Gender/Sexuality | ukwatch.net

The day the music died

Ellie Keen — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 21:26:54 +0000

And we all know the real song
but we won’t sing along
‘cause our boyfriends and girlfriends
and parents will say
Don’t be a square, grow your hair and be happy
It’s not god that made you this way –

So lift up your top
Lift up your top
Lift up your top, got to use what you’ve got
Try not to see anything but the fee
It’s all tongue in cheek anyway!

‘Our Daughters Will Never Be Free,’ The Indelicates, 2008

We have a very short window in which to start asking some crucial questions about wealth and gender. We have a short window, whilst the FTSE and the Dow and the Nikkei buckle and collapse, to commit blasphemy. To say that the very nature of financial markets, of patriarchal capitalism itself, engenders ideological violence against women – and by association, men – everywhere.

Fact: markets will seek to maximise profits. Fact: sexism sells. The image of the cackling city boy stuffing his bonus into a hooker’s disembodied garter – just the leg showing, never the face – has become one of the icons of hypercapitalist success. However you wrangle the incentives, an economic model spawned and nurtured in an atmosphere of male privilege will seek to make money by selling women’s bodies back to them, by selling them to other men, by exploiting women’s work and by hijacking femininity as a saleable commodity and nothing more.

I remember the first time I met Ginger Spice. It was four years ago, and I was standing at the reception desk in the acute anorexia wing of a London mental hospital. I was there because there was nobody but my receptionist to watch me and make sure I took my meds and kept my meal supplements down, wearing a floppy hat and a tracksuit that flapped on the bent coat hanger of my body, drawing slogans to keep me occupied. And Geri Halliwell walked by.

She was there to see the girl in the next room from mine, a friend and a fan. And my first thought was how very, very tiny she was – barely five feet three in massive heels, dwarfed by shopping bags and a bunch of violent pink crepe-wrapped roses. Tiny and fragile-looking, all desperate smile and thin hair bleached back to its natural pale strawberry-blonde, Geri Halliwell had been in the press all year, and still is, thanks to a much-touted recovery! from anorexia, bulima and other lapses in celeb inscrutability. Through the haze of numb, sour fear that dogged those hospital days I remember thinking: that’s Ginger Spice. That pale, frantic creature is the same girl whose posters I had on my walls, whose feisty, pumped-up pop smashes were the first singles I ever bought with my pocket money. That’s Girl Power, right there. There it goes.

How sad, and how empty it all seems now. In 1996, we were told that anything was possible. Girls were powerful! Girls were sexy! Girls were marketable! You could be anything you wannabeed! Fast forward twelve years and the record is scratched and broken, the Spice Girls themselves bleached by years of pap-dashes into wasted, desperate husks of the energetic, ballsy girls we once thought we knew. We made ourselves into products again the instant empowerment was wrenched away from the feminist movement and assaulted with price-tags, we were consumed; we consumed ourselves. Femininity was for sale, and too much of it made us sick. Sick of ourselves, sick of our lives, sick of looking forward to another twenty years of hard sell until we could no longer pretend that we were young and available and found ourselves consigned to the scrap-heap with the computer shells, splitting bin-bags and acid-leaking fridges.

The year I started eating again – really eating, not just subsisting on crackers and tea – the sub-prime mortgages broke and the markets began to deflate like a balloon at the end of a long party. Right now, a loaf of bread costs more as a percentage of the average wage than it ever has. Groceries are getting harder for everyone to afford. We can no longer stuff ourselves with impunity, but right now, right this second, I feel something I spent my whole life missing. I feel something girlishly blasphemous and slightly obscene. I feel full.

Shopping, preening, starving, serving, fucking. Five key activities for my generation of young women under capitalism. We were born in the shadow of Thatcher and taught to prepare ourselves not for productivity, but for producthood. We do not remember living through anything but boomtimes, but for us, money is still something we will not win without the trappings of servility; we came to learn that nothing sells better, or faster, than our bodies, and the better and faster we could cash in, the happier and worthier our lives would be –

There’s no better example of the pitfalls of unregulated capitalism than the strange case of the 22-year-old woman, known by the pseudonym Natalie Dylan, who is selling her virginity in hopes of financing her college education. She wants to be a marriage and family therapist. This transaction is “capitalism at its best,” according to the manager of the Moonlight Bunny Ranch in Nevada, which is brokering the deal. He made the point on a TV show last week on which we both appeared as guests. I argued this is capitalism at its worst. You’ve got a desperate woman (she was allegedly defrauded out of a hunk of cash by her no-good dad); virtually no safety net if you’re poor; gargantuan college fees, thanks to little government assistance or regulation; and the perfect storm of circumstances that makes a young woman think it’s OK to sell her body. Scary? Yeah. Does it have to be this way? No. It’s about the morality of the market.

Marian Meed-Ward, Kingston Whig-Standard, Ontario 25.09.2008

Maybe I’m a little biased, being accustomed to a student lifestyle and still having no job to lose- but I say let it all come down. Let the markets crash, and let the ugly arrogance of a society rent by the gashes of commodified gender come tumbling with them. So what if the glittering future that was promised to us as long as we behaved ourselves like good little girls has vanished? We may have been trained as hyper-consumers, but we don’t have to live that way.

Let it all come down. Let’s see the arrogance of the testosterone-stinking trading floors thwarted and the altars of deregulated markets toppled: we don’t need the old gods and their archaic laws any more. Now that governments have intervened with basic financial packages to has save us from utter disaster, we can breathe a little easier – but the ideology of Western capitalism will never be the same again, and its discourses of gender are open to decimation. Bring it all down.

Tories in queer hypocrisy shocker!

Ellie Keen — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 20:29:54 +0000

So now the Tories are courting the pink vote. Big surprise. But the notion, promoted even by the BBC, that gays might have a ‘duty’ to vote Conservative is baffling.

They’ve wheeled out Margot James, PPC for Stourbridge and noted deep-blue dyke, to tell us all why we need to vote Tory. This is the same Margot James who did not stand as a gay candidate at the last election, and who has been heard saying that she hoped her partner’s name, Jay, would be mistaken for that of a man by reporters. Ms James’ parroting of the party-line at the Stonewall event yesterday goes something like this:

“Gay people are net contributors to public services through their taxes, because very few of them have children.

“I think gay people have got more angst on this issue than anybody else because gay people are paying in, through their taxes and actually using far less of the NHS because they tend not to have families, less of the education system for the same reason and all the more reason to be angry with this government for the waste of their taxes.”

Translation: “Everyone knows you faggots hate kids! So vote for us – we hate kids, too!’

The suggestion that homosexuals do not have ‘families’ is both degrading and manifestly false. I happen to live in a massive multi-sexual household of six. None of us are related by blood, but we consider ourselves family. All of us, furthermore, have mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters and all of us feel that – despite our sexuality – we are just as invested in other humans as anybody else. Me and my big queer family are appalled by this throwaway rhetoric, at a Stonewall event, no less.

The logic of the tory tax argument also falls down when the ageing society is brought into play. Sure, homosexuals may, on average, raise fewer sproglets than their het friends, but this makes it all the more important for us that we live in a society that invests properly in healthcare, elderly care and the pensions system. Without the dubious surity of grown-up kids to wipe our octogenarian posteriors, we are going to need a government that invests in our care – a government that values the contribution we make as members of society enough to make public spending a priority.

The main tory line, however, remains that you and I should vote Conservative because, well, there are quite a lot of gay conservatives. Newsflash: there have always been gay tories; there have been gay tories before the word was even invented. What there have never been are tories promoting a gay agenda. In recent years, tory MPs have, for the most part, had an appalling voting record on queer issues in parliament – vital issues like civil partnerships and the age of consent. The tories are quite happy for us to carry on shuffling in the dark. If they’re gay, too, they certainly haven’t traditionally wanted the world to know about it. The tory closet door remains firmly shut. And no wonder, this being the party that introduced and tried desperately to save Section 28 of the Local Government Act, 1988.

Just a reminder: the amendment stated that a local authority “shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality” or “promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship”. Ian Duncan Smith and a great deal of the tory party faithful spent 2003 trying to save this disgustingly homophobic piece of legislation. Nobody has apologised for that, and the silence of top conservatives over their shocking record at the Stonewall event stunk of hypocrisy.

I am not suggesting that just because you like a bit of same-sex action you absolutely must be a political radical. Not at all. Not one jot. In fact, I’m grudgingly of the opinion that one thing the 1990s were good for was freeing gay men and women of the grinding obligation not to also be bigoted fuckwits if they so chose. But bigotry and a forward-thinking queer agenda have never gone hand in hand, and if one is queer – not just gay, which is a statement of fact, but politically queer – you do have a duty to vote for anyone else apart from the tory party and far right.

Queer politics involve more than a private penchant for cock and a public rhetoric of tax breaks for straight, married couples. Queer politics are politics which make it easier for the millions of men and women who choose to live and love outside of the heteronormative box to do so without cultural, practical or financial discrimination. Queer politics are inherently radical, and not everyone working towards them is gay, and not everyone gay has queer politics. Let’s not mistake gay – which is what the Conservative party has always secretly been – for queer, which it never will be.

