One25 Bristol Community Cake Book

Need a Christmas present for the cake lover in your life? You can’t do better than the Bristol Community Cake Book, produced by essential Bristol charity One25, and selling on their website here for the bargain price of £4.99. I’ve just bought three for presents, that’s how good they are.

The book is beautifully produced, lavishly illustrated with colour photos, and well supported by lots of Bristol restaurants and foodies. Recipes have been donated by everyone from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall to Pieminster and, of course, One25 volunteers. And those recipes include the tempting Apple, Pear & Honey Cake, Boisterous Brownies and, err, Courgette Cake (well, let’s give it a go!).

All profits from the book go to One25, which is a Bristol charity that is run by women for women who are street-based sex workers, those who are in the process of exiting such work, and those who have now exited. Launched in 1995, the charity helps vulnerable women build new lives away from violence, poverty and addiction. Support One25 by buying this tasty book!

Feminism In The News

“It is lazy journalists who frequently rely upon stereotypical representations of men and women, and who consequently do injustice to social movements.” (Mendes, p67)

Anyone with even a cautious interest in feminism is aware that we don’t get a good deal from the media. We never have. However, it’s not as cut and dried as all that and there are corners of the media, pockets of publishing, where women’s rights and feminism issues are allowed an airing… although there are always compromises and sacrifices involved.

In this extremely thorough analysis, Kaitlynn Mendes (a journalism lecturer at De Montfort University) goes back to 1968 and examines how feminism has been represented by eight national newspapers (four each in the UK and US).

Feminism In The News: Representations of The Women’s Movement Since The 1960s (Palgrave Macmillan, £49.99) is such a detailed and carefully woven study, presented in an academic yet readable style, that there’s little to find fault with. Apart from with Mendes’ findings that women’s issues have been so consistently and persistently relegated for so long, despite advances in reality!

Depressingly, Mendes’ studies confirm there has been little to no improvement in the perception of feminists as “crazy, ill-tempered, ugly, man-hating, family-wrecking, hairy-legged, bra-burning radical lesbians” (p35) from the ‘60s, and that – as we know – the lie that bras were burned at the 1968 Miss Universe pageant just will not go away. It proves that if the media peddles a story loudly enough, it simply doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, because people will want to believe it if it makes a marginalised group look foolish. However, Mendes also reports an attempt, in 1978, to counter the bra burning myth with an equally preposterous myth of men burning their y-fronts: “Downtrodden men are after something you have already got – equality. Moves are afoot to make 1979 the Year of Men’s Liberation. Bonfires of y-fronts could soon be burning in the streets” (p80). What a shame this equally ridiculous tale never worked its way into folklore in the same way.

What also won’t go away is the attempt by much of the media to ‘humanise’ feminists by needing to state the woman’s marital status and whether or not she is a mother in any introductory text. Mendes cites a 1970 report about Betty Friedan at the Women’s Strike for Equality rally which, she says, spends more time focussing on Friedan’s visit to the hairdresser than it does on the reason for the rally.

There is a lot of weight in Feminism In The News given to the public perception of feminism, because unfortunately this is something that is going to dog us until patriarchy no longer has the upper hand. Feminists on both sides of the pond have always been presented as unfeminine and threatening, an alien and ‘other’ type. While anyone who experiences or lives feminism knows this to be nonsense, sadly it is the willing disbelievers who we have a harder job to convince. Mendes calls this “the normalisation process” that the media needs to go through in order to try and reconcile these unruly deviants as “normal” (p60, p77).

Unable to escape the need to focus on the appearance of women, Mendes also notes a trend in her sample papers – especially in the 1970s – to link feminism women to all manner of apparently unsightly physical conditions from alcoholism to baldness, as well as the antisocial characteristics of bullying and violence (p118). Who knew that feminism could make your hair fall out?

Mendes observes trends in the writing of feminism, with newspapers honing in on one woman’s experience of a topic – thereby skewing or biasing their coverage, and neglecting to represent “the diverse nature of feminist political theory, goals and tactics” (p51).

In more recent years, she observes a trend for newspaper articles about feminism to try and hook the feminist thread up to pop culture, in a bid to make it fashionable. So there were scores of articles pondering whether Sex And The City was a feminist show, whether Bond girls are feminists, and declaring just how much of a feminist icon Cheryl Cole and the like is (p136), which is a trend that’s just not going away.

In almost all areas of her book, I agree with Mendes wholeheartedly and her findings are hard to doubt anyway. But one point ruffled my feathers – Liz Jones from The Daily Mail, whatever Mendes may say, is not a feminist. While rightly stating that The Daily Mail is particularly opposed to feminism, Mendes goes on to add that “certain writers such as Liz Jones are responsible for what little supportive coverage existed” (p148), and later: “Authors such as … Liz Jones stand out for their commitment to feminist values” (p165). Make your own mind up on that one, but I can’t think of one feminist who would stand next to Jones in a line-up.

