Lolita's Fist

To all the people who know that Blade Runner is my favourite movie of all time. I was 19 when I saw this movie, and I was mindbound (like footbinding, see Mary Daly). The patriarchal narrative enveloped/s me. Even after 30 years of my own feminism. The patriarchy is insidious and systemic, and I have to work daily to find the nooks and crannies it lurks in. I was so in love with Harrison Ford. He was an embodiment of the men in the Mills & Boon I was reading. Craggy, bad-tempered, masculine. Ooh. And scifi was new to me. New on film to everyone. It was shiny, it was intellectual, it was engaging, it was Mills & Boon antidote. From when I was five (or that’s when I remember), I have been protesting the advances of men. I still did not see Sean Young protest. When I started to feel horny when I was young, I saw that women were NEVER allowed to want sex, NEVER ask for fingers in your vagina, NEVER ask for hands to touch your breasts, NEVER ask for a kiss, NEVER...

Today my timeline is full of decent men asking, "How can I help?", in the wake of the viral #MeToo movement created by www.twitter.com/TaranaBurke . I'm going to take this question as sincere, and give a few suggestions. Here are some concrete ways men* can help: (*I wrote this specifically for a small group of my own male friends who were explicitly asking for advice after being stunned by the ubiquity of the #metoo abuse hashtag. I wasn't anticipating this being shared so many times. These tips can be used by people of all genders.) 1. Practice these phrases: "That's not cool" and "That's a shitty thing to say". Say them to other men who are saying disrespectful things to or about women. 2. Follow some feminist writers on social media. Sometimes what they write may seem "exhausting" or "too angry". Put aside that discomfort because that feeling is your male privilege allowing you to disengage from an importan...

  I was astonished at this video  because it didn't depict the patriarchal narrative of woman-as-victim, slinking off AS IF to hide her shame (this is how men hear our silence, and other women, and the next victim who then feels she must be silent and not tell HER mother, "what if I get blamed for soliciting that sexual attention" [when I was under 12] [in my personal view I believe the age of consent is stretching it at 16]). (Yes we want sex when we are under 16, but that doesn't give anyone the right to take advantage of our inability to make adult decisions about what to do with our bodies.) What has this got to do with the public groping of an adult woman? That attitude right there is where the thinking is wrong. No girl, no woman, is there for you to act upon at any time without her express, enthusiastic, informed, uncoerced consent. No debate.  AND THEN look at the very last moment of this video. #Aargh His friends embrace him back into the fold, here...

Teenage movies back in the day were about how we felt different to our peers, we were each unusual and didn't fit. The movies were about how we tried.   The films were highly inappropriate, but we were so normalized to inappropriate that we didn't notice. Rapey, racist, sexist, were normal.   Grease (1978) was chock-a-block full of sex talk - I didn't notice - children ignore what they don't understand and fit what they do into a world that normalized what they did understand.  Girls tossed aside if they didn't put out and accepted if they look like sluts was normal. Normal. But to grown men our ignorance of what we were looking at looks like consent, acquiescence, flirting. "Young girls come on to me." Olivia's pants were fashion. Slut pants were fashion. Even now I am deeply uncomfortable with using the term 'slut'. And does my discomfort systemically play right into the patriarchal agendas depic...

If we keep punishing the sexual assaulters - now not for their power-mongering pussy-grabbing dick-exhibiting rape-adjacent behaviour --- but for their apologies --- (and yes, apologies are not hollow if they are backed by a change of behaviour, a true understanding, a demonstration of amends) - then I think that's problematic. I was raised to unconditionally accept a concrete apology. That it's ungracious to not accept an apology. And as a feminist I think it is strategically problematic to keep beating a person with their hands up. I would feel like the cops leaning over Rodney King. Of course, the minute Louis CK whips his dick out again, he's dead to me. I am not the girl to hang around for the second apology. Not #MeToo