Northern Ireland - a sexist's paradise

Alex Doherty — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 11:14:42 +0000

It’s normal to feel embarrassed when you come from Northern Ireland. Barely a week goes by without some new instance of our abject ignorance, our awful compulsion to behave like noisy, immature yokels, whether it’s rampant homophobia, crazed bible-bashing or sheer dumb political intransigence. But a new Amnesty International poll, which found that almost half (46%) of Northern Ireland students believe that a woman is partially or totally responsible for being raped if she flirts, is especially shaming, even by our usual standards. What’s more, it’s OK to hit your girlfriend if she nags, flirts with other men or refuses to have sex – according to one in 10 local students.

The fact that these are young people makes it even worse. They are supposed to be the ones skipping open-mindedly into the glad new post-conflict future, not shoring up benighted old rubbish like this.

So it’s shaming, yes – but not particularly surprising. Northern Ireland remains a sexist’s paradise. It is the land of the macho swagger, a defiantly unreconstructed outpost of bullish masculinity and aggressive heterosexualism, fuelled by a trenchantly politicised culture and – of course – the long years of violence. (It’s not a coincidence that there is a significantly higher proportion of adult women raped at gunpoint in Northern Ireland than in the Republic of Ireland or the UK, and rape crisis counsellors are familiar with the tactic where perpetrators claim that they belong to a paramilitary organisation, in an attempt to ensure their victim keeps quiet.) Add a dash of the local brand of thin-lipped social conservatism, and you have a recipe for the “blame culture” attitudes seen in the Amnesty survey – whose respondents presumably included young women as well as young men.

Women’s rights have long languished near the bottom of the political agenda in the North, constantly displaced by the constitutional tug-of-war. The situation is really dire. Earlier this year, government figures showed a 50% rise in reported rapes over the previous six years, yet Northern Ireland has the worst support services for the victims of sexual violence in the UK. Our one heroic rape crisis centre is woefully under-funded, constantly teetering on the verge of closure. Women here have no access to specialist domestic violence courts, and there are no support services for women seeking to escape prostitution, trafficking and sexual exploitation. As a society, we can’t even bring ourselves to have a proper debate about abortion – which remains effectively banned in Northern Ireland – and our (overwhelmingly) male representatives continue to piously kick the issue under the carpet.

The strangest thing is the deafening silence on these issues from Northern Ireland women themselves. Why do we seemingly accept the brutish attitudes, the lack of support services, the absence of basic rights? Perhaps it’s because we have no place to find a collective voice. Tribalism has successfully divided us from one another, thrown rigid barriers across potential areas of common ground. It’s as if women have internalised the old hush-hush, lie-low maxim of the Troubles – “whatever you say, say nothing”- and applied it to our whole lives. But saying nothing changes nothing. If shouting is what gets you heard in this place, maybe it’s time to find our voices.

Stripping the Tories

Ellie Keen — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 23:24:23 +0000

Luckily enough for the Tory party, quite a few international markets went boom on the day that this story broke. Strip club vouchers offering discounts for Tory delegates, in with the brochure for the upcoming Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham.

Let’s not wallow around in anyone’s gloopy moral residue. Sex work isn’t nice work, but it isn’t immoral, and a visit to a strip club is simply a statement that you are happy to cash in on the privileges of your wealth and gender in the most sickly self-indulgent of ways, and that you are comfortable enough in that privilege that you don’t mind buying other people’s bodies for your personal sexual gratification in a room full of your colleagues. Hey, there’s a big market for that sort of thing, and markets, as we’ve all been reminded this week, are amoral, not necessarily immoral. Markets merely allow the flow of wealth and power to seep a little more smoothly towards the top. And hey, since it’s the annual Tory piss-up and we’re all very pleased with ourselves, why not flaunt that philosophy, especially if, in the words of Ian Taylor of Marketing Birmingham, the vouchers were ‘produced to help maximise the economic impact for local businesses’.

What angers me about this sordid little story isn’t the fact that Tory MPs might enjoy visiting strip clubs. Statistics suggest that well-paid, powerful white men will number most patrons of these newly-licensed ‘entertainment establishments‘ (A legal loophole means that since the introduction of the Licensing Act 2003 lap dancing clubs currently only require a Premises Licence for the sale of alcohol to operate, despite being part of the commercial sex industry. The number of lap dancing clubs across the UK is estimated to have doubled since 2004). There is always, always going to be a market for the more culturally and fiscally powerful to buy sex. What adds insult to time-worn injury, however, is the fact that it’s a buyer’s market. This was not an advertisement, but a voucher: a voucher offering conservative delegates a 66% reduction in entry price to Birmingham’s Rocket Club.

Now, these are bloody hard-working girls. The women who staff strip-clubs and brothels don’t do it for kicks, whatever the makers of Secret Diary of A Call Girl may say. They do it for the money, and they earn every penny of that money by laying the most intimate parts of their personhood on the line and risking their physical and mental health every day within a profession that earns them ostracization from friends and family. These women deserve better than to be offered up as discounted goods. These women deserve to be treated with respect.

In the vast majority of cases, women don’t become sex workers – prostitutes, lap-dancers, streetwalkers, strippers or porn stars – for the kicks. No, they do it for the money. They do it because there is simply no other way to earn that scale of living wage as a woman under 30 in the current UK job-market. In the Guardian today, most commenters seemed to miss the point of a heart-rending article by a prostitute and single mother. Her point was that she became a prostitute because her former job as an office PA was not paying her enough to support herself and her two children and was, at the same time, taking up so much time and energy that she barely got to see them. Her decision to go into full-time sex work was, as it is for many women in her situation, entirely an economic one.

We need to start respecting women’s work, whether or not they have made the difficult decision to enter the gloomy world of sex-work. If Tory MPs such as Anne Widdecombe really feel that the inclusion of the voucher in the brochure represents the party ‘throwing every value out of the window,’ if they don’t want to face the escalating realities of sex work for women of every class and background in the economic real world of contemporary Britain, then maybe they should start to analyse why women make these choices.

Eighty three per-cent of sex workers, according to recent studies by Object and Fawcett, want to leave the profession; but thousands of women every year make that career choice, and they make it because the country in which we live is currently fostering a gruelling long-hours culture in which women make up the bulk of lower-paid, exploited workers. Women are still paid 17% less than men in full time work and 33% less in part-time work, and when they get home they are still expected to perform the bulk of domestic chores, especially if they are single parents, as many sex workers are.

But the Tory delegates who have been so warmly invited to enjoy the bodies of the low-paid women of Birmingham at a discount price do not think this is a priority. In fact, a key part of current Tory policy proposes an end to equal pay audits, insisting that ‘only those firms which lose sex discrimination cases will be subject’ to them. Until the Tories get serious about offering low-paid workers decent living wages, then any paltry statement blaming the City of Birmingham for putting entirely appropriate adverts in the back of their brochures will be crass hypocrisy. Until that day, they may as well schedule complementary sessions with hookers into the official programme and stuff a few fivers into Lady Thatcher’s pearly g-string whilst they’re at it. Any less is pure hypocrisy.

Size Matters

Ellie Keen — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 22:08:17 +0000

There have recently been some fantastic investigative features in the print and electric press on the touchy subject of female surgical circumcision, also called cosmetic labiaplasty. One of the best, curiously enough, appeared in this month’s DIVA. This is a topic that needs airing and re-airing, but I’m going to take this space to tentatively suggest that there is also room in the feminist movement for a discussion of that curiously taboo subject: male genital mutilation.

In a culture of commodified testosterone, growing numbers of boys and men, some as young as three or four, some as old as eighty, are turning to genital mutilation as a form of self-harm. This in itself is not a new phenomenon, but as the culture of shame, anger and idolisation around the male sexual organ continues to increase, the phenomenon of boys and men damaging their own genitals, sometimes with extreme violence, is gathering pace. There are myriad individual reasons for this phenomenon, many of which are exacerbated by mental illnesses such as depression and paranoid schizophrenia, but the baseline reasons are fairly simple to grasp: a lot of boys have no frame of reference for what their penis should look like. Men are taught to see the appendage as a source of unimaginable sexual shame and embarrassment, or as a symbol of a sick, overzealous , hypermasculised culture in which they did not ask to be included, or, more frequently, both.

It’s not only the mentally ill who mutilate their genitals in private: you can pay a surgeon to inflict far more radical damage, a snip (literally) at £3-12,000. I’m talking, of course, about the booming industry of surgical penis ‘enlargement’, the nearest male equivalent to labiaplasty. We’ve all had versions of those relentless spam emails, offering in poor English to furnish us with a magnificent schlong for the price of a university education. Well, they keep coming because some people keep clicking – millions of anxious men and boys, in fact, all over the world, every day.

Yes, it’s fucking political. Male sexual neurosis is massively damaging, to feminism, to society, and to men themselves. This is not male apologism, or backsliding, it’s one feminist’s request for more discussion of a damaging socio-sexual taboo, in the context of a blog post in which I get to shout ‘COCK!’ a lot.

There, I’m glad I got that out of my system.

