How polyamory got me thinking about female solidarity

Whenever the media is lacking in convenient reasons to take a pop at feminism, you can be sure it will manufacture one sharpish. Whether it's Lily Allen's most recent bit of stirring about how apparently feminism is worthless because it has just descended into one big bitch fight or the gleefully seized-upon controversy over Paris Lees' assertion that she doesn't mind cat-calls, the image of modern (and especially online) feminism seems to be one of a world turned in on itself, where we spend not enough time fighting the real enemies (sexual and physical violence against women, attacks on our reproductive rights, media sexism, economic discrimination and so on) and too much time telling each other we're "doing feminism wrong."

 

Only this morning I saw a comment on an article about Femen, demanding that we stop using the word 'feminists' to describe the problematic Ukrainian group, because they a) have Islamophobic views and b) use their bare breasts to get their point across. Well, shit. Betty Friedan and NOW used to condemn lesbians as "the lavender menace" and exclude them from the women's rights movement, yet interestingly we don't deny these wealthy, middle-class American women the right to call themselves feminists just because they held shitty views in the past. But any attempt at feminism from a former Eastern Bloc country must apparently be slapped down if it's not as media-literate as, or politically aligned with, privileged US and UK feminists. I'm not interested in adding fuel to that fire. You want to call yourself a feminist, you go right ahead - none of us have the monopoly on that phrase. None of us are perfect, or free from prejudice, however much we like to think we're the enlightened ones. For the record, I can't stand Femen's tactics - but I appreciate that they are grown women doing what they think is right. Just as much as I am.

 

This links in to what I was thinking about earlier today, which was how it's difficult to be in any large group of women without the automatic assumption that it will be riddled with in-fighting. This is a view particularly perpetuated by sexists, who like to believe that women are simply too competitive with and disloyal to each other to ever truly unite. They love that old joke "If women ran the world, there would be no wars...just a load of jealous countries not talking to each other." Cos ha ha HAA, women may not be quite so prone to warmongering, murder, mutilation, rape and OK-ing drone attacks, but they're still just so BITCHY there's no chance they could ever actually create a true sisterhood, and that's clearly worse, right?! If Country A thinks that Country B looks better in that dress than she does, well, better man the cruise missiles, cos there's going to be an international catfight (ah yes, "catfight", that lovely term that trivialises and reduces female anger to a humorous and hopefully erotic sideshow for men to enjoy).

 

I spend a lot of time amongst a large number of women (and a slightly smaller, but ever-growing, number of men) in my roller derby team. Unsurprisingly, I do witness disagreements, personality clashes and unpleasantness between women in this community. I see it like you'd see it in any workplace, academic institution, or group of friends. I see it from some women, and not from others. I also see it occur between the men but funnily enough, when men criticise each other behind each other's backs (and hoboy, do they ever), they're never called 'bitchy' for it, nor is this used as the basis to accuse the entire male sex of being incapable of ever showing loyalty to each other.

 

This made me think about how women are both set up to compete with each other, then promptly criticised and demonised for doing so by both feminists and sexists alike. Which in turn led me back (and yes I know I'm hopping across a lot of concepts today, but stick with me, I'm having a lot of thoughts) to my previous post on how polyamory seems to promote a more feminist view of relationships. When you're open to the idea of your lover finding other people (and if you're a largely heterosexual woman like myself, that means other women) attractive, you have to abandon the monogamous line of thinking that attention for other women must indicate a lack thereof for you, or that male approval of other women means the loss of such approval for you. And yes yes obviously in an ideal world no one would be seeking anyone's approval, but let's put that aside for now and acknowledge that in the real world we all do seek validation of our attractiveness, regardless of our gender or sexual orientation. Because it's nice to feel wanted and sexy, and it's especially nice to feel like someone wants to have sex with you, particularly when you would really like to have sex with them.

 

But it's not easy. These things don't come instinctively. For whatever reason, when my lover says "X Girl is hot", I don't immediately feel overwhelmed with happiness that X Girl's beauty is being appreciated by someone, or pleased for my lover that he is able to honestly express his sexuality in front of me. Instead, what I feel is insecure. I assume that a comparison is being made, and I'm coming out of it unfavourably. I feel worried, that my lover is going to find someone else whose physique is preferrable or superior to mine, and not like my body any more, or not like it as much as he did previously. I'm doing all the things that monogamy has taught me - seeing love, sexuality and affection as a zero-sum game, whereby one person's gain must mean another one's loss, demanding a version of my lover that doesn't exist, demanding behaviour that I myself cannot promise in return, and basically viewing the world of love and sex as one of scarcity. But I'm also doing all the things sexism has taught me - viewing another woman as a competitor, rather than a player on the same team, assigning an importance to both hers and my physical appearance that ranks it above everything else about us, and viewing male approval of that appearance as the most important/only opinion that counts. I'm also forgetting that one of the main reasons I'm polyamorous is because I'm a pretty intense appreciator of the opposite sex myself, and I reserve the right to express that without feeling guilty or like a monster for it (as I did for many years in mono relationships).

