Introduction Issue

SISTERHOOD

ISSUE 001 AN INTRODUCTION

HAKIHEA 2019

Proudly printed by:

EDITOR'S LETTER

EDITORIN-CHIEF

Welcome to the inaugural issue of Sisterhood, the only baby I will ever have. (Because I have the right to choose).

Sisterhood is my attempt at making a difference. I have always believed that education is the most powerful tool and hope that in your hands this magazine can inspire you to create change. Yours, Ollie x SOMETHING TO NOTE: Sisterhood is written by a variety of voices, each with their own unique insight into the world. You may agree with an author’s thoughts, you may not. We encourage you to dwell on where you disagree; examine, discuss, and sit with ideas that are uncomfortable so that you understand them and yourself better. You may find some works trigger things in you; past memories, trauma, or fresh wounds that are raw. If you are struggling, reach out to a trusted friend and keep yourself safe. You can always come back to us when you’re ready or not come back at all.

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IN THIS ISSUE

IN THIS ISSUE 05

HINE-TE-IWAIWA Hine must be so tired ushering people, wāhine, from the living world to the next.

14

MITSKI MIYAWAKI My mother is a staunch Māori woman with deep brown skin, and my father is a white man who enjoys watching WWII documentaries.

18

FUCKING ENOUGH Feminist sex wars of the 1980s ended with the pornography industry as the winner.

23

WOMB FOR IMPROVEMENT Although the women of 1961 may deem us ‘fussy’ it’s also our right to feel good every day.

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Quynh Anh Tran Le

IN THIS ISSUE

26

WOMANSIZE There are countless records of women reporting the same exact thoughts I used to have.

28

KAITIAKITANGA OF ARTIVISM AND MAURI ORA Weaving together the consciousness of people and Papatuanuku.

32

POLITICAL 'ACTIVISM' To fight institutionalised colonial behaviour, you have to grow some sort of intestinal fortitude.

36

POETRY PORTFOLIO A Sisterhood collection.

46

EVA'S SASS SECTION Opinions you didn't ask for, and honestly, you probably don't need.

52

SUBSCRIPTION & CONTACT DETAILS Did you enjoy Sisterhood?

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WOMEN & CLIMATE CHANGE

CLIMATE CHANGE RESPECT YOUR MOTHER (NATURE) - Written by Emma Dalton You might think the potential destruction of the earth would be of great concern to everyone. You might think that we would all feel this concern equally. You might believe that feminism has nothing to do with climate change. You would be wrong. Scientists have been recording links between feminism and climate change for over 20 years. Studies have shown that women are more likely to believe in climate change and to believe that it will be a problem in the future. Women have been found to be more worried about climate change, spending longer thinking about it and suffering from greater levels of mental illness as a result. Research into climate policy shows that women are more likely to support environmental policies than their male counterparts. Overall, the science is clear. Women are more worried about climate change than men.*

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*Unfortunately, very few studies included gender diverse people as a category in their studies, so no conclusion can be drawn on their collective experience of climate change. So, what’s going on? Why exactly do women care more about climate change? There are a multitude of reasons:

wealth. UN data shows that 80% of current climate refugees are women. Women are more at risk from climate disasters than men. It should be noted that LGBTQIA+ folks and indigenous peoples will also be disproportionately affected as they suffer from high levels of poverty as well.

Women will be more impacted

Women are taught to look after

by the changing climate than

others.

men.

Women are more likely to be living in poverty and to not have the resources they need to protect themselves from climate disasters.

This is particularly true in developing countries, where already women are having to walk further and further to gather food and water for their families. They are also less likely to be able to move away from areas that are affected due to their low level of

Throughout their lives, women and girls are more likely to be encouraged to care for other people. They learn that looking after the people around them is just as important (if not more so) than looking after themselves. This is something that men are less likely to have been taught from a young age. It has been suggested that women extend this idea of caring beyond other humans and include other living things such as

WOMEN & CLIMATE CHANGE

Women make up 38% of New Zealand parliament members A record breaking percentage plants, animals, and Mother Earth (deliberately personified). Women feel as if it is their job to look after everyone, including our planet.

Women consume more regularly.

I don’t mean that women like shopping. By this, I mean that women are responsible for buying most household goods, with between 80% - 85% of all consumer decisions in relationships being made by women. This means that women are directly responsible for making decisions between different products, such as whether to buy meat or whether to avoid plastic. Having to consciously make these decisions regularly could lead to choosing more environmentally friendly options and becoming more aware of personal climate impact overall, compared to using items that have already been bought for you without thinking too carefully about it.

Environmentalism

is

seen

as

‘girly’.

Many men are reluctant to engage in environmentally friendly behaviours or express positive views around environmentalism, because they are worried about not being seen as masculine. This is a real

problem in New Zealand, where behaviours such as driving a big Ute or eating lots of meat are seen as “manly”. Women do not face this pressure to be “manly”, and maybe this is why they are more likely to express concerns about the environment.

So, any of these could be the reason that women are more worried about climate change.

Most women probably relate to more than one. Unfortunately, women are massively under represented when it comes to making any actual decisions! In NZ we are reasonably lucky, with women making up 38% of our MPs. We also just elected a record number of women to mayoral positions in local body elections (25%). Globally, the picture is grimmer. At the International Climate Negotiations, where policies like the Paris Agreement are being drafted, women represent just 22% of decision makers. Without a diversity of female voices at the table, climate policy will not be as strong, or as urgent, as it must be if we are to avert a climate crisis. It is so important that we continue to push for equality, so we can include the voices of women and other oppressed groups in the decision making that is going to affect us all.

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HINE-TE-IWAIWA Karen Legenderriere Sebire

Hine-Te-Iwaiwa RIAH DAWSON

I wonder if Hine-te-iwaiwa is bored. I am. Bored of my own cultural and personal trauma; of how ever-present it is. I am bored of my face in the mirror. My face that I pick apart and weave back together to my liking.

To look better. To look pretty and acceptable, like the half-caste brown girls I see all over my social media timelines. I say hello and goodbye to my face every morning, noon, and night.

I ache to be like my sisters. I stand in the middle of them, always. We’re three sides of the same paneled mirror: slightly different and worn but reflective of each other. I want to look so much like them, so much like someone else that I think it’ll kill me one day. I grow bored of that feeling, too.

Apathy and empathy in equal measure are the enemies at my back. They are the enemy of every other wāhine around me, too.

Young. Passionate but aimless and without a calling.

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Without love for anything. Who can I pour my love into? Where does it all go when I am left alone? Will I always be this tired?

I think Hine is tired like me. She must be so tired ushering people, wāhine, from the living world to the next. She and I are a revolving door of forgiveness and empathy for the wrong people. We get hurt; hard feelings calcify around our hearts.

Unlike Hine, I cut quick ties like ribbons or the seams of my dresses. I grow tired of that cutting detail, as well. I am so tired. History taught me well to do that, to cut away the dead weight. Hine cannot cut away anyone, it isn’t her way. Instead, she weaves them to her person forever and never forgets them – even those who hurt her.

Has Hine grown listless, restless?

Reckless? Does her anger sit under that all that tiredness, too? Like me?

Watching wāhine of her own flesh and blood endure violence at the hands of those who swear, promise, and plead that they love them.

Those men and women love their wāhine so much that they have to hurt them because their love overwhelms them like a cup overflowing. These are the lies they tell their wāhine. And we believe them.

Did Hine watch over me, too? Like so many before me? Roll her eyes as I rolled the dice? Returning again and again until I learned my lesson? I hope she is angry. Because I am angry at the stupidity of a young girl’s choices. She was a desperate, blinking neon green light of human that wanted love. She got what she wanted. And she was hurt beyond words because of it. I was hurt because of it. We are the same person, just in different parts of a weaved timeline. Hine watched me make my own mistakes. She let me make my own mistakes as my own mother does.

Mother Mary watched me, too.

Mother Mary stared down at more me all my life, in 10 different churches and two different schools.

Always in blue, always sombre,

HINE-TE-IWAIWA peaceful. Her eyes were always cast down, closing them because she couldn’t take the sadness of losing her son. She closed her eyes to the pain.

Or maybe she knew the pressure, the mantra of every Catholic school girl in every school to “be like Mary”, that she closed her eyes to that, too. Every time a girl or a teacher uttered that phrase, it always felt like a prayer to Mary. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for her. Her institution was, still is, heavily image-focused, dripped in gold and grandeur. It would make me want to close my eyes, my heart to it. And so I did.

It's hard being a role model to girls everywhere in every colonised, Anglo-Saxon country ever founded.

How depressing. Beautiful still and tragically stuck as a role model, something the girls she watches over can never actually be. Hine isn’t the example, not anything to aspire to be. She was the tiniest star, after all, before she was made to be a goddess. And then she became the moon.

I loved the moon as a little girl, letting her light wash over me in waves and beams. Maybe she protected me until I stopped looking for her in the night, grew too old for myths I had to seek out myself. The myth and love of Hinete-iwaiwa was not a story told in a Catholic high school full of highly strung, academically strong girls.

Who needs their own stories, their own culture when you can replace it with epic poems from Homer?

The drama, the sadness, the highbrow poems of Greek tragedies have nothing on what happened to Hine-te-iwaiwa and her sisters.

On me and my sisters. On me and myself. We are all our own mini, self contained Greek-Māori tragedy. But even that narrative gets tedious. My own story is boring to me because it is so self-indulgent.

I am always seeking out versions of myself, of my own history. Both personal and cultural. If you’re steeped in your own trauma, like a strong tea, it just becomes you. This is who are you, this is the story you tell; to anyone who will listen. I am simply a leftover casualty of the tragedy that is a white-washed, post-colonial world. I can’t speak the language, I barely know my iwi, and it’s even more embarrassing to try to claw back whatever I can from a past I never feel comfortable owning.

So I’ll replace it with other things that make me feel better, for a little while at least. I read more James Baldwin, have printed, scanned copies of Frida Khalo’s letters on my wall, and find any excuse to drop in some info about an interview I heard on NPR about the Latinx / police brutality rate. You try to replace what you never were to begin with. I need to show people the depth of my knowledge of other black and brown communities so they know that I am really trying – just not anywhere it counts for my own culture. Not yet, but maybe someday.