Gruesome butchery as labiaplasty undoubtedly is, the butchery involved boils down to a fairly straightforward amputation. Not so with penis ‘extension‘: I’ll spare you details of just what can go wrong, because Penny Red is a welcoming family blog, but suffice it to say: lots. And often. If you enjoy Bizarre magazine, you may click here now.

Thanks to the stalwart work of feminist writers and bloggers, there are now a lot of good, informative sites out there setting the record straight on what real female genitals look like. Sites that reassure women of all ages that they, too, are far less abnormal than they might have feared. Sisters working tirelessly and for free to undo the visceral harm done by the iconography of pornography and the language of fiction, erotica and women’s magazines in persuading girls that their vulvae should present as neat, hairless, odourless, tight pink slits with the sole purpose of funnelling equally tight, odourless, virginal vaginas, where all sexual sensation occurs. This is an ugly and damaging lie.

So where is the equivalent iconoclasm working to tear down the damaging fictions that young men internalise about their gender and physical sex?

The rhetoric of dickhood is entirely misleading, with emphasis on stiffness, straightness, rigidity, awesomeness, bestiality and hard, raging, pole-like qualities. The myriad of slang terms for the appendage range from the sublime – schlong, manhood, prick, dick – to the ridiculous – one-eyed trouser snake, luncheon meat truncheon! In fact, as most people are secretly aware, even the most impressive penis is no fearsome beast. They are extremely fragile things, normally soft, squishable and defenceless, generally flaccid, delicate , painful when struck, sensitive to touch and temperature. Freud was wrong. It’s not women who ‘envy’ the fiction of the perpetually hard, straining, bestial cartoon-penis – it’s other men,. That envy can largely be blamed on the shocking lie culturally perpetrated to convince young boys that their genitals are supposed to symbolise their masculinity and accordingly be other than the sweet, small, defenceless things they are.

If you’re laughing, stop. Now. I don’t believe it’s possible to call oneself a progressive feminist whilst taking the piss out of the sexual organs of just under one half of the human race. When it comes down to it, everyone’s genitals are ridiculous: messy, demanding, confusing and difficult to manage, with no instruction booklet and contents that generally differ wildly from the serving suggestion on the box. This does not mean that they are abnormal, inadequate or worthy of the childlike awe, tentative mockery, anger and aggrandisement that by turns characterise the treatment of the human prick in contemporary culture.

It is not surprising, then, that so many men and boys turn to surgery to change what they see as defective or abnormal, or to self-harm when they see a part of themselves as shameful and socially loaded in ways they reject. We just do not know how many men go through these experiences, how many operations are botched or how many wounds inflicted in private, because the subject matter is so sensitive that there simply isn’t enough data, and no comprehensive study has yet been done. All that we know is that it’s happening, and that it’s happening more and more.

The cultural markers of femininity are worn like a cloak and meticulously judged – from breasts to width of the waist and hips to degree of ‘curviness’ to hairstyle to set of the face and features. For men, only one specific part of the body is sexualised, and it’s kept under wraps, endlessly mythologised and certainly not featured in any fashion spreads. Feminists might argue that because women’s whole bodies are inevitably sexualised, men have it easier. Those feminists are right: men do have it easier. But that doesn’t mean that men don’t get a raw deal too – where little girls grow up seeing examples of perfect sexual bodies plastered everywhere they look, little boys experience the opposite – the cock is spoken of in hushed tones and never revealed, fictionalised, aggrandised, reduced to a few furtive glances in locker-rooms and arcane priapic symbols scrawled on playground walls and toilet cubicles.

In a perfect world, school PHSE lessons would include mandatory classes on sex and gender, in which children would be shown lots of photographs – not crude and misleading technicolour ink-drawings – of what real genitals look like. During these ideal lessons there would be open discussion of gender roles, physical sex, sexuality, feminism and gender egalitarianism. It won’t happen on these prudish little islands any day soon, not here where so recently we had laws banning the discussion of homosexuality in schools, but it’s nice to dream. Some girls dream of ponies. Today I’m dreaming of full-frontal PHSE photography with explanatory notes. It’s a vision thing.

The movement to reclaim the female body as a self-defined space is still a vitally important one, and it is perhaps just as vital to complement that discussion by extending its rhetoric to the male form. Talking about the realities of the female body in its many forms is a starting point for massive amounts of crucial feminist discussion of physical femaleness, of personal femininity, and of the difference and interaction between the two and the socio-political realities they produce. Talking about the male body in a similar way, and specifically about the cock – unlike for women, the only explicitly sexualised part of a man’s body – might just promote similar much-needed debate about physical maleness, personal masculinity and the difference between the two. Or at very least, it might make a few more people hesitate before doing inadvisable violence to the most sensitive parts of their body and paying for the privilege

Private Lives in Public Spaces

eddie — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 17:08:33 +0000

Women are whispering. A friend recently expressed concern that her boyfriend had visited a lapdancing club as part of a work social. She didn’t want to be perceived as prudish or uptight and she didn’t want her boyfriend to be the odd one out at work for abstaining when his colleagues headed into the club. Her hushed ambivalence is a common response to the lapdancing clubs springing up all across the country recently as a result of a legal loophole.

Lapdancing clubs have proliferated since they were allowed to be licensed in the same way as cafes and restaurants. Previously, they had to be licensed as sex encounter establishments along with sex cinemas, sex shops and peep shows. The 2003 Licensing Act states that a successful premises licence applicant does not require any other licence. Lapdancing clubs have capitalised on this clause and obtained premises licences only. These cannot be revoked unless a complainant proves that one of the four licensing objectives of “public order”, “public safety”, “protecting children from harm” or “creating a public nuisance” has been breached.

The legal redress is clear. The Licensing Act need not exempt sex encounter establishments from requiring their own licence type. This utilises existing legislation, allows that legislation to perform the function it was intended to, and does not require any new legislation. Furthermore, it allows local authorities to consider their gender equality duty when making such decisions.

Today, Roberta Blackman-Woods MP is proposing a ten-minute rule bill on this subject in parliament. She makes it clear that local authorities in London already have these separate licensing powers and that they could be extended countrywide.

Yet the question of lapdancing clubs goes beyond the legislative argument and into the far murkier debate that surrounds this new social phenomenon. There is the personal and the political, inextricably linked. Barrister Philip Kolvin is advising both The Fawcett Society and Object on their campaigns to license lapdancing clubs as sex encounter establishments. Kolvin’s own reason for representing the Fawcett Society was personal. He is alarmed by the presence of lapdancing clubs around Gray’s Inn, where he works. His colleagues shamelessly go to the clubs after work, and he reports that there are limousines containing naked women having sex on the floor being provided as part of the transport service.

Kolvin warns us that any cultural arguments are hazardous. We don’t want to go back to censorship. We don’t want to be accused of prudery. If we say there is a line, then the next question could be, what forms of sexual imagery do women approve of? At a Compass conference, the feminist scholar Angela McRobbie said she wants to see women having this discussion and dealing with the difficult questions. If women decide that they are fine about lapdancing clubs and see them as modern and empowering, she will accept that. But she doesn’t believe women are really involved in this debate. Instead she observes a strange silence on the issue. She also advocates the need to consider the responses of black and Asian women to lapdancing clubs.

Are lapdancing clubs harmless? If the no-contact rules are adhered to, then presumably the lapdancing clubs leave lots of sexually frustrated men wandering the streets at night. Otherwise, we can assume that rules have been contravened and that lapdancing clubs are just another route into the sex industry at large. If neither of these harmful effects prevail, then perhaps these clubs are not needed, and men attend them with some newfound sense of social obligation in an increasingly commodified society where every pleasure must be paid for.

I am of the view that the sexual empowerment argument for women is a myth. Women are reduced to sex objects for male gratification. They are emancipated only in the context of wage-earning capacity and participation in consumer culture. Increasingly, we find our power as citizens misleadingly equated with our power to consume or not to consume, to earn or not to earn.

So I say let local communities be allowed to decide whether or not lapdancing clubs are approved in their area. Do you want one on your doorstep? At the Compass meeting, a lady in the audience voiced the liberal argument that lapdancers are choosing to work and benefiting from it. A former lapdancer countered her by saying, “This argument really annoys me. It’s all very well you saying that, but would you choose this job for your daughter, or your sister, or your wife, or even yourself?”

Lets bring this back into the public domain and have a conversation about it in the public space. Let communities have a say in licensing these establishments, and let women have a say in their own representation. And let’s quit the double standards.

Lesbian Mums and the End of Patriarchy

Ellie Keen — Sun, 25 May 2008 08:52:18 +0000

Medical technology is an awesome thing. It can save lives, cure terrible diseases, rebuild bodies. It can prolong and improve the lives of the chronically ill and disabled beyond the wildest dreams of sufferers even fifty years ago. It can reattach limbs, restore sight, cure depression, return the manic to health and sanity. But can it be used to give women control over whether and when they have children? Only if male doctors and MPs say so.

Whoever your parents are, they’re going to fuck you up to some extent. I make no apologies for assuming that gay women and single women are just as likely to make good parents as anyone else, if not more so, as children conceived via the arduous process of IVF are slightly more likely to be wanted and treasured infants. For the purposes of this post we shall assume that one’s sexual orientation has no bearing on one’s likelihood of raising an unfucked-up child, nor on one’s right to attempt to do so. With that one out the way, let’s tuck in to a tasty breakfast of radical feminism with a gin chaser.

