The radical left needs to be a safe space for women

The Hand Mirror, Anarchia and Capitalism Bad Tree Pretty have all published a statement about Omar Hamed and his repeated sexually predatory behaviour.

I know that lots of people are going to complain that making this information public is unfair to Omar, and that it damages the radical left. So first of all I want to respond to those criticisms. Making it public knowledge that Omar has a habit of ignoring (lack of) sexual consent and preying on women who are drunk is not about persecuting Omar, it’s about keeping other people safe. It’s about making sure that people can make their own decisions about what their boundaries are around Omar, whether or not they want to work with him, socialise with him, get drunk with him.

Making it public knowledge that a man who plays a prominent role in the radical left movement has a habit of ignoring (lack of) sexual consent and preying on women who are drunk doesn’t damage that movement. What damages the radical left is when sexual assault isn’t taken seriously, when survivors of abuse are blamed or discredited, and when people keep quiet about sexual assault because they think it will damage the ‘movement’ to talk about it.

So I want to say thank you to Maia and Asher for publishing the statement, I think it was a really brave thing to do.

And I want to reccommend some reading material too:

Asher has written a lot about people’s responses to the statement.

Grumblings and gravity writes about her own experience dealing with a close friend who was abusive to his partner, and about Omar as well.

Kim has also written about Omar, and about community based justice in He Hōaka, and her article on supporting survivors of abuse in imminent rebellion 9 should be compulsory reading for leftists.

Bamboo writes about the way the left has failed to deal with gendered abuse in both mellow yellow and imminent rebellion 11.

Finally, what I wrote about abusive relationships earlier this year is equally relevant to Omar’s behaviour and the way various left activists have responded.

Uphold rape culture: become a cop

If you walk down K Rd in Auckland, towards Ponsonby Rd, you will see a mural depicting a man running away from two women police officers and the caption ‘do something extraordinary, become a cop’. The mural is part of a stencil art advertising campaign by M&C Saatchi, and it was painted by the street artist Otis Frizzell.

You may think it’s a little strange for the police to use street art to recruit new employees considering part of the job description is to arrest street artists. Apparently that’s the point. They are trying to appeal to ‘culturally aware and savvy young people’.

There’s also another sub-text here that isn’t mentioned by the Herald. Both the K Rd mural and the mural in Left Bank in Wellington show women cops. The message is very clear: if you are a woman then becoming a police officer is a way you can be strong and empowered. You can chase bad guys. You can protect children.

In the last decade the New Zealand police has been exposed as an institution that upholds rape culture. Cops have raped women in New Zealand. Other cops have protected their cop rapist mates. The police have a reputation for being a sexist institution and it’s not surprising they’re trying to address it with a fancy PR campaign.

But a fancy PR campaign doesn’t actually change an entrenched culture of sexism. Having women cops doesn’t equate to having feminist cops. It doesn’t mean those women cops aren’t upholding rape culture too.

A few weeks before the cop recruitment murals went up around the country, a few of my friends (for the purpose of anonymity we’ll call them Ms. Kaos, Ms. Calamity and Ms. Cannonball) were hanging out in an alleyway off K Rd drinking cider.

It wasn’t long before some cops showed up. In fact five whole units showed up to deal with three young women drinking quietly in a liquor ban area which makes you think those better work stories you get by joining the police force probably aren’t all that interesting.

One of the cops approached my friends. As chance would have it, she was one of the very same woman cops immortalised in Mr. Frizzell’s artwork. From Ms. Kaos’s account of events I gather the conversation went something like this:

Cop: What are you doing hanging out in this alleyway?

Kaos: What do you mean? Why shouldn’t I hang out in this alleyway?

Cop: Are you stupid? Do you know what could happen to you here?

Kaos: Tell me what you mean? What is it that could happen to me here?

Cop: You could be raped.

Now anyone who pays any attention to how sexual violence happens in our culture would be able to tell this cop that statistically Kaos is not very likely to be raped in the street with two of her friends around. She’s far more likely to be raped at home by her partner.

Which is beside the point, because I’m not about to say to a woman, ‘what are you doing being in a relationship with a man? Are you stupid? Don’t you know he might rape you?’ any more than I would say the same to a woman who is standing alone in a dark alleyway. Anyone with any feminist analysis of sexual violence understands that rape is always the rapist’s fault, not the survivor’s. Telling young women how to not get raped will not protect them from being raped. It just reinforces rape culture, it reinforces a culture where perpetrators of rape aren’t held accountable, because we think the person they raped is irresponsible for getting herself into a situation where she could be raped.

