the challenge begins

This (+ a thing of porridge which I forgot to take out for the photo) is what I'll be eating for the five days.

I'm doing the Live Below the Live challenge to raise money for Positive Women, a charity supporting women and children in Swaziland with education and income generation programmes. The challenge consists of surviving on £1 a day for food and drink, and free stuff from housemates or conferences or parties or what have you is off limits (although I will say I have so far cheated on that slightly as I had a glass of beer that my housemate brews himself, and a small sip of my friend's hot chocolate as she in-sip-isted). The poorest (that's 1.4 billion people), live on less than $1.25 a day - about £1 in the UK, not only for nutrition but everything else. I feel like Living Below the Line is a good way of realizing how little that is, and getting a better understanding of the challenges faced by people in extreme poverty. I'm still paying rent, using my bike and clothes and cosmetics, so am nowhere near an actual poverty line, but restricting/reducing something as crucial as food serves as a tiny imperfect simulation. Shopping for £5 worth of groceries for the entire week (minus the weekend) has already challenged my habitual perspective.

This is what I bought:

0.75 porridge
0.17 kidney beans
0.49 split peas
0.35 carrots
0.30 garlic
0.64 green tea
0.60 apples
0.18 pasta sauce
1.25 rice
0.20 spaghetti

=
£4.93


I was not as ambitious as my friend Clare who did the challenge last week, who rightly said that buying Tesco Value products is not very ethical. This already shows how the cycle of poverty continues, as to buy the cheapest produce you need to take advantage of the exploitation that creates the cheap supermarket prices. Nevertheless, I went into a big Tesco and looked for things that could feed me for 5 days that would cost as little as possible. I didn't think I spent much on food normally, but realizing how expensive stuff actually was gave me a bit of a headache. Especially fruit and vegetables were not budget-friendly, in comparison to all the fill-up carbohydrates that were in my price range. I tried to include a reduced (!) piece of broccoli but it was still 0.69, which wouldn't have worked unless I substituted it for at least 3 other items; yikes. So it seems cheap food is also quite unhealthy: a small apple and a carrot a day definitely don’t cover your five-a-day. I was ecstatic to find a pack of green tea that fit into the fiver; it doesn't have much caffeine but the perspective of not being able to have a hot drink for 5 days really stressed me out. I also stretched the rules a little bit and used leftover vegetable skins and ends that I usually store in a plastic bag in the freezer, trying to make up for the fact that we don't have a compost and also to make veg broth out of. The skins and ends actually contain a lot of good stuff, so I'm hoping this will help at least very slightly with my vitamin intake. The broth is very simply made by boiling the skins and ends in water and cooking for about an hour, then sieving them off. I also added a few garlic cloves to make it taste a little better. I tried to do a similar trick with the vile Tesco pasta sauce, frying some garlic and adding the kidney beans, but it still tastes pretty awful. So basically, I eat porridge in the morning, an apple at 11, some rice and split peas cooked in the leftover veg bits broth for lunch, a carrot at 5ish, and some pasta with thin sauce for dinner, + tap water and up to 4 cups of green tea. After almost two days I'm not wildly hungry at all, just a bit bored, and tired. I also had to refuse a few sweet offers free stuff (homemade lemon cake my

All this is not a personal development challenge, though. Apart from highlighting the issue and learning whatever you can learn from it, its point is to raise money for anti-poverty initiatives. You can choose from a variety of organizations you may want to raise funds for: Global Poverty Project, Salvation Army International Development, Think Global, Results UK, Restless Development, SAFE (Sponsored Arts For Education), International Service, Christian Aid, Methodist Relief and Development Fund (MRDF). I chose Positive Women because I had the amazing opportunity to meet its co-founder Kathryn Llewellyn at an activist training for Tea Time For Change, and I was extremely impressed with the kind and amount of work she was doing with her organization. Both Positive Women and Tea Time For Change deserve their own blog posts, which I hope to deliver in the remaining three days of the challenge. I'll also hopefully post about how focusing so much on eating so little does not seem too unfamiliar to me, and probably any other woman, although being well above the poverty line it's for entirely different reasons that we are so scarily used to doing it.