Throughout the wholesale technological reworking of the cultural landscape in the 20th and 21st centuries, laws remained in place to prevent new medical technologies and increased understanding liberating women’s reproductive choices. Even now, a woman must gain the permission of two doctors and undergo stringent ‘checks’ before she can access safe medical abortion. Until recently, women seeking IVF needed to declare a father and use a named man’s sperm despite the existence of plausible alternatives. But this week, in an impressive feat of anti-Luddism, MPs voted to allow single female parents and lesbian couples the right to reproductive self-determination: the right to have children, if they choose, without mandatory male interference.

‘Fathers are no longer needed!’ screamed the headlines as the Human Embryology and Fertilisation Bill passed through the commons on Tuesday. Well, we could have told you that. Millions of us grew up without fathers at home, without fathers at all. Millions more of us have loving and productive relationships with our fathers, but it is categorically not the case that any father at all is better than no father. The work of pregnancy, labour and the majority of childrearing still falls upon women, and it is inhumane to insist that that work be anything other than a sphere of self-determination. Men do not go through the physical trauma of conception, pregnancy and labour; men can have no right, as such, to insist upon any control over the process. It might be hard for individual men to swallow, but until medical technology enables them to conceive, incubate and bear children themselves, fatherhood will remain a privilege to be earned, rather than a right to be insisted on.

Reproductive rights campaigning goes far deeper than individual instances of choice. It’s a powerful cultural fascination, an issue that is woven into the very fabric of the stories that make us modern. From the rape of the Sabine women to Europa, ancient myth and precedent is obsessed by violent male control of feminine reproductive potential. From Brave New World to 1984 to the Culture, fables and fictions of the future are replete with paranoid speculation over the reorganisation of reproductive control.

The power to continue – or not to continue – the human race is quite simply the biggest social loaded gun on the planet. Since the dawn of patriarchy, male control over reproductive rights has been essential to the furtherance of patriarchal power, just as the ancient matriarchies ended when men’s involvement in human reproduction was realised.

This is why the rights of women to have children without ‘declaring the father’, to terminate pregnancy and to raise children alone, are such emotive and important legal sticking points. Women’s right to decide whether and when and how they have children is the ultimate threat to the rule of men, the ultimate insult to the divine supremacy of the father, and this week’s Commons vote is a milestone in the erosion of political patriarchy whose significance we will be debating for years to come.

Conservative MPs such as Ian Duncan Smith have made “impassioned pleas that the Government plan would “drive another nail into the coffin of the traditional family”“ (DailyHate, 21.05.08). The assumption of the Tories is that the vacuous notion of the ‘traditional family’ ever had any relevance. The organisation of human love has little to do with how children are raised and everything to do with the maintenance of the bourgeois state - and excuse me for coughing communism onto this keyboard, I’ve got this little marxist tickle that just won’t quit.

The Embryology Bill marks a turning point in the history of patriarchy, and all of us -men and women and transpeople, feminists and libertarians and trade unionists – can congratulate ourselves on beating back the tide of fundamentalist reactionism at extremely short notice. But, since this is a fight we’re going to be called to again and again, we will have to spend the meantime coming to terms with the radical systemic social change that must be the end-point of our ideology. The rights of women to biological self-determination, the rights of mothers to bear or not to bear children without mandatory male interference, must remain fixed points on the agenda of the British left. Men have a right to stand alongside women, a right to care for their children, a right to take up the responsibilities of fatherhood once that privilege has been granted them. Fathers have their place. But that place is no longer at the head of the table.

Questions for Ken

Ellie Keen — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 18:54:04 +0000

London mayor Ken Livingstone can justifiably boast that he has done much over the last 30 years to support lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) Londoners. As leader of the Greater London council in the 1980s, he was the first major politician to speak out publicly in support of gay human rights. His funding of previously unsupported LGBT welfare and advice agencies was trailblazing and immensely positive.

In his first term as mayor of London, Livingstone set up the UK’s first same-sex partnership register, which paved the way for the subsequent legislation of civil partnerships. But during his second term as mayor, he caused widespread dismay in the LGBT community when he welcomed to City Hall as his “honoured guest” Yusuf al-Qaradawi. The mayor subsequently repeatedly excused and defended the viciously homophobic and murder-inciting cleric.

Qaradawi supports the execution of gay people in Islamic states, the killing of Muslims who abandon their faith, wife-beating, female genital mutilation, forcing women to wear the hijab, terrorist attacks on innocent civilians in Israel and the flogging of women who have sex outside of marriage. He also said the 2004 Asian tsunami was punishment by God because the people who died had allowed their countries to become centres of “sexual perversion”.

Together with many other people, I criticised Livingstone over his embrace of Qaradawi. He responded with the wholly untrue claim that I am an “Islamophobe” and a person with “a long history of Islamophobia”.

Since then, despite an occasional pro-gay initiative, like opposing Westminster council’s attempt to ban rainbow flags in Soho, Livingstone’s record of supporting the LGBT community has been somewhat patchy.

LGBT Londoners are, of course, not only interested in LGBT policies. Like the rest of London, they are also concerned about transport, crime, housing and the environment, as well as the candidates’ stance on matters that specifically affect lesbian and gay people.

On four issues Livingstone needs to explain why he has let down the LGBT community. The other mayoral candidates also need to state where they stand. What are the Conservative, Lib Dem and Green policies on these questions?

Refusal to fund the gay football world championships in London

Livingstone has refused to contribute to the funding of the 2008 international gay and lesbian football association world championship, which is being held in London in August. London has won the honour of being the host city, and the UK’s Stonewall FC team is a strong contender for the world title, but the mayor is withholding financial backing.

Livingstone also refused to sign a letter of support for the associations’s grant application to the lottery fund. Having the high-profile support of the mayor would increase the likelihood of the grant succeeding. It costs nothing to sign a letter of support.

The unexpected lack of financial assistance from the mayor has contributed to the association being left with a funding shortfall. How does the mayor justify this denial of a few thousand pounds to the gay football world championships when he has showered billions on the 2012 Olympics? Where do the other mayoral candidates stand on funding the gay football world cup and similar gay sporting events? And will they offer financial support to increase youth, women’s, disabled and ethnic minority participation in sport?

Lesbian and gay museum

During the 2004 Mayoral election campaign, Livingstone promised to fund a lesbian and gay museum, which is now called Proud Heritage. The idea is to add to the diversity of London’s museums by creating a new institution dedicated to documenting and celebrating the lives and contributions of LGBT people, in a similar way to the existing specialist Jewish, children’s and slavery museums.

It took until 2007 for Livingstone to grant a rather modest start-up grant of £5,000. Further money was pledged. Proud Heritage made a bid for an additional £10,000, so it could launch the first stage online version of the museum this week. The mayor eventually agreed a further £5,000. This money has been contracted by Livingstone but not delivered as of 15 April. Why not?

On the basis of Livingstone’s contracted £5,000 grant, Proud Heritage organised development work. This work on the website, which opens on April 18, has not been completed because Livingstone’s money has not materialised. This has created needless last-minute stress for the Proud Heritage organisers.

Why has Livingstone delayed his election pledge on the lesbian and gay museum? Why, four years after his promise, has the Proud Heritage project been underfunded by the mayor? What will other candidates pledge towards this project?

Proud Heritage is, so far, only an online museum. Will the mayoral candidates support and help finance a physical LGBT museum as well?

Mayor’s LGBT forum

The mayor’s LGBT forum was set up to liaise with the LGBT community. But from the outset it has been structured in a wholly undemocratic way.

Why isn’t the forum allowed to elect its own chair? Why did Livingstone impose as chair one of his own people, a straight woman, Anni Marjoram? Why is the LGBT forum banned from proposing resolutions or holding votes on policy recommendations to the mayor?

Attempts to propose and vote on policy issues are ruled out of order by the chair. This has disillusioned many of us who proposed and backed the forum as an open, democratic space for dialogue and consultation.

The forum is now widely dismissed as a PR exercise, with no real power or influence. Many grassroots activists no longer bother to attend. What is the point? Anything that questions mayoral policy doesn’t get on the agenda and uncomfortable debates are curtailed by the chair.

How does the mayor explain the fact that many grassroots LGBT campaigners in London no longer participate in the forum? What does he say to allegations that it has become an unrepresentative forum attended mostly by pro-Livingstone factions and LGBT groups hoping to get money out of the Greater London authority? What would other mayoral candidates do to rectify this democratic deficit?

Underfunding of LGBT groups and events

The mayor has given millions to black projects, which is a very good thing. The empowerment of ethnic communities is vital to redress social exclusion and discrimination. But Livingstone has granted comparatively little to LGBT projects. The mayor keeps promising LGBT funding but he seems rarely to deliver. He is quite good at verbal support, but little more.

How does Livingstone justify the millions of pounds he and the London development agency have given to black community groups and the largesse provided for the St Patrick’s Day events, compared to the much smaller grants that he has given to Pride London and LGBT community organisations?

