Feminist Current

Despite being a century into the women’s movement, it can, at times, feel as though progress has stalled. Indeed, old stereotypes about the roles men and women play in the home persist, and some recent reports show that a significant number of American millennials still believe that a male breadwinner and a woman who “takes care of the home and family” is the ideal family model. A 2015 poll commissioned by MTV found that 27 percent of males aged 14 to 24 felt women’s gains had come at the expense of men.

But why? The economic realities of American families and the American working class, including issues like a lack of paid parental leave, affordable daycare, benefits, and job security all factor in to the choices people make at home and at work. We are also facing a backlash against women’s rights, fueled in part by the Trump presidency and the far right.

In order to get a fuller picture, I spoke with Stephanie Coontz, whose article, “Do Millennial Men Want Stay-at-Home Wives?” appeared in the New York Times last month. Stephanie teaches history and family studies at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, is the director of research at the Council on Contemporary Families, and is the author of several books, including, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap and A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s.

Despite feminists’ best efforts, many people today believe that inequality between the sexes is natural, not cultural. They will often point to the behavior, clothing, or play of girls and boys to prove this; or they will point to hormones, like testosterone, as evidence that men are inherently violent, sexually aggressive, or more adventurous than women. Cordelia Fine’s work throws a wrench into all of that. In her new book, Testosterone Rex: Unmaking the Myths of Our Gendered Minds, Fine paints a far more complex picture of brains and the impacts of hormones on human beings.

Fine is a psychologist and is also the author of Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference. I spoke with her over the phone last week.

Today, pornography is inescapable. It shapes our self-image, our relationships, our sexualities — even our body hair removal practices. In academia, many media scholars have taken a non-critical approach to porn and third wave feminists have embraced it. If it feels like the pornographers have won, it’s because in many ways they have.

A new book edited by Dr. Heather Brunskell-Evans explores the impacts of the porn industry on critical media studies, popular discourse, and on our bodies and sexualities. Featuring chapters by feminist scholars like Julia Long, Sheila Jeffreys, Gail Dines, and Meagan Tyler, The Sexualized Body and the Medical Authority of Pornography offers a wide-ranging analysis of the various ways the propaganda of the porn industry has shaped our culture and lives.

Heather is a social theorist, philosopher, and Senior Research Fellow at King’s College in London. She is a National Spokesperson for the Women’s Equality Party Policy on Ending Sexual Violence and co-founder of Resist Porn Culture. As a trustee of FiLia, a feminist charity that aims to bring about change for girls and women, Heather is helping to organize this year’s Feminism in London conference, which is taking place on October 14th and 15th.

In this episode, I speak with her about the book as well as about the way discourse around pornography has changed over the years.

The Working Class Movement Library

When the Working Class Movement Library — a small, volunteer-run library in Salford, England that holds records and stories of working class people’s lives and activism — announced they would be hosting feminist journalist Julie Bindel as a speaker, they were hit with a barrage of posts and messages attacking Bindel and the library.

As is the trend these days, hundreds of people — many of whom were middle class college students and young white men — began petitioning the library to no-platform Bindel, claiming her work and feminist analysis constituted bigotry. They even went so far as to go after the library’s funding and funders.

While some petitioners may have disagreed with Bindel’s analysis of gender and sexuality under patriarchy, that disagreement was not framed as such. Rather, Bindel was called “transphobic,” “biphobic,” “Islamophobic,” “hateful,” and “anti-sex work.” She was labelled a “TERF,” which is a newly-popular term used to smear any woman who argues against gender as either internal or an individual choice, speaks about or politicizes her female body, or understands that patriarchy oppresses women, as a class, based on sex.

A subset of the UK Green Party called “LGBTIQA+Greens” took particular issue with a tweet wherein Bindel joked that her pronouns were “Martini/whitewine/Negroni.”

Pronouns – Martini/whitewine/Negroni.

— Julie Bindel (@bindelj) January 4, 2017

Bindel, who has campaigned on behalf of female victims of male violence and for gay rights throughout her career, was even accused of “violence.” Some protestors shouted “fascist” and “Nazi” at Bindel, her partner, and some other women attending the talk, as they walked into the library. When Bindel explained that this was very offensive, as her partner’s family lost family in the Holocaust, the protestors laughed.

This kind of hyperbole, wherein political analysis is framed as “violence” or some form of “phobia” has become commonplace among anti-feminist queer activists who defend their attacks on, and efforts to, silence feminists based on a claimed interest in transgender rights. Any ideas or analyses that challenge theirs are labelled as hatred and literal violence. Indeed, when the Vancouver Women’s Library opened on February 3rd, founders and volunteers were accused of “acts of violence,” on account of their purported connection to Canada’s longest standing rape crisis shelter, Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter, and for including texts challenging the sex industry in their catalogue. These kinds of attacks on women are too-often paired with (actual) threats of violence and misogynist slurs.

What’s glaringly clear is that women who support female victims of male violence and who articulate a basic feminist analysis of gender, patriarchy, and male-centered sexuality are to be not only silenced, but destroyed.

With all this over-the-top protest, one would think Bindel planned to address some deeply controversial issue in her talk. Rather, she was scheduled to speak as part of LGTB History Month about her experiences growing up as a working class lesbian.

