When is Rape not Really Rape?

I went to a training session on children (usually age ten and up) who sexually offend. I am still reeling from what I heard while I was there. It is too long winded to go into all of it but the woman delivering the lecture began by giving an "example", see what you think.

Several young lads and a girl get together one evening and end up buying alcohol, getting very drunk, going back to someone's house and having sex with the girl. Next morning the girl reports that she has been raped by these boys.

Our trainer then went on to ask "Should these boys be criminalised for making one bad decision?" and said "there but for the grace of god go any of my own boys". The trainer went on to suggest that there should be a way of contextualising an incident like this because being labeled a sex offender can have damaging impact on young boys who simply made a stupid choice.

I could not believe what I was hearing. I interrupted and asked about the victim. How do we "contextualise" her experience? Unwilling participant in a childhood mistake? Facilitator in a rite of passage? Should her assault be ignored in favour of not branding the perpetrators as rapists? I did not get the answer I wanted. Of course the victim will be consulted and her feelings taken into account. If she feels that she was raped then that will be addressed. The whole situation must be addressed "holistically". This is such bullshit. Rape is rape. How dare she suggest that it should be treated as a mistake, a simple error of judgment.

I wanted to say that if she thinks her sons are the kind who might get drunk and gang rape a young girl then she ought to be ashamed. Bring up your sons better, stop making excuses. I wanted to stand up and shout that this was intolerable. That if we were talking about the gang rape of a young boy then the reaction would be different. I wanted to take over the training and begin again from a feminist perspective and tell all my stunned looking colleagues the truth about rape. I wanted to shake the trainer until she woke up.

I didn't do any of these things. I did say that rape should never be tolerated or excused away. I said that I was unhappy with the phrase "bad decision". In the face of all my co-trainees and their obvious discomfort at my questioning, I bailed.

I should have done better.

Choosing my Words Carefully

For a couple of days now I have been pondering my choice of terminology when it comes to articulating what I feel about abortion. I have a fabulous baseball shirt from Outspoken Clothing that reads "Against Abortion? Don't Have One!" It means (to me at least) that if you are anti-abortion you don't need to have one, but don't be stepping on my rights to have one. I thought it was clear. Turns out it isn't. This weekend two women have approached me and lauded my blatant and powerful anti-abortion stance. To my horror they have misinterpreted my slogan, and if they have then how many others have done the same thing but said nothing?

I had to explain (and I did it kindly) that in fact I am pro-choice. I am firmly and unequivocally in favour of every woman's right to decide what happens to her body. This was not well received! Spitting vitriol, these women walked away. I considered what I had said to them about my beliefs and felt dissatisfied.

In fact, I am pro-abortion. I used to say that I wasn't pro abortion; I balked at what that might imply. It almost suggested to me that I might be found rampaging through the streets looking for pregnant women in order to satisfy my lust for termination. "Pro-choice" seemed a sanitized version of what I was expressing; as a label, it was also a target in debates with anti-choice apologists. Many times I have defended myself with the words "Actually, I am Pro-Choice. It doesn't mean the same thing as being pro -abortion!" Well, now I think it does.

During this weekend's marathon thinking session I have felt increasingly that I can't say that I am pro-choice if I am not prepared to say that I am also pro-abortion. I have decided that I can't shy away from what this means or what impression it might engender in others. To that end, I am going to change my vocabulary and use pro-abortion rather than pro-choice. I am also going to shift focus when I talk about the "right to lifers". They are anti-choice, anti-freedom and anti-woman; let's label them as such instead of letting them hide behind the romanticized and evocative phrase "pro-life". Lets make them uncomfortable. Lets tell it like it is.

My Daughter Drives....

She passed her test! Yay! No more splashing out 20 quid a week for driving lessons. No more getting up really early to take her to work or college. I feel released. I feel redundant. She has her freedom and her own little car. She took off this morning to go out with her mates, leaving me here staring wistfully up the street as her car disappeared round the corner....She is moving on; I shall miss her.

