Women's Fightback, Feminism

“Police Sapphire teams strongly encourage women to drop rape cases... Police failed to believe victims”, reported the BBC news at the end of February. The report was linked to the case of a woman who reported a rape to Southwark police but was encouraged to drop the charges, the man later went on to murder his two children. A truly shocking case, but the many other times rape cases get dropped and police fail to believe victims do not make it into the mainstream news. It is a reality which won’t be unfamiliar to many women who have experienced reporting rape cases to the police, or who have...

Writing in Socialist Worker (5 March), timed for the SWP special conference, Judith Orr, with not-so-beautiful simplicity, explains how women’s oppression is rooted in class society. We agree with that, and with Orr’s subsequent argument that gender should not get in the way of a united fight against capitalism. But Orr’s basic picture leaves unexplained many complexities about capitalist exploitation and oppression worldwide: how the exact form of female oppression varies across geography and history; how human beings are “socialised” and gender and sexuality are constructed primarily, but...

The sixth “Million Women Rise” (MWR) demonstration in London on Saturday 9 March drew around 1,000 women. The march was lively, though smaller than last year’s. It included many contingents from migrant communities. The official placards read “Together we can end male violence”, but the chants went an unrealistic step further adding “in our lifetime”. The march assembled at Selfridges to march down Oxford Street, then through Soho before ending at Trafalgar Square. The march paused briefly in Soho since the sex trade is seen as a place especially symbolic of women’s oppression. The woman...

The London Student Feminist Network organised a conference on 23-24 February, Student Feminists 2013. Around 80 people attended on the first day, fewer on the second. The conference encompassed a variety of workshops, including ones on sex worker activism, Education for Choice and further education activism. Others were more experiential. A Workers’ Liberty/ Women’s Fightback session was on women education workers including information about Action for ESOL, the Postgraduate Workers’ Association and the 3 Cosas cleaners’ campaign. It is very positive that this initiative has been made, but in...

The “lad culture” (as seen in men’s magazines like Nuts) has been around for a long time. But it has recently taken a turn for the far worse with websites like Unilad, Truelad and others finding massive popularity on university campuses. Unilad (until it was forced through criticism to close down and reconstruct itself) existed to “push boundaries” with its “jokes” about humiliating women, and “tongue-in-cheek” advice about how to inflict sexual and other violence on women. All this at a time when according to a survey by the National Union of Students one in seven female students have been a...

The idea of “male gaze” flows from a psychoanalytical/philosophical theory brought into wider use by Jacques Lacan, but it is a huge subject and difficult to summarise. According to this theory, and to put it at its most crude, the “gaze” is the relationship between the subject’s desire to look and the knowledge that one can also be viewed. The idea is that in our desire to look, we realise we can be looked upon. Then we lose some of our ability to govern our own behaviour; this process is tied into the idea of ego. We change our behaviour in accordance with who we wish to be. Gaze theory...

On the evening of 16 December 2012, a young female student on a Delhi bus was gang-raped. Less than a fortnight later she died of her injuries. After new reports came out, something extraordinary happened: a layer of young, urban, educated, middle class people protested, others joined, and the demonstrations sustained, evolved and escalated. The early response of the Indian government was active disengagement, force — batons, tear gas, water cannons — and more conniving efforts to crush the protesters’ spirit (the woman was moved to Singapore, her funeral was hastily managed). But, after the...

What does it mean to be a feminist heroine in the 21st century? What does it mean to be a feminist? What does it mean to be a woman? These were the rather big questions that were going around my brain as I sat watching “Breaking Dawn: Part Two”, the last instalment of the Twilight Saga. According to some, “Twilight” is a story of female empowerment. In this last film, the heroine Bella Swan becomes a vampire, can fight to the death, and is stronger and faster than many of the men that surround her. Is this what it takes to be a feminist heroine? Who knows. There are certainly elements of the...

“Most people would come away shocked at what a moderate [Marx] was … if they read what Marx actually wrote.” So says Mary Gabriel, of people who would see Marx as (unjustifiably) responsible for the atrocities of the 20th century, committed in the name of communism. Mary Gabriel places Marx during the events about and for which he wrote, including the 1848 revolutions and the Paris Commune, and tells of his irreplaceable contribution to the International Working Men’s Association, afterwards known as the First International. But Marx was constantly torn between his devotion to his primary...