Witchy

1st edition Contents 01 Muslim Feminisms: Solidarity before Censure 06 Born a girl in the wrong place 09 Glorifying Selflessness In Women 13 My Body, as a Utopia 16 C*NT 21 We should all be feminists 26 A letter to my rapist 27 Reclaiming Pink: A FEMINISTS PERSPECTIVE

Witch Editor Alice Morris

Alicemorris@graphic-designer.com

Special thanks

Madelaine Walker, Genevieve Darling, Haseena Manek, Khadija Gbla, Priya Alika Elias, Ephrat Livbi

Get in touch-It would be great to hear from you!

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Witch From the editor Growing up is hard. Being a young adult is strange as it feels like a sort of limbo between being an adult, getting a mortgage, and being the carefree teenager that you once were. The stereotypes in which we are fed by the media do not make this any easier. They give us a one-dimensional view of what it is to be a 20-something, and a bunch of stereotypical roles in which we are suppose to fit into. The educated girl, the career girl, the mother. There are so many of them, with none portraying women as complex, and being interested in different realms of life.

This making it more difficult for women to find a place in the world. Often being the smart girl means that you cannot portray yourself as feminine. Girls who like pink and coat themselves in glitter couldn’t be smart, surely?

Finding feminism meant, well for me, my own definition of what it is to be a woman. The more feminist readings undergone, the more I began to understand how society constructs women, and tells them to act in certain ways.

I allowed myself to fall back in love with pink, a colour in which I had strayed away from after having countless pink bedroom walls, barbies and dresses as a child. I used to see pink as a weak, immature colour but I now see it as a lively, bright impactful colour. I used to hide from anything pink, but now I embrace it. I’m not afraid of femininity anymore. I understand that human beings are complex creatures and can be multiple things at once; that loving make up, wearing pink, and being intellectual are not mutually exclusive.

I understand how women are frequently subjected to others opinions upon how they look, dress, act and feel. Women are told how to live their lives, and have been told how to do so for hundreds of years. This is essentially why this feminist publication was developed, as a platform for the intellectual girl to gain opinions, be subjective and of course embrace pink.

The name of the publication ‘Witch’, was derived from a subject in which I am very passionate.

Witches have been listed throughout history in an attempt to undermine, and destroy any female who has a political stance. The ‘traditional witches’, our ancestors who were drowned, burnt and stoned for the sake of having an opinion, are true icons. Within two centuries, eight million women were brutally killed for being witches, all innocent of course. ‘Witches’ have appeared frequently through female opinion leaders since, Margaret Thatcher being a key example. Although not all may agree with her political goals, no male politician has ever undergone the scrutiny in which she gained. After she died, a somewhat victory was heard by many claiming that ‘THE WITCH IS DEAD’. An undignified way to respond to the demise of a woman who was the leading champion of economic and individual liberty of the UK, and essentially the United Kingdom’s first female Prime Minister.

Just as the Guerrilla Girls owned the word ‘girl’, we must own the word witch, breaking down preconceived notions, supporting our ancestors, and fighting for change. So that one day, when generations have passed, women can live in a world whereby they are no longer inferior.

Please enjoy,

Inclusive feminism necessitates an acknowledgement and acceptance of both the

In light of the recent terrorist attacks in Paris and the subsequent spate of abuse and assaults against Muslims living in Western countries, it is important that the vulnerability of visibly Muslim women is acknowledged. Even non-Muslim women of colour are at risk for abuse, should they choose to protect themselves from the cold with a vaguely Islamic scarf. As non-veiled Muslim women, both myself and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown carry a certain privilege in our ability to pass through Islamophobic spaces with slightly less scrutiny than our hijabi sisters.

There are many ways to be a feminist. There are many ways to show solidarity. It should go without saying that there are many ways to practice Islam.

Whether a woman covers her hair or face to appease an abusive conservative guardian—as Alibhai-Brown seems to think is the majority of cases—or begins covering as an adult, it is no one’s right to pass judgment on her choices. If the goal is freedom of choice for women who currently wear a hijab, jilbab, niqab, etc., only because they are pressured to, we cannot begin by condemning those women. We cannot police, victimize, or infantilize them.

“Half-naked lasses and young veiled women are an affront to female dignity, potential and autonomy,” she writes (emphasis mine).

Muslim Feminisms: Solidarity before Censure

by Haseena Manek

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Alibhai-Brown’s new book Refusing the Veil is at points a thoughtful and comprehensive walk through important points in the history of Islam and philosophies of practice. At other points, however, it reads as a soft conservative polemic against Muslim women and their agency, fraught with contradictions about how women should walk the fine balance between modest and slutty.

vulnerability of visibly Muslim women and the privilege of non-visibly Muslim women. Muslim women, veiled and unveiled, need to stand together. Feminists, Muslim or not, need to stand together. Without this, we are only perpetuating transcultural patriarchy—which seeks control of women’s bodies—through simultaneous criticism of wearing too much and too little.

But this is no solution. Imposing universal dress requirements in Western countries to prevent Muslim women from covering their faces or hair is not at all an answer to the problem of societally enforced rules for how women should dress. In fact, it is a reiteration of patriarchal and misogynist ideas that require women-identified persons to dress according to convention. This is not feminism.

Alibhai-Brown considers how conservative fundamentalist rhetoric calls for women staying out of the public sphere. How can making the public sphere hostile to all expressions of Islam be a solution?

