If ‘White Feminism’ is a Thing, Gender Identity Ideology Epitomizes It

If ‘White Feminism’ is a Thing, Gender Identity Ideology Epitomizes It

Featured image: United Nations Population Fund. Opting in and out of sex-based oppression is something only the most privileged believe they can do.

     by Raquel Rosario Sanchez / Feminist Current

When I was in grad school, I got into a heated debate with a classmate who insisted that “white feminism” was a serious problem in the women’s movement. The man (who was white and from the United States) argued that, “white feminism” meant that the women’s movement had centered the lives and experiences of only a select few — privileged white women in the US who traveled mainly in academic circles — “for most of its history.”

I told him I thought the term functioned as a tool to dismiss second wave feminists, glorify the (very problematic) third wave, and encourage infighting among feminists, creating divisions in a movement where collective struggle is crucial. His claim was at odds with the grassroots movement I’d grown up with in the Dominican Republic, which was obviously not led by women in the US (and certainly not by upper-class white women or academics). There are legitimate problems within feminism in my home country, particularly around class difference, but there is far more solidarity than animosity, and Dominican feminism has been consistent in addressing the struggles of rural, working class, and immigrant women.

Notably, during my time as an immigrant in the US, most of the people who complained to me about what they called “white feminism” were white themselves. I felt tokenized; like they wanted me, as a Dominican woman of colour, to validate them and their feminism. I became suspicious of all white people who used the term. Criticizing “white feminism” seemed to be a way for white people to present themselves as different, better white people — as cool, “intersectional” feminists who just happen to be white.

Now that I am back in the Dominican Republic doing shelter work, I believe my friend from grad school was right about one thing: white feminism is real. It is epitomized by gender identity ideology.

The current trend among third wavers, as well as among progressives, is to argue that we can ignore whether people were born male or female and instead use language like “genderfluid,” “multi-gender,” or “genderqueer.” But there’s a massive gap between this language — popularized within Gender Studies classrooms in the West — and the realities of marginalized women in countries like mine.

I’ve been thinking about what gender identity means in the context of the Global South. What does gender identity mean for women and girls who look like me? What does it mean for Dominican women and girls who are marginalized not just by sex, but by poverty, race, and xenophobia?

Recently, the Dominican Republic has been debating whether or not to outlaw child marriage. The country has the highest rate of child marriage in the Latin American and Caribbean region. According to a 2014 survey, 37 per cent of women who are between 20 and 49 years old got married (or became common law partners) before they were 18. The survey also shows that one in five girls between 15 and 19 are in a relationship with a man who is at least 10 years their senior. There is a strong correlation between child marriage and teen pregnancy, which can result in dangerous health complications for girls, like blood poisoning, obstructed labour, and high blood pressure. Indeed, teen pregnancy is the number one cause of death for teen girls worldwide. This is particularly worrisome because the Dominican Republic prohibits all abortion, even in the cases when the mother’s life is in danger.

Plan International, a children’s rights organization, published a study in March, looking at child marriage on the south side of the Caribbean island. They interviewed men who married underage girls, as well as the girls who “chose” these marriages. Almost 40 per cent of the men interviewed said they preferred younger girls because they were “more obedient and easier to control.” The study also revealed that many girls marry older men hoping to escape family violence and poverty, but then face violence from these men once they are married. One 15-year-old girl who was interviewed for the study said:

“I got married because I needed to run away from home. They were beating me. They used sticks. They wouldn’t trust me. One day I said: ‘I don’t want to live like this anymore.’ At home, there was a lot of fighting, one day in front of everybody, they beat me, in the middle of the street. So, I started working at a household. I was 11 years old. It was even worse there, the violence increased. I had to do all the chores, including washing all the clothes by hand. They wouldn’t even let me go to school and they never paid me because they said that they already gave me food. I was suffering a lot. I felt imprisoned I couldn’t even go to the park. I wanted to get married to leave all of that. I thought that if I got married I was going to be in a calm house, that I would be able to eat, sleep and go out. I didn’t know it wouldn’t be like that, like another hell.”

In the Dominican Republic, boys are not expected to clean or help raise their siblings — that is the responsibility of girls. Prior to marriage, 78 per cent of the girls who participated in the Plan International study said they were put in charge of doing household chores like cleaning and caring for their younger siblings. When girls were asked what it means to be a woman, most said that it meant being a mother and a wife.

Writer Caridad Araujo points out:

“Half of the women in Latin America who are in their [productivity years] are unemployed and the ones who do have a job earn considerably less than their male counterparts. For women in Latin America and the Caribbean, the wage gap becomes more exacerbated during their peak fertility years.”

This is because there is an expectation that women are inherently nurturing. Being forced into the position of caretaker translates to women having less savings, being promoted less, and accumulating less money in their pensions.

But gender identity politics reduces this reality — and womanhood itself — to a trivial, malleable identity. It is baffling that in a world where women and girls face structural oppression due to their biology, gender identity politics has thrived.

Susan Cox argues that: “The non-binary declaration is a slap in the face to all women, who, if they haven’t come out as ‘genderqueer,’ presumably possess an internal essence perfectly in-line with the misogynistic parody of womanhood created by patriarchy.” There’s a twisted, neoliberal cruelty in arguing that the primary problem with gender is its impact on the chosen identities of individuals, and not the way it operates systemically, under patriarchy, to normalize and encourage male violence and female subordination.

When confronted with evidence that, historically and globally, women’s oppression is sex-based, gender identity politics simply claims that sex itself is an “invented” social construct.

In an article at Quartz, Jeremy Colangelo writes:

“Sex and gender are much more complex and nuanced than people have long believed. Defining sex as a binary treats it like a light switch: on or off. But it’s actually more similar to a dimmer switch, with many people sitting somewhere in between male and female genetically, physiologically, and/or mentally. To reflect this, scientists now describe sex as a spectrum.