Clearly, by only focussing on eight newspapers, Mendes’ findings are relatively limited, however to have focussed on more would surely be impossible, and the fact her results from eight titles have been condensed so precisely into this trim volume is a credit to her.

Feminism In The News is an important and useful text, not least because in one book we now have clear academic proof that – regardless of what male editors may like to tell us – feminists have been consistently and repeatedly pushed to the margins and treated like a joke. It would be interesting to see follow up articles and volumes focussing on specific countries, or types of publication, to gain a bigger picture of this problem, as well as to try and suggest solutions for allowing women’s feminist voices to be heard on pages outside of The Guardian.

The Vagina Monologues

 

Last night, Bristol welcomed a one-night showing of the episodic play by Eve Ensler, The Vagina Monologues. Having been doing the circuit for 15 years, the three-woman production has seen all manner of actresses take the hot seats – from Oscar winners to TV stars.

Billed as ‘hilarious’ and ‘moving’, The Vagina Monologues seems a tricky show to market, especially with the ‘v’ word in its title, titter titter. I overheard one man walking past the Bristol Hippodrome complaining that seeing the word ‘vagina’ on a poster was offensive, and should be covered up to protect children. Seriously! I wonder if the same was said of The Puppetry of the Penis, which the same theatre put on a few days earlier.

Tonight’s production was performed by Louisa Lytton (EastEnders, The Bill), Wendi Peters (Coronation Street) and Zaraah Abrahams (Waterloo Road). And while they were all impressive, Wendi was the standout star – even if it was hard to shake off thoughts of Cilla Battersby!

Based on Eve’s ‘Vagina Interviews’ conducted with women from all around the world, the monologues give voice to human stories, all in some way related to the vagina: sex, love, periods, hair, masturbation, FGM, rape, birth, orgasm, the multitude of alternative names for the vagina… all presenting the vagina as an organ for empowerment.

Understandably, there’s been some debate in the feminist community about The Vagina Monologues. For instance, several critics have damned the play as too anti-male and for implying that heterosexual relationships are fuelled by violence.

As such, I wondered how the (few) men in the audience would feel hearing women talk about themselves and their relationships with men like this? More to the point, as a feminist who is very aware of the PR battle we face when trying to convince men that feminist women are not anti-sex, man-haters, I wondered if this play might in fact convince these men that feminist women are the angry harridans the media falsely portrays us as.

Men are even applauded by the cast for attending, which strikes me as patronising. Why wouldn’t they attend? This is an accessible opportunity to gain an insight into how women think and feel. It’s worthwhile anyone attending.

Here’s a recent review of the play by a male reviewer. It’s interesting to read his take on it. In it, the reviewer Rob writes: ‘It is disquieting to imagine the women one knows thinking like this. How many really do?”, before asking: “Do men have anything about which they feel similarly superior?” My comment here is not in any way directed at Rob personally (I don’t know anything about him), but this tack is dredged up when anything pro-women appears – what about the men? Why does a play called The Vagina Monologues need to pander to men? It is clearly about women.

And being about women, women dominated the audience. All sorts of women. Which was great. Although there were also a number of groups who were on hen nights, maybe thinking this was going to be a raucous, cackling, smutty show. And the feeling of my companion and I was that the performance on stage was great, but the performance from some audience groups was disgraceful. Because while it was fine (if irritating) for the hen parties to shriek in the monologues about, for instance, different types of orgasm, it was wholly inappropriate and disrespectful for the same women to giggle and talk among themselves through the monologues about rape in the Congo, for instance. We observed at least two such groups rightly being asked to be quiet by Hippodrome staff.

The Vagina Monologues is not a hen night show! It’s a thoughtful exploration of a part of the body that often goes ignored. The jarring discomfort of sequencing a monologue about gang rape next to a monologue about the joy of lesbian sex is effective in how it jolts you out of your mental comfort zone, but I wondered how much of the message about the gross global abuse towards women was lost on the hen party goers. Not least because they were giggling through it.

But The Vagina Monologues *is* an important show. The caliber of actresses it has attracted, its ability to fill theatres, and its lasting reputation are all testament to its future. It’s fantastic to hear the vagina being discussed, embraced and simply talked about – when normally, but inexplicably, it’s considered a taboo word. And by mixing serious and fun monologues, Eve Ensler is ensuring that the global inequalities for women are brought home to Western audiences, as well as highlighting more local women’s issues.

Through the success of The Vagina Monologues, Eve has formed the charity V Day, which is a global non-profit movement that has raised around £50m for women’s anti-violence groups worldwide. You can’t sniff at that.

Reclaim The Night 2011, Bristol

“On 18 November, we ask you to march with us in solidarity.
We ask you to join us in the fight to end violence against women and girls.” 

Bristol Feminist Network

Last night, was the annual Reclaim The Night march in Bristol. And it was a fantastically liberating and empowering experience.

