Online feminist community

I just wanted to give a quick plug to the new online feminist community, Rebellissima.

It's new and doesn't have many members yet, but there are opportunities for discussion via forums and personal pages. There are already at least a few vegan/AR women involved, and it would be great to see more... so come join us!

It's easy to register, just enter a bit of info and answer some optional questions and you're welcome to take part in discussions!

Hope to see you over there (and friend me when you join!)

Good news.

I know I mentioned a few posts ago that I had good news to share with you all.

Andy and I are engaged.

As a feminist, marriage is a concept I’ve struggled with. On the one hand, something about weddings has always appealed to me. They are pretty, it’s nice to celebrate love, they bring together family and friends who don’t often see each other. On the other hand, marriage is an institution with a pretty tarnished history. It isn’t exactly a pillar of equality. Weddings themselves are imbued with patriarchal and religious symbolism, and the language of traditional weddings is really abhorrent (honour and obey? Fuck off). And contemporary weddings have become a huge profit-making industry—I read last week that the average Aussie wedding costs $40,000.

However, not all weddings and marriages have to fall into that model. There are a lot that don't. I think that if both individuals are aware of the problems, they can be overcome. And for that reason, I felt comfortable saying yes when Andy asked me to marry him (in a very non-traditional manner). He gets it. I’m not saying our relationship is perfect—if it were, we would probably both be pretty bored. But, over the past four years we have both been challenged, and we’ve worked together to achieve what I think is a pretty egalitarian relationship (of course, we’ll have to keep working together as the years progress!).

I’m over the moon about this new turn our relationship has taken. We’ve made no plans yet (and probably won’t for a while, given our schedules until December—he’s away for 6 weeks, then I’m away for a week, then his parents are here, then he’s away for a month, then I’m away for two weeks), but I’m looking forward to doing things our own way.

Prisoners and sexual violence.

I've been crazy busy the last few days, and I haven't had time to think about uploading photos or coming up with creative new blog posts. So today I'm posting a few things I've grabbed out of Women's Centre newsletters.

This post is inspired by some of my busy-ness. On Monday afternoon, I went to the Townsville Correctional Centre with the Women's Centre, to celebrate International Women's Day with a group of women who are often forgotten about. Currently living their lives behind razor wire, these women are often treated as less-than-human by the prison guards who work in the Women's Secure section. But, the majority of women are in prison for minor offenses, many of which are related to poverty--break and enters, centrelink (welfare) fraud, stealing. But they are still women, and they deserve to be a part of International Women's Day.

So a group of women went up to the prison to spread the IWD cheer. We brought with us a proper deadly Aboriginal poet (proper deadly means really good in local Murri slang). We were met at the prison by an Aboriginal women's dance group and Soroptomist International (a moderate group of older women)--the Soroptomists had funded a visitor from the Pacific, a UN delegate. There were the obligatory speeches, and then there was dancing. A vast majority of the prison population is indigenous, and many of the women got up to join in with the dancers. (I joined in for the freestyle dance at the end, dancing like a turtle.) We heard heart-wrenching stories of homeless women who were victims of sexual assault, domestic violence, and poverty, and they don't know what to expect when they leave the prison--will the law protect them at all?

It was an incredibly moving experience, and words just really can't express how amazing and difficult it was. So I'll stop trying, and leave you with these statistics from the newsletters.

How much do we know about violence against women?

The best indicators available are from the ABS Personal Safety Survey 2005 which updates information about women’s experiences of violence collected in the 1996 ABS Women’s Safety Survey.

From the 2005 survey the ABS estimated that in the previous 12 months:
363 000 women (4.7 % of all women) experienced physical violence; and 126 100 women (1.6 %) experienced sexual violence.

The ABS further estimated that:
2.56 million (33 %of all women) have experienced physical violence since the age of 15; and 1.47 million (19 %) have experienced sexual violence since the age of 15.

