I'm an anarcho-socialist: get me out of here

Last night, an extraordinary thing happened. I watched open-mouthed as the United States of America elected its first non-white president. The country erupted with longing for democratic change, the world partied, and a million teenage fangirls squealed at the sexual tension between Rob Lowe and Brandley Whitford.

Oh, stoppit. Yes, I'm talking about The West Wing. Last night, I finally finished the series, and I find myself bereft like a late-night sugar junkie, suddenly coming to with sticky crumbs of the last of the biscuits smeared on my chin and down my pyjamas, subsumed by a creeping sense of shame; you know it's not real food, you feel a bit sick, but you still want some more.

Throughout this turpitudinous year, my housemates and I have purged our sorrows and self-doubt with liberal applications of all seven series of The West Wing, shock tea, narcotics and a metric buggerload of digestives. And now it's all over, three weeks after we stayed up to spoiler ourselves by watching the climax of season seven played out in real life on November the 4th, the biggest, best reality TV show politics ever paid for. That series is over, now, too, but never mind - we still have reams of fanvids, mashups and screaming teen slashfiction (Joebama, guys!) to see us through to Epilogue: Inauguration Day in January.

Is it me, or have we all been watching a bit too much TV?

In a speech written for the Fabians (well worth reading in full), David 'I was mates with Obama in college' Lammy certainly seems to think so -

What happens in the United States affects us all and there is a great deal that we can learn from it. But we need to make sure we don’t let politics become a mere spectator sport. We can’t adopt US politics as a new political soap opera to replace The West Wing. I know that the election campaign seemed to have hired the same scriptwriters, so that the plot of the final season happening for real. But this will remain fantasy politics for us if we engage – from the outside – in American politics as an alternative to taking responsibility for bringing about change for ourselves here.

I'm sick and tired of fantasy politics. I'm sick and tired of watching overseas politicians slug it out to exciting super-wrestling soundtracks on TV from a cold, crowded house in North London where our seventh flatmate, rattus africanus*, has recently returned to plaguify us all. I'm sick and tired of waiting for change and being delivered empty soundbites and endless, endless bloody fanvids.

When not writing this blog and searching vainly for paid work, I've spent this year doing endless internships for national newspapers, magazines and political thinktanks, and, as of last week, in parliament itself, hoiking my unemployed, overeducated little arse out of bed to be every editor and politico's least favourite helpmonkey. And all this time I've spent scuttling around various corridors of power I've been secretly looking for someone, anyone, who wants real change, someone even trying to angle the system to publish innovative articles, to get real groundbreaking work done, to interest themselves in something more socially affective than the latest dead celebrity. But to no avail. Because, and let's not pull any punches here, they've all spent the past eight years watching the sodding West Wing.

Seriously. The Fabian Society? West Wing fans. The Indie? The Graun? Parliamentary researchers? West Wing fans. When I say kill your damn tv I'm not talking to some fantasy socio-political underclass, I'm talking to everyone from the cabinet down: your next fix of social justice isn't bloody coming from Fox Networks.

We've got to accept that the fact that another country, a bigger, more powerful, more culturally significant country than this tiny clutch of islands just elected what looks like a genuinely liberal adminitration does not mean that we can now all clock off and head to the pub (and come to think of it, 36 of them are closing per week). It still smells unnervingly like we might elect a Tory government in 2010, and for no better reason than it might make us feel a bit less responsible for the state of our own lives for a while. If we truly want change, it won't come from the telly, it won't come from the tories, and it won't come from another administration in the New Labour idiom, either - so we'd better decide what flavour of change we want right bloody now.

Bring up the theme tune; let the credits roll. Time to get up off the sofa. Time to shiver at the static humming from the darkening screen, stretch, put the kettle on, and start planning a better world. Because it won't happen any other way. This revolution will be brought to you live.

But the backdrops peel and the sets give way and the cast get eaten by the play
There's a murderer at the matinee, there are dead men in the aisles
And the patrons and the actors too are uncertain if the play is through
And with sidelong looks await their cue
But the frozen mask just smiles
- Alan Moore, V For Vendetta, 1988

*The biscuit-stealing bastard is the size of a small dog, and my Ghanaian housemate assures me he ain't from round here. After a month of fruitless saucepan-flapping and definitely no resident camp artists squealing and standing on chairs, we eventually found it passed out halfway down a bag of caster sugar and threw it in the garden, where it rolled under a bush. I blame Boris.

LeftNewMedia: let a thousand flowers bloom...

Last night: the first meeting of what, after a little bit of squabbling, has been titled the LeftNewMedia forum. In attendance: some techie types, several folks who have the esteem of being Famous On The Internet, John MacDonnell MP, who is famous in real life, and my rather bewildered housemate, who actually has a life. StroppyBird was there, as was Dave Osler, a representative of thoughcowardsflinch, and several other quasi-hacks with a laptop, time on their hands and a sense of public justice. The topic under discussion: how do we use the netroots to achieve objectives within the British Left?

The Obama campaign, it was proposed, has put the British Left to shame in terms of its use of the internet to harness liberal energy. And at first that seems to be incontestibly the case. The way that the campaign tapped into local energy, targeted resources and raised a rustling shitload of cash for the cause can only be seen as an unprecedented triumph for the international Left as it adjusts to the new technological order. For more technical details of just how this was done, go read Crashing The Gate, visit the MoveOn site, and be inspired.

This meeting, convened by John MacDonnell's babyfaced flunky Owen Jones, took the Obama campaign as its yardstick and key ideal. Our objective was no less than to use the internet to unite the progressive left.

Um.

Have you met the progressive left? Its representatives at the initial meeting took ten solid minutes of recrimination just to decide when and where we were meeting next. The British left are good at many things, but we can't find absolute ideological common ground with both hands and a torch. Just look at the abortion rights movement: indubitably a progressive campaign, and also ostensibly a single-issue campaign, but put two pro-choice activists in a room and I guarantee you'll find points of contention as well as articles of common ground. You will never get the British progressive left to agree. Let me repeat that: there is not, now, and never will be any such thing as a British progressive left consensus. And nor should there be.

The semiotic nature of the left is very different from that of the right. By definition, we are about a multiplicity of ideals and platforms. We can think in subtle and progressive tones, we can consider different causes and outcomes simultaneously, we are contentious, and we are clever. And that's why the world wide websphere is a natural home for our efforts:

Look again at the abortion rights movement. A myriad of different positions, one for every activist and thinker and ally involved, but let an *objective* come up upon which we can roughly agree - stopping Mad Nads' initiative to lower the time limit, for example - and look how we mobilise. The hundreds-strong protest outside parliament when the Bill hit the table in May, and the energy that accompanied it, was garnered online; thousands of internet activists wrote to their MPs using E-letters, we blogged, we talked, we organised. All we needed - all the left ever need - was a practical objective. And look at us mobilise.

And that's what the Obama campaign had. It had a very practical, comprehensible and time-specific goal: to get Barack Hussein Obama elected president on the 4th of November this year.

Now look, in a different way, at the trans-allied protest outside the Stonewall awards this month. That protest, the largest trans demo in UK history, was organised entirely online. The internet allows minority groups, like transpeople and their allies, to find each other, to share ideas and to raise debate. The point of the Global Village isn't to create one big ideological blanket for everyone to scurry under (a Global Longhouse, if you will) - the point is to let a thousand flowers bloom. To allow a multiplicity of tiny groups to coagulate and enable them to link up and unite behing causes when they need to.

At the meeting there was much talk of how the BNP website is the most-visited party political website in the country. With predictable disgust at the message, the medium of the BNP's online avatar was praised for its comprehensiveness, its soundbites, its clarity of message, its simplicity. Can we make left-leaning sites as effective in the same way?

No, we bloody well can't. The reason that the BNP website is simple is because the BNP is a simple idea. They're not about taking a considered ideological position. They have a few soundbites, and that's it - their soundbites are forcible because soundbites are all they have. Their message and objectives - hating immigrants, being proud to be British, feeling angry at the Damn Liberals - are fairly clear-cut, and either you swallow them or you don't. The BNP have been successful at organising online, but we do not want to emulate the BNP's online scheme, and even if we did there's no way we could apply it to the British left. We are better than that. We are cleverer than that. We can think in shades of grey. The strength of the right is that its message is simplistic and requires little actual thought. The strength of the left is that ours isn't. Our strength is in our numbers and our diversity.

