Merseyside Women's Movement

In this week’s edition of The New Statesman In this week’s edition of The New Statesman magazine, Samira Shackle argues the British immigration system does little to help vulnerable asylum-seeking women. Using the cases of Esther from Kenya, and Salma from Pakistan, and in discussion with Asylum Aid’s Debora Singer, she looks at the persecution women face which force them to seek asylum and the problems they face after arriving in the UK, including the poor enforcement of gender guidelines by UK Border Agency staff. After raising with officials some of the demands of the Women’s Charter campaign, she concludes, ‘The UKBA says that it is working to ensure that women asylum-seekers are treated fairly, but these answers do not give a real sense of engagement with the complexity of the issue.’ To read the full article click here. You may also wish to comment on the article, which you can do after registering on the New Statesman website. Further information To read more about the Women’s Charter campaign, click here.

A huge thank you to everyone who turned up on Saturday to march! It was a great day and we got our message across loud and clear! 

March against gender inequality!

Sat 10th oct 12 noon, Williamson Sq, all welcome!

Why we need gender equality:

In the UK: 

• Each year, more women die from domestic violence and rape than 

die from cancer.  Two women a week are killed by a current or  

former partner.  

• More than half a million women experience domestic violence 

each year.  

• 1 in 4 women experience sexual assault. The UK currently has the 

lowest rape conviction rates in Europe: out of every 100 reported 

rapes, less than 6 cases end in the rapist being caught and       

convicted.    

• The pay gap between men and women has RISEN to 17.1% in full 

time work, 36% in part time work. 

Join us in a demonstration to promote gender 

equality and end Violence Against Women! 

Where: Williamson Square 

When:  Saturday 10th October  

Time: 12 Noon 

Bring banners, friends, husbands, wives,  

partners, kids, mums, dads, the pet dog…  

everyone is welcome to join  

in the struggle against Violence Against Women! 

PDF leaflet for march- please distribute!

Unaidi Jaime, Oxfam Gender Coordinator from Mozambique, will discuss her role as a gender co-ordinator for Oxfam, and the effects climate change is having on gender in Mozambique.

3.00 pm Tue 29th oct LJMU’s School of Social Sciences, 68 Hope Street

Click thumbnail for larger image!

Come and Join us on Thu 24th Sept 5-7 at WHISC Bold Street for our next meeting.

We have lots of things planned and are always gald to see new faces and hear new ideas!

Everyone’s doing it, join us on twitter for the minutae of what we’re up too. 

http://twitter.com/merseysidewomen

http://herstoria.com/

Based in the Wirral, available in News from Nowhere or via subscription.

A great read, so pick up a copy and show your support!

Our next meeting will cover our up-coming activities for autumn and beyond, including:

Anti-rape campaign focussing on men’s attitudes and the law
That Takes Ovaries
Working with homeless women at the Basement

Violence Against Women Conference
Website
I hope you can come along and contribute.  We’re going to need lots of volunteers for the bar-crawl for the anti-rape campaign, and please encourage any men who might be interested in getting involved to come along!  The main idea is that we will be targetting men to raise awareness about rape and the law, so having men with us will be important in getting this message across!
 
We’re also looking for women with spare time, enthusiasm and drama/theatre experience (optional) to work on the THAT TAKES OVARIES project.  This will be a project for writers, performers, artists and basically any women with stories to tell.

Come along if you can, and bring ANYONE you think might be interested in getting involved.

We also want to know about what you/your organisation is up to – let us know at merseysidewomensmovement@googlegroups.com

Don’t forget to join our Facebook group for more updates and to join in our discussions on a variety of topics. http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?topic=12091&post=159772&uid=2241811044#/group.php?gid=92800507123&ref=ts

I’ve been having lots of conversations lately about pornography, and they’re making my head hurt. 

There’s been a debate raging within feminism for decades about pornography: ‘sex-positive’ feminists vs. Dworkinites and anti-porn feminists, liberal feminists vs. radical/socialist feminists, ‘free speech’ vs. ‘protecting women’.  We need a way through the maze.  Especially seeing as everyone else, particularly pornographers and pimps, are sitting back laughing at our inability to raise any kind of effective opposition to their exploitation, laughing all the way to the bank.  The status quo is unacceptable; too many women are abused and exploited by an unregulated brutal industry that uses people up and spits them out, that exposes them to injury and disease and drops them when they are no longer commercially viable.  Pornography has invaded our collective consciousness, and is now one of the most accessible sources of ‘sex education’ for our youth.  The language of pornography has infiltrated our colloquial usage; this is a language of degradation and misogyny. 

So here I’ve tried to elucidate some of my thoughts about pornography and sexuality for your perusal.  

For me, many of the arguments surrounding pornography come down to what it is that can and cannot be bought and sold, or what should or should not be bought and sold.  There have been few human societies in history that have not rested on some basic system of trade, even if the concept of money was not extant.  Trade (of money, goods, labour) is a fact of every-day life, but society has deemed some things to be beyond the transactable, outside of those things which a person could morally or rightfully trade for material or social gain.  Included in this group are (in this country) human blood, human organs, and live human people.  Although we know that these things are still traded, it is illegal to do so, the rationale being that making the parts or whole of a human body into a commodity (regardless of whether or not it has a market value) is to undermine the humanity of that individual, undermine their integrity and, by extension, undermine the humanity of all individuals belonging to that group/class, or even humans generally. 
 