This reminds me of Michael Sanguinetti, the Canadian cop who famously told a group of students that women can avoid rape by not dressing like sluts, and unwittingly gave birth to Slutwalk.

It would be disingenuous of me to say that police officers should know better than to spout rape myths, because I don’t think that the police is an institution that can be reformed. I don’t think that feminists can work within the police to achieve feminist goals. I think giving any group of people the kind of power that cops have is bound to end with that power being abused. I’m an anarchist; I want to abolish the cops along with the state whose laws they uphold.

A hip new advertising campaign isn’t going to change that.

One more news story to get outraged about

If you live in New Zealand you’ve probably read the article on Stuff yesterday about the British woman who is being deported because she left her abusive husband:

Timmons and her ex-husband, a plumber, and their two children arrived from London in 2007. He was granted a work permit and, in September 2008, lodged a residence application for the entire family under the skilled migrant category. Immigration New Zealand approved it in principle in February 2009.

The couple needed to send in their passports and a $1050 fee but Timmons left her husband before the process was completed. As a result, she and the children were illegal immigrants, and she was told she had to leave the country.

This news makes me think three things:

Thing one: Charmain Timmons’s appeal to the Immigration and Protection Tribunal was denied because there are ‘no exceptional circumstances of a humanitarian nature that would make it unjust or unduly harsh for the appellant to be removed’. This is one more example of how domestic violence and abuse is seen as a personal issue, not a political or humanitarian issue.

Thing two: Timmons has had a lot of public support from people who have power and influence in New Zealand, like MP Nathan Guy and Kapiti Coast District Mayor Jenny Rowan. This is a lot more support than most women in her position receive. Of course, Timmons is a White woman from an Anglophone Western country. Most women who are deported from New Zealand after leaving an abusive marriage are Women of Colour from Majority World countries. Most of the time their cases don’t even make it into the media. Which is not to say that Charmain Timmons doesn’t deserve all the support she can get — but there are many other women who also deserve it. This case isn’t an exception, it’s more a norm.

Thing three: National borders and immigration laws are aimed at excluding people who are vulnerable and marginalised. Sexism is structural in nature and is upheld by the legal system. Patriarchy and the state reinforce each other. Not exactly a groundbreaking insight.

Slutting around

I’ve been wanting to write something about Slutwalk for a while now, and putting it off because I have so many complex and conflicting ideas on it I think it’ll be a neverending rant.

There’s been a bunch of critiques of Slutwalk all over the interweb that have seriously resonated with me. Then there was this opinion piece, which reminded me why Slutwalk is actually really relevant:

‘But suddenly the women who had worn the dungarees – or perhaps the daughters of the women who had worn the dungarees – said they were still feminists, but that they were something called “new feminists”. This meant that they still wanted to be treated as equals by men, but that now they could wear very, very short skirts, and very, very low tops, and very, very high heels.’

Well let me clarify: I am not a ‘new’ feminist. I am the regular old fashioned kind of feminist. The kind that thinks women should have autonomy over our own bodies, and that this extends to choosing our own wardrobes. There is nothing new about the notion that feminism is a political stance, not a fashion statement.

‘It must be quite hard for [men] to tell the difference between the women who join “SlutWalks” and the ones who want to drink a lot of alcohol in nightclubs and maybe have sex with a stranger.’

There is a clusterfuck of sexist assumptions here. Starting with the assumption that women who wear revealing clothes do so because they want to have sex with strange men, moving on to the assumption that women who want to have sex with strange men are not feminists, and finishing back at the assumption that women who wear dungarees never want to have sex with strange men.

This is victim blaming rhetoric. The implication is that women who dress in ‘short skirts, low tops and high heels’ are doing so because they want sexual attention, and that because they want sexual attention they are inviting sexual harassment or assault.

This really pisses me off, because it reinforces the idea that women should have to choose: that we should have to choose between being virgins or whores, that we should have to choose between never saying yes to sex and never saying no, that we should have to choose between never getting laid and being raped, that we should have to choose between being appreciated for our intelligence and talent and being appreciated for how hot damn sexy we are.

I’m not willing to settle for these crappy choices. I want to have sex when I want, how I want, with who I want (when and how they want).

