Well I’ll Go To The Foot Of My Stairs…

…and, yes, I had a fab break - thank you all for your good wishes. Relaxed, refreshed and raring to go I bring you… *drumroll*… the reason for all things bad in the world - feminism!

From a dear friend who actually can sing.

Like her, I have a more substantive post to come but I’m severely jetlagged right now. Please bear with me.

…there’s this little opportunity to make a difference.

Dylan is my grandson; Mark’s my son-in-law. And he’s running the London Marathon!!

The NAS helps lots of people besides my daughter, my grandson, his dad and his brother and sister. Just ordinary people, you know?

Help the NAS to help ordinary people? Every fiver counts.

Much love,
Witchy
xxx

*gone*

…on my annual visit to the India Ocean to spend some time doing these kind of things. This time I shall be staying on this, even smaller, mountain top in the middle of the sea.

Fab, huh?

I acknowledge I’m very, very lucky to be able to do this. I feel the need to qualify my break in paradise by saying that my voluntary sector salary doesn’t pay for it - it couldn’t. But there’s also the fact that, without my break in paradise, I couldn’t continue to do the work that I do without burning out emotionally. Anyone who works closely with abuse survivors and most people who work in the voluntary sector will understand this.

I need to take care of myself - and I do. My break in paradise is part of that.

Blue, blue skies, warm ocean full of the most vivid, exuberant life just ten steps away from my door, powder-white sand, palm trees bursting with promises of fresh coconut milk still warm from the blazing sun, geckos climbing the walls of the open-air bathroom to find shade, gigantic fruit bats gliding over the tops of the waving palms in the light of the full moon, warm days filled with whatever I want - no phone, no tv, no news, no post and hardly any people. Bliss.

I’m usually choked when it’s time to leave because I don’t want to. Imagine your day starting somewhere like that and ending with you driving round the M25 in the rain… that’s what coming home is like. It’s poo.

But, barring tragedy, I’ll be back in a few weeks; back at work doing what I do best the only way I know how. In the meantime, have a fab new year everyone - I hope 2008 is….well, just…better.

…and, if they ask me to, I’ll take down this piece from the Guardian. But I hope they don’t.

Marina Hyde’s piece points fingers precisely and asks the pertinent questions that so many other papers dare not print.

Here it is. 

Truly, nothing says Christmas like a footballer-party rape allegation. It’s getting so Pavlovian that the first story suggesting one guest might have enjoyed herself rather less than the others at some club’s festive bash has become as evocative as the smell of mulled wine or wilfully spun reports suggesting the Muslims are stealing our Christmas.

Facetious? Most of the responses to the fact that a 19-year-old Manchester United player has been accused of raping a 26-year-old woman at the club’s Christmas party early on Tuesday have been about as nuanced. They have run the gamut from “footballers are lawless scum” to “the girls are no better: they all deserve each other”. There were some “she probably made it ups” in there, too, and maybe the odd “women are just meat to these beasts”.

Yesterday further revelations about the party surfaced. One “very drunk” woman was “roasted” by five or six men, according to another guest, who told a newspaper that “I asked her if she was OK and she said, ‘Yeah, why wouldn’t I be? They said I was a great shag.’”

There will be people - some would even count themselves as third-wave feminists - who can read that statement and accuse anyone who feels the vaguest sense of unease about it of being straitlaced, or repressive of this woman’s natural sexuality. These people like to think of themselves as sexual cognoscenti - a bedroom version of those television chefs who tell you they always get their truffles from a family supplier in Puglia and assume you’ll do the same. For their bondage tips, they go to the Marquis de Sade in the original French.

If they’re that smart, though, they should appreciate that not everyone indulges in these things with quite the same degree of consequence-free delight and rationalised abandon as they do - and it’s inverse snobbery to pretend that it is so.

And so to a vexing riddle of our times. Namely, if six footballers can have six girls each, why do they only want one between them? The answer is actually incredibly simple (and has nothing to do with repressed homosexuality). It might be partly that they enjoy team activities and it’s a kind of extended goal celebration, but it is primarily because that is what they see in porn. And porn is screwing up sex. Not sex in relationships, but the kind of casual sex in which it would be nice to think people could indulge in a mutually enjoyable, non-exploitative fashion. In this context, footballers are not qualitatively different from plenty of other young men, it’s just that being regarded as demigods makes it easier to act in this way.

