Category: General (Page 4 of 27)

– Martha PW

(content note for mentions of sexual violence, rape apology, misogyny)

The Socialist Workers’ Party are rapists and rape apologists, they covered up rape in their ranks and victimised women who came forward about it and decried “creeping feminism”, whatever that is, as an evil sectarian force, they are a writhing nest of misogyny and they are not a friend to women on the left. There was a huge exodus of former members because of the SWP’s complete and utter refusal to be anything other than horrendous misogynist rape apologists. You can read more about that here.

Despite this, they are an omnipresent force at protests in the UK. You will probably see their stalls at demos, you will probably see them handing out their shitty backwards-facing rape apologist newspaper The Socialist Worker, and you will almost certainly see a lot of people holding placards with their name on it. This means protests and demos become a space where women – especially those who have faced sexual violence / abuse / harassment – are not safe or comfortable among the people who are supposed to be on their side. Feeling unsafe at a protest because of the threat of police etc is one thing; feeling as though your allies are throwing you under the bus for the sake of a placard someone handed them is something else entirely.

If you’re at a demo in the upcoming weeks/months/years you can help to deal with this:

• DON’T TAKE SWP PLACARDS/PAPERS/ETC. just don’t take them. just don’t. make your own. take any other placard. whatever. if you really really want to be holding a sign and the only one available to you is a SWP placard, consider bringing paper & tape / a sharpie to the demo with you so you can cover up the SWP logo. but if you can’t do that it is better to have no sign than to have a misogynist organisation’s sign.

• DON’T LET YOUR FRIENDS TAKE THOSE THINGS EITHER. friends don’t let friends support corrupt rape apologists. explain why you’re refusing to tacitly support the SWP by holding their signs and tell everyone else to do the same thing.

• CONTACT THE PEOPLE ORGANISING
  — in advance, email or facebook message the organisers of the demo asking if there will be a SWP presence (even if they say no it is likely the SWP will show up anyway) and asking whether it will be tolerated if so. stress the fact that the presence of the SWP actively alienates women (who are, after all, one of the marginalised groups likely to be most affected by whatever it is you’re protesting about, e.g. tory cuts); stress the fact that women will not show up to the demo, or will show up and feel upset and unsafe and triggered, if the SWP are there. encourage stuff like a post on the facebook event making clear that rape apologist organisations will not be tolerated at the demo.
  — on the day, and if you feel up to it, talk to stewards (demo stewards, not police stewards) about it if you see a SWP stall or a SWP member handing out placards etc, encourage them to ask the SWP to leave (as politely or impolitely as they feel is appropriate).
  — IF THE ORGANISERS IGNORE / DISMISS YOU despite your explanation of why the SWP are an unacceptable presence at protests, or if they are actively affiliated with the SWP, spread that shit on social media, because people who brush off these criticisms should be held accountable for their lack of care for women in their movement.

• MAKE SURE YOU ARE LOOKING OUT FOR WOMEN (whatever your gender) at demos and in other activist spaces where this conflict about the SWP might arise. many many left-wing spaces feel latently hostile and unwelcoming to women already, because they are (like everywhere else) usually male-dominated and issues of sexism and misogyny are brushed aside as women’s problems for women to deal with. this feeling of being pushed out of what should be our movement gets far worse when our complaints about sexual violence in the left are dismissed as ‘divisive’ and ‘sectarian’, especially at protests when emotions are already running high. it’s exhausting to have to defend our right to safety among our ‘comrades’ over and over again. back up your women friends in these arguments, don’t let them face rape apologists alone.

• IN GENERAL – IF YOU’RE A MAN, consider what you can be doing to make your leftist spaces and politics inclusive and welcoming to women; the SWP is only one particularly bad example of an endemic problem. consider a statement or policy of condemnation of the SWP. more broadly, if your group/organisation is predominantly male, ask yourself why that has happened – it’s probably not a coincidence – and how you can fix it. check whether women have ended up doing most of your work, whether that’s activist labour or emotional. pay attention to the language you’re using and whether it erases women’s struggles in favour of a homogenous or outdated idea of ‘class’ or ‘work’. steer clear of calls for “unity” and against “sectarianism” or “division”, which are usually used to shut women up.

Certainly a lot of people holding those placards at demos are ignorant of the crimes of the organisation that made them, and we can only fix that by sharing the knowledge of the SWP’s misogyny as widely as possible and not letting it fade into memory. But many more people know about the ‘scandal’ and continue to accept the alliance and support of these open, unapologetic, dangerous misogynists, whose existence is actively harmful to left-wing women. As long as this problem is not tackled, women will be pushed out of the movement. Organisers have no excuse.

[TW: suicide, physical disability]

 

Each syllable
each rounded, echoing diphthong
conveys nothing, except creating delicate
incisions in my ears

My back is bristling.
I have not felt in control of this body
ever
Let alone “at home in it”
“comfortable in my skin”

On this day my legs forget how to walk,
On this day my mind attempts to kill me
And on this day, again, I fail
To speak in ways that appease people
Whose thoughts and desires are a mystery to me.
I don’t remember doing anything with ease.
I cannot even trust my body to hold me upright.

Sexuality
is something that people who are not me
possess.
How can someone who resembles
a scuffling witch
who hobbles and aches
who stutters,
who falters and forgets
own something as
precious as this?

