Why I am really fucked off with the organiser(s) of Slutwalk London

I am so fucked off. In spite of having over 7,000 attendees on Facebook, Slutwalk London has been rescheduled to a week later: apparently there is a Stop Child Abuse rally on in Trafalgar Square on the same day. Some people are still able to make the following Saturday; others are able to make the 11th and not the 4th. Many, however, many people, myself included, are either no longer able to attend or no longer willing to. At least hundreds of people have organised and paid for travel and accommodation for this date that are now useless - and, more importantly, the organiser has totally fucked up what could've been an amazing opportunity to galvanise more support for a feminist cause than I'm aware there has been in years.

Since I have not seen such a (promised) turnout for Reclaim the Night (I am not aware if there are any other large feminist events like this in the UK - does anyone know?) and, generally, events in London are likely to have far more participants than in any other UK country, I think it's fair to posit that many of those who intended to be involved were newcomers to public feminist activism. To reschedule the event at such short notice is to run the risk if putting off these newcomers - if this feminist event is so shoddily arranged, then why bother? What if other feminist events like this turn out to be as unreliably co-ordinated? We do not need to give people any more reasons than they already have to not participate in gender liberation. Feminism as a set of movements simply can't afford it.

On this vein, in fucking people around, the organiser has run the (large) risk of wasting the opportunity there was (that she did not have to take up!) to mobilise more support for a sex-positive feminist cause than we have previously been able to access. Lots of people have heard about the Toronto Slutwalk; lots of people I know are interested in organising Slutwalks of their own. In Leeds, for example, a group has recently been created on Facebook for those interested and the people who created it are organising a meeting for people who want to be involved in setting it up to attend. The organiser did not have to take on the whole task of doing this either alone or with a larger but equally useless crew. Why didn't she reach out to other people? It is (in this case catastrophically) arrogant to presume the ability to solely organise such an event; even if she wasn't aware of how much interest Slutwalks would generate, there is nothing to say she could not have reached out for more support as the attendance list grew. Since she did not access the support she needed, she has risked the disinterest not only of newcomers in feminist activism in general but of current feminist activists in this particular event. I'm not happy to change my travel tickets to the following weeked: what is there to say that this won't happen again? When you organise an event people trust you to do it properly; if you can't do it properly, then don't fucking do it. Let someone else step up: it's hardly as though nobody else is interested. Furthermore, with the BBC and the Guardian and several other news sources advertising the event as being on the 4th, there may well be people showing up on that date with no knowledge of the late change. How the fuck are they going to feel? And how likely is it that they will be happy to involve themselves in similar events in the future? And, if some other, more able people decide to organise a Slutwalk London, is this going to have an adverse effect on their rates of attendance? I would be highly surprised if it didn't.

A lot of the excuses I've come across on the Facebook page for this massive fuck-up revolve around the fact that she is 17 and undertaking her A-levels; I'm afraid I have absolutely no sympathy with her. If these are reasons that an event like this can be damaged to this extent, then she should not have decided to do it in the first place. There was no need to have it so soon; there was no need to take on this task concurrently with her A-levels. These are not arguments: they are a crock of shit.

Another thing that really pisses me off about the organiser's 'apology' and 'explanation' is that she's said: 'please try to stay with the bigger picture along with us. The treatment of rape victims is too important an issue to lose sight of.' I couldn't agree more, which is why I think it's highly inappropriate for someone who cannot do this job properly to do it at all. I also think it's wildly unfair to position responsibility for 'the treatment of rape victims' in the hands of those who no longer trust the organiser as far as they could throw her. When someone says 'this event is on this day,' it's reasonable to assume they have done the necessary groundwork (i.e. checking ahead, booking the space, finding out how much insurance will cost) to justify such certainty; since she had not done that, she would have saved herself and god knows how many other people a fuckload of bother by including a disclaimer that the date and time were provisional. What a load of ASS. Now I have to find someone who wants my coach tickets. Anyone?

Some more outrage

As with most things I bitch about on here, I know very little about Buck Angel. I first became aware of his existence through Corin, who is a fan of his on Facebook; essentially, he is reportedly the first FtM porn star, and seems pretty popular. From the little of his online presence that I have researched, I've noticed that he sees himself as a success, primarily because of the authenticity he and others perceive in his masculinity. His bio on Facebook is essentially presented as a wrong body narrative; we are encouraged to see him as an ordinary guy who was unfortunate enough to have been born into a female body.

