In Millitary Terms

Three waves of feminism… and in each and every wave there have been different aims and goals. Women fought for the vote, we won it... England gave women the vote on equal terms with men in 1928. Then of course there was the second wave, suddenly industrial and matrimonial rights were challenged. Did we not have the right to break away from the man-made institution of marriage? At third wave it becomes a little blurry, am I part of the third wave? Or was third wave more 80’s-90’s? I would definitely say the 90’s played a part either way, images of the Spice Girls and Riot Grrl spring to mind. Does this leave us with the tail end of Third wave or the beginnings of Fourth wave? There has been a distinct movement in this latter half of the 00’s towards a rise of feminism that leaves the water bubbling under the surface and beware any man who dares to step in our way. We have had Reclaim the Night Marches and Million Women Rise most recently, there are groups of feminists from the north to the south and ranging across the entire breadth of the UK.
We have made such huge gains, finally we can vote… we are taking control of our reproductive rights… women are infiltrating the spheres of music, politics, medicine, business in higher numbers than before. But when I stop and think about it, I am left far from satisfied. Things are not moving fast enough. The amount of discrimination and violence in this world, instigated by men towards women (and children) should drive the women of this world to greater and more powerful strengths. And yet sometimes I feel like we are dragging our feet in the dust. Of course we are fighting for different aims and goals but are we sticking to the tried and tested battlefields? I am by no means one to say feminism only began one hundred or so years ago… in my opinion feminism has been around as long as women have been around. But for all intensive purposes, feminism has only just begun to have an impact on the political face of things, yet with around one hundred and fifty years under our belt are we having enough of an impact?
There are so many eloquently, beautifully written books out there with pain stamped across each and every page that it seems obvious to me that men will not take notice of words. Who could not read “Desert Flower” and “Desert Dawn” by Waris Dirie and not want to put their whole being into fighting to end FGM? Who could not read “The Women’s Room” by Marilyn French and not feel that we owe our mothers something? Who could not watch “Iron Jawed Angels” and feel that there was something worth fighting for? At the very least, who could not read yet another Sun headline "Women murdered/raped/abducted" and not think something is going wrong? The media is now more readily available than ever before, it is not that men cannot access these things, it is that they choose to ignore them.
For this reason we need to change our battlefield, our battleplan… our amo and our armour. Men will not treat us as equals until they fear us and see that we pose a real threat, we must show them we mean business… that we are strong warriors and that we will not lie down defeated. I will win or die fighting because that is the only way it can be.



Lucy

Million Women Rise

English Language

It has been long acknowledged that a means of oppression is through language.
In studying 'The Tempest' by Shakespeare last year for my A levels, discussion arose around this theme and it is through language that Prospero is able to dominate Caliban, a simple and pure truth emerged: If you cannot name something, you cannot oppress it.

Recently the English language has been a main feature in my daily thinking… I feel it would be appropriate to point out obvious ‘glitches’ such as the use of titles and the perpetual insistence that we are all part of ‘mankind’. However there is a more frustrating and infuriating use of language of which I am not aware that other feminists have recognised. Every day women are faced with a barrage of male orientated language... “firemen,” “businessmen,” but of course there are modern female/gender neutral equivalents. However when it comes to words and phrases that are still predominantly male without a female counterpart, suddenly the word ‘woman’ is inserted. An example could be “woman teacher,” or “woman doctor,” this I feel is degrading and oppressive. Should we be judged by our gender above our profession or political bias?
The word ‘woman’ is a noun and nouns are not descriptive words. This is an obvious inequality because we do not say “man nurse,” or “man nanny,” we use the correct adjectives: “male nurse,” and “male nanny”. Nevertheless even if we ignore the overt grammatical errors, the sound of the phrasing is harsh and perhaps reflective on attitudes towards female professionals. The phrasing can accurately be compared to “get my washing done woman!” and “do as I say woman!”
In the thirties when racism common-place similar terminology was used to oppress and insult, people of darker skins were called “n*groes” which derives from the politically correct racial term to describe someone of African origin. The parallel is that the word ‘woman’ is not offensive in itself (minus the obvious dependency on the male equivalent), it is the usage of it that brings the oppression.
Therefore, let us keep our nouns in their correct places and use phrases such as “female teacher,” and “female doctor,” if it is absolutely necessary to highlight a professional’s gender.

Lucy

Did you know?

They mutilate little girls gentials in Africa. Did you know that? Did you know a third of women experience violence in their life times? Did you know fifty percent of sexually active women will be sexually abused in their lives? Did you know two women die every week from domestic violence? Did you know that their are now more licesenced lap dancing clubs than women's shelters? Did you know about the female infantacide in China and India?
Did you know that DESPITE THIS women consistently perform better at school. Did you know that DESPITE THIS the majority of the world's population are women? Did you know that DESPITE THIS two thousand women marched for women's rights on November 24th in London. Did you know that DESPITE THIS women live longer than men in all countries apart from one. Did you know that women do not commit sexual crimes? Did you know that women commit only 20% of other crimes? Did you know that there is still a 17% pay gap in the United Kingdom? Did you know that less than 5% of rapists are convicted in England? Did you know that it is still illegal for a women to fight on the front line? Did you know that women are banned from entering the Olympics in twenty sports? Did you know that women are not allowed to compeat professionally against men in sporting competitions from age tweleve upwards? Or did you just sit infront of your tv watching your Men's Football World Cup and not think about that? Did you know that some of the Men's Football World Cup Squad earnt as much as £250,000 per week when they were in Germany? Did you know the women earnt as little as £800 (combined) a day in China? Did you stop to think about the number of women trafficked over to Germany to cater for men's innately deserved SEXUAL NEEDS? Now what are you going to do?