In the meantime, if you could sponsor my efforts, and by that support women and children in Swaziland, that would be really, really great. You can do that at my sponsorship page: http://www.livebelowtheline.org.uk/martalucysummer. Any amount would be kindly appreciated!

Living Below The Line (£1/day for 5 days)

This May (31st May - 4th June as I'm staring this a bit late) I'm going to be living below the line: for 5 days I'll be surviving off just £1 a day for all of my food and drink. The rule is that everything has a price, so items I already own/am given for free also count towards the £1. Aside from rent, bills, etc I will try not to spend any money on anything else, in a still imperfect simulation of what it would be to survive on such a tiny amount of money. It seems so much tougher but cooler to do this instead of going out and getting drunk after my final exams are over.

It's definitely going to be hard, but it's an awesome way for me to raise money and awareness for the 1.4 billion people who have to live like this every day - and who have to make £1 cover a lot more than just food.

I chose to raise money for Positive Women, a charity set up to empower women and children in Africa, starting with Swaziland. Their work focuses on supporting women to change their own lives and circumstances. They support them and their families in projects that will help alleviate poverty and make significant social change. Through education of their children and HIV/Aids orphans, through women-led income generation projects and through legal work, Positive Women is helping the women of Swaziland and their families secure their basic needs, and empower them to secure a different, better future. Positive Women has reached some of the poorest communities in Swaziland and has already had significant and far-reaching impact on the lives of thousands of women and children.

Please donate to support me, and critical anti-poverty initiatives. Also please consider joining up and doing it yourself; it's a worthwhile initiative.


http://my.livebelowtheline.co.uk/martalucysummer

I will blog about the experience after I'm done here on Women, Fire & Dangerous Things. I'll also write a bit more about Positive Women, their mission and activities in Swaziland, where they empower women to change their lives and the lives of their communities. Their focus is in particular on HIV positive women and children, on HIV/AIDS prevention education and also on removing the stigma associated with the virus. 

Here's also what Positive Women are saying specifically about the Live Below The Line campaign: “Live Below the Line highlights this generation’s biggest challenge – to help 1.4 billion people out of absolute poverty. Positive Women has seen what small amounts of money and support can do, long term, for these communities. It’s vital, particularly now, that we give our support and help to those most in need. That’s why we’re taking the challenge”. (Read more: http://positivewomen.org/?page_id=783)


This should be a good opportunity to get out of the final year at uni + a load of personal issues lethargy that has led me to think about posting but never actually posting in the last few months. Regular service should resume very soon; apologies.

+/- 1,000 words on the new feminist movement

This is an article I wrote in early September for a new online magazine that apparently never launched. It was supposed to be about the new feminist movement, and it mentions Kat Banyard (founder of UK Feminista) extensively as she kindly agreed to be interviewed over Skype for this. I already briefly mentioned her book The Equality Illusion: The Truth About Men and Women Today in the review of UK Feminista's Summer School. Banyard was also profiled in The Guardian around that same time.

Women earn 23% less then men. The conviction rate for rape is only 6.5%. 1.5 million people have an eating disorder, and 90% of them are female. During the 1990s the number of men paying for sex acts has doubled. One in four women will experience violence at the hands of a current or former partner. And that’s all not in the third world, but the UK.


Ever since feminism existed, in whatever shape or form, there’s been arguments that its mission is done and hence the movement outdated. Virginia Woolf (!) in 1938’s Three Guineas claims that ‘since the only [women’s] right, the right to earn a living has been won, the word [feminism] no longer has a meaning.’ The illusion that equality has been achieved persists: nowadays, when a widely read liberal paper runs a story on feminism, the comments underneath are shockingly aggressive and sexist, the mildest insinuating that whoever wrote the article was transported back to 1969 in some homemade time machine.  Oxford University Press’ Short Introduction to Feminism stops around the turn of the millennium. Women got the vote, women can work, they’ve got the pill - what else could they possibly want?

