[DOCUMENT TITLE]
Lizzie Ford [COMPANY NAME] [Company address]
EDITOR’S NOTE
LIZZIE FORD
YOU OWE ME AN APOLOGY PRIVILEGE NOT OUR FRIENDS. NOT OUR ALLIES THE MENINIST MANIFESTO GIRLS ARE GREAT // SPEAK OUT WITCHES OF WESTERN PHILOSOPHY BAD BLOOD WHAT ARE WE FIGHTING FOR? MUSIC : HALESTORM AND THE PRETTY RECKLESS PROTEST ROUND UP KNOW YOUR RIGHTS CREATIVE: TEA WITH THE MAD HATTER
SAM HALL ELSPETH DAVIES ANONYMOUS
COVER DESIGN
SAM WELLS
NOTE ON PRONOUNS: The contributors’ pronouns are listed so as to avoid any accidental misgendering NOTE ON TRIGGER WARNINGS Trigger warnings are given where appropriate. Please, request specific tws which the editors may have missed, so that they can pay more attention in future edition
ERIK SUNDERLAND ZEPH DEAKIN ELEANOR PAISELY ALIYA CAMBRAY LIZZIE FORD GABRIELAWILLIAMS COLLABORATION GBC.ORG ELEANOR CHAPMAN-DRAKE
A pronoun chart can be found on the back cover Trigger warnings are given in the format CW: (Specific Trigger) at the start of each piece
EDITOR’S NOTE When Hills Road Feminist Society was founded at the beginning of the year, none of us knew what an impact it would have. Since then our members have attended and spoken at protests, held workshops and crushed the patriarchy both close to home and farther away. We are so immensely thankful for the help and support we have received from everyone, from those who have donated to keep us going through next year, and helped to fund the printing of this zine, to those who have spoken at events with us and helped us put on talks, to every single other feminist who has helped us and encouraged us. You really are like sisters to us. I’ve never been prouder to be a feminist. I’ve never been happier or felt safer to hold my head up high and to tell the world how angry I am. I have also never been prouder to be queer, and so I’m so joyful that the Hills LGBT society is joining us in contributing their love and expertise to this zine. The contributors to this zine come from a wide range of feminist philosophies and fields. While we have attempted to keep a general focus on issues such as intersectionality throughout, not every contributor, or even I, may agree totally with each piece. There are a wide and diverse range of feminist opinions featured here- and I would not have it any other way. This isn’t my zine, it belongs to all of us. To every activist on the streets fighting against a government which steals away our rights when they think we are too distracted to see it, every woman struggling against oppression and to every queer individual fighting for your right to exist, your fury is our anger. Solidarity. -Lizzie Ford Hills Road Feminist Society, Campaigns Director 2014-15
YOU OWE ME AN APOLOGY Sam Hall He/Him CW: street harassment, parental abuse, mental health issues To everybody who’s insulted my appearance because you believe my body is public property to be gawped at and commented on by every passing stranger, you owe me an apology. To everybody who’s catcalled me and yelled slurs while I’m alone in public, you’re collectively responsible for hundreds of panic attacks. Maybe you weren’t planning on attacking me, maybe you were. How can I possibly know? You owe me an apology. To the man old enough to be my dad who called me a frigid bitch for ignoring his catcalls, what did you really think yelling abuse at a child from your car would achieve? Did you want to have sex with me, which by the way would have made you a rapist? Or did you just want to scare me, to remind me that men of any age are entitled to my body and I’m never truly safe from them? Either way, you owe me an apology. To my actual dad, who told me my depression was self-centred and attention-seeking, who told me he’d be depressed if he was me, who mocked me for having a panic attack. I know those comments were more about your own pain than mine, and I’ve forgiven you. But nevertheless you owe me an apology. To every single one of you and so many more people whose words I’ve forgotten, although the feeling you left me with has stayed: You were wrong. I am beautiful. I am not yours. I am not scared. I deserve to be happy. And you owe me a fucking apology.
