Silicone Valley

Nadine Dorries has been suspended from the Tory Party over her decision to take part in reality TV show I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here!, and right on cue, the feminist blogosphere is rejoicing, with many people crowing in delight in equal measure over her suspension as well as the opportunity to see Dorries being forced to eat bugs, strip in the jungle shower, clean out a toilet with her bare hands, and endure various other kinds of public humiliation. Can we back up for a second, here?

This has been coming for quite some time. I’ve already seen countless so-called anti-oppression activists be utter shits when it comes to Dorries. I quickly left online groups contesting her policies on abortion and abstinence-only sex education because they were full of people who, rather than discussing her politics, were calling her various combinations of ‘fat’, ‘ugly’, and ‘cunt.’ I’ve seen a disability activist (just one, thank goodness) reproduce the media’s disablist nickname and call her ‘Mad Nad.’ Seriously?

We don’t hurl this kind of personal, gender-based (because of course there’s nothing worse to call a woman than a fat, ugly cunt) vitriol at male politicians, activists or other figures. This is a special kind of abuse reserved for women of any political leaning who dare to express an opinion in public.

These feminist campaigns, against reducing the abortion time limit and against bringing in abstinence education for young girls, are not safe spaces for women. This hypocrisy is alienating to female activists, and I do get the feeling sometimes that these ‘feminist’, pro-choice and sex-positive men (and it is mostly men) have just been waiting for a chance to let their violent misogyny out on someone.

Incidentally, other things about Dorries? She grew up on a Liverpool council estate and her dad was a bus driver. She was a nurse, and then she founded a company providing childcare for working parents. She has publicly criticised the Etonian boys’ club in Parliament, attacking Cameron and Osborne for being ‘arrogant posh boys.’ She has received gender-based dismissal directly from Cameron, and doubtless lives with misogyny from her party every day.

She says she’s going to the jungle because 16 million people watch I’m A Celebrity, and she has an excellent point about appealing to people beyond Guardian readers and Question Time watchers. Political engagement is a class issue, and she is absolutely spot on in wanting to reach out and be accessible to people beyond the middle classes. (I’m hardly surprised that this is largely lost on the middle-class students that make up the majority of these online groups.)

I’d love to see people criticise her policies without hurling personal insults, and most people don’t seem to have any trouble doing this when it comes to male politicians. Television *will* humiliate her. The media *will* publish photos of her naked in the jungle shower, the newspapers *will* lay into her body. Please, please let’s not buy into this.

If you oppose her politics, some activism you could do that’s more constructive than writing misogynistic and disablist slurs online includes:

- supporting Education For Choice, a London-based organisation that delivers workshops in secondary schools with the facts about abortion so young people can make informed choices
- supporting Scarleteen, who deliver the most comprehensive feminist sex education the web has
- supporting Abortion Rights, who lobby to protect the 24-week time limit

And please call out this behaviour where you see it. I’m very disappointed right now – let’s sort this out.

So, he’s tied to the chair and being threatened and caressed by the evil queer villain who alludes to there being a first time for everything… and then Bond says:

‘What makes you think it’s my first time?’

And there was applause around the cinema and whoops and cheers from me, and Bond was so matter-of-fact and chilled out, and then he just carried on… being Bond.

NORMALISING MALE BISEXUALITY

*JAMES BOND* TALKING CALMLY ABOUT BEING BISEXUAL

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

So, some of the Internet is talking about this scene being about power, not about sex, and bollocks, I say, because both these men are clearly bi and that’s a much happier thing to think anyway. Bear in mind that we live in a social context where the very existence of bi men is something that people seem to think is up for legitimate debate (bi women don’t have it much better – we’re dismissed as eye-candy for frat boys, but at least we’re acknowledged) – you know, I’m going to take what’s available in the normalising-male-bisexuality stakes, and an alpha like Bond responding to the idea of sex with a man with anything besides revulsion is, quite frankly, bloody excellent.

Did you know that Daniel Craig expressed interest in a bisexual Bond back in 2006, when he was first announced as being cast? (Citation here, though the rest of the article is biphobic bullshit and I don’t recommend it.) Do you know that when asked about the scene in a press conference, he said, “I don’t see the world in sexual divisions.” ? (Classic queer/bi thing to say, that.)

I didn’t like Bond until I saw Skyfall. I’m uncomfortable with this gun-toting, fucking-women-everywhere, killing-everyone-all-the-time, hypermasculine, patronising and dismissive alpha being raised up as some kind of heroic icon by around half the world, and I’m exasperated that these films that show dozens of people being casually killed are classified as 12A. You know, I just can’t begin to express my utter delight that this same hypermasculine alpha has, essentially, just come out as having been bisexual all along – with no change to his character since. Even if this particular storyline goes no further, that line alone is one of the most powerful acts of bisexual normalisation I could imagine.