Many women around the world voiced their support for Bindel’s work, political analysis, and her right to speak about her experience as a marginalized person, as well as in support of the library. Regardless of your opinion on every single article Bindel has published, lesbians and working class women (and, of course, females as a whole) are still very much oppressed in this world — erased, abused, marginalized, and silenced. The notion that no-platforming and vilifying feminists who speak out against violence, systemic oppression, and abuse is ever a progressive or ethical response is dangerously wrongheaded.

Luckily, the Working Class Movement Library did not cave to the aggressive pressure to cancel Bindel’s talk. The event went on as planned on February 4th and Bindel spoke, as always, with wit, bravery, and brilliance.

The Women’s March – Vancouver. (Photo: Jess Martin)

On January 21st, three million people across the globe — a majority of whom were women — took to the streets. A response to the election of Donald Trump, the initial Women’s March was set to take place in Washington, but sister marches spread across the globe. It turned out to be the largest demonstration in U.S. history.

While the organizers faced many critiques — some valid, some less so — the event was decidedly powerful.

In this episode, I speak with Lee Lakeman, who attended Vancouver’s sister March, to hear more about her perspective and experience of the event, her reflections on some of the critiques made, and to find direction on what can and should come next.

Lee has been a feminist activist for 40 years, fighting men’s violence against women. She has spent her adult life building the independent women’s movement in alliances against patriarchy, including capitalism and racism/imperialism. Lee is currently writing a history of the work of the women at Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter in resistance to patriarchy.

An upcoming event featuring Chris Hedges and Suzanne Jay, “After Trump and Pussy Hats,” will continue the conversation about next steps. The event will take place on Friday, March 3, 2017, at 6:30PM, at St Andrew’s-Wesley Church.

On January 21st, three million people across the globe — a majority of whom were women — took to the streets. A response to the election of Donald Trump, the initial Women’s March was set…

In Robert Jensen’s new book, The End of Patriachy: Radical Feminism for Men, he asks one question: “What do we need to create and maintain stable, decent human communities that can remain in a sustainable relationship with the larger world?” His answer is feminism.

The book puts forth a radical feminist challenge to institutionalized male dominance, offers a historical and social analysis of patriarchy itself, a critique of the sexual subordination of women, and a challenge to gender identity politics.

The End of Patriarchy isn’t only for men (it’s actually a great Radical Feminism 101 text), but in advocating a radical feminist analysis as foundational to undoing the institutionalized hierarchy that harms people and the planet, Jensen creates a powerful argument for men to adopt this approach.

In this episode, I speak with Robert Jensen about his book, current challenges to the movement, and how men can act as effective allies.

Robert is a professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas, a founding board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center, and a member of the board of Culture Reframed.

His forthcoming book, The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men, will be out in early 2017 from Spinifex Press.

Image: Women’s Liberation Front v. United States Facebook page

On August 11th, 2016, Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF) filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and U.S. Department of Education (DOE) in order to challenge their recent redefinition of “sex” in Title IX to include “gender identity.” These kinds of changes have been taking place across North America — in many cases “sex” is simply replaced by “gender identity,” as though they are one in the same. But what does this mean for women’s rights? And why are governments pushing through these policy changes so quickly, without consulting with the public?

In this episode, I speak with Kara Dansky, WoLF spokeswoman and board member, about the lawsuit and what’s at stake. Kara is a lawyer, policy analyst, radical feminist, and the Founder and Managing Director of One Thousand Arms — a consulting firm committed to dismantling racism.

Sarah Slamen

On November 8th, American voters elected, not the first female president of the United States — an exceedingly qualified, tough, smart woman named Hillary Rodham Clinton — but a sociopathic reality TV star whose racism, misogyny, and stubborn ignorance made his run seem like little more than a bad joke… Until it was too late.

With many of us still reeling at this new reality in the U.S., we’re wondering how this happened and what to do next.

In this episode, I speak with Sarah Slamen, a political consultant and women’s rights activist based out of Houston, Texas. Sarah worked for Bernie Sanders and cast a vote on Tuesday for Hillary Clinton.

In September, NBC greenlit a sitcom called Mail Order Family. The plot would center around a widowed single father who orders a mail-order bride from the Philippines to help raise his two preteen daughters. Online backlash was swift, as people asked what was so funny about the exploitation of marginalized Filipino women, so plans to produce the show were cancelled, but that doesn’t mean the issue of mail-order brides and the racist stereotypes that surround them have gone away.

Charlene Sayo was part of a team from the Philippine Women Centre of B.C. (PWC) that conducted a study on Filipino women who came to Canada, either explicitly as mail-order brides or via the caregiver program (previously called the live-in caregiver program), who were now living in provinces across Canada — often isolated in rural areas — with their new husbands and families. The PWC includes domestic workers, mail-order brides, prostituted women, as well as other Filipino women who are forced to emigrate as part of globalization under the umbrella of trafficking.

In this episode, I speak with Charlene about these programs, as well the stereotypes and the struggles Filipino women face today in Canada and beyond.

Charlene Sayo is blogger, commentator, and co-author of Canada: The New Frontier for Filipino Mail-Order Brides. She also hosts MsRepresent: Behind the Face, A Fierce Woman.