In 2006, the mayor gave £175,000 to the St Patrick’s Day festival and £288,000 to the Rise festival – but only £100,000 for the LGBT Pride London festival.

I don’t begrudge support for Irish, Black, Hindu, Jewish, Sikh, Muslim and women’s groups and events. The mayor has duty to support all of London’s wonderful diverse communities. He is right to do so. It helps create a more liberal, tolerant and cohesive city.

But shouldn’t there be a more equitable distribution of mayoral funding, with all community events receiving roughly similar levels of financial backing? Or at least there should not be such huge disparities in the mayor’s financial support. Where do the other candidates stand on this question?

Livingstone’s mishandling of these four issues has implications way beyond the LGBT community. It is symptomatic of a style of governance that adversely impacts on many Londoners. As well as Livingstone, all the mayoral candidates need to address this issue, so Londoners know what they will do if they are elected mayor on May 1.

Gay Iranian Safe - For Now

Ellie Keen — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 17:19:33 +0000

In the latest protest aimed at preventing the UK from deporting 19-year-old Iranian Mehdi Kazemi to his homeland where he faces probable execution, 150 demonstrators braved hail, snow, and rain in London on Saturday, March 22, to rally outside 10 Downing Street, the official residence of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Protesters demanded that Brown’s government refrain from efforts to deport any gay and lesbian Iranians.

For the moment, at least, the Brown government has put its original deportation plans for Kazemi on hold, pending formal reconsideration.

The Kazemi case has attracted worldwide attention ever since the UK Home Office ordered him to be deported last year after his student visa expired. While in Britain, where he had been a student since 2005, Kazemi learned that his longtime boyfriend, Parham, who was the same age as him, had been arrested, tortured, and executed by the Islamic Republic of Iran. In a lengthy e-mail to the Iranian Queer Organization describing his plight, Kazemi wrote, “If I return to Iran I will be arrested and executed like Parham.” (For background on the Kazemi case, read this reporter’s February 28-March 5, 2008 article, “ Another Iranian Tragedy”.)

After losing an internal Home Office appeal against his deportation, Kazemi fled the UK, first to the Czech Republic and then to Germany, before finally arriving, after weeks of peregrinations, in the Netherlands, where he was detained as an “illegal immigrant.” A Dutch court on March 3 ordered Kazemi returned to the UK, citing the European Union’s Dublin Regulation, under which asylum applications must be processed in the first EU country in which the petitioner made an official claim for legal recognition as a refugee.

A worldwide campaign to save Kazemi from deportation to Iran was spearheaded by the Italian human rights group Gruppo EveryOne, which also launched an online petition campaign on Kazemi’s behalf and mobilized other Italian human rights groups and the country’s Radical Party to lobby the European Parliament to take action. In the UK, the militant gay rights group OutRage! and a newly-formed committee called Gay Asylum led the fight on Kazemi’s behalf. None of the US gay rights groups, including the New York-based International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, made any public statement about Kazemi’s life-or-death struggle for freedom.

TV networks CNN, ABC in Australia, the BBC and Sky News in the UK, and Italy’s RAI have all carried stories on Kazemi, as have major newspapers, including the Independent, the Guardian, and the Times in the UK, Corriere della Sera and La Republicca in Italy, and El Pais in Spain.

On March 14, the European Parliament overwhelmingly approved a resolution on the Kazemi case that had been introduced with the support of 142 of its members and 62 members of the British House of Lords. The EuroParliament resolution pointed out that the Iranian authorities “routinely detain, torture, and execute persons, notably homosexuals” and that “Mehdi’s partner has already been executed, while his [own] father has threatened him with death.”

The resolution added that “the EU and its Member States cannot apply European and national laws and procedures in a way which results in the expulsion of persons to a third country where they would risk persecution, torture, and death, as this would amount to a violation of European and international human rights obligations.” The EuroParliament stressed that the EU directive regarding criteria for refugee status “recognises persecution for sexual orientation as a ground for granting asylum.”

The resolution “appeals to the Member States involved to find a common solution to ensure that Mehdi Kazemi is granted asylum or protection on EU soil and not sent back to Iran.” More broadly, it argued that “more attention should be devoted to the proper application of EU asylum law in Member States as regards sexual orientation.”

The resolution invoked the European Convention on Human Rights, which prohibits the removal of persons to countries where there is a serious risk that they would face the death penalty, torture, or other inhuman treatment, as well as the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and the Geneva Convention.

Within hours of the passage of the EuroParliament’s resolution, British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith issued a brief statement granting Kazemi a temporary stay of his deportation.

“Following representations made on behalf of Mehdi Kazemi, and in light of new circumstances since the original decision was made, I have decided that Mr. Kazemi’s case should be reconsidered on his return to the UK from the Netherlands,” Smith said.

Openly gay British MP Simon Hughes of the Liberal Democratic Party, who had campaigned on Kazemi’s behalf, told the UK’s Pink News, “I hope Mr. Kazemi will now come back to Britain [from the Netherlands] where arrangements are already in place for an urgent meeting with him, his family, specialist lawyers, and myself to prepare a new application to the Home Office.”

Hughes added, “It is becoming more and more clear that sending gay people back to Iran under the present regime is completely unacceptable.”

But it is not only young Kazemi who remains at risk for deportation to Iran. Another 12 gay and lesbian Iranians living in the UK also risk being sent back into the hands of the theocratic Tehran regime.

Prominent among them is 40-year-old lesbian Pegah Emambakhsh, who became a refugee in the UK in 2005 after her partner in Iran was arrested, tortured, and sentenced to death by stoning. Her request for asylum was refused, and in August 2007 she was arrested in Sheffield and imprisoned to await deportation. But after a worldwide campaign on her behalf, she was released on September 11 last year while her appeal of the deportation order remains pending.

However, the Independent reported on March 7, Emambakhsh has lost her latest appeal.

“Ms Emambakhsh narrowly avoided deportation in August last year but only after her local MP, Richard Caborn, and other parliamentarians persuaded the Government to allow her to stay while further legal avenues of appeal were explored,” the British newspaper reported. “She says she was already on the way to Heathrow [Airport] when she learnt of her last-minute reprieve. But last month the Court of Appeal turned down her application for permission for a full hearing. Ms Emambakhsh said yesterday that she was ‘very disappointed’ by the ruling but planned to apply for a judicial review at the High Court. The Home Office has also agreed to consider fresh legal representations on her behalf.”

The UK was embarrassed when Emambakhsh was offered asylum by the center-left government of Italy’s Premier Romero Prodi, an implicit criticism of the British plan to deport her to Iran. Prodi acted after Gruppo EveryOne mobilized pressure.

Emambakhsh told the Independent, “I will never, never go back. If I do I know I will die.”

As the Independent noted in a March 6 article on the Kazemi case by the newspaper’s law editor, “The Home Office’s own guidance issued to immigration officers concedes that Iran executes homosexual men but, unaccountably, rejects the claim that there is a systematic repression of gay men and lesbians.”

At Saturday’s Downing Street demonstration, OutRage! leader Peter Tatchell denounced Brown’s Labour government for “failing LGBT refugees.”

“Asylum staff and adjudicators receive race and gender awareness training but no training at all on sexual orientation issues,” he pointed out. “As a result, they often make stereotyped assumptions – that a feminine woman can’t be a lesbian or that a masculine man cannot be gay. They sometimes rule that someone who has been married must be faking their homosexuality.

Tatchell went on to say, “The government refuses to explicitly rule that homophobic and transphobic persecution are legitimate grounds for granting asylum. This signals to asylum staff and judges that claims by LGBTI people are not as worthy as those based on persecution because of a person’s ethnicity, gender, politics, or faith.”

Moreover, Tatchell noted, “The Home Office country reports on homophobic and transphobic persecution are often partial, inaccurate, and misleading. They consistently downplay the severity of victimization suffered by LGBT people in violently homophobic countries like Iran, Nigeria, Iraq, Uganda, Palestine, Algeria, and Jamaica.

And, he said, “Cuts in the funding of legal aid for asylum claims means that most asylum applicants – gay and straight – are unable to prepare an adequate submission at their asylum hearing. Most solicitors don’t get paid enough to procure the necessary witness statements, medical reports, and other vital corroborative evidence.”

It’s clear that Kazemi, Emambakhsh, and the other Iranian LGBT refugees seeking asylum in the UK still have a difficult road ahead of them.

The online petition for Mehdi Kazemi, which can be signed at the bottom, is at http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/UKMADHI/. The Iranian Queer Organization’s website is www.irqo.net. OutRage! leader Peter Tatchell’s website is http://www.petertatchell.net/. The website for Italy’s Gruppo EveryOne is http://everyonegroup.com. Doug Ireland can be reached through his blog, DIRELAND, at http://direland.typepad.com/direland

Galloway's Iranian propaganda?

Ellie Keen — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 23:12:55 +0000

George Galloway, the Leftwing Respect MP, has been accused of making allegations that border on paedophile smears and play to homophobic prejudice. He claims that the boyfriend of gay Iranian asylum seeker Mehdi Kazemi was executed for “committing sex crimes against young men”.