In Bristol, the march is organised by a team of volunteers from the Bristol Feminist Network (BFN). For those that don’t know about Reclaim The Night, I’ve copied a brief explanation of  the march direct from BFN’s website: “Reclaim the Night is an international movement against sexual violence. In Bristol, supporters organise vigils to remember those affected by sexual violence, and march to demonstrate our right to walk the streets at night.”

The most recent statistics show there are an average of 130 rapes every month in Bristol (collating figures between those bravely reported to police, and those unreported for a number of understandable reasons). Sian (a co-founder of BFN) explains how these figures are calculated here, and concludes: “When we know that we have 19 reported rapes per month in Bristol, but that only represents 15% of rapes overall, we can estimate that each month in Bristol there are 127 rapes.” It’s chilling stuff, and I recommend you read her post to get the bigger picture about this.


Sian told me yesterday: "I am just one woman from a larger group who have dedicated lots of time and energy over the past 3.5 years to make Reclaim The Night happen each year. Together, we have worked to create a successful and influential event that is part of BFN's wider work on breaking the silence on violence against women and girls in all its forms. I am proud to be part of this group of driven and determined women who are dedicated to ending violence against women and girls." 


The first Reclaim The Night marches were in 1977, and they fast became a feature in cities all over the world. Yet by the mid-1990s the marches had died out, until they were revived by Finn Mackay in 2004, the same year that she set up London Feminist Network. The first revived march had just 50 women, says Finn, but now around 3,000 women march in London every year.

Finn told me this today: "Revolutionary feminists in Leeds first started Reclaim the Night marches in the UK in November 1977, calling for women to organise synchronised marches on the same night in towns and cities across the country. Up to 400 women, carrying flaming torches, converged on their city centres and took back streets and parks and areas where women were told not to go. At that time women were appalled at police advice to stay indoors to stay safe - where women are actually most at risk of male violence - and at the fact that only one in three reported rapes ended in a conviction.

"Today that figure is one in 20. We don't believe that 19 out of every 20 women who report rape are liars, we demand justice for survivors, safe streets for women, protected specialist services for survivors and an end to all forms of male violence against women."

In light of the facts that the vast majority of rapes go unreported, and the fact that street harassment is still such an enormous issue, as well as a huge number of other factors, the worldwide Reclaim The Night marches remain vital dates on the feminist calendar. Both for women to meet like-minded people and proudly march through their city’s streets, and to reinforce the point to society that women deserve to be treated with respect – and that nobody is EVER asking to be raped or abused. Ever. Whether on the street, at home, anywhere.

In Bristol, this is all sadly extra poignant for us. When Joanna Yeates was murdered in our city last Christmas, the police wheeled out the same public advice that they have done for decades: women should stay home, women should not go out alone after dark (which can mean as early as 4.30pm in winter), and women must take responsibility for not being attacked. There is rarely mention of the attackers taking responsibility for not attacking. To their credit, police in Bristol later altered their advice and encouraged women to carry on with their lives. However, we need to lessen the need for this kind of bulletin in the first place, which is where the Reclaim The Night marches play a pivotal role.

Starting with a moving candlelit vigil on College Green, outside the Bristol City Council houses (ironically, the location where some many bad licencing decisions are made - for lap dance clubs, Hooters etc), we remember the victims of violence. The sight of so many candles flickering in lanterns and makeshift jam jar lanterns is both beautiful and touching, and a fitting start to the march through the city centre. With hundreds and hundreds of people marching (the front of the march is for self-identifying women, but anyone is welcome to join the main section), it’s a truly powerful feeling and sight to take back the streets of our city.

The march concluded with a rally in the central gardens of the Georgian architecture that makes up Portland Square, near the St Paul’s district. Speakers included Sian Norris and Anna Brown (BFN), Dr Helen Mott (Bristol Fawcett), Nimco Ali - above (Daughters of Eve), Lesley Welch (Bristol Domestic Abuse Forum), Susan Lawrence (Bristol Rape Crisis), Jess Dicken (NHS 4YP) and Chitra Nagajararan (No Women No Peace). The whole evening was especially significant when Lesley shared the awful news that a woman had been found murdered in the St George's area of Bristol only three days ago.

BFN states: “The aims of Reclaim the Night are to educate about consent and violence against women. To educate and eradicate the myths that surround rape, to eradicate the belief that women are to blame if their drunk or have a history with the attacker, to educate and eradicate the belief that men can’t stop once they’ve started, to educate and eradicate the belief that only stranger rape is real rape. To educate about respect and consent in relationships. To educate and empower men and women about their sexuality and relationships.”

Bristol’s Reclaim The Night march is in support of Bristol Rape Crisis, the Sexual Assault Referral Centre (SARC), One25 (helping women trapped in street sex work), and other vital Bristol services (whose funding is constantly at risk) supporting women who have suffered rape, violence or any form of abuse.

Finn adds: "If you are in London on Saturday, 26 November, then put your feet on the streets for women and help us shut down central London to say NO to male violence against women and NO cuts to women's services. Be there, be one of many, be a movement - reclaim your night and win the day." 

 

Take back the streets - Reclaim the night!