Despite the evidence, people hold on to the idea that sex is binary because it’s the easiest explanation to believe. It tracks with the messages we see in advertisements, movies, books, music — basically everywhere. People like familiar things, and the binary is familiar (especially if you’re a cisgender person who has never had to deal with sexual-identity issues).”

But feminists don’t argue that sex is real because it is “the easiest explanation to believe” or because of what the media tells us. We argue sex is real because from the moment an ultrasound reveals a baby is female, her subjugation begins. And though “gender identity” is presented as an issue feminism must contend with, it is, as Rebecca Reilly-Cooper explains, completely at odds with feminist analysis of biological sex as an axis of oppression:

“Women’s historic and continued subordination has not arisen because some members of our species choose to identify with an inferior social role (and it would be an act of egregious victim-blaming to suggest that it has). It has emerged as a means by which males can dominate that half of the species that is capable of gestating children, and exploit their sexual and reproductive labour.

We cannot make sense of the historical development of patriarchy and the continued existence of sexist discrimination and cultural misogyny, without recognizing the reality of female biology, and the existence of a class of biologically female persons.”

Far from fluid, the realities of sex-based oppression are strict and enforced through violence — this is particularly true for women of colour and women in poverty.

Presumably, the Romanian women and girls who are filling up brothels in Spain (six out of 10 prostituted women in Spain are from Romania) would like to opt-out of their gender. Evelyn Hernandez Cruz, the 19-year old girl who has just been sentenced to 30 years in jail in El Salvador for having a stillbirth, after being repeatedly raped by a gang member, surely would like to reject her status as “woman.” The 12-year-old girls in Kenya who are sold into prostitution by their families, desperate for money amidst regional droughts, probably don’t identify with being exchanged as if they’re commodities. Presumably the girls in Nepal who die from snake bites and low temperatures in menstruation huts are uncomfortable with the restrictions of their gender.

Even in the US, sex-based oppression is compounded through other forms of oppression, like race. According to a 2017 report, black women are four times more likely than white women to die from pregnancy-related complications, and are “twice as likely to experience a life-threatening complication during childbirth or pregnancy.” A study conducted by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention shows that half of the murders of women in the US are committed by a current or former partners and that black women are most likelyto die by homicide than all other demographics. It is fair to assume that this is not a reality these women “identify” with.

To argue that sex is not real and that gender is innate or chosen, instead of socially imposed, demonstrates both ignorance to the world around you as well as a position of privilege. In this way, we see that gender identity ideology literally is“white feminism”: a (so-called) feminism that ignores the material realities of the marginalized, centers the feelings and interests of the most privileged, and presents itself as universal. It is a “feminism” invented by academics in Western countries that does little to address the struggles of those outside these circles.

Cate Young defines white feminism as:

“A specific set of single-issue, non-intersectional, superficial feminist practices. It is the feminism we understand as mainstream; the feminism obsessed with body hair, and high heels and makeup, and changing your married name. ‘White feminism’ is the feminism that doesn’t understand western privilege, or cultural context. It is the feminism that doesn’t consider race as a factor in the struggle for equality.

White feminism is any expression of feminist thought or action that is anti-intersectional. It is a set of beliefs that allows for the exclusion of issues that specifically affect women of colour.”

Considering this definition, what do we make of a man claiming that eyeliner defines his “womanhood,” as Gabriel Squailia did this year in an article for Bustle? He writes:

“My politics and my eyeliner became inseparable. Projecting my own sense of beauty, without shame or hesitation, scared the hell out of my opponents. My look was my armor and my weaponry. Every day, my personal power has grown. Strength and security come from drawing lines on my lids, and from the visibility that follows.My sense of myself is personal, particular, idiosyncratic. It involves massive, complex issues of identity and politics. And all of this is present when I’m leaning into the mirror, getting my eyeliner wings just right.”

The ridiculousness of Squailia’s claim that makeup makes him a woman and that power, strength and security are easily available and acquirable through superficial means, is made ever more clear when contrasted with the day-to day realities faced by most women and girls around the world. In his piece, Squailia admits womanhood is something he has been able to put on and take off, as he pleased:

“I stopped wearing anything that scanned as feminine. I didn’t even own eyeliner for 20 years. And I said nothing when people took me for a straight, cisgender man.”

But women and girls oppressed for being born female don’t have the privilege of opting out of womanhood, and appropriating the male privilege of straight men. Patriarchy doesn’t care if women don’t like or relate to their subordinate role.

Many people who consider themselves progressive believe that by swearing allegiance to gender identity ideology, they demonstrate “intersectionality.” But if they truly cared about the intersections of sex, race, and class, they would center women and girls marginalized by those axes of oppression. Instead, progressives and queer activists are centering men who believe oppression is something you can opt in and out of. Surely, most women around the world would take offense at the notion the violence and injustice they suffer is a choice… Or that it has anything to do with eyeliner. 

RAQUEL ROSARIO SANCHEZ IS A WRITER FROM THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC. HER UTMOST PRIORITY IN HER WORK AND AS A FEMINIST IS TO END VIOLENCE AGAINST GIRLS AND WOMEN. HER WORK HAS APPEARED IN SEVERAL PRINT AND DIGITAL PUBLICATIONS BOTH IN ENGLISH AND SPANISH, INCLUDING: FEMINIST CURRENT, EL GRILLO, LA REPLICA, TRIBUNA FEMINISTA, EL CARIBE AND LA MAREA. YOU CAN FOLLOW HER @8ROSARIOSANCHEZ WHERE SHE RAMBLES ABOUT FEMINISM, POLITICS, AND POETRY.

Why ‘The Queerest Generation Ever’ Hasn’t Managed to Address Women’s Oppression

     by Meghan Murphy / Feminist Current

At The Establishment, Tori Truscheit asks, “How can the queerest generation ever still believe in gender roles?”