 

So along with all the learning and growing that polyamory requires you to do in shaking off your monogamous conditioning, I think it also demands some feminist growth. It takes a lot of strength to always show solidarity to other women. Especially when, as I've found on my polyamorous journey, some of them are apt to judge, hate on or spread rumours about you for daring to be a woman who will not settle down with one man. I've had moments when I'm very tempted to wreak the kind of havoc on others' personal lives that they have tried to do to me, and even though I know that walking away from such temptation and being 'the bigger person' is the right thing to do, it still feels bittersweet when it would be so easy to hurt those hypocrites the way they are trying to hurt me. Being ethical does not always feel like its own reward, but I have to believe in the long game, and believe that trying to take down other women simply because they cannot get their heads around the way I live, ain't feminism. Neither is hating on, or being jealous or suspicious of another woman who has done nothing wrong to me except attract the attention/appreciation of my male lover. A sexist society teaches me to see that woman as a competitor, as a superior, up-herself bitch who I need to 'bring down'. Demanding a better society means that I need to drag myself up, and see that woman as just another flawed person trying to get on in this horrendous cultural pressure-cooker. The most feminist thing I can do is be kind towards that woman, and also kind to myself, by remembering that a compliment aimed at someone other than myself is not an insult to me by proxy.

 

Because that's sexism's greatest secret. When we start liking ourselves, and start liking other women, then we really do pose a threat, one so great that all sexists can think to do to mask their fear of female unity is to make jokes about catfights.

Class, privilege and 'respectable' feminism

This fantastic response to Lily Allen's deeply questionable 'Hard Out Here' video (which I'm not going to link to, because I agree with every criticism of its racialised objectification of black women, it and so I don't particularly want to give it the click-bait) got me thinking about the intersection of class and feminism. As Deanna Rogers says so articulately, what allows Lily Allen to treat a group of (mostly black) dancers as props in her video is not just her colour, but also her wealth. With her "mortgage paid" and her "kids settled", Lily Allen is in a position that few women in the music industry can claim - she has earned the privilege to appear in her music videos fully dressed, even looking (gasp!) slightly curvier than in her earlier videos, and even attempt to send out a bit of a feminist message in her lyrics. At a time when music videos are so unanimously populated by oiled female butt-cheeks and bikini lines waxed up to one's hipbones that it's easy to forget that there was a time when women were actually allowed to wear clothes in the music industry, this in itself seems refreshing. But then we look at the giant car-crash of racist, sexist stereotypes that Allen's video relies on, and it doesn't feel so revolutionary any more. Yes, Lily Allen was allowed to claw back that tiny victory of appearing fully clothed and relatively unobjectified in her video - but only at the expense of other women.

As I wrote in my last post about Britney Spears' "Work Bitch" video, it's not the image of black women on leashes held by a powerful white woman that is problematic per se. After all, in the same way that Lily Allen defends her video by stating the consent of all the dancers involved, we can't assume that Britney's dancers were any less happy to be depicted as submissive and highly sexualised. But we also can't assume that the power dynamic between a rich white woman and her dancers is in any way equal. The majority of us are slaves to our wages, and we all do things we don't particularly like in order to earn money. That doesn't mean we hate our jobs - when I was a care worker, it's safe to say that changing incontinence pads and helping people use the toilet wasn't my favourite part of the job, but that's not to say I didn't find other aspects of my work incredibly rewarding and sometimes great fun. However, when you need to pay the rent you are inevitably in a weaker position than those who can choose to refuse work. Writing about motorsport was not something I ever intended to do, but I did it because it was paid writing work (while certain major newspapers were asking me to write for free at the time) and I found that I didn't totally hate it, and actually found some bits quite interesting. It did mean though, that when I witnessed sexist aspects of the motorsport industry - and as I'm sure you can imagine, there are quite a few - I didn't feel able to do or say much about them. I bit my lip, rolled my eyes, did my work and went home. You choose your battles much more carefully when you're aware of the need not to bite the hand that feeds you.

Now, Lily Allen's dancers, or Britney Spears' dancers, or any number of less privileged women who are paid to dance (usually wearing very little) behind a more wealthy, more privileged woman, may not feel this way at all. They may not object to or even notice the racialised way in which their sexuality is being commodified. Or if they are aware, they may simply just not care - after all, they get a nice paycheque at the end of the day, so they're content. But it's still pretty disingenuous for Allen to imply that, as long as we can check with her dancers that they were all happy to be involved with the video (and really, are any of them likely to admit live on Twitter "No, I fucking hated it, I thought it was shit"?), there is no wider problem. The very fact that Allen's lyrics proclaim she is somehow superior because she doesn't "shake her arse on TV" says far more than her denial that her take-down of sexism is both sexist and racist itself. It also brings to mind a facet of feminism that has begun to grate on me more and more recently - the privileged, middle-class feminism that polices and dictates acceptable behaviour based upon its own narrow viewpoint.