This is where my love goes when I am left alone: to other people, to other figures of brown and black history who need my adoration and prayers. But I keep Hine-te-iwaiwa to myself. She doesn’t bore as I bore myself. She replaces my girlhood love for the Virgin Mary. She is a painting on the mantle of my rental home in Lyall Bay. She is something

Tanya Putthapipat

"We are the same person, just in different parts of a weaved timeline" inked on my heart. Someone to carry with me. Hine is my own personal saint. I know I said she wasn’t a role model and maybe she wasn’t meant to be. But who could be better? Who watches over women in this life and the next?

Who protects them like Hine? She may not have been meant to be a role model, but we make her because we need something to believe in.

Anything is better than nothing in this cold, hard (beautiful) world.

Having hope and faith in a false god is far better than anything, so I pray at the altar of Hine, and myself. I make a goddess of myself.

I love myself: pour love into me because I am alone in the hatred and the healing of it all. Alone with myself and Hine.

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OPINION

Shivashish Andrews Indian - 24 - Male - Gay

O P I N I O N

When I think about feminism and my outlook, I only care about one distinguishable

factor.

I

am

a

feminist in the classic sense of the term – equality of the sexes, in all aspects

of

life.

Not

a

radical

movement that demonizes men, deterring many other people from championing

for

the

rights

of

women.

Growing up with many women in my life, I have had the fortune of seeing

their

loving,

hardworking,

strength,

tenacity,

and

multi-

faceted nature. My mother remains my biggest source of inspiration.

She’s had such an adventure of a life, growing up in a military background and formerly worked in the Red Cross as a peace negotiator for the Indian Army (at 19 years old!).

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OPINION

"BESIDES BEING MY MOTHER, SHE REALLY IS MY BEST FRIEND"

I

learned

so

much

from

her

cultural

traditions

in

other

taken seriously by some cis people

growing up, bearing witness to

countries, issues against pro-choice,

(men

both her soft, warm nature, as well

and overall misogyny – while some

Annoyingly, these cis people view

as the grit and strength from life

progress has been made over the

gender-identity as being a choice –

experience – like two sides of a coin.

years and a larger spotlight is now

like wearing a different hat for the

Besides being my mother, she

on these issues, it’s clear there is still

day.We also cannot fail to recognise

really is my best friend and I

a lot of work to do. Some issues also

the experience of a queer woman

continue to learn from her in my

exist within or in relation to the

of colour, and the adversities they

adulthood (she’s super funny, by

LGBT+ community. While equality

would face. We have to remember

the way). A large majority of my

and being inclusive is a key part of

that they not only experience the

other inspirations are also female.

the rainbow community, I have

inequalities of being a woman, but

Real life role models include Lady

noticed discrimination more than

also the setbacks of being in two

Gaga, Nikki and Brie Bella, Ariana

once (Which I have experienced in

minority

Grande, Naomi Campbell and Viola

other areas, as a gay guy of colour –

being some of the strongest, we

Davis; while early all my favourite

off topic). Lesbians, for example,

should remember to see, hear and

fictional characters are also women:

often don’t get as much credit or

support them.

Lara Croft, Nina Williams, Ciri, Faith

prevalence in queer media as gay

Connors, and Bayonetta. With the

men do. They are often on the

There’s so much more that can be

power of women and my role

receiving end of dated stereotypes

said,

models being said, it has always

and jokes. This is sadly where the

something, Indian gay guy has a lot

dumbfounded me every time I

misogyny of the LGBT+ community

more he wants to learn! But I hope

learn of a setback, or inequality that

exists, regardless of us knowing all

my fellow sisters out there know I

women

My

too well what it’s like to face

come as an ally, with lots of love

question is always, “why?” Gender

discrimination. On another hand,

and respect, and I hope to be a

pay gaps, the cost of feminine

trans women also have to deal with

supporting presence wherever I can

hygiene, slut-shaming, archaic

their gender identity not being

be.

of

all

walks

face.

and

women

groups.

and

this

While

little

alike).

perhaps

twenty-

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KATA BROWN

THE WAY I LOVE YOU ASH & FRANCES Married three months.

"We

met

years

ago

through a local cafe that Ash co-owned. We are best

friends

who

help

each other be the people we want to be"

FRANKIE & GABRIELLE Friendship through heartbreak

"The first time we spoke properly, she just cried and was really open. We got close quickly"

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KATA BROWN

THE WAY IÂ LOVE YOU LILLIAS & SOPHIE Half sisters, best friends "Our friendship will last forever because we are sisters. She is my little sister but also my best friend, so it is a mixture between

love

and

friendship"

Mella & Emma Six year friendship

"We met in our first year of

high

school

and

bonded over music"

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KATA BROWN

THE WAY I LOVE YOU LOLA & NGAKAUIA Meet three weeks ago

No

comment

Silence

is

given.

louder

than

words.

ROSE & SARAH Mother, daughter

"Rose is 15 and I am loving watching grow

into

my a

young woman"

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little

girl

beautiful

Quynh Anh Tran Le

GENERATION Z

GENERATION Z A VIEW ON CLIMATE CHANGE WRITTEN BY KAITLYN EVANS – AGE 12 Have you ever contemplated what your car is doing on your way to work? Well, your car is discharging toxins that include carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, formaldehyde, benzene, and soot. These toxins get delivered into the air and contribute to climate change.

Climate change is a massive problem and is wrecking the atmosphere. You’re adding to climate change by driving, smoking, working at a factory, using gas lamps, heaters, barbecues, and much more.

Climate change is a serious and complex issue that has to stop! If we don’t slow down or stop it entirely then you’re shortening the lives of yourself and the generations

in the future. I believe it’s wrong that people add to climate change and, well, leave the mess for us, the kids, to clean it up and stop it!

Do you think it fair that previous generations create this everchanging madness just for us, your children to clean up? Or make the sea life, the birds and other animals to suffer through the smoke and toxins that we are releasing into the environment?

Not to mention us chopping down trees and burning forests! The weather patterns change as we add more pollution into the world which is thawing glaciers that are plunging into the ocean and causing the oceans swell over the islands. Did you know that due to

global warming the ocean has risen five to eight inches! That’s a huge quantity of water! but believe it or not us humans aren’t the only things adding to this monstrosity!

The sun has engulfed meteorites and our garbage! Stars and possibly more! The sun is expanding and consequently growing closer to earth meaning that earth will become like Venus, uninhabitable.

I think climate change is deadly and is annihilating the earth and everything on it! Climate change is exterminating us and everything on this planet, but we do hardly anything about it! We add to it, we say we are going to stop using things that encourage it, but we don’t! We need to stop even if it’s the last thing we do.

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MITSKI MIYAWAKI

MITSKI MIYAWAKI Lyric Waiwiri-Smith

I am a fool for music by female musicians scorned by men. I think I’m trying to find some kind of closure or validation for my own personal male-inflicted scorn but I never find release. I have a hunger inside of me that is simply insatiable for the stories of heartbreak and anger and loss – I devour and devour and devour and still there is room in me for more sadness. I’ve devoured Joni Mitchell.

I’ve devoured Taylor Swift. I’ve devoured Lorde. Beyoncé. Snail Mail. Soccer Mommy. Lauryn Hill.

SZA. I’ve absorbed the stories of vulnerable women and shrouded my life in them until their narrative

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became mine, shaping my trauma to fit theirs. But when I discovered Mitski I felt a satisfaction, as though someone had finally written my story for me. I have to be careful with where I listen to Mitski, because her music has the ability to transport you elsewhere. My bus ride home becomes the cinematic ending to a coming-of-age movie.

Sitting alone in the dark becomes a sacred meditation. Once I played her music over the speakers at work and starting crying as I was wiping down a bench. Mitski Miyawaki is Japanese-American and has openly expressed her attraction to both women and men

She is a classically trained musician and has an intimidating level of intelligence.

She’s completely beautiful and yet has no desire to be a product of shallow consumption. She seems to have wholly dissected the female experience. She is unapologetically detailed and unflinchingly honest in her storytelling. On ‘Happy’, she describes the act of a being named Happy “[coming] inside” of her, and makes it seem at once an act of intimacy and also a bomb being planted. On ‘Nobody’, she recalls being “big and small and big and small and big and small again”, and you painfully remember being big

MITSKI MIYAWAKI and small too. On ‘Townie’, she wants “a love that falls as fast as a body from the balcony”, and it’s wildly romantic. But her music really is both cinematic and a sacred meditation. Listening to it makes you feel seen, and heard, and validated, and understood. Her music is the hand that holds mine throughout the trials of life, and I’ve formed a close bond with it not just for all its intelligence and vulnerability, but for what is means coming from a mixed-race woman.

Mitski is half American, half Japanese and I tick both NZ Māori and NZ European on government forms. My mother is a staunch Māori woman with deep brown skin, and my father is a white man who enjoys watching WWII documentaries on the History Channel in his spare time. A lot of my life has been a balancing act between these two worlds: I stand on one end of the scale and watch as the other is about to tip over. I run over to save it from falling and, in the distance, I see the end I just left start to go down. I’ve never really been sure how to be a mixedce woman and, even though I can’t say Mitski knows either, she can beautifully narrate the experience, especially in terms of love. Being mixed race, there is an inexplicable ache when it comes to loving white men (and women). It is the overwhelming self-consciousness and hatred that is ingrained into WOC (women of colour) from a young age – we’ve spent our whole lives looking towards the media for advice on How To Be Beautiful, and a European face looks back at us.

We are taught that ‘white’ features and bodies are the epitome of beauty and the subject of desire.

Even when prominent white women adopt the physical attributes that are typical of ethnic

women it becomes a sensationalised trend that they invented, and the painful history where these features were once a focal point for racist backlash becomes just a distant (if remembered at all) memory. You are taught that you are not the ideal, that exceptions would have to be made in order for you to be loved. I’ve always feared that my brownness would make me less loveable, less desirable, less of a “dream girl”, and I’ve carried this fear into every relationship, fling, and hook up I’ve ever had in my life.