If that question seems jaw-droppingly lacking in self-awareness, congratulations: you have been paying attention. If, on the other hand, you’re scratching your head, trying to get to the bottom of why a society drowning in rainbows and glitter, with endless “genders” to choose from, remains so steadfastly misogynistic, you’ve probably spent too much time at Everyday Feminism and The Establishment

We have one problem to start: the word “queer,” which in the past (first as an insult, then reclaimed) referred more explicitly to gay and lesbian people, has recently come to mean pretty much anything. We have heterosexual women and men calling themselves “queer” because they claim to be “non-binary,” like “kinky” sex, or wear glittery makeup. In other words, today, “queer” and “gay” do not mean the same thing. And mushing together homosexuality with a variety of chosen identities or funky haircuts means that the question of why “the queerest generation” might not be progressive on the issue of women’s liberation is flawed from the start, because it’s unclear what the word “queer” even means in this context.

Either way, whether we are talking about gay men or those who identify as “queer,” there is one glaring reason why sexist gender roles have stuck around: being “queer” is not necessarily the same thing as being feminist. In fact, in many ways the queer movement has wholly rejected women’s liberation, as a political aim.

Truscheit is right on one thing: the gay marriage movement was not particularly feminist. Rather, this was a liberal effort that chose not to challenge the institution of marriage itself — which exists only because men wished to trade women as commodities, among themselves — and instead fought for inclusion in a heterosexist, patriarchal tradition. This is actually a useful demonstration of the difference between liberal feminism and radical feminism: one fights for equal access to already existing institutions, the other fights for a new system (and therefore new institutions) entirely.

Most (if not all) American liberals support gay marriage, unequivocally, but don’t necessarily have any vested interest in destroying male supremacy. (This is evidenced, for example, by liberal support for things like the porn industry and the legalization of brothels.) Liberals are capitalist, also, which means, again, they are invested in maintaining the systems already in place, but tweaking them a little, in order to offer an illusion of equality (i.e. if we all are allowed to make more money, get married, and own property, the world will be a better place.)

It is here that North American liberals tend to get lost on the question of feminism: they fail to understand that in order to achieve liberation for women and other oppressed groups, capitalism and patriarchy need more than a few tweaks.

Truscheit writes:

“More than half of high school students identify as something other than straight, 12 per cent of millennials are trans or gender nonconforming, and millennials overwhelmingly support gay marriage.

In a world where millennials are increasingly embracing marginalized groups, you’d think their accompanying views on gender would follow suit.”

But the thing is that none of the positions or identities listed here are necessarily anti-patriarchy. By and large, the male-led fight for “marriage equality” ignored the plight of women in its effort, meaning that the oppressive system behind homophobia remained intact, despite marriage rights. Gender identity discourse misunderstands how the system of gender works and that it exists to oppress women and legitimize male supremacy. And “embracing marginalized groups” doesn’t mean understanding or fighting the underlying systems that ensure certain groups are oppressed as a class. To liberals, “marginalization” doesn’t need to happen on a class basis — it can happen on an individual basis, which is why liberal societies keep digging themselves deeper into these pits of violence and vast inequality — because fighting structures of oppression can’t happen within an individualist framework.

Truscheit’s big mistake is to look towards yet another anti-feminist, liberal movement for a solution to patriarchy: queer politics.

Trans activist Mya Byrne at Pride San Fransisco, June 25, 2017.

While Truscheit blames “mainstream gays” for not “questioning gender,” she lets the trans movement off the hook — an odd blind spot considering that trans activism is largely responsible for re-popularizing the idea of gender itself. Whereas feminism has said gender, under patriarchy, is something we should reject, not embrace, today’s queer movement has positioned gender as fun and liberatory. Indeed, transgenderism itself can only exist so long as we have gender and believe gender roles are fine, so long as we choose them.

Truscheit says the “white male activists behind the marriage equality movement… sacrificed trans rights on the altar of their own desired outcome,” connecting this to what she perceives as a failure to “question gender.” But what she doesn’t realize is that an end to gender means an end to transgenderism — we can’t “identify” with gender roles if there are none to identify with. Indeed, if the gay rights movement had explicitly gone after gender, the result would not have been allyship with the transgender movement.

While I understand feeling let down by those around us who claim to want a more just, more equitable world, what feminists have learned over and over again in the past 150-odd years is that we can’t rely on male-centered movements. In order to liberate women, we need to put our energy into political activism and ideology that centers women and addresses the root of male supremacy.

Transgenderism isn’t going to save us from male dominance anymore than liberal gay men or male anarchists will. If we want real change, we need to look back, and take our cues from the women who broke ties with the men who sold them out and took matters into their own hands. From Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who, after being betrayed by their abolitionist allies, formed the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), which refused to support constitutional changes that did not enfranchise women; to the radical feminists of the late 1960s, who told the left to fuck off because “we’re starting our own movement;” to the black women involved in black militant politics who were expected to take a “traditional feminine role,” allowing men to lead the movement and hold positions of power within it — these women learned the lessons we should have memorized by now.

There is one answer to the question of patriarchy — there always has been. While queer politics may be more trendy (a result, in part, of its marketability and individualist ethos), feminism is the only political movement that can free women from the shackles of male domination.

Liberals like Truscheit and her colleagues at The Establishment will continue spinning their wheels until they decide to pick up where first and second wave radicals left off. We need to stop looking around, and asking ourselves who to turn to next: our sisters have the answer.

Prostitution Legislation Must Include Women in the Porn Industry

Prostitution Legislation Must Include Women in the Porn Industry

Featured image: From left to right: Cherie Jiminez, Per-Anders Sunesson, Gail Dines, Julie Bindel, Clara Berglund. By Gail Dines/Facebook)

     by Susan Cox / Feminist Current

I remember when I was first struck by the question: If prostitution is against the law in the US, why isn’t porn?

A friend of mine was telling me about an undercover sting operation at the massage parlour down the street from her apartment in New York, wherein police arrested some of the Asian women who “worked” there. This story made me wonder what kind of men would go to a “massage parlour” and exploit a woman’s desperation and marginalization as an immigrant in the US. Just the men should be thrown in jail for doing that, not those women, I thought.

