I like socialist feminism, hardcore punk, riot grrrl, arguing, chinese food, pirates, punk girls, revolutionary socialist boys, tattoos, customising my clothes, stretching my piercings, comics and singing along to Sick Of It All.
Email me: volsunga [at] gmail [dot] com
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I read this in a debate about transwomen feminists at I Blame The Patriarchy
Gender neutral | January 15th, 2007 | 1 Comment »Hint #1: The little skirted stick figure on the bathroom door doesn’t have magical powers. If a pervert wanted to go into the women’s bathroom to ogle or harass, he can still do it even if you relentlessly beat out all the transwomen who just want to pee in peace.
Special Bolshevik love to anyone who can tell me why my site looks fine in firefox, but in IE the writing is all centered and wrong…
IE help | January 1st, 2007 | 3 Comments »What I’ve been doing since I haven’t been blogging (or working);
Bleaching my hair back to red with blonde bits
Breaking in my new biker boots
Teaching my boy to talk Yorkshire like
Entertaining small children with Meccano and Playdough
Trying to get Playdough out of my hair
Reading celebrity magazines, State and Revolution and Porno
Making a tiara
I’ve nearly bitten through my knuckles already. Some of the more reactionary statements from the relatives;
- “People on benefits are all (*all* - no exceptions, even me) waster scum”
- On our half-Chinese neighbour - “well, first time I met him I though ‘illegal immigrant’ but he’s actually quite a nice man, considering”
- “The war in Afghanistan is all about stopping drugs coming to this country to feed all these junkies”
- On Brixton - “doesn’t it scare you, being a minority in your own country?”
Will I even make it to New Year without killing someone…?
Christmas in WASP hell | December 24th, 2006 | 5 Comments »Song Against Natural Selection
The weak survive!
A man with a damaged arm,
a house missing a single brick, one step
torn away from the other steps
the way I was once torn away
from you; this hurts us, it
isn’t what we’d imagined, what
we’d hoped for when we were young
and still hoping for, still imagining things,
but we manage, we survive. Sure,
losing is hard work, one limb severed
at a time makes it that much harder
to get around the city, another word
dropped from our vocabularies
and the remaining words are that much heavier
on our tongues, that much further
from ourselves, and yet people
go on talking, speech survives.
It isn’t easy giving up limbs,
trying to manage with that much
less to eat each week, that much more
money we know we’ll never make,
things we not only can’t buy, but
can’t afford to look at in the stores;
this hurts us, and yet we manage, we survive
so that losing itself becomes a kind
of song, our song, our only witness
to the way we die, one day at a time;
a leg severed, a word buried: this
is how we recognize ourselves, and why.
- Edward Hirsch
Song Against Natural Selection - Edward Hirsch | December 15th, 2006 | 1 Comment »The IUSW press release;
More on Ipswich murders | December 13th, 2006 | 1 Comment »International Union Of Sex Workers calls for decriminalisation of sex work to increase worker safety
The confirmed murders of three prostitutes in the Ipswich area and concerns for a missing fourth highlight the desperate need for decriminalisation of sex work, states the International Union of Sex Workers (IUSW).
“Sex workers are currently forced into dangerous working situations by the illegality surrounding their profession, and do not feel able to report offences or concerns to police for fear of arrest,” says Ana Lopes, President of the IUSW. “ASBOs and proposed laws to criminalise clients are forcing them into increasingly vulnerable situations. Decriminalisation would allow them to work safely and be protected by European labour laws. It is also an essential starting point to reducing stigma against sex workers which leads to their being even more vulnerable to attack.”
Prostitutes need safe areas in which to work, be that safety zones on the streets or brothels where they can work together indoors. “Sex workers are part of the community and should be treated as such, not as a public disorder problem,” Lopes states. “We believe ways can be found to manage street sex work through cooperation with workers so that any inconvenience to the community is minimised. Police forces need to develop strategies to decrease violence in cooperation with workers, groups and unions such as ourselves, and the local community.”
The IUSW supports the English Collective of Prostitutes’ calls for a police amnesty to allow prostitutes to come forward with possible information about the murders without fear of arrest, but urges that this be extended into a new framework through decriminalization whereby sex workers are always free to report concerns to police. Financial support and cooperation is also needed from government and police forces to support sex work projects running Ugly Mug schemes (early warning systems about violent clients for sex workers).
International human rights and workers rights laws, already in place, must be applied to sex workers as much as to other members of society, the IUSW states. The Declaration of the Rights of Sex Workers in Europe, endorsed in the European Parliament in Brussels in October 2005, identifies human and labour rights that sex workers are entitled to under international law. These include: the right to life; the right to liberty and security of person; the right to be protected against violence, physical injury, threats and intimidation; the right to equal protection of the law; and the right to work, to free choice of employment and just and favourable conditions of work.
The Sex Workers in Europe Manifesto, endorsed at the same time, represents the voices of sex workers from across Europe. It states:
“We condemn the hypocrisy within our societies where our services are used but our activities are criminalised and legislation results in our exploitation and lack of control over our work and lives.” The Manifesto calls for the establishment of designated areas for street prostitution to enable those who work in public places to do so safely.