Other arguments made by pro-porn advocates centre around the free participation of the actors, the consensual nature of their participation, and the fact that they are adequately paid for their ‘labour’.  The susposition is that these people (women and men) have the right to ‘trade’ their bodies, dignity, sexuality (real or faked) for money, and that they are all (or mostly) doing so of their own volition with a full understanding of the potential harms of doing so, in terms of physical harm, disease risk, psychological/emotional harm and social stigma.  This seems to me to be a totally ridiculous position to take, and quite contradictory to supposedly mainstream views of the ‘sanctity’ of the human body and the liberty of the human (i.e. the prohibition of slavery).  What the pornography industry and its apologists reveal to us is that the human is routinely traded, commodified and violated in capitalist and patriarchal societies, and that this violation disproportionately affects women, as it disproportionately affects poor people, and non-white people.  All the religious/’pro-life’ spokespeople who spend countless hours arguing about the ‘ethics’ of human-animal chimera embryos and abortion rights claim that they are aiming to protect the integrity of the human body and human life.  This could not be further from the truth, but even if that were their real motivation, their time would be far better spent arguing against the sex industry.
 
Another common argument I have encountered is along the lines of ‘some people need porn to have satisfactory sexual lives’ and ‘its preferable that people engage in the fantasy provided by porn than that they go out and abuse/rape women/children or use prostitutes’.
Even accounting for the wide variety encountered in human sexuality, this argument holds little water for me.  How can the harm/indignity exacted upon the actors in a porn film ever be justified by the sexual satisfaction of others? Yes, there are individuals who claim to ‘enjoy’ working in the sex industry, but these voices, while valid, seem to be a particularly vocal minority rather than the consensus of the majority.  The truth is that for every Sasha Grey or Jenna Jameson there are thousands of women (and men) who are exploited and harmed by this industry, and finding out about them is not difficult, although the porn industry does it’s best to cover up the human cost of its multi-billion dollar annual profits.  Another tell-tale hint that working in porn may not be the ‘sexy, fun route to fame and riches’ it is billed to be is in the testimonies of former porn ‘stars’, often littered with stories of physical abuse, drug abuse, coercion, being drugged/given large quantities of alcohol to ‘get through’ scenes.  Even Jameson herself, one of the world’s most famous porn stars, said in her autobiography that if her daughter ever wanted to go into the industry she’d do everything in her power to stop her, and describes two rapes, several abusive and exploitative relationships, and drug addiction.  Jameson made several million dollars out of this book, and continues to run an adult film production company with profits in the tens of millions of dollars. 
 
I can’t fathom why anyone would view access to porn as a ‘right’ or ‘need’ – this seems akin to suggesting that having computer games or tennis balls should be human rights.  Although, what is revealed here is the understanding that human sexuality is in fact more important and more profound than mere entertainment, and therefore occupies a higher echelon of cultural significance.  This tacit acknowledgement that porn is providing something more valuable than just entertainment belies the argument that we can buy and sell it without consequence. 
 
While I understand that people’s tastes in terms of sex may not be readily satisfied by what’s available to them in their relationships/social encounters (I know this is a problem that I often have), pornography removes all responsibility from the viewer to develop their sexuality and seek relationships or sources of stimulation that both satisfy them AND satisfy others’ needs, or at least avoids harming/exploiting others.  In other words, most porn promotes selfishness in sex, discredits and even jeers at the idea of reciprocation in sex, and compounds the twin ideologies of sexual and gender dichotomy, passive/active, dominant/submissive, slave/master (or mistress?). Further, it de-humanises the actors themselves, objectifying them, and denying them a right of reply.
 
Using porn also removes the responsibility to acknowledge a more subtle truth – that by buying porn (or even streaming it from websites that make money out of it), you are funding the exploitation of human bodies and sexuality for material gain.  To me, there is little difference between opposing slavery or bonded labour and opposing porn – both involve exploitation (i.e. not adequately recompensing people for their labour) and a violation of the integrity of the human (i.e. making human bodies into commodities). 
 
Now the complicated part of the argument emerges – what if we were making ‘porn’ that depicted real sex (i.e. consensual, reciprocal sex, without the use of degrading/humiliating language or acts, that acknowledged the desires/feelings/thoughts of the participants in some way)?  What would be wrong with that?  Is there anything inherently wrong about making depictions of human sexuality?
 
This is the part where my answers become more complex and perhaps contradictory.
 
Firstly, what we would be producing would cease to be pornography, by definition.  Pornography is the depiction of πόρνη (porne – prostitute), thus implying that it is inherently commodified material.
 
On the one hand, I would suggest that the sale of such material would still be making money out of something that I think is violated by its commodification, namely human bodies and human sexuality.
 
