Feminist Current

Too often, when women are not interested in sex at the same levels their male partners are, they are told either that there is something wrong with them or that they are obligated to find a way to meet men’s desires. Friends instruct us to engage in “maintenance sex” in order to keep our male partners happy. Women are told they are cruel or bad partners if they don’t have sex with their boyfriends and husbands “enough” or in the ways requested of them. In sex advice columns and self help books, as well as in sex therapy, women are often instructed to watch pornography with their partners or are told there must be something wrong with their relationship because they don’t show interest (or the correct level of interest) in penetrative, heteronormative sex. Somehow, it is always women who are the problem — dysfunctional, prudish, selfish, or lazy.

To learn more about the ways sex therapy, sex advice, and sexology more broadly reinforce ideas that harm women and perpetuate rape culture, I spoke with Dr Meagan Tyler, a Senior Lecturer at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia.

Meagan is the author of Selling Sex Short: The sexological and pornographic construction of women’s sexuality in the West and co-editor of Freedom Fallacy: The limits of liberal feminism. You can follow her @drmeagantyler.

Transgenderism is often discussed in terms of personal identity — a person expressing themselves, becoming their true self, connecting their outer persona to an internal feeling, etc. — but what about those around them? What happens when a woman’s heterosexual partner decides he is, in fact, a woman? How does this impact the relationship?

In this episode, I speak with a woman who saw and experienced this firsthand. In a relationship with her husband for 14 years, Shannon Thrace’s life went into turmoil when her husband decided he was, in fact, a transwoman. She describes the extreme changes to his personality as well as the painful impacts on their relationship and on her life.

Shannon is a grad student, writer, and IT professional. She is currently writing a memoir, tentatively titled, 18 Months, about her marriage to and divorce from a transgender person.

I spoke with her over the phone from her home in the Midwest.

Girls learn, from the time they are young, to hate their bodies. We learn to focus on and work to fix so-called “flaws” — everything from weight to wrinkles to body hair to skin “imperfections.” Once we hit puberty, things often become worse, as men begin to gaze at, comment on, or grope our bodies, now sexualized and deemed available for public consumption. Considering that these messages are so widespread in culture, what can mothers of daughters do to try to counteract this learned self-hatred and self-objectification? What does it mean to love our bodies under patriarchy? Is it even possible?

In her new book, Mothers, Daughters, and Body Image: Learning to Love Ourselves as We Are, Hillary McBride, a registered clinical counsellor and our resident feminist therapist, looks at these issues and shares her own story of dealing with an eating disorder.

In this episode, I speak with her about all this, as well as about what it means to approach therapy from a feminist perspective.

 “Male violence against women is still considered a distraction [by the male left], rather than a fundamental oppression that the left has to deal with.” — Daisy Kler

We talk about intersectionality a lot these days, but what does it really mean to combine our analysis of race, class, and gender? While we know women from all walks of life suffer male violence, how are working class women and women of colour impacted particularly? How has the activism of Indigenous women and other feminist groups in Canada made a difference, in terms of understanding the reality of male violence? And moreover, why has the left failed to effectively analyze and challenge sex based oppression and male violence, despite its interest in ending systems of oppression and building an equitable, just society?

In this episode, I speak with Daisy Kler, a collective member at Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter and the founder of South Asian Women Against Male Violence. Vancouver Rape Relief is Canada’s first rape crisis line and runs a transition house for battered women and their children. Daisy has worked there for over 18 years. In those years she has played a role in training and maintaining volunteers and as a media spokesperson. She now assists in operating the rape crisis line and transition house. In recent years she was voted one of the 100 most influential Indo-Canadians in British Columbia. Daisy is a proud Punjabi whose paternal grandfather came to work here in 1905. She is rooted in the history of Vancouver’s South Asian immigrants and continues to fight for all women’s equality.

In 2003, Andrea Dworkin wrote, “The world was sleeping and Kate Millett woke it up.” Indeed, Kate Millett was a game changer. In 1970, she published Sexual Politics, which catapulted her to fame, both in and out of the feminist movement. The New York Times called the book “the Bible of Women’s Liberation”, and her publisher, Doubleday, said it was one of the ten most important books they published in the 20th century. In it, Kate argued that male supremacy relies on “the acceptance of a value system which is not biological.” Indeed, her arguments underpin our understanding of feminism today: that “sex is a status category with political implications” and that society, as we know it, is founded on a lie “that insists that gender stereotypes are natural rather than cultural.” Sexual Politics destroyed the idea that social sex roles were determined by biology. Gender, Kate argued, was socially determined, ideologically reinforced by a system of male dominance called “patriarchy.”

An unforgettable feminist icon who paved the way for the rest of us, Kate died on September 6th, while in Paris with her spouse, Sophie Keir. It would have been her 83rd birthday on September 14th.

I spoke with Kate’s longtime friend, Eleanor Pam, about Kate’s life and work, over the phone from her home in New York.