The insinuation of such a claim is that Mehdi’s boyfriend was a rapist or a child sex abuser. It also stigmatises Mehdi with the shame that he was the partner of someone who committed sexual assaults on male youths. He will suffer with this stigma when he is returned to the UK and could face considerable personal hostility from people who have heard and believe these allegations against his boyfriend.

Mr Galloway made his astonishing allegation on Channel Five’s The Wright Stuff. You can watch his interview here.

He has been asked to explain the source of his claim, but has so far failed to do so.

I am not aware of any paedophile-style sex abuse claims against Mehdi’s partner. Moreover, no human rights group has mentioned any evidence that Mehdi’s boyfriend was a rapist or a child molester.

Although the regime in Tehran frequently defames political, religious, ethnic and sexual dissidents with false claims of kidnapping, rape, alcoholism, sodomy, adultery, drug-taking and hooliganism, even the most extreme ayatollahs have not made allegations that Mehdi Kazemi’s boyfriend was involved in sex abuse.

Nevertheless, Galloway has broadcast this very serious, potentially defamatory, allegation to the British public, and has then failed to back it up with evidence.

To some people, Galloway’s claims look like propaganda in defence of the totalitarian, homophobic Islamic Republic of Iran. His passionate opposition to a war against Iran, which I share, seems to have clouded his judgement; leading him to downplay the regime’s persecution of lesbians and gays, which includes state-sanctioned executions.

In the same interview for The Wright Stuff, Galloway went on to state: “All the [British] papers seem to imply that you get executed in Iran for being gay. That’s not true.”

His claim that lesbian and gay people are not at risk of execution in Iran is refuted by every reputable human rights organisation, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission and the International Lesbian and Gay Association. None of these esteemed bodies are anti-Iran warmongers, as Galloway has subsequently seemed to imply.

The leftwing US journalist, Doug Ireland, has documented cases of the flogging and execution of men who have sex with men in Iran. These are just the cases we know about. It is likely that some similar executions never get media coverage in Iran and are therefore unknown to the outside world.

The Iranian Queer Rights Organisation also confirms that homosexuality is a capital offence and that gay Iranians are subjected to brutal punishments, including torture and hanging.

The government of Iran admits that it has the death penalty for homosexuality. Gay people are sometimes tortured to make confessions – even false confessions. Iranian law makes no distinction between consensual and non-consensual same-sex relations. Both are punishable by execution.

If Iran doesn’t execute queers, why does it need to retain the death penalty for same-sex relations? Why doesn’t it repeal a law it supposedly never enforces? Why doesn’t it announce a moratorium on hangings for homosexuality?

As with other dissidents, gay men are usually hanged in public by the barbaric slow strangulation method which is deliberately designed to maximise and prolong the suffering of the victim. These gruesome public barbarisms are also designed to terrorise the gay population.

To discredit the gay people it hangs, and to stir up public homophobia in support of its medieval religious-inspired punishments, the regime sometimes frames gay people with false charges of rape and child sex abuse. It wants to create the impression that homosexuals are monsters, in order to deter men from seeking same-sex relations.

This is what happened in the case of 21-year-old Makwan Moloudzadeh, who was executed in Iran last December. He was hanged for alleged sex offences against male teenagers, when he himself was a mere 13 years old. Amnesty International condemned his trial as “grossly flawed” and a “mockery of justice.”

Human Rights Watch reports that Moloudzadeh was coerced and tortured into making a confession. According to Amnesty International, his accusers retracted their sex assault allegations and admitted that they had been pressured into making false claims against him.

Even if Moloudzadeh had been guilty as charged, he should never have been hanged because the alleged offence was committed while he was a minor.

Strong evidence for Moloudzadeh’s innocence is the fact that hundreds of villagers turned out for his funeral; which would not have happened if the official Iranian account that he was a child sex abuser was true.

In a second interview on The Wright Stuff, Galloway launched into a scurrilous attack on Medhi’s friends and supporters, and the defenders of lesbian, gay and bisexual human rights in Iran, including myself:

“This (Mehdi Kazemi’s case) is a useful story for the war propaganda machine, the khaki machine now taking on a tinge of pink….what I will not accept is people being used, as Tatchell is, as the pink end of the war machine. That’s what Peter Tatchell has become by attacking Iran in the way that he does.”

At the antiwar protest in London on March 15, which I supported and attended, Galloway repeated these claims in his keynote speech. He said the “khaki war machine now has its pink contingent”. He went on to imply that people who support gay rights in Iran are “useful idiots” and said their aim is to “bamboozle the public to go along with mass murder in Iran”.

It is untrue and deeply offensive to suggest that those of us who oppose homophobic persecution in Iran are backing the bombing and invasion of Iran. We are not.

I am on record in my writings and speeches as opposing an attack on Iran. When, for example, I exposed Tehran’s racist and neocolonial persecution of its Ahwazi Arab ethnic minority, I stated categorically:

“I am part of a new campaign group, Hands Off the People of Iran (HOPI). HOPI opposes both a US war on Iran and the tyranny of the Iranian regime. My motto is: Neither Washington nor Tehran!

A war against Iran would be another disastrous neo-imperial adventure, which would strengthen the Tehran dictatorship. President Ahmadinejad would play the patriot and manipulate nationalism to rally the population behind him. He would use a US military attack as an excuse to further crack down on dissent in the name of safeguarding national security.

The overthrow of the theocratic police state by the Iranian people – not by US military intervention – is the best way to resolve the nuclear crisis and prevent a needless, unjustified war. With no dictatorship in Tehran, President Bush and the neo cons would lose the rationale for a military strike against Iran.”

Galloway’s insinuation that I am banging the war drum and siding with imperialism is both laughable and dishonourable.

For nearly 40 years I have supported the Iranian people’s struggle against dictatorship, first against the western-backed Shah and, since 1979, against the clerical tyranny of the ayatollahs. I have been totally consistent. I am not suddenly focusing on Iran’s human rights abuses and doing the dirty work of the Washington neocons, as Galloway seems to suggest.

Undeterred by criticisms that his outbursts collude with homophobia and with a viciously anti-gay regime in Tehran, Mr Galloway boasts: “I have an unblemished record of support for lesbian and gay equality.”

Well, not quite. The Public Whip website (which monitors MPs votes) notes that Galloway did not vote on 8 out of 10 of the major parliamentary votes on gay law reform in recent years. His repeat absence is a strange way to express support for gay rights. Most other MPs turned up to vote. Why not George?

Galloway is, of course, a Respect MP. A commitment to gay rights was entirely absent from Respect’s 2005 general election manifesto. Some insiders claim gay equality was originally included but was removed to appease Muslim fundamentalist voters (this apparent assumption by Respect that all Muslims are homophobic fundamentalists is just plain wrong – they are not).

The policy section of the Respect website has included a one-line opposition to discrimination based on sexual orientation but it is hidden away under “other policies”. Not exactly upfront.

One of Respect’s major funders is Dr Mohammed Naseem. He is a one-time member of their executive and was a Respect parliamentary candidate. He is also a leading member of the Islamic Party of Britain (IPB) which appears to advocate the death penalty for consenting adult homosexuality in certain circumstances.

The IPB is viciously homophobic in other respects too, as it’s website explains, and as my OutRage! colleague, Brett Lock, has revealed.

Naseem is a strange bedfellow for a supposedly pro-gay rights MP.

George Galloway was magnificent before the US Senate, exposing the Iraq debacle. Sadly, he now sometimes seems to be exonerating a cruel, unjust regime in Tehran that is responsible for some of the worst state-sanctioned homophobia in the world. This regime is also responsible for the equally heinous persecution of trade unionists, women’s rights campaigners, student leaders, human rights advocates, investigative journalists and activists who defend Iran’s subjugated minority nationalities, such as the Kurds, Arabs and Baluchis.

Misguided, untruthful attacks on Iranian gay people, the queer rights movement and the pink community do not strengthen the antiwar movement and the struggle against US imperialism. On the contrary, they play straight into the hands of the tyrants in Tehran and their mirror opposites in Washington. They betray all Iranians who are yearning and striving for democracy, human rights, social justice and the self-rule of Iran’s oppressed minority nations.

Abortion: Their Morals and Ours

Ellie Keen — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 00:26:35 +0000

The right is seriously mobilising around the issue of abortion. Tory leader David Cameron has stated that he wants to bring the limit down to 20 or 21 weeks and Tory ex-minister Anne Widdecombe has been taking her “pro-life” road show around the country in an effort to rally the troops. This is not something a Tory has been confident enough to do on any issue for many years – though, thanks to local activists, these meetings did not happen without noisy protests outside.

It is clear that the right have been waiting for the opportunity to challenge the abortion law for some years. They have partly succeeded in focusing the debate about the time limit, currently set at 24 weeks, around the issue of viability and away from a women’s right to choose.

There have been regular stories in the press claiming that new scientific developments prove the need to bring the time limit down. The medical establishment has rejected this view. Last year’s inquiry into the abortion time limit by the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee reported: “We have seen no good evidence to suggest that foetal viability has improved significantly since the abortion time limit was last set, and seen good evidence that it has not.”

The arguments about why a small minority of women might need to access an abortion at this stage in a pregnancy get little coverage and need to be constantly restated. It is a fact that some young women simply don’t realise they are pregnant, some go into denial until they can’t hide it, and, in the case of older women, some mistake missed periods for the menopause and don’t realise for some months that they are pregnant.

