Tales of everyday resistance

There is something so compelling about The Everyday Sexism Project that I find myself reading anecdote after anecdote in a compulsive fuzz of empathy and anger. It’s the little things. The little things that viewed singularly can, and often are, dismissed as aberrations, but when viewed as a whole clearly make up the fabric of our lives.

What is so devastating about the Everyday Sexism Project is that each little snippet shared by the women who contribute is uniquely horrible and yet completely standard. They are the consistent punctuation’s to our lives. To be borne often without comment, to be internalised with shame and self loathing. I can barely even described how it feels to see  stories that run so parallel to my own, lived out by women  I have never met. The quiet, unassuming little stories that so often slip by without our noticing. The little pinches.

I have been thinking a lot recently as to something else that could come out from the Everyday Sexism Project. Shared experiences of everyday resistance. Those times when sexism has been addressed, responded to, called out. Through a little comment or full blown campaign, I want to read those stories too.

I used to work for this guy who made comics. One time last year, I was at the after party of  a promotional event I had helped organise for his newest comic book series. It was in a bar,  I was running around selling comics, talking to people, etc. In bright and breezy work mode, I started chatting to a guy who helped put on the event. He immediately started to barrage me with questions about my interest in comics. What did I read? Who was my favourite comic book artist? But not in a friendly, ‘let’s chat about comics we both read’ way. In a suspicious, ‘what are your credentials?’ kind of way. He then went on to ask me if I considered myself a ‘geek girl.’ Confused by the implications of this term I replied noncommitally with a ‘maybe? I guess you could say that?’ he sneered back at me ‘ You self proclaimed geek girls are all the same, you love having the pick of the guys.’ Which is when I  politely excused myself.

I couldn’t say anything to the tongue pierced little pustule because I was working. Or maybe I just didn’t feel able to say anything. Either way, I was humiliated and furious.

On the journey home that night at about 11pm I was sitting alone on the train to New Cross from London Bridge. My carriage contained a few people, mostly business men making their boozy way back home from central. I happened to catch the eye of one such business man as I sat down. The train was a couple of minutes leaving, and I could see this guy staring at me from across the carriage. I was using my book as a prop in an attempt to ignore him, but sure enough the arsehole decided to make his way over from his seat and come and sit next to me. I had fucking had it. I turned to face him. I said in a surprisingly calm voice ‘What exactly do you think you’re doing?’. He looked at me blankly and burbled something. I continued.

‘You have been staring at me.’

‘Staring I wasn’t staring…’

‘Yes staring at me from across the carriage, and now uninvited you have come and sat next to me. If you want my advice, you will stand up, walk back over to your seat, and sit down.’

His gluey eyes were open wide.

‘Now. Are you going to take my advice?’

He got up and shame faced, stumbled back to his seat.

The two events are of course linked. If I hadn’t felt so wound up by the evening events, I may very well have shuffled uncomfortably when this guy sat next to me, and attempted to pretend it wasn’t happening. But instead, I reacted immediately, and faced his behaviour head on. It may not seem a big deal, effectively telling a drunk guy to leave me alone. But it is one of the only instances where I feel I have been able to assert myself against a form of everyday sexism that has been directed at me, in a way that actually worked.

When ever I feel shitty about feeling too ashamed, or scared, or just not strong enough to respond to the sexism I encounter, I reflect back on that interaction on the train. It gives me hope.

I want to hear and read the tales of other women’s victories. So I can carry these stories with me through my life, and take courage from them. Sexism is everyday, but so also is our resistance to it.

Dancing for ourselves: Sexual harassment and dance floors.

When I first moved to London when I was 20, I spent a great deal of time hanging out in gay clubs. I had a gay, male flatmate in halls who possessed a penchant for Britney Spears, horror movies, and clubbing. I accompanied him to many GAY nights, and felt safe nestled in its flamboyant bosom. I was for the most part left alone, could dance, drink and not police my own behaviour. I was not, as I know some gay people have (probably rightfully) accused heterosexual visitors to gay clubs, coming to view the wild animals on safari. It was not my desire to ogle at the exotic gays in their natural habitat. I just wanted to dance.

