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?

Why I like the word 'slut'

I am super excited about the London Slutwalk, which is happening on the 4th of June (you should totally go!). I feel really privileged that there's an international movement of feminism happening while I'm alive and able to take part that doesn't (yet) make me feel at all uncomfortable or compromised. I'm especially glad that there are international feminist events happening that make much more sense than Reclaim the Night and allow for what I see as more positive celebration. But I understand that some feminists aren't as comfortable with slutwalks as I am - Laura Woodhouse has written a piece about it in The F Word - and so I wanted to write about why I like the word 'slut' and think it can be a really useful tool for facilitating social change, if feminists feel comfortable using it.

Of course, the word is frequently used in a negative context as a way to marginalise, dismiss, and other women. I would like to posit, though, that this isn't necessarily all bad. I'm not saying that I want to be treated like neither I nor my opinions matter; what I am saying is that being singled out as a problem by disciples of a heteronormative, kyriarchal agenda is something I'm actually pretty happy about. If you look up the word 'slut' on dictionary.com you will see that the definitions given often involve words like 'immoral' and 'dirty' - words that I think are awesome when used by people I disagree with to describe me. Immoral? Great, that means I don't have to keep my sex missionary with men and, more importantly, a shameful secret. Dirty? Fantastic, this means I get to express myself when I dress rather than the preferences of the conservative and (covertly) religiously-informed. Obviously I would rather than nobody found it problematic when I am loud and queer. However, given that we do not live in my ideal world, I aspire to rock the boat when I disagree with something. If people are identifying me as a threat to their restrictive sexual politics, I know I'm doing something right.

I also think that just because a word might have negative connotations to people whose views I find problematic does not mean I shouldn't use those words in a context of reclamation. For instance, sometimes people are confused that I identify as queer. More than once I have been asked, 'isn't that a word people used to discriminate against people like you?' Of course it is. But that doesn't mean we leave that word in the dust. It doesn't mean that we restrict our language, and buy into prejudiced people's definitions without questioning them. I love the word 'queer' because it represents what I deem a win - whenever someone associates it with positive gender and sexuality expression rather than abuse, it kind of means that my team is winning. Moreover, it's a useful word for me. I am neither L nor G nor B nor T. Even though I predominantly identify as a woman and the people I am interested in tend to be (cis)women also, I don't like closing down my options, because sometimes I fancy people who do not situate themselves at the tips of the gender binary, and I certainly don't like subscribing to a gender binary when describing my self or my sexual partners, which is invariably what happens when you use a word that says 'I am one sex and I like people of this sex.' I like leaving room for changes, and I prefer not to identify 'anomalies' as such. The word 'queer' gives me the freedom to do this, just like the word 'slut' gives me the freedom to openly enjoy and explore my sexuality.

By writing this I certainly don't intend to suggest that, because I feel this way, all feminists ought to - that would be extremely entitled. I respect Laura Woodhouse's feelings and rationale, as I do those of any feminist who feels the same. What I wanted to do with this blog post is talk about a differing opinion that I think (hope) might afford people more freedom. This is something I think it's really important to have a dialogue about - so if you have any comments, please make them!

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.

Basically a massive whinge

I just had an AWESOME TIME reading lots of blogs I haven't read in ages (Sof Jacques Faith Allie Brosh bit of Angry Greek think that's it) and it made me realise I haven't written in even longer, so HELLO. This shouldn't be very long, partly because I am recovering from a hypo and may sound a bit insane at points because of this, and partly because I get v. limited internet time these days what with not having it in my house and I am meant to be sorting out All The Bills for next year. But I can't right now because I am not fully lucid.