And I will fight like hell for everyone’s freedom to do the same. Because I’m a fucking feminist. Not a new feminist, just the regular old fashioned kind.

An abusive relationship is a moving train

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the ways that revolutionaries address misogynist sexual and intimate abuse[1]. In the ten years that I’ve been involved in revolutionary activism I’ve seen so many instances of abuse perpetrated by men against women, particularly abuse within sexual relationships. Sometimes this abuse is subtle and hard to identify: a pattern of emotional and psychological manipulation and control. Sometimes it’s not subtle at all: I know women who have been severely beaten by their socialist or anarchist partners. I know socialist and anarchist men who have raped women.

All of these situations have been different, but I think the common thread is that every time a woman has been brave enough to come out as a survivor of abuse, to expose a man who abused her, there have been some fucked up responses from people around her. People who are revolutionary activists dedicated to building a society based on justice sometimes don’t see how the injustice of misogynist abuse fits into their political struggle, because maybe they don’t think that intimate relationships, and the abuse that can happen within them, are a political issue.

One thing that always strikes me is the emphasis people put on having a ‘neutral’ view of the situation. For example they might argue that there are two sides of the story, and that both the abuser and the survivor’s side of the story should be given equal weight. Or they might try to set up a police style investigation, where the person who was abused is expected to reveal all the awful details of everything she went through so that the rest of her community can judge whether what happened to her was really abuse. Often people will refer to the ‘allegations’ of abuse, and insist on referring to the perpetrator as an ‘alleged’ abuser.

I think this is a strange response, because anarchists (and other revolutionary leftists) don’t really take a ‘neutral’ approach to any other political issue. For example I haven’t heard any of my comrades refer to George W. Bush as an ‘alleged’ war criminal, or demand that we wait until he is given a fair trial before we pass any judgment on his imperialist invasions. I haven’t heard any of my comrades withhold solidarity with striking workers because they haven’t yet heard the boss’s side of the story. When Rebel Press published The day the raids came: Stories of survival and resistance to the state terror raids, no one thought to criticize us for not telling Annette King and Aaron Pascoe’s stories alongside the stories of the people the New Zealand state terrorized as part of Operation Eight.

Leftwing Revolutionaries don’t usually take a neutral position on political issues. This is because we recognize that you can’t be neutral on a moving train. Standing aside while somebody is being oppressed is allowing oppression to continue. If you don’t stand solid with the oppressed you are taking the side of the oppressor. This applies to imperialist Western states bombing majority world peoples, it applies to capitalists getting rich off the labour of workers, it applies to the state using force to repress activists, and it also applies to men, even revolutionary men, who abuse women.

Because an abusive relationship is a moving train.

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[1] I’m talking specifically about men abusing women, because that’s the pattern I’ve seen recur. That’s not to suggest that intimate and sexual abuse is only ever perpetrated by men against women.

Please Mr DJ, won’t you play my dedication?

I feel like I’m caught in the talons of a misogyny onslaught that just won’t die. There’s a lot of things I want to write about, but until I work out how to articulate what I want to say, I’m gonna let other women’s music do it for me.

So this is dedicated to The Rock for treating Eastern European women like merchandise:

This is dedicated to John Key for his clichéd beneficiary bashing:

This one goes out to Right to Life for thinking they are entitled to an opinion on what happens in my uterus:

This one goes out to Julian Assange and his defence lawyer:

This one just goes out to some guy I used to know. I haven’t seen him in years, but I still have nightmares about him sometimes:

John Key, Tony Veitch & Dean Lonergan are telling.

I wasn’t gonna write anything about the Key and Veitch misogynists’ club because hating on John Key is just, like, so clichéd and there are so many more original people to hate on, but then John Key said this, and I just couldn’t help myself.

This whole saga has been pretty telling. As in, it tells us a lot about how acceptable sexism is in New Zealand, starting with how much the capitalist media just doesn’t get what it is that’s making all us feminists so mad.

Now, I don’t have a problem with people having celebrity crushes. In fact I’m still working out my Joss Whedon top five. Of course unlike John Key I’m not kidding myself that Eliza Dushku and Enver Gjokaj would give a shit that they’ve made my list. Also unlike John Key, I don’t feel the need to talk about my celebrity crushes on national media because (a) I don’t assume people care and (b) I have way more urgent important issues I’d like to engage with people on. But then again I am not a politician.