In the last couple of months I have revisited these memories of avoiding ‘straight’ dance nights. Just before Christmas, two female friends and I had the great idea to go out as a group, and do nothing but dance all evening at ‘Gaz’s rocking blues bar’. The entire night, we felt threatened and uncomfortable by a constant circle of men. We found ourselves forming a protective ring, as drunken men lunged for body parts, or attempted to insert themselves amongst our group. It was not only the explicit harassment which was bothering, the men shoved us to a corner, forced us to dance small. Their dominance of the dance floor was physical, as they shoved and lurched with no regard for our diminishing physical space.

This is something that goes beyond the dance floor – I think that a lot of the time,men feel more entitled to physical space than women do. They are larger, and often seem to have a solidity that is of course a result of their size, but also derives from an almost unconscious entitlement to space.

What comes to mind is the man and woman sitting on the underground  - the man thinks nothing of stretching out, legs stretched out apart, with no worries about whose space they might be encroaching upon. Women will often shrink into their seats, reducing their physical selves. Legs tucked in, arms folded – we let the men assert their dominance over the space we share.

Move over bro

It is this kind of physicality that becomes even more apparent on a dance floor, as men demonstrate an entitlement to the space, and a similar entitlement  to the women also  occupying it.

I feel often that when out dancing, I am in effect giving up my rights to not be touched by strange men. That dancing, showing my own physicality, somehow equates to sexual availability. And this strange translation of ideas is not isolated to clubs in central London.

This weekend I attended the Anti-Raids benefit night in a squat in Elephant. A great night full of, what one might assume, were politically engaged  men and women, listening to music, drinking, and dancing. At one point in the night, weaving my way across the dance floor in an attempt to find my friends, two separate men groped me. Each time I turned around to confront the person, only to find a melting wave of male faces, and who knows which one to turn my anger on. What became crashingly apparent was that without the chaperoning force of my boyfriend, I was suddenly up for literal grabs.

I assumed that in a night run by a group of people opposing the brutal deportation of human beings, I could expect a fundamental right not to be accosted.  If it happened once, I could chalk it up to one lecherous bad seed. But twice? This suggests something else. A thoughtless entitlement to women which for some reason, does not disrupt  other politically informed beliefs and understandings about the world. It’s all progressive fun and games until the girls get on the dance floor.

It placed a horrible paranoia in my mind that, if there were no repercussions, this is how the majority of men around me would act. Men who are supposed to be my allies. That if they knew they could get away with it, they too would have a grope my body on the dance floor. Perhaps this is extreme, but what else can I take away from this? That supposed comrades will do whatever they think they can get away with once the lights have gone down.

Perhaps it is naive of me to assume different forms of behaviour from men at a night filled with the self described poltically engaged. We need only look at the recent goings on in the SWP to realize that sexual assault perpetrated by politicos is hardly an abberation. But naive or not, I was still shocked and saddened to realize that this too, was another place where I could not act in a free manner. That no matter where I go, or who I am with, there is a high chance that my body will cease to be my own as soon as I start moving it around to music in the presence of men.

The assault of women at dance nights is so common place, I barely even mentioned it to my friends. It seemed hardly worth the effort of making a fuss. At the time, I managed to brush it off and carry on with my evening. It has been retrospectively that my anger has built.

Because part of the problem is that we don’t make a fuss. We try to laugh it off, ignore it, pretend that it isn’t happening. At that moment, it seems safer to retreat away and just let it go. My initial reaction when groped was to walk away. No one wants to be the shrieking woman making a big deal out of nothing and ruining every body elses’ good time. But there is power and importance in being the feminist kill joy.

If we don’t shout out in protest when these things happen to us, then who will? What has become increasingly apparent to me is that the majority of women will be grabbed or groped or touched without permission. This is of course, a regular occurance outside of venues hosting dance nights. But there seems to be a special and specific allowance for this sort of behaviour when carried out on dance floors. As though the act of dancing immediately makes women fair game for assault.

