Category: General (Page 9 of 27)

Trigger warning: mentions a rape and mentions rape jokes.

Before I begin, let me be clear about where I am coming from; I am a heterosexual, white, cisgender man from a lower middle class background, who is also a feminist, a pro-gay activist, and a socialist. I am also a disabled man. In other words, in the grand and complex landscape of liberation politics, I can define into one group of protected characteristics, meaning that I can stand at the front of the disability rights movement. But I am not, automatically, a good feminist or pro-gay rights activist.

The question I want to answer is simple. Can I, as a man, be a good feminist? Some would answer that I cannot. I am not female. I have never faced discrimination because of being a woman. Whilst my long hair doesn’t conform to normative models of masculinity, I have never been objectified, groped, or been paid less than my colleagues like women are on a day to day basis. Whilst I have been raped, it wasn’t because of my gender, but because I was a vulnerable child placed in the environment of a predatory and sick man.

Despite not facing the discrimination that women face, I continue, of course, to support feminism. I wish to see an end to patriarchy and gender discrimination because I believe it will better our society. I believe that as a heterosexual man, I am affected by feminist issues, but I recognise that it is in a VERY different manner to the way my female friends are. They are on the front line, as it were, and I am several miles back, still chocking on the stink of gunsmoke, but not in immediate fear of losing my life. The same would go for my gay, lesbian, bisexual and trans* friends. That is all reversed when I am with my non-disabled, but pro-disability rights friends. I am in the trenches there; my non-disabled girlfriend is back at HQ.

What I am trying to say is that if you are one of a group I am going to call the “indirectly affected” that is, a feminist man, an anti-racist white person, a pro-gay heterosexual, a pro-trans* cis-sexual, or a pro-disability rights able person (…the list goes on…), you can be a valuable friend and ally, but you need to be clear on where the boundaries are. I have tried to put these into three golden rules of being “indirectly affected”: Continue reading

Whilst over the centuries it’s a horrible, abhorrent fact that women have had to struggle to be seen and heard in virtually all professional arenas, we are very, very lucky that art can endure. We are lucky that many women (though not as many as might have) dared to push against societal pressures by training in and executing their gifts in various times and places – when it undoubtedly may have been easier (albeit unhappier) to quietly run the home and children, and little else. Likewise it seems to me a further product of patriarchal systems that many female-dominated ‘applied arts’ such as weaving, embroidery, etc. are viewed with considerably less social significance compared to the historically male dominated ‘fine arts’. Embarrassingly, many fans of fine art may find themselves unable to name more than a handful of female artists. In contemporary terms Tracy Emin and Yoko Ono spring to mind though are often callously dismissed as ‘mad’ or ‘talentless’. To go back further chronologically, could I even confidently declare Frieda Kahlo and Barbara Hepworth as household names with the same confidence as Van Gogh or Michaelangelo? I sadly doubt it. The following list of artists was selected to represent a cross-section across different times, cultures, and styles – I really hope you’ll Google these women, as the effort it will have taken to produce their works only heightens their deservedness of an audience.

Claricia (13^th Century)

One of the few positions in life which provided the freedom for artistic expression in the middle ages was in monasteries and nunneries. Claricia was thought to be a lay student at an Abbey in Augsberg in Germany where she illustrated herself into a psalter – her body swinging as the tail to an ornate capital Q. Continue reading

Disclaimer: this article refers to the rape of women by men. I acknowledge that men can be raped and that people can be raped by members of the same sex, but choose to deal with this kind of rape for a variety of reasons, including its recent prevalence in the media.

Content warning: references to rape, rape apologism/denial, victim blaming, and objectification.

Myth 1: A woman who is raped asked for it if she dressed “provocatively”.

In other words, if a woman gave the impression that she might be interested in sex at all*, she forfeited the right to choose with whom, when, where, what kind of sex, or to change her mind; if a woman is interested in sex at all, she is no longer a discerning human being, but a sex object for the indiscriminate use of any man.

Myth 2: A woman who is raped asked for it if she was “flirtatious”.

In other words, if a woman gave the impression that she might be interested in sex at all, she forfeited the right to choose with whom, when, where, what kind of sex, or to change her mind; if a woman is interested in sex at all, she is no longer a discerning human being, but a sex object for the indiscriminate use of any man. Continue reading

Trigger warning: This article deals with issues around domestic violence, sexual violence, emotional violence and may be upsetting to survivors or witnesses of violence.

One out of four women in the UK will be affected by domestic violence in their lifetime (British Crime Survey 2011). That’s one out of your close group of girl friends, two of the girls in your rowing team, four of the women taking your bus, about twenty of the girls in a large lecture hall, and a quarter of the women you pass on the street every day.

Why then, does no one talk about domestic violence outside of feminist and charity circles? Does no one believe in the reality of its existence? Is it simply taboo? Is it, like rape, something we know happens but just don’t want to acknowledge because it makes us too uncomfortable? I think the problem is partly due to a misunderstanding of what domestic violence is.

The image that springs to mind stereotypically is of a woman who is beaten by her husband. However, although physical violence is part of domestic violence, a far larger proportion of the abuse consists of the psychological and emotional violence used by a man to control his partner on a regular basis. (Men can be victims of domestic violence from female perpetrators, and domestic violence happens in same-sex relationships, but in this article I will talk about evidence based on male perpetrators and their female partners.)

The psychological and emotional abuse commonly used by perpetrators includes the use of strategies such as: Isolation, Forced Trivial Demands, Degradation and Humiliation, Threats, Displays of Total Power, Occasional Indulgences, Exhaustion and Distorted Perspectives. (These terms and this model is one commonly used by practitioners in the field and is the one I was taught on a domestic violence awareness training day run by Tender, an excellent organisation who work with young people. These strategies parallel some of those used in concentration, torture and POW camps.) Continue reading