Blackout

Tomorrow morning this blog will be blacked-out as part of the Internet blackout against S92a. S92a would require that ISPs cut off access to the internet for anyone repeatedly accused (yes that's accused) of breaching copyright. The law will come into force in six days.

I haven't written about s92a as part of my resolution to only write about things where I feel like I've got something to say (Prisons and Joss Whedon at the moment). So instead I'll post a comic:

On being the butt of the joke

I was on the bus this afternoon when I got a text from Julie (my co-blogger from The Hand Mirror):

Hey is everything ok? Farrar has mentioned something about u getting arrested this week

I replied:

What? Where? Only excitement I've had this week is getting a warrant for my car

Which reflected my thought process pretty exactly.

She called me (which was really good, because I have no credit on my phone) and said DPF had twittered that he was wondering if Maia was going to be arrested this week.

I didn't think I was going to be arrested this week. I couldn't think of any reason to be arrested this week as opposed to any other week. I tried to think of a protest that I might be going on, and I couldn't think of one. I've spent quite a lot of time challenging the police these last few years. I couldn't rule out that they'd arrest me for something related (maybe DPF had a source in the solicitor generals office).

I was nowhere near a computer and I was going to get home for hours. I wanted to see the context, check the news, find out what was going on, but I couldn't.

I texted a whole bunch of people, and waited nervously for replied. One friend rang me, and confirmed about the twitter: "I also checked the news and there's nothing breaking about anything you've been involved in, or anything you might have been involved in, or anything the police might have mistakenly thought you've been involved in."

He offered to ring DPF, and I said yes. At this point I just wanted to know what was going on.

A few minutes later my friend rang back, he no logner sounded concerned:

It's all right. I should have guessed. He was talking about Maia from Shortland Street

. And so now everyone is making fun of me.*

I'm not sure what the moral of this story is. Pick from the following:

1. Try and avoiding sharing a name, or pseudyom with a character on a major Television show.*
2. Try to keep up with general knowledge and pop culture, you never know when you may need it.
3. Social networking sites have more pitfalls than you ever dreamed of.
4. It's better safe than sorry.

*They might be making a little less fun of me if I didn't sort of make a habit of this sort of thing. A while ago I thought there was a serious chance of being arrested any day (I'll leave long time readers of the blog to try and figure out when that might have been). I was living alone and didn't want to get arrested and no-one know that it happened. So each night I set up a text message to ten of my friends saying: "police here, if you don't have another text message in ten minutes assume I am arrested." (You know where this is going right?) But I was tired, I wasn't going to bed early enough and I was finding it hard to get up. My alarm would go off and I'd hit the snooze button. So I stumbled out of bed, picked up my cell phone and accidentally pushed one of the buttons.

I watched the little sending message screen, and I couldn't make it stop. While I was writing a text message explaining what happened, my phone kept beeping with replies, and my home phone rang. Opps

* Talking of which, one of those arrested in the police raids in 2007 is called Omar. I watched the Wire alone, but because I like to talk about TV when I watched it I sent random text messages to my friend Larry who had lent me the DVDs. I started to worry that if the police were collecting my text messages they could completely misunderstand "I love Omar, he fucks shit up."

Exciting new blogs

One is Else Woman, a new blog by Anne Else. I have admired Anne Else for years, and her second post shows why. She writes on plastic bags, and the Sunday Star Times current campaign to rid the world of them*:

The only sensible approach to getting rid of plastic is to throw the responsibility back where it belongs. The supermarkets, takeaway bars, yoghurt makers, et al are the ones who put all this stuff into circulation in the first place.

Then they leave us to tie ourselves in knots trying to avoid it - and feel incredibly guilty when we inevitably fail. And if there is one thing no modern woman needs, it's having another load of guilt dumped on her head.

Now that the cloth bags are really cheap, charging for plastic bags is a good idea. But I'm working on a plan to deal with plastic in a completely different way. It involves pausing just before I get to the checkout counter, carefully divesting everything in my trolley of all the surplus packaging, and leaving it neatly piled on top of the nearest display of goods.

