Iran, Feminism, Books, Sex Dolls

My changing focus

I’ve had such trouble writing lately. I wrote six versions of a piece about Iran before abandoning it for now. It’s not that I’m frightened of the Islamic Republic, or Muslims, or feminists. I think my focus is changing a little.

My expertise and interest lies in political/cultural commentary especially around sexual politics and the politics of sex but also more broadly in domestic and international politics. I almost always focus on the culture of politics, the unspoken rules, the things we act out but don’t say.

I started writing in The Spectator about the gender issue because there was so little writing about it from a gender critical feminist perspective in Australia. The more others have written about it, the less I have wanted to, because I want, above all, for people to see the inherent misogyny in the push to eradicate sex in law and public life. I’m not sure I’ll ever make a living in writing what isn’t being written about, rather than meeting an existing demand with supply, but I “yam who I yam” Popeye would say.

With my many criticisms of the right, that I will continue shortly, they have attempted to maintain free speech in some of their publications and this has made all the difference for feminists. That is why magazines like The Spectator who steer right, have become more open to this centrist place that is emerging as authoritarians take over the left and the right lives to react to them.

This is the space I am interested in, this space of active resistance to authoritarianism, to calling to account the right and the left to the call of the people, rather than the narratives of capital and government. Wouldn’t it be nice to see some representation of the people in government return?

What broke my heart in the Iranian situation from the perspective of a western feminist (with a special interest in the Middle East), is that the desperate women of Iran are so in need of political support they strategically can’t identify as “feminist”. The women of Iran are not unaware of the gender wars within western feminism.

According to the line of the current political resistance movement in Iran, the Iranian women stand with their brothers in a freedom movement. This is true and vital, because the emancipation of any nation is intricately linked to the emancipation of women. But it is also true that a broad fight for freedom is more likely to secure the support of western wets like Trudeau and whoever is operating Biden on a weekday.

From a non western perspective, if you need the support of the west and if you move to side with western feminism, you now have to pick a side of feminism, and if you pick the side that believes that women are a sex class, you lose the support of all the people with all the bombs. Well, the people with the bombs who are not even worse than your own regime. If that doesn’t tell you something about the way feminism has been moulded by states and economies, I don’t know what will.

I feel like I’m holding my breath for the women of Iran. I know they can’t be ignored, women can’t be murdered for headwear, nobody can look away from that. Teasing my bourgeois sisters who are embedded in power structures that compel them to deny their sex, just isn’t on my list of things I want to do over this issue. I know bougie feminists are hypocrites and hacks, but I feel desperate to see things to change for the women of Iran, if I had to kiss the feet of Clementine Ford myself to make the wind change in that direction I would.

The right media can be relied on to call out the hypocrisy of the left by asking about the location of western feminists on such an occasion as this, but the call itself is a posture that is unlikely to help the women of Iran. The right know that calling on bougie feminists on these issues is like tapping on a bear’s cage in a zoo.

Any western feminist with a media or government position has already sighed up to a progressive narrative managed feminism. The others have almost no voice except what we can tap out here in independent and right leaning publications.

Gender critical feminists are the dissidents of the west and frankly I wouldn’t want to be associated with me. The cost of my own freedom to write is not small, but I do it for my own children, for myself and in the tradition of the history of the feminists who have come before me. My feminism emerged from a British and Australian working class tradition and the feminism of the women of Iran has been forged in a different kind of furnace, but it is feminism we are seeing.

Feminism, for me, is the political solidarity of women to forward their interests to the state and more frequently against the state. It is the state we have fought for our rights, for the protection that we are due because of our vital reproductive role. Next to her male sexual partner, the state is the most dangerous person in a woman’s life. The violence of the state in the hands of a misogynistic ideology will always direct itself toward non-compliant women with full force.

The fact that the western state have now grown a form of feminism that theologically absolves their responsibility to see women in relation to her reproductive role, should scare the living shit out of every single woman in the west. But they are under a spell that myself and a committed group of women hope to break.

Yes, western feminism is toxic, and I’m all in. I’m in for my daughters, for myself, for the girls of the world, for the women and girls of the Middle East, from which my own daughters are descended. So if my focus shifts it won’t be away from feminism but hopefully to a broader place in the same stand.

It would be a fantasy world to think I would be writing about feminism for a good deal of time when I’ve just this minute heard that a Victorian inquiry into extremism is going to make gender critical feminism illegal, with the power of arrest and imprisonment. I won’t be writing about rainbows and unicorns any time soon I know that.

---

This week I did a little YouTube video in response to Owen Jones picking on my friend @danfromsydney. Not sure that YouTube stardom will come anytime soon but it was a bit of fun

Sheila Shed Book club Update

Here is the first Book club podcast on The Tyranny of Structurelessness. It was just Kit and I talking for the first one but we are sorting a broader discussion structure with the next which will be Caitlin Roper’s Sex Dolls Robots and Woman Hating; The Case for Resistance.

Our First Book Club Podcast

Thanks guys, your feedback is welcome.

Cheers

Edie.