No offence to Hurley, Alba and Jolie, but John Key’s top three list does seem pretty banal. This is telling. It tells us that John Key (and Phil Goff too) are banal people. More importantly it tells us that Key’s comment had less to do with expressing his sexual desires and more to do with proving how manly he is, because he too can treat women as if they’re put on this earth to be objects of his fantasy. I guess it’s his way of connecting with the Average Voter, meaning the voter who’s male and sexist and also obsessed with proving his manliness. I guess that’s what’s making us feminists so mad.

That and, this show of manliness took place on Tony Veitch’s radio show. Remember Tony Veitch? That famous guy who kicked his ex-partner while she was lying on the ground and broke her spine multiple times?

John Key thinks that Veitch ‘clearly made a mistake’. That’s surprisingly enlightened and forgiving from a dude whose political party is all about hardline law and order policies and building more prisons.

I’d like to be enlightened and forgiving too, and I agree that Veitch made a mistake. If Veitch had addressed his mistake by publicly acknowledging his abuse, and publicly apologizing to Kristine Dunne-Powell, her family, friends and support network, and than started anti violence counseling of his own accord, and committed himself to prioritizing Dunne-Powell’s needs over his own, and made it clear that he understood that this might never be resolved, because actually breaking someone’s back like that is a vicious and horrific thing to do and it’s likely she’ll never be able to forgive him for it, if he’d done all that, then I would be able to say, ‘Tony Veitch clearly made a mistake, and he’s working really hard to make it right.’

But that hasn’t happened. Veitch got his job back, and he gets to play best buds with the prime minister. This is also telling. It tells us that nobody cares much that Veitch is responsible for a horrific act of violence against a woman. Probably because no one thinks that horrific acts of violence against women are all that horrific. At least not if said woman is your lover or used to be your lover. It tells us that deep down many people in this society, especially male ones, still think that women become men’s property when they have sex with them.

John Key’s decision to use Tony Veitch’s radio show as a forum to exhibit his manliness is telling. It tells us that Key sees Veitch as a man whose views on masculinity and women’s roles is compatible with his own. I guess that’s another thing that’s making all us feminists mad.

To top it all off, Dean Lonergan thinks that, ‘those women who might be upset at his comments are obviously just disappointed they never made John Key’s list and never will’. Again, this is telling. It tells us that Dean Lonergan thinks that the only reason women might mind being treated as though their most important role in life is to fulfill men’s desires, is if they aren’t ‘hot’ enough to fulfill those desires. This tells us that Dean Lonergan thinks that the idea that women’s most important role in life is to fulfill men’s desire, only hurts those women who aren’t ‘hot’ enough to fulfill those desires. This really isn’t true. The idea that women are on this earth to be fucked by men hurts all women, regardless of whether or not Dean Lonergan, John Key or any other man thinks we are hot enough to be fucked by them.

That’s what’s making all us feminists mad.

Listen up

I feel so tired and drained from dealing with sexist bullshit right now. I mean, there’s this, and then there’s this, and to top it all off there’s also this and as if there wasn’t enough sexist bullshit in this world I also find myself dealing with sexist bullshit in the radical left, where too many guys get away with abusing women because the activist work they do is considered more important than a woman’s autonomy over her body, her sexuality and her life.

It makes me angry and it makes me exhausted and it makes me wish they would just stop because my life would be 100 times easier if all the men who treat women as if they’re only on this earth to meet their needs would get their shit together and start treating women like human beings.

It also makes me fucking appreciative of all the awesome, strong and courageous women I know. The women whose lives are disrupted because men don’t respect them, and the women who see that happening to other women, and challenge sexism and support each other.

Whenever I get overwhelmed by rage and hopelessness I find comfort in angry feminist punk songs. So here’s some feminist punk anger for all the other women out there who have to deal with sexist bullshit.

First of all, here’s Heavens to Betsy performing Stay Away live:

And here is Tribe 8′s classic anti rape anthem Frat Pig:

Here is some Delta 5:

Here is Listen Up by The Gossip which I’ve had in my head all day:

OK, and just one last one, because Vi Subversa is my patron saint. Here are Poison Girls singing Real Woman:

Turn it up, jump around, throw shit at the wall, let your rage out.