Alibhai-Brown’s solution for women and girls forced to cover is dress codes. Whether it’s a school uniform or legislation against face coverings, she believes that requiring Muslim women living in the West to uncover by law will allow those women coerced into covering to finally be free: “I think it is perfectly fair and civilized to insist on dress codes that apply to all citizens in schools and other public service establishments, and, within limits, the private sector too,” reads a section titled: “Why the veil should be repudiated.”

Women, especially young women, who find themselves in controlling or abusive situations need to be free to go to work, or attend school— whatever might allow them to eventually remove themselves from that situation. If a Muslim woman is in a situation where her family—a spouse or a guardian for example—will not allow her to go outside the house without certain coverings, making those coverings prohibitedoutside the home leaves Muslim women literally nowhere to go and no opportunity to live their lives.

‘The solution is simple: solidarity.’

From the debate on reproductive rights in the United States to female infanticide in India to sexist public service announcements in France, women all over the world experience inequality; reinforcing a connection between sexism and any particular religion or culture erases the experience of all women outside of that religion or culture.

The solution is simple: solidarity. Any woman— Muslim, not Muslim, living in Western countries or not—should be able to dress exactly how she pleases. It’s true that there are cases of women in Muslim countries and families who do not have that freedom. But patriarchal oppression is a global phenomenon.

Secondly, spending time differentiating between the hijab and the jilbab, Sunni and Shia, and examining the philosophies of the veil (from Quranic scripture to modern teachings) is much more talk than is really necessary for this socalled debate. Talking about historical, philosophical, and conceptual understandings of the veil is unnecessary when deciding whether you support women’s choices even if they are not the same choices you would make for yourself.

I want to note two points. First, I strongly do not believe that the above scenario represents the majority experience for Muslim women in the West who choose to cover. Fundamentalism, control, and abuse certainly do exist, but there are so many passionately faithful muslim women who choose to veil for a number of reasons. Not being amongst their number, I won’t disrespect them by speculating. I encourage you to do what liberal feminists often fail to do: listen to those women themselves.

The result is that conservative families will keep their daughters at home. Can this be considered liberation?

When that someone is a visibly Muslim woman-identified minority that means allying yourself with a community that is currently under fire. The so-called “question of the hijab” has been answered in the voices of veiled women who have spoken explicitly about their choices and their faith across various mediums. Any feminism that overwrites the words of the oppressed with their own rhetoric about how to liberate them is no feminism at all. It is repression in another form.

What is solidarity? It’s more than just aligning yourself with a cause or a community, or calling yourself a feminist. It’s standing next to someone (or behind someone) and supporting their choice to live their life as they please.

Alibhai-Brown’s focus on the abusive guardians and forced modesty erases the agency of Muslim women who choose to cover themselves and it erases the opportunity for collaborative solidarity between feminist organizers and activists on an international level.

“This issue cannot be left to Muslims to debate and decide.” Alibhai-Brown’s state-based solution serves xenophobic and misogynist rhetoric to right-wing pundits on a silver platter.

Additionally, it tends to remove agency from women of that religion or culture who are painted as unknowing victims their own culture. Be it family values, law, latent societal ideas, or bad feminism, women all over the world the world over are being told how to dress and how to express themselves.

Born a girl in the wrong place When I was three, war broke out in Sierra Leone in 1991. I remember literally going to bed one night, everything was good.

The next day, I woke up, bombs were dropping everywhere, and people were trying to kill me and my family.

We escaped the war and ended up in Gambia, in West Africa. Ebola is there as well. While we were there as refugees, we didn’t know what was going to become of us. My mom applied for refugee status. She’s a wonderful, smart woman, that one, and we were lucky. Australia said, we will take you in. Good job, Aussies.

Before we were meant to travel, my mom came home one day, and said, “We’re going on a little holiday, a little trip.”

She put us in a car, and we drove for hours and ended up in a bush in a remote area in Gambia.

In this bush, we found two huts. An old lady came towards us. She was ethnic-looking, very old. She had a chat with my mom, and went back. Then she came back and walked away from us into a second hut. I’m standing there thinking, “This is very confusing. I don’t know what’s going on.” The next thing I knew, my mom took me into this hut. She took my clothes off, and then she pinned me down on the floor. I struggled and tried to get her off me, but I couldn’t. Then the old lady came towards me with a rusty-looking knife, one of the sharp knives,

This old lady sawed away at my flesh for what felt like forever, and then when she was done, she threw that piece of flesh across the floor as if it was the most disgusting thing she’s ever touched.

They both got off me, and left me there bleeding, crying, and confused as to what just happened. We never talked about this again. Very soon, we found that we were coming to Australia, and this is when you had the Sydney Olympics at the time, and people said we were going to the end of the world, there was nowhere else to go after Australia. Yeah, that comforted us a bit.

We got to Adelaide, small place, where literally they dumped us in Adelaide, that’s what I would say. They dumped us there. We were very grateful.

We settled and we liked it. We were like, “We’re home, we’re here.”

My mom then had this brilliant idea that I should go to a girls school because they were less racist. I don’t know where she read that publication. Never found evidence of it to this day. Six hundred white kids, and I was the only black child there. No, I was the only person with a bit of a color on me. Let me say that. Chocolate color. There were no Asians, no indigenous. All we had was some tan girls, girls who felt the need to be under the sun. It wasn’t the same as my chocolate, though. Not the same.

orange-looking, has never seen water or sunlight before. I thought she was going to slaughter me, but she didn’t. She slowly slid down my body and ended up where my vagina is. She took hold of what I now know to be my clitoris, she took that rusty knife, and started cutting away, inch by inch.

