male and female - reacting to the increased demands of forced feminisation and gender fascism. The fact that some of the very people complicit in enforcing the overculture – people who, like Prescott, necessarily take on some of the characteristics of that culture –have turned to the same terrible methods of stress control should tell us a lot about how fragile the whole system is.

There is a lot of ugliness and violence out there, and one of the worst parts of recovering from bulimia - apart from the shame, the self-disgust and the terrifying weight gain –is that you start to see that ugliness and violence outside of yourself, in a political and ideological sense, rather than internalising it.

But the fact that our political leaders suffer in the same way tells us that there is no conspiracy going on here. Nobody has forced a grotesque hypercapitalist overculture on us: we have all sleepwalked there together, and even the most powerful cannot deal with its demands. And if we can sleepwalk there, we might just be able to stumble back.

The face of power in a binge nation

John Prescott has made eating disorders news again by coming out as bulimic. This, of course, is a perfect opportunity for me to lash myself to my favourite look-at-this-damn-issue-flogging horse. Eating disorders need celebrity chic to be news these days, but they don't cease to be a dangerous epidemic when someone famous hasn't just bared their soul in a lucrativebook deal. The thousands of brilliant young, and not so young people who are killed or mentally crippled by bulimia, anorexia, bulimarexia, binge-eating and other disorders every year fail to make regular headlines for one reason only: it's a 'girl's illness.'

This is a deeply feminist issue, of course. Although eating disorders are not, in fact, a 'women's problem' -10% of those afflicted are men and boys - is is a highly feminised disease in western culture, not helped by the fact that women and gay men make up the majority of sufferers, and this has everything to do with how it is handled by the state and press. Much was made of Naomi Wolf's erroneous statistics in 'The Beauty Myth', but she used them to make the very salient point that if an equivalent number of men and boys were suffering -even the real statistics, as the charity Beat "currently believes the number of people receiving treatment for anorexia or bulimia in the UK to be near to 90,000, while many more people have eating disorders undiagnosed, in particular those with bulimia nervosa" -there would be a national public health outcry, rather than a series of intermittent media farts.

Prescott having the disorder strikes a violent, on-air media punch of representation for the thousands of men whose lives are destroyed by the disease, and for that one can be reasonably grateful. Prescott does not merely 'represent a sick society', though. He was actually in power, actually helping to build and shape that society. It stuns me that the effect of Prescott's bulimia nervosa upon his role as a key political agent has barely been questioned. For myself, it was only after winning my 6-year battle with anorexia that I was able to properly engage with political power again, as a radical writer and an activist. This is because you cannot engage effectively with outer, political space when all your energies are being focused on fighting interior, emotional battles.

And this is perhaps the most worrying part of the Prescott affair: the fact that we have just been told that government was until not so long ago partly run by a politician who was deeply affected by a serious, chemically addictive mental illness, but because it's 'a girl's disease' that's somehow unremarkable. Charles Kennedy was only third-party leader and he was eventually forced to step down over his alcoholism, but because it's a a feminised concept, nobody takes bulimia nervosa seriously. In fact, it is one of the most physically dangerous psychoses, with a 5% mortality and 20% permanent relapse rate. But noone has yet questioned whether those years of nightly binges, vomit-swollen cheeks and emotional disturbance affected the former deputy Prime Minister's ability to govern during the years of the Iraq invasion. It's 'a women's disease' - of course it didn't affect his mental robustness, not a gruff old bulldog like Prescott!

All this talk has made me hungry, so I'll go and make dinner and muse on this more. If you, too, see John Prescott in the mirror from time to time, don't hesitate to call this helpline.