I’m scared of someone lifting the veil on my racial ambiguity, that knowing I’m mixed race will make the thick thighs, big nose, and messy hair all the more prominent – and ugly. Daring to exist as a woman of colour is inherently a Political act. Being brave enough to be a woman of colour in love is like waging war. Mitski reflects on this feeling many times in her music.

Perhaps the most obvious example is ‘Your Best American Girl’: Your mother wouldn’t approve of how my mother raised me. But I do, I think I do. And you’re an all-American boy I guess I couldn’t help trying to be your best American girl

I remember the fear of introducing my first “real” boyfriend to my mother. He was from a far nicer white family, and my mother was completely, unapologetically brown – loud, haughty, and missing the ‘polish’ of Western society. I would have much rather spent our entire relationship (which lasted two years) without him ever meeting her and knowing my truth – yes, I really am a brown girl! Yes, my mother really is a brown woman!

Yes, we live like this! Mitski’s mother Japanese and Mitski herself has

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MITSKI MIYAWAKI

Anon 2019

16 |

MITSKI MIYAWAKI spoken of her closeness with the Japanese side of her family. She speaks about her Asian identity frequently and proudly, and yet she’s also admitted a need to “apologise for existing” just for walking into a room. In her I see a reflection of my own inability to fully integrate into white society.

We are both proudly biracial, yet aware of what our presence means in white spaces. We are both tethered to a life of apologising, yearning, and feeling like an outsider.

As she sings to her lost lover on ‘Strawberry Blond’, “all I’ve ever wanted is a life in your shape”.

Mitski’s work has a gritty nakedness to it. She is fearlessly hurting and Putting it on parade. Even in her pursuit to ‘Be the Cowboy’ and put on a brave, masculine front in the face of this pain, there is always something about her work that is incredibly feminine. She is the “idiot with a painted face” in ‘Me and My Husband’ until her lover walks in, and in ‘Pink In The Night’ she makes a desperate weakening plea to try and kiss her lover “again, and again, and again, and again”. Often, we tend to treat female musicians who are daring enough to lay their emotions bare as submissive and powerless, but this vulnerability is perfectly feminist. There is nothing more empowering than to bravely showcase your emotions to the world, without fear of who is listening and interpreting. She seems to have such a firm grip on the female experience, and I’m obsessed with her description and analysis of it. Her song ‘Happy’ is on a constant loop in my mind. I find myself pouring over her lyrics. The second verse is particularly beautiful and scrutinising of the

romantic women;

and

domestic

life

of

I was in the bathroom, I didn’t hear him leave I locked the door behind him And I turned around to see all the cookie wrappers And the empty cups of tea Well I sighed and mumbled to myself, again I have to clean

The first time I heard this I felt winded. The act of cleaning up after men is so embedded into womanhood – how many times has Kanye West preached questionable political views just for Kim Kardashian to have to defend him?

How many times do we listen to Lemonade and hear Beyoncé go through the aches of having to repair her relationship with her husband, broken over his infidelity?

How many times have you watched your mother clean up after your father? How many times have you as a young woman had to fix the parts of yourself and your life that were torn apart by a lover? Cleaning is a constitutionally feminine task, and this detail Mitski slips through of her lover leaving a mess behind, and the fact that tidying up is something she has to do again, is so undeniably powerful. At once her lyrics seem like the entries of your own diary and biblical passages on female life. Despite making her emotional vulnerability public in her music, Mitski remains an enigma.

on womanhood and identity.

However, the mystery of Mitski sometimes feels comforting consumers of art we have the freedom to interpret music in our own way, and so her stories become ours. When I show someone one of her songs, I like to say she wrote it about me. Even in her absence I hear her wise voice at the back of my brain offer me advice: don’t live to be consumed, let yourself be emotionally vulnerable. And stop messing with boys.

Editors Note: If you are in a position where you need help or just need to talk to someone about what you are going through, Aotearoa has 24/7 FREE support lines. Never hesitate to contact them.

Text Text Call Call

1737 4202 1737 0800 111 757

Kia Kaha

She recently deleted all her social media accounts in time with the end of her tour and, although there exists many fantastic interviews of her online, I still want to pick her brain apart to see her inner workings, or at least sit in silence for six hours as she presents a speech

| 17

FUCKING ENOUGH

FUCKING ENOUGH A RADICAL INSIGHT – DEIDRA SULLIVAN

The feminist sex wars of the 1980s ended with the pornography industry as the winner. The bitterly fought battle pitted groups of feminists against each other. In 1983, Andrea Dworkin and feminist lawyer Catherine MacKinnon fought to have pornography recognised as a violation of women’s human rights. Women who could prove they had been harmed in or by the production of

pornography the right to seek damages from producers and distributors of pornography.

Opposing Dworkin and MacKinnon were groups including FACT (Feminist anti-censorship taskforce) and COYOTE (Call off your old tired ethics) who, aligning with the pornography industry, argued that the problem was the nature of the pornography, rather than pornography itself. Dworkin and

MacKinnon took the view that pornography and the industry were irredeemably exploitative and demeaning. Their definition of pornography didn’t set the bar low in terms of what qualified: 1) Women that are presented dehumanised as sexual objects, things or commodities; or 2) Women are presented as sexual objects who enjoy pain or

NEW ZEALAND WOMEN LIVE IN A CULTURE SATURATED WITH SEXUAL AND DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

humiliation; or 3) Women are presented as sexual objects who experience sexual pleasure in being raped; or 4) Women are presented as sexual objects tied up or cut up or mutilated or bruised or physically hurt; or 5) Women are presented in

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postures of sexual submission, servility or display; or 6) Women’s body parts including but not limited to vaginas, breasts, and buttocks – are exhibited, such that women are reduced to those parts; or 7) Women are presented as being penetrated by objects or animals; or

8) Women are presented in scenarios of degradation, injury, abasement, torture, shown as filthy or inferior, bleeding, bruised, or hurt in a context that makes these conditions sexual.

The legislation was vetoed on three different occasions. Justice Frank

FUCKING ENOUGH Easterbrook, in overturning the ordinances in Indianapolis, observed: ''We accept the premises of this legislation. Depictions of subordination tend to perpetuate subordination. The subordinate status of women in turn leads to affront and lower pay at work, insult and injury at home, battery and rape on the streets... [however] ...this simply demonstrates the power of pornography as speech...''. In essence, Easterbrook stated the harm pornography does proved its effectiveness as a form of speech, and as such it was protected as a form of expression – given that the First Amendment means that the US government has no power to restrict expression because of its message [or] its ideas. In 2004, Dworkin observed, “If we give up now, younger generations of women will be told porn is good for them. And they will believe it.” In 2019 we can safely say we have arrived at this point. With little challenge to the pornography industry since the 1980s due to the liberalisation of feminism, women

have increasingly been sold the idea that pornography, rather than being harmful or demeaning toward women,is potentially liberating.

Should women have concerns, however, it is also framed as ‘inevitable.’ Journalist and anti-porn campaigner Robert Jensen recalled a conversation with his female students about their boyfriends’ porn use: ““There’s no sense in asking them not to,” one woman told me, “because they won’t.”Perhaps some women profess not to be bothered by pornography when they feel they have no options.” The liberal media tells us the men around us watch porn because it is ‘natural’ for them to be be sexually aroused by images of women.

That contemporary porn depicts women being sexually abused, in pain, being debased, is rarely questioned however, and the apparent ‘inevitability’ of violent porn is a constant reminder to women that we are viewed as sexual chattel.

Internet porn is trending toward the more degrading and violent end of

the spectrum. A 2010 study found that 88.2% of popular internet pornography contains violence, and that 94.4% of that violence is committed against women. A 2013 study found the more a user watches the particular ‘media script’ of pornography, “the more embedded those codes of behaviour become in their worldview and the more likely they are to use those scripts to act upon real life experiences.”

The researchers argue, “pornography creates a sexual script that then guides sexual experiences.”

Similarly, the Australian foundation VicHealth released a study in 2006 which found that, "Exposure to sexually violent material increases male viewers' acceptance of rape myths, desensitises them to sexual violence, erodes their empathy for victims of violence, and informs more callous attitudes towards female victims ... adults also show an increase in behavioural aggression following exposure to pornography, again especially

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FUCKING ENOUGH violent pornography." A 2009 metaanalysis, surveying studies of porn from the 1980s to 2015, also found a strong positive correlation between porn consumption and aggressive attitudes. These are just some of the studies out there. It is impossible to deny the link between pornography consumption and sexual violence: pornography functions as a form of advertising for normalising sexual violence.

What does this mean for women? It means women are increasingly expected to accept sexual aggression and violence as a normal part of sex. In the UK, increasing numbers of young women are presenting at medical clinics with anal fissures and bowel incontinence due to boyfriends who want to replicate what they have seen in porn. In Australia, rape crisis centers are reporting a large jump in numbers of intimate partner rape of women aged 14 and older, with “a huge increase in deprivation of liberty, physical injuries, torture, drugging, filming and sharing

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footage without consent. What is now considered to be the norm is frightening” stated Di McLeod, director of the Gold Coast Centre for Sexual Violence, in 2015. Feminist anti-pornography researcher Gail Dines observes that pornography also filters into mainstream visual culture and that, “this has a terrible effect on girls' sexual identity because it robs them of their own sexual desire.... girls and women are stripped of human status and reduced to sex objects." The tragedy of this is that young women are being taught that the sexual violence of pornography is normal and inevitable. Liberal feminism, with its emphasis on‘choice’, and he idea that ‘anything is feminist, if you choose it’, reduces every situation to the personal, giving women no way to name the harm pornography perpetuates against women collectively. Individualism is a divide and conquer strategy, and it works in favour of the porn industry to nullify any collective feminist critique of porn. Furthermore, as feminist Meaghan Tyler observes,

“So thorough is the individualisation of “choice feminism” that when women criticise particular industries, institutions, and social constructions, they are often met with accusations of attacking the women who participate in them.