I screamed, I cried, and asked my mom to get off me so this pain will stop, but all she did was say, “Be quiet.”

Khadija Gbla

Settling in Australia was quite hard, but it became harder when I started volunteering for an organization called Women’s Health Statewide, and I joined their female genital mutilation program without any awareness of what this program was actually about, or that it related to me in any way. I spent months educating nurses and doctors about what female genital mutilation was and where it was practiced: Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and now, Australia and London and America, because, as we all know, we live in a multicultural society, and people who come from those backgrounds come with their culture, and sometimes they have cultural practices that we may not agree with, but they continue to practice them.

One day, I was looking at the chart of the different types of female genital mutilation, FGM, I will just say FGM for short. Type I is when they cut off the hood. Type II is when they cut off the whole clitoris and some of your labia majora, or your outer lips, and Type III is when they cut off the whole clitoris

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anger

Pain Confusion Fear and then they sew you up so you only have a little hole to pee and have your period.

My eyes were drawn to Type II. Before all of this, I pretty much had amnesia. I was in so much shock and traumatized by what had happened, I don’t remember any of it. Yes, I was aware something bad happened to me, but I had no recollection of what had happened. I knew I had a scar down there, but I thought everybody had a scar down there. This had happened to everybody else.

But when I looked at Type II, it all came back to me.

I remembered what was done to me. I remembered being in that hut with that old lady and my mom holding me down. Words cannot express the pain I felt, the confusion that I felt, because now I realized that what was done to me was a terrible thing that in this society was called barbaric, it was called mutilation. My mother had said it was called circumcision, but here it was mutilation. I was thinking, I’m mutilated? I’m a mutilated person. Oh my God. And then the anger came. I was a black angry woman. Oh yeah. A little one, but angry nevertheless. I went home and said to my mom, “You did something.” This is not the African thing to do, pointing at your mother, but hey, I was ready for any consequences. “You did something to me.”

She’s like, “What are you talking about, Khadija?”

She’s used to me mouthing off.

I’m like, “Those years ago, you circumcised me. You cut away something that belonged to me.” She said, “Yes, I did. I did it for your own good. It was in your best interest. Your grandmother did it to me, and I did it to you. It’s made you a woman.” I’m like, “How?” She said, “You’re empowered, Khadija. Do you get itchy down there?” I’m like, “No, why would I get itchy down there?”

She said, “Well, if you were not circumcised, you would get itchy down there. Women who are not circumcised get itchy all the time. Then they sleep around with everybody. You are not going to sleep around with anybody.”

And I thought, her definition of empowerment was very strange. That was the end of our first conversation. I went back to school. These were the days when we had Dolly and Girlfriend magazines.

There was always the sealed section. Anybody remember those sealed sections? The naughty bits, you know? Oh yeah, I love those.

Anyway, there was always an article about pleasure and relationships and, of course, sex. But it always assumed that you had a clitoris, though, and I thought, this doesn’t fit me. This doesn’t talk about people like me. I don’t have a clitoris. I watched TV and those

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women would moan like, “Oh! Oh!” I was like, these people and their damned clitoris. What is a woman without a clitoris supposed to do with her life? That’s what I want to know. I want to do that too — “Oh! Oh!” and all of that. Didn’t happen.

you did out of love is harming me, and it’s hurting me. What do you have to say for that?”

So I came home once again and said to my mom, “Dolly and Girlfriend said I deserve pleasure, that I should be having orgasms, and that white men should figure out how to find the clitoris.” Apparently, white men have a problem finding the clitoris.

Just saying, it wasn’t me. It was Dolly that said that.

Then I got married. And once again — FGM is like the gift that keeps giving. You figure that out very soon. Sex was very painful. It hurt all the time.

And of course I realized, they said, “You can’t have kids.” I thought, “Wow, is this my existence?

Is this what life is all about?”

And I thought to myself, I had an inner joke in my head that said, “I will marry a white man. He won’t have that problem with me.” So I said to my mom, “Dolly and Girlfriend said I deserve pleasure, and do you know what you have taken away from me, what you have denied me? You have invaded me in the most sacred way. I want pleasure. I want to get horny, dammit, as well.”

I’m proud to tell you, five months ago, I was told I was pregnant. I am the lucky girl. There are so many women out there who have gone through FGM who have infertility. I know a nine-year-old girl who has incontinence, constant infections, pain. It’s that gift. It doesn’t stop giving. It affects every area of your life, and this happened to me because I was born a girl in the wrong place.

That’s why it happened to me.

And she said to me, “Who is Dolly and Girlfriend?

Are they your new friends, Khadija?”

I was like, “No, they’re not. That’s a magazine, mom, a magazine.”

She didn’t get it. We came from two different worlds. When she was growing up, not having a clitoris was the norm. It was celebrated. I was an African Australian girl. I lived in a society that was very clitoris-centric. It was all about the damn clitoris! And I didn’t have one! That pissed me off.

She couldn’t answer my questions, so they went unanswered. When I started having my period around the age of 14, I realized I didn’t have normal periods because of FGM. My periods were heavy, they were long, and they were very painful. Then they told me I had fibroids. They’re like these little balls sitting there. One was covering one of my ovaries. And there came then the big news. “We don’t think you can have children, Khadija.”