One other major reason that women need access to abortion at a later stage is the discovery of severe foetal abnormality. For example, one important test for impairments such as Down’s syndrome is amniocentesis. This cannot be carried out until 16 weeks, the results may take two to three weeks, and then the woman may need counselling and advice. If she decides to have an abortion it may be yet another week or two before this can be arranged.

The truth is the anti-abortionists are not concerned with any of this. They want to stop all abortions happening but they are faced with the fact that an overwhelming majority, 83 percent of the British population, support legal abortion. So they are left with trying to chip away at the time limit where they think they can make gains. If they win this time they will come back for more.

The anti-abortionists will have gained confidence from the defensiveness voiced by some pro-choice campaigners in recent months. Even David Steel, the man responsible for bringing the 1967 Abortion Act onto the statute book, has been quoted as saying that “everyone can agree there are too many abortions” and “there is a mood now which is that if things go wrong you can get an abortion, and it is irresponsible”. The implication is that women are frivolous about having abortions, and it repeats the myth that women use them as a form of contraception.

For socialists the key argument is that women are more than incubators: they have the right to control their own bodies. No woman should be forced to continue a pregnancy if she feels she cannot cope.

So there is no optimum or “normal” number of abortions to aim for. Every woman who needs one should be able to access one speedily and safely. When abortion was illegal no one knew how many took place. Many women never told anyone for fear of the law (see below) and so the pre-1967 numbers were based on speculation and the number of women who ended up in hospital with sometimes life threatening complications. Neither will it ever be known how many women went through with pregnancies simply because they didn’t want to take the physical or legal risk of a backstreet abortion.

Sex education

Today, far from being too easy to get an abortion, there is massive unevenness in access across the country, which is why any new amendments to extend and improve provision are to be welcomed. The 1967 act was never about giving women full choice. As David Steel himself said at the time, “We want to stamp out the backstreet abortions, but it is not the intention of the promoters of the bill to leave a wide-open door for abortion on request.” Politicians claimed that opening up abortion provision too much would encourage sexual activity.

Today the right still argue that access to sex education, contraception and abortion is too open, claiming it has led to Britain having the highest teenage pregnancy rates in Europe. Every year almost 50,000 young women under 18 fall pregnant in Britain – six times that of Holland, four times that of Italy and three times higher than in France. In the 1970s rates of teenage pregnancy were similar across Western Europe. The idea that this is because of too much sex education and the availability of contraception and abortion would be laughable if it didn’t have such tragic consequences.

The example of the US is telling. Over $1 billion has been spent on abstinence programmes in schools yet the rates of teenage pregnancies are the highest in Western industrialised countries. Britain comes second.

One way Holland has achieved the lowest rate of teenage pregnancies across Western Europe is by having compulsory sex education in schools from the age of five and continued explicit and supportive sex education from then on. In contrast, comprehensive sex education is still not a required part of the curriculum in Britain, making provision uneven. What is needed is more openness about sex, and systematic and sympathetic sex education in schools from a young age.

Of course, some teenagers choose to become parents and they should not be demonised. But society needs to make it as easy as possible to avoid unwanted pregnancy, and attempting to repress natural sexual behaviour will not do that.

We are a long way from the crushing morality of the 1950s, when any women who got pregnant outside of marriage faced stark choices: illegal and dangerous abortion, have the baby and then feel there was no alternative but to give it up for adoption, or keep the child and face society’s opprobrium. It is hard to convey the stigma that went with being an “unmarried mother” – a pejorative description which used to be commonplace. The term “unmarried father” was never used.

Happily, today millions of us have relationships and babies without feeling the same pressure to marry or conform, and no serious section of the ruling class can argue that women should be pushed back into the home. Women are now a permanent part of the workforce and women’s paid work is vital to the economy.

Yet despite all the advances and changes in women’s lives, ideas about the family, and a woman’s role, still persist. We are told that the family is a vital cornerstone of society, and women’s role within it as child bearer is central. Such ideology still plays an important part in shaping expectations and consciousness. It helps ensure that people continue to see it as natural that the family carries the bulk of the economic burden of bringing up the next generation.

This lies behind the moral panic about single mothers and working class families that politicians still regularly whip up. If you have a baby on your own it will be financially difficult, unless you have a very highly paid job and good maternity leave. But the state makes you go through hoops to get assistance. You are seen as feckless and undeserving, and in some way hardship is still judged as an appropriate state for you.

Women can’t win. If they have children young they will struggle to be financially secure but will get little support. If they wait to have a baby until financially stable later in life they will receive little sympathy if they then face problems with fertility as they have tried to “buck their biology”. When women do have children they can only stay at home without criticism if they are not a “burden” on the state. Any single parent on benefits will, from October, be forced to look for work when the youngest child is 12 rather than 16 as in the past. New Labour wants to bring this threshold down to seven years by 2010. This completely ignores the reality of the lack of affordable and flexible childcare that means some low paid workers can’t afford to leave the house to work.

In contrast, middle or upper class women can make other choices. They can leave their children with nannies or send them to boarding school at a tender age and not be accused of neglect. Imagine if Madeleine McCann’s parents had been manual workers rather than doctors and had been staying on a package deal in Benidorm, leaving their children locked in a flat while they went to a pub. I believe the media would then have taken a very different stance. Instead of sympathy and global support we would have witnessed at best a wave of vitriol about selfishness and irresponsibility, and possibly even the prospect of legal charges.

But the other side of this is that women today have more economic independence and are more sexually liberated than 40 years ago.

Whatever the state or politicians say about our lives we are not going to go back to a time when our lives were totally restricted and repressed. Women are not going back in the box. The enthusiasm for the pickets against Anne Widdecombe’s rallies and the success of the 300-strong Abortion Rights meeting in London in January show that. Veteran activists are being reinvigorated, but most importantly a new layer of young women are getting involved in the campaign to defend and extend abortion rights. Many are hearing these arguments for the first time.

There is no time to lose. Every trade unionist and activist needs to raise the issue of abortion rights at work, in the trade unions and at college. During the last serious battle to defend abortion rights the bigots were pushed back by the collective strength of the trade union movement. We need to be prepared to make such a mobilisation again.

But by taking on the wider arguments about women’s oppression, morality and class we can do more than stop the current attacks. Already there are thousands of women, and men, who are angry about women’s position in society, about the rise of raunch culture, unequal pay and the lack of childcare. Right now we have a real opportunity to win this new generation to socialist politics and the fight for women’s liberation.

Judith Orr is the author of Sexism and the System published by Bookmarks, £3. To join Abortion Rights go to www.abortionrights.org.uk.

Before abortion was legal

For the first 30 years of my life abortion was illegal in this country.

Almost as soon as I got involved in politics in the late 1950s, a friend came round to my flat and asked to stay with me for a few days. She had just had an abortion; the foetus had come away in the toilet. She had to borrow lots of money and was frightened she would be found out and imprisoned.

We sometimes had telephone calls from teenage girls giving false names and asking if they could come and stay. They were afraid they would be chucked out of their home or arrested after having abortions.

In the late 1970s I interviewed an old lady who had had an abortion as a young woman. She insisted I did not give her name or anything that could reveal her identity. Even though abortion was by then legal she was still worried that she might get into trouble.

I have friends who have told me horror stories after they realise I am in favour of a woman’s right to choose, but they always say I am the only person they have ever told and I must not tell anyone else.

It is terrible that people are still frightened of the law, even though it no longer applies.

Mary Phillips

The Rising Women's Liberation Movement in the Radical 1960s

Ellie Keen — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 22:55:45 +0000

It is hard to imagine just how different the world was for women before the 1960s.

When my mum got married she had to leave her job in a bank. It was assumed that her husband would keep her and she would look after the home.

This was not unusual – in many jobs, including the entire civil service, married women were not employed. It was difficult for a woman to get a mortgage or even buy something on hire purchase without a man’s guarantee.

These were the days before the pill. Sex before marriage was seen as shameful and if a single woman got pregnant it was devastating. Abortion was illegal and many women risked their lives going to the backstreet, or were forced to give their baby up for adoption.

The radical political movements of the 1960s blew apart this repressive and stifled world.

The gains women made then – legal abortion, easier divorce, freedom to express our sexuality and the principle of equal pay – changed the lives of millions.

The Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) was born in the US among students radicalised by the mass black civil rights movement and opposition to the Vietnam War.

In Britain the WLM developed from the struggles of women workers for equal pay.

The two movements had different characteristics but both were rooted in the effect of the long post war economic boom.

This had pulled increasing numbers of women into the workforce and into further education.

For example between 1960 and 1965 there was a 57 percent increase in women being awarded degrees in the US (the same figure for men rose by 25 percent). Suddenly a whole generation of women had new expectations.

The universities of the US became centres of struggle and debate. By 1967 thousands of women had been on marches and protests. They had fought for black civil rights, opposed the war in Vietnam and challenged the state.

Yet they faced sexism in their own political organisations and felt sidelined and trivialised by the mainly male leadership.