I’m sorry to break it to you - feminism is not finished. Actually, I’m not sorry at all; but whoever wants to believe that the world they inhabit is fair and free will have to reevaluate their standards, and that is never a pleasant thing to do. Some people claim that women in allegedly developed and great first world countries should stop ‘moaning’ and instead focus on the enslavement of women in Islam. What? Do you think that’s a valid response to the fact that Harvard President Lawrence Summers believes that there are fewer female scientists because of the ‘innate’ differences between the sexes, or to the UK government’s recent emergency budget, where 72% of cuts will be met form women’s income, as opposed to 28% from men’s? Yeah. If you think for more than 30 seconds, you should agree that feminism is not just another piece of 60s/70s/80s/90s nostalgia. It’s a real necessity in 2010. And it’s not just for women either: according to Kat Banyard, recently profiled in the Guardian as one of the UK’s most influential feminists, if you believe in the inherent dignity of people, in justice and human rights, then feminism is for you.

Banyard is the author of The Equality Illusion: The Truth About Women and Men Today, a carefully researched study that takes an interesting shape of an ordinary day in a life of British women. Issues begin as early as 06:56 am with Waking Up To Body Image, continue through the morning with A Gendered Education and Sexism and the City, turn to Coming Home to Violence and A Night Out in the Sex Industry, to culminate with Bedroom Politics at night. Banyard’s focus is incredibly broad, which makes her work even more impressive. It only took her 9 months to write the book, and apart from researching academic journals, she conducted case studies, finding individual women who agreed to speak to her about their experiences. She is not a theorist: everything she writes about is deeply rooted in reality. And exceptionally, it reaches much further than the bookshop. Banyard believes that academia and activism have to go hand in hand, and so she used the advance on setting up UK Feminista, an organization that brings together feminist activists, campaigns, and organizations. It only started in March, and with no external funding, already in August UK Feminista ran a free feminist activism Summer School, an amazing training and networking opportunity with panels, workshops, and talks for experienced activists as well as complete beginners in fighting gender inequality. It generated a huge buzz online, and proved that the book+organization initiative is symptomatic of a wider upsurge in feminist activity. As Kat Banyard told me when I briefly interviewed her, despite the huge amount of stigma that has grown around feminism in the last decade(s), change is happening. There’s been a steady growth in activism at a grassroots level: more groups, more blogs, more websites, more marches, more conferences. More feminist publications came out in the last twelve months than in the last twelve years (Catherine Redfern’s and Kristin Aune’s Reclaiming the F Word: New Feminist Movement, Ellie Levenson's The Noughtie Girl's Guide to Feminism, Nina Power's One Dimensional Woman, Natasha Walter's Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism, Sheila Rowbotham's Dreamers of a New Day, or the recent and hotly debated Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference by Cornelia Fine). It all shifts feminism back into the center of the political debate so policymakers, the media, and all sections of society have to pay attention.

Local London initiatives abound, from big organizations like London Feminist Network (its huge annual conference Feminism in London happened on Saturday 23 October; review here), London Third Wave, Equality Now, OBJECT or two London branches of the Fawcett Society, to specific campaigns like LASH (London Anti Street Harassment) or Hollaback London/ Hollaback UK, a dozen of local groups and Women’s Institutes like Shoreditch Sisterhood, Feminists of Hackney, East End W.I. or Feminist Societies based around universities at Goldsmiths, UCL or LSE; and even groups for men: London Pro-Feminist Men’s Group, White Ribbon Campaign, or the newly launched Anti Porn Men Project, ran by young male activists who oppose the aggression and sexism in pornography. Launched in mid-September, this initiative ties in perfectly with what Banyard believes is a crucial condition for feminism to advance: the involvement of men. ‘The future of feminism depends on focusing on the role of men and masculinity. We need to change what it means to be a man’, she said when I asked about feminists who have inspired her most, and she listed academics Robert Jensen and Michael Flood alongside famous US PhD Rebecca Whisnant. Hopefully the rise of the new feminist movement means that the stereotypes around man hating and marginality will disappear, and we will all accept that women’s issues are everyone’s issues, and sexism harms all genders. And that doing something about it is awesome, and as valid as it ever was.