The importance of a structural-level analysis has been almost completely lost in popular understandings of feminism.” Any critique of the porn industry is perceived as being an attack against the personal choices or situations of the women in it.

Because of this, liberal feminism will never be able to challenge the porn industry. Wary of being labelled ‘swerfs’, liberal feminists prefer to argue for ‘improved conditions’ for women working in pornography and prostitution, something akin to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, while the connection between sexualised violence in porn and sexual violence in society remain unchallenged. Women need a radical feminism that gives us the ability to name the truth – we need the radical feminism of Andrea

FUCKING ENOUGH Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon.

Women need to be able to say there’s a clear link between pornography and sexual violence; that someone’s ‘kink’ is no defense for sexual violence; that no one has a ‘right’ to sex or is entitled to buy women for sex. We need a structural analysis of the sexual exploitation industries that harm women. New Zealand women live in a culture saturated with sexual and domestic violence, where a man can rape an 82 year old woman in a rest home and get home detention, where a man’s potential sporting career is deemed more important than the harm caused to the young women he raped, where a young man can film and distribute the rape of young women and expect a career in the music industry five years later. It is time we stopped turning a blind eye to the connection between violent porn and sexual violence against women. We need a powerful and collective radical feminist movement that fights for women, not a defanged liberal feminism which tells us abuse is ok if we choose it.

Women deserve better.

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WOMB FOR IMPROVEMENT

Womb for improvement

CAITLIN ABBOTT

It’s 1961: the Mini Skirt is on the rise; the first wine is legally sold with a meal; 65,000 babies are born, the peak of the post war boom.

Notably, women are being prescribed their first ever contraceptive pill – Enovid – with proof of a husband required, of course! This early pill was the cornerstone in women’s reproductive autonomy, the first separation of sexual activity from reproduction, and an essential factor in the sexual revolution.

However, it was a clunky dose of synthetic estrogen and progestogen approximately ten times stronger than the modern pill. It left many women nauseous, bloated, and at high risk of blood clots. But in 1961, our mothers and grandmothers felt this was a fair price to pay – their families in the late 1800s having an average of seven children each. Much has changed in the nearly sixty years since. What does New Zealand’s current contraceptive climate look like? As of the 1st of November 2019, the New Zealand government and Pharmac have granted funding for Mirena and Jaydess (brand names) that provide individuals with 5- or 3-year long-acting reversible contraception respectively. They are both levonorgestrel intrauterine systems (LIUS). Before funding, they would cost NZD$340, exclusive of doctors’ appointments for

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insertions and removal. Orna McGinn, an Auckland based GP, petitioned to “fully fund Mirena IUD for all women who request it”.

Mirena is one of the most effective methods of contraception in the world and, according to the petition, carried with it the implication that it would “reduce the rates of unplanned pregnancy and abortion”. The petition was accepted earlier this year with a total of 4451 signatures.

What is the process and how does it work? The Mirena is a small Tshaped IUD which is inserted vaginally by your GP or a doctor at Family Planning. It slowly releases levonorgestrel (a progestogen hormone), thinning the uterine lining making implantation very difficult, and thickening cervical mucus inhibiting fertilisation. It is over 99% effective in preventing pregnancy, equal to that of tubal ligation or vasectomy (failure rate of 0.16 per 100 women). It removes the ‘user variability’ that is synonymous with pill taking and condom use. The Mirena also reduces menstrual blood loss by up to 75 percent, as well as inhibiting ovulation and menstruation in some women (in contrast to traditional IUDs that generally increased menstrual bleeding).

Therefore, the Mirena is highly effective in treating heavy, painful

WOMB FOR IMPROVEMENT

periods, regardless of contraceptive needs. It can be removed at any time, and studies show that Mirena does not interfere with future fertility.

New Zealand women are more confident in moving towards contraceptive autonomy.

Regardless of our marital status or age we can be in control of our reproductive decisions. But it’s not to say it’s perfect. For many women, I’m sure, there is familiarity in contraceptive pill intolerance, weight gain, heightened depression, nausea with increased hormones. Migraine sufferer? Look past the combined pill please.

Condom breakage, weeks of pregnancy anxiety, and costly medical appointments evoke a strong sense déjàvu. We hear phrases like “99% effective in pregnancy prevention when taken perfectly”, and yet that still implicates one person out of your high school year who has actually tried their best. And I guarantee many of the 100 do not practise perfect pill taking. Finding a method that works can be exhausting, particularly when our bodies typically take three months to adjust to something new.

Although the women of 1961 may deem us ‘fussy’ it’s also our right to feelgood every day. We are not treating a ‘disease’ and therefore the side effects of having a fulfilling sex life with low pregnancy risk should, in my opinion,match the side effects that men experience... which are minimal. Although I maybe painting a bleak picture here, I understand that women at one end of the spectrum have no difficulty finding a contraceptive option without sideeffects, but for so many the contrary is reality. For this demographic, the Mirena may offer a solution for some that minimises the effects and confusion expressed above.

Furthermore, it may shine light on negative aspects of our contraceptive routine that we have grown to consider a ‘normal part of being a woman’ or discomforts that we have simply ‘gotten used to’.

As a ‘woman of modern day New Zealand’ I have always strived to be of the idealistic mindset that men and women are of equal sexual liberation. But writing about what many of us tolerate makes me question if we really can be as liberated as men when there is

"The United Nations believes that access to family planning services including contraception is a human right" such an imbalance in the mental energy, money, and anxiety surrounding our birth control decisions. I do not believe one can be fully sexually liberated if their contraceptive situation is affecting one’s quality of life. I often wonder if our male counterparts realise to what extent female sexual liberation does not just rely on one doctor’s visit at age 18, and that being on contraception is far from the default but can be a lifelong process of deliberation, discomfort, and re-evaluation. There are many disparities in the understanding of contraception. Mumblings of ‘Yes, I’m on the pill’ does not equal gofor-it-sans-condom. I’m confident that over half of women paying the forty dollars for an Emergency

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WOMB FOR IMPROVEMENT Contraceptive Pill are self-funded (statistic scientifically taken from conversation with many female friends) and I’m very confident that in the throes of passion if one has the niggling thought of a missed pill, a broken condom, or nausea and bloating, they are not having the transcendental, out-of-body sexual experience that their partner is having. This is where the dialogue must be open, educational, and the right contraception for the individual available. In our modern society, deemed sexually liberated, we need to be looking further than just liberation of the act itself but also towards equality in the education surrounding sex and the pressures that an individual experiences in order to be a sexually active adult. Working towards men and women having equal understanding of contraception holistically, and reducing the ‘side effects’ (the physical, emotional, the intangible, and the monetary all inclusive) can have such a positive effect. By funding the Mirena, New Zealand is providing an effective means for many women to have an affordable, effective, and safe contraceptive option, and I believe this will contribute to sexual equality and empowerment. On a global scale, anything that gives women full choice regarding their own bodies is undeniably a good

thing, despite some powerful political male figures creating barriers. Funded, and effective contraception will undoubtedly reduce teen pregnancy or pregnancy in a demographic who may otherwise not have been able to afford long- term contraception, thus unlikely to be able to afford raising a child. Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid’s Tale, comments on the control of female reproduction being one of the primary steps in female oppression, and women of reproductive age will be most vulnerable in a male dominated political regime. Those familiar with the themes of her work, predominantly the politics of female reproduction, will hear this ring true (and scarily not far from reality in some places in the world).

For these reasons it is important that we keep our reproductive laws up to date with science. Hopefully other countries that haven’t already will follow suit. The United Nations believes that access to family planning services including contraception is a human right, thus New Zealand’s implementation of a funded Mirena is providing us with the top level of support. It will be interesting to be part of the movement and observe how this change will take effect. For now, I’m booking my appointment!

For more information head to: Pharmac.govt.nz Familyplanning.org.nz Book an appointment with your GP or Family Planning clinic and ask about Mirena or Jaydess to find the right option for you.

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7 HOURS 51 MINUTES

7 HOURS 51 MINUTES ZARA COLLINSON

I lay on my floor at 2.32am because I was drunk. I pulled my washing basket off my bed, full of clothes, socks scattered on my floor. Those socks with the dog bones are my favourite. My sister bought them for me.

I lay on my floor at 2.34am because I was drunk. I was wearing clothes that reeked of alcohol and sweat and smoke and dancing and a sense of faltering innocence. I’d just moved out of home. The world was at my feet.

I lay on my floor at 2.36am because I was drunk, and then you knocked on my door. You didn't wait for a reply before you came in. You had pineapples on your underwear, you said. You wanted to show me. You

wanted to see the state I was in.

You picked up my socks, the ones with the dog bones, you put them back in the basket with the rest of my laundry. You welcomed yourself into my room while I lay spiraling into thoughtlessness on the floor, my eyes drooping, my giggles waning, asking me to join you in my own bed.I know you slept with him, you said. I've only slept with one girl, you said. I bet you've slept with loads. So, how does this normally happen?

I didn't know what you meant. The room was spinning, and you were closing in. You turned towards me and my soul got caught in my throat, but you pushed it further down with your tongue. Your hands were all over me.

Your body all over me. I didn’t push you off. I didn't say no.My head was a boat trying to navigate an angry sea of alcohol that threatened to compromise my consciousness.

You were a tidal wave that refused to crash. After you were done you told me you'd never cum using a condom before. I rolled on my side and wished you would leave. You didn't.I lay in my bed at 10.17am with my clothes on the floor and a boy in my bed who knew what it was like to be inside my body but not what it was like to hear the word yes from my lips. We were both drunk, I said. It was no one's fault, I said. Don't tell anyone, I said.

Sometimes I’d walk past you in the hallway. You wouldn’t meet my gaze. Later, you told my friend you were stone cold sober.

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WOMANSIZE

WOMANSIZE BY

A while ago I read a book called Womansize – The Tyranny of Slenderness by Kim Chernin. It was first published in 1981 but it’s still relevant and has changed my perspective, both on the female body in general as well as my own.

The book is about how women see their bodies, how they deal with the pressure to look a certain way, and how their struggles to reach unrealistic social expectations often translate into extreme dieting, disordered eating, self-hatred and mental health issues.