I recalled the disgustingly racist way I have seen so many white men fetishize Asian women, imagining them to be extra-submissive. I thought about how there were probably hundreds of thousands of porn films promoting this view online, featuring Asian women “servicing” white men — many of which were probably even set in a massage parlour. Then it hit me: Why was it illegal at the place down the street from my friend’s apartment, but when the same thing is done with a camera, it’s considered totally legitimate?

It’s been years since this incongruity occurred to me, but I still don’t have an answer to that question… Because there isn’t one.

Last week, a panel held during the 61st session of the Commission on the Status of Women in New York addressed this bizarre disconnect between pornography and prostitution in law, activism, and consciousness. Moderated by Clara Berglund, Secretary General of the Swedish Women’s Lobby, the panel featured pornography expert Gail Dines, writer Julie Bindel, prostitution survivor and abolitionist Cherie Jimenez, and Sweden’s Ambassador at Large for Combatting Trafficking in Persons, Per-Anders Sunesson. All panelists advocate for the Nordic Model (a legal model which decriminalizes those who are prostituted and instead targets the demand side of the sex trade, by criminalizing pimps, brothel owners, and johns). The panel was preceded by a screening of Gail Dines’ documentary, Pornland: How the Porn Industry Has Hijacked Our Sexuality.

“When I first saw this documentary, I did not know how bad pornography had gotten,” Jimenez said, referring to the extreme acts of degradation and physical violence (slapping, gagging, choking, prolapsed anuses) that have come to dominate online porn. As a survivor of prostitution who now does frontline work with women trying to exit the sex trade, Jimenez has noticed a parallel between the increase in the brutality of porn and the increasingly sadistic demands of johns experienced by prostituted women today. “It’s a whole different game now,” she said.

Through her journalistic research in Cambodia, Bindel found that the prostituted women she interviewed shared a similar experience. They told her the demands of johns had gotten much worse since gonzo porn had flooded Cambodia, becoming more accessible to men through smart phones. Men would even play this kind of porn on their phones during the encounter and make prostituted women re-create the brutal acts performed in it.

Pro-”sex work” lobbyists like to frame prostitution as something natural, that has always been present throughout history. However, the disturbing requests and acts prostituted women say are expected of them since the Internet porn revolution show otherwise. The demand for prostitution has changed, suggesting it is no more natural than modern cultural norms like the pressure on women to shave their vulvas bald as per porn standards.

“Do you think men are born johns?” asked Dines. “Do you think they just suddenly wake up one day and decide to go to a trafficked or prostituted woman? No! That takes a socialization process. And what is the biggest socializer of sexuality in the world today? Pornography.”

Dines argues that pornography is the ideological arm of what is essentially one and the same sex trade, facilitating the demand for prostitution by normalizing sexual violence, dehumanizing women, and killing empathy in johns. Nonetheless, a sharp legal distinction is made — while prostitution is illegal in many countries, porn is considered to be an above-ground industry.

Its legitimate status means that the porn industry is in a position to dump massive amounts of money into influencing politicians and legislation. Ironically, it also enables the industry to facilitate illegal actions, such as sex trafficking in minors. Dines explains:

“The porn industry has put a ton of money into fighting a law called 2257. All that law says is that, on a porn set, you have to prove with some form of ID that everyone is 18 or above. The porn industry has been fighting that for years, claiming that it inhibits their free speech.”

Although industry lobbyists claim pornography is simply “free speech,” what happens in porn happens to real women (and girls, apparently). The fact that the act is filmed does not make the prostitution disappear, but effectively ensures the trauma is captured for eternity.

After exiting prostitution, Jimenez says she struggled “for a long time trying to feel whole again.” Dines extended this to the experiences of women in pornography, citing research by Melissa Farley which found that prostituted women who had pornography made of them experienced even higher rates of PTSD.

According to Dines, this is most likely due to the fact that, for women in pornography, there is no way to ever truly exit the sex trade. Their exploitation is frozen in time, allowing millions of johns to re-victimize women endlessly, even after their deaths. “Think of the trauma of never again having any sense of bodily integrity or privacy,” said Dines.

Bindel attended the 2015 LA Porn Awards as a journalist and learned about yet another way the industry makes it impossible for women to truly exit porn. She explained:

“The biggest category in 2015 was ‘Milf.’ And it was because when the women were retiring at the age of 35 or 36, the industry wanted to get more out of them. And someone told me something about this that left my blood cold. When the women are about to drop out of making films, for the most popular women, they make a ‘real doll’ from her. And it’s anatomically correct in every way. So men are ordering these exact replicas of these women and their orifices. They mold from her body, inside and out, which means that whatever happens to her, wherever she goes, there are men literally fucking her replica and writing about it online, etcetera. And that to me is the height of sadism.”

Considering the impact of the industry on women prostituted through porn (never mind on women and girls as a whole), Dines’ delivers an impassioned plea to the anti-trafficking movement:

“Don’t forget pornography and don’t forget the women in the industry…The less we think about it, the more we ignore the women in pornography and say, ‘You don’t count. We’re not even including you in this.’”

In her final comments, Dines called upon governments like Sweden to incorporate pornography into the legislation that already exists: “Now has come the time, after so many years of the Nordic Model, that if you’re going to fine or imprison [men] for sexual exploitation, you have to also do that for the exploitation of women in pornography.”

As the Nordic Model continues to spread across the world, this landmark legislation for women’s rights could also be a huge blow to the multi-billion dollar porn industry. It may be some time before feminists can convince states to craft and implement specific policy that includes pornography within the Nordic Model, but it is imperative we push for it. Anything less would abandon so many women and girls, arbitrarily denying them their humans rights and the justice they deserve.

Liberation or liberalism? Women, it’s time to choose!