Boobs, Boobs everywhere!

Did anyone see the BBC programme "My Breasts and I" last night? It was excellent. There were a couple of dodgy moments when the presenter (Jenny Frost) got all shy about her breasts and explained that she happily poses (not topless) for lad mags but wouldn't expose her boobs for a documentary in case her family saw it. (?)

The segment on bare breasted women in New York was entertaining. A photographer was exploring people's responses to topless women going about their daily lives. He was trying to understand why some societies think its okay for men to wander around topless but not women. I often wonder this myself. I HATE seeing men walking along topless simply because I know that were I to do the same thing I would likely be arrested or worse. I digress. Just as I was starting to fume that all the women being snapped were perky breasted youngsters, out popped two of the largest bosoms ever, both pointing south and looking well used. I was thrilled to bits. I actually punched the air and shouted "YESSSSSSS!" We need to see those breasts. We need to know that those breasts are great.

My only experience so far with breast cancer was twenty five years ago when my lovely nana had a mastectomy. All I remember is not being able to cuddle her for months after the op. and I was always aware that she had a "funny" bra with an already filled cup to make her look "Normal". We did not discuss anything about how she felt about her body. I later found out that my Grandad had held her after her operation, looked at her scar and told her she was beautiful. Knowing this has coloured my opinion of mastectomy and reconstruction.

There was a very moving segment on breast cancer survivors and the effects of mastectomy and subsequent reconstruction. In my ignorance I had never even considered what happens if you want nipples that are a darker colour than the reconstructed breast (you can have a kind of tattoo effect). I had never thought about how they make the new breast or what other options there are if reconstructive surgery is not for you. One woman showed a stick on breast-shaped prosthesis that looked like it would seriously irritate the tender skin to which it was attached.

I wish the programme had included women who choose not to have reconstruction and do not wear prosthetics. I wish it was okay for women to lose their breasts to cancer and not feel ashamed of their changed bodies. I know now that some women feel unbalanced without two breasts, something I had never considered before, and I understand that this is a reason for prosthesis. I still think we need to see breast cancer and its effects; we need to see women living with mastectomy and loving their bodies. I'm questioning as I write...would I think this way about prosthetic limbs? If not, why not? I am not ashamed to say that I held my own breasts while I watched.

My stop smoking experience. (as if you wanted to know)

I just read Bitchphd's post about smoking and it prompted me to dig out my stop smoking pep talk, I wrote it for a consumer website ages ago but it could stand an airing...Well it would have helped me to know more about other people's experiences when I was giving up so here goes: (smokers don't take it personally!)

I smoked for fifteen years, 30 a day, through pregnancy, in the rain, on the beach, in the bath, on the loo, full of a cold, during a bout of bronchitis, you name it. I was utterly determined to have my daily allowance. I spent an absolute fucking fortune (I liked the more expensive cigs, you know, the American ones that begin with an M and cost about 5 quid a pack in the UK), not just on fags, I bought loads of perfume and body lotion and mints etc. all in an attempt to hide the smell of smoke. What a waste. But my cigs were so gooooood. Who can resist that feeling of absolute pleasure when you light up after a long, enforced break? It IS good. But it's all an illusion and most of us know that. It only feels so good because we are addicted.

So, after fifteen years of "enjoying" smoking I gave up. What follows is the why, and more importantly the how.

I decided to stop because I couldn't afford to smoke and have a new kitchen. How shallow and sad is that!? There was no moment of crisis in my health, no moment of realization, no epiphany. I just worked out that my home loan payments were about the same as I was spending on cigs and if I didn't stop I would forever be living in squalor. Simple..he he he. It Soooo was not.

I didn't do any of the things you are supposed to do beforehand. I didn't pick a quit date, I didn't get rid of my smoking paraphernalia and I didn't seek advice from a quit group (been there, done that and failed too many times) I just got up, had whatever fags were left in my packet and then resolved not to have any for the next hour or two.