And once again, I was an angry black woman. I went home and I said to my mom, “Your act, your action, no matter what your may defense may be” — because she thought she did it out of love — “what

She said, “I did what I had to do as a mother.”

I’m still waiting for an apology, by the way.

I channel all that anger, all that pain, into advocacy because I needed my pain to be worth something. So I’m the director of an organization called No FGM Australia. You heard me right.

Why No FGM Australia? FGM is in Australia. Two days ago, I had to call Child Protective Services, because somewhere in Australia, there’s a fouryear-old whose mom is planning on performing FGM on her. That child is in kindy. I’ll let that sink in: four years old.

FGM is child abuse. It’s violence against women. It’s saying that women don’t have a right to sexual pleasure. It says we don’t have a right to our bodies. Well, I say no to that, and you know what? Bullshit. That’s what I have to say to that.

So please join me in ending this act. My favorite quote is, “All it takes for evil to prevail is for a few good men and women to do nothing.”

Fight FGM by signing Khadija’s petition on Change.org

stop genital mutilation

Glorifying In Women My great-grandmother never made a single selfish decision in her life. From the moment she woke up (earlier than everyone else in the household, to begin the morning puja) to the moment she went to sleep, she focused on everybody else’s needs. She was the first to serve food and always the last to eat. She was the one to receive guests, the one to clean the teacups, the one to bathe the children.

She never knew what it felt like to say “I’m going for a walk because I feel like it,” or “I’m going to watch a movie today.” There was nothing that she felt entitled to in her 84 years of living. She was the kind of woman that most Indian women are taught to emulate.

The rhetoric of selflessness has always been preached to women.

It’s in our religious texts (Sita sacrificing her family in order to prove her purity), in the films we watch (Mother India showing us the archetype of Indian womanhood), in the news that we read every day (young girls staying home so that their brothers can afford school fees). Unconsciously or consciously, women are held to a higher standard than men.

For instance, every time a woman is molested after dark, men take to Facebook to express their opinion in droves. They almost always say the same thing — “if you don’t want to be molested, you should stay at home”. You see, men can’t control themselves, and so we are expected to sacrifice the small pleasures of life, like drinking a beer after work with our friends. It’s for the greater good!

The day Indra Nooyi was named President of PepsiCo, she came home at 10 PM to her mother saying “You forgot to buy milk.”

It’s the same in the workplace. Take Indra Nooyi, who is easily the most successful Indian businesswoman in the world, and one of the most powerful women in the world. You might call her a role model. But the day she was named President of PepsiCo, she came home at 10 PM to her mother saying “Go buy some milk.

You forgot to buy milk.” When Indra asked why her husband

Selflessness couldn’t buy the milk, she was told, “He’s tired. Listen, you may be President of a company outside this home, but here, you’re the wife, you’re the daughter, you’re the mother.” So she went out and bought the milk.

Some might take this story to be inspirational and cite it as an example of humility. I see it as another example of the way that we are kept in our place, reminded that we cannot put ourselves first.

Would anybody expect Indra Nooyi’s husband to do household chores when he got home from work? Would anybody question whether he was fulfilling his husbandly duties? Would he admit, as Indra did, that he felt like a bad parent for being too busy to pick up his children from school? No matter what we may achieve, women are still the ones who have to go buy the milk.

When I tell older people “I don’t want to get married right now,” or “I’m not planning on having children,” they look at me in complete disbelief. I try to explain my reasoning, but they cut me off with “That’s selfish. Don’t you think your parents want to see their grandchildren?”

Selfish. It’s a word that is weaponized against Indian women in a variety of ways; a word that I instinctively flinch from. As I look at the men around me, I see how loud they are at work, how assertive and demanding. I see how instead of selfishness, this is viewed as ambition, how it is framed as something desirable. I see how they behave at home, how they throw their clothes on the floor, how they leave the dirty dishes on the table. They never offer to lay the dishes, or wash up, or even push their chairs back in. From a young age, they are taught that women will clean up their mess.

The invisible, intangible burdens weigh even heavier. I see how my friends patiently take on the lion’s share of emotional labor, supporting and comforting their boyfriends through the bad days. I see how little they get back. Sometimes it’s painful to witness.

Sometimes it’s funny, and we learn to joke about it with each other. I tell my friends about the time a DJ invited me on a date and I showed up only to realise that he was the house DJ that night, and that he expected me to stand and listen to him for three hours. They tell me about how their boyfriends don’t seem

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to care about their hobbies or take an interest in their art. We find solace in group chats with other women who share our plight.

The dictionary tells me that the word selfish means “lacking consideration for other people.” When I read that, and think of the Indian women I know, I want to laugh.

This inequality naturally extends to the bedroom. There’s a lot of talk about the modern, sexual woman, the Sex and the City prototype, who is liberated enough to demand oral sex, or multiple orgasms from her man. However, Indian women have a long way to go before they achieve this kind of outspokenness.

In heterosexual encounters, pleasure is seen as the exclusive dominion of the man. Dr. Mahinder Watsa, sex columnist for Mumbai Mirror, says that men are such in a rush to get off that they don’t attend to their female partner’s needs. Many women I know are afraid to bring up the topic with their boyfriends, so they fake it or become resigned to an unsatisfying sex life. It’s just another one of the many sacrifices we make.

I’m not sure what being selfish means for an Indian woman. The dictionary tells me that it means “lacking consideration for other people.” When I read that, and think of the Indian women I know, I want to laugh.