PRIVILEGE Elspeth Davies She/Her
Imagine a coconut shy. People line up in order to throw balls at the coconuts on the platforms at the front. They are arranged in three lines, with the first row of people a couple of metres from the coconuts, the second a couple of metres from that and the third a further few metres away. In order to win, all they have to do is knock the coconuts off the platforms with their ball. When told not to move from where they are and to launch their balls, the people at the back exclaim that this is not fair. But, that is just how the game works, so everyone throws their balls from where they are. Most but not all of the people on the front row manage to knock coconuts off the podiums with their balls. By contrast, only a couple of people stood at the back are able to do this. Of course, only the people at the back complained about the unfairness of the situation. All the people at the front could see were the coconuts in front of them and so they failed to recognise the advantage they had over the others. This is exactly how privilege works. Privilege is the term used to describe societal advantages that benefit certain groups of people over others. These groups experiencing advantages may be white, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied, male or from a favourable class. One of the trickiest things about this situation is that those who are benefitting often fail to fully recognise their privilege from their sheltered place in society. The people at the front need to turn round and look behind them. Not so they can feel guilty about the advantages they have been given over others, but because everyone needs to understand the way injustice in this system works in order to fix it. We all deserve the same chance to win coconuts.
RAINBOW FILTERS CAN’T
HIDE FACEBOOK’S
TRANSPHOBIA. HILLARY CLINTON COULDN’T CARE LESS ABOUT LGBT YOUTH.
ALCOHOL BRANDS EXPLOIT
QUEER COMMUNITIES TO
KILL US FOR PROFIT.
DON’T LET THEM PRETEND THEY CARE. THEY MIGHT SEE US AS HUMANS BUT ALL HUMANS ARE JUST MONEY MACHINES FOR BIG CORPORATIONS
CAPITALISM KILLS THEY ARE NOT OUR FRIENDS. THEY ARE NOT OUR ALLIES.
THE MENINIST MANIFESTO Erik Sunderland He/Him CW; satirical misogyny, lesbophobia Feminists: Socialist, lesbian, divorced women. Feminist. A word that strikes fear into the genitals of every good man, every hero. The witches that steal women from their husbands, that drags them down to hell and seduces them with their ‘liberal views’ and their ‘freedom of speech’. These are the women we must fight against, the ones that have it into their stupid little heads that they are our equals. That they are not bred solely to mother our children. They have it into their little brains that they can have sexual stimulation without a man! Fools! We must rise against these women, with their liberal views. Meninists unite! Menemenists must claim the world back from these evil witches. We are the master sex. Their place is in the kitchens, in the schools awaiting our children to return, their place is cleaning and cooking, crying and caring for our families. They should be praying in church by our sides, not protesting outside the houses of parliament, not leaving us for harlot witches! They must submit! Feminisimismsm is an affront to mankind and must be stopped. It’s called ‘mankind’, not ‘lesbians and bitter divorcees-kind’. We Menememeists must take back the world and put the women back into the kitchen to make sandwiches and to carry our children, like they were originally built to do. We Memenists will rule again, we will be superior.
GIRLS ARE GREAT // SPEAK OUT Zeph Deakin They/Them
THE WITCHES OF WESTERN PHILOSOPHY Eleanor Paisley She/Her Among a huge following of male feminist philosophers - of which there are few but all of whom are profoundly dedicated to the cause - there exist a small gathering of lesser known female philosophers. These women founded the durable links between politics, feminism and more abstract philosophy such as existentialism and metaphysics; for this, we owe them much more than they are credited. (Editor’s note: These women are all white, western philosophers, and are by no means the only female thinkers to give huge insights into feminist thought. However these philosophers, among others, define what we might think of today as ‘liberal feminism’- a branch of feminism which has its own issues and its own strengths). One of the very first pieces of literature to really make an impact in the world for the feminist cause was Mary Wollstonecraft's ‘A Vindication on the Rights of Women’. Wollstonecraft (1759-97) was writing under her own name in the later 1700s, which was an incredible feat in itself; she also wrote down her opinion in clear terms and became viewed as a ‘radical woman’ for doing so. She rebutted Rousseau’s claims, which he expressed in his book ‘Émile’, that girls should be educated separately from boys. She explained clearly that girls should be given the same education as boys and that, without such an education, women cannot be expected to be comparable to educated men. She expressed and dealt with these ideas way ahead of her time - she was modern before modernity - which emphasises the acumen of her writing when placed in context. However, even Wollstonecraft had to make some compromises in order to persuade what was a largely male audience, thus she stated ‘let women share the rights and she will emulate the virtues of man’. Such a phrase, nowadays, does not appear entirely strong in defence of the feminist cause, but it helped to persuade narrow minded traditionalists err more towards her way of thinking. In response to this, Simone de Beauvoir (1909-86) decided to draw some lines. She criticised Wollstonecraft for her compromise and began defining the terms ‘woman’ and ‘man’. Women, as Beauvoir pointed out, should not be seen as the ‘same’ as men, but ‘equal’ to them - the difference here should be clear - and she argued that this is what early feminist philosophers tripped upon. ‘Woman’ and ‘man’, said Beauvoir, should be seen as biological terms, purely physical descriptions of a ‘female’ and ‘male’ body. The identities of ‘woman’ and ‘man’ are also distinct from one another, therefore we should not be advocating the two to become one androgynous mass - nor should we do so with other gender identities. Here we come to the problem of ‘social construct’. Beauvoir herself
famously said, ‘one is not born but becomes a woman’, meaning that it is our society and its view of gender and sexual identity that define who we are to become. The notion of ‘woman’ - as being a mother, an object, weak, passive, shallow - is drilled into us as a form of general education as soon as we exit the warmth of the womb. These ideas planted into our heads by society are ‘social constructs’, meaning they have no real significance in anything other than the views and expectations of society. Beauvoir and Wollstonecraft believed that education reaches beyond the confines of the walls of the classroom and so every person should be taught, from birth, to know their potential as individuals, that their identity should not be formed by the way society views them as defined by their sex.