----

 
In other, more recent news, this Saturday is Reclaim the Night, an annual national march in London to say no to rape and all forms of male violence against women.

"A recent survey by the young women’s magazine More in 2005 found that 95% of women don’t feel safe on the streets at night, and 65% don’t even feel safe during the day. 73% worry about being raped and almost half say they sometimes don’t want to go out because they fear for their own safety.

In every sphere of life we negotiate the ...threat or reality of rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment. We cannot claim equal citizenship while this threat restricts our lives as it does. We demand the right to use public space without fear. We demand this right as a civil liberty, we demand this as a human right.

According to the British Crime Survey (2001) there are an estimated 47,000 rapes every year, around 40,000 attempted rapes and over 300,000 sexual assaults. Yet our conviction rate is the lowest it has ever been, one of the lowest in Europe, at only 5.3%. This means that more rapists were convicted in the 1970s when Reclaim The Night marches first started than they are now. Did you know that the maximum sentence possible for rape is life imprisonment? Probably not, because rarely are rapists even reported or convicted, let alone with a realistic sentence. This situation has to change.

We march to demand justice for rape survivors."



Reclaim The Night
Saturday 27th November 2010

Assemble 6pm, Whitehall Place (near Embankment tube) for women-only march followed by mixed rally and party at the Camden Centre, Euston till late. All welcome.

Men can support the Reclaim The Night march by joining the London Pro-Feminist Men’s Group solidarity demonstration. Meet by the Edith Cavell statue, opposite the National Portrait Gallery at 6pm on Saturday 27th November to make your protest against violence against women.


http://www.reclaimthenight.org/
http://www.facebook.com/?sk=events#!/event.php?eid=156359841057661


I will be visiting Nadine in Glasgow this weekend so sadly neither of us can come, but we will no doubt stage our own mini march in solidarity.

Feminism in London 10

The huge Feminism in London conference took place last weekend. Over 1,000 feminists came. I was one of them.

Many amazing speakers; too many to summarize, but an evident theme that kept being mentioned was cuts and the massive inequalities implied in them. Women hold 65% of the public sector jobs, and women also rely on these services more because they earn and own less. Intro panel Women in Public Space had a young mother and activist Lindsey Hills speak out about harsh stereotyping of teenage mums, film director and writer Virginia Heath who started a campaign against sex trafficking, Ceri Goddard from The Fawcett Society and Helena Kennedy QC concentrating on the economic policy gender bias issues, and journalist Rahila Gupta commenting on how even in fairly liberal media sexism and misogyny are rife.


The following session was on Reproductive Health, which in my mind meant contraception, but was in fact largely about how women are massively restricted by hospitals in terms of giving birth. There was even a short film about home births and all kinds of issues I never gave a second thought. Another issue that gets just about zero coverage and so I imagine the general public is entirely unaware of there being any controversy about it.

I ordered vegan lunch, and got a piece of cake that contained milk and eggs - that was the only major fuck up (predictably, the venue was to blame). I didn't mind, because I'm merely vegan-curious, but I imagine actual vegans must have been very unhappy about it. Because almost all the sessions ran over there was really not a lot of time to explore the stalls, and because the venue had to be cleared right after the conference finished lunch time was the only chance to see any of them, which I sadly didn't get a chance to do. I'm sure it has to do with venue costs and all, but it would maybe be a good idea for future events to have the stalls available for a bit longer.

