Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Conceal IT! Reveal IT!

I'm travelling through Europe at the moment, first stop Paris. A land where they DO NOT USE A WORD FOR FEMALE GENITALIA AS A DEROGATORY TERM = a land which I ♥.

So fucking lovely to be out of freezing Melbourne winter & to be able to wear what I want. At the moment I'm sitting in the sunshine in a t-shirt & not much else. Of course, I can't wear everything I might like to here...

Since April 2011, women have been banned from wearing burqas in public in France, the Govenment audaciously citing feminist motivations, stating that to "ensure the dignity of the person and equality between sexes, this practice, even if it is voluntary, cannot be tolerated in any public place". In Australia & elesewhere, there have been calls for similar laws, also sometimes, on 'feminist' grounds.

How legally enforcing any form of dress on women can be a feminist action is beyond me.

In both of these countries we, as women, are already compelled, culturally & legally, to cover our cunts & breasts so now we are required to simultaneously conceal & reveal different parts of our bodies. The law-makers do not seem to see the inherent hypocrisy in this situation. Their bizarre dissection of the female anatomy & the privileging of some parts over others is fascinating, disturbing & profoundly fucked-up.

So, I made some special Cunt Fling-Ups...

Conceal IT! Reveal IT!

LE cacher! LE révéler!

I exhibited them as part of the Ladyfest Paris festival which really was ALL kinds of awesome...

And normally I would then go & fling the cunts up over a power-line but Paris has NO powerlines so I had to look for somewhere else to hang them...


Saturday, July 2, 2011

So, I think I might be in love...

You can tell it's love when you think that they're just AWESOME & you start daydreaming about your future together & smiling inanely while staring into space & jumbling up all of your words, yeah?

Check this out:

La Barbe


& this:



♥♥♥♥

La Barbe (The Beard) is a group of French women who don facial hair & hijack the French Senate, corporate do's & "places of male power" to show their "commitment to resisting male hegemony and make visible all the ridiculous situations of inequality betweenmen and women". Their manifesto proclaims: "It is time to put feminism in the saddle and set out to conquer the territories of power in all its forms".

So is this love? I think they are just AWESOME. I am gonna ask them if I can set up an Aussie chapter & am smiling inanely while I daydream about them saying yesyesyes & jumbling up all my words.
Admittedly the word jumble bit is probably ma
inly due to me being in France trying to learn French which I haven't attempted since before I got my first period. But still, I think it's pretty clear - I am smitten.

Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Feminists fighting fairly fairly.

Wow. Slutwalk & Feminist Futures Conference on the one weekend. What a wonderful, giddy-making time it has been here in Melbourne.
For so long there has seemed to be an apathy around activism in this city and feminism in particular & I've been just wishing women would get angry, get out there & get fighting.
Then suddenly, in the past few weeks, it's been ON.

We've been getting passionate, & vocal, & active &, for the most part, despite the emergence of disparate views, we've been interacting in a strident but respectful manner. & THAT IS FUCKING AWESOME. Feminism being torn apart from within is as useless as feminism which doesn't peek out of the shadows in the first place.



There is no referee in feminist debate, that's the whole point of feminism - we want to be autonomous, to be able to govern our own lives and determine our own paths free from oppression. Therein lies the challenge, we need to all be able to band together and support each other as feminists in order to overcome the patriarchal system, regardless of our differences.



Massive props to the Feminist Futures crew who made a concerted effort to include a wide range of feminist voices (including inviting me to give a workshop so obviously I'm predisposed to thinking they're pretty ace & inclusive...). It certainly wasn't perfect, the lack of childcare facilities seemed to be a glaring oversight but they acknowledged this, made efforts to accomodate parents such as offering to fund babysitters, & I'd be very suprised if they didn't make this a priority for future events. They also listened to complaints that the proposed conference did not have enough gender diversity by altering the original line-up of their panels to include a member of the transgender community. It was inevitable that they'd receive flack from people who opposed individual speakers but even so, I've seen copies of some of the letters & facebook posts they received & some of them were incredibly aggressive.


The means don't justify the ends, the means are the ends. The shape of our struggle will determine the shape of our future.

The final panel included Kathleen Maltzahn, a greens candidate and anti-trafficking campaigner. Fliers were left on the seats of the auditorium saying 'Kathleen Maltzahn supports legislation which harms sex-workers' (from memory) & during her presentation several audience members stood & turned their backs. So far so good, all strong, non-aggressive voicing of opposition.