My co-organiser gave this speech on the opening night of the event, summarising the controversy over our gender balancing policy and making explicit our feminist agenda. My role in the welcoming session was to give a more general welcome and to discuss a few practicalities. He (and not I) gave this speech because I generally feel less comfortable giving long speeches, and because we knew that many people in the room, particularly the men, would be more likely to listen to a feminist message coming from a man than a woman.

Hi everyone,

I’m loving being back at OpenCon – it’s great to see so many of you here.  Every year we keep asking for more and more space from Osho Leela, and every year we keep getting fully booked out.  This year we have 87 people coming to OpenCon.  So, yay for that and thank you for coming here. I want to talk for a few minutes about a controversy that’s been brewing around OpenCon for the last couple of weeks, that you may or may not have been following.  At last year’s OpenCon, we had about a 60% – 40% ratio of men over women and people of other genders. About three weeks ago, when we realised that we were going to be fully booked out again this year, we took a look at the demographics.  With about 20 places left, we were running slightly over 2/3 men.  Ludi and I made a decision that we’d like a more gender-balanced OpenCon, and we reserved the remaining space here for women, people of non-male genders, and partnered groupings.

This year, my partner and I ran the third UK OpenCon – a weekend-long, residential unconference creating space for experienced non-monogamous people to discuss non-monogamy in greater depth than could usually be possible at a one-day introductory event. The past two events have been hugely successful, with attendees commenting on the relaxed, friendly and intimate nature of the space, and excited about the community that we are building.

This year, we were well on our way to selling out our places when we saw that our gender ratio was heavily skewed: it was rapidly approaching 2:1 male:female/others. (We based our count on knowing most of the attendees, and on gendered names and social media accounts, knowing that this isn’t perfect.) Two weeks before the event, we closed bookings to unaccompanied men with the intention of creating a safer, more balanced space at the event, and based on feedback we had consistently received from female attendees about not wanting to be massively outnumbered by men, as well as noting that harassment at cons usually came from unaccompanied men.

Soon afterwards, the UK-Polyamory mailing list absolutely exploded with men shouting about the policy. Huge posts were written about our stupidity and incompetence. We were called discriminatory, sexist, rabidly feminist, and obsessed with political correctness. People who had never before been concerned with trans* activism suddenly became extremely keen to call us out for transphobia. Legal action was called for. Most of the people shouting were male-rights-activist types, and I was delighted when they called for a boycott of the event.

Many of the people complaining about the policy were men and were people who had never been to OpenCon. They said we weren’t representing the interests of the poly community (the poly community being those people who were shouting loudly on the list about our being discriminatory.) They said we should run the event with policies they requested. They said that this was a PR disaster for us, and that we should backtrack and apologise profusely immediately to prevent any more harm coming to us.

Meanwhile, messages of support from attendees and friends came in. Women emailed me, thanking me for the policy and for taking this heat. Several unaccompanied women booked, specifically messaging to say that our policy helped them feel safer, and that was why they were coming.

We canvassed our attendees, because while noisy MRAs on the uk-poly list aren’t especially important to us, the people at our event are. Feedback on the gender balancing policy was overwhelmingly positive, with people sending messages of support for the policy as well as concern for our well-being, having seen the conversation replicated everywhere OpenCon was mentioned, including a thread in my own facebook I’d specifically created to help with personal emotional support. The 20% of so of people who didn’t support it came back with thoughtful, kindly phrased suggestions. We also had near unanimous support from our non-binary-gendered attendees, as well as from many binary-gendered trans* people. After we passed the results on to the uk-poly list, we were called liars. We then stopped engaging with that conversation, and I no longer read the list.

At the event’s welcoming session, my co-organiser read out a speech (I’ll post that here too) we had written about the controversy over the gender balancing policy, about the feedback we’d been receiving from women for the last three years about creating safer spaces, and our vision for OpenCon as an explicitly feminist space. Many of our attendees hadn’t known about the flamewars until we’d mentioned them, and after the welcoming, several first-time-attending women (and some other people) came up to us, thanking us for the speech, for making our feminism so radical and explicit, for taking this heat to create a safer space.