A true story about Pornography

Once upon a time there was a little boy, his family loved him very much and he had a brother and a sister. Although he ate healthily he sometimes had chips and chocolate as treats! As this little boy grew up he and his friends started getting interested in football, they would talk about it whenever they could. The little boy used to enjoy watching his favourite football stars on television and every time he blew out the candles on his birthday cake he wished that one day he could be a famous footballer. When the little boy was eight his friends told him about ‘The Sun’, a newspaper that had a picture of a naked woman in, this was something the little boy had never thought about before, he thought all naked women looked like his mother and sister. Soon the little boy was very curious and when his friends dared him, he snuck into a newsagents and secretly opened the newspaper. What he saw made him feel very naughty and he enjoyed winning the dare, all of his friends thought he was really cool. After he had seen the naked woman the boy began to think about how other women would look like naked, he wanted to see another picture. When the little boy was eleven he used to like going onto the computer and chatting to some of his friends in senior school, some of his friends had heard older boys talking about looking at naked pictures of women on the internet and even watching people have sex. The little boy and his classmates weren’t taught any sex education because his teacher was too embarrassed, once they had been shown a condom and taught about body hair but the little boy wanted to see how adults had sex. When he was on the internet the little boy typed in “naked women” and “sex” into a search machine, suddenly millions of sites flashed up on the screen in less than a second. The excited little boy began clicking on some sites and without warning a lot of images that he didn’t want to see, forced themselves into his view. He saw women licking men’s penis’ and he saw men holding women down while other men put their penis’ inside them. He was both shocked and interested, he wrestled with his feelings because he despite his curiosity he didn’t like the images he was seeing. He logged off the computer and decided not to look at those kinds of internet sites again. A couple of months later the little boy gave into his curiosity and the things he heard his peers talking about at school and started looking at pictures of naked women having sex on the internet again. This time he was careful to only look up things that wouldn’t surprise him, for a while simply pictures of women in their underwear was nice to look at then as he grew older and his friends bought The Sun, Nuts and Zoo regularly this was not something that excited him anymore, he saw it everyday and it got boring. He wanted something naughtier and sexier, the people in Zoo wrote about “handjobs” and “blowjobs” although he didn’t know what these things were he typed them into a search engine and excitedly looked at all the pictures and videos of women touching men’s penis’ with their hands and mouths. Soon after this the little boy began to feel used to these images and videos, he wanted more, something that would excite him to greater realms of pleasure. He started to watch men and women having sex on the internet, he didn’t understand about consent or whether women really enjoyed what they did with the men, he had never been told or taught that it was something he should think about. The little boy eventually began to look at videos of a more extreme nature to fulfil his desire for sexual pleasure, in the same way a cannabis smoker has to smoke more and more to experience the same high, until he entertained himself watching women being raped by multiple men at once. He didn’t know it was rape because although the women said “no” and tried to push the men away they always had an orgasm. During this time the little boy was not really a little boy anymore, he was interested in the women at school and had had girlfriends. He didn’t know how to treat them and so he treated them the way he watched men treat women on the internet. Zoo told him that “women like to be dominated,” and so he would make his girlfriend give him oral sex, he copied what the men did on the internet and held her head and then thrusted into her mouth- he thought this was how normal people had sex.
One day the not so little boy was at a party, his best friend came up to him and told him an older man had given him a drug to give to women to “have a good time,” they thought this would be funny and picked out the drunkest girl in the room and put some of the drug into her drink. They took her into a separate room with some of their other friends who kept laughing at the way her head lolled and how she was dribbling down herself. The little boy thought it was so funny that she had got so drunk that she had let them put drugs in her drink. His best friend started unzipping his trousers and although the little boy didn’t really understand what was happening all the other boys were laughing and calling the girl a “slut,” and a “whore,” they said she was “asking for it,” and so the little boy stopped worrying and went along with his friends.


Pornography is immoral and dangerous because it is an addiction. It can be successfully compared to alcohol and drug abuse, however the difference is that an addiction to pornography hurts other primarily people. It teaches men that it is normal and acceptable to buy images of women and then throw away when finished with (The Sun, Nuts, Zoo) and eventually teaches men that they have an innate right to female flesh. I believe that pornography has a strong link to sexual abuse and rape. I have more than facts, figures and statistics to back this up.
I’m sure it may appear that a daily topless picture of a “glamour” model in national newspapers and ‘lad’s mags’ is harmless… but to the younger generation to whom sex education has been deemed by Ofstead “unnecessary,” this plays a huge part in their perspective of women and they grow up.Women are humans and deserve respect, I ask that men behave like men for once instead of pleasure hungry, hedonistic schoolboys. I ask that men treat women as they would treat their own sister or cousin, as a human worth knowing and spending time with rather than as a sexual object to be ogled, groped and eventually abused.