My humanity
and my body –
all accidentals
and false starts.
I lack identity
with your movement
with myself

By Mel Berill

[TWs: misogyny, classism, ableism]

 

come back and tell me

you don’t like safe spaces

when you know what it’s like

to feel unsafe

 

when you’ve walked down a street

where you’re not human

but a piece of public flesh

 

when you’ve explained you’re ill

for the thousandth time

and you know half the world still thinks it’s fiction

 

when you know for sure

that if some people got their way

you’d have even less to live on

than you do now

 

when your home is not

cosy and safe

 

when your words are not

worshipped and valued

 

when your body is not

important.

 

come back and tell me then

that I’m not allowed a space

where people have agreed to respect me

and I them.

 

where people try not to hurt me

and I them.

 

where I can listen to people

who need safety more than me

and let their words

sit above mine.

 

where, sometimes, it’s all right

for me not to speak

or even be there

because I’m white

and cis

and I can know that sometimes, to keep people safe

i must keep quiet.

 

when you know what it’s like to need that space

come back and tell us we can’t have it.

come back and tell us then.

 

you will, of course

you’ll come back louder, stronger

full of bile

and make us listen

in your column

on your platform

through your megaphone

’til it’s deafening.

 

that’s why we need spaces

where we can’t hear you.

and fuck you

we’re going to make them.

 

By Amy Clark

tw: rape mention, misogyny, racism body policing,

Call me Medusa,

for my monstrosity is not mine to bear

but yours to fear.

When I first started writing this article, it was going to be about the rape of Medusa and the analogy between her punishment and the treatment of rape victims in modern society. A god raped Medusa and she was punished for it with ugliness and exile from society. When women are raped today they are blamed, ostracised and ‘othered’ in an eerily similar manner. Because when the perpetrators of a crime are untouchable – whether because they are gods or simply because of their dominance in society – it is the victim of their crime who ends up being blamed for it.

But this is going to be about ugliness: about ugliness as a punishment and a weapon against women, about the power that people calling (or making) you ugly have over you and about the power that you can have over them in return.

If you’ve ever seen Mean Girls you might remember the scene where the Plastics stand in front of a mirror and say in turns what’s wrong with their bodies. They insult their nailbeds, their hairlines, their pores. Then, in a voiceover, Cady says, “I used to think there was just fat and skinny. But apparently there’s lots of things that can be wrong on your body.”

And she’s right.

Ugliness is being fat and being too skinny, yes, but it’s also having skin that isn’t white, having short hair, having outspoken opinions, saying no to a guy, wearing baggy clothes, wearing tight clothes, showing too much or too little skin, having a big nose, having a small mouth, being a feminist, being too educated, not being educated enough, eating too much food, biting your nails, not shaving all of your body hair, fucking too many people … Ugliness is everything about us that isn’t ‘right’, which means it’s every part of us that doesn’t live up to an idealised and impossible standard of what it is to be a woman or a person.

Calling women ugly is a fear tactic in itself and ugliness has been used as a weapon against us for so long. When we live in fear of being ugly we live in fear of being ‘outside’ of society and we try and try and try to do everything we can to fit into the restrictive lines of what ‘normal’ is. If a characteristic of yours is something societally viewed as ugly – and everyone has many – then you are consistently being told that you are not right and that who and what you are is not okay.

In the same way, calling someone ugly or calling some characteristic ugly is a gross way of perpetuating so many different forms of discrimination in society. When women bleach their skin, it is because darker skin is considered uglier. Women shave or bleach their body hair because hairiness is an ugly quality for a woman to have. Queer and masculine women are ugly because their presentation does not fit with the stereotypical concepts of femininity and what it is to be a woman. Ugliness and what is ugly is not a subjective opinion, it is a response to age-old and pervasive discrimination, oppression and elitism.

But where does Medusa fit into this?

DuBois has said that ‘The myth of Medusa, is a myth of fear of women, fear of […] their self-sufficiency, their buried power’. DuBois is not talking about Medusa when she was ‘beautiful’, when her existence fell within the norms. All of Medusa’s ‘power’ comes when she is made ugly and exiled from the rest of the world. And the power isn’t because she was ugly, but because she was unapologetic about her own monstrosity. Her ugliness wasn’t something she could change or cover up – she was unequivocally and irrevocably ‘other’ – it was something that terrified and (literally) petrified the rest of society.

Whilst it’s hard to talk about ‘buried power’ without sounding like a pretentious self-help guru, what I and many others have found is that we have to stop apologising for ourselves and the parts of us that are ‘ugly’. We accept ourselves as ‘other’ because the ‘normal’ that we’re supposed to fold ourselves to fit is just a load of impossible restrictions that have nothing to do with subjective beauty and everything to do with damaging and systematic discrimination.

As much as I wish it was true, practising radical self-love and refusing to apologise for whatever is monstrous about you doesn’t give you the power to turn people to stone when you glare at them. Deciding that you won’t accept the body policing that society tries to impose on you wont suddenly mean that you love yourself, because ‘ugliness’ is too ingrained for us to magic it away.

There’s the cliché that as long as you’re confident, people will think that you’re beautiful. This is bullshit. Confident women get insulted and called ugly all the time. But when you tell people that you don’t give a fuck – when you show off your unshaven armpits in pride, when you say your opinions loudly and don’t shut up when people disagree with you, when you wear the hotpants and don’t apologise for it or try to cover up – at least people are fucking terrified.