Notes on socialism and sex..

Some random notes I've put together this evening after reading Lenin's writings on women. Thoughts appreciated - these are very rough, so I'd like to know what to develop and whether to write it up into something more coherent!

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Given the constituent parts of my daily existence, it's hardly surprising that sexual politics is a large theoretical preoccupation of mine. There is passion, excitement, comradeship and beauty in equal measure in both.

And in imagining a better future, a socialist future, I have always been incapable of detaching political and economic liberty from the freedom to love in a new way. To love, as Kollontai argues, without possession or boundary. To love without the fear of reaching an impossible peak, to love without dependency or shame.

This is why, as a socialist, Lenin's insistent sexual moralism is such a constant disappointment.

In his discussion with Clara Zetkin, painstakingly retold in her notes 'Lenin on the woman question', he makes no bones about tearing Alexandra Kollontai's theory - that 'sex should be as easy as drinking a glass of water' - to pieces. 'Would a normal man, with normal thirst,' he asks, 'lie down and drink from the gutter? Or even from a glass who's rim had been greased by many lips?'

He will not vouch, he adds, for 'male comrades who chase after every petticoat', nor for 'women whose love affairs are entwined with politics'.

This from a leader who had an excellent position on the organisation of women in the party, and on the importance of extending revolutionary ideas into the home as well as the workplace.

Lenin's letters to his suggested lover, Innessa Armand, lay out his proposals for communist love. In place of marriage, he proposes a proletarian civil union; indistinguishable from marriage in form, he envisages the partnership as monogamous and lifelong. This is an exact replica of bourgeois moralism.

Of course, the Bolsheviks legalised divorce, so they were eager in one sense to tear down the oppressive family institutions. But as socialists we must understand that it was not simply the label 'marriage' that was so destructive to familial and sexual relations. It wasn't even the fact that divorce was illegal, although this was undoubtedly a huge constraint on the rights of women and the possibility of  unrestrained love. What ruins love under capitalism is the insidious nature of every intimate personal relation. The fact that every single interaction is bound up not only in the economic base, but in the ideological superstructure.

The superstructure is the terrifying mass of ideas, practices, ways of living our daily lives that come not from 'nature' but from our relation to capitalism. The base might dictate the need for women to work in the factories during both World Wars - but the superstructure created Rosie the Riveter. Likewise, whilst private property generates the need for patrilineal societies, it is ideology which supplies us with the ideal of lifelong love, of finding 'the one'.

Of course, this superstructure cannot simply dissolve immediately as soon as workers seize power. Lenin himself recognises this to an extent - he discusses the problem of women, post-revolution, still being confined to the eternal drudgery of housework whilst their male partners throw themselves into party work. This serves, he says, not only to perpetuate the oppression of women the Bolsheviks were wholeheartedly attempting to destroy, but also drives a wedge between women and the party as they begin to resent it for taking up their husbands time and energy and leaving them in much the same position they were before. His solution was eminently sensible and inherently progressive - a true socialisation of housework and childcare, leaving people of all genders free to work, relax and continue building a better society.

The fact that Lenin is so progressive in this respect makes his conservative attitude to sex almost ridiculous. Clara Zetkin points out that sexuality and the moral maze surrounding it is where women feel their oppression perhaps the most. If this is the case, it is likely to be where they find their liberation first too. A sexual awakening can be inherently political. Many people only discover love or sexual arousal for the first time when they discover someone of the same sex; given the social castigation that follows, how can we say this is not political? Or the freedom women discovered at the onset of the sexual revolution: the contraceptive pill and Shere Hite's groundbreaking study of female sexuality meant women could sleep around and enjoy it too, changing the way we interacted with sex and men on one level forever.

It's true that socialists can't substitute progressive sexual ethics for committed political work; we can't, as much as some of us might like to, move into polyamorous communes and spend our days wrapped up in love and sex, removing ourselves from capitalism. We need to work for a society where everyone has the opportunity to love without fear. But reinscribing the same conservative sexual moralism - or ignoring the question altogether - can only harm our cause and alienate those we wish to reach the most.

hide the flame

Your words sting harder than your fist ever could. When you write of me as a child, as incapable of constricting my emotions or repressing desire, I long for you to just punch me in the face. It would hurt less than a ruthless deconstruction of my personality flaws. Isn't that sick? Well, it's no sicker than  months of emotional turmoil, of so much guilt for demanding what I need, for being uncompromising, for refusing to be second best. No sicker than staying with a liar. No sicker and no more disgustingly misplaced than hating the madonna for making me the whore.