The most credit they seem to get is a Facebook post on Mother’s Day. “To my dear mother, who does everything for me.” Sometimes, these mothers don’t even see those posts because they’re not on Facebook. I wonder if heaven will recompense these women for the work they did, because this world doesn’t.

Women are not inherently better than men. We are as mortal as men: as full of weakness, foolishness, and vanity.

What I do know is this: I’m tired of the narrative that women are selfless. It’s easy to place Indian women on a pedestal, to say that they are somehow better than men, and thereby to argue that they should be the ones to nurture everybody at the expense of their own well-being. Sometimes, when I tell men I’m a feminist, they say “Well, I agree that women are better than men.” It is an answer that frustrates me, because it is such an easy way to evade responsibility.

No, I want to say, women are not inherently better than men. We are as mortal as men: as full of weakness, foolishness, and vanity. We have the unrelenting human desire to be selfish, to prioritize our own desires and place ourselves first. It’s just that — as my great-grandmother knew — we are not afforded that choice.

I think especially of the mothers I know, the ones who get up early to pack their sons’ lunches.

Priya Alika Elias 12

My Body, as a Utopia Lydia Havens

God Help Me

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I have made this clear to my family: I am not taking hour long walks every morning to feel pretty. I am not gathering dried mango slices, cold water bottles, and vegetable patties to feel pretty. I am not burning off these 70 pounds and scattering their ashes into the desert to feel pretty. I’m already pretty. These 70 pounds are leaving because I am tired of choking on staircases. I am tired of feeling like my body absorbed a cemetery. I am tired of back aches, interrupted oxygen, my doctor’s abrupt handwriting, my doctor’s slow-burning stare. The word “unhealthy”-- it is haunting. That word roams in so many directions at once.

We pluck it from the girls with stomachs like Jupiter, the girls who make dance recitals out of their thigh gaps. As if that’s any of our business. Today I find out that I’ve lost seven pounds.

God help me if I ever begin to believe that the weigh someone else wants me to be is paradise.

Nine pounds away from what The Biggest Loser would tell me is “One-derland”. God help me if I ever begin to believe that the weight someone else wants me to be is paradise. I want bodies to be seen as Utopias. I want my dream vacation to take place right in my own skin. I will write a lease that never expires, all under my terms. This body, it is my home. The love I have for it is no secret. Yes, today I am unhealthy. But just because I am does not mean that the next girl you come across at 215 pounds is as well. You did not get a key to the front door for a reason. Let this be mine.

And let that be hers. My Body, as a Utopia

CUNT CUNT

T T

C*NT By Ephrat Livbi Cursing is a good way to be bad. It’s mostly harmless and signals authenticity to listeners. For the linguistically bold, vulgarity is just one element of a rich vocabulary, a spice for speech. Yet even those of us who curse like sailors shirk the word “cunt.”

Breathe deep, because we’re about to cover an awkward topic.

But it’ll be fun and we’ll be more free when we’re done. Go ahead, say it. Just once. “Cunt.”

It’s a tough, clipped, harsh word with hard sounds; two consonants and a guttural stop. It’s powerful, sounding almost like an assault. The taboo against using it is extremely strong too, according to ”radical” anthropologist Camilla Power of East London University, who illuminates the history of “The C-word” on the July 25 episode of the Very Bad Words podcast.

Still, there’s reason for women to reclaim this word. While cunt’s exact origins are unknown because the word is so very old and has sounds that are common to both European and Indian languages, there’s evidence it was used throughout the ancient East and West—and not as a pejorative. For example, in The Story of V: A Natural History of Female Sexuality, published in 2003, Catherine Blackledge noted that kunthi referred to female genitalia in sanskrit. A Hindu nature goddess bore the name Kunti as well.

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Cursing is a good way to be bad. It’s mostly harmless and signals authenticity to listeners. For the linguistically bold, vulgarity is just one element of a rich vocabulary, a spice for speech. Yet even those of us who curse like sailors shirk the word “cunt.”

Breathe deep, because we’re about to cover an awkward topic. But it’ll be fun and we’ll be more free when we’re done. Go ahead, say it. Just once.

“Cunt.”

It’s a tough, clipped, harsh word with hard sounds; two consonants and a guttural stop. It’s powerful, sounding almost like an assault. The taboo against using it is extremely strong too, according to ”radical” anthropologist Camilla Power of East London University, who illuminates the history of “The C-word” on the July 25 episode of the Very Bad Words podcast.

From fine to pejorative The process of cunt’s pejoration—going from a good or neutral word to a bad one—is inextricably tied to ancient human history, according to anthropologists. Once upon a time, about 10,000 years ago in the Stone Age, people wandered.

They lived in societies where men and women had multiple sexual partners and female sexuality was not problematic.

But women with sexual power got a bad reputation when ancient nomadic societies stopped moving and began grabbing and holding lands for families. Men then needed to know who their children were, which meant keeping women monogamous was a must. Women’s roles shifted. For children to inherit, societies became patriarchal, and so the notions of female Still, there’s reason for women to reclaim this word. sexual power and goddesses disappeared, as While cunt’s exact origins are unknown because described by anthropologist Joseph Campbell. the word is so very old and has sounds that are common to both European and Indian languagThe end of women’s sexual liberation tarnished the es, there’s evidence it was used throughout the reputation of female sexuality. But the word cunt ancient East and West—and not as a pejorative. was a simple descriptor for a long time after that, For example, in The Story of V: A Natural History and it can be heard in old Norse and Germanic of Female Sexuality, published in 2003, Catherine tales. It lived on in English and shares linguistic Blackledge noted that kunthi referred to female origins with noble words like queen, king, and genitalia in sanskrit. A Hindu nature goddess bore country, and harmless terms like quaint, linguistic the name Kunti as well. anthropologist Evelyn Dean Olmsted explains.