Julia Kristeva (1941-present day) is well known for ‘rejecting feminism’ [Kelly Oliver, Julia Kristeva's Feminist Revolutions, 1993, vol.8] but what she actually does is reinforce egalitarianism into the feminist cause. (EN: hence; one of the criticisms of modern liberal feminism: a movement should be putting women at its core rather than struggling to please men. In this philosophy, Kristeva does not acknowledge the belief of many that male complaints of alienation are relatively minor compared to the oppression felt by women- nevertheless, this concept has become a core part of 21st century feminism to many others.) The aim should not
be to supercede men and thus become their dictators, but to gain equality and a respected voice. Most issues we struggle with in this world concern power and Kristeva observed that feminism is in great danger of becoming yet another branch of the ‘power principle’ that dominates the leading members of society. Kristeva seems to advocate the use of slow revolution, rather than a full-on takeover, in which no one may become obsessed with power and end up replacing one dictatorship with another, equally messy, regime. For Kristeva, egalitarianism is the obvious way forward. When each person is born, they are in our eyes a total tabula rasa (blank tablet). This person should be treated with the utmost respect, be given every basic human right and a full, open education from the very first possible moment onwards.
BAND AIDS DON’T FIX BULLET HOLES
BLOOD // TAYLOR SWIFT
BAD
INTERSECTIONAL // INSURRECTIONAL Lizzie Ford Fae/Faer If our feminism does not represent single mothers, working on minimum wage zero hours contracts whilst their child benefit is being cut to the bone, then who are we fighting for? If we do not represent women without degrees and A-Levels, for whom the wage gap is much more vicious, who are often subject to abuse and harassment at work, then who are we fighting for? If class does not factor into our feminism, if we refuse to acknowledge that women are far more likely to end up in poverty and have far fewer chances to get out of it, if we are not constantly fighting to liberate women from economic exploitation and abuse, then who are we fighting for? More men named ‘John’ run large companies than any women do- this is not evidence that we need to get more women into boardroom positions, but rather that the very system upon which our economy is based is stacked against women. The lucky few who slip through the net are then turned against their sisters, isolated from them at the top of their careers, writing books telling middle class white women to ‘lean in’ and look towards their own attitudes to advance in the workplace. Meanwhile the emotional labour which women are expected to do is devalued under capitalist markets around the world. Meanwhile zero hours contracts penalise unqualified women with dependents far more than any other demographic. Our feminism must recognise that to overcome gender inequality we must also combat the social and economic equality of class system. The exploitation of women’s economic and emotional labour is just as much a part of neoliberal capitalism as it is of patriarchy. If we do not, how can we move forward? If our feminism does not represent immigrant women and asylum seekers, some fleeing from rape and abuse in their own country and who are then detained and further abused in ours, then who are we fighting for? If we wear t-shirts which proudly proclaim that ‘this is what a feminist looks like’ whilst ignoring the sweatshops across the globe where they were manufactured by exploited women and children, who are we fighting for? If our feminism is white, Christian and unashamedly ripping the hijabs off Muslim women for the sake of their liberation, then who are we fighting for?