Well, no more. You called my demands monstrous, you said I burned too brightly. You are a dry husk and I am sorry for your loss, but I will not apologise for setting you on fire.

standing beneath the shard

I stood beneath the Shard and watched its peak disappear into the clouds and lamented a life spent on the ground. Where the colours are too bright, the focus too crisp, where people move with all the ungainliness and imprecision you'd expect from someone trying to force their way through a game they were never taught the rules of.

I stood below the Shard and my heart raced, my skin turned pale, my breathing rasped and fluttered.

The Porn Wars never ended: why we're still getting it wrong decades later.

In an effort to bring the sexual proclivities of modern Britain in line with the Tory vision for society – middle class couples with 2.5 children spending their Saturdays gardening and their Sundays performing the ritualistic once-a-week missionary position– Prime Minister David Cameron is looking to restrict access to internet pornography.

Lining up meetings with four top Internet Service Providers, Cameron is pushing for an ‘opt-in’ scheme to access adult content. Ostensibly the scheme is to protect children from being exposed to porn.  Faced with the cheek-scalding embarrassment of having to discuss your Sunday evening masturbatory habits with Sal in the BT Internet call centre, however, it seems likely that scores of people will essentially be goaded into locking themselves into a no-sex contract. Not a problem for a government that aims to recreate Victorian Britain, work houses and all: dismantling the welfare state and relying on private benefactors; leaving the poor to languish in gutters and beg for loose change; and making sure no-one thinks about, let alone takes part in sex that isn’t for the sole purpose of producing children inside a stable marriage.

It would not be unfair to suggest that a desire to instil a stiff-upper-lip-and-not-much-else attitude to sex might have something to do with the proposals. This is the party that introduced Section 28 – banning the discussion of homosexuality in schools – and recently attempted to make sex education optional. Essentially, they sent a message to a whole generation that you should only hop on the good foot and do the bad thing within the confines of a heterosexual monogamous marriage – and even then, you shouldn’t really talk about it.

 This proposal is another step in a long line of prudish and unhealthy proclamations and laws around sex that only serve to directly hurt thousands of people and make millions more unhappy.  HIV infections amongst the heterosexual population have skyrocketed because of consistent scaremongering around homosexual transmissions in the 1980s. Section 28 undoubtedly led to confusion, depression, and isolation for gay children and teenagers seeking legitimacy from teachers instructed by law not to provide it. Chlamydia infections amongst the under-25s in Britain have soared as a result of chronically underfunded sex education.

I certainly don’t want to argue that pornography is on a par with sex education and anti-discrimination laws in terms of what it can teach us about sex. Much mainstream pornography teaches teenagers that women love being doused in semen without being asked first; that the female orgasm happens in five minutes through penetration alone (not the case for 70% of us); that a man’s role in sex is to be a disembodied penis slamming relentlessly into a shaven vagina. The proposal, however, is non-discriminatory; videos of foreplay, (actual) female orgasms and real, sweaty, smelly sex between two consenting adults is made as taboo as the grotesquery of Barbie-style plastic porn.

Sadly, prominent critiques of the proposal in the Guardian this week by Brooke Magnati and Anna Arrowsmith have veered down an equally worrying road – for entirely different reasons.

In pieces for Comment is Free, both women draw attention to what they call ‘content theft’ – in other words, the online distribution of mainstream pornography through peer-to-peer file sharing, and YouTube-style user-generated porn sites. They argue that this is the real problem, as it allows teenagers to access porn online as well as reducing the profit margins of directors and producers. Arrowsmith asserts that “they need to take down the (handful of) porn torrent sites, which give teenagers free, easy access to hardcore scenes – scenes whose copyright has been stolen from the producers”. The women are essentially calling on the services of Mr Cameron to prop up huge pornography firms. It’s a clear-cut case of capitalist moralists versus capitalist pornographers; and it stinks. The issue here is not that teenagers are accessing porn, nor that content is being stolen from pornographers turning over a huge profit margin. The fabricated binary of sex being hush-hush or garish, boring and secret or loud and crass, means the biggest danger is that children will grow up with an entirely distorted vision of sex. A confusing garble of facials and profit margins; taboo and desire; shame and repression.