And that is why the internet might have designed as a special playground just for us. All we need to do is abandon the notion of creating any kind of 'consensus'. Why the hell do we need consensus? We're the British left. We're never going to agree. You may as well go herding cats. When we have practical objectives to organise and gather behind - keeping out the Tories, fighting the far right, holding our own parties to account, supporting or opposing government bills, setting up community projects, organising protests - we are formidable, and we are very, very fast. And this week, we proved it.

The instant that the BNP membership list got out online this week, there was no stopping the anti-fascist hacktivists. Whine and stamp though Griffin might, within minutes the list was all over the world in millions of inboxes. Within hours Wikileaks had it, and some clever techies in their bedrooms had set up a tool to search the list by name and postcode and another tool mashing the list with GoogleMaps.

Without the online left, that list would never have become news, would never have reopened the debate around the far right in this country. We are powerful. We have at our disposal a great deal of talented people: techies, geeks, bedroom pyjama nerds, writers, bloggers, graphic designers, political canvassers and campaigners, directors, humorists. Obama's campaign remains an inspiration, but we're not doing too badly over here, and we'll only do better as the stakes are raised and we learn to own our syncretic differences. The future of radical politics is a geek in zir bedroom with a cup of coffee, a pile of manifestos and and internet connection.

LeftNewMedia aims to build a dynamic coalition of left-wing techies, computer geeks, writers, internet users, bloggers, activists and other interested parties with the aim of forging specific online campaigns. I encourage you all to come to the next meeting, at which we will set down details of our first campaign, and which will be in Central London on the 15th of December at 8pm, further details TBA. For those who can't make it, I'll be writing it up here.

Tales from Turnpike Lane Station 2: the trouble with Reclaim the Night

Last night, on the platform at Camden Town, I gave the friend I'd been out with a big hug and saw her onto her train before settling down to wait for the last tube home to Wood Green. Just then, I heard a voice behind me.

'Do I get a hug too?'

Two lads, about my age, maybe a little older, looking like something out of Neil Gaiman's 'Neverwhere', and grinning. I stiffened, smiled and said, 'no, you don't', not wanting to seem what I was. Which was scared, and angry.

Suddenly, I was a small, skinny young woman in London on her own, and here were some blokes who might or might not be about to give me some trouble. Defence mechanism one: Blunt and Rude hadn't worked, because they were now laughing and looking mock-hurt. So I opted for Defence Mechanism Two: bore them away.

I shook hands, introduced myself, started asking interminable questions about where they were born, what jobs they did, giving monosyllabic answers. The train rolled in and I still couldn't shake them off: we were apparently going to the same stop. And not for the first time, I found myself thinking: if I'd gone to Reclaim The Night like a good little feminist, this wouldn't be happening.

If I hadn't refused to march through another biting November night, shouting
'Men Off The Streets!', I'd be surrounded by sisters with placards and bovver boots rather than having to negotiate the potential danger posed by two men decidedly *on* the streets.

As we rattled past Caledonian road, one of the lads went quiet. And then he started telling me how, about a month ago, he and his father were attacked by a group of guys at Cally Road station. He came out with a few scratches. His father was still in hospital, having suffered potentially catastrophic brain damage. The other man was his cousin, who had come down from Liverpool to help the family out.

I listened. And then I explained how, about a year ago, I was nearly raped outside the same tube station. I explained about the calculations women make when faced with a lone man, or a group of men - and they nodded, and talked about very similar calculations that men make when they're out after dark. We talked about male violence against women, and male violence against men. I told them about Reclaim The Night, and why I wasn't there.

Because violence in the streets is something that affects all genders. Because as much as I want to support my sisters in their anger and their defiance, I have too many brothers who have been mentally and spiritually broken by beatings, who have had legs, fingers and self-confidence shattered by laughing strangers, who have not yet recovered - who may never recover - from living saturated in a sick culture of masculised violence.

Brutality is bred in the bone in this country, in playgrounds, in the streets, and at home. It runs even deeper than a simple insult to women perpetrated by patriarchy. We are not as civilised as we like to think. Sooner or later, we all learn to fight, or we learn to run, or we learn to lie down and take the kicks and learn to hate. Sooner or later, we all learn to be afraid to walk the streets after dark.

Would I like to live in a world where all women felt safe at night? Damn straight. And all men, too. And all boys, all girls, all transpeople, bankers and shopkeepers and streetwalkers: none of us should have to steel ourselves for a beating when we pop to the shops for milk. This is something that needs to be addressed urgently in our culture. It's not just a feminist problem; it's a gendered crisis that makes new demands of feminism, and I will not be Reclaiming any Night until the men and transpeople whom I love are allowed to march beside me.

Say you want a revolution

'Revolutions are the locomotives of history.' Marx, Class Struggle In France

'I don’t know what you mean. I am free. Free to have the most wonderful time. Everybody’s happy nowadays.” Brave New World

For three days I've been racking my brains for a witty and incisive new angle on current affairs to post on this blog that I love so much. Three days huddling on top of a tiny merciful space heater, drinking endless sugary tea in a cold North-London commune ringing with the hacking petrarchan coughs of smokers with chest infections: it's winter, we can't afford 5-a-day or red meat, we're precariously employed or unemployed, we're battling winter depression, viz: we are all sick. Here is the arena of the unwell: we have reached it. Nothing to do but scramble for dog-ends in the bottom of beercans, eat plain pasta and play thrash guitar late into the night whilst hallucinating Grant Morrison in between frantically applying for every job we can find. Dicking around with each other's hearts and groins because there's nothing else to do in the baby-killing socialist utopia of Haringey.

We didn't think it would be this hard.

The reason I can't quite summon a sparkly opinion about the US president-elect, or the various ways in which George Osborne is a disgrace to right-wing social economists everywhere, or what the car-crash spectacle of I'm A Celeb 2008 really signifies, is a lingering sense of betrayal. We're good kids. We did everything we were told to do: we went to the schools our parents picked for us and then to university because that's what everyone does these days, because everyone knows you need a degree or two to get yourself employed even if it lands you in crushing debt. Somehow, we made it through three years of higher education only to find that our parents' generation finally broke the economy for us and no degree in the world is going to make us any more employable, or fit us out with the training we need to make decent lives for ourselves. They told us that if we worked hard and did as we were told and stayed off the crack and didn't get pregnant, then the shiny new neo-liberal free-market world would be our playpen. They told us that if we behaved, we'd all get jobs in advertising and end up partying at Bungalow 8 with Peaches Geldof and Jaime Winstone. They lied.

And you know what? I'm sick of being lied to. I'm sick of accepting a shitty deal for myself and my loved ones because I'm told that it can't be any different. I'm sick of swallowing nonsense from a nominally liberal government that refuses to tax the wealthy to fund decent healthcare and welfare for people on the ground and yet comes up with untold billions when a real banking crisis hits. I'm sick of being told that nothing can change. I just don't believe it any more.

What the neo-liberal consensus has been achingly effective at doing is persuading the generation that has grown up knowing nothing else that there can be nothing else. We hear of different political paradigms like fairy stories, with international communism as the wicked old witch who gets cooked in her own oven at the end of chapter three. But in real life, the story goes on. The kids grow up, and the honey walls of the gingerbread cottage begin to crack and crumble.

And now the sheen has worn away, we can see with older eyes that although we are living in one of the richest countries in the world, with more than enough credit to its name for every citizen to live a comfortable and free life, millions of us still live in poverty, misery and personal and economic servitude. The amount that our government has spent on trident, the Iraq war and the maintenance of a massive standing army over the past three years could have eradicated child poverty in Britain. There is a choice here, and it's a choice that our elected leaders are making for us every single day.

The way the right and left wing corps in the press have used the tiny body of Baby 'P' as a bargaining chip is vile. But the point stands that there remains a vanguard of British citizens who continue to believe that, in a pinch, the state is there to protect their children. The state is there to enact justice and social decency. Our expectations of the state are justly high, and if the state fails in its duty, it deserves to be raked over the coals. There remains a social democratic consensus beating just below the surface of the British psyche, and the nation's response to the horrific case of Baby P bears that consensus out.

