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?

EEEEEEEE

This must be short because I woke up 2390487235 hours ago and spent basically all day in a car with a dog wriggling all over me BUT: I listened to Evelyn Evelyn (by Evelyn Evelyn) for the first time and since then I have been unable to listen to anything else because it is SO GOOD. I. Love. Amanda. Palmer. And Jason Webley is probably excellent, since he's involved in this, which is fucking RAD. I'm in no fit state to be eloquent but for now I'll just say that it is theatrical to the max and fucking beautiful. So tragic! So haunting! Awesome! Current favourites include Evelyn Evelyn, You Only Want Me 'Cause You Want My Sister (my FAVE), My Space, and the Love Will Tear Us Apart cover which, in my extremely overexcited opinion, is the best rendition of the song that I have ever heard. (I am not really a Joy Division fan. I heard the song too many times in dingy indie clubs in Bristol full of gropey misogynists pretending their pretensions to meaning meant their actions were fine. Well, that and their penises. ANYWAY.) I am extremely pleased. I AM ALSO SEEING THEM NEXT MONTH. Wowzers in my trow-zers. I can't *wait* until I'm back in Leeds to enjoy the (hopefully delivered) presale package that entitled me to these mp3s a week early.

eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

I KNOW this is my third post today but

Tom found a sticker in some toilets today on campus emblazoned with 'Speak out against feminism and the demonisation and scapegoating of men'. Nobody in the Peanut Gallery (which has been recently saved, hooray!) could figure out who or what produced it. We are all very interested. I personally would like to have a debate with them. And by 'debate' I mean 'let them know that feminism is actually about gender equality and they even have a feminist society whose Facebook group page encourages men to join and challenge outmoded perceptions of genders'. Ryder says we should make some stickers with 'Speak out against sexism and the demonisation and scapegoating of feminists' and put them where the previous ones were.

Today

Something really annoying just happened.

Picture the scene: I am settling into a seat in Conference Auditorium 2 for a lecture on eighteenth-century literature. I am alone; there is nobody around me to whom I can quietly rant/at least gesticulate. Behind me are two students, a man and a woman, bitching about all the reading they have to do. Then THIS happens:

She: God, and we have to read Mansfield Park this week.
He: Ugh, that's just a load of feminist crap.
She: Mansfield Park is not feminist!
He: It's written by a woman, and it's shit. [she giggles] That's feminist.
[LIZ DIES]

Obviously I was in no position to question this self-assured DICK CHEESE because the lecture started (it turned out to be on landscape and nature again - why is it that whenever I actually turn up it's to the boring ones?). Anyway, I was totally disinterested, and there was no way for me to conveniently leave since I was in the middle of the row, so I started Mansfield Park. Which so far has yet to be feminist or "feminist."

The hour before this lecture was my eighteenth-century lit seminar, in which I had to give a presentation on James Thomson, Anne Finch and Mary Leapor's nature poetry. I spent most of it talking about the gender personifications in Thomson's 'Spring' - how the masculinised aspects of nature are imperial, powerful and, at one point, literally penetrative, and how the feminised aspects of nature are smiling and willing, how gales only 'sigh', and how feminised Nature's assets are separated into desirable and not desirable (there's a line referring to the 'moist Meadow' and the 'wither'd Hill'). After I'd spoken my tutor said something along the lines of 'that's a really interesting point; I've read this poem hundreds of times and I'd never realised that. I'll never be able to read that moist line again!' I mean, I recognise that of course not everyone has the same research interests as me in this field, but I'd always assumed gender was pretty rudimentary; my tutors in the past have never flinched to bring it up, and I've certainly never been in a situation before where my observations about what a text says about gender (or that a text says something about gender) have been met with such surprise.  Then I was thinking about my previous tutors and I realised that the majority of them have been feminists, so maybe I've just been super-privileged until this point. But still. Weird. She's working in an institution whose English exam papers and essay questions always, always include a gender question.

Finally, and less angrily (although I will likely get angry about this when the time comes) I discovered this morning that Germaine Greer is giving a public lecture in a fortnight at Leeds Met. I'm pretty excited; I hate her so much. I mean, I've not studied her works or the period so I have only a dim idea of what she did for second wave in the seventies; all I know about her really is what she's said when wheeled out onto Newsnight Review and what other feminists have said about her attitudes towards more contemporary feminist concerns. From this I have deduced that she is a belligerent, sanctimonious, self-serving twit of a transphobe. Corin feels very similarly, although I haven't asked her what she knows of Greer so please don't anyone assume she's as ignorant as me. We're both really looking forward to it. It'll be good to actually experience some of her ideas first-hand - either I'll end up with fewer things to be angry about or my anger with her will gain something resembling authenticity. Woo!