Imagine that instead of this mad crusade against depictions of sex, we had properly funded and comprehensive sex education in all schools; that diagrams of the female reproductive organs labelled the clitoris; that Personal Social and Health Education lessons in schools discussed active consent instead of encouraging students to wait until marriage, as my Catholic school did. And imagine that instead of sleazy shaven hugely profitable pornos, we had something which vaguely resembled real life.

Instead of engaging in a moralistic frenzy, or fretting about profit, we should give our teenagers the tools to successfully navigate a sexual minefield of commodification and shame.

The Kensington Hamster Massacre; or, a trip to the Science Museum

Tim Jones was exhausted after dragging himself up seven flights of stairs to his family flat. The fox-powered lift was out of order - the skinny buggers you get scrambling round inner-city estates just weren't up to the job like the fat fuckers you got in the countryside. Instantly cheered by the mushroom risotto his wife Lucy was prodding on the stove (luckily blood supplies were pretty high round here, especially given the recent spate of gang fights, so the cooker was less temperamental than the lift), he flopped down in front of the TV. Justin Beiber, he opined to just about anyone willing to listen, was the best Doctor yet, and at 73 he'd really broken out of the roles usually available to older men.

"Oh, for cocks sake,", he growled under his breath as the telly cut out yet again - bang in the middle of a climactic fight scene between Beiber and the Daleks - "I'm not the fucking hamster fairy- why doesn't anyone else in this house clean out that bloody dispenser?". Grumbling and muttering, he heaved himself off the armchair and fumbled around in the dank cabinet underneath the bookshelf until he struck gold, pulling out a small box full of the scurrying little bastards.
Taking the opportunity to stock up for a few days and avoid the hassle tomorrow evening, he upturned the whole box into the pulveriser. After those few seconds of frantic squeaking which he'd just about learned the trick of unhearing, Tim was once again absorbed in the Doctor's fearlessness in the face of danger.



Today's dystopic vision has been proudly sponsored by Shell, Siemens and Merril Lynch for the London Science Museum!


......no, really. [Well, minus Justin Beiber. Dramatic licience.]

I gathered, from the corporate-logo-plastered posters advertising the Climate Science exhibition, that it might not be the full, in-depth exploration of the technology and challenges surrounding climate change as I might like. But I had a free day and a man in tow, so off we trooped to peruse its seedy pleasures. (FYI, dates at the Science Museum are cool. You can count that as official party diktat).

A quick glance proved this was an exhibition primarily aimed at kiddies - *adorable*, and such fun given the Bank Holiday rush of concerned parents ensuring that Amelia gets some responsible education with her fun.

Incidentally, a giant circular electronic display showing the public's answers to hard-hitting questions like "What do you think about having a wind farm next door to you?" flashed up a truly vomit-inducing 140-character snippet from a six-year old; in response to the question "how can we tackle unequal consumption of energy?", he apparently replied "With a global carbon trading system, with carbon credits for underdeveloped countries". Right. I'm sure Mummy thinks she's doing a fantastic job imparting rationed, liberal thought to her poppet, and I'm sure he'll grow up a responsible citizen who always offsets the long drive in his 4x4 back from central London to the Home Counties after spending the evening ostensibly in a meeting but really shagging the low-paid female employee he keeps around for eye candy whilst professing a commitment to 21st century feminism, but it would have been nice to have a day out at the museum without being forced to swallow my own sick.

But, back to the fictional hamster genocide alluded to above. I had naively assumed that this would perhaps be a slightly-too-objective, catious, but ultimately factual presentation of the realities of climate science by, well, scientists. I hate to invoke repition to make my point but I was, in fact, inside the Science Museum. What confronted me was a garish jumble of interactive games, touch-screen fact finders and faux-art masquerading as an object with something important to impart.

The most disturbing aspect of the exhibition by far, however, was a trip into the future to investigate the possibilities for energy generation once our very finite pool of fossil fuels finally bites the dust. The exhibition in question introduces us to the Jones family and the innovative ways in which they navigate power in a post-oil world, and it looks like a vision of the 2000s by a wonderstruck producer in the 1960s. You can almost hear the RP voiceover exclaiming "in the future, cars will fly and humans will take all their meals in one small pill; not for the busy 21st century family the stress of eating!".