In addition, the word kunt was found in the writings of Ptah-Hotep, an Egyptian vizier who lived in the 25th century BC. It referred to women and appears to have been a term of respect. The Egyptian word for mother was k’at, which meant “the body of her,” a sign that reference to the body could apply to even the first beloved woman in a person’s life and was just fine.

In medieval England, the word cunt wasn’t totally taboo. It first appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1230. As recently as the 1400s, there were even about 20 “Gropecunt Lanes” in the country; that was a practical description of what might be obtained in these red-light districts, just as one might visit Meatcut Lane for a steak.

In the 1983 book Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets (pdf), Barbara Walker noted that 20th century Egyptologists were shocked to discover Ptah-Hotep’s language. But Walker says that the word’s “indelicacy was not in the eye of the ancient beholder, only in that of the modern scholar.”

Wits referred to the cunt more subtly. In Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, published in 1478, the Wife of Bath asks, “Is it for ye wolde have my queynte allone?” While this sounds like a reference to cunt, and is often cited as such, “queynte” actually means a clever device, and is presumably used euphemistically in this context.

fuck off you CUNT 18

C C U U TC NT NT U N U C C U C C NT NT NT U U U C NT C NT C T C N U U U C C T T C T CU N N N U C U U C T C TC NT N U N U C T CU NT C UNT C U N U NT C NT UNT U C U T C C T T N

CU T N U C T N U C T N U NT U C NT U C T UNT TC T A more accurate descriptor

Today, many feminists argue that cunt must be revived. One reason is simply because it’s a better descriptor for female genitalia than “vagina.”

The word vagina has Latin origins, and refers to a sword sheathe—the female sex organ, in this linguistic rendition, is simply a holster for the penis.

Technically speaking, vagina refers only to the “sexual passage of the female from the vulva to the uterus.” Cunt, however, describes the whole shebang, external and internal, including labia, vulva, pudendum, vagina, and clitoris. Thus, it accounts for and allows female sexual pleasure. To reclaim the power of their sex, women must take back the word that best describes their sex organ, feminists argue.

Politics of language

Despite its fine lineage, saying cunt can be awkward, however. Very Bad Words podcast host Matt Fidler—a long time public radio producer who loves salty language—was nervous about covering this particular curse, he told Quartz. “I grew up in a house where swearing was okay, and my mom doesn’t censor herself. But that’s one word she never uses, which intrigued me,” he says.

He began digging into the history of cunt and was stunned by what he found. Fidler had no idea his research would take him to the start of human history. “I wanted to talk about it but I didn’t want to mansplain it since we still live in a patriarchal society and I do need to careful with some of the language I choose to explore,” he says.

But when he dared to talk about it, he discovered that female friends were already embracing the positive power of cunt. Writer Katrin Redfern, who co-hosted the c-word episode with him, had already thought a lot about this topic, for example.

Redfern read Inga Muscio’s 1998 book Cunt: A Declaration of Independence and it changed her life. She came to understand that the word is only an insult if you think strong women with sexual desire are a bad thing.

Still, Fidler was hesitant to utter the word when speaking to Quartz, as if he couldn’t get over the fact that it sounds very, very, very bad indeed, even to the indelicate. He admitted it’s still hard to say. “It’s just language but language is all about context,” he explains. “In the current cultural understanding cunt is still an insult for many people. But when I taught young women in broadcasting classes in New York, many seemed to be re-appropriating it, and things may change. I heard them use it a lot.”

Facing facts about sexuality Evidence that strong young women are reclaiming the word includes musician Azealia Banks’ charming 2011 debut music video, 212. At the time, Banks was only 20 and cute as a button, her hair done in two braids like a child, her smile sweet. Wearing cut off jeans and a Mickey Mouse sweater, she declared repeatedly, “I guess that cunt getting eaten.”

The song, video, and Banks were a huge internet sensation, but even those thrilled with her hit found her sexuality shocking. In a December 2011 story for Self-Titled magazine, Banks’ interviewer Arye Dworken admitted, “It’s jarring hearing a young girl say ‘cunt’ so often.”

Banks replied, “It’s so funny because I didn’t know it was that offensive…I feel like cunt means so feminine.”

So, should you start saying cunt, and when would doing so be okay? It all depends. It may be an empowering move when used in the right spirit. But do consider context. “I do use it now, partly in jest, knowing it’s offensive but not meaning it that way,” Fidler says. “But I still wouldn’t say that word around my mother.”

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We should all be feminists

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Now, men and women are different. We have different hormones, we have different sexual organs, we have different biological abilities; women can have babies, men can’t, at least not yet. Men have testosterone, and are in general physically stronger than women. There are slightly more women than men in the world, about 52% of the world’s population is female. But most of the positions of power and prestige are occupied by men. The late Kenyan, Nobel Peace Laureate, Wangari Maathai, put it simply and well when she said,The higher you go the fewer women there are.