Post-lunch I was booked in a workshop called Exploring Your Internalized Prejudice. There was a whole bunch to choose from (including one workshop exclusively for men!), but I decided on that one in hope to get some unchallenged stuff out of my system. It was led by FolesHillfields Vision Project, who sat us in two circles, so that each person was facing someone else, and for the first half of the workshop we were switching a lot to be able to talk to a different person each time. The 'questions', or issues to talk about for about a minute each were about why it's good to have men as allies, imagining what our lives would be if there was no sexism, remembering first instances of gender prejudice, or considering what we would change in our childhood or youth if we could today. It was a bit all over the place, but because we had to think on our feet, quite inspiring. Then we got into slightly bigger groups and were trying to remember the first time we'd noticed racism, or were exposed to racist comments. Some people's stories were quite unbelievable; it was very interesting to hear many perspectives on that, and even just to try to identify yourself the very early and often un-intellectual instances of racism. The premise of the workshop was to prove that noone is born racist or sexist or in any other was unfairly biased, but that culture/society have their creepy ways of installing those prejudices into our minds very early on. I guess what might conclude from that is a higher awareness of those processes and somehow guarding yourself from them, but sadly the workshop didn't go as far as that. The final bit was a panel of women of colour who talked about what it's like to be women of colour: what's hard about it, what's great about it, what they'd never want to hear again from white people and what one thing they would change if they could. That was a very interesting, though also a slightly strange setup, to have all us white girls listening - it would have been excellent if there was more time for dialogue. Still, apart from slight technical/organizational hitches it was an interesting experience.

The final panel, or as it was officially called, a 'rousing finale' was indeed very strong: speakers declared they were angry, cuts again were mentioned extensively. My favourite two quotes: 'We don't hate men. We hate what capitalist patriarchy does to men as well as women' and 'If equal rights mean equal rights for exploitation of others, we want something different'. Many speeches interspersed with applause, and a standing ovation for Finn McKay at the very end. Definitely a very successful day for feminism. Many women and men who attended also brought their kids - it was really amazing how children-friendly and considerate the whole event was: so rare, though it should be entirely evident.

Tons of content, including videos, photos, write-ups, blog links, workshop descriptions, detailed speaker lists and anything else you may want to know about the conference available on Feminism in London's website: http://www.feminisminlondon.org.uk . I hope to go again next year!

Courtney Love FTW

Courtney Love played Warsaw last week at Orange Warsaw Festival - I went to the press conference she gave backstage, which was exciting as hell.

I was never into grunge at all, but I can’t disagree with Rolling Stone when they say Courtney Love is the most controversial woman in rock history. Widely known not so much for her own career, but for her husband’s suicide, she is the object of hate for legions of his fans, and an object of admiration for those who actually listened to her music and lyrics, appreciated her role as a style icon, or just the fact she’s been creatively active for 25 years. She is just as likely to appear on celeb gossip websites and in tabloids as she is on esteemed music blogs. She’s in her 40s, and still an iconic bad girl, transgressing a dozen social norms at a time. Pop culture loves spectacular troublemakers. The more the public hates her, the more symbolic she becomes - but with so much more class and artistic credibility than similar figures who have emerged in the last decade. According to feminist Rachel Shukert, she has the guts to be just as nihilistic and self-destructive as a man, knowing all along that the world, instead of praising her like a genius, will crucify her and make everything her fault.

As Shukert says in her brilliant essay, telling the story of her becoming-a-feminist-lightbulb-moment, Love is no one's role model but she still changes lives. She has, above all, no shame. She says or does what she wants, genuinely not caring what people will say. She's the kind of person always described by the press as 'troubled', her every action being reported as the final condemning proof of her disgusting lifestyle, threatening the morality of the rest of the world. And she would still flash her tits on tv, post semi-nude pictures of herself on twitter, rant all she wants, and above all, continue to write and record. Aged 12, she applied to join the Mickey Mouse Club and was rejected after reading Sylvia Plath's Daddy for her audition. A most recent controversy is that surrounding her loss of custody over her daughter, venting on twitter insulting everyone involved, then on Frances Bean's 18th tweeting a 'crazy-ass incoherent 35-tweet rant', expressing out-of-control, contradicting, yet undeniably sincere emotions. I think there's no doubt that she's crazy: hard childhood, years of substance abuse, personal trauma; but you know what - she isn't trying to pretend like she isn't. She's out there just like she is, crazy, conflicted, troubled, whatever. She's not acting like it's all great and a piece of cake. People naturally hate that: it's disturbing, shocking, and also real. Love isn't scared of being real, whatever it can mean. That's why I may not get what she's about, but I admire her greatly nonetheless.