We cannot, must not condone Theresa May’s ‘feminist’ T-shirt whilst she keeps female victims of rape, domestic violence and trafficking locked up in detention centres such as Yarl’s Wood, just outside Bedford. In recognising that women are hugely affected by war and violence, and often, without the mobility afforded to their male peers, have nowhere to go- how can we as feminists condone the bombing of these women’s countries? How can we call immigration and refugees ‘complicated’ when we know that, thanks to restrictions on the movement of people, women and girls are trafficked as either domestic servants or -in 80% of cases- for sexual exploitation? How can we buy from companies which use disproportionately female slave labourers, locked in factory prisons? As feminists, we need to know that our actions have consequences and that every transaction is steeped in colonial blood money. The costs are too high. If our feminism does not represent lesbian women, instead choosing to constantly reject and alienate them from a movement that should be working for their liberation- if instead of acknowledging that some of the best activists in our movement are and always have been lesbians, we choose to shout that ‘not all feminists are lesbians’, sacrificing our sisters to impress men, then who are we fighting for? If our feminism does not represent bisexual and pansexual women, if we watch while their bodies and sexualities are transformed into nothing more than a man’s fetish and fantasy, while the male dominated LGBT movement happily stand by waving pride flags, then who are we fighting for? Our feminist movement has a history of lesbophobia, dating back to Friedan’s lavender menace. Now liberal feminism is throwing queer women under the bus once more in order to make a movement more tangible to the males who we once fought for liberation from. But we are on a war rig supposed to be bulldozing through patriarchy and gender roles. Why throw women under a bus, when they should be helping to drive it? Queer women are some of the first targets of patriarchy. Because what’s better than objectifying one woman? Two at once! Corrective rape, too, is a weapon of patriarchy used against those women who dare to refuse men. So too is the slut shaming of all bisexual women- a phenomenon which has led to, according to one recent statistic, the sexual harassment of almost one in two openly bisexual women. So fuck
patriarchy, and fuck homophobia too. Stand up for queer girls and women, because we cannot trust a traditionally gay, cis male dominated lgbt rights movement to fight for us. If our feminism does not represent trans women, who are we even fighting for? If we hold up the ideal of a women, plastering the Venus sign over everything while we ignore women being murdered by a vile combination of misogyny and transphobia, who are we fighting for? If we refuse to acknowledge that feminism has a poor record with transphobia, if we refuse to actively reject transphobia in our movement and if we do not work to make our movement more accepting of all of our sisters, not just some of them, then who are we even fighting for? If our feminism does not represent non binary people, victims of an oppressive, violent gender binary imposed and enforced by patriarchy, then who the fuck are we fighting for? Feminism is a movement which is focussed on the liberation of all those oppressed by patriarchy, and who suffer from misogyny. We cannot pick and choose which women we want to represent: nor should we want to, because trans women and non-binary people are an important part of our movement, always have been and always will be. Transmisogyny is not only unacceptable and illogical, it damages our movement because we miss out on the strength and fire of great activists and great women. It’s time for feminists to acknowledge their past mistakes and oppressive, transphobic behaviour and actively work to create a safe space for all our sisters. If our feminism has borders of acceptability, if our feminism represents only the women who ‘don’t need feminism’, then who are we fighting for? If our feminism is straight, cis, rich, western and white, what are we doing? Who do we represent? We are nothing if we are not intersectional. We must acknowledge the interconnectedness of our oppressions and support our sisters because of the differences between us. If we are not fighting imperialism, racism, classism, heteronormativity and transmisogyny with the same resistance we turn against the patriarchy, we can do better. We understand oppression. If we refuse to fight it, then why are we even here?
MUSIC: HALESTORM AND THE PRETTY RECKLESS Gabriela Williams She/Her Girls take the lead, boys to the back: Gabriela reports on seeing these two fantastic female-fronted bands- live
Halestorm is one of the best Rock bands I have had the pleasure to see. The adrenaline-filled atmosphere of intimate and stunning concert venues accentuates the bands style and makes their performances that much better, as well as being a well-worth the money experience. Bands such as Halestorm and current co-tour band, The Pretty Reckless, are within the Rock and Heavy metal genre of music and always deliver an ear-splitting performance, which for the fans is exactly what they want- the louder the better. The social attitudes at the performances is also a tribute to the fans as well – they are a delight to spend a few hours in a mosh pit with, screaming out your favourite lyrics, hoping that Lzzy Hale might hear you. As for The Pretty Reckless, their amazing lighting and technical elements add to the experience of seeing an up-andcoming talent in the rock music industry- although their immensely talented frontwoman, Taylor Momsen, won’t yet use the word ‘feminist’. There’s no denying that bands such as Halestorm have once again opened up the heavy metal and rock scene for women- the genre is not always the most welcoming at gigs and concerts, but nobody can deny the talent of either Lzzy or Taylor. Halestorm’s Feminist Anthems: You Call me a Bitch like it’s a Bad Thing / Daughters of Darkness
