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comrade-meow · 3 years

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The struggle against patriarchy — whether organic and spontaneous, or militant and organized — constitutes one of the oldest forms of resistance. As such, it carries some of the most diverse arrays of experience and knowledge within it, embodying the fight against oppression in its most ancient and universal forms.

From the earliest rebellions in history to the first organized women’s strikes, protests and movements, struggling women have always acted in the consciousness that their resistance is linked to wider issues of injustice and oppression in society. Whether in the fight against colonialism, religious dogma, militarism, industrialism, state authority or capitalist modernity, historically women’s movements have mobilized the experience of different aspects of oppression and the need for a fight on multiple fronts.

THE STATE AND THE ERASURE OF WOMEN

The division of society into strict hierarchies — particularly through the centralization of ideological, economic and political power — has meant a historic loss for the woman’s place within the community. As solidarity and subsistence-based ways of life were replaced with systems of discipline and control, women were pushed to the margins of society and made to live sub-human lives on the terms of ruling men. But unlike what patriarchal history-writing would have us believe, this subjugation never took place without fearless resistance and rebellion emerging from below.

Colonial violence, in particular, has focused on the establishment or further consolidation of patriarchal control over the communities it wanted to dominate. Establishing a “governable” society means to normalize violence and subjugation within the most intimate interpersonal relationships. In the colonial context, or more generally within oppressed communities and classes, the household constituted the only sphere of control for the subjected male, who seemed to be able to assert his dignity and authority only in his family — a miniature version of the state or colony.

Over the centuries, an understanding of familial love and affection developed that split from its roots in communal solidarity and mutuality, further institutionalizing the idea that violence and domination is simply part of human nature. As authors like Silvia Federici and Maria Mies have argued, capitalist imperialism — with its inherently patriarchal core — has led to the destruction of entire universes of women’s lifeways, solidarities, economies and contributions to history, art and public life, whether in the European witch hunts, through colonial ventures abroad, or through the destruction of nature everywhere.

In modern times, many feminist activists and researchers have critiqued the relationship between oppressive gender norms and the rise of nationalism. Relying fundamentally on patriarchal notions of production, governance, kinship and conceptions of life and death, nationalism resorts to the domestication of women for its own purposes. This pattern is recurring in today’s global swing to the right, with fascists and far-right nationalists often claiming to act in the interests of women. Protecting women from the unknown, after all, remains one of the oldest conservative tropes to justify psychological, cultural and physical warfare against women. As a result, women’s bodies and behaviors are being instrumentalized for the interests of an increasingly reactionary capitalist world system.

Colonialism yesterday and capitalist militarism today immediately target the spheres of communal economy and the autonomy of women within them. As a result, epidemic waves of violence against women destroy whatever was left of life before capitalist social relations and modes of production took hold. No surprise then, that women, feeling capitalist domination and violence most intensively and from all sides, are often at the forefront in the Global South to fight against the capitalist destruction of their lands, waters and forests.

IMPERIALIST FEMINISM AND PATRIARCHAL SOCIALISM

Let us identify two further issues that radical women’s struggles need to engage with today.

Perhaps the older of the two is the sidelining of women’s liberation by progressive, socialist, anti-colonialist or other leftist groups and movements. Historically, although women have participated in liberation movements in various capacities, their demands were often pushed aside in favor of what was identified by (usually male) leaders as the priority objective. This, however, is not an occurrence inherent to struggles for socialism or other alternatives to capitalism. It is, in fact, rather a demonstration of how deep the fight against oppression and exploitation needs to reach if real change is to be brought about.

The authoritarian traits of past historic experiences, based on their high-modernist and statist obsessions bordering on social engineering, are very much in line with patriarchal conceptualizations of life. As many feminist historians have pointed out, class has always meant different things to women and to men, particularly as women’s bodies and unpaid labor were appropriated and commodified by dominant systems in ways that naturalized their subjugated status profoundly.

As an outcome of millennia-old feminicidal systems, many of which do not feature in history classes even today, combined with the everyday reproduction of patriarchal domination in hegemonic culture, intimate relationships or in the seemingly loving sphere of the family, deep psychological traumas and internalized behaviors produce a need to radically break with societal and cultural expectations of passive femininity and womanhood through consciousness-raising, political action and autonomous organizing.

As the experience in our own movement — the women’s struggle in the Kurdish freedom movement — has shown, without a total divorce from patriarchy, without a war on our internalized self-enslavement, we cannot play our historic role in the general struggle for liberation. Neither can we find shelter in autonomous women’s spheres without running the danger of separating ourselves from the real concerns and problems of the society — and with that, the world — that we seek to revolutionize. In this sense, our autonomous women’s struggle has become our people’s guarantee to democratize and liberate our society and the world beyond.