It was incredible to see her in real life. She was really pale and really skinny, unhealthily so, kept smoking compulsively and jumping from one digression to another, occasionally making little sense. What was incredible though was how confident and calm she was in all that. Much more vulnerable than onstage, but still totally unafraid to be who she is. Piotr Metz, the festival's creative director, asked her about a Pearl Jam cover she played in Paris, and here she's replying to that, sort of, at the same time talking about a million other things:






Further questions were not up to any standard - what do you expect from the Polish public, playing here for the first time? Why aren't you headlining, is it a conscious decision? Were you upset by the reviews of Nobody's Daughter? And Love answers, in a totally reasonable way, even if the questions are inane or designed to intimidate.

I really wanted to ask her about her daughter, but felt it was way too painful and personal. Love mentioned sexism in her previous answer already, talking about her manager and how she's the only female artist he manages; so I asked her about the current state of feminism:






I'm not entirely sure what she was saying about the lunch she was having with another feminist, nor what she said exactly about her daughter in the beginning (I didn't catch it on video, but I think she said Frances Bean doesn't identify as a feminist, yet she recently made a bunch of feminist statements), or why the Credit Suisse bacchanal story was there, but it's really out of order how the interpreter then mistranslated the entire thing, saying that Love believed feminists were unattractive. What she said was that the connotation for the word was still negative, that 'we who wear heels and lipstick' can spell it femme-inist to make it sound more classy and French, but for most people, a feminist is still an unattractive woman. She also said she believed she was the last woman standing from her generation. She said she passed Kathleen Hanna in the street in New York the other day ('who has grey hair and runs a salon'), and they didn't say a word. It was sad.

I should really read Courtney's 2006 memoir Dirty Blonde before I say any more underreasearched stuff.But let me just mention Rachel Shukert's Nice Girls again, which is definitely worth reading, whether you care about Courtney Love or not. For a gist-of-the-story shorter reading, see Standing Up For Courtney Love And Outcasts Everywhere by Anna North. That's only the tip of the iceberg of controversy, but shows some fucked up and sexist shit that women who dare have to deal with.

UK Feminista Summer School

I ecstatically posted about this as soon as I found out: UK Feminista, despite only existing since March 2010 and operating wholly through the work of volunteers, organized 'two days of feminist training, explaining and gaining', a FREE event on feminist activism in London. Held at Amnesty UK, it was overbooked and a visible 99% of the 350 registered attendees came. Nadine and I were moving house that weekend, which made it a bit difficult, but I skived off for some time and went as Women Fire's delegate.

Maybe the most amazing feature of the event was that it provided genuinely fun and interesting talks for activism beginners and veterans alike. Despite many cautionary remarks that 'we're preaching to the converted', it was far from redundant to hear statistics, learn skills, and absorb enthusiasm from various speakers. Just from listening I felt so inspired I started taking notes for future endeavours/involvements/articles and frankly, nothing beats that intense feeling of wanting to do something RIGHT NOW, and being given some actual tools as opposed to just walking up and down the room reeling from frustration. It's also refreshing to be able to talk to people who despite very different backgrounds and occupations share your views, and you don't have to defend yourself before you even finish making a point. Also very important is the realization that your power lies in numbers, and there are those other people out there - so if you organize, you can actually achieve something, and you really should try.

UK Feminista was started by Kat Banyard, author of The Equality Illusion: The Truth About Men and Women Today, who gave a particularly inspiring speech during the first panel The Importance of Feminist Organising: that more and more grassroots feminist movements are emerging, despite the general society's claims that equality is achieved and there is nothing else to fight for. Banyard's book dispels those myths, displaying research of amazing scope proving that gender inequality is still a serious issue. She pointed out that after a 'ten year drought' we had 'six feminist books in the last 12 months', and that publishing trend was definitely reinforced by an upsurge in actual activism, from NGOs and local groups, in form of blogging as well as marches, campaigns, demonstrations. In a stark contrast, perhaps the most cited statistic of the weekend had been about women taking about 70% of the consequences of proposed budget cuts in the UK. On the same panel was Gwendolyn Sterk from UK Joint Committee on Women, who reported that of the four sister organisations from across the UK that made up the Committee (Engender, network of women’s organisations in Scotland, the National Alliance of Women’s Organisations (NAWO) in England, Women’s Voice in Wales and Northern Ireland Women’s European Platform) only three were still operational: Women's Voice in Wales was recently denied funding and its future is uncertain. Women's issues are widely seen as a fringe, as something marginal 'real politicians' don't have time for. Actually thinking about it, most people probably don't realize women's issues are everybody's issues. And allegedly there are more men called John in the Parliament than women - sounds like a joke, right?