There is a hunger in this country for social democracy, for socialist ideals if not for socialism itself, and that hunger will only rumble the louder as this recession bites. Change needs to happen, and fast. As Saint Toynbee pointed out in a recent Guardian article, the last recession created a lost generation of young people entering the workforce unable to find jobs. I fear that the slow creak of social stagnation has already begun for my peer group, and that this time our leaders' failure to adapt to the transition between the information age and the industrial age will take a cruel chunk out of our futures. Whilst ministers squabble about how and whether and when to fund skills training, a generation of 16-to-27- year olds slides slowly into unemployment. We are not asking for the earth. We are asking for the chance to earn our keep.

When I say I want a revolution, I don't mean blood in the streets. Since 1688, this country has had a proud tradition of sweeping social change effected without the death of millions. When I say I'd like to see revolution in my lifetime, what I mean is that I'd like a government with the balls to give us what we need. Welfare that is positive, not punitive. A commitment to on-the-job training, along with more pressure on businesses to fill the gap in skills training that the state cannot fill on its own. A commitment to instituting a living wage, so that anyone can support themselves in a job of work and so that a life on benefits isn't truly the easiest option. A commitment to flexible working and to European working-time directives, making it easier for women and those unable to work full-time to really contribute to the economy and to their own lives. A commitment to taxing high-end financial transactions and to increasing the income tax payable by the wealthiest 10%. A commitment to chasing state money held in offshore accounts and channelling it back into the larders and school lunchboxes of the needy. Would I like to see David Miliband dressed in green and challenging the Sheriff of Nottingham to an archery contest? It'd be good for a giggle, but give me the rest and I'll go home happy.

Ask most of our generation if they think we'll ever see a socialist revolution in this country and they'll laugh at you. The Poppy Project laughed at me when I told them the sort of systemic change I believed was needed to end prostitution - but when I suggested that campaigning for a living wage would do a great deal to reduce the numbers of poor women choosing prostitution, they nodded in agreement, before suggesting that we get 'back to the real world'. But this IS the real world. Exploitation, suffering, class, race and gender discrimination happen, and part of the reason that they happen is that my generation has accepted the neoliberal paradigm that allows them to happen.

Today, Jacqui Smith's prostitution proposals have been made public: another moralising legal solution to a problem that can only be solved by a commitment to systemic social change. How we get there isn't the immediate problem: first, we need to say that this is not good enough. We need to say we want a revolution. Even quietly, in empty rooms, in the privacy of our heads, we need to reject the lie that this is the best of all possible worlds. Say you want a revolution, because - sometimes - even just wanting it is enough.

The Poppy Project: the showdown...

On a grizzly, awful day in Brixton, I went to visit the organisers of The Poppy Project to see if we couldn’t resolve our differences. I’d love to be able to tell you that I stormed in there and showed them the error of their ways with copious intellectual shouting before setting the desk on fire, singing the red flag and lighting a cigarette off the debris, but I felt that it would be more helpful to listen and, at any rate, our common ground turned out to be more considerable than either of us believed. So much so, in fact, that most of the discussion time was taken up with sisterly bitching about the state of the world. Here's what was resolved, and here's what wasn't:

Conditional help
‘Every time someone tells me that I don’t really care about prostituted women, I see red. They have no idea.’ Denise Marshall, Poppy's chief executive, was keen to set the record straight, not least on the fact that she and her organisation support both the decriminalisation of 'the women' (by which I here assume she was inferring all prostitutes) and the offer of non-conditional support to all trafficked women. One thing that I hadn't realised when I wrote the original piece is that the conditions that the Poppy Project imposes on the women who receive its care, whilst very much a reality, are a government intervention in the scheme. Indeed, the original conditions of the funding included such gems as a mandate that women who received the Project's help would not then be allowed to apply for asylum, and a condition that they had to have sold sex on the day that they came to the Project. Poppy organisers fought these conditions and managed to get some of them reduced or even removed altogether - but some conditions do remain. Women are not obliged to appear in court, thanks to pressure from the organisers, but they are still obliged to give evidence to the police as a condition of Poppy's assistance. The situation remains unideal, and the marriage between even this most on-message of women's groups and the government which funds it is not an easy one.

Why did the government impose these conditions? 'That's a very interesting question,' said Denise. 'Partly, I think, it's an immigration issue.' The government, not fully understanding what the Project was trying to achieve with trafficked women, was keen that the Poppy Project did not become a vehicle for hundreds of terrible asylum seekers, simply desperate to work in the oh-so-fluffy British sex industry, to scamper into the country. Because protecting women is important, but so is securing the votes of Daily Mail readers.


Conceptual disagreements
Although the reasons behind the Poppy Project’s conditional help and their real attitude towards decriminalisation were quickly established, the research conducted by the Project - research recommending ‘The Swedish Model’ of prostitution reform along with other sanctions adopted by the government for its own ends - remained a bone of contention. The organisers did not persuade me that the research done for the Big Brothel report was in any way systematic or their conclusions sound, and the fact that they did not really attempt to convince a vocal critic otherwise is telling. Anna, Poppy's press officer, told me that part of the reason they push for the criminalisation of the purchase of sex is 'conceptual': 'we don't believe that men should feel that they can just buy women's bodies'. It is true, then, that a significant part of what the Project's research is trying to achieve is a shift in social morality through targeted legal change. The problem is that this rarely ever works, even if it were the job of the law to police people’s sexual morality. Legal prohibition often creates more problems than it solves, and certainly in Sweden, where criminalisation of the purchase of sex has been implemented, life has become riskier for the women who choose to stay in the sex trade.

We live in an amoral, free-market capitalist society where, like it or not, most bodies are up for sale for a given fee. Even were the buying of sex to become illegal, as the buying of some chemicals is now, there would still be outlets where sex could be bought, if in a much more underground fashion which poses greater risks for sex workers in the industry. Interestingly, even the Poppy representatives seemed to disagree on this one: whilst Denise was adamant that prostitution is not 'a fact of life', Hannah*, a former sex worker from the USA and a Poppy volunteer, claimed that she could not imagine a time when it would not exist. I cannot reconcile myself to the Poppy mantra that 'prostitution is not a valid career choice', because the fact stands that men and women who choose to go into sex work do have agency - agency predicated on poverty, desperation and, often, a misconception of what the job involves, but agency nonetheless. Prostitution may be a sad and disempowering choice, but it is a choice, and it has to be recognised as a valid one free from arbitrary moral stigma. The problem isn't prostitution itself, but the fact that in a society underpinned by class and gender inequalities people go into prostitution for all the wrong reasons, and are likely to face abuse within the industry – abuse which is all but sanctioned by the British justice system.

We also live in a society where prostitution, particularly female prostitution, has a negative moral loading which makes it far more difficult for sex workers to pursue justice when they are victims of crime such as rape and assault. And this is a fact that no legal move is going to alter until protections are in place to ensure that all women can bring their sexual abusers to justice. Without that sort of systemic change, without real commitment on the part of the police, of parliament and of society in general to valuing the personhood of all women, particularly the young, the poor and immigrants who are most likely to go into sex work, no legal change is going to make a significant difference to the experience of women who work as prostitutes.

The Poppy organisers and I are in agreement that prostitution is a dangerous and unpleasant industry to work in, and that the attitude of this society towards sex work is repulsively hypocritical. But I remain convinced that all that criminalising the purchase of sex would achieve would be to make some women feel a bit better for a short time and drive prostitution further underground in the long run, especially when combined (unlike in Sweden) with moves that further outlaw the selling of sex, which is what the Home Office is moving towards. The point isn’t that buying sex is wrong. The point is that it’s not okay to treat all women like whores, and all prostitutes like pieces of meat that you can punch with impunity. The ‘Swedish Model’ confuses the issue, compromising personal freedoms instead of addressing the real issue. The real issue is not the moral value or otherwise of a woman’s choice to work in the sex industry. It’s the state of the sex industry within a society that fundamentally does not value women, and that’s a complex distinction to make, but a vital one if we are to make progress for women without alienating our allies.

Prostitution is not a crime committed by men against women. The state of the sex industry is a crime committed by society against its poorest and most vulnerable. It is a crime committed by patriarchal capitalism against the poor women and young men that it values least. I believe that in looking to ‘criminalise men’ (their words), the Poppy Project are lashing out at the wrong enemy.

The fact stands, though, that if I spend much more time picking perfectly valid holes in the work of the Project on this blog, then so am I.

