Mad Women on the March

Alicia would probably be a better Prime Minister

Write up of Fawcett Society's 'Don't Turn Back Time March' - published at openDemocracy: http://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/ray-filar/mad-women-on-march

It's time for British Zionists to speak out with Arabs in Israel

A few weeks ago I was invited on an excursion to Israel organised by the wonderful people at New Deal of the Mind. It was funded by BICOM. Here's something I wrote about the trip: http://www.opendemocracy.net/ray-filar/it’s-time-for-british-zionists-to-speak-out-with-arabs-in-israel

The refugee area in East Jerusalem.

Staring at dykes on trains

Article originally submitted to Gender Agenda Zine, edited by Elly Robson and Clementine Beauvais, whose wonderful cartoons you can find here: Doodles from the Bubble

Like this (left), but with less touching and more staring

Saturday afternoon. I’m wearing a yellow vest top and long adidas shorts, listening to Sleater-Kinney at their angry best, reflecting portentously upon an event of singular importance: my next haircut. Should I go for the quiff and shaved side bits again, or is it time to change to the andro-summer crop? Every recent hairdressing experience of mine features this exchange - ‘I won’t cut it that short, you don’t want to look like a boy’... ‘No, I do! Make me a boy! I like masculine! Actually, maybe that’s too short. Oh God, what have I done?! Maybe it will be ok with lipstick.’

Its a truism that every lesbian looks like a lesbian in some sense. But if every lesbian really looked that different we wouldn’t be recognisable at all, and we are. Much of my commuting time over the years I’ve been living in London has been dedicated to figuring out what gives the game away, what distinguishes a straight-looking woman from an obviously, irreversibly flaming dyke.

From humble beginnings trying unsuccessfully to catch the eye of an attractive, shaven headed, twenty stone, dungaree-wearing bull-dagger holding a copy of the (sadly defunct) Pink Paper - she stared me down mockingly as she left the train - I have come to know something of what the signs are.

There are the socially visible markers of a woman with a butch identity. Docs, crop, shirts, jeans, ties, the ‘I can take you, your best friend, and your mother. As long as you all consent.’ attitude. There are the East Londoner signs: slightly more androgynous than your average hipster, likely to be found wearing an aggressive jacket. There are the femme indicators, sometimes nothing more than a look in the eye, a slightly geometrical haircut, short nails, and the all-over back-at-you appraisal which is definitely (in my imagination) more I’d-like-to-fuck-you than I-like-what-you’re-wearing-oriented.

There are lesbian-feminists from the hallowed field of Greenham Common. I often see them holding ‘zines, wearing badges and studiously defying fashion fascism all at once. There are queers who defy fashion fascism by denying that fashion could exist as a meaningful class. There are the bisexual women who might fall into any of these camps.

And of course there are the lesbians that don’t look back at me, who I don’t recognise and can’t put into a lesbian-concepts box based on outmoded ideas about what we look like. There are the straight women who I prejudicially stereotype as lesbians because they’re wearing plaid shirts. There are women of all orientations who probably want to know why I’m looking at them when they’re trying to get to work.

The train is one thing. The scene is another. In a lesbian club, or, more likely, a ‘mixed’ night (i.e. 94% cock, 5% cunt, 1% other) you’d be forgiven for the default assumption that whatever the woman in front of you looks like, she’s on the team. But given the straight female penchant for turning up with gay men at gay nights, it is not just interesting but also quite useful to keep an eye out for lesbians.

Please bear in mind, when I say that, that I once spent a significant proportion of a night chatting up the only straight girl at Brighton Pride. (She didn’t tell me until I tried to kiss her. She was at PRIDE, LESBIAN PRIDE, and I could not have made it more obvious that I was flirting.)

Anyway, in amongst this resuscitation of ideas so hackneyed they lived in squats in Dalston before it was hip, there is a point, I promise. Here it comes.

Why have I spent years, mostly on the tube, trying to distinguish dykes from heteros based mostly on cliche-driven assumptions? It’s not just because trains are long and boring, its because, in this big bad heterosexist world, seeing another queer woman is a little bit of reassurance. When I catch a lesbian’s eye and she catches mine back before I look away in terror, it’s a small affirmation of a shared identity. That’s what it is to me, anyway. And by the way, speaking as someone who has been scared of ‘looking like a lesbian’ for my whole life, I don’t think we should be scared of admitting that there is something true enough to stereotype that the many cultural signifiers of queer-woman-hood are visible to those who look.

By the way, for those of you that find this article pointless, superficial, objectifying, banal and generally offensive, feel free to leave a comment.

Sadler's Wells: Sampled

Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui's Faun

I wrote a review for BELLYFLOP Magazine. CLICK HERE.

Fancy some anonymous outdoor sex? No, I'm a woman.

Its hardly the most earth-shatteringly important story running at the moment, but it was surprising to read about Stephen Fry's idiotic comments on the lacking nature of the female sex drive in a recent interview. This is apparently what he said:

In uncharacteristically extreme comments, the openly gay Twitter champion said he believed most straight men felt that "they disgust women" as they "find it difficult to believe that women are as interested in sex as they are".