Go check out Anne Else's blog

The second is The Hand Mirror. Julie's done a lot of hard work to create a New Zealand feminist group blog. It's got some great content and regular features. I'm going to be posting over there sometimes, and cross-posting some of the posts I write here.

Speaking of which, I am planning on posting a little bit more regularly now (it would be a challenge to post less regularly. I was working on a writing project, which meant at the end of the day I was completely out of words. But now that's all done.

* Admittedly it could be much worse, their other over-riding concern appears to be rehabilitating Clint Rickards.

Comments have gone on moderation until further notice

I don't have the time or energy to write anything substantive, and I'm not going to let people slag off my friends, and the other prisoners, in the comment section of my blog.

Redesign - Help!

When blogger gave me some new knobs to twiddle I had great fun experimenting with you this blog looks. But I've come to the conclusion that it my attempt to design a blog was ugly (this was helped by everyone I knew telling me it was ugly). I decided I wanted my blog just to be black text on a white background with a really simple banner. I made myself the banner (in paint - that was fun). I've put it up the top, but it just kind of sits there, it won't resize itself, I can't seem to centre it in the page - so it's just kind of funny looking. Help advice, or even just telling me to go back to the Minima template (which has always been my favourite but it misformats in a way that really irritates me), would be welcome.

I think this is when my friends start shunning me...

I have now discovered if you search for: harry potter deathly hallows review buffy then this blog comes up first. I think that's the geekiest search to find my blog, but I could be blocking some out.

New blogs

Binary Heart is by a friend of mine. He's got some really good stuff about the Hospital workers. Plus he used a Buffy quote as a headline for the post he wrote about Clint Heine, which makes him super-cool.

Take Back The News is a feminist response to the way the mainstream media reports violence against women. I will be writing for it as soon as wordpress stops sulking (hopefully tomorrow). Anna, who has been writing so far, has got some amazing stuff, particularly on the word 'allegedly'. Far more useless analysis than yelling at the radio, which is what I've been doing up till now.

PS You know when I said I'd post some actual content, instead of just ordering my readers around? I lied; go to a picket line, or donate money to the locked-out workers.

Oh No, Not Again

I wasn't going to comment any more on Clint Heine, but his comment threads get worse. SimonD said:

I want to offer a job for Maia in K'Rd. My massage parlor needs 2 women to dance nude on stage.

Does anyone know Maia's full name? I want to forward the job offer to WINZ, so they can get registered unemployed people like Maia to apply. I know WINZ doesn't like unemployed people who are registered with them to decline a job offer (any jobs really). So, there is a chance that Maia will take my offer.

For those who don't know the NZ benefit system, if you turn down a job you can go on a benefit stand-down for up to 13 weeks. So people on benefits can't turn down work.

SimonD wants to coerce me into sex-work by cutting off my other forms of income.*

Clint Heine's objection to this isn't based on my right to my own body:

If her blog is accurate I do believe she is already well known to the WINZ staff in her area. I somewhat doubt you'd want somebody like her in with your lovely girls. :)

I'm proud to say that he's right. If I was to work on K'Rd I'd educate, agitate and organise, and SimonD wouldn't know what hit him.

But the point here is that coercing a woman to work in the sex industry by cutting off her other forms of income is rape. These clearly men view women as objects to be used by them, and my desire is irrelevant. This is the second time a man on Clint Heine's blog has expressed a desire to punish me with sex, and Clint Heine has no problem with that at all.

* In reality WINZ do not require women to accept jobs in the sex industry.

All things considered I think I'd rather be expelled from the Labour Party

I'd like to thank everyone who has posted and commented about James and Clint Heine's comments.

Clint Heine appears to be claiming that he thought James was talking about masturbation (he also claims to know that James was only talking about masturbation too, although I've no idea how Clint could know that).

He seems to think that this would mean that there was no implications of non-consensual sexual activity in what James wrote.

He's wrong.

James does not care about me as a person, he has no knowledge of, or interest in, my desires. His prescription of a dildo - whatever he imagined was done with it, was based on him, and what he wanted, not on me. To talk about sexual acts in a way that renders women's desire invisible and irrelevant is to promote rape culture. To talk of 'fixing' a woman with a sexual act and ignore her desires is to threaten rape.