A survivor of anorexia, the author brings up this illness again and again throughout the book. A survivor of anorexia myself, I could see my reflection in every page.

When I read that anorexia is an illness of self-division, where the body and the mind are considered two separate entities of which the mind can take control over the body – that used to be me.

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GIULKA

EBDUS

When I read about the author’s desire for her body to look like the one of an adolescent boy’s – that was also me. When I would get panic attacks over the irrational fear of having gained weight overnight and be suddenly fat. When I’d wake up in the morning and immediately hate myself. When I’d feel a constant uneasiness within my body, a systematic guilt after every meal, when I only felt beautiful when hungry.

I was not alone.

I am not alone.

There are countless records of women reporting the same exact thoughts I used to have. It saddened me beyond words to learn how many women feel the need to diminish themselves, feel like they don’t deserve to take up space, that they are powerless and unworthy and inferior. According to the author, this is one of the reasons why eating disorders like

anorexia and bulimia became so common from the 1960s – and may I add, more than ever today. They often reflect a girl’s struggle not just to live in a body, but in a woman’s body. This girl cannot deal with the idea of becoming a woman in a culture that tells her that women are to be despised. It’s interesting how the author makes this connection between wanting to keep an undeveloped body and the fear of womanhood. For many anorexics, fat often equals maturity.

For them, women who look like women – with curves, prominent breasts and wide hips, according to traditional standards – are those who get catcalled, whose opinions are futile, who are deemed as weak and powerless, who get paid a fraction of their male counterparts for the same work. The longing to live in a body that looks like the one of a child’s often reflects the fear that becoming a woman would mean having to conform to all of the above. I don’t want to say that

WOMANSIZE this applies to me. I don’t think my anorexia developed out of fear of having to face society’s expectations as a woman. But reading this book I have realised that my most profound anxieties revolve around attributes that are strictly linked to my identity as a woman.The parts of my body I am the most insecure about are my hips and my bum – a woman’s most distinct traits after boobs and vagina. Even though I had zero body image issues throughout my teenage years, I do remember being annoyed and feeling uncomfortable at the realisation that the boys clothes that I had been wearing all my life no longer fit the way they used to: they were too tight on my hips, my onceloose jeans were now filled up with bulging bum and thighs, my boobs were small yet all too visible. In fullblown anorexia, I could fit into those clothes again. Anything I wore would hang loose off my bones. I looked like the adolescent boy I couldn’t be when reality (and puberty) hit. And then recovery came, and with it my curves, my hips, my bum. And ten years later, reading this book, an enlightening awareness hit me: what I used to call fat is the body of a woman. This is what I’m supposed to look like.

My body is appropriate for a woman body, not a 15-year-old boy.

Recently I’ve been struggling with body image as I’ve noticed my body has been through some changes.

I looked at some pictures of myself a few years ago, when I was in my twenties, and I realised I don’t look like that anymore. My hips have gotten a bit larger, my bum a bit heavier, my thighs a but fuller.

My tummy’s grown a small but visible roll of fat around my bellybutton that didn’t use to be

there. However. I’m not in my twenties anymore. I’m not cycling 24km to and from work every day.

I’m not worrying to much about not having carbs for dinner. These changes my body is going through – they are natural. I am 33 years old.

It would be unrealistic for me to expect to still have the same body I had 10 years ago.I constantly compare myself to others (let’s be real) but I also find it easy to remind myself that it’s absolutely pointless because I will never be someone else. What is harder is not comparing myself to my past self.

Because I used to look a certain way, I know I’m capable of looking like that, or at least I was, and it’s difficult for me to accept that I may not look that same way ever again.

What’s been helpful to accept and embrace my body changing is the notion that it means everything is working fine. I’m in my thirties, which is when the female body is naturally ready to get pregnant and have children. I’m not planning to have kids, but my body doesn’t know that. And it’s getting ready just in case. I am actually fascinated by the concept of motherhood and what the female body can do, how it can adjust to bear another life, how it can produce food to feed a tiny human. I admire large women with kids around their ankles and babies on their laps because, in a way, they represent womanhood.

My body reshaping and gaining weight is just part of the natural process of being a woman, and I should be grateful for that. Instead of wishing I could freeze in a perpetual status of adolescence, I should be amazed of all the wonders my body is capable of.

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ARTIVISM

K A I T I A K I T A N G A O F A R T I V I S M A N D M A U R I O R A WEAVING TOGETHER THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF PEOPLE AND PAPATUANUKU.

Ko te mauri mana atua, he mona hei whakahua I te kai, hei pupuri I te kai, kei riro ki ētahi atu wahi, mauri ki uta, mauri ki te wai, ki ngā awa, ki ngā roto, mehemea he

maunga

kore

manu,

he

ngahere kore manu, a he awa

nurturing for healing relationships between people, nature and cultures.’ The first stage in the development of a Kaitiaki relationship with the land and fellow humanity is by seeking to know our whakapapa. As an Australian in Aotearoa it is through biculturalism.

kore kai ika tuna aha rānei, ka whakanohoia he mauriora…

Mauri is a divine authority derived from the Gods in order to nurture food resources in a particular area lest they go somewhere else: mauri upon the land, mauri in the waters, rivers, lakes. If one has a mountain without birds or a forest without birdlife or a river without fish (fish eel and so on) then a mauri ora is planted. (Royal 1993)

‘Kaitiakitanga a protector ecofeminist artivist model can be summed up as; being the Guardian of mauri ora through co–creating love and balancing power within self and others through ecological

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‘When the elements come together, as when people come together, there can sometimes be turbulence. For this reason, it was necessary for the children of Rangi and Papa to develop protocols for meeting and ways for recognizing one another. These protocols have been passed down for generations and are used on marae throughout the country, with minor variations.

The protocols on Te Papa's marae were developed after extensive consultation. This ensured their integrity as well as the flexibility needed to accommodate all iwi.’ Te Papa Marae, Wellington. The carved poetry of the Marae (meeting place) at Te Papa Museum

embodies te Tiriti o Waitangi. The statement and intent emphasises the importance of Maori protocol in the ways in which people meet.

That is, the Tangata Whenua (People of the Land) who signed the Treaty were explicitly entering a protocol for a way of‘meeting and recognising one another…to accommodate all Iwi.‘ and now included pākehā and all others through the Crown. Biculturalism is the lens through which to relate with proficiency between cultures in Aotearoa. This ability to inter relate stems from the process of learning about oneself and learning about the other. I will be examining ecological artivism through Biculturalism, Tangata Whenua bodies of knowledge and Ecofeminist theory.

These worldviews share a sense of of evolving embodiment and positioning in an effort to strengthen the relationships between people and the land to balance power and co create love.For Māori, Pohatu expresses

ARTIVISM “our spiritual connections to ourselves, our lands, our responsible trusteeship obligations comes through the whakapapa frame works of values and beliefs fashioned and lived in their times by our ancestors…to the beginnings of our cultural times, to Io the source of being.’

The Tangata Whenua’s very source of being is reflected through these ways of meeting protocol and defines what it means to be Māori today. Values and beliefs passed down from the ancestors are paramount to who Māori are and how they recognise themselves and each other. These values that were instrumental in forming te Tiriti were about strengthening relationships so as not to encourage ‘turbulence’. The Marae and the Treaty are Māori principals and epistemological knowledge informed by their whakapapa back to Rangi and Papa. This cultural imperative deeply informed the First Nations when they met and recognised Pākehā or the manuhiri (guest) onto the land in line with their cosmological protocols. It is the formality of these protocol that makes te Tiriti o Waitangi

instrumental in Aotearoa positioning as a bicultural nation.

The Tangata Whenua are meeting all others onto the land. And that is essentially the cultural foundation of a bicultural society in a now multi-ethnic nation. Eco-artivism aims to partner in the same way, to meet all others into relationship with the land.Feminist theorists have long challenged disconnective hierarchy by introducing concepts of inclusion and equality through partnership.

Eisler (1987 as cited in Hipp & Munson 1995) recognised that in challenging hierarchies of patriarchal power she saw a new direction of ‘a partnership paradigm where women, men and nature are interrelated rather than in competition or comparative status, where co-operative relationships are valued rather than domination and ranking.’ (Hipp Munson 1995, pg 127) In this way, the te Tiriti o Waitangi is a cosmological embodiment of the partnership model which ecofeminism and ecoartivism aims towards. Royal confirms this notion saying the Treaty’s purpose ‘was more forward looking, guaranteeing and entrenching

certain rights to those representing ‘tino rangatiratanga’ and establishing new rights for those representing ‘kāwanatanga’…. [rather] I think they saw the Treaty as a way of entrenching their position as well as introducing some order into relationships with the newly arrived pākehā of the time. ‘ Royal, 2008. The signing of the new partnership had a huge impact on the culture of Māori. Because of the impact of cultural indoctrination, Pākehā and Māori relationships became familial and institutionalised, cultural assertions began to emerge that would inherently erode and destroy the possibility of real equal partnership. An important part of Tangata Whenua deculturation was the introduction of the bible through colonial education (Royal 2006).

This colonial biblical indoctrination was an ideological tool that reinforced through its stories of origin a patriarchal hierarchy (Ruether 2011).

T O B E C O N T I N U E D . . .

SPIRITUAL CONNECTIONS AS TOLD BY HEIDI THRELFO

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LEZ BE IN TENTS

LEZ BE IN TENTS THERE WERE NO BLOKES, WE DID WHAT WE LIKED

It was while leading her choir group at the Ngatiawa Anglican church, tucked away in the hills near Waikanae, that Ann-Marie Stapp realised she had visited the site decades previously with a

land – then owned by the Presbyterian church.

“I can’t remember how we explained it, how on earth do you sell something like that? I don't imagine we said ‘Hi we're a bunch of lesbians who want to take over your land!'"

very different group: “I wondered if I should tell the church crew up there that a pack of lesbians once ran around on their land with our boobs hanging out.”

A 45-minute drive up the coast from Wellington, Waikanae is renowned for its pristine gardens, retirement homes, and Suzuki Swifts driving perilously under the speed limit.