We have different ideological conceptions of what feminism means. But there is much that radically abolitionist, women-only groups such as Poppy and socialist feminists like myself can do together. Whether we believe the problem to be men in general or the entire structure of capitalist patriarchy, we all believe that desperate women working in prostitution need support, protection and rights. The practical work done by the Poppy Project is almost identical in motive to the work of socialist-feminist aligned Xtalk, a project established to help immigrant prostitutes improve their circumstances.

Even former employees agree that the academic rigour of the Poppy Project’s research leaves much to be desired, and the actions of government based on their recommendations more still. Our ideological differences are considerable, and we will come to those differences if and when there is a real chance of the most misplaced aspects of that research becoming law. Right now, though, we are more alike than we are unalike. And we have work to do.

Freak Power!

Thursday's event was the largest trans demonstration in British history. One hundred and fifty transsexual, transgender, transvestite, intersex, gay, lesbian, bisexual, queerfolk and allies gathered in front of the Stonewall awards, yelling 'Stonewall: hyp-o-crites!' as wonks in spangly dinner jackets made their way up the steps. A fantastic evening, although I did feel a little sorry for the tiny 'Julie Bindel fanclub' that gathered on the other side of the steps, a thunderous twelve chilly people at maximum who left early (although we did try to invite them along to the pub). Early press reports seem to be firmly on the side of the protest, with even Stonewall award-winners lamenting the exclusion of the trans community. We did good.

We screamed, we shouted, we complimented each other's dress sense, we stamped our feet in the glowing London winter air, we had fun, we were fabulous, and we made our point in song format: We are the trans nation, and we won't take crap no more! Summerskill can hear us shout outside his door!.

Bindel was not, in the end, named 'Journalist of the Year' by Stonewall - the honour went to Dr Miriam Stoppard of the Mirror. But will someone please take Julie's pen away before she pokes her eye out with it? Today, in the Guardian, in a piece which contains not one scrap of research but a great deal of bile, she's having a little tantrum, telling the whole queer spectrum to go 'way and just leave normal people like her alone:

'It is all a bit of an unholy alliance. We have been put in a room together and told to play nicely. But I for one do not wish to be lumped in with an ever-increasing list of folk defined by "odd" sexual habits or characteristics. Shall we just start with A and work our way through the alphabet? A, androgynous, b, bisexual, c, cat-fancying d, devil worshipping. Where will it ever end?'

Spouting such paranoid filth in a national newspaper and then demanding not to be held accountable for 'hate-speech' would be funny if it didn't make me want to eviscerate the nearest Guardian editor. It is clear that Ms Bindel does not want to be associated with anyone apart from other lesbians, literally or figuratively. If this hadn't been made plain already, her prudish, achingly unfunny little 'alphabet', where she links 'androgynous' and 'bisexual' people to 'devil-worshippers', spells it out. She resents the expansion of the Queer nation beyond the tidy little enclaves of 'gay'and 'lesbian', and seems to pine for 'the 1970s and 80s' when 'lesbians were left to our own devices, and mainly organised and socialised separately from gay men.'

And that's alright. That sort of rampant bigotry is what we have come to expect from Bindel and Rod Liddle's ilk of biscuit-eating armchair prudes, sneering at the young, the freakish and the brave. What's not okay is that organisations like Stonewall and the Guardian newspaper continue to give people like Bindel a platform for her horribly right-wing views. Please believe me: the only difference, now between Bindel and any fun-hating Daily Mail hack is that Julie likes cunt. But being gay, by itself, does not make you a liberal or excuse gender fascism.

Sarah, a young transperson and organiser of Thursday's demo, commented: 'I do genuinely feel sorry for her. I think she so wanted to be a big crusading journalist, who uncovered some great big medical plot to turn gay and lesbian people straight through surgery. But all she's succeeded in doing is managing to unite most of the trans community in annoyance at the organisations who are so keen on ignoring their own communities in order to cosy up to her, and make herself look increasingly stupid in print.
To the people behind her nomination for "Journalist of the Year", I think you should be ashamed of yourselves for the way you've treated trans people by proxy, and you should also be ashamed of yourself for nominating someone who produces articles like today's, because lots of people can recognise quality journalism, and that's not it.'

Bindel and her supporters have abandoned any notion of solidarity within the women's rights movement or within the queer rights movement. It's up to us to stand up for our generation of freaks and rule-breakers and say: we will not permit you to pull up the ladder of progress behind you. We are not ashamed. We're coming to rattle your complacent little cages: sexual deviants, transfolk and gender magicians, bisexuals, pansexuals, pagans and atheists, angels and demons, black, white, Asian, mixed-race, boys and girls, men and women and everyone in between. We will not ghetto ourselves any longer. We will not be denied again. In fact, you know what? We're here. And we're queer.

Get used to it.

More news on Bindelgate...

Penny,

You are to be admired for your chutzpah! No, I will not talk to you on the record. I don' t mind so much your hate mongering re the trans issue, but I am greatly offended by the piece you sent to National Newspaper re my 'unethical and unreliable' research (she's talking about this one). The lies and distortions you both repeated and reinforced are nothing short of irresponsible and nasty. Prostituted women are the ones to lose out if you lot are ever listened to.

If I see you on the demo, and are able to get to you to say hello without being lynched, I will of course talk to you. But do not expect anything else after the duplicitous way you have behaved.

Best, Julie

*******

Hi Julie,

That's one of the issues I wanted to talk to you about. I'm aware that we have very different stances on the prostitutes' rights issue. I respect that you disagree with my views, but I don't understand how 'irresponsible' and 'duplicitous' is a fair description of an article based on several discussions with academics, sex workers and feminist activist groups up and down the country. I spent three days researching the article for a major newspaper, and would not have done so if I thought I were spreading lies. My intentions on that score were not to attack you personally but to question a piece of research from a government-funded body that seems to have led directly to government policy - I'm sure you see the necessity for ethical journalism on that score.

If there are distortions in the academics' response to the Poppy Project report, I'd be delighted to hear them. I've also been invited by the Project to go down and see for myself; I'm going to do so next week, with an open mind.

What worries me is your blase use of 'you lot'. The feminist movement desperately needs to move beyond this partisan politics; I'm the first to admit that we need to stop attacking each other and attack patriarchy instead. That's why I'm so keen that we talk to each other and see what we can share.

If you like, I don't mind doing it the other way round - I.e, I could talk to *you* on the record and you could write a report of it for, I don't know, wherever you want to, really.

We come from near-opposite sides of the feminist spectrum; we are from different generations and have different experiences of what sexism means, what sexuality means and what it means to be a woman in 21st-century Britain. But I think that's even more reason for us to talk.

By the way - I've posted a transcript of my original letter to you on my blog, (http://pennyred.blogspot.com) although if you object I won't post your reply, merely a precis of it. Just so we're clear!

In real sisterhood,

PR.

ETA for blog: [I did monger a small amount of hate in the past. I did monger it, I admit to that mongering. I am now a year past 21 and willing to, you know, get to the issues. Are the leading lights of the radfem movement, more than twice my age, willing to do the same?]
*******

PR, yes there were lies in the piece by the academics, and willfully misleading statements. You will hear about this when you visit POPPY. I will see you there.

I also hope to achieve a 'real' sisterhood.

All best, Julie


So! Result, sort of. I'll be reporting back from the demo tonight; hope to see some of you there.

This could get interesting...

And now for something completely different: tomorrow, the demonstration against Stonewall's nomination of Julie Bindel for a prestigious journalism award will take place from 6.30-8.30pm outside the Victoria and Albert Museum in central London. I'll be there.

Julie, for her own part, has now read and expressed distaste at the content of this blog. In fact, I'm quoted twice as an anti-Bindelite (which apparently equates to lesphobia) in this statement that Ms Bindel has put out prior to the demonstration.