I'm aware that James, and Clint had no intention of taking any action, that discussion of sexual violence is just words to them. But the effect, and the intention, is to police women's behaviour, with threats about what will happen if we don't conform.

I promise to get back to things that aren't about me tomorrow. I've still got a report on Angela Davis's talk to write (although I'm afflicted by a kind of curse, whereby if I ever mention that I'm planning on writing a post on this blog then it's guaranteed that I never actually get around to writing it).

The Dangers of Blogging While Female

Clint Heine linked to my post about The Australian Labor Party. The post and comments are almost entirely made up of personal insults, which is unsurprising. But one commenter, James, said (about me):

Nothing a big black dildo won't fix......

Clint replied:

James.....!!! Nice suggestion, go over there and tell her that :)

Insults go with the territory, I have no problem with people calling me a thieving, parasite dog. But James wants to hold me down and stick an object in my vagina (or mouth, or anus), and Clint thinks this is a good idea.

Clint Heine is blogging under his real name. He is affiliated with the ACT party, and was formerly President of Prebble's Rebels. Yet he is comfortable not just hosting, but encouraging a threat of rape against me. Are rape threats really that acceptable?

To anyone reading this, no matter whether or not you agree with what I say, do you believe rape threats are an acceptable response to a woman speaking her mind? I know the New Zealand blogsphere isn't known for being a place of high intellectual debate, but I'm asking for there to be a line. I am asking people to take a stand against what James, and Clint Heine wrote, however much you disagree with me.


Comments on this blog are on moderation until further notice.

Pip

My friend Pip has a blog called Great Expectation. She's only got a couple of posts up but she's asking some really interesting questions:

Are there white middle-class butches? If so, where are they? I found Judith/Jack Halberstam’s book, Female Masculinities, particularly disappointing in this regard. It seems that J/J identifies as butch (??). But although she shows how butch history has been ignored by middle-class feminism, she doesn’t admit that being an academic means that working-class butch history doesn’t simply belong to her. She doesn’t use this opportunity to share her own experience of butchness, and instead uses the (often extremely personal) stories of others to illustrate this story. It’s this kind of behaviour that allows white middle class men/women/butches to claim a rich history and identity, while hiding our privilege over others of the same gender (just like white women using pictures of black mothers to symbolise the fertility or spirituality of all women).

You should go and check out her blog, leave some comments and encourage her to write more.

DON'T

I'm vain enough to check my stats reasonably often. Not as much as when I first started writing, when ever reader was a victory, but a few times a week I check how people got here.

Usually they're searching for Brad Shipton, Clint Rickards or Bob Schollum. That people who want to know about those men find what I've written satisfies me.

There are always some upsetting searches which manage to convey a weight of racism or misogyny in so few words. I think most feminist bloggers have it worse than I do; I don't write much about pornography.

But a few days ago someone found this blog by searching for: "rape a woman" "get away with it".

I'm on the second page. He hadn't found what he was looking for in the previous 18 sites, so he checked me out. This is what he read:

For most rapists, there are no consequences, formal or informal. There are consequences for all too many women out there who try and pursue justice and safety.

So any men out there, know you can rape women with impunity, know that there is no need to treat women as human beings. I don't know if you can imagine what it's like to live as a woman knowing that, maybe you could try.

I'm scared he read my words and ignored what I'm saying. I know that most men who rape face no consequences. I'm terrified that this man is now going to add to that number.

Places to go

Aotearoa Indymedia has a great end of year summary. It's a good summary what's being going on around the country - and further afield last year. The only criticism I'd make is they left out the excellent series of posts from Tonga. It still shows that Aotearoa indymedia is more than chicken liberation.

Mark Lillico, a Wellington human rights lawyer, has started a blog. So far he's written about the prison system, particularly the death of Liam Ashley (an event I couldn't write about it, I found it so depressing). He specifically mentions human rights when it comes to prisons, immigration, and criminal law (which are all important issues that don't get discussed enough). Plus he's defended heaps of my friends (and go them off).