There seems to be this assumption that a woman dancing is doing so to garner attention or  admiration from men. That she is acting to titillate her viewers. When I dance, I do so only for me. I find myself looking at the ground, or the sky, anything to avoid the faces of men who may construe my looks as some sort of come on. We are so used to understanding women as being perpetually looked at, and sexualised, that the possibility of a woman dancing just because it feels good seems too much to concieve of. And so, the assault of women on dance floors is allowed and tolerated. A woman dancing is  understood as a precursor to sex, her female form moving is understood purely as gratifying male desire.

I even heard recently of a woman who experienced a man grabbing her vagina whilst out in a club. She sadly explained it away as just ‘something that happens’. Men are so used to treating us as objects, that even within the most politically radical group, women on a dance floor cannot expect to be safe. And we as women are so used to being treated like shit, that we accept this behaviour as a matter of course.

I want to dance without thought or hesitation about who is watching me. I want to catch whoever’s eye I please, without the implication being that I am inviting a hand on my waist. I want to enjoy my body, which is my body, without fear that someone I don’t know may take this pleasure as reason or validation to assault me. I want, for once, to let go. To not have to monitor my own behaviour in case it is misunderstood as titillation. This is my dance floor too, and I am dancing for no one but myself.

Sunflowers

Sunflower Sutra

I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and
sat down under the huge shade of a Southern
Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the
box house hills and cry.
Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron
pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts
of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed,
surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of
machinery.
The oily water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun
sank on top of final Frisco peaks, no fish in that
stream, no hermit in those mounts, just ourselves
rheumy-eyed and hungover like old bums
on the riverbank, tired and wily.
Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray
shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting
dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust–
–I rushed up enchanted–it was my first sunflower,
memories of Blake–my visions–Harlem
and Hells of the Eastern rivers, bridges clanking Joes
Greasy Sandwiches, dead baby carriages, black
treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded, the
poem of the riverbank, condoms & pots, steel
knives, nothing stainless, only the dank muck
and the razor-sharp artifacts passing into the
past–
and the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset,
crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog
and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye–
corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like
a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face,
soon-to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, sunrays
obliterated on its hairy head like a dried
wire spiderweb,
leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures
from the sawdust root, broke pieces of plaster
fallen out of the black twigs, a dead fly in its ear,
Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O
my soul, I loved you then!
The grime was no man’s grime but death and human
locomotives,
all that dress of dust, that veil of darkened railroad
skin, that smog of cheek, that eyelid of black
mis’ry, that sooty hand or phallus or protuberance
of artificial worse-than-dirt–industrial–
modern–all that civilization spotting your
crazy golden crown–
and those blear thoughts of death and dusty loveless
eyes and ends and withered roots below, in the
home-pile of sand and sawdust, rubber dollar
bills, skin of machinery, the guts and innards
of the weeping coughing car, the empty lonely
tincans with their rusty tongues alack, what
more could I name, the smoked ashes of some
cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows and the
milky breasts of cars, wornout asses out of chairs
& sphincters of dynamos–all these
entangled in your mummied roots–and you there
standing before me in the sunset, all your glory
in your form!
A perfect beauty of a sunflower! a perfect excellent
lovely sunflower existence! a sweet natural eye
to the new hip moon, woke up alive and excited
grasping in the sunset shadow sunrise golden
monthly breeze!
How many flies buzzed round you innocent of your
grime, while you cursed the heavens of the
railroad and your flower soul?
Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a
flower? when did you look at your skin and
decide you were an impotent dirty old locomotive?
the ghost of a locomotive? the specter and
shade of a once powerful mad American locomotive?
You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a
sunflower!
And you Locomotive, you are a locomotive, forget me
not!
So I grabbed up the skeleton thick sunflower and stuck
it at my side like a scepter,
and deliver my sermon to my soul, and Jack’s soul
too, and anyone who’ll listen,
–We’re not our skin of grime, we’re not our dread
bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we’re all
beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we’re blessed
by our own seed & golden hairy naked
accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black
formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our
eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive
riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening
sitdown vision.

Allen Ginsberg

Berkeley, 1955

This poem has been rattling in my mind for the last week or so. I hear it in my head when I take the tube to work. I see the locomotive dust on myself and my fellow commuters. This city makes machines out of us all.