I felt (and still do) that planning the whole quit date shebang would be too depressing, I would worry more as the big day approached and then feel so spineless and pathetic if I slipped up. It’s so much better to catch yourself off guard, take your fags by surprise and jump in at the deep end. Just do it on the spur of the moment because you then have less emotion invested in the venture. We have all tried and failed and tried again and despaired and hated ourselves and smoked defiantly and wheezed and coughed and started the whole cycle again. It is really bleeding depressing.

I say bollocks to the National Health Service approach and just try it this way. Get some gum, not patches because the faffy bit of smoking where you find the pack in your bag/pocket and take out the fag and light up is important to smokers. We like to have something to do. So now you have a blister pack of fruity gum-(Nicotinell is best, trust me) to fiddle with and the whole process of putting the gum in and remembering to chew and park is just enough of a distraction. Wearing a patch is just too passive for me; I want to have to work for my nicotine!

So I made it through my first two hours and felt quite confident enough to do another couple and before I knew it, it was bed time.! Wahay! A whole eight hours fag free and not as bad as I thought. It was bad, I won't lie to you but it was do-able. I didn't die. I didn't even get too upset and wasn't that nasty with my family. Most importantly I didn't set myself any goal that felt too big. I always kept in my mind that I was trying to avoid smoking "today". With each successful day your confidence grows. I have done over 1000 days now. I don't REALLY count them anymore; I just sat here and worked that number out. And I really don't miss smoking at all. In fact I hate it. I regret all those lost years and all that lost money. I regret being a bit smelly. I regret not being able to sit in the library and do any work because I had to get up and go out for a fag every 20 minutes and I curse the days that I smoked around my daughter and sent her to school smelling like an ashtray.

What you can expect when you give up:

Cravings!!! The gum helps but it takes a bit longer than a ciggie to work. You need to be calm and tell yourself to hang on a minute and if it is ABSOLUTELY intolerable you can have a cig. It won't ever get that bad.

You will miss smoking. It feels a little bit like bereavement. You cigs have been with you through thick and thin. They love you and help you out when you need it. When they are gone you feel quite sad about it for a while. Just remember that all the time you thought they were being nice to you, they were actually slagging you off behind your back.

You might sleep badly for a few days. Just have a horlicks and a nice warm bath and remind yourself that when you wake up you won't have toilet breath! It passes.

Now we get to the positives:

You will smell great!

Your fingers will turn a normal colour again. No more yellowy orangey stains. And the same goes for your teeth, eventually,

You feel fitter and can breathe easier. This is such a big and unexpected bonus! You never really think you have problems when you smoke. You only know you did when you stop.

You won't be a social pariah. You will sit through a flight and not be nasty and cranky, you will be able to go to the pictures and enjoy a film.

You will feel so unbelievably, utterly, fabulously proud of your incredible achievement that you will wake up every day feeling smug and satisfied and nothing beats that! Giving up is difficult, if you can do it then you deserve unlimited praise!

So that's that. Long winded but I hope helpful and not preachy. Please try giving up. You are so worth it.

Feminist Standpoint Theory Anyone?

I have to understand it pretty quickly. I am not current on this particular theory and all I know is that it may encompass various theoretical feminisms. Googling seems to throw up too much random crap so if anyone can point me towards a readable potted version I would be really grateful.

I slept very badly last night and today I have a headache...I feel decrepit!

Is YOUR wife fat?

I got a free copy of the Sunday Times yesterday. (I fed my neighbour's cats and was told to take any papers that came and keep them for myself. Just so you know I didn't steal it) It has so many sections that it is almost laughable, but the one I really enjoyed was the "Style" supplement. Because I'm just so stylish.

Nestled in amongst the advice about spotty teens, adverts for £500 lampshades and £210 Yoga bags, expensive clothing suggestions and miracle face cream hype was this nugget by James Delingpole :

Can You Tell Your Wife She's Fat?