Liberation or liberalism? Women, it’s time to choose!

by Renée Gerlich

A New Zealand Prostitutes Collective (NZPC) spokesperson has instigated an online pact against yours truly. That might flatter me, if it weren’t so effective. It’s titled “Against Human Rights” – appropriately, since it exists specifically to help negate an individual woman’s rights to further education, a voice, and a livelihood. The pact (below) misrepresents my concerns about women‘s safety and the medicalisation of gender, and asks signatories to collaborate in withholding study, speaking and work opportunities from none other than myself.

This pact was instigated just after I was banned from the Wellington Zinefest, a community hand-made book market; and just before I lost my job. The reason Wellington Zinefest gave me for their ban was that my work is critical of both prostitution, and gender identity politics, and this makes me “unsafe”. Supporters of this ban then trained their attention on the impressionable new manager at my work, making her nervous with allegations of “hate speech”. Her response to that peer pressure has given me enough material for a five-page personal grievance for workplace bullying. I chose to resign.

So forgive me, but I have some bones to pick with the local liberal feminist scene.

I think feminism is in dire straits, and that is exemplified by my own situation, as well as other events we celebrate as successes. I would like to point the finger at whoever is ultimately, specifically responsible for manipulating women into the position we are in, on our turf; but that would take the kind of organised investigation I am not resourced for. All I can do is observe what we are doing in the name of “feminism”; consider who that is serving, what difference it is making, and compare that to the aims of feminism. Feminism is of course the movement to end rape and the systemic, sex-based oppression of women by men in power.

It looks to me like, in Wellington, “feminism” is in a state where it is insisted that women must be content with the routine and systemic pornification and commodification of our bodies. If we don’t like it, if we raise any issues with it – with the sex trade, or sex-based oppression – we’re treated with hostility. We are labelled prudes, not “sex positive” enough, blacklisted, and forced to recognise where our place is.

Women back-up dancers represent the male gaze in Ambition

The NZPC pact against me, if successful, is the kind of thing that could help put a woman on the street. This collaborative agreement to withhold opportunities from me is taking effect – I have lost my job – and whether or not I have other support, job prospects, or family behind me, is not of interest to NZPC or their followers. If I’m tracked closely enough (even my friends get text messages asking them, “how can you be friends with Renée?”) will I find another job in this city? This real-life pile-on has chances of real, destructive success. Indeed, that’s the appeal of witch hunts – they’re so easy to make effective. One woman rarely stands much chance against a mob.

If this pact did succeed in putting me on the street, I’d find what many women find: that the most readily available option to me, to sustain a livelihood, would be prostitution. This is not a far-fetched scenario, it happens all the time. That’s what keeps the industry alive – women are pushed out of options, and are left with that one.

Where would I go for support if it happened to me? To NZPC?

Magazine cover for Massive

Even the likes of Mike Hosking and Tony Veitch (a sports commentator who broke his partner’s back) don’t get this kind of treatment from liberals – pacts to cut off their options. I’m not comparing myself to these misogynists – but their example demonstrates who liberals truly get excited about hounding and destabilising. A Mike Hosking petition says, “We no longer wish to see or hear any more from Hosking on our TV screens” – nice and specific. I can’t even find a Veitch petition, and Veitch is still on air. Mine wants me indefinitely silenced  – even though I have no platform – through an indefinite commitment to bad-mouthing.

In fact, Darkmatter performer Alok Vaid-Menon – a rape apologist and open misogynist, performed a slam poetry series earlier this year in Wellington. When I raised the issue of his public misogyny and rape and paedophilia justifications, I was told on no uncertain terms that I was not to speak about them, because Vaid-Menon is transgender. So he may have his global tour in spite of overt misogyny; I may not have my job, because of my feminist politics. Carwyn Walsh, the magazine editor who published this Massive cover also stayed in his job, while my public objection to it as offensive, was cited by the Wellington Zinefest committee as one of the reasons I was banned.

Again, the message is clear: I’m to know where my place is, as a woman.

Compare this to a lot of the other liberal feminist successes of late. They seem to almost be predicated on women flaunting some conformity to that very premise: we know where our place is. We, collectively, don’t mind being sexualised or pornified by men. We either aren’t aware of it, think it’s harmless, or we find it empowering and fun.

Hera Lindsay Bird, an incredible poet, rocketed to celebrity status this year with a stunning first book, creating her platform with an abundance of talent – and the poem Keats is dead so fuck me from behind.

City Gallery billboard

In 2015, the City Gallery placed this image, Gigi on their floor and on a Courtenay Place billboard. Regardless of her talent as a fine art photographer, the reproduction of pornography is one of Fiona Pardington’s major claims to fame. Local producer, beat-maker and musical powerhouse Estère just released an album in which the title track, Ambition, features “Magdelaine Lavirgin, bordello resident,” who “wants to be the United States President”.

There’s a “Free the Nipple” event coming up this month (“How far will you go for equality?”), asking women to get topless on Oriental Bay for gender equality, and that follows October’s Naked Girls Reading night. Both these events are international franchises. One guy told me he likes the idea of “Free the Nipple”, because he thinks it makes “porn redundant” – places it at his doorstep. There’s no shortage of leery commentary to be found about Free the Nipple from men online. That alone should make us question whether such events really bring about social change, and challenge to male power – or whether they co-opt feminist language to keep women in our place.

Women seem to be engaging in these events as activism because we somehow believe that normalising exposure of “the nipple” will help liberate “it” because men will become so accustomed to seeing female breasts in everyday settings, that they will no longer find them arousing, and then women will finally have the same privilege as men do to go topless. One of the problems with this notion is that it rests on the same habituation principle as pornography does, and the trajectory does not lead to liberation. What happens instead is that men are habituated and desensitised to the point of boredom, and then the game is lifted. In pornography, that means more explicit degradation and violence. Men did not used to like watching a woman being anally raped until she suffers rectal prolapse: they do now. It’s called “rosebudding”, and it’s the new trend.