As a doley I was desperate to press myself back into the machinery. As if that would some how validate my existence, to be another head bobbing and yawning on the underground at 7am. I am no more human now than I was then, my worth has not changed, I have only become more grimey with the city.

Smog and smut from the dole office, smog and smut from the desktop. I see things from the other side now though, The fantasies weaved and sustained about job seekers, how the benefit claimant is derided, despised and secretly envied. I also see the less than peachy view of the full time worker. Sore eyed early mornings and a growing coffee dependency, routine and drudgery. At least I get to sit down in my job. I have access to a computer. I know these are very real luxuries.

I have earnt a little more respect from my family. I can answer without elaborately evasive methods that awful question ‘what do you do?’. I can converse without squirming with similarly employed peers, and no longer suffer the same degree of pity bestowed on me by the more successful. But it seems to me to ultimately just be a new form of dust settling on my skin. One that doesn’t rub off at the end of the working day. This is why this poem keeps scrawling itself across my mind. I have to remind myself, I am not a locomotive. I am a sunflower.

Clowes

I love Daniel Clowes. Without him, I don’t think I would have become the maladjusted, neurotic comic book loving adult I am today.

Awesome.

Gilbert Hernandez’s ‘Sloth,’ a review

Another load of books from Deptford library, another comic review. Sloth, my first exposure to the work of Gilbert Hernandez.

Sloth struck me as being a rather unsuccessful combination of Ghost World (Daniel Clowes) and Lost Highway (David Lynch). A self consciously dreamy tale of haunted lemon groves, nightmares, comas, urban legends, teen angst, and provocatively drawn ‘indie’ girls.

Sloth focuses on a group of American suburbanite teens afflicted, as American suburbanites will be, by a crushing sense of ennui. In an attempt to escape the gnawing banality of their lives,
some of the towns teens romantically jump off buildings, or make brother-sister suicide pacts. Miguel our protagonist tackles his own imperfect life by simply deciding not to wake up one day, falling into a coma. Lying in his hospital bed he can hear his Grandparents and friends speaking, but the dream life of his coma is too comforting a world to break from.Then one day, a year later, he inexplicably decides to wake up.

The tale languidly continues, as the morning after his return back home his pre-coma girlfriend Lita – ‘The best habit to get out a coma for’ – meets him on the way to band practice. They make some adorable puns, and even though Lita’s boyfriend has been absent for a year and has just inexplicably returned, there is no discussion as to his waking up or her feelings towards it.

The two have a band, that include a mutual male friend. Lita has an obsession with urban legends, most significantly the Goat Man, a creature that lurks in the lemon groves and if caught sight of, will swap places with you.

Miguel, Lita and their friend Romeo strike out one night to find the Goat Man, video camera in hand. There is a strange encounter with an old man, and when the friends get home there appears to be a sighting of the Goat Man on camera.

From there on in shit get’s weird. The comic switches perspective from the view of Miguel to that of Lita, who in this new reality was the one who chose to fall into a coma. Romeo is a rock star, and the Goat Man continues to be a ghostly omnisicent presence.

I don’t mind any of this. The alternative realities was a little perplexing, but I was perfectly happy to go along with it. Presumably the sighting of the Goat Man formed a series of parallel universes in which the characters enacted new and increasingly bizarre lives, some how connected through wilful coma states and the Goat Man. This is all pretty standard magic realism fare.

What bothered me was the lack of any internal logic. Characters acted entirely inconsistently from moment to the next, with little to no explanation offered. For example, when Lita and Miguel are exploring the Lemon Groves, they come across an old man guarding the trees from trespassers. For no reason I could discern, the two teenagers barrage the man with a string of abuse. It’s weird and unsettling, and has no relation to the nature of the characters we have so far seen. This is most especially true of Miguel who post coma is slow moving and dreamy. In another scene, Miguel is beaten up by a group of guys who a few pages back he had been on good terms with. Absolutely no explanation is offered as to assault upon Miguel, and it is a strange interjection to the rest of the plot.