Well can you? Turns out, you can. If you can no longer pretend that you still fancy her you can be direct and tell it like it is. Or you can tell her best mate and get her to tell your wife. Or you can sneak in a weekend at a health farm and pretend YOU want to slim down. Or you can take your wife to a fabulously expensive clothes shop that only does tiny sizes and let her work it out for herself. (This one carries a risk: your wife may lose the weight and then you will have to actually buy the expensive clothes.)

Here's the killer quote from the whole piece: "When we start going out with a woman, we do so in the expectation that she is going to remain more or less the same as she was when we bought into the package." Well.

You know when you just can't start expressing what you feel because you don't really know where to start and you might not be able to stop and your head might explode and they won't get it anyway and life's too complicated already so why bother.....That's how I feel about this. I KNOW it's meant to be tongue in cheek. I KNOW I'm supposed to have a sense of humour about these types of articles. But I just can't find it funny. I find it sickening. I leave it to you to take the piece apart, please make me feel better!

Front Bottoms and Other Unmentionables...

While I was over at Yclepta reading the recent post on body hair I remembered seeing this fantastic cartoon and thought I would share it with you. It is by Mikhaela. Pop over there and have a good look at her political cartoon series, it is excellent.

I volunteer in a youth centre and there is a poster in the girl's toilets that actually reads: "some of your bits aren't nice" !! It then goes on to explain how to keep armpits and front bottoms all nice and shiny and inoffensive. I understand that some young people do need advice on personal hygiene but this takes the piss. It is offensive and every time I go to the loo the clean and hairless girl on the poster winks at me and defies me to challenge her. I shall be ripping the poster from the wall this week.

I may even take it into the car park and set fire to it.

Pippa is on Time!

I made my deadline! I am so bad at meeting academic deadlines that actually being on time is quite amazing for me.

What I have to watch for now is my tendency to think that I can have a few days off to recuperate from the stress of submitting some work! I usually think that I can have a few days in the garden poking about at seedlings and uprooting things that have overgrown their space. I like being muddy and disheveled. I can allow myself a little bit of down time but I can't let it get out of control. There's too much to be done...


Here, for your admiration, are some of my tulips!

Just When You Think You've Heard And Seen It All...

I introduce you to THIS. Have a good look round the Purefreedom site. It's wise to familiarise yourself with new concepts of freedom for women. Can anyone here spell L.I.B.E.R.A.T.E.D.?

I Really am Trying to Work...

I am in the umpteenth year of my PhD. I have a deadline in two days for my latest written piece which is a mapping out of a potential introduction. I am working on a rationale piece; a few pages explaining my choice of primary texts. I feel like I am getting nowhere, just swimming around in circles in the soupy swamp water that is my academic life.

Research is a lonely occupation. Nobody believes that I really am working; no-one gets what I am talking about and nobody actually wants to. My family thinks I am available all the time and at a moment's notice for hours on end. My friends make stupid comments like "when will you eventually have a job?" and "you don't know how lucky you are not to work". I am paid nothing and feel guilty all the time about not earning a living.

I often forget why I even started this process and dream of getting a full time job in a bakery with plenty of company, a living wage, no solitary thinking days and access to all the cakes and pies I can eat...

A comment!! All for me!!

Feminist First gave me my first welcome today! I am chuffed with this so I am linking to her excellent post: Anti-Porn Activism. I completely agree that we need to make the public more aware that porn is about violence and power and not sex.

I have taken to giving derisive snorts of laughter when I find myself standing near any man flicking the through the tit mags. This is merely my best defense mechanism; I don't really find it funny when men leer at porn in W H Smiths. I use my laughter to try and rid myself of the the feeling of revulsion and intimidation that overwhelms me when I am in that situation. I hope it embarrasses the men within earshot. It probably doesn't.

What worries me most about porn is how insidious it can be. Images that were at one time indicative of soft porn magazines are now becoming mainstream. Through "lad mags" like Loaded and Nuts, the standard shot of an open mouthed, spread-eagled blonde in minimum clothing has filtered into mainstream media. My snorting, feeble, uncomfortable laugh is lost in the ether....