If you’re dissing the hookers you ain’t fighting the power

The new Auckland Supercouncil has voted to support a submission in favour of the Regulation of Prostitution in Specific Places Bill. This law would let Supercouncil pass bylaws banning street workers in specific areas of Auckland.

Arguments in favour of criminalizing street workers are usually about protecting families, and moral values, and community standards, and ‘won’t somebody think of the children?’

But sometimes these arguments are also about ‘won’t somebody think of the hookers?’ because, according to Sandra Coney, ‘she supported the bill because prostitution was harmful to women and led to violence and murder’.

Let me break this down for you:

Yes, being a street worker probably isn’t an ideal employment situation for most workers. It’s possible that some street workers work on the street because they truly prefer it. But I suspect most sex workers who work on the street are doing it because they don’t have other options, like working at a brothel, or for an escort agency, or hiring a flat to work from. Maybe brothels and agencies won’t hire them because of a drug dependency or maybe because they’re transgendered or maybe they just managed to piss off all the bosses and maybe they can’t afford to put an ad up on nzgirls.com and hire a flat or a hotel room.

The point is that those sex workers who work on the street are usually the ones who are most marginalized, most disadvantaged, most discriminated against and most vulnerable to exploitation. Sandra Coney is right to worry about their safety. But she is living in an alternate universe if she thinks giving the police more power over street workers is going to protect them. Actually, all that’ll happen is that the police will have even more power to exploit and oppress street workers. This law will allow police to arrest anyone they think might be a sex worker. Who do you think police think might be a sex worker?[1] This law isn’t going to prevent sex workers from working on the street. Because it doesn’t actually address any of the reasons some sex workers end up working on the street. All this law will do is make street workers’ lives more difficult and more dangerous.

Now, I get that sex workers working on the street does create some problems, like for examples used condoms and syringes in the streets[2]. There’s lots of really useful things the council and the government could do about that. They could install medical waste bins on the street, so there’s a place to dispose of syringes and condoms safely. They could provide sex workers with a safe indoor premise to work from. They could fund food banks, council housing, medical clinics, drug rehab support, even job training[3]. They could address some of the root causes of the problem, like transphobia, drug prohibition and poverty. All of these would be way better uses of resources and energy than criminalizing street workers.

Supercouncil isn’t going to do any of those things, because doing them might make the council look like they’re not being morally disapproving enough of sex work. And this law has nothing to do with protecting sex workers, or even other residents who aren’t sex workers, it’s all about protecting Auckland’s public image and making the council look like it’s upholding Moral Values.

Meanwhile the NZ Herald reports that the sex industry is expected to boom during the rugby world cup. You know what I think? I think GOOD. If I have to live through the mind numbing obnoxious infuriating bullshit that is the world cup, at least lots of hookers are going to make good money. I hope all the rugby fans are considerate and respectful clients, and I hope they tip big.

The herald seems concerned about foreign workers coming to New Zealand to work illegally in the sex industry. But they aren’t sure why they’re concerned. On the one hand, they’re worried about people abusing the immigration system, and that a ‘significant amount of revenue’ will leave the country. On the other hand, they are deeply concerned about the harsh conditions for foreign sex workers. Foreign sex workers are ‘exploited and live in appalling conditions’.

I am also deeply concerned about the harsh conditions for foreign sex workers. And other foreign workers. And local workers too. I am deeply concerned about the harsh conditions for workers.

If we are serious about protecting foreign sex workers from being exploited and living in appalling conditions, we have to start by not criminalizing them. Tourists who come here on a temporary work visa are specifically prohibited from working in the sex industry. I know the official justification for that is that it’s to prevent human trafficking, but clearly it’s not having that effect. The real reason for this policy is to avoid ‘tarnishing New Zealand’s reputation’.

How about we start prioritizing the rights of sex workers ahead of New Zealand and Auckland’s reputation?

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[1] The answer is: transwomen, brown women, women who look poor, women who look like junkies, women who look slutty.

[2] Although I don’t see an inherent link between street workers and dirty needles. Not all sex workers are drug users and not all drug users are sex workers.

[3] I’m not suggesting that sex workers should be ‘rehabilitated’ into Upright Citizens. I think people who want to stop doing sex work should be supported to do so, and people who want to keep doing sex work should be supported to improve working conditions for themselves and their fellow workers.

‘Corrective’ and other sub-categories of rape.