The only other female character apart from Lita that figures heavily in the story is Miguel’s tutor, a 30 something year old lithe teacher, who at one point appear with a navel gazing belly top with the word ‘MILF’ splayed across it. As a character she appears to be schizophrenic, mumbling paranoid fantasies about conspiratorial groups plotting against her. Her purpose is entirely unclear, as she pops up inexplicably from time to time in revealing outfits and with wild hair. Miguel makes no real comment upon her actions or appearance, and I found her entire character utterly baffling. She progresses the plot in no real way, is barely commented upon, and seems really only to fulfil some bizarre need for a sexy, mentally unhinged older woman. The only real point ever made about her is when she meets Lita, who comments in passing that she is the saddest person she has ever met.

Due to the parallel universes that spin from the incident in the lemon grove, we come to view events from the perspective of Lita for a while. She becomes the object in a love triangle between Miguel and Romeo, who she ends up seeing simultaneously. Although the story takes on the voice of Lita at this point, I found her portrayal throughout the comic entirely unsatisfactory. There is nothing genuine or believable about Lita, she acts entirely as an empty figure on to which the fantasies and desires of the male characters can be projected. The only concession made to Lita having a personality of her own is her obsession with urban legends, which ultimately is only a way to serve a necessary plot device.

The physicality of Lita is the most important thing about her. She possesses strong thighs, large round buttocks and wears revealing tops and leggings. She is drawn continually throughout the comic in positions that show off her physical form to the their best advantage. . She possesses no more depth of character than any other sub standard comic book female, and is drawn with the same voyeuristic slathering as any Power Girl comic.The only difference being that she appears in an ‘indie’ comic and therefore plays in a band and wears kooky hats.

To be honest, I found this entire comic unsatisfying. It felt like a self-indulgent and pointless exercise in surrealism, with poor character development and sexist portrayals of women. The art work is dull and repetitive, with standard black and white depictions of suburban homes, schools and rock concerts. The dialogue has that lacklustre emptiness of self-consciously indie art, and the lack of consistency regarding the plot was not intriguing or magical, but instead merely frustrating.

Yossel: A Review

I had seen the cover of Yossel several times in my local library before finally deciding to take it out. An emaciated arm with an upturned hand, the cuff of striped pyjamas and an unmistakable tattoo. A holocaust comic. I avoided this comic again and again because I could not believe that there was really anything the comic book genre can add to the vast spectrum of works that continue to respond to the holocaust. There is Maus. What is left to say after Maus?

I have a habit of always reading a book first, and then if I enjoyed it, returning to read the introduction later. The in and outs of how a writer formed his work only really becomes interesting to me after I have finished the piece. This habit was to have a strong influence on my view of this comic.

Yossel is both written and illustrated by Joe Kubert. I find it is often the case that when a writer illustrates his own work it creates a cohesive flow that can be lacking otherwise. Yossel is an excellent example of this. The comic details the life of Yossel, a young Jewish boy with an extraordinary ability to draw. Living in the Warsaw ghetto of Nazi occupied Poland, the boys talents are noted by the overseeing officers. His American style comic book drawings of superheroes tickle the soldiers, who see themselves in his Supermen. It is for this reason he is spared the camps. Throughout all of Yossels experiences, he draws. It is these drawings that illustrate the pages, a unique and for the most part successful device. Instead of finely lined and inked colour drawings, Yossel is a comic of hastily scribbled sketches, with corners unfinished and parts unfilled. Yossel hears about the death camps through the words of an escaped survivor. He draws all that he hears, painfully creating for himself a sketched gallery of unseen horrors. It is through this gallery of his mind that we come to see the final destiny of Yossel’s family. The hasty lines, the smudged charcoal become a prism through which we are able to glimpse Auschwitz and its gas chambers.

Something I am always aware of when it comes to any art or writing relating to the holocaust is how quickly descriptions can become voyeuristic. Like looking at a car crash, we shudder in horror but also savour the gruesome nature of the scene. It creates a specific sort of problem. How can we think and talk about atrocities, without indulging our desire to be tantalised by horror?