It's Raining Again...

Well, no-one expected the sunshine to last over the weekend did they? That never happens.
Continuing the theme of women in sport, this struck me as interesting. We need our own Title ix in Britain. Enjoy your day!

My New Language

I have spent the last few hours learning HTML in haphazard fashion! I know enough now to add links and put in underlining! I don't understand pingbacks yet and I can't get my blogroll button to work but hey, you can't have everything!

Feeling a bit better now.

This cheered me up somewhat! have a look and feel inspired!

It's sunny in Salford today! The sun almost cheers me up but not quite. Last night's national news left one Salford feminist feeling angry and depressed. In the middle of all the "serious" news was a lighter topic: Theo Walcott and his surprise place in the England football team. We were told that it is "every young boy's dream" to be in Theo's shoes. I suppose it is. Sadly, young women can not aspire to the same achievement since their football teams are not afforded the same television time, the same sponsorship deals and the same credibility as men's teams

During a segment documenting the daily routine of a young woman with a crippling and rare disease, we were given insight into the ambitions of "EVERY young girl" in Britain. Turns out to be karaoke. As if we needed to be told....

I am so fucking sick of it. We are constantly fed this kind of editorial bullshit about what girls desire and aspire to. It is so common and so insidious that it is barely noticed anymore. I too often feel weak and powerless in the overwhelming mass of it.

Still, there's always the good weather....

My daughter smokes (Yes, it is the title of an Alice Walker Essay)

Oh My God I cannot believe that the tiny red headed freckly baby is a smoker. I am so angry about this that I am almost incandescent. I finally gave up two years ago after fifteen years of smoking thirty a day. It was hellish but I did it. My daughter hated me smoking. She loathed the smell and my stained teeth and hands. She also has asthma. So why is she smoking now? It can only be peer pressure. Her new college friends smoke in clubs at weekends and she wants to be like them? When I ask her she shrugs and smirks and tells me I am making too much of it. I don't get it.

Alice Walker's fabulous Essay "My Daughter Smokes" in her collection Living by the Word is in part an exploration of the politics of smoking and the pain of watching your child inhale toxins and carcinogens; it also gives a short account of her father's death from pneumonia and his battle with bronchitis and emphysema. I shall be making my daughter sit down and read it. It will mean nothing to her and she will think I am stupid. I wish I could do better on her behalf but I can't. The smoker's need for a cigarette will nearly always overwhelm any common sense desire to quit. I used to long for a cigarette so much that I would be able to convince myself that I was actually warding off disease with the smoke. It is a vicious addiction and I despair for my daughter and her fine young skin and her compromised lungs.

Ooh, my very own blog.....

This is my first entry. I feel so self conscious! I read lots of different blogs every day, some of them are incredible, beautifully written and meaningful. I am jealous of anyone's ability to write well and I am always looking for people to listen to my rants so thought that I might like to give it a try.

I think that I have lots to say, particularly about being a woman, a feminist, a parent and a student. I am fervently pro-choice, pro-abortion on demand and anti-racist. I was born into a Methodist family but I now have no religious affiliations. I once thought about converting to Judaism, I have also wanted to be a nun, an opera singer and a fire fighter. I am 34 years old and am trying very hard to complete my PhD....At this rate it may never happen.

I live in Salford in North West UK, a city that I love. I like listening to (in no particular order) Shawn Colvin, the Indigo Girls, k d lang, Elvis, Dolly Parton (!) and Patty Griffin.

My favourite films are Raising Arizona, Steel Magnolias, Dr Strangelove and Spinal Tap. I read mainly short fiction, American and Canadian literature, however my current read is Andrew Martin's The Necropolis Railway. (I bought it for a pound at Waterstones. It's rather good.)

That's a bit about me then. I will add bits more as I go along. Hmmm. Still self-conscious....