One protester, however, used an umbrella to block the view of other members of the audience & during the question time a couple of the protesters interrupted with heckles from the crowd.



The organisers managed to save the proceedings from descending into chaos by moving to the microphone when things started to look a bit dicey & reminding the room of basic house rules so the event ended on a calmer, more positive & optimistic note.


Censorship & oppression are what we're fighting against. Censorship & oppression should never be part of our fight.

When the audience member raised an umbrella to block others' view - that was censorship & oppression.


When another audience member interrupted with heckles from the crowd - that was censorship & oppression.



& to try to introduce legislation to ban sex work (which protesters claimed was Kathleen Maltzhan's aim though she didn't state that during the conference, has actually said in the past that she wants to decriminalise sex work & has advocated workplace reform rather than elimination of the sex industry) if she, or anyone else did move to ban sex work, that would be censorship & oppression.



Here's hoping we can can continue to band together as feminists against censorship & oppression.



*(If Kathleen Maltzhan has stated somewhere that she'd like sex work made illegal & I've missed it, please do let me know)

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Happy Cunt Day! & multiple happy returns.

International Women's Day, like my birthday, always brings out mixed emotions in me.

First & foremost I have a feeling of jubilation: Yay! It's a celebration & it's celebrating mememe us women hurrah! Then I have a sobering moment of: Oh fuck another year has passed and sweet bloody fuck all has changed. Then I remember: Yay! It's a celebration for mememe us women! & I put on a nice frock & eat some cake.

Such was the case this year.

A lovely day of hanging around with Melbourne brothers & sisters celebrating feminism with plenty of well wishes flitting about in the cyber realm & even a few presents, such as the following video. It's been posted a zillion times (with mixed but mainly positive responses) on facefuck so I thought I may as well re-gift it here. It depicts the dude who plays James Bond listening to Judy Dench go through a list of the current inequalities between men & women.



Watching it I thought: yeah - this is pretty cool, showing a guy who represents a stereotype of heightened masculinity listening to & apparently thoughtfully absorbing the words of a woman talking about sexual inequality - this is a good thing. Yay! Celebration etc.

Then I read the comments below the vid & had my sobering moment. The flip side of surrounding myself with ace men & women is that I can sometimes loose touch with reality. I honestly forget how many boofheads there are out there. The general gist of most of the comments was 'why can't men be men & women be women?'

Says phillyvinilli: 'Some guys need to be nicer but also some girls also need stop being so skanky'

Says 0678421: 'WHAT DO YOU TELL A WOMAN WITH TWO BLACK EYES? Nothing you already told her twice.'

Says geoharmonic: 'If sexual equality is similar to where things have been going then I don't want to go there. I prefer men being men and women being women. Too much of the equality idea is not good. Those statistics are all about high end jobs. Most jobs that people work in offer similar pay.'

GEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEZ! Way to try & dampen the celebrations shitwits. It's our party & we can cry if we want to but actually I don't wanna. So, I'm gonna take off my pretty frock, eat some cake & send a big celebratory loveheart out to all the ace men & women who have joined in the feminism festivities.



We may not yet share the same rights as these snailbrains but at least we don't share their wrongs.

Monday, February 21, 2011

A. Label-lover B. Label-loather C. Label-confused

Labels make the world go around.


It's how we navigate through life; we categorise and we sub-categorise things, people and places based on our interactions with them, then we encounter new things and slot them into the categories according to perceived similarities with the stuff we already know.

Labels are what keep us healthy




And help us to locate potentially satisfying sexual partners




Without labels and categories we would all be mush-brained non-functional blobs.

Of course, categories can be damaging. Over the years they can become hardened and inflexible, preventing the lateral flow of ideas and trapping things, people, places and sometimes entire races in deep dark chasms.

No-one wants to be an oppressor – actually that’s not true, I’m forgetting the whole (rather large) megalomaniac, power-hungry category of society...


...but they’re a rather nice category to forget so I’ll just continue.

Ahem. No one wants to be an oppressor and it can often be tempting to try to cast off labels and do away with judgements.

The problem is, if we don’t make day to day judgement calls the results can be impractical and even a little hairy.

...As I found out as a teenager when I decided a nice old safety pin would be good for piercing my ear.

I’d had one piercing already and knew that what was required was a sharp implement → sub-category: metal → sub-sub-category: pointy. Unfortunately my judgement system was not highly evolved enough to take me to the all-important sub-sub-sub-category of sterilized.