New Comment Policy

I've had a hard time figuring a comment policy that works for me, so have so far stuck with the random deleting of unbelievably obnoxious comments. That's no longer works for me, it doesn't create a space that welcomes the sort of discussion I am looking for.

If I was going to sum up my politics in half a sentence it'd would be: the fight for liberation of the powerless against the powerful.

Although I don't think my blog has a grand political purpose, and my motives for writing are primarily self fulfilment (I see my day-to-day activism as being the way I take part in that fight), I want conversations on my blog to be primarily about how we achieve that goal, not the legitimacy of that goal.

Too often the conversations that were happening in my comment section were ones that I didn't want to read.

So from now on the comment space is for people who believe in the fight for liberation of the powerless against the powerful. Anyone else is here on sufferance, you're welcome to contribute, but remember that this space was not for you. If I believe that what you are saying is getting in the way of the conversation I want to have I will delete your comments and may ban you.*

In the past I've also had a hard time keeping track of who is banned and who isn't. So I'll also start a list of who I have banned in this post.

Questions? Comments?

* If you don't know who the powerless and powerful are then you are also here on sufferance. If who you think is powerless bears little resemblance to the actual world then you are definitely here on sufferance (hint: men, white people, and capitalists are not particularly powerless).

2006 a retrospective

I thought I'd do a proper retrospective, with my favourite post from each month. It's been a funny year for me; I think it shows in my writing. I had two months of insanely intense activism, so that I couldn't think about anything else (see March and September below). But those months almost threw the rest of the year out of balance - I know I did a lot but it's hard to see every other month as anything but empty.

January Why I call Myself a Feminist and don't qualify that statement:

There's an interesting discussion on Alas: 'Is The Oppression of Women The Root Of All Oppressions?' Now I've given my response to that argument in the comments (Short Answer: Don't know, don't care. Slightly Longer Answer: Will you shut up with comparing black men to white women already; I'm glad that the rest of us have learned a bit from the 19th Century), but I thought I'd take this opportunity to write a little about why I just call myself a feminist, and don't put anything before or after it.

I wasn't that into any of my posts in January last year, but this post outlined some of my ideas about feminism quite nicely. I wanted to include this post, just because I liked the pull quote I would have used:

I'm finding it really hard to believe that there's anywhere in America or New Zealand where a teenage girl is sitting thinking "I really want to know what the low-fat alternative to ice cream is, but I just don't know where to find that information."

February Being Purple:

Maybe that's not even what I mean - maybe I mean: the experience of being fat is part of being a woman in the society I live in - whatever size you are.

This was the first post where I wrote about something that was hard for me, something I still don't do enough (if anyone - except my friend Besty) can identify where the title of this post comes from I'll write a post on the topic of your choosing, but your guesses in the comments).

March I Believe Louise Nicholas:

The jury has found Brad Shipton, Clint Rickards, and Bob Schollum not guilty of raping Louise Nicholas.

[deleted]

Obviously some members of the jury believed Louise Nicholas, or else the deliberations wouldn't have taken this long. I pay tribute to them, and wish they could have had the evidence that would have convinced the rest.

The post that is there now isn't actually the post that I'm talking about - read this for an explanation.

April East Beasts:

I was talking about high school with a guy who had recently left Rongotai (the male version of my Wellington East). When I mentioned that I'd gone to Wellington East he started a chant I'd forgotten about (if I ever knew about it in the first place, paying attention to the world around me wasn't my forte in high school):

East Beasts
Thunder Thighs
Eating all the Georgie Pies

Ten years later I found it funny. But it reminded me that this is what boys, particularly those at all-boys schools, chanted at East Girls. In a way I'm impressed at how much they managed to pack into 9 words, at how many different degrading sexist and racist attitudes can be conveyed in so little time.

The first moral of this story is don't send your sons to all boys schools.

May Geeking Out This was mostly a list of my top 5 most feminist, and top 5 least feminist episodes of Buffy:

3. Lullaby Ok I know this is actually an Angel episode, but it flew from one franchise to another powered on nothing but it's own misogyny, so I had to include it. The plot is that Darla is pregnant with Angel's child, and having a good human being inside her has stopped her from being evil. It looks like the child will not survive giving birth so Darla stakes her (evil) self in order that her (good) child can live.