Sidestepping such irrelevancies as the invention of water, wind and solar generated energy, I learnt that in the future televisions will be powered by hamsters, electricity will be produced by blood in teddy-bear shaped bags ('to make it less scary'- of course!) and children will be forced to become a walking advertisement for their parents hydrogen home brewery. Below are some choice reproductions..

Of course, we don't mind destroying both animal and human life when we mine tar sands; but feeding hamsters to your TV in a fictional universe? Woah, soldier, that's one step too far!

I think my personal favourite here is "all the scientists we asked were sure that Tom and Tim's animal-eating, blood-drinking machine would never happen"...."but that didn't stop us from including this rampant scare mongering in our climate science exhibition, because hey, it's not actually based on science!"

I found the poo section particularly disturbing given that we had just had an extremely enjoyable jaunt around the psychoanalysis exhibition, which implored us to think about our relationship to fecal matter and what it meant regarding our unconcious mind..

And hey, why not instill some good old capitalist ethos in the kids whilst they're here? They sure as hell won't have learnt anything else on their trip to this godforsaken corporate island.

And this one is just to prove that they really did posit that the future entails evil televisions snaffling up baby hamsters...

I hope you're all suitably disturbed by this exclusive insight into the demonic minds of Shell's corporate executives, and implore you to avoid this pile of shit (quite literally) if you're in South Kensington. Instead, you should gaze upon this fantastically phallic sculpture in the Psychoanalysis section, which manages to create the shadow of a double-faced head from a craftily-lit sculpture made from casts of the artist's hand and (really quite large) penis. Brilliant. 

Lady Gaga: That's Not What a Feminist Looks Like

Originally published at Counterfire in March 2010

As someone who picked up on ‘geek chic’ about two years too late, who has only recently discovered the joy of cardigans and fell belatedly into the trend of spiky, shaved haircuts, it’s no surprise that it’s taken me so long to watch the new Lady Gaga and Beyonce video; the much-discussed, supposedly seminal, blockbuster of the year.

Ms. Gaga has been touted as the new Madonna; the provocative, exciting and edgy face of pop. I was promised by many a daring, queered-up feminist riot of a music video, accompanying the new single ‘Telephone’. Imagine my disappointment when, filled with wild expectations of the return of feminism to popular culture, I found nine long minutes of leather bikinis, a barrage of booty-popping and breasts, copious grinding and gyrating and more than one lingering shot of disembodied groins and fishnet-clad legs.

A strange amalgamation of scenes follow Lady Gaga being locked up and then rescued by Beyonce, whereupon they embark on a mass homicide involving maple syrup and rat poison, before eloping into the sunset with the police hot on their tail. Too much is wrong with this video to fit into 800 words, so let’s look at the most controversial clips; Gaga and the penis scandal, the lesbian kiss, and that sandwich.

After Gaga is thrown in jail, we see her vagina exposed as she’s undressed, and again as she rubs herself against her cell bars, prompting a guard to remark “See, I told you she didn’t have a dick”. There’s been a huge furore in the world of showbiz blogging over her purportedly ambigious genitalia, prompting remarks that she is trans, intersex, or a drag queen. Until now, she’s taken this whirlwind of gossip with the characteristic playfulness we’ve come to expect of her; telling reporters that she has a ‘huge donkey dick’, and posing for GQ with a strap-on down her trousers.

This is great: it’s funny, silly and a big “fuck you” to the hounding mobs of gossip weeklies that attempt to devalue her by suggesting she’s not a ‘real woman’. Rubbing your vagina through cell bars for a captive audience, however, is none of those things. It’s a capitulation to that very same pack of papparazi, who can now triumphantly hold up Gaga’s labia minora as their proof that she fits a binary mould of woman/man, and is willing to ‘get it out’ for the cameras along the way. Not exactly a triumph for challenging gender constructions.

When Gaga, bound in chains, is escorted out into the exercise yard, she proclaims her audacity and deviancy by engaging in that great taboo, the lesbian kiss. This has been the subject of much gleeful proclamation, the idea being that Gaga is taking lesbianism into the mainstream and ushering in an age where the gender of two people having a cheeky snog doesn’t matter.