I totally misjudged that ol’ safety pin because I didn't restrict its possible uses with stringent enough categorising & now I have a little black bump on my ear lobe to remind me. But at least I was utilising some sort of category system and wasn’t trying to put a hole in my ear with a hammer or some shit.


In short, labels and categorising are vital for practical interaction with the world so I’m afraid, cunts, that we’re gonna have to pull ourselves up out of that quaint little contradictory category of ‘non-judgemental people’ and own up to the fact that we are intrinsically and fundamentally judgemental creatures by necessity.

Members of the Gay community, or, as I should say the GLBTI (Gay, Lesbian, Bi-Sexual, Transgender, Intersex) community, are all over labels. You may now file them away in the ‘label experts’ category in your mind.

Most hetero women I know simply identify themselves as straight females and loll back in this broad category, slipping straight into it from their mother’s cunts, sure that that is where they belong because their genitals go in, not out and they’d like to rub them up against genitals which go out and not in.

For Lesbians it seems rather more complicated. Many don’t identify themselves simply as gay females but file themselves into a ton of other sub-categories based on attitudes, inclinations and behaviours. And there are TONS. I know of gay women who identify as Femme, Butch, Bi, Trans, Babydyke, Queer, Sportydyke, Tops, Bottoms, Gold-star lesbian, Blue-jean femme, Truckerdyke, Lipstick lesbian, Chapstick lesbian, Stone butch, Soft butch and Boi. I guess that once you get to the point of figuring out how to exist in a society where your sexual orientation is in the minority, you’ve done a lot of thinking about gender and have built up quite a bit of knowledge. So, just as Eskimos have a kazillion words for snow, queer folk have a kazillion for gender. We are THE gender experts!

All of this intricate knowledge is beautiful and enriching but sometimes, sometimes, I wish it could all just be a bit less complex. I don’t want to restrict myself by defining myself too closely; I almost want to go back to the simple unquestioning category of ‘female’ alone. Mush brain longing!

Fortunately there seems to be a fair bit of fluidity between the various categories, most gay women I know say ‘Welll, I’m a little from column A, a little from column B, and sometimes, when I’m drunk and have watched an excessive number of Justin Beiber music clips, I might go in for a bit of column F’.

This is just as well, ‘cause I wanna sleep with women and I wanna dress tough one day and glam the next and paint my toe-nails and use power-tools and do crochet and swear and have facials and razor my hair and grow it long and ride in a bike gang and wear high heels and maybe have kids some day or maybe not and make music and arrrrt and fall in love and for it not to last forever so I can fall in love with someone else later. I want all of the experiences of being a female, of being human, ALL of them. I just hope I don’t end up hitting myself in the ear with a hammer as I try to navigate my way.

Saturday, February 19, 2011

Users guide to insulting ME

Okay, so we're all in agreement, there's nothing even vaguely offensive about cunts. There may come a time, though, when you want to insult me, even though I'm totally awesome and faultless and stuff - maybe that pisses you off. What are you gonna do? Obviously calling me a fucking cunt ain't gonna cut it.

Don't fret! My masochistic tendencies have compelled me to create a (non-exhaustive) list of words which I find offensive. Please use sparingly, I'm feeling fragile.

1. Cuddles

Ewwwwwwww! No I do not want to cuddle you coochie coochie coo.


You may hug me or hold me but if you think you're gonna start trying any of that 'cuddle' shit on I'll ask you to kindly exit the bed. Excellent break-up technique, future lovers! You won't be asked back.

2. Rotarian

Rotary is, of course, a pompous male-dominated business club designed to keep wealth in the hands of those who've had it forever under the guise of doing good deeds. Rotarians monopolise business activities in towns to the detriment of entrepreneurs who aren't white enough or old enough or male enough or boring enough to join their back-patting brethren. They do this while wearing hideous eye-hurting blazers and vests, adding injury to insult, you may say. Occasionally they put a natty little plaque on park bench.
In short, they suck. Call me one and I will punch you in the nose. Hard.

3. Boobies
An ex-lover referred to part of my anatomy in this manner. EX.


In the words of the inimitable Joan Jett: 'Girls have balls too, they're just higher up'. Start calling those balls 'boobies' and we'll prove it.

K. Think that's about all I can handle for today - I'm not a punching bag you know!

To be continued...

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

A cunt by any other name would taste as sweet


I've been getting my craft on a bit lately at Melbourne's Queer Stitch 'n' Bitch. It's held twice a month in Fitzroy, lovely people & all inclusive - even extending to stitch hacks like me . & look! I done made a thing already!

Check out their facebook group .x.