So, because someone's got to be the grown-up here, I've just sent her this message:


Dear Julie, I'm (firstname) (surname), the blogger who's been leading a bit of a charge against you, not without opposition. I stand by my opinions; I'm sure you stand by yours. However, I'd like to meet you, and if you can persuade me that I'm wrong, I'm willing to concede that in as public a forum as I can manage. Would you like to meet up at some point to talk about our differences and see if we can't resolve some things in sisterhood? I think there are things both of us wish we hadn't said, and I'd like to be able to articulate in person what I feel about your platform; I'm sure we'd both learn a lot from each other. If you'd like to come and talk to me tomorrow, not that you'll probably be able to do so, I'll be at the demo - small, caucasian, hair a bit like yours, wearing big boots, all black and a sparkly scarf. If not, I'd really like to meet with you at some point soon - it can be on or off the record (although obviously I'd prefer to be able to write about it). Please let me know when you're free - I can come to any London location and am fairly flexible as I work freelance at the moment. My telephone number is (myphonnenumber), and my email address is my@email.blah. In a spirit of hatchet-burying, and with respect for a media career that I can only hope to emulate, I hope the demo tomorrow isn't painful for you and your family. IMHO, if Stonewall are going to stand by their nomination of you, then they should damn well come right out and give you the award . So....good luck, I suppose. With respect, and hoping to hear from you soon, etc.

I hope she replies, really, I do. I hope we get to meet, and I hope she proves me wrong - I hope the feminists of my generation can work with the 'radical' label, and with the old guard. I hope we can stop distrusting each other. And I hope she allows me space to explain to her what elements of cissexism, misandry and partisanism we now have to abandon within the movement if we're going to adapt to the challenges of this generation. Because yes, alright, I watched those speeches too, and it made me realise somewhere amongst the just-hayfever-really sniffles that what we should be working together for goes beyond partisan squabbling. We're working for women, and men, and everyone else who's worked over by patriarchy every day. And that needs to be the bottom line.

Webcomic for Election Night

ETA: FUCKING YES.

After New Labour: report on Guardian/Soundings event last night

So, last night I found my tiny self at a debate organised by Soundings and Comment Is Free, provocatively titled 'After New Labour'. I was starving, having been writing all day when I should have been eating lunch, and had just about enough time to pick up the world's largest blueberry muffin on my way to King's Place. As I was due to write a piece for the Graun (Pennyred articles commissioned and turned down by Guardian currently stand at 6), I was ushered into a little room containing The Rt Hon Harriet Harman Rt Hon, Madeleine Bunting and someone else who knew them both so was obviously famous, and - me, and my muffin. Dilemma! I have an annoying tendency to shake and fall over when I haven't eaten. But Harriet Harman was right there! I couldn't just scoff down a muffin in front of her without even introducing myself - could I? Or could I? In the end I made my excuses and sprinted outside for sugar, cigarettes and other vices, before heading back in to ask cheeky questions and generally have a great deal of fun. A report/thinkpiece follows. Enjoy.


*


After New Labour, we have been delivered a shrill and remote language of progressive politics. Every speaker at last night’s Soundings/Comment Is Free debate agreed on the urgency of abandoning old rhetoric and working towards what John Cruddas called ‘a new sense of economic and social solidarity’, but such high-mindedness will be scuppered if Labour continues to define itself against the Conservative party.

My generation does not remember an ideology of Old Labour. Some young people who were born after the fall of the Berlin wall have already cast their first votes. Our parents may have voted for Blair in 1997, and we may even remember the excitement and pounding pop anthems that signalled the fall of the Major government, but we do not relate to that excitement. We do not play well with big, simple political ideas for one very good reason: big, simple ideas no longer seem relevant.

The global credit crunch has delivered the final blow: we have come to the end of ideology as a significant rallying factor in party politics. The New Labour generation, raised with the syncretic paradigms of internet technology, is bright and informed enough to understand that answers that look too easy usually are too easy. Radical socialism no longer quite suits; neither does the sacred cow of free market capitalism, currently flailing its hooves in bovine panic.

In the midst of this crisis, the same Labour party which not ten years ago declared an end to ideology is now casting about like a teenager anxiously trying to define itself. The party needs to move on from its adolescent wavering and realise, like every growing kid, that nobody cares how it defines itself anymore: it will be judged on its actions. At last night’s event, Harriet Harman lauded New Labour as ‘a delivery mechanism for Labour values’ – but the 18-26 year old cohort no longer has a clear idea of what those values are.


The party is still, as Harman noted, ‘driven by our experience of what it was like to live under a Tory government whose values we abhorred,’ but with what Chuka Umunna identified as Labour’s failure to ‘deal a blow to the Thatcherite consensus’, my generation can only point to New Labour when the cruelties of neo-liberalism begin to bite.

What will win votes is not ‘a return to Labour values’, but principles and practical planning, two noted absences from the current Conservative platform. If we are not offered practical principles, my generation will vote for personality, as we already have in London this year (not that anyone's grateful).

Umunna, by far the most engaging speaker of the evening, was the only one explicitly to agree that Labour must offer something more than a platform of ‘not the Tories’. He noted that the notion that the individual prospers in the context of a strong and active state has always been at the heart of Labour’s mission – ‘it’s not that hard to say, so why don’t we say it?’,

Labour must stop defining itself by what it is not, and instead step forward with real principles to win back the 4.3 million voters who have abandoned the party since 1997. One of these core principles must be the potential of the state as an engine of wealth redistribution. The collapse of the derivatives market provides a perfect opportunity for this government to raise the pitifully low tax thresholds for the wealthiest 10 percent, who own 71 percent of this country's wealth - so long sticking place for a British progressive consensus attempting to reconcile itself with New Labour values.

In the wake of this financial crisis, Brown's government will enjoy a unique window in which to tax the wealthy, in response to a real public hunger for tax justice. My generation is crying out for socio-economic fairness, and the forcible lowering of petrol prices at the pumps this month is a baby step towards the platform of real social solidarity which Cruddas and Umunna echoed the call for last night. ‘After New Labour’, the Labour party’s first question must not be what it now stands for, nor what its values are, but what precisely it plans to accomplish with another term in power.

***

ELECTION NIGHT ON PENNYRED: THE DOOMED YOUTH OF TODAY ARE HOLDING AN END OF THE WORLD PARTY AT MY MEATSPACE RESIDENCE, WITH GIN, CHEMICALS, BBC-ONLINE AND MASSIVE QUANTITIES OF DORITOS AND BLIND HOPE. THERE WILL BE A SMALL AMOUNT OF LIVEBLOGGING, DEPENDING ON WHETHER OR NOT I'M SOBER ENOUGH TO HOLD THE KEYBOARD STRAIGHT. STAY TUNED TO THIS SITE AND TO LIBERAL CONSPIRACY.

Neo-nazis say: vote Obama

Esquire magazine, admittedly not always the most reliable of sources, has interviewed several prominent US career fascists, and amongst the drooling, gum munching racist filth it was today revealed that significant members are planning to vote for Barack Obama rather than his white, Republican opponent.

Rocky Suhayda, the Chairman of the American Nazi Party, said: 'White people are faced with either a negro, or a total nutter who happens to have a pale face. Personally I’d prefer the negro.'

And there's more!

Tom Metzger, the Director of White Aryan Resistance, said:'The corporations are running things now, so it’s not going to make much difference who's in there, but McCain would be much worse. He’s a warmonger. He’s a scary, scary person--more dangerous than Bush...I hate the transnational corporations far more than any black person.'

Please understand the difference between endorsing white supremacists' rhetoric, which I'm not doing, and giggling helplessly as the last rats leave the sinking McCain schooner and American politics goes through the looking glass. Combine this with possibly the worst assassination plot ever (two young men plan to buy/steal some guns, wear white tuxedos and drive in the general direction of Obama, somewhere, whilst shooting things and shouting, before getting shot by police. That was their plan. That was their whole plan.) and I think liberal American kiddies can sleep safe in their beds.

When we're done cackling, we should probably remind ourselves that on this side of the pond we're rather short on Charlie Chaplin fascists - instead we've got a highly organised neo-fascist faction, the BNP, with a stunning PR team and the guile to get out there knocking on doors and trying to win parliamentary influence, having already gained a seat on the London assembly. Just, yknow, saying.

Pantomime dames (Oh yes, we are!)

Queer campaigners and feminists alike are outraged over Stonewall’s decision to nominate Julie Bindel for its ‘Journalist of the Year’ award. Bindel is a notoriously outspoken transphobe (her insulting and upsetting remarks about transpeople in national newspapers can be found here, here and here) and protestors say that the decision to promote her as a pioneer of gay rights is an insulting piece of hypocrisy. ‘This is not just an insult to transgendered people, but hypocrisy in the extreme -Stonewall claims to represent a minority group which suffers from discrimination, but they are prepared to honour someone who is instrumental in repression of transgendered people with her bigoted transphobic journalism,’ said organisers of the protest against the controversial nomination.