We made time that evening to gather in the venue’s cafe with tea, to listen and discuss things with people who wanted to talk about the policy more. What followed was one of the most compassionate, constructive and kind conversations I’ve ever experienced: it was the absolute antithesis of what I’d seen online. We talked, and listened to each other, for over two hours, and were able to define some of the problems we were concerned with, and float a few ideas for solutions. Namely:

1) harassment needs to be dealt with. Most harassment comes from unaccompanied men who are strangers, ie. have not been to other poly events. Not letting in unaccompanied men is one, admittedly blunt, solution to this, in addition to an explicit and backed-up code of conduct (which we already have.)

2) separately – men massively outnumbering women is a problem, because it creates a space that feels less safe for many women. Women are less likely to speak up in discussions, to run workshops, and often feel more intimidated when outnumbered by men. Gender balancing can create a con with a better atmosphere, because women often feel safer in a gender-balanced (or majority-female) environment.

Ideas to help address these problems included making gender balancing explicit from the outset, advertising more to women, especially queer female communities, and continue working to make it a feminist space.

Another point I’d like to mention separately relates to the ways in which communities treat volunteer organisers. I feel that telling volunteer organisers how they should run their event, assuming the loudest voices are those which are representative of the poly community (and that the poly community is one entity, with one agenda and one opinion), is problematic. It is entitled and arrogant, and it alienates volunteer organisers. This is a separate point because it’s of more relevance to the online flaming from non-attendees – we’re less interested in creating an event to the specifications of people who don’t attend than we are in listening to the thoughts of our participants. This is something that could do with being addressed more broadly and generally – perhaps most of all, I was struck by the way in which OpenCon was perceived to be so dangerous, such a threat, by the men shouting on the uk-poly list. (It ties in with a more general trend I’ve noticed, where men become *so angry* when anyone suggests limiting their access to women.) We are one event, over one weekend: we are not stopping anyone else running a poly event, or telling anyone else how all poly events should be run.

The discussions continue, and we don’t yet know how we’ll run the event next year, or how OpenCon will change to be safer and more inclusive. I wrote this post because I wanted a record of what happened – in other posts, I’ll reproduce messages of support from women, as well as the speech my co-organiser gave to the attendees of the event. This post isn’t intended as a space in which to continue these discussions – please respect that I’ve received a great deal of flaming already, and that this is my personal blog in which I’m creating a record, rather than starting a conversation. I also don’t need to be around every conversation about this – this is a far bigger issue than that which relates to just one event. Conversations can be continued on the uk-poly list (though that’t not a space I’ve any interest in engaging with), on Polytical.org, on social media, or in person. Thanks for reading.

[in response to Love Is Infinite's musings on working in a bank]

A friend of mine is vegan and a teacher, but is not vegan at work. She says that she only has a certain number of… ‘distancing myself from colleagues’ tokens/cookies/units, and that she’d rather use those up on radical educational politics than on being vegan around colleagues.

When it comes to feeling alienated in a mainstream workplace, my being non-monogamous is the least of my worries.

When I contemplate going to work in a bank or office, I know that I will be surrounded by colleagues with a mainstream, heteronormative approach to the world. I know that they will assume me to be straight. I will have to listen to the women talking about their diets and lamenting their fat thighs in the toilets. I will be expected to participate in ‘girl talk’, to share makeup tips and dating details and diet plans and to criticise the women in the magazines that will inevitably be scattered around the coffee room.

I know that some people there will be racist, and xenophobic, and I will say nothing. I will allow casual sexism to wash off my back. It will never be quite enough to note down, record and later report: it will be office banter, just friendliness, social chit-chat that assumes a hundred messed-up norms.

If my non-monogamy is relevant at all, it’ll be so through highlighting mono-normativity as misogynistic. When my colleagues claim that men are only after one thing, or that dates will show affection through overt jealousy, or that I should get married as soon as possible, I will nod and smile, knowing that my coming out to them as poly will not change any of these views, nor their assumptions towards me.

If I am to come out as anything, I would want them to know that I am queer and feminist. Non-monogamy seems like a side issue: it is one facet of my queerness and feminism, but in the workplace, it is not the most important part. I’d want them to know that I want no part of their diet talk or ‘bikini body’ discussions, and that my dating is none of their business, and that they are not to project their views onto it. I would want to be out as queer, knowing that at least in legal word I should be protected for it, and hoping that would shield me from some of the straight-girl talk. If I have a limited number of distancing-myself cookies, I’d rather use them on that than on coming out as poly.

I recommend joining two unions. Join the IWW, the anarchist union, as well as a more mainstream and field-relevant union. Get to know your union rep, get to know your rights, and note down instances of heteronormative bullshit just in case you ever need the records.

Don’t come out as poly. They won’t get it, you’ll distance yourself further and you don’t need another area (and for forty hours a week) where people attack your lifestyle with misinformed questions and silly objections. Do come out as queer and feminist: hopefully you can find an ally at work.