I watched this episode with my friend Betsy and said "wow everyone who had anything to do with this episode must have hated women with a firey passion."

I enjoyed writing this post more than is healthy.

June Women are Really neat People:

I think there is some danger that this sort of analysis leads to the sort of paralysis that comes when feminists talk as if 'choice' was the most important thing for women. I used the word 'actions' rather than 'choices' in this post, and I've did that deliberately. To me the point of feminism isn't to give women choices, but to make sure that we don't have to make them. We don't have to be virgins or whores, or career women or housewives. We have to make shitty choices every single day - for me the point of feminism isn't to celebrate shitty choices, but make sure we don't have to choose.

This was my piece about Carol Hanisch's article The Personal Is Political, as I'd said earlier in the year:

Before I go any further, I have to interrupt our regular programming with some words from the rant department. The phrase is "The Personal is Political" not "The Political is Personal." There's a really important difference there, and it gets lost (although to be fair less lost in the feminist blogsphere than it does among hippy types).

The feminist revelation wasn't supposed to be that by buying fair-trade coffee, not shaving your legs, going braless, having lots of sex, charting your fertility, boycotting tobacco companies, dumpster diving, dressing butch, dressing femme, not doing the dishes, vacuuming the floor, boycotting Domino's, working as a lawyer, raising children, or whatever other individual decision you made, could change the world. These decisions are all fine decisions but they're not political actions and they're not going to change anything.

What women's liberation was saying was that things we experience as individual problems: sexual harrassment, unwanted pregnancy, body hatred, unconcensual sex, domestic violence, depression, housework and so many other parts of being a woman, were actually political problems. They weren't just things individuals were experiencing and they weren't things individuals could fight - they had to be fought collectively. Almost the exact opposite of what the phrase is so often reduced to now.

Every time I hear that phrase so bastardised, so trivialised, and so misrepresented I imagine the members of those early women's liberation groups turning in their graves - and most of them aren't even dead yet.

July Beautiful Boy:

My friend has an 11 month old baby boy. When she was pregnant someone she knew was raped and we talked about the not-yet-child inside her. She didn't know whether the Frog was going to be a boy or a girl and we didn't know whether it was worse to raise a girl and be afraid that when she grew up she'd be raped, or a boy and be afriad that when he grew up he might rape someone.

This was the post that made my friend's baby (known as the frog) pitied by right-wing men all over New Zealand. The thought that there was a little boy out there that was being raised by women who didn't want him to rape anyone, terrified them (yeah I wish I was kidding).

August Motherhood

Until we acknowledge that caring for children is work - and restructure our society accordingly - women are going to continue to be screwed over by the double shift. I'm not suggesting it can be done under capitalism (I don't believe it can). But I think we can fight for changes in the right direction - anything that makes it easier for parents, that makes space more accesible for parents, that offers more support for parents, and makes child-rearing more a collective responsibility, will make women's lives better.

The more I think about it, the more I write about, the more I realise how central my analysis of reprdouction is to my feminism.

September My favourite post was definately Take it Easy but Take it:

But out at Ford, here's what they found,
And out at UPS, here's what they found,
And out at Stagecoach, here's what they found,
And down at Progressive, here's what they found:
That if you don't let the red-baiting break you up,
And if you don't let the racism,
And if you don't let the sexism break you up,
And if you don't let homophobia break you up,
And if you don't let red-baiting break you up,

You'll win

Obviously more for the sentiment than the content - that was the day we won the lockout (I think my favourite post of any substance is my post on Section 59, it was one of those issues where the debate was infuriating me, even though I was very firmly on one side).

October I'm not even going to touch the 'oh my god she's had sex' subtext:

Look I'm a middle-class white girl, I find the idea of having a baby before I'm economically and socially secure terrifying, but I get to think that one day I will be economically and socially secure. Not everyone grows up with those set of assumptions about their life, and if you don't have those assumptions your feelings about pregnancy and motherhoood are going to be qutie different.

The response to Keisha Castle-Hughes's pregnancy in the New Zealand media infuriated me.