Full disclosure - I AM middle class, white and identify as largely heterosexual. So I accept that whatever I say here is likely to be tainted by those privileges. However, I'd like to think I am learning, however slowly, to question them and how they mean my voice may be awarded more credibility and airtime simply because of them. A friend recently said to me she didn't think she was a feminist because she hadn't "read lots of books all about it". It made me sad to think that she felt excluded from a movement intended to welcome all, simply because she hadn't necessarily done the academic legwork. It also made me think, much as I loathed the deliberate shit-stirring of Joss Whedon's 'I don't like 'ists'' speech, he may have inadvertently had a point about some versions of feminism coming across as primarily concerned with academic discussions, to the detriment of real actions. I don't want a feminism that asks to see your degree certificate before you're allowed through the gate.

Nor do I want one that labels women either respectable or disposable, which is pretty much what Lily Allen has done in her video by implying that rich white women get to wear clothes and have integrity, while less well-off black women get to have champagne poured on their naked buttocks and be 'hos'. It brings to my mind the prurient mainstream fascination with well-spoken, middle-class 'call girl' Belle de Jour, the articulate and educated sex worker whose blog, books and TV adaptation were hungrily consumed by the British public. Were Belle from a council estate and had left school at 16, the discourse surrounding her would be very different, I'd imagine. She would be assumed to be ignorant, desperate and doing sex work only out of lack of other options - and I doubt she would have a regular column in a major, right-of-centre UK newspaper either. When I talk to people about my friend, a single mother whose children have different fathers, I can see the stereotype forming in their heads. I feel I have to immediately jump to her defence and explain that she is intelligent, articulate, well-qualified, a fantastic mother, and not promiscuous, empty-headed or irresponsible as people will inevitably assume she must be. In other words, I feel I have to emphasise that she is not a 'chav', not a candidate for The Jeremy Kyle Show, that bear-baiting programme watched so often by middle-class people, supposedly in the spirit of irony, but really just so they can feel better by mocking the less well-off. But why should I have to make that distinction? What would it matter if my friend was one of 'those women' - isn't the point of feminism to fight for us all, not just those of us who can afford to do their weekly shop in Waitrose?

Nowhere did I see the lines of 'respectability' more vehemently drawn, both by women who identified as feminists and those who did not, than when I recently wrote about Swansea University Union's decision to ban the pole fitness society. You can read the article for my full list of reasons for disagreeing with the ban, but the feeling that pervaded my take on the subject was one that well-meaning, very likely middle-class feminists, were patronising women they saw as less enlightened than themselves. By dictating to the female and male students of Swansea University that they couldn't consensually participate in a fitness activity, the union was basically telling women that they knew what was best for them, and that anyone doing pole dancing for fitness, or even (god forbid!) for money must basically be a brainwashed victim. But it wasn't just SUU who were making those distinctions. When I discussed the issue with several women, one of whom is a pole fitness instructor, the others in the conversation us were at pains to emphasise to her  "But you just teach it. You're not actually a pole dancer," implying that the real strippers that this woman teaches (who are by no means her only students) were beyond the pale, but she was still graciously allowed entrance to the club of respectable women. That's not a feminism I want any part of.

I'm currently reading this excellent book documenting some of the most famous women of the 'Flapper' era, who challenged conventional sexual morality and traditionally held views on how women should behave. This has really made me think how class privilege has long allowed certain feminists access into worlds that exclude poor, working class or women of colour. What comes through to me again and again as I read about Tamara de Lempicka, Nancy Cunard and Tallulah Bankhead, is how their wealth and social status enabled these women to be as transgressive as they were. Had they been preoccupied with earning money and trying to keep their heads above water as the average working-class woman of their era had been, it's doubtful that they would have had the luxury to become the artists, writers and actors that they did. Had they been middle-class women expected to surrender themselves to marriage, children and domesticity, it's unlikely they would've gotten much chance to gallivant around Paris and attend orgies either. What seems to have allowed them this freedom was their upper class status - their wealth and class gave them the social power to drink, smoke, wear shorter skirts and have pre-marital sex without being questioned, and the image of the arty, bohemian, upper-class eccentric was a convenient cover for this behaviour, one not afforded to poorer women of lower status.

I don't see that much has changed when I look at how women like Lily Allen and the powers that be at Swansea Students' Union are proclaiming themselves feminists largely at the expensive of other, less privileged women. At least many of the famous flapper women never proclaimed to speak for all women, whereas the kind of feminism that Allen and SSU are practising is doing exactly that - unjustifiably and presumptuously. I suppose the best way us middle-class, white, heterosexual cisgendered feminists can help change this is not just to stop speaking for other women, but maybe stop speaking at all - and listen, for a change, to the stories of women whose faces are often absent from the public image of feminism. So on that note, I'll now STFU.