In the last few days I’ve seen heaps of people on facebook linking to an online petition against corrective rape in South Africa. Every time I see it I get uncomfortable, because I really hate the term corrective rape, and I’m never sure how to explain why it makes me uncomfortable.

I suppose one reason I don’t like it is that it’s an incredibly detached technical term for describing something which is a horrific experience to go through. The horrific experience it’s describing, in case you don’t know, is lesbians being raped in order to cure them of being lesbians. You might think that being raped by a bunch of men does not sound like a very effective cure for lesbianism.

Which is another reason I don’t like the term ‘corrective rape’: there’s no such thing as corrective rape. This is punitive rape. It’s rape as punishment for transgressing gender and sexual norms. It’s rape to remind you of what your place is, what your function in society is. The rapists might try to justify it by calling it corrective rape, but we all know that there’s no such thing as ‘corrective’ rape. This is because lesbianism cannot be corrected, since one can only correct that which is currently incorrect, and lesbianism is not incorrect. This is also because rape cannot correct anything.

Okay, there’s another reason I don’t like the term ‘corrective rape’. It’s a bit like ‘honour killing’. It’s one of those terms that mean ‘a specific type of misogynist homophobic violence that only happens in non-Western societies’. Having special names for kinds of misogynist homophobic violence that only happen in non-Western societies is super handy because it allows us to pretend that the kind of violence that happens There is different from the kind of violence that happens Here. Because That kind of violence is an intrinsic part of Their culture. But violence that happens Here is always an isolated incident committed by individuals. It is something extrinsic to Western culture, which is a culture of respect and equality[1].

Misogynist and homophobic violence is a problem all over this planet. It needs to be fought all over this planet. The problem is that too many feminists (and folk who aren’t even feminists) in the West, address violence in non-Western societies not as allies who are there to support the liberation struggle of non-Western people, but as saviours riding white horses, there to liberate non-Western people at the point of a Crusader sword. Women’s and queer rights are repeatedly used as a justification for imperialist invasions, racist immigration policies and Western supremacism.

That’s why I always feel a little ambivalent when someone brings up corrective rape, honour killings, female genital mutilation, sharia whippings, bride burning, and other violence against women and queers that is supposedly exclusive to non-Western cultures. Because I want to oppose that violence, but I want to oppose it in a way that doesn’t uphold racism and imperialism, and sometimes I’m not a hundred percent sure how to do that.

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Actually there’s another reason I don’t like the term ‘corrective rape’. It’s because I don’t like all these terms people invent for different sub-genres of rape. You know, like ‘date rape’, ‘drug rape’, ‘acquaintance rape’, ‘stranger rape’, ‘marital rape’, ‘institutional rape’, ‘rape-as-a-weapon-of-war rape’, and so on.

Usually the purpose of categorizing rape like that is so you can rank all the different ways a person can horrifically violate another person, and then you can tell someone that the way somebody horrifically violated her wasn’t really that bad, coz it was just ‘date rape’, not ‘rape rape’, and she should really stop exaggerating what happened, because she’s trivializing the experiences of women who’ve ‘actually’ been raped.

I do understand why people put qualifiers like ‘date’ or ‘drug’ in front of the word ‘rape’. Rape is a giant scary word and people are scared to use it because if they do, someone will probably say something like, ‘that’s a really strong word to use, I mean, yeah, what happened to you was really fucked up, but are you sure it was rape?’ and then the rest of the discussion will revolve around whether what happened was ‘technically’ rape, instead of the fact that a human being did something horrible and traumatizing and fucked up to another human being.

I guess rape is a giant scary really strong word because lots of people think of rape as this twisted dark thing that twisted dark pathological people do on CSI:Miami, and not as something that’s actually common as bullshit. Maybe once you realize that your mate who’s a really good guy, and that TV comedian, and the guitarist in that band you really like, have all raped someone before, you’ll start to think of rape as something really common and normal and not that big a deal, coz after all, heaps of women have had it happen it to them.

That’s a problem. Making people aware of how common rape is is not supposed to normalize rape. It’s supposed to make people outraged enough to do something to stop rape happening. There’s got to be a way that we can acknowledge how common rape is, and make space for people to talk about their experiences without having their pain trivialized, while refusing to accept that rape is an inevitable part of life.

 

 

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[1] Now that I think about it, Adrienne Rich’s Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence includes a description of ‘corrective’ rape in Norway, so I guess it does happen in the West.