The point is, that as long as power is still in men’s hands, and men are still buying women, using pornography, broadcasting misogyny, and capitalising from it all, while controlling every position and institution of influence there is – the habituation principle doesn’t work in women’s favour. If we are not taking power away, but we are taking more clothes off in more places, we are succumbing to the demands of men. If we are forcing or coercing other women to accept this status quo, we’re doing the patriarchy’s work for it, gratis.

The Art of Stripping is an exhibition that recently showed at Thistle Hall, offering nipple plaster castings. The exhibition showed art by women who strip in Wellington strip clubs, claiming to demonstrate how “women involved in sex work are all unique and complex people”, though the show was still geared toward ultimately leveraging women’s creativity to legitimise the sex trade. Free trial pole dance classes and burlesque shows are never lacking in Wellington, which normalise that trade too; then of course there’s the usual barrage of objectifying advertising and media, that all these “feminist” activities still insist on distinguishing themselves from. They’re meant to be more sophisticated, avant-garde, political and literary than low-brow mainstream objectification.

Naked Girls Reading, an international campaign. Photo: Facebook event page

Estère’s Ambition music video, featuring Magdelaine Lavirgin (“bordello resident”) presents a telling commentary. Estère’s music has a rebellious, politicised, independent spirit. I Spy, for instance is a song about child poverty, inequality and the 1% caricatured through Baba Yaga imagery. To understand Estère’s punch is to know too that she can shake the world up from home in her pyjamas if she wants to: she makes music with a portable Music Production Centre called Lola, recording the slamming, for instance, of a cutlery drawer; the banging of a drumstick against a lampshade. Her search for rousing sound in her surrounds reminds me of the music company Stomp – except she is one woman.

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Ambition presents Lavirgin as strident, not downtrodden. According to a meme Estère has made, “Emancipation of the afro” is one of Lavirgin’s campaigning platforms – she whips a blonde wig off at the video’s opening to liberate her afro by the end of the song, in a profound gesture of black liberation. Estère’s presence, spunk, creative integrity and production talent is jaw-dropping.

Estère’s Lavirgin is not a prostituted womanShe’s the “empowered sex worker” of liberal feminist mythology. She struts in a red cocktail dress pursued by figures in suits with cameras for heads that shine their lights on her. Presumably these camera-headed suits are pornographers, or perhaps they stand more abstractly for the male gaze; Lavirgin in any case, barely pays them notice. She’s just too sassy.

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These pursuers eventually tear off their headgear and suits to reveal themselves as a group of women who then hoist up Lavirgin like a prize, decorate her with jewellery and fan her with star-spangled American flags in her presidential chair. To me, this video is a portrait and snapshot of the state of feminism in Wellington; the song a rather cutting anthem. It’s a depiction of the liberal feminists of Wellington and their downright worship of sex trade lobby spokespeople. The video contains vital motifs and messages about black liberation. Yet parallel to that, it tells a story of women, consciously or not, doing the patriarchy’s work for it: the promotion of pornography, and legitimising of prostitution.

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It is possible to examine what really happens when a woman sex trade lobbyist – someone with vested interests in promoting the idea of “sex work” as “empowered” – gains access to the highest halls of power. It is not good news for women. Kat Banyard’s book Pimp State discusses how Alejandra Gil, a convicted sex trafficker, managed to lobby the U.N. and Amnesty International into developing policy of benefit to pimps and traffickers such as herself. She’d had a fifteen-year prison sentence for trafficking women and girls; it’s not hard to see why she’d want the sex trade legitimated. It doesn’t help the girls and women who are trafficked and prostituted; neither does our mainstreaming of this kind of lobbying.

Radio New Zealand seems in on this too. The Wireless published an article this year, about how “stigma” causes violence in prostitution (not pimps or johns), and RNZ did a terrible podcast on prostitution that was more like a lobby-produced advertorial.

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It is worth considering too, that when Eleanor Catton (another magnificent creative and heroine of mine) won the Booker Prize, she did so for writing an 832-page novel in which the central protagonist is a prostituted woman, but rape is barely mentioned and prostitution hardly problematised.

I know that I will get in trouble with sisters for writing this; I’ll be accused of attacking women. I still think we need to be talking about the trends that might be keeping us “in our place”, keeping us immobile and unthreatening, while we enter a Trump-era of escalating violence, exploitation, attacks on reproductive rights, mass manipulation and hostility toward women.

With regard to that manipulation – consider that businessmen-pornographers have been grooming the market to make porn socially acceptable in the interests of capital gain since the 1950s. The first years of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy, Bob Guccione’s Penthouse and Larry Flynt’s Hustleron the shelves saw these pornographers work hard to normalise porn. By the 90s, bunny merchandise was being consumed by women everywhere – the bunny branding everything from stationery to pyjama pants.

“It was a very different world,” says feminist writer Gail Dines, “after Hefner eroded the cultural, economic, and legal barriers to mass production and distribution of porn.” It is now even considered up for debate now whether pole dancing is the best after school activity for 8-year-olds.

How did this shift to the mainstream happen? The answer is simple: by design. What we see today is the result of years of careful strategising and marketing by the porn industry to sanitise its products… reconstructing porn as fun, edgy, chic, sexy, and hot. The more sanitised the industry became, the more it seeped into the pop culture and into our collective consciousness.

Free the Nipple, Naked Girls Reading – these are global franchises, they are not grassroots community events. Where this pressure and facilitation and support comes from to run them, we need to understand. We need to understand that this is part of the normalisation of pornography, prostitution and porn culture, which are absolutely and inextricably intertwined with male capital gain, male entitlement, rape culture, sexual violence and the notion of women as property. That notion is shared by conservatives and liberals alike. Both these political groups are male dominated. Both have ways of capturing and co-opting of feminist language and ideals to keep women “in our place”.