On the other hand, I find it very difficult to condemn the production of such material (although I know that very, very little of it exists and even less is in the public domain).  Human beings have always produced erotic images and texts – from Greek vase paintings, to Indian temple carvings and the vedas of Hinduism, to Anais Nin and the richly diverse genre of modern lesbian erotic fiction.  Sharing your sexuality with someone you can’t see or know has been a common activity for millenia.  Unfortunately, so has misogyny.  I think the mistake that feminists who argue for ‘free speech’ when in comes to pornography, who claim that pornography can be ‘good for women’ and ‘enable them to safely explore their sexuality’ are missing a fundamental point.  The male authorship of female sexuality has been a yoke borne by women for centuries.  Even erotica made by women today often fails to break this mould, and no wonder, it is very firmly entrenched in our collective consciousness, perhaps never more so.  For this reason, I do not wish to participate in the knee-jerk blaming of such women as ‘betraying’ the values of feminism, as Ariel Levy implies in her book ‘Female Chauvignist Pigs’. Rather, I would implore them to acknowledge that their’s is not a position of superiority because they have cast aside the reflective, critical position of the anti-porn feminists in favour of sexual liberation (despite the fact that they are constantly validated as such by the patriarchal culture they live in), and that they have a responsibility to women and men to maintain the dignity and integrity of the human OVER AND ABOVE their responsibility to make ‘hot porn for women’ – this is not a public service, unless it is conducted in a truly radical and subversive way.  I do not flinch from condemning those (male or female) who make money out of porn.  Full stop. 
 
If even feminist pornographers or makers of erotica often find it difficult to avoid making something for the male audience due to the patriarchal culture they are working and living in (nevermind the ‘market forces’ they are driven by), maybe there is a deeper question to be examined here.  Perhaps in rushing out to make ‘porn for women’, pro-sex feminists have often over-looked what making erotica for the female gaze actually means – what IS the female gaze?  While there are certainly many women who watch and enjoy porn, there are certainly many, many more who do not.  Are these sexually ‘uptight’ or ‘prudish’ women?  I think not.  What is it about porn, as an entity, which is unappealing to women? Or is it just that the content of current mainstream porn, and even supposedly woman-oriented porn, is not designed for them?  John Berger pointed out in his book ‘Ways of Seeing’ that women are culturally groomed to look at themselves, and constantly analyse their own appearance in terms of how they appear to others, rather than (as men do) regarding their environment with little reflection on their own appearance within it.  I find this analysis compelling, as it is certainly true not only of myself and many of my friends, but also informs a great many gender stereotypes and behaviours.  We see this gender difference played out time and again in arts and entertainment, and indeed in erotica and pornography.  In most cultures, while the phallus is a symbol of power or even divinity, the female body is the home, the source of sexuality and desire.  Conditioned by a cultural environment such as this, it would be reasonable to hypothesize that the ‘female gaze’ is not merely the reverse of the ‘male gaze’ (i.e. directed toward the objectified male form), but is in fact a self-reflective gaze, which could inform a kind of autoerotica which is seldom represented in pornography. 
 
Compare the testimonies of cancer patients: men with prostate cancer often complain of their loss of sexual FUNCTION (inability to get an erection/have an orgasm) and the effect that has on them emotionally and on their feelings of self-worth and masculinity; women with breast cancer often talk about no longer ‘feeling womanly’ or ‘feeling sexy’ (terms which are almost synonymous in this context) after losing a breast – they have not lost the ability to have sex or achieve orgasm in terms of physiological function, but their internal view of their erotic IDENTITY has been fundamentally challenged nevertheless.  What does this example tell us?  It informs us, I think, that the central issue at stake in the battle for sexual determinism that feeds the debate about porn and erotica is the culturally imposed way that men and women look at themselves as sexual beings.  There is an imbalance in the necessity of sexual identity to the holistic identity of women and men, and particularly in their social validation.  Men do not rely on their sexuality or appearance for power, in fact their sexual charisma is often derived from them having other types of power (economic, social, cultural).  Women, even women who are very accomplished or influential in other fields, still have a disproportionately large part of their identity and self-worth, as well as their social worth, wrapped up with their sexuality.  And this sexuality is not strictly theirs: it is dependent on validation by others, particularly by
 
If, as a woman, you see your own body as being (or at least, as being supposed to be) the source of all things erotic, seeing its worth and integrity undermined in pornography and in wider culture is bound to inflict harm, even while it could inspire titillation.  This is the titillation of not being the one being fucked but sharing the male’s priviledged position of voyeur.  It is titillating because it is a holiday from the every-day position of self-reflection and self-censorship that most women experience.  It feels new and empowering, and it is those things, but it is still also participating the the perpetuation of the commodification of the human and of sex, which women will always be on the losing end of. 
 
Perhaps truly liberating, non-exploitative erotica cannot be produced in a patriarchal society.  But then again, how can we re-write the story of female sexuality and identities without engaging in the world of literature, film and even pornography?  Afterall, it’s the folks that watch pornography and see no problem with it that we are really interested in converting to our point of view on wider gender issues.  Perhaps the best we can hope for in this era is ironic/subversive depictions of sex that make the audience question the status quo.