Regular readers of this blog will know how I feel about Julie Bindel and her terrible views, which are - upsettingly enough - shared by grand dames of the movement including Germaine Greer. I think it’s important not only to challenge them, but to offer a response. So here’s a contemporary feminist take on femininity, feminism and transgenderism, from the point of view of a largely cis-gendered feminist activist (yes, many of my best friends are transgdendered and wondering where all their makeup has gone). For a transsexual feminist's viewpoint and a much more in-depth and articulate study, look no further than the excellent Whipping Girl by the ravishing and razor-sharp Julia Serano.

I've actually met very few transpeople who shout about it in the street. Most, after years of bravely facing down abuse, dealing with the reactions of friends and family, struggling to access treatment and, often, battling the psychological fallout of feeling themselves born in the wrong body, simply want to be left in peace. Nonetheless, transsexualism's existence and tentative acceptance within mainstream society is immensely radical.

Transsexualism is not merely a valid part of the queer- and gender-liberation movements: it's a vital one. The notion that one's biological sex does not have to dictate anything about one's behaviour, appearance or even the eventual layout of one's genitals and secondary sex organs, now that we live in a glittering future where such things are possible, is a radical one.

Furthermore, not all transsexuals present, as Bindel would have it, as 'men in dresses'. Transsexualism, transgenderism, transvestism and intersexuality present in a myriad different ways. Some bio-men choose to live as women and to take hormones, but do not elect to have any surgery. Some bio-women present as males half the time by binding their breasts, stuffing their pants and going to nightclubs in tanktops and baseball caps, the liberated 'bois' of the spreading San-Francisco scene. Some people are born with hormone imbalances, or born entirely outside of the two-gender sphere altogether: in fact, one in 2,000 babies is born without an XX or XY genotype. Trans issues go way beyond 'men in dresses', although drag queens tend to remain the postergirls for the same reason that Kylie Minogue is now the face of breast cancer: they look good doing it.

Femininity is not a sacred cow. Femininity is a social construct, and Bindel is right to identify it as such, but utterly wrong to claim that transsexuals re-enforce these stereotypes. The problem is not with transsexuals, but with our entire fucked-up construction of what is 'male' and what 'female', what 'masculine' and what 'feminine'. Bindel's bio-'boys' in 'fuck-me-boots and birds-nest hair' are no different from today's bewildered 12, 13 and 14-year old girls struggling to make the transition from deeply felt, little-understood womanhood to socially dictated artificial 'femininity'. Like teenage girls stuffing their bras with loo-roll and smearing on inappropriate lipstick, the m-t-f transsexuals for whom Bindel, Greer and their ilk reserve special hatred are simply craving what all growing girls crave: social acceptance.

Yes, they are performing femininity. But so are all women, every day. Yes, some of them might sometimes present as 'pantomime dames' in Greer's ever-tactful phraseology. But after a long night out on the tiles, too much slap, tarty heels, padded bra, bling and rapidly deflating hairdo, I fail to see in what way I'm less of a pantomime dame than, say, the fabulous Jodie Harsh (a lady who does it much, much, much better than almost everyone else).

Jodie Harsh is a pantomime dame. So is Victoria Beckham. Lily Savage is a pantomime dame. So is Vivienne Westwood. So was Margaret Thatcher. So is the Queen of England. We are all pantomime dames, performing femininity because that's how we gain social acceptance. Those who have least to gain by performing femininity – bio-males who, in doing so, voluntarily and utterly abandon male privilege – are perhaps the bravest and canniest of all of us.

It is those who have found themselves outside the two-sex system who have done the most to challenge toxic gender binaries throughout history. From the Hirjas of India to the holy hermaphrodites of ancient Greece, from the Molly-boys of 18^th century London to the f-t-m artists of bohemian paris, transsexual, transgender, transvestite and intersexed individuals have been revered and reviled, studied and sought out, as if they held the keys to the mysteries of the gender system that binds us. Perhaps they do.

Victorian philanthropy and government hypocrisy.

The work of government-funded anti-prostitution group The Poppy Project is ‘incoherent’ and ‘dangerous’, according to British experts.

The release of a damning report by academic specialists in the politics of sex work comes in the wake of Home Secretary Jacqui Smith’s plans for a massive crackdown on the ‘blight’ of prostitution in the UK. The Home Secretary’s proposals, based largely on the dubious work of The Poppy Project, will outlaw street prostitution and criminalise some buyers of sex – moves which have also been denounced by women’s rights groups.

‘We are appalled that the government has used this sloppy research while ignoring a large body of reputable research,’ said Dr Helen Ward, one of the authors of the document. ‘Jacqui Smith’s proposals are deeply flawed and will put sex workers at even more risk of violence and exploitation. They also contain yet another major assault on civil liberties – this time on the liberties of adults having consenting sex.’

‘Just two years ago in Ipswich we all witnessed the tragic consequences of zero tolerance policies on sex work,’ said Kate Hardy, a researcher in sex work and member of activist group Feminist Fightback. ‘Women are forced to take more risks, with less time to decide whether or not to get into cars, having to work alone rather than in pairs or small groups and working in darker more isolated areas.’ Police in Ipswich implemented just such a policy before the tragic murders of a number of sex workers in the city in 2006 (pictured).

‘It is not the place of the criminal law to be policing people’s personal morality,’ said Dr Belinda Brooks-Gordon of the University of London, adding that ‘If they really cared about people’s safety or about public nuisance, the government would allow these women to work off the street.’

The Poppy Project, which last year received over £2.4 million of public money, offers highly conditional help to the 0.2% of prostitutes who are victims of sex trafficking. Feminists and sex workers alike have been appalled at the insistence by members of the Project that prostitutes agree to give up sex work forever and to turn in their traffickers – sometimes a very dangerous step for them to take – before they receive any help whatsoever. ‘It’s like the worst sort of Victorian philanthropy,’ said Dr Brooks-Gordon.

As well as making life more dangerous for street prostitutes, the Home Secretary’s proposals will give the police greater powers to raid brothels and flats where sex workers operate. This move is particularly astounding, given the fact that the police are currently allowed to keep a quarter of the money used in such raids – even if that money represents a woman’s life savings. The risk of diverting police attention to pursuing the most profitable rather than the most exploitative sex work establishments has not been lost on the Home Secretary, who simply declared: ‘we will take their bling away from them.’

‘There have been scenes of police arriving at 5am in full riot gear and dragging women out into the street in their underwear,’ said Dr Brooks-Gordon. ‘As a feminist, I find it very hard to see how that promotes women’s rights.’

The aim of the changes, according to a Home Office memo, is ‘to send a clear message that the Government will protect the vulnerable.’ However, many groups, including coalitions of sex workers, have raised concerns that the implementation of such legislation will actually increase the dangers for trafficked women and migrant workers in the sex trade, whose lack of papers will leave them even more vulnerable to abuses within underground prostitution rings.

The Safety First Coalition denounced the moves towards criminalising the purchase of sex being promoted by UK ministers ‘despite evidence from academics and sex workers in Sweden that the law has forced prostitution further underground, undermining women’s safety, driving women into the hands of pimps and making it harder for the police to prosecute violent men and traffickers.’

Isabella Lund, of the Sexworkers and Allies Network in Sweden, commented on the failures of the Swedish Model in Sweden itself, saying that ‘street prostitutes today are more exposed to robbery, assault and rape than before.’

If Jacqui Smith and her cronies really care about protecting society's most vulnerable workers, they wouldn't be focusing on 'taking their bling away' but on putting schemes in place to help prostitutes clean up and clear out, or to make their work safer, if that's what's needed. The work of The Poppy Project smacks of the worst sort of moralising Victorian philanthropy, and is utterly inappropriate for dealing with the social problems caused by prostitution in the 21st century.

Now, let me try to explain this in song....

A brief interlude for a grey October evening: Withiel, Pennyred's multitalented comics artist, presents That One, a techno tribute to our favourite candidate. Featuring Barack H. Obama and the adoring masses.

Click the link and sing along.

Abortion, rape and hypocrisy

On October the 22nd, pro-choice amendments to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill will hit the table again. Dr Evan Harris MP, who has been instrumental in forcing these amendments onto the bill, said on Monday that this is 'a once in a generation opportunity to modernise the law.' With it, it's time to modernise our attitudes.