From this it is possible to estimate that approximately one in five women (19 %) have experienced sexual violence at some stage in their lives since the age of 15 and one in three women (33 %) have experienced physical violence at some stage in their lives since the age of 15.

http://www.aph.gov.au/library/intguide/SP/ViolenceAgainstWomen.htm

Statistics on Reporting Rape in Australia

“Though not exact, the consensus seems to be that only one in five rapes gets reported.
So, if 20 out of every 100 rapes are reported to police and 15 per cent of those reports lead to charges being laid, according to latest research, then only about three of the accused in every 100 assaults face trial. This suggests, based on the 25 per cent conviction rate at trial, that fewer than one of the original 100 assaults actually ends up in a conviction.”

Somewhere to help heal and fight back
Simon Mann
The Age
July14 2007

I think this is an important question to ask

If:

• 89% of women in prison have been sexually assaulted

• 70% of men in prison have been sexually assaulted

• one in 4 girls are sexually abused by 18

• one in 8 boys are sexually abused by 18

• On average in a classroom of 30 grade 12 students 5 of these have been affected by sexual assault

• one in 3 women are sexually assaulted

• only 10% of sexual assault is reported to the police

• only 10% of this reported crime results in a conviction and not always a prison sentence

Are there more victims of sexual abuse incarcerated into our ‘Correctional Centres’ than perpetrators of sexual assault?

Heather Bond

A pleasant surprise and some lols.

International Women’s Day is on Saturday, and this year will be the 80^th that the day is celebrated in Australia. To commemorate, I had a few feminist rants written for you all—about assholes who yell out ‘show us your tits’ as they drive past on the street, about super-expensive IWD events around Townsville, and sexual assault and prisons. But, I accidentally deleted them, and they can’t be recovered in any way. So, shoot. Maybe I’ll recreate them soon. For now, here are a few little things.

--The JCU Student Association hosted an alternative media workshop, a free bbq, and a movie night yesterday for all women. As far as I know, it was the only free, open-to-the-public IWD event in Townsville this year. Even though I am wary of bbqs, I wanted to go even if I just ate a bit of lettuce on bread. Well, imagine my surprise when I turn up to find an all-woman band playing kick-ass music while homemade chickpea-veggie burgers were being grilled on a meat-free grill! (There were beef burgers, but they were cooked after the veggie burgers were taken off.) Sure, the crowd was very small, but it meant that I got to have good, in-depth conversations with other feminists. And, even though I knew I would be eating dinner when I got home, I ate a veggie burger and it was so good. When the meat burgers were all cooked, no one was eating them. The 'chef', a veg*n, asked if anyone ate meat--amidst a chorus of "no", only one person said yes. Wahoo! Vegan feminists! Unfortunately, I had to cut the afternoon short because I was riding home on my bike, and I didn’t want to get stuck in the dark.

--When I did get home, Andy was just starting to cook me a delicious dinner. This is the second time he’s cooked in two days, thanks to late afternoon meetings—Tuesday I got home at 9:30 and was welcomed with fried rice and orange tofu. Last night he had the Ultimate Uncheese book open to the “Spinafel” recipe, which are spinach and ricotta balls. The recipe was changed in a fairly big way—instead of firm tofu we used a tin of chickpeas. And instead of vegan mayo, we used a block of silken tofu and a splash of vinegar. They were good, but a little dry and a little bland. After some tweaking, I’ll post the recipe. While he was mashing, I peeled and chopped some beetroot which we tossed with olive oil, salt and pepper.

--Nacho loves chickpeas. Andy was getting annoyed with her trying to get into the mixing bowl while he was cooking, and I overheard a conversation that made me laugh out loud:

“Nacho, when I sleep on the couch all day and you walk to the shop to buy the food, you can have all the chickpeas you want. Until then, get off the counter.”

--Nacho also loves Andy’s armpits, for some weird reason. The other day he was sitting with his arm resting on the windowsill, and she was going nuts, licking and biting his armpit hair. We bought her a toy a few weeks ago and she just doesn’t like it. We thought maybe it was the smell, so I came home to find the toy wrapped in Andy’s shirt, which was really sweaty from a bike ride. I laughed out loud when I saw that (maybe it was endorphins since I had just ridden home). She still doesn’t like the toy.