The area seems an unusual location to host secret lesbian camps, yet the Ngatiawa camp, with its proximity to the capital city and sheltered by native bush hugging the bottom of the Tararua ranges, was the perfect stomping ground for thirty or so women to let loose away from prying eyes of mainstream society. Stapp is foggy on details as to what the group actually said in order to hire the

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At the time of the Waikanae camp there was a sprawling network of lesbians, second-wave feminists, academics, and activists who had been working for decades to create spaces for women who’d long been relegated to the kitchen. Beneath the radar of the straight world, these women built a rainbow underground railroad to spread information in an age before the internet and more than two television channels.

"Our best hope back then was that we could be marginally accepted by open-minded people once in a while, so we really created the camps for ourselves.” Stapp said.

“Bars back then were mixed, with the occasional women-only nights – it was the gay boys and us; there weren't really any lesbian-only

hangouts." News about the camp spread and, in the late summer of 1990, a young and eclectic group of lesbians headed into the valley carrying guitars, softball equipment, and tents, buzzing about sharing a space that didn’t involve yelling at each other over men in a crowded bar. Many of the group already knew each other, having met previously through various networks within the small, mainly Wellingtonbased lesbian and feminist scenes.

Other women attending the camp were first-timers and not ‘out’ during their day-to-day lives. For them, being completely surrounded by other lesbians was a brand new experience. For many professional women it was easier to remain in the closet at the time, with mainstream society home to a raft of homophobic clichés. Gay men were lisping, limp-wristed flamers, while lesbians were mulleted, braless, man-haters – intent on causing havoc to the Kiwi social structure by flinging around a little thing called feminism. In playgrounds across New Zealand, AIDS magically

LEZ BE IN TENTS spread through school-yard chants and was attached to anyone who defied gender stereotypes. Lesbian was a dirty word back then, Stapp said. "Even now you can say you are gay or queer, but lesbian has always been 'one of those words’. It's still a bit of a dirty word, along with feminist."

The secrecy of the camps was necessary, as proven just five years earlier when there had been massive and violent protests against the Homosexual Law Reform in New Zealand. Arguments rested on moral and religious grounds: that homosexuality was 'unnatural' and that the Bible condemned it.

It was suggested at meetings throughout the country that decriminalisation would lead to pedophilia, marriages to cats and dogs…possibly the entire All Black pack suddenly becoming bum chums. "What on earth will be next?" worried Kiwis asked.

Nevertheless, against all odds, the law passed to resounding cheers

from the gay community – but acceptance in mainstream society was still a long way off. The Ngatiawa camp was strictly lesbianonly, which Stapp said caused some drama when a bisexual woman was asked to leave. “We were strict about that, although some of the women didn’t like it. But we thought it was really important that we didn’t have to explain ourselves to each other, we knew we were all a pack of dykes, and that was that,” Stapp said.

Although children weren't welcome, many campers brought their dogs: "They were our kids. We used to joke we treated our dogs like our children." She recalls running the camp kitchen with other women, everyone taking turns at cooking and cleaning for the group. “It was like marae living; eat, clean, then head down to the river,where we’d all swim naked. It was all about space, having the freedom to do that.” Hooting and hollering would carry on throughout the night, Stapp said,

connecting it to the music, the camping, and softball games where the women all “cheated like shit. ”She has a particularly fond memory of the camp talent quest, and one woman who knew how to spin plates. “She was bloody mad. I must have taken 20 pictures, and these were the days before digital cameras, so somewhere I have all these photos of a silly dyke spinning plates."

Things changed quickly in the years following the camp with the introduction of The Human Rights Act in 1993, which included discrimination against sexual orientation, further opening the door for wider acceptance within New Zealand society.

"By the year 2000 everyone knew at least one gay or lesbian – but my word it was a hard few years to get there.”

WRITTEN BY KATE BURNEY

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POLITICAL "ACTIVISM"

POLITICAL "ACTIVISM"

MADDI ROWE My political “activism” (I like to put quotation marks around it so I feel like less of a dickhead) started in 2017 with sharing the odd post here and there on my Instagram story. It started off as a choice. A thing I could shift in and out of. A perspective I could switch on and off.

Retrospect, being an incredibly powerful tool, lets me know that while my intentions were entirely innocent and came from a place of love, my perspective was incredibly cloudy.

The fact that I could choose to access these resources, then educate myself freely, was a huge privilege I did not wield as gracefully as I wish I did. What I thought were my strong, unwavering opinions were actually panes of glass added to the ceiling,

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tempered by white saviourism. My entire perspective on advocacy changed this year when I decided to use this privilege as a tool rather than a weapon against those oppressed by it.

comfortable speaking te reo and encouraging other Pāhekā to do so as well. I sat with the indigenous people in my life and listened to them speak to their experience of existing in a neo-colonial state.

I embarked on multiple internet deep-dives, reading scholarly articles and think-pieces by notable social media figureheads. I became involved with political action groups. I revised the colonial history of the land I walk on. I devoted every inch of my spare time to learning tikanga Māori and kaupapa to protect the whenua at Ihumātao. I was at the protests, the hui, the wānanga.

My own shortcomings and traumas were not isolated experiences.

I got on my hands and knees, literally, and chalked messages of support and advocacy around the entire Wellington CBD. I got tired and achy and dirty. I became more

I discovered that to be an effective and helpful advocate, you had to understand that the ability to choose to advocate for people, intrinsically, was the hole in the framework. The people I was meeting through various campaigns had been working on these issues because they had to.

The politically engaged lives they led were out of necessity, not a hobby. At first, I was disillusioned by this sudden, acute awareness.

Frustrated. Angry. There was a good couple of months where I felt stuck

POLITICAL "ACTIVISM"

"WHAT’S MOST IMPORTANT, I’VE LEARNT, IS THAT YOU’RE TRYING" and helpless. It was tiring: as I learnt, it should be. To fight institutionalised colonial behaviour, you have to grow some sort of intestinal fortitude.

Your duty as an ally is not to apologise. Your job is to listen, to receive, and to uplift. Your job is to recognise the patterns of behaviour you’ve inherited from decades of oppressive systems and actively challenge them, every single day.

And this doesn’t just apply to tino rangatiratanga and indigenous land protection. This also applies to the intersectionality of issues that have affected indigenous peoples since colonisation, but have been brought to the surface within Western principle. Your advocacy within feminism, climate change awareness, your acts of daily decolonisation etc. should be inclusive and equitable.

It is necessary work that requires empathy, patience and gripping an in-depth understanding of the privilege that we as Pākehā benefit from. It is increasingly important to include other voices at the forefront of the conversation. In fact, it’s your

social responsibility to learn and grow. What’s most important, I’ve learnt, is that you’re trying. And sometimes that’s all you can really ask of yourself.

My advice to baby activists, coming from a baby activist: no matter how hard you try, you’re going to mess up sometimes. Sometimes your hardest will not be enough.

We’re all fighting the same monster. Sometimes we just need a push in the right direction, a sharper edge to our blade.

That’s okay. Be teachable.

| 33

SNAPPING OUT OF IT

WHEN VULNERABILITY FINDS BEAUTY

SNAPPING OUT OF IT Karen Legenderriere Sebire Photographer

www.facebook.com/legenderriere @legenderriere legenderrierephotos@gmail.com

Karen’s job took her away from home for 32 weeks of the year. It was a people focused job, but when everyone left the classroom at 4:30pm her world shrunk to nothing. A hotel room. Alone. Hour after hour after hour.

No conversation over dinner, no community to turn to. Loneliness set in; her mental health suffered.

Something had to be done. A new challenge was needed, Something that would make her

34 |

uncomfortable. She bought a Canon 80D and set herself the goal to be off the auto setting within a month. If she didn’t achieve said goal, she’d sell it on. Determined Karen focused (pun intended) and had learnt all but the iso by the end of the month. Karen found that not only was it therapeutic, she had a natural talent. She started noticing different things, noticing beauty in the smallest of details – a beauty that made her feel less lonely. What started as a challenge turned into an artistic adventure. Karen bought a drone. She’d thought about drones for a while but dismissed them for being in the ‘male domain’. That thought soon flew out the window (again, pun intended) when she saw the Mavric 2 Pro – basically an 80D camera with wings. Overwhelmed, she watched a 30-minute video

tutorial and tried her first flight in her paddock on starter mode. But she hadn’t figured out how to land it. Thankfully common sense prevailed, and she fathomed the process before it fell to earth and smashed to smithereens, taking her hard-earned savings with it. Karen’s world has expanded. She’s had to research drone laws, the rules of aviation, military airspace, DOC land permits, tourist sites that ban them and more. Excitingly, she’s enjoyed many a threesome with drone (George) and camera (Ray), capturing George in the sunset.

Drone pilots get a bad rap due to those who don’t give a fuck about anything, but Karen argues that you get a different view of the world or where you’ve lived your whole life.

And she’s not lonely anymore.

People stop by and chat, ask, question, and she now sees the perspective of just how beautiful and big things are. Photography saved Karen her from depression, what might save you from yours?

THE GOOD DANCE COMPANY

Nasty Retro Aerobics AN INTERVIEW WITH BAILEY DUPUIS AND THE GOOD DANCE COMPANY

BY EVA CHARLES

Under the umbrella of George Fowler (better known by the stage name Hugo Grrrl) The Good Dance Company provides open level, inclusive dance classes for dancers of all sizes, abilities, and genders.

Their mission is to create a safe, inviting space for people who may be turned off or intimidated by the traditional dance class environment. The room at Te Auaha on Dixon St had no mirrors, and people were encouraged to come dressed how ever they felt comfortable. Nasty Retro Aerobics is exactly how it sounds; leg warmers, white sneakers, neon bodysuits and eighties tunes. Monique Walford aka Altra Violet aka Robin Yablind (Mister Burlesque Aotearoa 2018

and Supreme Grand Tease WLG Winner 2019) fronts the class with bottomless enthusiasm. Right from the warm up, the classes are a pulsing medley of loud music, grooving bodies of all shapes and sizes, and some hella funky lycra.

plenty of experience. Block tickets are are no longer on sale as the first class has already taken place, but one-off tickets are available.