A significant proportion of the UK believes that abortion is far more permissible if the pregnancy is the result of rape. In October 2007 a CBS News poll showed that 34% of the residents of the United states - the highest proportion of the sample- believed that abortion should only be permitted 'to save a woman's life, or in cases of rape or incest.' And in a survey of British students, over two-thirds of those who identified as 'pro-life' believed that abortion should be permitted in cases of rape. This single fact tears a savage hole in 'pro-life' reasoning.

Believe it or not, there's one area where the twisted logic of Governor Sarah Palin actually makes some sense: either abortion is murder, or it isn't. I happen to believe that it isn't, but let's suspend disbelief for a second and suppose, as some people do, that a foetus is an entire and sentient person from the moment of conception. Murder’s still murder, even if you do it with virgin, unsullied hands. The prominence of the viewpoint that abortion is okay as long as the woman has been raped tells us what the real issue is here.

The real issue is women daring to have sex at all. What people really mind isn’t women evacuating the poor little embryos, it’s women daring to exercise sexual self-determination and getting away with it. In other words – in fact, in the words of several pro-choice websites – women deserve to ‘suffer the consequences of sin’. Of course, if a woman’s been raped then it wasn’t her fault she had sexual intercourse, so she's excused.

It's easy to see why the pro-choice movement takes such pains to parrot this wildly hypocrytical piece of rhetoric, appealing, like at the parliamentary rally this week, on behalf of women who might be 'forced to have their rapist's baby.' But unless you subscribe to the misandrist Dworkinite premise that all penetrative sex is rape, there has to be more to it than that. A woman shouldn’t have to justify her decision to have an abortion in terms of her sexual purity.
If you truly believe that it’s alright for a woman to terminate a pregnancy when she has a good excuse for being pregnant -one that doesn’t involve the crime of consenting to sex - then you concede that it’s okay for some pregnancies to be terminated. In the pro-choice movement, we are convinced that nobody else should get to decide whether or not a woman ‘deserves’ an abortion. We believe that it should be her decision alone, not someone else’s blind sentimental call, and certainly not a question of sexual virtue. Let’s put aside this archaic reasoning and modernise abortion law to reflect 21st-century values.

****

Use Abortion Rights' online lobbying tool to lobby your MP ahead of the crucial vote on Tuesday, or come to the protest on Monday the 21st at 5.30pm outside parliament, Westminster tube.

The day the music died.

And we all know the real song
but we won't sing along
'cause our boyfriends and girlfriends
and parents will say
Don't be a square, grow your hair and be happy
It's not god that made you this way -

So lift up your top
Lift up your top
Lift up your top, got to use what you've got
Try not to see anything but the fee
It's all tongue in cheek anyway!

'Our Daughters Will Never Be Free,' The Indelicates, 2008

We have a very short window in which to start asking some crucial questions about wealth and gender. We have a short window, whilst the FTSE and the Dow and the Nikkei buckle and collapse, to commit blasphemy. To say that the very nature of financial markets, of patriarchal capitalism itself, engenders ideological violence against women - and by association, men - everywhere.

Fact: markets will seek to maximise profits. Fact: sexism sells. The image of the cackling city boy stuffing his bonus into a hooker's disembodied garter - just the leg showing, never the face - has become one of the icons of hypercapitalist success. However you wrangle the incentives, an economic model spawned and nurtured in an atmosphere of male privilege will seek to make money by selling women's bodies back to them, by selling them to other men, by exploiting women's work and by hijacking femininity as a saleable commodity and nothing more.

I remember the first time I met Ginger Spice. It was four years ago, and I was standing at the reception desk in the acute anorexia wing of a London mental hospital. I was there because there was nobody but my receptionist to watch me and make sure I took my meds and kept my meal supplements down, wearing a floppy hat and a tracksuit that flapped on the bent coat hanger of my body, drawing slogans to keep me occupied. And Geri Halliwell walked by.

She was there to see the girl in the next room from mine, a friend and a fan. And my first thought was how very, very tiny she was – barely five feet three in massive heels, dwarfed by shopping bags and a bunch of violent pink crepe-wrapped roses. Tiny and fragile-looking, all desperate smile and thin hair bleached back to its natural pale strawberry-blonde, Geri Halliwell had been in the press all year, and still is, thanks to a much-touted recovery! from anorexia, bulima and other lapses in celeb inscrutability. Through the haze of numb, sour fear that dogged those hospital days I remember thinking: that’s Ginger Spice. That pale, frantic creature is the same girl whose posters I had on my walls, whose feisty, pumped-up pop smashes were the first singles I ever bought with my pocket money. That’s Girl Power, right there. There it goes.

How sad, and how empty it all seems now. In 1996, we were told that anything was possible. Girls were powerful! Girls were sexy! Girls were marketable! You could be anything you wannabeed! Fast forward twelve years and the record is scratched and broken, the Spice Girls themselves bleached by years of pap-dashes into wasted, desperate husks of the energetic, ballsy girls we once thought we knew. We made ourselves into products again the instant empowerment was wrenched away from the feminist movement and assaulted with price-tags, we were consumed; we consumed ourselves. Femininity was for sale, and too much of it made us sick. Sick of ourselves, sick of our lives, sick of looking forward to another twenty years of hard sell until we could no longer pretend that we were young and available and found ourselves consigned to the scrap-heap with the computer shells, splitting bin-bags and acid-leaking fridges.

The year I started eating again - really eating, not just subsisting on crackers and tea - the sub-prime mortgages broke and the markets began to deflate like a balloon at the end of a long party. Right now, a loaf of bread costs more as a percentage of the average wage than it ever has. Groceries are getting harder for everyone to afford. We can no longer stuff ourselves with impunity, but right now, right this second, I feel something I spent my whole life missing. I feel something girlishly blasphemous and slightly obscene. I feel full.
Shopping, preening, starving, serving, fucking. Five key activities for my generation of young women under capitalism. We were born in the shadow of Thatcher and taught to prepare ourselves not for productivity, but for producthood. We do not remember living through anything but boomtimes, but for us, money is still something we will not win without the trappings of servility; we came to learn that nothing sells better, or faster, than our bodies, and the better and faster we could cash in, the happier and worthier our lives would be -

There's no better example of the pitfalls of unregulated capitalism than the strange case of the 22-year-old woman, known by the pseudonym Natalie Dylan, who is selling her virginity in hopes of financing her college education. She wants to be a marriage and family therapist. This transaction is "capitalism at its best," according to the manager of the Moonlight Bunny Ranch in Nevada, which is brokering the deal. He made the point on a TV show last week on which we both appeared as guests. I argued this is capitalism at its worst. You've got a desperate woman (she was allegedly defrauded out of a hunk of cash by her no-good dad); virtually no safety net if you're poor; gargantuan college fees, thanks to little government assistance or regulation; and the perfect storm of circumstances that makes a young woman think it's OK to sell her body. Scary? Yeah. Does it have to be this way? No. It's about the morality of the market. - Marian Meed-Ward, Kingston Whig-Standard, Ontario 25.09.2008

Maybe I'm a little biased, being accustomed to a student lifestyle and still having no job to lose- but I say let it all come down. Let the markets crash, and let the ugly arrogance of a society rent by the gashes of commodified gender come tumbling with them. So what if the glittering future that was promised to us as long as we behaved ourselves like good little girls has vanished? We may have been trained as hyper-consumers, but we don't have to live that way.

Let it all come down. Let's see the arrogance of the testosterone-stinking trading floors thwarted and the altars of deregulated markets toppled: we don't need the old gods and their archaic laws any more. Now that governments have intervened with basic financial packages to has save us from utter disaster, we can breathe a little easier - but the ideology of Western capitalism will never be the same again, and its discourses of gender are open to decimation. Bring it all down.

Is the Future Conservative?

You can't say 'Compassionate Conservatism' without baring your teeth, but I wanted so badly to believe - so I went to the Comment is Free/Soundings debate on Monday with an open mind. It was titled 'Is the Future Conservative?', and my mind was as open as a field, as open as the sky. As open as my jacket pocket, from which I lost £2.55 and my student bus pass on the way home, which just shows what you get for trusting people.

Stand up for women in Northern Ireland!