Several years ago Naomi Wolf pointed out that the proliferation of porn, particularly on the internet, was the way most young men and women were now, in effect, taught about sex - “what sex is, how it looks, what its etiquette and expectations are”. It had a significant impact on the way they interacted. She wondered whether all the sexual imagery around represented the true liberation of sex, or whether “the relationship between the multibillion-dollar porn industry, compulsiveness, and sexual appetite has become like the relationship between agribusiness, processed foods, supersize portions, and obesity”.

No matter where you stand on it, porn has undoubtedly skewed many young men’s expectations of sex, and many young women’s sense of sexual obligation. The marvellous website jezebel.com touched on this theme recently, having identified an experiential trend among the staff’s acquaintances. Several of these women had been on a first date, ended up sleeping with the guys, and the men had ejaculated on their face without asking. The reader responses were revealing. It transpired that lots of people had had this surprise experience, and while there was debate about whether the act referred to was rank misogyny or something you could truly love, there was unanimous concurrence that it should be on the “have to ask first list” - and that the presumption even in a few people that it wasn’t signified a shift in popular male imagination. Several younger readers wrote in saying that they found men their age were so conditioned by porn that “they don’t think sex is ‘good’ unless it’s somehow fetishy”.

Now, either these guys were just borderline rapists, or - way more likely and way more scarily - they simply didn’t know any better.

It would be nice to think we could reclaim the right to say people don’t know any better without being accused of snobbery, because the longer we allow the argument to be short-circuited in that fatuous way, the longer the debate remains buried. And there are plenty of questions, wherever you stand. Is this the only sexual liberation we’re going to have, or are we due another rethink? Are both genders having better sex than they did 10 or 20 years ago? Could it be that women who queue up outside a hotel just itching to be told they are “a great shag” by an assortment of footballers have bad sex most of the time? If we placed more emphasis on addressing these issues, would there be fewer of what we might, with immense charity, call “misunderstandings”?

Merry Christmas one and all.

…is lending her whole-hearted support to raise awareness of trafficking of women and girls into the UK to be raped and sexually abused by men who feel it’s somehow ok to do that.

She’s made a film for the Helen Bamber Foundation who “…work with survivors of genocide, torture, trafficking and rape who seek safety and refuge” and it’s pretty powerful stuff. It may trigger.

I applaud both the Helen Bamber Foundation and Emma Thompson (whom I love) for their efforts to end the sexual slavery of trafficked women and girls. But it seems to me as though there’s a big thing being made about ‘borders’ in recent years. Yes, it’s horrendous that women and girls from overseas are being auctioned at Gatwick airport and in Cambridgeshire pubs and I’m pleased that sexual slavery is recognised as a national horror these days. It should be.

But I admit that I’m a tad bemused by all the recent outrage.

The buying and selling of female bodies by men has been going on for centuries in this country and no-one that I know of ever decsribed it as ’slavery’ before.

But that’s exactly what it is - whatever your national boundaries happen to be.

NO Legal Brothel in Vancouver

by Ex-Prostitutes Against Legislated Sexual Servitude (X-PALSS)

We urge you to oppose any attempt to introduce a legal brothel in Vancouver.

As women who have been prostituted in Vancouver and in the light of these facts:

• That current discourse on prostitution would have the public believe that it is normal work that simply needs to be better regulated
• That there is currently a proposal to open a legal brothel in Vancouver
• That this proposal is said to speak for current and former prostitutes of Vancouver
• That this proposal promises to make the lives of prostituted women “safer” at best
• That none of us have ever met a prostituted woman who would not leave the “trade” if she had a real chance to do so
• That we are women who have been abused on Canadian soil, by Canadian men while all levels of our Government did nothing to intervene.
• That some members of parliament are now advocating to legalize that abuse.

We want you to know:

We are women who have been harmed by prostitution. We believe that no amount of changing the conditions or the locations in which we were prostituted could ever have significantly reduced that harm.

We experience the normalizing of that harm by calling it “work” insulting at best.

It matters very little to us whether we were prostituted on the streets or in the tolerated indoor venues and escort agencies of Vancouver. Our memories are not of the locations but of the men who consistently acted as though we were not quite human. We remember the countless other men and women who daily averted their eyes. We remember the utter lack of services or options that made any sense and the blatant denial of access to any kind of help or justice. We remember the need to “dumb down” our sense of entitlement to a better life so we could bear the one we were in. And we remember too well the numbing despair that came when we finally lost faith that there existed in this world anything decent and good.

We oppose any measure that would put more power in the hands of the men who abused us by telling them that they are legally entitled to do so. This proposal does not speak for us, would not have affected our level of safety in a way that matters, and would not have spared us the harm that is inherent in prostitution.