Bailey Dupuis of the Good Dance Company said, “We wanted people to know the songs and sing along.

“You can take it as seriously as you want” she said. The class would be supportive of all abilities, whether you’re there for fun, get fit, or advance your skills. “We want to be that sweet middle spot,” said Bailey.

She said if this block went well, the Good Dance Co would love to set up classes for contemporary and heel dancing, where Bailey had

Book now on Eventfinda. www.eventfinda.co.nz Where: Te

Auaha,

NZ

Institute

of

Creativity, 65 Dixon Street, Te Aro, Wellington.

Ticket Information: 1x Drop In Class: $23.00 6 Week Block: $106.00 3x Class Pass: $59.38

| 35

POETRY PORTFOLIO A SISTERHOOD COLLECTION

POETRY PORTFOLIO

K A T E

S P E N C E R

Beautiful Armageddon I.

I have no retirement plan – I’ve never had one.

My father hates this inattention to the future.

“One should: work hard buy a house be a slave to a 40-year mortgage then: spend one’s twilight years in a care home waiting for death to release you from this curse of life for it is the capitalist way.”

I said a great big “fuck you” to capitalism a while ago, knew that I’d never retire because a) I don’t have a job b) I was planning on killing myself way before retirement age anyway and now c) the world is going to end, so fuck everything, not just capitalism.

Which has admittedly hastened our planet’s demise grab grab grab land, resources, slave labour let’s be clear.

Earn money and hoard it stored in offshore accounts

grab labour

by cunts.

II. Well, thank you capitalism because it’s going to be a beautiful Armageddon.

Personally I can’t wait for more of those perfect pollution sunsets and sunrises; we don’t need a solution to this climate crisis naaaah, just let her run her course.

Humans have been here for a mere blink of eternity’s eye but we haven’t shied away from destroying out of sheer pride – the end of the world is a trophy, a prize and whoever hurries it along soonest will get their hands on a fucked up planet.They’ll probably be the deniers, the fucking liars, the evil geniu...s..

No, wait, that are no geniuses here.

Like the really bad baddies in movies.

But, oh, it will be a beautiful Armageddon from where they’re sat.

In privilege.

They could have prevented this but instead the poverty-stricken will have the distinction of being on the quickest pathway to extinction

– either in deserts or water worlds –

| 37

POETRY PORTFOLIO but those are their just desserts because they didn’t work hard enough to earn their way up the mountain to relative safety.

I say relative safety because a beautiful Armageddon is still an Armageddon.

The end of all things will no doubt be stunning but there’s no cunning way to avoid it.

Those devoid of humility don’t see the futility of denial No smile and glint of eye will make us forget that Flint, Michigan still has no clean water supply after how many years?

Soon more rivers will run dry as sea levels rise and the rich won’t so much as frown from their ivory towers as indigenous folk drown with flowers in their hair.

Theirs will not be quite such a charming Armageddon after all.

III.

We are not so far from the last hurrah 30 40 50 years max before the klaxon sounds.

We continue to compound the dangerous chemical compounds that create breathable air.

Do we care?

Yeah, some of us do and do what we can.

But our lifespan is shrinking.

Thinking that banning plastic straws and bags will do it instead of corporations co-operating in creating a better method because CAPITALISM will not capitulate and so we will be captivated by our beautiful Armageddon hurtle towards it then grind to a halt our own fucking fault for buying into system of greed and not seeding fruits that grow what we really need: community companionship camaraderie but no we accumulate stuff and nonsense Conned into worshipping Mammon.

Come on!

IV.

We are so close to a beautiful Armageddon might as well go out with a bang.

– God, if only a meteor would help us greet the end more swiftly instead of drifting on shifting sands.

Wipe us out in one fell swoop – no warning like this global warming bullshit. That would be super. – But no, stupefyingly we have to wait.

The coming apocalypse is unfixable no magic tricks will bring salvation civilisation will crumble at the foundation even the humble will fall emptiness will resound in the deadened world of Armageddon.

So, like I said I have no retirement plan.

I’m waiting on the demise of humankind resting on our deathbed and I’m betting on a beautiful Armageddon.

38 |

POETRY PORTFOLIO

 | 39

POETRY PORTFOLIO

K A T E It was I didn’t think it was

but it was

exit blocked choice denied told it was my fault I didn’t cum that I just needed to relax that it’d be okay because I could go to Family Planning on Monday

he didn’t think it was but it was he promised to pull out and he did he did what he did neither of us thought it was

but it was

40 |

S P E N C E R

POETRY PORTFOLIO

R I A H

D A W S O N

They Tell Me A man once told me I was aggressive as / I walked home / another told me I was “a very bitter woman” / I am both because / survival is preferred over my fuckability status / An old friend told me I was little too much for them / too intense for friends / far too loyal / I resolved myself to be a liability of a person

Like my fuckability status / I do not care / like that status / it is a part of me

They tell me that trauma + enough time makes a great joke / but the distance between trauma and time is getting shorter and shorter / and my jokes never land / I have never made my mother laugh / because our trauma is laughing matter

no

My mother tells me that lavender is good for sleep / I tell her my friends think she is a witch and she laughs / she reminds me of the emotional separation we went through as mother and child when I was born / I should keep this in mind when I am making new relationships

My partner told me he loves me a lot, when drunk, proposes over text / He tells me he’s been thinking about it for a while now / I text back that sometimes I want to shrink myself down and sit inside his heart / But then I remember he eats like shit and I might drown in the fat of his bad choices / Maybe sitting in his brain might be better / then I can finally know what he is thinking all the time / and know that my overthinking is never / truly warranted

I tell myself lots of different things / lies and truths / and sweet fiction all blur together

| 41

POETRY PORTFOLIO

L E A H

M A C P H E R S O N

Johanna Pride

when she calls, the oceans fumble.

An all-encompassing might that tatters glass hearts in the sound of her skina mother of the earth itself, a limitless love that licks the shrouds of humanities evanescence.

Her crooked eyes turn to me: the tides swollen deep in her bowls – a woman's intuition.

And in all her crevices, Venus herself cannot compare to the enchantment of this feminine power – the rapture, sisterhood.

Pride when she calls

Bloom Forbearing eyes acutely gloss the enrapturing of a mirrored allure, a succinct sway in amorous reverie – culminating luminescence on an ink ridden sleeve leaves velvet wrinkles to bloom at the nape, burgundy lilacs adrift, a sweet incense of intrigue falls undiminished in realms of iridescent thought, cast eyelashes carry each verse to the heart’s crevices, strings weary, mind craving, igniting mortality.

42 |

POETRY PORTFOLIO

J A N H A V I

G O S A V I

The Weight of Divinity I have grown weary of hearing my vessel be mislabelled as holy Are only heavenly objects worthy of love?

Nothing about me is godly This body is but the sum of fleshy sinew and tarnished bone Divine femininity does not make me more durable or less revolting I sweat, excrete, purge the same way you do And I do not appear any more beautiful while doing so I am no straonger than you because I possess the ability to birth another I do not wish to create more life A COLLECTION OF POEMS Humanity will suffice without my half-hearted contribution I wish to only sustain the small space I occupy Foraging enough food for one My nurturing womb is neither blossoming nor nurturing It is dormant and it will gather dust and I will not apologise When I am reduce to androgynous ash Those who tether themselves to the idea of me Will scarper In search of new hobbies And I will rest Filthy, angelic, mundane, alone Relieved of responsibility Regretting your womanhood is a tiresome pastime

Man Upstairs A sea of hands raised to the heavens Reaching out to their maker In the hopes that He will reach back I don’t doubt it for a second Only a man could have fucked up something so beautiful And left us with the wreckage

 | 43

POETRY PORTFOLIO

INTRO Written by Katie Thomas

"Blame" and "Bitch" are two stories that reflect a battle with

anxiety over the course of a decade. They are both my stories – exaggerated in parts. As a woman and the eldest daughter in my family, I felt a huge amount of pressure from those around me to take on the mistakes made by my mother (in a nutshell, she was imprisoned when I was 20 and then died of cancer when I was 28).

These poems are not just a reflection of my life, I feel like both stories feed off the expectation on us as women to get our shit together for the sake of those around us - back then I didn't know what "mental load" meant but in hindsight, that was what it was.

BITCH And so, you’re back.

That white, white glare of your teeth.

That sharp, sharp point of your fingernails as they sink into my temples.

The hot, hot pulse of my heart.

Racing.

Pacing.

I want to cut the back of my head, let the blood flow thick and red.

Relieve the pressure of my thoughts; let the battle I have within myself run its course until my mind is completely free.

But the moment never comes.

Thoughts I confuse with nostalgia, thinking that all I want is to re-live the memories.

Not as I was back then.

But as I am now. I don’t want you, yet I embellish you.

The tourniquet to my madness.

The catharsis to my rage.

You’re not welcome anymore.

44 |

POETRY PORTFOLIO

BLAME I remember right before you came. It was summer, second year of university. The smell of burnt central Otago grass and Passion Pop. Warm days and cool nights. Best friends. I should have known that you were lingering in the distance. The blackening around the edges. A sign that not all was right. And then you were here. Oh, how you toyed with me at first. You appeared like a challenge, a way to prove that I had breached the gap between child-teen and woman. The weight shifted slowly to begin with. A phone call. The sinking heart. A hurried 270km drive back to reality. The next moments were fleeting. Unopened paper bills. Conversations with empathetic strangers. Everyone around me in disbelief. The blackened edges became more pronounced as I stood in the police station. Vision closed in and all I could feel was the pain of seeing her slip away. The first time, behind bars she was there and I was unable to hold her. The second time would come later when she was gone and all I could do was hold her. I don’t remember how many days it was. Another 270km drive back to hyper-reality. Tunnel vision as I walked through a life of split shifts, unfaithful encounters and drug haze. And then, you were there. A heated argument that sent me over the edge. My chest fell fast, felt heavy, and I could not catch my breath.