November Mutually Abusive:

'Mutually abusive relationship' as the default setting creates the idea of a perfect victim. If anyone who fights back is in a 'mutually abusive relationship, then the only way you are entitled to support is if you don't fight back. But if you react to the abuse, physically defend yourself, act jealous or fucked up by what's happened to you, then you don't deserve support, and people around can wash their hands and walks away from what they term a mutually abusive relationship.

As a feminist, as a human being, it is my duty and my desire, to support the powerless against the powerful, and to not wash my hands of women who fight back.

My favourite posts are the ones where I can bring together personal experience and link it to a wider debate. A lot of my posts about violence against women recently have been based on what I've seen among people I know.

December Maia vs Winz: wrk4u:

The whole thing was in essence creating opportunities to shove people down the cracks. What makes me so angry is that it won't be the people who need the benefit least who don't get the benefit under this system, it'll be the people who need it most. I'm fairly certain that I'll get the benefit, and I'm also fairly certain that the woman sitting next to me, who'd been on the student allowance and was wearing a Gucci bracelet, will too. But the guy who'd been on the independent youth benefit and didn't have a passport or a birth certificate, he probably won't.

This has definately been a year of beneficiary bashing in New Zealand and I've written a bit about it, but you can't quite comprehend the complete distance between WINZ-land and reality until you experience it first hand.

Onwards and upwards, I start 2007 unemployed, wondering what to do next with my life, and with a shockingly tidy house.

Year in Review

I've seen a few people do a year in review by posting the first sentance they wrote each month (the most recent was Raising WEG.

This is what I was writing. It's actually a fairly accurate representation, except there's not enough Joss.

I think it's colonialism's fault that I'm grumpy.

The Senate has appointed Alito to the supreme court.

Isn't it a good thing that the state sector unions put so much time and energy into getting labour re-elected promoting the importance of health and education?

I am not hosting any comment that calls Louise Nicholas a liar.

There was a protest march in support of Louise Nicholas today in Auckland.

Now I stayed away from the John Miller's list of top 50 conservative rock songs, because it was too dorky to comment on (plus Amanda did a fine job).

One of the biggest lecture theatres at Victoria University has a sticker up the front it says "Mobilisation May 1: Stop the Tour".

A New Zealand Idol contestant has been kicked off the show for being pregnant.

I went to a Coutdown supermarket on the weekend.

As I said in my last post, I have some experience with alternative primary schooling.

I've become convinced that I will know the last person on the unemployment benefit in Wellington.

This is what she had to say about the Medical Laboratory Workers strike.

New Comment Policy

I've been too busy to deal with the ignorant anti-union comments that have been posted on my blog lately. The comments that offend me most are the ones that insult the locked-out workers by implying they're not capable of making decisions.

I've come to realise I don't have to host this shit. Right-wing union bashing comments will be deleted. If you want to be obnoxious and ignorant go do it somewhere else.

It's not that I don't have anything to say

Most readers have probably figured out that it's not a coincidence that posting has slowed down during the lock-out.

I'm not directly involved in this struggle. I'm not a member of NDU, and I don't work for them. But this is an important struggle, and right now any spare time or energy I have needs to be givent to doing the little bit I can do to help.

Notes on Comments

1. I've allowed anonymous comments again. I had to turn off anonymous comments during the police rape case - if for no other reason than the confusion that is caused when there are 20 different people called anonymous all disagreeing with each other (I was also getting a lot of spam). I will be more inclined to delete obnoxious anonymous comments than obnoxious named comments. But some of my favourite commentators have stopped posting since I turned off anonymous commenting, and I'm hoping they'll come back.

2. I'm not necessarily planning on posting a lot on Israel's invasion of Lebanon (although possibly writing about Gaza right now might be a good idea, because the excitement of a new war seems to have meant that it has slipped right off the radar), but I thought I should warn people that anyone who uses the "Jews" instead of Israelis will have their comments deleted (and possibly be banned). The only people who have any interest in conflating Israelis and Jews are Anti-Semites and Zionists. I'm not willing to host the myths that uphold either of those ideologies on this blog.

Best Bag Ever

I have to show-off this beautiful bag my friends made me:


Now this is a blog with an official bag.