In the recent US elections we kept hearing of the Lilly Ledbetter Law. And if we go beyond the nicely alliterative name of that law, it was really about a man and a woman doing the same job, being equally qualified and the man being paid more because he is a man. So, in a literal way, men rule the world. And this made sense a thousand years ago. Because human beings lived then in a world in which physical strength was the most important attribute for survival. The physically stronger person was more likely to lead. And men in general are physically stronger; of course, there are many exceptions. But today we live in a vastly different world. The person more likely to lead is not the physically stronger person, it is the more creative person, the more intelligent person, the more innovative person, and there are no hormones for those attributes. A man is as likely as a woman to be intelligent, to be creative, to be innovative. We have evolved, but it seems to me that our ideas of gender have not evolved.

Some weeks ago I walked into the lobby of one of the best Nigerian hotels. And a guy at the entrance stopped me and asked me annoying questions. Because the automatic assumption is that a Nigerian female walking into a hotel alone is a sex worker. And, by the way, why do these hotels focus on the ostensible supply rather than the demand for sex workers. In Lagos, I cannot go alone into many reputable bars and clubs. They just don’t let you in if you are a woman alone. You have to be accompanied by a man. Each time I walk into a Nigerian restaurant with a man, the waiter greets the man and ignores me. The waiters are products of a society that has taught them that men are more important than women. And I know the waiters don’t intend any harm, but it is one thing to know intellectually, and quite another to feel it emotionally. Each time they ignore me, I feel invisible. I feel upset. I want to tell them that I am just as human as the man, that I am just as worthy of acknowledgement. These are little things but sometimes it’s the little things that sting the most.

Now, not long ago I wrote an article about what it means to be young a female in Lagos and an acquaintance told me it was so angry. Of course it was angry. I am angry. Gender as it functions today is a grave injustice. We should all be angry. Anger has a long history of bringing about positive change, but in addition to being angry, I’m also hopeful because I believe deeply in the ability of human beings to make and remake themselves for the better.

Gender matters everywhere in the world, but I want to focus on Nigeria, and on Africa in general, because it is where I know and because it is where my heart is. And I would like today to ask that we begin to dream about and plan for a different world. A fairer world. A world of happier men and happier women who are truer to themselves. And this is how to start. We must raise our daughters differently. We must also raise our sons differently. We do a great disservice to boys in how we raise them. We stifle the humanity of boys. We define masculinity in a very narrow way. Masculinity becomes this hard small cage and we put boys inside the cage. We teach boys to be afraid of fear. We teach boys to be afraid of weakness, of vulnerability. We teach them to mask their true selves because they have to be, in Nigeria speak, “hard man.”

But by far the worst thing we do to males, by making them feel that they have to be hard, is that we leave them with very fragile egos. The more “hard man” a man feels compelled to be, the weaker his ego is. And then we do a much greater disservice to girls because we raise them to cater to fragile egos of men. We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls, “You can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful, otherwise you would threaten the man. If you are the bread winner in your relationship with a man, you have to pretend that you’re not. Especially in public. Otherwise you will emasculate him.” But what if we question the premise itself? Why should a woman’s success be a threat to a man. What if we decide to simply dispose of that word, and I don’t think there is an English word I dislike more than, “emasculation.”

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I know a woman who decided to sell her house because she didn’t want to intimidate a man who might marry her. I know an unmarried women in Nigeria who, when she goes to conferences, wears a wedding ring, because according to her, she wants all the participants in the conference to give her respect. I know young women who are under so much pressure from family, from friends, even from work to get married, and they’re pushed to make terrible choices. A woman at a certain age who is unmarried, our society teaches her to see it as a deep personal failure. And a man, after a certain age isn’t married, we just think he hasn’t come around to making his pick.

We teach females, that in relationships, ‘compromise’ is what women do. We raise girls to see each other as competitors, not for jobs, or for accomplishments — which I think can be a good thing — but for the attention of men. We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are. If we have sons, we don’t mind knowing about our sons’ girlfriends. But our daughters’ boyfriends, God forbid. But of course, when the time is right, we expect those girls to bring back the perfect man to be their husbands. We police girls. We praise girls for virginity, but we don’t praise boys for virginity. And it’s always made me wonder how exactly this is all suppose to work out, … I mean, the loss of virginity is usually a process that involves two people.

Now, imagine how much happier we would be, how much freer to be our true individual selves, if we didn’t have the weight of gender expectations. Boys and girls are undeniably different, biologically. But socialization exaggerates the differences, and then it becomes a self-fulfilling process.

I used to look at my grandmother who was a brilliant, brilliant woman and wonder how she would have been if she had the same opportunities as men when she was growing up. Now today, there are many more opportunities for women than there were during my grandmother’s time because of changes in policy, changes in law, all of which are very important. But what matters even more is our attitude, our mindset, what we believe and what we value about gender.

I’m trying to unlearn many of the lessons of gender that I internalized when I was growing up.

But I sometimes still feel very vulnerable in the face of gender expectations. The first time I taught a writing class in graduate school, I was worried. I wasn’t worried about the material I would teach, because I was well prepared and I was going to teach what I enjoyed teaching.

Instead, I was worried about what I was going to wear. I wanted to be taken seriously. I knew that because I was female, I would automatically have to prove my worth, and I was worried that if I looked too feminine, I would not be taken seriously. I really wanted to wear my shiny lip gloss and my girly skirt, but I decided not to. Instead, I wore a very serious, very manly, and very ugly suit. Because the sad truth is that when it comes to appearance, we start off with men as the standard, as the norm. If a man is getting ready for a business meeting, he doesn’t worry about looking too masculine, and therefore not being taken [for granted] [seriously?]. If a woman is getting ready for a business meeting, she has to worry about looking too feminine, and what it says, and whether or not she will be taken seriously. I wish had not worn that ugly suit that day. I’ve actually banished from my closet, by the way. Had I then, the confidence that I have now, to be myself, my students would have benefited even more from my teaching because I would have been more comfortable, and more truly myself.