Yossel manages this problem with great delicacy. Its sketches to do not strive to recreate in full multi colour the myriad of human sufferings its story centres upon. The dark black sketches, highlighted in white and grey are like shadows upon a wall. The brightness of the true event is so strong it would burn our eyes, but these shadows allow us a shard of insight.

I read the comic with the assumption that it was autobiographical. When I reached the end though, and flicked back to the beginning to read the intro, I discovered that Joe Kubert had in fact escaped the holocaust. His family had managed to make it to America, and he had grown up a happy boy free to draw much pleasanter things. He had created the comic as a ‘what if’. What if Joe Kubert’s family was denied access onto that fleeing ship to the New Country? What if, instead of flourishing in East New York, he was trapped in the Warsaw ghettos, sketching for a crust? I can understand to a degree how haunting that possibility must be. The random chaotic chance that you were saved when so many other perished. But it gave the whole piece a somewhat self indulgent slant. I feel that by writing and drawing ‘Yossel’, Joe has managed to purge himself of the phantom of his ‘what if’ life. I can imagine him laying down his pen on its completion with a gratifying ‘ahhhhh’, and setting his work aside to attend to his real life. I don’t like that thought.

I feel that anything written about the holocaust should be motivated by more than the personal purging of guilt. To discover that personal catharsis was the driving force behind the work lowered its value in my eye. Whether that was fair or not I cannot say, it was a gut reaction to what I was reading.

Ultimately, Yossel tells us stories we are all now familiar with. The ghetto resistance, the camps, the Nazis. Stories that nonetheless, still feel like a kick in the stomach every time they are heard. But there are far better written accounts of the holocaust out there, both fictional and non-fictional. I would not recommend Yossel for that. It’s the drawings. Joe Kubert is a talented artist, and the stark sketched lines of this comic vibrate across the page. They are extraordinary.

Out of the Dole House

I have often thought, whilst cycling full pedal to the job centre, that if the government could they would reinstate work houses. The moral motivations of these old institutions glow clear to me now. The hands of the idle poor need work, if only to keep the devil at bay. Picking oakam, breaking rocks, stacking Tesco shelves… It’s all ultimately the same. A punishment doled out for those who dare to be poor, free labour for those who deserve to be rich.

The Victorian Work House

I see the best and brightest of my generation weighed down, bent and crooked with the burden of unemployment. Alternatively faces plastered up each morning with a smile to serve the public. Low paid retail, coffee shops and cafes. Unpaid internships with the glinting promise of employment, that magical pot of gold at the end of a grey shaded rainbow. Or we chose perhaps another term at University, paying money that doesn’t exist for an MA that delays the wolves at our door.

I myself have had a hand now in many things. Retail, agency work, admin, an internship. I have worked for charities I have loved and hated. I have looked after children and written fundraising applications, answered a hundred phone calls, and smiled at a hundred faces. But it is the Job Centre I find myself back at again and again. My months contract ran out, the cover work dried up.

The Job Centre. The workhouse, poorhouse, the spike. The Dole House. The dole house is not just the institution of the Job Centre nor is it merely the physical building you enter into every other week. It is the carpet and walls of your own private existence. It’s the limitations and designs made upon your life. It is something intangible and yet terrible, which bleeds into all things.

To be a resident is to find yourself following a cycle of emotion and action that is particular I think, to being unemployed. Furious job applications, phone calls, emails, the rare and glistening interview, followed by in turn by a debilitating dawning of your own worthlessness. The depression you feel whilst signing on is unique in it’s own particular flavour of awfulness. No amount of rationalisation about the economy or the similar status of your friends eases the underlying and constant knowledge that your life is shameful. A quote I read recently from Walter Greenwoods ‘Love on the Dole’ I felt typified my own emotions perfectly. As the protagonist comes back from the dole office for the first time “He trudged homewards staring, a strangulating sensation in his throat, a feeling in his heart as though he had committed some awful crime in which he was sure to be found out”. To be unemployed in this country is to be of a criminal class, imprisoned by a gnawing lack of money, opportunities, and the descending shabbiness upon your life.

It is my intention to write more about the job centre, my own experiences and my speculations as to its function. Watch this space.