Cultivate a rich and full life outside of work. Defend the boundaries between work and your real life fiercely. Take a notebook to work, and write or draw or daydream when you can. Read this. Tweet. Plan coffee dates with friends for lunchtimes. Get out and go for a walk. Arrive on time, and leave on time: work the hours you are paid for, and no more. Look forward to your evenings: fill them with projects and joy. This is your real life. Work just pays the bills. Start a tumblr to catalogue frustrations at work if you need to. Offload onto friends who understand. Phone in sick occasionally. Don’t let them intimidate you. Stay in contact with your union rep. Keep life as easy for yourself as you can. Good luck.

So, there was this space, full of happy, noisy, brash, confident women – playing, talking about kink, discussing stuff and teaching each other, and there totally weren’t even any annoying men there. I’ve just come back from the S/M Dykes conference in Manchester, and I had the most wonderful time.

Somehow, it completely passed me by for several years that the UK might have a kink conference – and at that, a queer-and-female-focused one. I’m so glad to have finally gone along.

The full conference can run for four days, with four nights of partying, two days of workshops, an auction, a cabaret and a brunch. Having no lovers coming along with me, and not knowing anyone there, I decided to just attend the workshops – I’m glad I took that approach, and I may well check out the parties and socialising next year.

On arriving, I was given a programme and was delighted to be offered a choice of a service-based gift – a manicure set, or a shoe-shine kit. Thoughtfully, the polish in the shoe-shine kit was neutral – great for those of us with boots in many colours. There were three streams of workshops, and I started off with a crowded and noisy speed-friending session.

First, we were asked to team up with two strangers and plan a hypothetical house of pleasures – I sat down with two women, who immediately asked, ‘so, what are you into?’ Even at BiCon, I’m not used to conversations being quite as open as that! Then, the entire room recombined to take turns deciding to answer a kink-related question or act out a mini-scene. I watched, amazed, as loads of the women there cheerfully played with clothespins, candle wax, canes and kicks – several played more than once, and I realised there were a lot of switches in the house. Having hidden shyly for most of the session, I was eventually called up and decided to answer a question – my musings on giving pain received quite a few smiles and nods, and I was applauded as I hurried back to my seat. It was surprising, and challenging, to be in a space where I was brand new, and felt shyer than most people there, but the group was affable and friendly, and I quickly felt welcomed.

After lunch, I went to a workshop on life in D/s relationships – I was pleased to see that there were quite a few workshops on D/s scheduled over the weekend, as it’s not something I’ve had a chance to discuss much at events like BiCon or in most kink 101 sessions. We talked about challenges, and what struck me the most was that both submissives and dominants talked about feeling pressure to be psychic, to be some idea of ‘perfect’, to never need an off day and to always be up for all sorts of play. It was reassuring to hear that other people, many more experienced, also struggled with self-doubt and the desire to live up to an unrealistic expectation sometimes. We reassured each other, shared stories and discussed practicalities, and it was brilliant.

Saturday’s last session was on cultivating dominant and submissive body language – most of the conference seemed to have packed into the workshop room, and I was beside myself with excitement to realise halfway through that the facilitator was Andrea Zanin, or Sex Geek: the writer of a blog I’ve been following for a while, and one of my huge activist crushes. She was a brilliant facilitator, too – great as a public speaker, positive and affirming when others shared their anecdotes, and gave entertaining and educational demonstrations. I left beaming, and with a few new ideas about protocols.

Other workshops available over the weekend included discussions on edgeplay, playing with anger, first aid, face bondage, and mental health. This was big, involved stuff: this wasn’t kink 101, or a bit of rope and spanking (what I think of as being normative kink), or endless sessions on impact toys. At another recent conference, I’d sat silently through the facilitators of a kink workshop slating 24/7 dynamics – it was great to be able to actually talk openly about the complicated, difficult stuff with experienced, knowledgeable and positive people.

I arrived on Sunday morning to a much smaller crowd than I’d seen the previous day (most had been to last night’s party), and went again to speed-friending: a far more intimate affair this time. In one game, I teamed up with two women to plan a scene: we shared our interests, orientations and kinks, and were able to build up quite an elaborate story that I itched to be able to run off and try! In another, we were asked to write down our top three fetishes on paper, and were then teamed up with a stranger. The facilitator asked us to cross off the first item, and then the second… and we were to talk about the third item, uninterrupted and receiving no feedback, for five minutes. Naturally, I’d written down the thing I was the most shy and embarrassed about third, and this exercise was excruciating – very challenging, and also, once again, really safe and affirming by the end. My partner in this session had no problem at all talking openly about her fetish, and nor it seemed did the other people around the room – that openness, that owning of one’s own tastes and talking about them with an easy smile, was contagious.