Of course better representation of LGBT people in the media can only be a good thing, but in this context it’s about as liberating as T.a.T.u. dressed up as schoolgirls kissing in the rain: gratuitous shock-value porn that exists to boost video hits and not much more. Not quite a campaigning tool for the local LGBT group.

So far, it’s all been a little bit doom and gloom, so let’s look at the one aspect of the video that merits a bit of praise; Gaga eating a sandwich. Twice. Now, this might not seem like a rallying cry for celebration, but I seriously can’t remember the last time I saw a woman on the screen actually eating a meal that didn’t consist of a lettuce leaf and a couple of ‘naughty’ olives. Of course, in both of these scenes Gaga and Beyonce are either engaging in a little light domination fantasy (Beyonce), or dancing around in see-through vinyl with bondage tape crossed over their nipples (Gaga), implying that it’s only okay to eat if you’re making an effort to look hot at the same time.

Regardless, this is actually an interesting and perhaps even slightly progressive move in an industry that tells you that it’s not okay to eat, ever, full stop; lest you become a morbidly obese armchair-bound slob. Sadly though, this is not enough to save a video steeped in boring misogynistic femininity tropes.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t expect all pop videos to be genderqueering, femineering, domineering masterpieces. I’ve come to expect that much of the pop industry is happy to churn out the same tired sexist stereotypes day in, day out, and if I complained about every one of them I’d be wasting my time. But when the most liberating thing in a video touted as a feminist masterpiece is someone eating a sandwich (and not even the whole sandwich at that) then we need to seriously re-examine our notions of liberation and emancipation.

Panorama: The Cuts - How to Fight Back

Originally published at Counterfire in May 2010

BBC Panorama has, in recent years, bought us treats such as ‘Immigration: How we Lost Count’ and ‘Muslim First, British Second’ – so you would be forgiven for assuming that anything it beams onto your TV screen is likely to be a reactionary pile of frothing Islamophobic drivel.

Ninety-nine percent of the time, you’d probably be right. This week, however, seems to be the exception that proves the rule.

The Cuts – How to Fight Back , whilst not quite providing the ten-point plan it seems to promise, is an inspiring tour of successful campaigns fought by local residents against savage cuts to local services – if you can ignore the Dad’s Army theme tune that the patronising producer has inexplicably inserted every time an old person appears on screen, that is.

We begin, as ever, in London –  Barnet to be precise, where the Tory council has decided that a live-in warden is not a necessary part of sheltered housing for OAPs. Apart from begging the question of what then differentiates sheltered housing from the local estates, this move is fairly repulsive – as a resident points out, this means that there is nobody to visit them, or to assist them if they become suddenly ill, meaning that they are increasingly likely to be put into a residential home.

For a party that proclaims the values of self-sufficiency and savings, paying for healthy OAPs to be put into a nursing home they don’t need seems fairly counter-intuitive. Thankfully the residents organise, petition, march and demand the re-instatement of the warden, finally mounting a legal challenge and winning.

A whistlestop tour ensues, where we see various councils dangling the butcher’s knife over music lessons, community centres and road repairs. The award for most vomit-inducing council without a doubt goes to Northamptonshire, where officials mount a roadshow survey of residents asking them which public service they would like to see cut (it goes without saying that ‘none’ is an answer not represented here).

As an insightful resident argues, “it’s a con, it’s all cut and dried before they come to ask us. It’s like a murderer asking his victim, would you sooner I strangled you or smothered you?”.

Paul Blantern of Northamptonshire Council, effectively tells residents that they need to choose between safe roads without potholes, care for the elderly and money for local schools – whilst earning a salary of up to £130,000. Anybody who isn’t hopping up and down and screaming at the telly by the end of this sickening tirade should seriously re-examine their political principles.

Whilst scenes like this might test your capacity for self-restraint, there is hope; the packed meeting halls, angry demonstrations, committed residents and petitions you could fill Downing Street with show us that the next round of savage cuts promised by the coalition government (or the ConDemNation, as angry tweeters have taken to calling it) will not be accepted in silence – they will be resisted and resoundingly rejected.

When they ask us to bear the brunt of the financial crisis by giving up our local libraries, swimming pools, community centres and parks our answer should be loud and clear – can't pay, won't pay!