Radical feminist midwife MaryLou Singleton sums it up beautifully. “There is liberal patriarchy and there is conservative patriarchy,” she says,

but I agree with Sunsara Taylor, the founder of Stop Patriarchy, that between the pope and the pimp there is really no fundamental difference. But right now, our options are being set up so that you can either align with the ‘Pope Lobby’ or the ‘Pimp Lobby’.

This manipulation and recruiting of women into sex-trade promotion through liberal politics has been successful to the point that porn and sex are now for all intents and purposes, synonymous. As Dines states, if you are anti-porn, you get slapped with the label “anti-sex”. This shows to what extent women have had the wool pulled over our eyes. Our sexuality istheir industry.

I have a fantasy of my own: of women rejecting that colonisation of our bodies and sexuality. Of women no longer pulling punches. What if Estère’s powerful contribution to black liberation struggle was combined with a rejection of prostitution as a tool of women’s subordination? What if Lola really held the power to boot the Chow brothers – known abusers who capitalise from exploitation of women in Wellington – out of town? I think she does hold that power.

What if Hera Lindsay Bird used her stir-up, startle-power to expose anti-feminism in the literary world? What if Fiona Pardington photographed johns and pimps and brought their abuse to light in chiaroscuro, instead of re-photographing already exploited women? If Eleanor Catton, after being called an “ungrateful hua” on air, called for a cull of commercial radio misogynists? If Hadassah Grace used her writing talent, slam voice and powers of intimidation to get White Ribbon ambassadors to check their phallocentric campaigning, re-open Christchurch’s Rape Crisis centre, provide some actual analysis, and perhaps support free self defence for women?

What if Free the Nipple was a women’s gathering, like the consciousness-raising, political gatherings of the 1970s? Like, if we all got bullied, banned and censored for talking sexual politics alone (fuck that)… what if we organised?

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When a Man Kills a Woman

When a Man Kills a Woman

Featured image: Counting Dead Women project

     by Karen Ingala Smith /  openDemocracy

Across everything that divides societies, we share in common that men’s violence against women is normalised, tolerated, justified – and hidden in plain sight.

Since 25 November last year, at least 118 women and girls in the UK aged over 13 have been killed by men, or a man has been the primary suspect.

An average of one woman dead at the hands of a man every 3 days.

I’ve been recording women’s names and details of how they were killed since January 2012 when Counting Dead Women was launched.

Today we commemorate 653 women.

Men’s fatal violence against women in the UK crosses boundaries of class, race, nationality and age.  Over the last year, the oldest woman killed was 85, 18 were over 60, and 21 were aged 25 and under.  They included hairdressers, writers, shop assistants, prostituted women, a politician, lawyers, students and school girls; women born in Eritrea, Poland, China, Italy and other countries, and of course women born in the UK with a range of ethnic backgrounds.  Most, but not all, were killed by current or former partners, others were killed by burglars, rapists, neighbours, brothers, sons, men they saw as friends or men who paid for sex.

Many think of intimate partner violence, or, more broadly, domestic violence, if they think about women killed by men at all.  This focus is reflected and reinforced by official statistics.  The Office for National Statistics (ONS) publishes an annual report on violent crime, including homicide.  For the year ending March 2015, the Home Office Homicide Index recorded 518 homicides. There were 186 female victims, 331 male victims, and one victim whose sex is unknown/undeclared.

The proportion of female victims was the highest recorded for 20 years. 19 men and 81 women were killed in circumstances described as partner/ex-partner homicides. 31 were killed by other family members (domestic/family violence).

But what about the remaining 74 women?  Is it important to have a sex-specific analysis of their deaths?

51-year-old Majella Lynch died in hospital after the a removal of a 400ml shampoo bottle  from her abdominal cavity.  William Mousley QC, prosecuting, said  “The bottle could not have been self-inserted because of the extreme pain such an act would have caused.” Mousley said her attacker, Daniel McBride, 43, an habitual user of hardcore pornography “had an interest in violent sexual activity and was in the mood for sex that night having had an argument with his girlfriend and being rejected by another female.”  Yvette Hallsworth, 36, was selected by  Mateusz Kosecki  because she was “slightly built.” At 18 he was already a predator targeting women in prostitution.  He had attacked at least three women who sold sex before he killed Yvette Hallsworth, stabbing her 18 times.  Judge Michael Stokes QC described him has having a “fascination, if not an obsession” with prostituted women.

How can a feminist perspective of men’s violence against women disregard some women when patriarchal misogyny, violent sexualisation and objectification are so clear in their murders?

The prevalence of intimate partner violence (IPV) is globally uneven. Corradi and Stockl, 2014, looked at the relationship between men’s fatal violence against women, feminist activism and government policy in European countries since the 1970s.  They found no clear link between rates of IPV and government policies, rather that feminist activism was a crucial catalyst of change – and was most effective when it was independent of government.

“Since the late 1960s, organized women’s activism played a fundamental role in rallying the state to tackle VAW.” (Corradi & Stockl, 2014: 605).

It is estimated that across the world around 66,000 women and girls are violently killed every year. Comparing country-by-country data is challenging, partly because there isn’t a cross-national approach to collecting and disaggregating murder statistics by the sex of both victim and killer, but globally women are at greater risk than men of intimate-partner homicides and are overwhelmingly killed by males.  Across everything that divides societies, we share in common that men’s violence against women is normalised, tolerated, justified – and hidden in plain sight, and that there is a lack of truly proactive and deeply rooted state action to protect women’s right to life.

Of course it is essential to look at domestic and intimate partner violence, including homicide; but to focus only on this context not only obscures the full extent of men’s fatal violence against women, it also misses the sex differences within these crimes.  In the UK, women are more than 7 times more likely to be  killed by a man than men are by a women in the context of intimate partner homicide. Men are more likely than women to be killed by a same-sex partner, and histories of violence before the homicide are different – with men tending to have inflicted months or years of violence and abuse on the women they go on to kill, while women tend to have suffered months or years of violence and abuse from the man they go on to kill.

