Author Archive

From Terry Pratchett’s novel The Wee Free Men:

A few children were waiting on the benches inside the booth for the lesson to begin, but the teacher was still standing out in front, in the hope of filling up the empty spaces.

“Hello little girl,” he said, which was only his first big mistake. I’m sure you want to know all about hedgehogs, eh?

“I did this one last summer,” said Tiffany.

The man looked closer, and his grin faded. “Oh, yes,” he said. “I remember. You asked all those … little questions.”

“I would like a question answered today,” said Tiffany.

“Provided it’s not the one about how you get baby hedgehogs,” said the man.

“No,” said Tiffany patiently. “It’s about zoology.”

“Zoology, eh? That’s a big word, isn’t it.”

“No, actually, it isn’t,” said Tiffany. “Patronizing is a big word. Zoology is really quite short.”

Journalist/professor Nina Power has a great piece on the Guardian’s site today about the role of women in the protest movements that have been rocking Britain in the last few months, and the ways in which critics of the protests have reacted to their prominence.

Some excerpts:

For the usual suspects the participation of so many young women – in the education protests in particular – has given rise to a certain moral panic. See, for example, the hilarious Daily Mail cover:“Rage of the Girl Rioters”.

The attempted pillorying of these young women – accused of “lacking respect” – by the Mail is the latest in a long line of attacks on women who campaign directly against the state: the suffragettes; women involved in the 1926 general strike; the miners’ protests in the mid-80s; those who fought for reproductive rights and against domestic violence. Just as with the attack on “ladettes” in the 1990s, what looks to be a moral criticism frequently masks a deeper political and economic fear – what shall we do when young women are academically successful, economically independent, socially confident and not afraid to enjoy themselves?

…

The past few years have similarly seen an eruption of interest in feminism across the country, with meetings and book launches spilling over with women and men of all ages. Whatever the 1990s tried to tell us was over – from inequality to political commitment – has most definitely not gone away; and the idea that one would simply have a passive, ironic or otherwise disinterested stance towards the brutal and brutalising policies of a government hell-bent on removing any vestige of a social bond now looks historically outmoded.

While there were many women tirelessly campaigning throughout the 1990s and 2000s on a variety of issues – both those that directly concerned women and as part of broader political campaigns – it was with the anti-war marches from 2003 onwards that the kind of street politics we see today came back on the agenda in a more visible way. Many of the schoolkids who played truant to attend anti-war protests have grown into articulate and politically passionate adults, rightly incensed that education is being transformed into something insanely expensive, increasingly exclusive and socially divisive.

…

When young women feel they are no longer held back by their gender, that they can take on any job, that they are more likely to do well in education than their male peers, that they don’t have to think of themselves as wives and mothers first, one outcome is an increase in political confidence. If you tell women they can be and can do anything they want, and then let them down – by taking away their education maintenance allowance, by making university prohibitively expensive, by forcing them to stay in poverty – they, along with their male peers, will make you pay for your lies and hypocrisies.

Go read the whole thing — it’s really sharp.

Last week’s March 2 National Day of Action saw scores of protests in more than a dozen states — including two that ended in arrests and one that ended with a bunch of people taking their clothes off.

The big story out of last week, however, was three extraordinary campus occupations — one in the Northeast, one in the Midwest, and one on the West Coast.

In Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, feminist students — fed up with their administration’s foot-dragging on campus sexual assault policy — occupied their administration building for four days. They left on Saturday having won major changes to campus regulations.

At the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, an occupation of a theater space on campus is still ongoing, six days after it began. The students behind this action, in solidarity with the ongoing protests at the Wisconsin State Capitol, have announced a schedule of events for the coming week ranging from yoga to historical workshops to a movie night.

And at UC Berkeley, the site of an ever-growing list of mass arrests at peaceful student protests, students finally found a tactic that — at least this time — the administration had no way of shutting down. When nine students climbed up on a high ledge on a campus building and chained themselves together, administrators quickly met their demands.

March is shaping up to be an interesting month this year.

A week ago Yevgeniya Lomakina of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst Daily Collegian wrote a column criticizing sex outside of marriage and other artifacts of such “feminist movements as ‘female liberation’ – women having the freedom to have sex with anyone, anywhere.”

“If a young woman wears a promiscuous outfit to a party,” Lomakina continued, “then proceeds to drink and flirt excessively, she should not blame men for her downfall. She made a decision to dress a certain way, to consume alcohol and should be prepared to deal with the consequences. Far from being a victim of rape, she is a victim of her own choices.”

The column drew exactly the response you’d imagine, leading the Daily Collegian to post an apology the next day. Both Lomakina and night editor Hannah McGoldrick, who greenlit the piece, were fired from the paper.

But Lomakina, for her part, insists she was misunderstood. She wasn’t talking about actual rape in the passage in question, she insists, but circumstances in which “women put themselves in a vulnerable position by dressing provocatively and consuming alcohol,” then “consent to sexual activity,” but later “regret it and accuse their partner of rape.”

Glad she cleared that up.

Two days ago, a group of more than two hundred students at Pennsylvania’s Dickinson College marched on the school’s administration building to protest campus policies on sexual assault.

They’re still there.

The Dickinson activists — a significant fraction of the total student population of the 2400-person campus — are demanding specific changes to the college’s policies, and they’ve already won several concessions. (The college has agreed to expel students found to have committed rape, and to use the campus alert system to notify students of sexual assaults.)

The Dickinson demonstrators are tweeting about their occupation using the #oldwest hashtag, and I’ll be updating this post as developments warrant.

Monday Update | The Dickinson students won. On Friday, the administration announced major changes to sexual assault policy on campus, and student tweeters declared that the vast majority of the demonstrators were satisfied with the outcome. Some students remain concerned about implementation, and the group decided to continue the occupation for one last night as a show of resolve and commitment. They left as a group on Saturday morning.