It seems shocking that such brilliant radical movements did not take women’s rights seriously. But when the movements exploded in the 1960s they did so in a vacuum.

The socialist tradition had been decimated by the witch-hunts of McCarthyism. There was no Labour type party or revolutionary left to speak of. The shadow cast by the experience of Stalinism made many feel that socialism had nothing to do with liberation.

Women activists began to organise their own workshops, write papers and talk about their oppression.

The movement in the US was dominated by the idea that women had to organise separately. Meetings often involved women talking about their personal lives – a process described as “consciousness raising”.

Groups, dominated by college educated middle class women, spread to cities all over the US.

But although it was never a truly mass movement in terms of numbers and activity it did articulate the dashed hopes and frustration of millions of women.

In Britain the experience of the women’s movement was shaped by the greater influence of the left and class politics here. The presence of a Labour Party, the higher density of trade union membership, and an organised revolutionary left made a difference.

It meant that there was an understanding of the socialist tradition of fighting for women’s rights.

These influences ensured the demands of the British WLM reflected the needs of working class women – free abortion and contraception, equal educational and job opportunities, free 24 hour nurseries and equal pay. Strikes of women workers like the London office cleaners were seen as very much part of the movement.

But there were problems. Ideas about women needing to organise separately divided the movement. In fact bitter experience showed there was nothing inevitably “sisterly” or democratic about women-only organisations.

By the mid 1970s the high point of the WLM on both sides of the Atlantic had passed. Groups fragmented over questions of sexuality, race and issues such as national liberation and imperialism.

Yet the world had changed. For the first time women could control their fertility. Millions of women were gaining a level of economic independence that gave them new choices.

The struggle for women’s liberation and equality had made massive strides but the movement disintegrated. Next week I will look at why.

Seen But Not Heard

Ellie Keen — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 23:11:06 +0000

On Tuesday evening, around a 100 women and men were heard protesting noisily outside Ealing town hall at the council decision to cut funding for Southall Black Sisters. Among the oldest women’s organisations aimed at helping ethnic minority women, SBS has been caught in the crossfire of two political trends that started since the July 7 bombings in 2005.

The first has been for the government, in an effort to give the impression that it is trying to deal with terrorism, to shift funding to Muslim groups at the expense of other minority groups. In October last year, Hazel Blears announced £70m to combat extremism. Here too there has been a shift, initially from funding top-down “community leaders” to grassroots groups to a bigger focus on empowering women.

Either way, the government is chucking money at the problem and hoping it works. That agenda has inevitably sucked funds out of other priorities. That in itself is likely to breed resentment due to its politically motivated nature.

The second trend has been for commentators of every stripe to decry multiculturalism as the source of all evil and the collapse of our society, without specifying how they define the term and what exactly they object to.

In accordance with the political weather, the commission on integration and cohesion last year declared that funding groups based around ethnicity fuelled separatism. Curiously it said very little on specifically funding religious groups, probably because one of its commissioners, Ramesh Kallidai, is the one-man-band otherwise known as the Hindu Forum of Britain.

Giving money to groups on the basis of ethnicity rather than need can fuel resentment and separatism, especially if that group in question deliberately sets out to exclude others. Plus, I have my own criticisms of multiculturalism.

But SBS’s case is rather different. It provides specialist services to ethnic minority women who may not feel comfortable at mainstream/bigger refuges. As I uncovered in my radio documentary last year, there are plenty of brides who come to this country every year without having learned any English and face domestic violence at home. For them, such services are vital, if we focus purely on need rather than political pointscoring.

Asian women have thus become political footballs. Everyone is falling over themselves to protect them by banning sharia and railing against forced marriages. In a speech on Tuesday the Tory leader David Cameron again mentioned forced marriages, citing the campaigner Jasvinder Sanghera. And yet her refuge group, Karma Nirvana, set up for women in similar situations who had run away from home, would face funding cuts under Cameron’s regime. Ealing council is Tory controlled.

This isn’t to say that Labour is any better. Despite all its rhetoric in favour of equality and women’s rights, the party is largely perceived to be under the thrall of “community leaders” who have little interest in the well being of Asian women.

Last month the tragic story of 19-year-old Sabia Rani’s murder by her husband came to light. And yet, even if she had escaped him and run away, current legislation forbids such brides from recourse to public funds. In other words refuge groups would get no funding to shelter her and her choice would be to stay at home or be destitute. Who cares about those Asian women now?

Southall Black Sisters, it must be remembered, also campaigned hard to get justice for Kiranjit Alhuwalia, who had faced domestic abuse for years, before retaliating one night by setting her partner on fire. It made legal history because the legal interpretation of what constitutes as “provocation” (for murder) was changed for domestic violence cases as a result. It was later even made into a film.

This is the same group that spearheaded Women Against Fundamentalism, which bravely challenged and picketed Muslim activists in 1989 when they were calling for Salman Rushdie’s head. They were fighting the fight against extremism and trying to empower Asian women way before these agendas were even on the political radar. Now, typically, our brave politicians are full of empowering language with little in the way of action to back it up.

Lap Dancing

eddie — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 22:47:28 +0000

With customers ranging from groups of young men out on the lash, corporate bank office parties, celebrities such as Sophie Dahl and Robbie Williams
and even supposedly ‘liberated’ women, lap dancing clubs have become a staple of British nightlife.

However, while the number of clubs has increased rapidly since the first one opened in the UK in 1995, few other industries are so riddled with self-serving myths and illusions about the way it operates.

Liz Kelly CBE, who I have come to speak to in order to gain a greater understanding of this modern phenomena, gives one word to explain this growth: “Profit.” She explains: “They have created a market for it. It’s grown through the expansion of the service industry”.

As Professor of Sexualised Violence at London Metropolitan University and Director of the Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit (CWASU) Kelly has a
particular interest in the social and cultural impact of lap dancing and the sex industry as a whole.

While the lap dancing industry has always tried to gain legitimacy by presenting itself as mainstream entertainment akin to going for a drink
down the pub or visiting a dance club, a study commissioned by the CWASU in 2004 concluded that it is firmly part of the sex industry and that its
existence is “in direct contradiction with equality between men and women” because it normalises men’s sexual objectification of women.

Sitting in her office in north London, Kelly herself does not dispute that a certain proportion of men find lap dancing entertaining, but points out it is no longer “acceptable for wild bears to be taught to dance and appear as entertainment however much people might pay for it or however much they might enjoy it.”

But while a bear is forced to perform, many people assert – echoing selective, often salacious, media coverage – that women make a considered, rational decision to work as a lap dancer, are somehow empowered by what they do, and often earn considerable amounts of money. Unsurprisingly, although Kelly is careful never to make any blanket statements, the analysis she provides is very different. She argues the working conditions in lap dancing clubs are “inherently exploitative in the labour relations that are going on as well as being sexually exploitative.” Rather than making a good living, Kelly says the CWASU has “talked to women and actually a lot of nights they go home and they make no money!”

“None of them get a wage”, she explains. “They are self-employed. They have to rent the space, they have to pay to literally dance in the
club. So they start off being in debt.” For Kelly this puts a lot of pressure on the dancers to behave in a particular way towards clients,
“possibly do more things than they would have done had they not had that situation, to really look that they are enjoying what’s going on because
they only get money from private dances.” Kelly describes these poor working conditions as a “conducive context for prostitution”.
Worryingly, she says “a significant minority go in whilst they are a minor” while many often have histories of abuse and violence which makes
them vulnerable to being recruited.

So what would Kelly like to see happen?

“I want men to stop going”, she says simply. However, she is keen to stress that while it is often assumed the majority of men are consumers of
lap dancing, actually the data for the UK suggests it’s a minority of men. The problem is that the majority collude with the men who do
patronise lap dancing clubs by not questioning or criticising their actions. “Somehow it gets caught up with you are not really a
red-blooded man, not really a heterosexual man, so they stay silent”, Kelly says. To counter this she is keen to encourage men to see speaking
out against lap dancing as ”a kind of strength and solidarity with women.”

Introduced last year, the Gender Equality Duty, which requires all public bodies to proactively promote equality between men and women, is another
avenue of resistance. Kelly explains that concerned citizens can use this legislation to pressure local councils to reject licence applications for
new lap dancing clubs. She notes this has already been used successfully in Durham, while recently in Archway in north London a coalition of local
residents, women’s organisations, local councillors, churches and a local school worked together to defeat an application for a new club.

On a societal level Kelly argues lap dancing clubs both rely on and reproduce wider gender inequality – “in terms of the economy and the
market, and the way women have less options – the gender pay gap and all those things.” Always keen to look at the wider picture, she sums up:
“My issue isn’t about whether there are more lap-dancing clubs. It’s much bigger than that. It’s about how do we get towards a society where
human beings are equal.”

This point is especially important when one considers the social backgrounds of the dancers. “In the main it’s not privileged
middle-class women”, Kelly says. “It’s young working-class women who don’t feel like they’ve got any opportunities to do something in the
world that makes a difference or makes them feel good. So they read magazines and aspire to be a glamour model or a lap dancer.”

“I want to live in a world where they can have bigger hopes and dreams than that”, she adds hopefully.

_Originally published in the Morning Star newspaper. ian_js@hotmail.com._