We are not impressed with lip service proposals to make prostituted women’s lives “safer”. Safer is not good enough. We consider it a violation of our human rights that we were abandoned to years of situations that fit the definition of sexual assault under current law. But not only is this violence not recorded, not prosecuted, not punished. We are now being told that we chose it.

We believe that, where there is public and political will, lives can be changed for the better. We do not believe the lie that prostitution is inevitable. We believe it can be abolished.

As hosts of the 2010 games, we want our city, our home, to refuse to take part in the global flesh market that is sex tourism and send a message to the world that women will not be sold in Vancouver.

We believe that every sexually exploited woman represents a life wasted. We are greatly saddened for the lives of women lost in prostitution, as well as the loss of the sum of the contributions that countless women still living would have made had they not been abandoned to sexual slavery.

We urge you all to refuse to believe that prostitution is normal or that is an equal exchange “between two consenting adults”.

We urge you to oppose any attempt to introduce a legal brothel in Vancouver.

X-PALSS (Ex-Prostitutes Against Legislated Sexual Servitude), Vancouver, B.C.

Via Amy, via Lierre

ETA - there’s tons more here that’ll make you laugh too.

…because they make me smile and I think they’re fab. Besides, they dress a lot like me and I can do most of what they’re doing now.

Look…

There’s also something very powerful about them. One video on their website shows them improvising to a salsa band along Thetford High Street. How fab is that?

What do you think?

….makes depressing and angrifying reading but I recommend you read it.

It’s a report from EVAW (End Violence Against Women) in partnership with EHRC (Equality and Human Rights Commission) about ‘the postcode lottery of violence against women support services’. In her article about the report in the Guardian Julie Bindel says:

Most women in the UK do not have access to a rape crisis centre, and fewer than one in 10 local authorities provide for minority ethnic women escaping or recovering from attempted “honour” crimes, forced marriage or female genital mutilation. Almost a third of local authorities have no specific domestic violence services, and fewer than one in 10 have services for women in prostitution.

and

There are more refuge spaces for abused and stray cats and dogs in the UK than for women and their children escaping domestic violence. For those who wish to stop smoking, there are more places to go for instant access to help than for women who feel their lives are in danger from a former partner.

Anyone who’s been reading here for a while will know that much of my life is taken up with the provision of support services for women recovering from experiences of violence and the essence of this report really doesn’t surprise me. The local Rape Crisis group I volunteer with learns of the closure of yet another group almost every month as more and more women call us from further and further afield. There were 85 Rape Crisis centres in England and Wales in 1984. These days there are only 32 - and that’s not because there are fewer women wanting our help and support. The Refuge group I work with can only just manage the ever growing demand for space for women and their children fleeing domestic violence and abuse from all areas of the country.

Both groups I work with are seriously underfunded, women only, Not for Profit organisations. Women who need violence against women support services tend to prefer services designed and delivered by such organisations because we are woman-centred and client led. We’re non-threatening. Statutory agencies work in a different way and often seem to work to an agenda that is less about enabling and empowering women and more about blaming and punishing them. For thirty years or more Not for Profit violence against women services have been achieving excellent results - changing lives - on a shoestring.

The Map of Gaps illustrates only too well the shameful tokenism of successive governments in their repeated acknowledgement of our wealth of knowledge and expertise and their abject failure to put their money where their mouth is. It actually costs the public purse far more not to support Women’s Refuges, Rape Crisis Centres, services for BME women and prostitution and trafficking services than it would if existing services were adequately funded and allowed to get on with doing what we do best - supporting women in their recovery from experiences of violence.

(I could go into a long and boring tirade about Supporting People here - the Central funding stream that was hailed as the saviour of Refuge funding problems but has turned out to be a time consuming red-tape exercise that has us all jumping through endless administrative hoops which keep us from doing our jobs i.e. actually supporting people. And all for peanuts! It really is the bane of my life but I’ll leave that for another time.)

From the Map of Gaps here’s an illustration of the postcode lottery as far as Rape Crisis Centres are concerned.

It’s shameful, isn’t it.

…is here.

We all did this last year. We all did this the year before that too. Actually, some of us have been doing this kind of thing since the 70’s - can you imagine?

How come we’re still having to do this?

I want things to change. All feminists want things to change - for the better -for all women.

Much love to Fin for being who she is - it’s a massive deal to get London’s roads closed for a bunch (troupe/tribe/army?) of women saying “Enough!”. Personally, I think it’s a huge deal to have SR close their main London doors on a Saturday night because the Feminists are in town so Yay us! A minor victory, maybe. But it’s minor victories that win wars, isn’t it?