At lunchtime, I had my boots polished. It was fab, and I got to chat with three boot-polishin’ subs while they worked, listening to them explain what they liked about service. I found this throughout the weekend – people were very open and happy to chat about their likes and opinions, they were affable and friendly and extremely matter-of-fact.

The next workshop was more new and challenging stuff for me, this time on punishment. I explained that I was here to challenge my preconceptions and that I, as a fluffy, loving dominant, couldn’t quite understand why someone would want to punish their submissive. Over an hour of listening to the experiences of both dominants and submissives, and again sharing stories, experiences and insecurities, changed my mind: I left feeling more open and understanding, and as though I’d learned a great deal.

Lastly, the majority of the conference again packed into a room to see Andrea talk about impact play. She started out by emphasising that all play should be much more about interaction and psychology than about shiny toys or flashy skills, and, having sat through too many situations emphasising flashiness over empathy, I was so pleased to hear her say that. As well as talking about techniques, she covered some practicalities of playing while physically impaired, and asked around: what do people like about giving or receiving impact? Why do you like the toys and tools you like? The demonstrations – four of them, on pre-negotiated volunteers – left the room in turns absolutely silent or full of giggles, and I again left turned on and full of new ideas.

The S/M Dykes conference is wonderful – I very much recommend checking it out, and I’ll definitely be going back next year.

Three years ago, I had my cunt cast. It was only last week that I really understood why.

The Great Wall Of Vagina is an art project, showing the cast cunts of four hundred women and a few trans men, and it has come to London for a month as part of an exhibition, “Skin Deep”, at the Hay Hill Gallery. It’s free, and I’d very much recommend a visit.

The idea behind the Great Wall is to show natural variation – it’s another part of the battle against a homogenised, Photoshopped view of cunts. There are cunts from cis women, from trans women, from trans men, from old people, younger people, at least one virgin, there are cunts full of piercings, ones without, and the variety in shape, in texture, in size, is absolutely staggering.

I knew intellectually that cunts varied enormously, that variation was normal, but there’s absolutely nothing like standing in front of a panel, resting eyes on one cunt after another after another. The photographs do not do the sculpture justice. In person, you can see just how far some of those labia extend, how puffy or long or pendulous they might be. I had thought it would be difficult to locate my own cunt in a group of 400 – it was a piece of cake.

I understood why this was so important. I’ve seen a few cunts in my time, and I’ve managed to dodge having many body issues of my own, but even so I had no idea how wide the bell curve went, and I left with even more appreciation for the ability of cunts to be enormous, flappy and magnificent just as much as they might be small and neat. I loved seeing the bigger, messier cunts with huge labia, and understanding them to be beautiful.

(icky stuff ahead – ) Look, did you know that in Australia they’re getting the makers of soft porn to Photoshop out visible labia minora? That these Photoshopped cunts are all that thousands of people ever see of what others’ cunts look like? That hundreds of women, there and in the UK and all over the place, are asking surgeons to *literally cut off their labia with knives*, for no medical reason than that their society has instilled this false idea of what’s beautiful in their minds? Can you imagine how pissed off that makes me?

I’m not going to do a huge amount of consciousness-raising on this, ’cause that’s not much fun to read – just, here’s a video if you’d like to know more about this godawful stuff, and look, folks, negative body image is a big deal, yeah? So, I’m really glad to see stuff like the Great Wall in the world.

There is also a book about the project! And I’m in it, writing about myself and body image from two years ago! I hope that it’s been edited beyond all belief, and I wasn’t actually that bad a writer back then.. I’ll post some of what I wrote later this week, so you don’t need to squint.) And this book – it’s just full of other people writing about their cunts, their body image and the experience of being cast. It’s brilliant. As the Monologues have said, ‘once they got going, you couldn’t stop them. Women love to talk about their vaginas, they do.’

 
Showing more of what un-Photoshopped cunts actually look like feels like a really important endeavour. I’m proud to be part of this project – it’s been really fun to see it get bigger and bigger (I’ve had email updates for the last three years), and to see friends talking about it online (to which I bounce and say ‘I’m in that!’) I really, really recommend seeing the exhibition – it’ll run in London til June 2nd, at the Hay Hill Gallery near to Oxford Circus.

As for more pictures of non-Photoshopped cunts – here are some galleries, here is a tumblr, and of course here are lots of photos of the Wall. You can also chat about cunts and much more with the enormous and wonderfully queer- and trans-friendly Vagina Pagina community on LJ – enjoy!