Responses to men’s violence against women which focus almost exclusively on  “healthy relationships,” supporting victim-survivors  and reforming the criminal justice system simply do not go far enough. Men’s violence against women is a cause and consequence of sex inequality between women and men.  The objectification of women, the sex trade, socially constructed gender, unequal pay, unequal distribution of caring responsibility are all  simultaneously symptomatic of structural inequality whilst maintaining a conducive context for men’s violence against women. Feminists know this and have been telling us for decades.

One of feminism’s important achievements is getting men’s violence against women into the mainstream and onto policy agendas.  One of the threats to these achievements is that those with power take the concepts, and under the auspices of dealing with the problem shake some of the most basic elements of feminist understanding right out of them.  State initiatives which are not nested within policies on equality between women and men will fail to reduce men’s violence against women.  Failing to even name the agent – men’s use of violence – is failure at the first hurdle.

Working in partnership, Counting Dead Women and Women’s Aid Federation England, supported by Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer and Deloitte, have developed The Femicide Census, a  relativity database  that  allows  data  to  be  collated  and  disaggregated  for  analysis. It currently contains information regarding over 1000 women who were killed by men between 2009 and 2015. Our intention is to build a research resource than can be used as a tool to influence understanding and policy development.  We’ll soon be releasing our first report. In September, our work was cited as an example of good practice in a report by the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women.

Feminists have started Counting Dead Women or femicide count projects in Australia,  Canada, New Zealand and Counting Dead Aboriginal Women.  There is feminist action against femicide on every continent, in countries including Argentina, Peru, Italy, Spain, India.

Women across the world are finding ways to protest the murders of our sisters.

By recording women’s names, and where possible their photographs, we want to create a reminder that women are not reducible to statistics.

653 women dead in the UK in 5 years at the hands of men cannot be 653 isolated incidents. Action is needed and action can be taken to reduce these killings.

Read more articles on openDemocracy in this year’s 16 Days: Activism Against Gender-Based Violence. Commissioning Editor: Liz Kelly

Professor Watchlist fails in reasoned argument

Professor Watchlist fails in reasoned argument

     by Robert Jensen

From a “critique” of my work on the latest Professor Watchlist, I learned that I’m a threat to my students for contending that we won’t end men’s violence against women “if we do not address the toxic notions about masculinity in patriarchy … rooted in control, conquest, aggression.”

That quote is the “evidence” that I am one of those college professors “who discriminate against conservative students, promote anti-American values, and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom,” according to the watchlist’s mission statement.

This rather thin accusation appears to flow from my published work instead of an evaluation of my teaching, which confuses a teacher’s role in public with the classroom. So, I’ll help out the watchlist and describe how I address these issues at the University of Texas at Austin, where I’m finishing my 25th year of teaching. Readers can judge the threat level for themselves.

I just completed a unit on the feminist critique of the contemporary pornography industry in my course “Freedom: Philosophy, History, Law.” We began the semester with On Liberty by John Stuart Mill (I’ll assume the Professor Watchlist approves of that classic book), examining how various philosophers have conceptualized freedom. We then studied how the term has been defined and deployed politically throughout U.S. history, ending with questions about how living in a society saturated with sexually explicit material affects our understanding of freedom. I provided context about feminist intellectual and political projects of the past half-century, including the feminist critique of men’s violence and of mass media’s role in the sexual abuse and exploitation of women in a society based on institutionalized male dominance (that is, patriarchy).

The revelations about Donald Trump’s sexual behavior during the campaign provided a “teachable moment” that I didn’t think should be ignored. I began that particular lecture, a week after the election, by emphasizing that my job was not to tell students how to act in the world but to help them understand the world in which they make choices.

Toward that goal, I pointed out that we have a president-elect who has bragged about being sexually aggressive and treating women like sexual objects, and that several women have testified about behavior that—depending on one’s evaluation of the evidence—could constitute sexual assault. Does is seem fair, I asked the class, to describe him as a sexual predator? No one disagreed.

Trump sometimes responded by contending that Bill Clinton was even worse. Citing someone else’s bad behavior to avoid accountability is a weak defense (most people learn that as children), and of course Trump wasn’t running against Bill, but we can learn from examining the claim.

As president, Bill Clinton abused his authority by having sex with a younger woman who was first an intern and then a junior employee. He settled a sexual harassment lawsuit out of court, and he has been accused of rape. Does it seem fair to describe Bill Clinton as a sexual predator? No one disagreed.

So, we live in a world in which a former president, a Democrat, has been a sexual predator, yet he continues to be treated as a respected statesman and philanthropist. Our next president, a Republican, was elected with the nearly universal understanding that he has been a sexual predator. How can we make sense of this? A feminist critique of toxic conceptions of masculinity and men’s sexual exploitation of women in patriarchy seems like a good place to start.

In that class, I spent considerable time reminding students that I didn’t expect them all to come to the same conclusions but that they all should consider relevant arguments in forming judgments. I repeated often my favorite phrase in teaching: “Reasonable people can disagree.” Student reactions to this unit of the class varied, but no one suggested that the feminist critique offered nothing of value in understanding our society.

Is presenting a feminist framework to analyze a violent and pornographic culture politicizing the classroom, as the watchlist implies? If that’s the case, then the decision not to present a feminist framework also politicizes the classroom, in a different direction. The question isn’t whether professors will make such choices—that’s inevitable, given the nature of university teaching—but how we defend our intellectual work (with evidence and reasoned argument, I hope) and how we present the material to students (encouraging critical reflection).

If the folks who compiled the watchlist had presented any evidence that I was teaching irresponsibly, I would take the challenge seriously. At least in my case, the watchlist didn’t. But rather than assign a failing grade, I’ll be charitable and give the project an incomplete, with an opportunity to turn in better work in the future.

Robert Jensen is a professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, and author of The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men, to be published in January by Spinifex Press. Other articles are online at http://robertwjensen.org/. He can be reached at rjensen@austin.utexas.edu.