Basically my life recently has been mostly crap with moments of awesomeness. I moved house, and tidied and cleaned everything with only two of my housemates, and am the only person in my current house so have to do lots of things there too. I have yet to unpack hardly anything and the house is a tip because of this. I have to organise getting a first attempt resit for my Romantics exam. My mouse Annie died yesterday. Also on the same day the previous tenants cancelled Virgin so now I only have Freeview to while away my breaks with. Also I on that day I got a letter through the door asking me if I fancied a fuck and leaving a boy's name and number. I don't even know what to do about this - it's totally inappropriate and intrusive and it makes me feel really uncomfortable but it's likely that it was written by someone else so if I call the number and have a go that's like a win for the author, and even if it was written by "Tim" getting attention for it was probably the aim; since it's technically soliciting I could contact the local police but whenever I contact them (twice so far) it's always about sexual intimidation and I know this is irrational but I'm worried that if I do it for stuff that doesn't bother me as much as men following me in cars or men following right behind me up a back street with their hands in their pants then the police might start thinking I'm oversensitive and stop taking me seriously? Also, what if they could, like, be focussing on an actual rape case or something, but then I go along and am like 'I got this message which is probably a joke but I do not find it funny' and everyone's like HUMOURLESS FEMINIST and I obstruct worse things being sorted out? Not that rape really gets 'sorted out' usually but you know what I mean. Also yesterday I got a call from DEBT COLLECTORS and now I have c. 28 hours to pay a £300 bill left outstanding at our old house; Ryan and Sof can come up with their shares, I will have to contact my father for mine which is stressful but I can do it, and Tom is still on holiday (on holiday. At a time like this?! Moving time? I am cross about this and want to talk to him about it but want to do it face-to-face and can't do that until he comes back from holiday) and I tried calling his mum but have as yet had no response and argh. Debt collectors?! GOD. Then I also have to set up TV licence and internet and phone line and TV content and electricity and gas and water. And get a new mouse because they're social and it's cruel to have them by themselves unless it's necessary i.e. they are my old mouse Fran who bit the other mouse's balls off. Also I have therapy every week from which I always leave feeling better but is a lot of WORK and about which I am always apprehensive before I go in. Also I have to revise for two exams. Also I have to read as much as I can for the coming year, having done basically nothing for at least a fortnight. Also today I discovered I do not have enough money even to take a tenner out of my account.

I MEAN. I'm sorry to whine. But this is essentially my life now. Although I am obv not obliged to keep everyone up-to-date about everything. But still.

GOOD THINGS, HOWEVER: Sapphic Traffic was RAD, especially DJing fun and Sof birthday fun and seeing Faith and Ray-Ray was AWESOME, Corin is now here after only being away for a week and that's awesome and if she can get a job in Leeds she will stay for summer which would be lovely, Germany has made me interested in football?? so that's new and interesting, once my room is done it will be lovely, I like reading, I have three pretty comfy sofas in my living room, there are a few beers in the fridge for later on. There is also a lot of Friends on TV, which I appreciate, although accept that there will be less now that I have fewer channels. Julia Downes' EastEnders barbecue is coming up and that will be brilliant, I have decided. Also soon I will hopefully have money.

Fun fact!

Yesterday I discovered that the myth that women are mostly/only raped by strangers outside of the home first appeared in the eighteenth century. Turns out the emergence of the middle class in Britain and the way in which families began to change led to all this thinking that it was "natural" for women to stay at home while men went out working - and this also led to the removal of servants from the notion of the 'family' and the development of the idea of the 'housewife', which made marriage an employment contract whereby women did the work the servants would have done, except they weren't paid. So obviously it was desirable that women did not leave the physical confines of the home, and rape lies were a good way of ensuring this happened.

It's amazing to me that this myth flourishes so today when it's so OLD. Also (obviously this makes a lot of sense, but I'd never considered it this way before) it came out of a(nother) totally misogynistic and reductive imposed theory of social practice. Essentially, WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH EVERYTHING slash this is quite interesting.