Lopes comments, “December 17th is the fourth International Day To End Violence Against Sex Workers, the marking of which will be particularly poignant in the light of recent events. These murders highlight how urgent the need is to reassess the law and society’s view of sex workers to ensure they enjoy the same rights as the rest of their communities. ”
For further comment please contact:
Rose Conroy, GMB Press & Media for London Region, on Rosie.Conroy@ gmb.org.uk, tel. 07974 251823
IUSW President Ana Lopes on ana@iusw.org, tel. 00351917162817
The Declaration of the Rights of Sex Workers in Europe and Sex Workers in Europe Manifesto can be found at www.sexworkeurope. org
I got this press release from the English Collective of Prostitutes a few days ago, about the killings of three prostitutes in Ipswich;
When prostitute women are not safe, no woman is safe
Gemma Adams and a woman the police believe to be Tania Nicol, have now both been found tragically murdered in Ipswich. We pass our deepest condolences to their loved ones. A number of women also working as sex workers have gone missing in the area in recent years. In order to save lives and not to repeat the horror of the Yorkshire Ripper, who was allowed to continue killing until 13 women had been murdered, the Suffolk police must not use the criminality imposed on sex workers by the prostitution laws as an excuse to deny women the protection we are
all entitled to by law.We demand:
* an immediate temporary amnesty from arrest for prostitute women and clients so that anyone can come forward to give information to this inquiry without fear of criminalisation or harassment; (Previously, women with outstanding arrest warrants either couldn’t contact the police or when they did were arrested. (See Criminalisation: the price women and children pay, English Collective of Prostitutes response to the government’s review of the prostitution laws, December 2004)* an end to street sweeps, arrests and ASBOs against prostitute women and clients which have forced women into darker, more isolated areas making them more vulnerable to rape, violence and even murder. Women working under increased pressure are less able to look out for each other, have less time to check out clients and are forced to take more risks;
* a change in police priorities; money and resources being used to prosecute women and clients for consenting sex must be re-directed into vigorously pursuing violent men and protection of all women
following the example of New Zealand, decriminalisation of the prostitution laws, which by criminalising sex workers signal that women’s lives are not worth much. The police and courts don’t protect women and violent men think they can get away with attacks.
The police are telling women to look out for each other and come forward with information. But whatever safety systems that women have and will work out among themselves, they can never substitute for the police doing the job that the public overwhelmingly wants them to do – protect sex workers from rape and other attacks.
Over 70% of prostitute women are mothers. As poverty, homelessness and debt go up and women’s wages go down, more women (especially with Xmas round the corner) are forced into prostitution to support themselves and their families. Every woman is some mother’s daughter, someone’s sister, aunt, beloved friend . . . Every life is of value.
The subheadline on the front page of the Guardian website today is Police urge town’s sex workers to stay off streets as fourth prostitute is reported missing. .
Sex workers in and around Ipswich now have a choice - stop being able to support themselves and their families, or risk being murdered. The police reports would have us think these are the only two options; where prostitution isn’t legal, it’s not like sex workers are going to be given police protection to carry out their work when under the threat of attack. Any abolitionist feminists want to defend that?
Sex workers murdered in Ipswich | December 11th, 2006 | 3 Comments »Julie Bindel irritates me. She’s written this piece about lesbian motherhood in the Guardian today, in response to the news that Mary Cheney is pregnant. So far, so good; of course it’s basically quite funny that the religious nutjobs are giving the Bush administration grief over this, and their homophobia is unfounded, and all the usual stuff about why lesbians don’t make bad mothers by virtue of the sexuality. But this bit really really misses the point;
Although I find the homophobes’ attitude towards lesbian pregnancy and motherhood utterly abhorrent, then, I still believe that lesbians were not really made to breed. Why? Because lesbian feminists have traditionally provided a critical analysis of heterosexual family life, pointing up the fact that it is oppressive to women, and limits their opportunities. The lesbian mothers I know are always knackered, broke, and can never come out to play spontaneously because they have to organise childcare.
This seems to imply that the oppressive nature of the family is a direct result of heterosexuality; that lesbians aren’t made to breed because lesbians are inherently carefree. Nothing to do with living in a capitalist society which takes full advantage of the nuclear family unit to produce a new generation privately, in the home, for free. Nothing to do with the lack of free, publicly-funded, universal childcare and a strong welfare state then. Nope, lesbians who have children are oppressed because they become like straight people.
Bindel goes on to bemoan the fact that “even more are emulating heterosexual couples by forming conventional family units”. I think it’d be pretty good if people decided to stop living in nuclear units. But there’s a lot more to the reasons why we do than heterosexuality, and it’ll take a lot more than a few people making decisions to reject family units to rid society of them. Perhaps Julie Bindel can kickstart a campaign for better childcare for people of all sexualities, for a start…
Julie Bindel on Motherhood | December 8th, 2006 | No Comments »Eventually I’m going to find something to write here, but right now my hands are so cold they might actually develop chilblains and I’m wishing someone would market warm Red Bull, mulled wine style. Just read this;
“Capital comes into the world dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” - Karl Marx
Capital | December 6th, 2006 | No Comments »Her News
You paused for a moment and I heard you smoking
on the other end of the line.
I pictured your expression,
one eye screwed shut against the smoke
as you waited for my reaction.
I was waiting for it myself, a list of my own news
gone suddenly cold in my hand.
Supposing my wife found out, what would happen then?
Would I have to leave her and marry you now?
Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad,
starting again with someone new, finding a new place,
pretending the best was yet to come.
It might even be fun,
playing the family man, walking around in the park
full of righteous indignation.
But no, I couldn’t go through all that again,
not without my own wife being there,
not without her getting cross about everything.
Perhaps she wouldn’t mind about the baby,
then we could buy a house in the country
and all move in together.
That sounded like a better idea.
Now that I’d been caught at last, a wave of relief
swept over me. I was just considering
a shed in the garden with a radio and a day bed,
when I remembered I hadn’t seen you for over a year.
“Congratulations,” I said. “When’s it due?”
- Hugo Williams
Her News - Hugo Williams | December 5th, 2006 | No Comments »— Next Page »