A few days ago Corin read a status from this page to me and it's been troubling me ever since. It reads:

This was sent to me today. Pretty Cool!

"
My ass.
You have not been a woman.
That's impossible.
You have a bitchin mustasche and you could probably beat a wild
animal to death with your
bare hands.
You look like you could star as a villian in a Die Hard film.
You look like you could demolish a house by headbutting it.
You simply look to convincing to have ever been a woman."

Obviously I have several issues with this. For one thing, 'been a woman' is really problematic terminology - I recognise that this is the terminology of the person writing to Buck, but it is also terminology he tacitly supports by publishing it without criticism. The following account leads me as a reader to believe that both Buck's fan and Buck himself believe women to be inherently inferior to men, and this makes me fucking angry.

According to this quote, it is 'impossible' for women to have facial hair or, at least, facial hair that is so socially acceptable as to be 'bitchin'. Similarly, a woman could not possibly 'beat a wild animal to death'; she could not star as a Die Hard villain; she couldn't have the strength to 'demolish a house by headbutting it'. And, by she, I mean we. We, as women, are weaklings and failures. We can't impress people with our plumage (possibly because, since most women feel under pressure to present themselves in a way that indicates great care has been taken over their appearance, it just isn't special when our hair - non-facial, non-armpit, non-pubic - looks good. It's meant to look that way). We can't take on wild animals - we simply don't have the necessary testosterone levels. We are worse than ordinary - we are substandard because, in the grand competition to be entertaining that apparently is life, we barely have half the physical resources of people signified as male, or 'appropriately' masculine. We don't exist in this conversation except by omission and derision. I am not trying to say that conversations about transmasculinity ought to refer to women - sometimes women are not relevant - but, when heteromasculinity is being so revered, women become present through their silent inadequacy.

What is strength in this conversation? It is destruction, brute force, the ability to literally throw your weight around. Fuck childbirth. Fuck existing in a society that constantly undercuts you - Buck Angel has apparently made a safely-unnoticed exit from the parade of fuckery that assaults most of us who are not heteromen on a daily basis, so it's alright for him. He can become an oppressor of those less 'fortunate' (i.e. less outwardly normatively masculine) than him. I feel very self-conscious about coming across, to myself as well as others, as being transphobic in this complaint but, more importantly than that, I cannot subscribe to something that relies on the subordination of femininity to be 'successful'. Because according to this narrative I am not strong, and I do not have strength. While Buck is made a spectacle - which I do not mean to imply is okay: he is a person, not a freakshow - I am fainting somewhere in a corner, where I am either being attended to by another woman behind the scenes or ignored entirely. As is every other woman. And, essentially, it seems to be that we are being ignored because society has not awarded us the resources to throw our weight around.

This is not to say, though, that the only strengths that can be ascribed to women are separate from those ascribed to Buck (or Buck's masculinity): there are strong fucking women. There are women body builders and women wrestlers and women cage-fighters and women who pull cars with their teeth. Corin remarked, and I think this is totally feasible, that working out to the extent that you become a body builder does basically the same things to any body, be it a woman's or a man's, or male or female, or something else. Are woman-identified body builders too 'convincingly' masculine to be considered women? Are other people's gender the properties of outside critics? I find it disturbing that anyone, let alone a queer person, would endorse these ideas.

And what's 'convincing'? What exactly is being celebrated when Buck Angel is seen to pass? To me, this is not about his personal journey, or his comfort. This is about supporting a gender binary. This is about celebrating the idea that even queers can support this myth, this piece of shit idea that seems to permeate everything, that sits in so many people's heads and dictates so much about how they treat people and how they let themselves act: the idea that the genders are the (perceived) sexes and are opposite and entirely different, and that it's of the utmost importance to assert this at all times. It's fucking bullshit and I'm fucked off about it. I feel like I've probably made a lot of oversights in this blog, because there is so much about gender that I do not know, because I'm angry and when I'm angry I tend to throw rationality to the wind and often debase what I am attempting to defend by being too obtuse to understand, let alone defend, it properly. If you're reading this and you want to call me out, please do. I'd like to talk about this with someone.