Some alarming facts about Ann Widdecombe

I am watching 'The People's Politician' on BBC2 at the moment, which heavily features Ann Widdecombe. Tom asked me what I thought of her and I said I had a soft spot for her but had no idea why, so I decided to learn some more about her (on the Be All And End All Of Truth, ie Wikipedia). Here are the things I found most troublesome:
- she converted from CofE to Roman Catholic following the Church of England's decision that women could become priests
- she opposed the repeal of Section 28 (and opposed fifteen out of seventeen motions for equal rights for homosexuals - the two she did not vote against were the two she did not turn up to vote about)
- in 2009, she said, 'there is no climate change. Hasn't anybody looked out of the window recently?' (She has apparently expressed a variety of views on this issue. However, I think saying things like this when your opinions can affect not only what parliament decides to do but also potentially others' views, regardless of what else you've said, is dangerous and irresponsible. Has she *read* anything on the subject?)
- in 1996 she defended the government's policy to shackle pregnant women prisoners with handcuffs and chains when giving birth in hospital (THIS IS THE ONE I FIND THE MOST DISTURBING)

So I don't really have much of a soft spot for her any more. I kind of think she's a bit monstrous.

All information in this post is pretty much copied verbatim from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Widdecombe

The Vajayjay Monologues

Last week, the School of Culture and Performance (or whatever) put on The Vagina Monologues. Ryder noticed that it wasn't either week surrounding Valentine's Day, which isn't in keeping with Eve Ensler's seemingly excessive performance rules (apparently she dictates costumes and set and everything? I mean, not that I don't have any understanding of artistic ownership, but let yr frickin' baby grow up, Ensler). Anyway, that's a sidenote. The important thing is what I thought of it. Which was considerably less than I was expecting to.

TVM was quite a formative part of my formative years - I bought a copy of the book from Fopp for about £3 when I was thirteen or so and, for some reason, was pretty interested in it. I especially liked My Short Skirt, and the monologue about all the different types of moans. When I was nineteen and in my gap year some local feminists were putting on a showing, which I auditioned for and got a role in - due to some fuckery, which I won't go into because it's tedious and beaurocratic and long ago and also I'm still a bit cross about it, I didn't end up being in it after all (N.B. this experience is not accountable for any ill-feeling I have towards the play, just FYI).

Then comes Friday night. Corin and I went alongside (not really with - we missed the preceding Old Bar gathering) the feminist society. I was quite looking forward to it, since it'd been present in my consciousness for some time but I'd not seen it before. Then it started and I felt immediately out of place, like I should have been catapulted into the past but actually it was the present and it was actually a bit embarrassing. I mean, some bits were good - the woman who performed the moaning monologue was especially good - but overall it was quite shambolic, which I think was more to do with the script than the actors. It seems to aim to represent women of several different backgrounds, but in this attempt it only really succeeds in othering those who are not straight, white, and middle-class. The attempts to represent queerness where patchy - as before, the moaning monologue was done well, but the woman talking about her seduction by an older woman as a teenager just wasn't convincing, and I don't think that's just because of the performance. (Also, PROBLEMATIC - if that monologue were about a teenage girl's experiences with an older man it wouldn't have been 'acceptable', so I suppose women just can't be sexually predatory or abusive in the same way.) Furthermore, the intermissions of images of acid burn victims in Asia was not made congruent with the rest of the pieces - which mainly amounted to middle-class women voicing concerns - which completely othered them. The assumption seemed to be that these women *should* be in a society like ours, that they would want that. I'm not saying that many people would *want* to be in societies in which 'honour' killings etc are accepted, but our presumed superiority was all over the whole thing.

Also, and I think most importantly, I think something like TVM just doesn't do now what it may have done (or sought to do) when it first came about. Most women in the room were feminists, most women I know know where their clitoris is, and probably more know that they are worthy of liberation. I think we're living in a post-Vagina Monologues state of consciousness, and I don't think it has much political weight, particularly since it is only accessible to people of a very specific group, and fails to offer that group much in the way of feminist realisation that is inaccessible anywhere else.

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!