You wove your way into my life. The steely thread, The one that glistened in the light. Strong and sharp, ready to cut me whenever I was down. Your pattern consumed me; like a jealous lover, you refused to let me live. The face of you replicated in crowds, unable to look at myself for fear that I would see you staring right back at me, teeth bared and lips curled. I tried to find my way home though counting my steps, leaving trails of crumbs and empty packets so I knew where I had been when all the time, everything led me back to you.

And now, you are here again. Just when all the pieces come back together, the edges blacken once again. This time I can feel you even deeper than I have before, your thread buried deep within my sleep, panicked breath replaced with my insomnia. Have you not had enough of me? A million tears, illogical fears, countless hours awake in the dead of night waiting for a release. It saddens me that I can trace the root of you back to her. 33 years ago, she opened up and gave me to this he is gone now and all my questions remain. It is with a heavy heart, a panicked mind and a sleepless night that I allow you to consume me. Your breath on the back of my neck, a constant reminder that you are here.

You make me feel so heavy and I just don’t know if you are now a part of me.

"MY CHEST FELL FAST, FELT HEAVY, AND I COULD NOT CATCH MY BREATH"

| 45

Sisterhood presents

Every m onth!

s ' a ev s s sa n o i t c e s

Monthly Moon BULLSHIT

 QUIZ!

EVA CHARLES

Opinions you didn't ask for, and honestly, you probably don't need.

At the age of 4, I wanted to be a mother. My dad bought me a Tonka truck, a little yellow one with a flat deck, and I put it to bed in the pram. I pulled the blankets up to its little yellow cab and tucked it in tight. Dad was bemused, to say the least. Playing mothers and fathers, I was always the mother. My little sister was always the dog, and the poor interchangeable childhood friend we were frolicking with at any given moment was the dad. If they refused to be the dad, they were the cool aunt, and the dad was away on business. I called my make-believe family “honey,” and I pretended to cook dinner, remembering what order my own mother put things in the casserole dish and miming the same. I looked up to my mother, but gradually I saw what it took away. The times we weren’t nice to her, or refused to tell her how our day at school went, or her exhausted sigh after she made dinner and placed it on the table and I picked at my steak.

These days, kids horrify me. I sat in the car one day with my mum, stopped at traffic lights beside a Mad Butcher, and watching a small child spitting the Proverbial

Dummy at the crosswalk next to us I said without thinking, “I just don’t think I’ll have kids. ”Mum looked at the road, looked at me, looked at the road. “I think that’s very sensible,” she said. At the age of 23, I do not want to be a mother. By the age of 25, I may want to be again. I often express my insecurity with the idea of having kids, and people say, “It’s different when it’s your own! ”But I’m tired of the inevitable ensuing exchange. Saying I don’t want kids doesn’t mean, “Tell me why I should have kids.” A life, I think, can be fulfilling without them. Someone I know, and like a lot, thinks its immoral to bring more humans onto this groaning, heaving, burning planet. We can’t guarantee the longevity, and therefore the safety, of either the planet or our offspring. My reasons are more selfish – I want to own white furniture, and I want to spend money on nice coffee and boutique candles, and order ridiculous smoothie makers from the infomercials. For now. And if my mind changes in three years, four years, ten years’ time, I’ll probably get a lot of, “I told you so!”. Okay boomer. So I proved you right, and

pushed a tiny, screeching helldemon into the world to love with all my heart. What I’m trying to say is it’s our choice. It’s your choice and my choice, and the idea that a life is sad and lonely and unfulfilled without spawning is damaging, and controlling, and another one of the ways women are pushed into the box of our gender-normative society. If you want a kid, have a kid.

If you don’t, fucking don’t. And if you end up with a little bub, do them a favour and buy them a Tonka truck.

They’re hugely versatile, and wonderful for metaphors.

AUTHORS NOTE: If you got to the end of this article and realised my opinion is fucking brilliant,

hilarious,

well

written,

accurate, or maybe that I have changed your entire outlook on life within 500 words, then email me with things you would like me to babble about next month: sisterhoodwellington@gmail.com

| 47

HOROSCOPE

MONTHLY MOON BULLSHIT

Aquarius: If you see a cat today, pat it. Life's too short.

Gemini: The twins are in line with Jupiter this month. They're not in line with each other, though, which means you may be in for some internal conflict.

Take a walk and let them battle it out. The voices yelling in your mind will shout each other hoarse, and you'll be left with the truth.

48 |

Aries: There's probably going to be some bullshit making you angry this month. The only way to deal with things, according to my mother, is to "give them a good round swearing" and move on. Give it a go. Write in. Tell me how it went.

Taurus: You've been rushing through life like a bull in a china shop, Taurus. That is, a shop that sells breakable objects, not a shop in China. Unless you're planning to go to China? You know what, yes. Taurus, your calling is in China. Go forth, book some flights. See ya never.

Cancer: Beware of a stranger in a coloured skirt, they may offer you treats but it'll turn out to be treason.

Leo: This month you need to embrace change. I know that's not what you wanted to hear.

Nobody likes change, I get that.

But it's inevitable, as much as it fucking sucks. Talk it through, with yourself and with others.

Call your mum, your pal, or harass a cat on the street. It'll be okay.

HOROSCOPE

An astrological prediction of your future as told by Eva Charles.

Admittedly, someone who knows nothing about astrology.

Virgo: This month for you, Virgo, brings a problem, a pest, and a pineapple. The problem will be solved, the pest will be tamed, but you're still not sure what to do with the pineapple. Check back next month for a banger pina colada recipe.

Libra: So your star sign is a tampon brand. That's chill, you can learn to live with that. While you're deciding whether or not to be cut up about the tampon thing, I can suggest you make a change to your diet. Just a small one, perhaps eat less meat, or go to taco Tuesday at the bar down the road. Switch it up and see how you feel.

Scorpio: Scorpio, scorpio. Why are you such a bitch, Scorpio? I bet you got all offended at that, didn't you? I'm only teasing, I know at least two scorpios that are tolerable in small doses. I think the problem is that when you walk into the room, it lights up, and it makes me feel dark by comparison. Don't listen to me.

You keep on lighting up rooms, you beautiful wanker, you.

Sagittarius: There is a light in the distance, Sagittarius. No, wait. That's just a scorpio.

Capricorn: There's a book in your life you haven't finished, a dream half-remembered, and a half eaten bar of Dairy Milk down the side of your couch.

Finish that thing you started and just can't seem to stick to. Set that goal, and get it done. You might feel better, and if you don't at least it's one less thing to do.

Pisces: There's a sun overhead and grass underfoot, and Summer is going to bring great things for you, Pisces. Strange things, yes, but great in their own way. Sleep with the curtains open so the morning sun can wake you gently. Laugh a lot, and drink water. I'm not fucking kidding, drink a ton of water. The toilet breaks will be worth it when your skin's a-glowing like a halogen lightbulb.

| 49

QUIZ

WHAT IS MY NEW YEARS RESOLUTION? It’s November. How the fuck did that happen? It was June, then I made a cup of tea, blinked, and it was November.

Who can I write to about this? “Dear NASA…” Anyway, take this dumb quiz to figure out what you should pledge to do, and then definitely not do, come January.

Pick a kind of bread: a) Plain ol’ white toast (you fucking vanilla bitch) b) whOLeMeAL c) a bagel d) croutons, coz ya alty AF What would you pierce, if you had to get one? a) Hmmmm might get my seconds done aye b) Eyebrow? Maybe both? Maybe twice each c) Tongue, so you can do that annoying thing where you tap it on your teeth all the time d) YA CLIT go hard or go home Where would you visit? a) Queenstown’s kinda nice? b) Trump’s America, I wanna watch the world burn c) Pareeeee. What?? Oh right, Paris, but for wankers. d) I hear they’re taking people to Mars in the next five years, I’m down for that What’s your worst habit? a) You hoard dirty mugs in your room like a filthy gremlin b) Can’t be on time to save your life c) YOU FLAKY. They’ll stop inviting you soon, you know. d) Using a word ironically for so long it starts to become serious

50 |

QUIZ Choose a pet: a) Tiny handbag dog b) Big ol’ golden retriever boi c) Axolotl? Fucking, okay, sure. d) Rats, and I’d built them a castle.

What shoe are you? Tag yo’ self. a) Vans, but covered in black scuffs from town b) Docs, coz you’re a badass c) Birkenstocks with socks d) Jandals everywhere always

Your results!

Mostly As: Branch out. For real, it sounds like you’re doing okay, you’re doing fine, but imagine what else could be out there. Pick a new sport, adopt a weird hobby, join a niche club. If you hate it, ditch it. Haha, unless?

Mostly Bs: You have the best intentions, and you throw yourself at them like a fucking freight train. I love that about you, but this year try and chill out. Try and do (now don’t freak out) nothing. Try one evening of meditation, see if it tickles ya bits.

Mostly Cs: How’s your career going? Well? Non-existent? Set yourself a work goal. Everything else can hold for a little while. Give yourself permission to put some of the shit in your life on standby and try not to do too much. Compartmentalising is healthy.* Mostly Ds: Like the Ds do we? Childish cackle. D, I don’t know what to tell you. You strike me as the kind of person who either fucking loves a resolution, or hates the idea of it to its very core. That’s the thing. You’re allowed to do things by halves sometimes. You don’t need a rock solid opinion on everything. Maybe make a resolution, maybe don’t. But stop being so polarising, aye?

*I am not a medical professional, and I actually do not know if compartmentalising is healthy.

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EDITORS & JOURNALISTS

Kendra Stone Quynh Anh Tran Le Emma Dalton Riah Dawson Karen Legenderriere Sebire Tanya Putthapipat Shivashish Andrews Kata Brown Kaitlyn Evens Shanti Gore Lyric Waiwiri-Smith Deidra Sullivan Caitlin Abbott Zara Collinson Giulka Ebdus Heidi Threlfo Kate Burney Maddi Rowe Leah Macpherson Janhavi Gosavi Katie Thomas Eva Charles

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SPECIAL THANKS & IN LOVING MEMORY Colin McCormick Thank you for being my childhood artistic inspiration.

Sisterhood – Hakihea 2019

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