For months, Northern Irish MPS have been holding the government to ransom over abortion rights, using the bodies of their female constituents as bargaining chips over the 42 days legislation and claiming that if moves are made to extend abortion rights to Northern Ireland, the peace process will be threatened. 'It's time to call their bluff,' said Diane Abbott MP at a rally in Parliament last night.

Diane Abbott has tabled an amendment to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, due for its third reading on the 22nd of October, calling for an extension of the 1967 Abortion Act to Northern Ireland. This is precisely the same amendment that Emily Thornberry MP was forced to withdraw back in May, when Gordon Brown assured her that the move would be seen as a slap in the face by the nine DUP members who swung the 42 days vote in the Prime Minister's favour. Today at noon, forty women from Northern Ireland will hand into Number Ten a letter signed by the leaders of civil society in NI supporting abortion rights for women in the region.

The women want to meet as many MPs as possible whilst they are in London, in order to counter some of the anti-abortion propaganda which is doing the rounds in Westminster. MPs are, for instance, being told by the government that they should not adopt an ‘imperialist’ or ‘colonialist’ attitude to NI and impose something on the region.

'But there is no question of Westminster ‘imposing’ abortion on NI; it is already a reality of life here,' said Alliance for Choice spokesperson Goretti Horgan. 'Each year thousands of Northern Irish women travel to Britain and Europe and pay for private abortions. For women living on low incomes, getting the money together on time is impossible. An unwanted pregnancy can leave some women in a desperate situation – which is why we now find some women turning to the internet to buy the abortion pill.' Women who have taken black-market abortion pills often present at hospitals in Northern Ireland with terrible bleeding - and if the reason for their symptoms is discovered, some could face a life sentence once they recover, last night's audience was told.

'The poverty of some women in NI also impacts on the numbers of late abortions in Britain,' said Ms Horgan. 'The time it takes some women to find enough money to have an abortion means that women from here are three times more likely than British women to have abortions after 20 weeks. However, thousands of others are forced to continue pregnancies they find intolerable. This includes women pregnant as a result of rape and sexual abuse', says the Alliance for Choice spokesperson.

'If you're afraid of falling into some colonialist mindset by overriding Stormont, please, forget it - we need our human rights,' said Dr Audrey Simpson of the Northern Irish Family Planning Association, reminding those present that when the Bill was last on the table in May, Northern Irish MPs had 'no qualms' in voting to cut the time limit from 24 to 12 weeks for English, Welsh and Scottish women.

Whilst a majority of Stormont MPs are vehemently anti-choice, they do not represent the needs and opinions of their constituents on this matter. Northern Irish MPs are elected along sectarian lines, with a simple choice between orange and green candidates. Since 1967 over 80,000 women have travelled to England to have abortions, but there's one big reason why more pro-choice women, doctors and lawyers aren't speaking out, according to Annie Campbell of the Alliance for Choice: 'they are afraid'.

Ms Campbell explained how women suspected of seeking abortions in Northern Ireland have been the victims of appalling abuse, adding that anyone vocally supporting the pro-choice cause in Northern Ireland can expect significant harrassment. 'This is a global war and, as usual, women's bodies are on the frontline,' she said. She urged all the women and men present at the meeting to lobby their MPs, asking them to speak out for Northern Irish women 'because at the moment, we can't speak for ourselves. There's no use in us lobbying our MPs for the right to legal abortion - for all we know we'll just be put on a hit-list,' she said.

Dr Evan Harris MP, who has been instrumental in furthering the pro-choice cause in parliament, repeated the call for pro-choice citizens to lobby their MPs and urge them to vote for the positive amendments on the bill, reminding those present that 'this is a once in a generation opportunity to modernise the law'.

It's also the last chance Northern Irish women will have to fight for their rights to legal abortion for a very long time: soon, criminal law will be devolved to Stormont, after which 'we won't see positive change for generations,' said Annie Campbell.

If you agree that it is unacceptable that a group of women in the UK are still treated as second-class citizens and denied reproductive self-determination, here's how you can get involved -



WHAT YOU CAN DO:

1)Write to your MP, asking him or her to vote in support of the amendment extending abortion rights to Northern Ireland, and encourage your friends and family to do the same. 'We get so much hate-mail from pro-life groups that every supportive letter we receive makes a genuine difference', said Katy Clark MP last night.

2) Sign the online FPA petition in support of extending rights to Northern Ireland, here.

3)Come along to the protest organised by Abortion Rights UK ahead of the crucial vote - details will be posted here as soon as they appear and will also be available at Abortion Rights.

4)Add your voice to the Pro-Choice Majority website, containing testimonials of delays and obstruction to the process of medical abortion by representatives of the 80% of the UK who support a woman's right to choose.

Webcomic 6!

Art by Withiel, script by Penny Red, lettering by Twitch. x

Tories in queer hypocrisy shocker!

So now the Tories are courting the pink vote. Big surprise. But the notion, promoted even by the BBC, that gays might have a 'duty' to vote Conservative is baffling.

They've wheeled out Margot James, PPC for Stourbridge and noted deep-blue dyke, to tell us all why we need to vote Tory. This is the same Margot James who did not stand as a gay candidate at the last election, and who has been heard saying that she hoped her partner's name, Jay, would be mistaken for that of a man by reporters. Ms James' parroting of the party-line at the Stonewall event yesterday goes something like this:

"Gay people are net contributors to public services through their taxes, because very few of them have children.

"I think gay people have got more angst on this issue than anybody else because gay people are paying in, through their taxes and actually using far less of the NHS because they tend not to have families, less of the education system for the same reason and all the more reason to be angry with this government for the waste of their taxes."

Translation: "Everyone knows you faggots hate kids! So vote for us - we hate kids, too!'

The suggestion that homosexuals do not have 'families' is both degrading and manifestly false. I happen to live in a massive multi-sexual household of six. None of us are related by blood, but we consider ourselves family. All of us, furthermore, have mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters and all of us feel that - despite our sexuality - we are just as invested in other humans as anybody else. Me and my big queer family are appalled by this throwaway rhetoric, at a Stonewall event, no less.

The logic of the tory tax argument also falls down when the ageing society is brought into play. Sure, homosexuals may, on average, raise fewer sproglets than their het friends, but this makes it all the more important for us that we live in a society that invests properly in healthcare, elderly care and the pensions system. Without the dubious surity of grown-up kids to wipe our octogenarian posteriors, we are going to need a government that invests in our care - a government that values the contribution we make as members of society enough to make public spending a priority.

The main tory line, however, remains that you and I should vote Conservative because, well, there are quite a lot of gay conservatives. Newsflash: there have always been gay tories; there have been gay tories before the word was even invented. What there have never been are tories promoting a gay agenda. In recent years, tory MPs have, for the most part, had an appalling voting record on queer issues in parliament - vital issues like civil partnerships and the age of consent. The tories are quite happy for us to carry on shuffling in the dark. If they're gay, too, they certainly haven't traditionally wanted the world to know about it. The tory closet door remains firmly shut. And no wonder, this being the party that introduced and tried desperately to save Section 28 of the Local Government Act, 1988.

Just a reminder: the amendment stated that a local authority "shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality" or "promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship". Ian Duncan Smith and a great deal of the tory party faithful spent 2003 trying to save this disgustingly homophobic piece of legislation. Nobody has apologised for that, and the silence of top conservatives over their shocking record at the Stonewall event stunk of hypocrisy.

I am not suggesting that just because you like a bit of same-sex action you absolutely must be a political radical. Not at all. Not one jot. In fact, I'm grudgingly of the opinion that one thing the 1990s were good for was freeing gay men and women of the grinding obligation not to also be bigoted fuckwits if they so chose. But bigotry and a forward-thinking queer agenda have never gone hand in hand, and if one is queer - not just gay, which is a statement of fact, but politically queer - you do have a duty to vote for anyone else apart from the tory party and far right.

Queer politics involve more than a private penchant for cock and a public rhetoric of tax breaks for straight, married couples. Queer politics are politics which make it easier for the millions of men and women who choose to live and love outside of the heteronormative box to do so without cultural, practical or financial discrimination. Queer politics are inherently radical, and not everyone working towards them is gay, and not everyone gay has queer politics. Let's not mistake gay - which is what the Conservative party has always secretly been - for queer, which it never will be.