Eleanor Pam was an early feminist pioneer and joined the National Organization For Women in 1966 with Kate Millett where, together, they founded and led NOW’s first Education Committee. She is currently the President of the Veteran Feminists of America, an organization of women who pioneered the modern American women’s movement. Eleanor is also a passionate advocate for women in prison who exposes and speaks out against gender discrimination, guard brutality, sexual harassment, and rape in the Corrections and Criminal Justice systems.

In this episode, I speak with Ninotchka Rosca, an incredibly accomplished activist and writer from the Phillippines. She is the author of six books, including two bestselling novels — The State of War and Twice Blessed (which won the 1993 American Book Award for Excellence in Literature) — a two-time recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and has written for numerous magazines and websites. She was a political prisoner under the dictatorial government of Ferdinand Marcos and went on to work with Amnesty International and the PEN American Center, drafting statements on women and human rights at the UN’s Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing and the UN’s World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna. A powerful anti-prostitution advocate, Ninotchka was press secretary of the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery which convicted Japan’s wartime era leadership for enslaving and exploiting Asian “comfort women.”

Ninotchka founded and was the first chairperson of Gabriela Network, a US-based organization of women and women’s rights advocates supporting the Philippine women’s movement, which eventually became AF3IRM, a transnational feminist organization. AF3IRM’s national summit will be held on October 21st in New York City, and will look at the foundational ideas of American feminism — concepts and wisdom drawn from the tribal societies of this continent, particularly the Iroquois, with whom pioneers of the American women’s movement were in touch.

I spoke with Ninotchka over the phone from her home in New York.

Women’s bodies have always been have always been the focal point of patriarchy. Liberals and conservatives alike have both worked to ensure women don’t have bodily autonomy. As a result of patriarchy, women’s knowledge of and control over their own bodies has been wrested from us. We are forced to depend on male legislators, a male-dominated medical establishment, and Big Pharma, and woman-centered knowledge and practices, like self-abortion, menstrual extraction, other alternative forms of birth control, and woman-centered birth practices, are no longer common knowledge. While feminism has fought for women’s reproductive rights  — for access to things like abortion and the pill — Mary Lou Singleton says we need to look beyond rights, and towards sovereignty.

Mary Lou is a midwife, nurse practitioner, reproductive sovereignty activist, and founder of Personhood for Women. I had the pleasure of watching her present at this year’s WoLF Fest, and spoke with her over the phone last week, from her home in New Mexico.

Women’s reproductive rights are under attack, yet again. In the United States, women are being jailed, physically violated, traumatized, endangered, and even dying as a result of increasing restrictions on abortion rights and limited control over their reproductive health. A new documentary, Birthright: A War Story, tells the stories of real women who have become collateral damage in the aggressive campaign to control women’s bodies and reproductive capacity.

In this episode, I speak with the director of Birthright, Civia Tamarkin, about the film and the horrifying reality of women living in the United States today.

Birthright: A War Story premieres today in New York City. To find a screening near you, visit birthrightfilm.com.

The feminist movement is still going strong, though today’s young third wave feminists could learn a thing or two from the activists of decades past. In her book, Radical Feminism: Feminist Activism in Movement, Finn Mackay delves into the history of radical feminist activism; exploring struggles, debates, and triumphs. A longtime activist herself, Mackay founded the London Feminist Network and revived the London Reclaim the Night in 2004, sparking a national resurgence of the protest march.

The book draws upon interviews with activist women Mackay conducted for her doctoral research, offering readers inspirational and educational accounts of grassroots, revolutionary feminist activism. She addresses key controversies and debates, including the question of whether men should be permitted to participate in Reclaim the Night marches. The book is not just a historic account, though, as Mackay also demonstrates how patriarchal oppression continues to manifest itself and why radical feminism is still needed today.

After a career in policy work on domestic violence prevention, Mackay is now Lecturer in Sociology at the University of the West of England, UK. Radical Feminism: Feminist Activism in Movement was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2015.

I spoke with her over the phone last week.

“I don’t see technology as neutral — I see technology as driven by cultural forces. And the cultural forces that are driving this technology is the commercial [sex] trade.” — Kathleen Richardson

Kathleen Richardson launched the Campaign Against Sex Robots, but her aims are actually much broader than humanoids built for male pleasure. Richardson is an abolitionist, and sees sex robots as very much connected to the sex trade and a larger culture that treats people as tools and objects. Through the campaign, she says, she wants to “radically disconnect the idea of sex from rape.”

Sex robots have been in the media lately on account of a new prototype, developed by the Matt McMullen, the CEO of Abyss Creations and the man behind RealDoll. A recent report in The Guardian introduces us to “Harmony,” a humanoid that exists to service men. She is programmable, so that customers can choose certain “personality traits,” as well as physical details, like nipple size, colour, and shape. Harmony exists not only as a thing to-be-fucked, but as an ego boost for her owner, as she learns details about him, so her communication is wholly centered around his needs and interests.

While some claim sex robots are a solution to everything from rape to prostitution, Kathleen argues that sex robots exacerbate these problems.

Kathleen is Senior Research Fellow in Ethics of Robotics at De Montfort University, Leicester, the author of An Anthropology of Robots and AI: Annihilation Anxiety and Machines, and the director of the Campaign Against Sex Robots.

I spoke with Kathleen over the phone this week from her home in England.