"For good reason," he declares in a candid interview in the November issue of Attitude magazine. "If women liked sex as much as men, there would be straight cruising areas in the way there are gay cruising areas. Women would go and hang around in churchyards thinking: 'God, I've got to get my fucking rocks off', or they'd go to Hampstead Heath and meet strangers to shag behind a bush. It doesn't happen. Why? Because the only women you can have sex with like that wish to be paid for it."

Fry, 53, continues: "I feel sorry for straight men. The only reason women will have sex with them is that sex is the price they are willing to pay for a relationship with a man, which is what they want," he said. "Of course, a lot of women will deny this and say, 'Oh no, but I love sex, I love it!' But do they go around having it the way that gay men do?"

"If you expect me to believe you really like sex you'd better do it my way"

Jarring ideas from someone so purportedly intelligent. Maybe some straight men do feel that way. And, as has been noted elsewhere, some women and men do probably use sex as a bartering tool. And some men and women don't. And some gay men don't go around 'having it' the way Fry seems to assume. But on top of this, what's surprising is the lack of analysis in the two superficial comment pieces I've seen countering Fry, here, and here.

One really important thing that both the above pieces are fundamentally missing is reference to patriarchal/kyriarchal* control of public space. Its simply this: the fact that there are no particularly well-known male-female or female-female cruising grounds has little to do with sexuality that isn't about the construction of female sexuality through control of space. This isn't an inherent thing whereby all men biologically control space and all women biologically don't, this is just another sign that we still live in a patriarchy, or overwhelmingly 'masculine' dominated culture.

Most public areas are run, still, as they always have been, along the lines of a traditional culture of masculine interest, and are kept this way not just through resistance to change, hostility to feminism, divisiveness between women, and so forth, but by an implicit threatened violence that physically and mentally keeps women (and men!) in their places.

To take an example of a public space central to our culture, how often are pubs colonised by men (and token women) doing stereotypically male things like watching men's teams play sport? Isn't it expected, at least during the 'World Cup' (not any world that interests me), that every pub will be taken over by the competition, and if you don't like it you can stay home by yourself, you spoilsport? Women do run events for women in pubs, but the overwhelming culture of the traditional public house is masculine, and more than that, macho.

I for one have never casually dropped into a pub screening something stereotypically 'female', whether a women's sports game or an episode of Sex and the City. I have also never been to a pub where groups of mostly women dominate the public space and marginalised tables of men sit as far away from the noise as possible. It just doesn't happen.

We might conclude from this that women don't like hanging out in pubs as much as men do, (as Fry would say, 'women will protest that they do like drinking in groups with their friends but if they do, why haven't they traditionally controlled society for all of time in order to create public houses specifically tailored so that they can do that in peace?'). Rather, if it can be said to be the case that women like pubs less than men, maybe its because men overwhelmingly control and run public houses in line with traditional male pursuits/traditional ideas about about what people should like to spend their time doing.

Of course the analogy with anonymous sex isn't direct, but the point stands. Just as some women go to pubs and enjoy men's sports with their male friends and just as sometimes one sees a group of women drunkenly shouting and laughing at a pub or bar, so it is that some women have and enjoy casual outdoor sex. At least, browsing the Craigslist personals section suggests that there are some straight women interested in anonymous sex with men.

But coming back to notions of male and female sexuality, think about what would happen if a group of lesbians tried to set up an outdoor cruising space? Well there are two subsidiary issues that fall underneath the pretty, I think, undeniable fact that space is patriarchal. The first, sexual violence, the second, fear of sexual violence.

On the first point, as soon as some unfortunate subsets of the male population got wind of any lesbian cruising area its quite probable that it wouldn't be left alone for long. I can only speak from my own experience here, but one of the only times I've had anonymous sex in a public area I looked up to see at least ten men standing around watching. Which soured the mood somewhat.

I'd like to think that the majority of men would be completely uninterested in any lesbian cruising area, but even if that is the case, sexual violence happens, and weighing up the attraction of anonymous casual sex with the possibility of being raped is a risk seemingly much greater for any woman than for a gay man.

Even if we believe now that the majority of rapes in the UK are carried out by perpetrators already known to the victim (see footnote four of the Stern Review), i.e. a boyfriend/girlfriend or friend, or acquaintance, it is still the case that violent stranger-rape is a cultural motif. We are taught that as soon as it gets dark, behind every bush lurks a rapist, and whilst obviously this kind of rape happens, fear of this kind of rape is one issue (though of course not the only issue) that - I'd speculate - prevents many women from ever experimenting with the kind of sex that Fry reckons all gay men have.

When spaces, both indoor and outdoor, are so often controlled by men, and where women are taught not to recognise or develop their own physical strength and bodily autonomy, and where the fear of rape is something so internalised - is it any wonder that women aren't all out having anonymous sex on Hampstead Heath? Its not for no reason that female reclamation of space, such as Reclaim the Night, generates so much controversy and feels so radical and groundbreaking. It is radical and groundbreaking.


*From this point on I'll say 'patriarchal' or 'male' rather than kyriarchal, because I'm particularly focusing on gender insofar as it makes any sense to talk about gender as something separate from the other axes of oppression. Likewise, to talk of male oppression is not, in my view, to talk of all men oppressing all women, but rather to talk of a particular kind of masculinity and a machismo-glorifying culture that also discriminates against some men.