I have chosen to no longer be apologetic for my femaleness and my femininity. And I want to be respected in all of my femaleness because I deserve to be.

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Some people will say that a woman being subordinate to a man is our culture. But culture is constantly changing. I have beautiful twin nieces who are 15 who live in Lagos. If they had been born 100 years ago, they would have been taken away and killed because it was our culture, it was our culture, the Ibo/Igbo culture to kill twins. So, what is the point of culture. I mean, there is the decorative — the dancing — but also culture is really about the preservation and continuity of a people. In my family, I am the child who is most interested in the story of who we are in our traditions and the knowledge of ancestral lands. My brothers are not as interested as I am, but I cannot participate. I cannot go to Umunna meetings, I cannot have a say, because I am female.

Culture does not make people. People make culture. So if it is in fact true that the full humanity of women is not our culture, then we must make it our culture.

My own definition of a feminist is: feminist : a man or a woman who says, “Yes, there’s a problem with gender as it is today, and we must fix it, we must do better.”

A letter to my rapist

Tattered fabric falls to frozen winter ground. Your face, your face, your shove, it’s madness in this place.

Fence built around, wood will splinter if you try to smooth your hands across the white wash grain.

Like it, love it, keep it, suck it, blow it, but now it’s touch this, mend this— bandage, balm.

Sew around what matters most, even when the machine is broken. That dress looks homemade. That dress has blood at the hem.

Water never hot enough, confusion settles in like a contusion, it blooms purple, lingers like a birthmark.

I ate Chinese food with girlfriends. Denials, fake confessions, their real happiness, virginity lost means I’m a woman.

Victim: my shaking flesh, the vomit in my palms when I tried to face school, locking knees, the punch I gave you.

Hidden, pieces of me— a shard, a wing broken never to match the solid wing, purity and innocence.

Sarah Lilius

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Reclaiming Pink: A FEMINISTS PERSPECTIVE I miss having pink hair. I wish I could say I didn’t. I wish I could tell you I was embracing life as a blonde, and that of course I don’t mind the fact that people no longer approach me in the street and ask me what dye I use, and tell me how fabulous I look. But that would be a lie. I hate to say it folks, pinks do have more fun.

There’s one thing I don’t miss though. For the year and a half I was pink, too many people took my choice of hair colour as a sign I no longer identified as a feminist.

I’ve been a feminist ever since I picked up my first Spice Girls album. I was brought up by strong, shouty women, and it’s hard not to let that rub off on you. Feminism was handed down to me.

It was in my blood as well as on my CD player. Now I’m an adult, I read about it, I write about it, and I argue on social media about it. Guys, I am a bloody feminist.

But the minute I dyed my hair pink, all previously hard-won battles about equal pay and sexual politics went out the window. Apparently I could no longer feel strongly about the emancipation of my gender because I favoured a cheery raspberry hue.

There can be no doubt about it; pink is a feminist issue. The colour will take centre stage this weekend with curator Dr Courtney Pedersen chairing the In the Pink panel at WOW Brisbane on Saturday, looking at the gender politics of my favourite colour.

Are girls more partial to pink because their parents have dressed them in it since birth? Am I fond of the shade simply because society has conditioned me so? Does liking pink make me a bad

feminist? Writer Hannah Pool, who is on the In the Pink panel this weekend, wrote this week that she considers her passion for pink to be a “feminist failing”. How depressing is that?

My mum never dressed me in pink. In fact, she dressed me in anything but.

As a child I wore greens, browns, blues, reds, and yellows – every colour under the sun. But not pink. It’s hard to argue that toy manufacturers didn’t force the colour on me though. I used to dress my dolls up in frilly pink dresses, the type my own mother never let me wear. Boys and girls toys are shamefully segregated, even today. Cars, bricks, and guns for boys; dolls, kitchens, and crafts for girls.

And there lies the rub. Pink is used, to its detriment, to pigeonhole girls and exclude boys. The colour has become lazy shorthand for girl and now everything about it feels, well, girly. And because of the damaging way we treat anything female, a thing that’s deemed “girly” is considered somehow second-rate. The colour has been judged pretty, quiet, and inoffensive – just like women.

We all need reclaim pink, and fast, lest it do any more damage. Dress our girls in it and dress our boys in it. Give our children choices; offer them all the colours of the rainbow. And if they (boy or girl) plump for pink, embrace it! Pink is a strong colour, it’s vibrant, it’s happy.

It’s the colour of love and life. There’s nothing wrong with the hue itself, just the negative connotations we’ve attached to it. It’s time we reversed those.

And, as I said to anyone who questioned my feminism while I sported the shade, you can like pink and still feel strongly that men and women should be equal.

Fancy that, eh?

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GRL

pwr

Chloe Hamilton

thanking you Contributors Visual Genevieve Darling (illustrations) page 13 Madelaine Walker (illustrations) pages 3,5,14,21,24,25 Alice Morris (illustrations) pages 10-12, 15-20, 28

Written Haseena Manek Khadija Gbla Priya Alika Elias Lydia Havens Ephrat Livbi Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Sarah Lilius Chloe Hamilton Alice Morris