PROTEST ROUNDUP: WHERE TO BE THIS SUMMER
SURROUND YARL’S WOOD AUG 8, YARL’S WOOD, BEDFORDSHIRE Taken from the Event Page: On 8th August we return to Yarls Wood women's immigration detention centre in force - join us in a movement that can bring an end to the hated, rotten, racist system of detention. A bus fare to Bedford costs 8 pounds with a student card Hills Road Femsoc will be taking a group and may be able to subsidise travel based on means. Visit the demo’s Facebook event for more details
CREATIVE The section of the zine where we show the work of talented women and queer writers or poets: with no requirement for a feminist theme, just creativity and inspiration TEA WITH THE MAD HATTER Eleanor Chapman-Drake She/Her
In Alice’s infinite dream of Wonderland anything is possible. You can walk down a straight corridor and end up in the room you started in. You can drink from a bottle only to find the bottle gets larger and larger until it has swallowed you up. The characters are actors in a play or pieces on a board, making a story out of real life and inverting our lives around theirs. If one man’s imagination could dream up this world and present it to us in a reality, does it make him a genius or a madman? Does it make us narrow minded for not seeing it before? Or maybe we do see it but we discount it as a dream or an idle fancy. What if fantasy does exist? What if, to any of us, the Cheshire cat sips tea with the March Hare in Costa, the White Witch hitches lifts in taxis through the streets of London, or little men and women, no bigger that your thumbnail, really do live under your floorboards and borrow from your dolls houses? When you look out of a widow onto the rolling country side, can you also imagine a small rabbit with a blue jacket and brass buttons leaping to and fro? Or when you walk in a wood at dusk, do you glance over your shoulder in case a man with a donkey’s head wanders by or tread silently in case you interrupt a fairy’s quarrel? Who’s to say that imagination is not just a state of mind but is, in fact, memories of a world as yet unacknowledged? Nowadays our children content themselves with Disney characters for inspiration and lifeless plastic toys for playmates. Why? Why give up the unending pleasures of your own private imaginings and leave yourself room enough only for banal concerns, like dresses for your dolls or school colouring sheets? Is the answer to be found in our society? Do we encourage a conformist mind set so much that even from a young age; children are too embarrassed to share a dream with their parents? Without this constraint every child would be an author, a poet, and an artist; their imagination giving validity and colour to the translucent world around them. Legends and folk myths have survived and brightened their area with the constant telling and retelling of
stories, the Loch Ness monster being a classic example. We have thousands of years of history and mythical belief behind us which give every village in England and the world significance and yet we do noting with it and indeed, kill it with our credulity.
In today’s world is it possible, with our fascination with fact, that we will purge all imagination from our minds and set future generations on a course with only one level- blind as we are to deeper meanings? The national curriculum taught in many schools focuses its main energies on the mathematic and scientific, and why shouldn’t it? That is, after all, the direction our society is going. But along the way core ideals are being left behind. It is now difficult to find many English students who do actually have a deep rooted love of language and books. The subject is considered useful and vaguely interesting, possibly even by some an easy subject that doesn’t require too much practical implication. However could it also be possible that science and fantasy could converge? The pursuit of knowledge is just another journey into the unknown, the same journey every reader feels on reading the first lines of a book, except that this book will never end because all knowledge cannot be discovered and scientists are merely an endless set of modern Sisyphus’ bent on an impossible task. Perhaps the greatest example of when imagination and practical science coexisted together is the case of Stephen Hawking. His theory and the subsequent discoveries that arose from it were all due to his imagination and his spark of creativity which allowed him to see things from a new perspective. Does this example answer the underlying question; that adults today lack that spark and this will mean an end to the literary geniuses like Lewis or Carrol? Or does it simply mean that life goes on in any way we want it to, with nothing planned or fated? Will “this insubstantial pageant faded leave not a rack behind”?
We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep.
PRONOUN CHARTS Note: These are by no means the only pronouns in use. If you would like another pronoun added to the chart, ask us!
SUBJECT
OBJECT
POSSESSIVE
REFLEXIVE
She
Her
Hers
Herself
He
Him
His
Himself
They
Them
Theirs
Themself
Fae
Faer
Faers
Faerself
Ze
Hir
Hirs
Hirself
Ey
Em
Ems
Emself
Xe
Xem
Xyrs
Xemself
CONSENT IS VOLUNTARY, SOBER AND ENTHUSUASTIC
SEX WITHOUT CONSENT IS RAPE
JUST DON’T DO IT CONSENT IS NOT ‘SEXY’ CONSENT IS A HUMAN RIGHT