© Kirsty McCall-Thornley

The enormous strength of the first day of summer school was its focus on practice. The afternoon was split into workshops on different levels of involvement: from how to run a feminist group to how to organize a Ladyfest, on running effective campaigns, organizing demonstrations, creative campaigning and direct action, using gender equality duty and other laws to promote your campaign ends, or what to look forward to in the feminist year ahead. If that wasn't amazing enough, all the materials fromt he workshops will be available at the UK Feminista website in the coming days. Simultaneously to the events, UK Feminista volunteers were tweeting, providing good quote selections and links, and doing it so well I didn't even feel the need to take many notes and instead have that online record of what was being said. I encourage everyone to go through the resources grouped under the #femschool hashtag on twitter (you can view it even if you don't have an account yourself), and to have a look at the materials when they're posted on UK Feminista - where in fact you'll find all kinds of useful info on local groups, campaigns, feminist links, and also discussion boards. A goldmine of news, information, and also people! What struck me about the event, aside from supreme organization, was the enthusiasm of everyone involved, organisers and participants alike, and the general friendliness - people were chatting away and forming new alliances all the time. After the event ended, UK Feminista volunteers announced they were going to dinner somewhere nearby, and everyone was welcome to join - in the end, about 20 of us went to a Vietnamese place on Kingsland Road to spend another 2-3 hours exchanging stories. I was about to go home after that, when on the way to the bus stop we passed a strip club, and someone said we should sticker it with the Sexist Shit and Feminisn't stickers we got earlier in the day. As a result, an ad hoc feminist action happened, and the next day the club's email address was still enhanced with a Sexist Shit note. All this was filmed - I hope to post the videos soon. That relatively small action made us feel so inspired for at least a couple of people who were going home to fall down on a couch instead found a nice pub to sit down in and keep talking to each other. There's no better feedback for an event than when people just don't want it to end.

 

© Kirsty McCall-Thornley

The second day was a lot more opinion- and discussion-based, but great training was still being given: from how to use the media to how to influence politicials (theyworkforyou.com to check who your MP is and what they're doing), how to fundraise, include disabled people in campaigning, promote diversity within feminist groups, and why is climate change a feminist issue (I'm especially looking forward to the materials from this to come up online as I missed it, attending using media instead). At lunchtime there was a stand up show from Lynne Parker of Funny Women (which I shamefully missed getting actual lunch - I hope there will be videos). Two arguably biggest events of the day, however, were the opening and closing panels with Big Names. Women in the Media was led by Jess McCabe of The F-Word and had Hannah Pool (ex-Guardian/freelance journalist) and Kira Cochrane (Guardian women's editor). All three talked about their experiences with the media (including a funny, but actually quite depressing story of how Hannah Pool set up a white male comments account as Harry Pond and didn't get any of the abuse she did get as herself). Only 18 of 100 people on media's most influential list are women, and out of 18 national papers one has a female editor, reported the panel, and the recounted experiences were more or less along the lines of challenge and hardship (but also some hope). Pool's story exposed sexism and misogyny on the Guardian's website (cause just because you read a lefty paper doesn't mean you can't be sexist..), but also instantly motivated people to get their opinions out there, whether working in the media or not, just by presence and comments. Granted, under the excellent post-summer school write-up from Bidisha there is already a sea of disgusting, disgusting comments. Just asking people whether they were feminists is a very revealing question, and an important one to ask. Someone from the audience tackled the enormously important but very unpublicized issue that most instances of ageism in the media are in fact straight cases of sexism. All panelists agreed that to be a female journalist takes more effort and more talent, but through their examples showed it was possible, and important. Exposure is crucial for a greater awareness and understanding of feminism, so every publication counts - in all types of media, not just ones targeted at liberal audiences. Also platforms brought forward by web 2.0, like commenting facilities on all media sites, as well as blogging, facebook, twitter - it all counts and helps to change people's minds.

© Kirsty McCall-Thornley

That first discussion was heated, but mostly in unison - the closing panel, Feminist Question Time with Bidisha, Dr Aisha Gill (Roehampton University), Sunder Katwala (Fabian Society), Karon Monaghan QC (UK Feminista) and Julie Bindel, provoked a lot more controversy. Julie Bindel said there was a lot of terrible anthropological research, particularly concerning women in the sex industry, and that they should not be treated as an anthropological field research group, but that there should be good quality social research instead. She went as far as saying that if she had one bullet in the gun, it would not go for the pimp, but for the academic who's all into the sex industry. Dr Aisha Gill was talking a lot about how the media essentialize women and in cases of trafficking for example, create stories of 'good victims'. Both raised a lot of comments and if it wasn't for time limits, this could have gone on forever. Interestingly, one of the questions on an earlier panel concerned dealing with disagreements within the feminist community. There isn't really an answer for that, just as there isn't one for tackling antifeminism, especially when it's displayed by women. There had been attempts to give advice on this (watch a video of this question on femblr), but all, in my opinion, failed: 'just being on the girls team' is a really not that simple, it's a slogan that doesn't help much when you face women who are misogynist themselves, nor does it when faced with super offensive comments (like those under Bidisha's article). Julie Bindel said 'we make a lot of excuses for men to the point where we praise them for not being fuckheads', which made everyone laugh, but about five minutes later someone angrily said from the audience that the men (there were a couple in attendance) must feel very excluded in the current talk, to which both Bindel and Bidisha reacted heatedly. As @inspirewithhope on twitter remarked, it was sad to see gender binaries reinforced in most of the conferences - people kept talking about *both* genders, *both* sexes, as opposed to all of them. The sex industry came up a number of times, but without a clear and visible designate - prostitution, trafficking, porn, strip clubs were all mentioned, but those issues are so broad, and the sex industry comprises of many more branches, each deserving an analysis. Not saying that sex industry doesn't hurt women and isn't a product of inequality, but these matters have traditionally been massively controversial within the feminist movement and that variation of opinion was not addressed at all (like the mixed stance on pornography, and the emergence of what could by some be called 'feminist porn', or pornography for women - see a previous post). However, overall I am inclined to say it was the best summer school I ever attended - really inspiring, a great opportunity to learn as well as meet people, and acquire skills and information to proceed with conviction and fury. 'We've had wave after wave of feminism; we need a tsunami of feminism. Mass civil disobedience is the only way they'll listen.' 'There's not a central office for activism, you have to do it yourself.' 'Feminism is about social justice and basic human rights... Of course we still need feminism, that shouldn't even be a question.'

© Kirsty McCall-Thornley

More feminist summer school coverage:
UK Feminista official summer school resources (including some of the presentations)
Kira Cochrane's article 'Feminism is not finished'
Bidisha's commentary Women's mass awakening
Radio 4's 'Exciting time' for British feminism with Kat Banyard and Gaby Hinsliff
Discussion post with summer school reflections, links to blog posts, etc
review on Daily Feminist Action
We Mixed Our Drinks review 
At Home blog
Notes on a Campaign by Delilah
femblr video with advice on countering antifeminism


More links:
Equality Now
Women's Aid
Womankind
Eaves
Fawcett Society
Southall Black Sisters
Women Against Violence
Justice for Women
European Women's Lobby: Centre on violence against women
Pink Stinks
Ladyfest
Strom In A Teacup 
The Girls Are
OBJECT
Lash campaign

all photos by Kirsty McCall-Thornley (Flickr / Twitter / Blog)

NEXT CONFERENCE: Feminism in London 

I'm going. Register here!

Iriarte Iriarte online shop

Just to let you know, Carolina of Iriarte Iriarte who I last posted about just opened an online shop for her bags (and wallets). Check it out at iriarteiriartestore.bigcartel.com!