The flipside of this negative experience of women’s movements within broader struggles for liberation is related to the second and more recent issue that women’s struggles face today: the de-radicalization of feminism through liberal ideologies and systems of capitalist modernity. Increasingly so, progressive movements and struggles that have the potential to fight power are confronted with what Arundhati Roy refers to as the “NGO-ization of resistance.” One of the primary tools to enclose and tame women’s rebellion and rage is the delegation of social struggles to the realm of civil society organizations and elite institutions that are often necessarily detached from the people on the ground.

It is no coincidence that every country that has been invaded and occupied by Western states claiming to import “freedom and democracy” is now home to an abundance of NGOs for women’s rights. The fact that violence against women is on the rise in the same aggressor countries should raise questions about the function and purpose that such organizations play in the justification of empire. Issues that require a radical restructuring of an oppressive international system are now reduced to marginal phenomena that can be resolved through corporate diversity policy and individual behavior, thus normalizing women’s acceptance of cosmetic changes at the expense of radical transformation.

Today, women are expected to cheerlead self-congratulatory manifestations of the most overt forms of imperialism and neoliberalism for their “gender inclusivity” or “female friendliness.” This grotesque appropriation of women’s struggles and gender equality was demonstrated in a recent joint article in The Guardian, co-authored by Hollywood star and UN ambassador Angelina Jolie and NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg, in which the two made public their collaboration to ensure that NATO fulfils “the responsibility and opportunity to be a leading protector of women’s rights.”

The imperialist mentality underlying the logic that NATO, one of the main culprits of global violence, genocide, unreported rape, feminicide and ecological catastrophe, will lead the feminist struggle by training its staff to be more “sensitive” to women’s rights is a summary of the tragedy of liberal feminism today. Diversifying oppressive institutions by supplementing their ranks with people of different ages, races, genders, sexual orientations and beliefs is an attempt to render invisible their tyrannical pillars and is one of the most devastating ideological attacks on alternative imaginaries for a just life in freedom.

Both right-wing conservatives and misogynist, authoritarian leftists, particularly in the West, are quick to blame “identity politics” and their supposed fragility for today’s social problems. The term “identity politics”, however, was coined in the 1970s by the Combahee River Collective, a radical Black lesbian feminist group that emphasized the importance of autonomous political action, self-realization, consciousness-raising for the ability to liberate oneself and society on the terms of the oppressed themselves. This was not a call for a self-centered preoccupation with identity detached from wider issues of class and society, but rather a formulation of experience-based action plans to fight multiple layers of oppression.

The problem today is not identity-based politics, but liberalism’s co-optation thereof to remove its radical intersectional and anti-capitalist roots. As a result, mostly white female heads of state, female CEOs and other female representatives of a bourgeois order based on sexism and racism are crowned as the icons of contemporary feminism by the liberal media — not the militancy of women in the streets who risk their lives in the struggle against police states, militarism and capitalism.

Focusing on identity as a value in itself, as liberal ideology would like to have us, runs the danger of falling into the abyss of liberal individualism, in which we may create sanctuaries of safe space, but ultimately become directly or indirectly complicit in the perpetuation of a global system of ecocide, racism, patriarchal violence and imperialist militarism.

INTERNATIONALISM MEANS DIRECT ACTION

One of the primary tragedies of alternative quests is therefore the delegation of one’s individual or collective will to instances outside of the community-in-struggle: men, NGOs, the state, the nation, and so on. The crisis of representative liberal democracy is very much related to its inability to deliver its promise, namely to represent all sections of society. As oppressed groups, particularly women, have historically experienced, one’s liberation cannot be surrendered to the same systems that reproduce unbearable violence and subjugation. In the face of these false binaries that women’s struggles are often confronted with, the urgency of internationalism emergences even more insistently.

At the heart of internationalism has historically been the realization that beyond any existing order, people must be conscious of each other’s suffering and see the oppression of one as the misery of all. Internationalism is a revolutionary extension of one’s self-awareness to the realm of humanity as a whole, based on the ability to see the connections of different expressions of oppression. In this sense, internationalism must necessarily reject any form of delegation to status quo institutions and must resort to concrete, direct action.

More than one hundred years ago, the month of March was chosen by socialist working women to be the international day of women and their militant struggles. A century on, March has become the month to commemorate and honor women internationalists in the revolution of Rojava. This past March, two remarkable militant women, Anna Campbell (Hêlîn Qerecox), a revolutionary anti-fascist from England, and Alina Sanchez (Lêgêrîn Ciya), a socialist internationalist and medical doctor from Argentina, lost their lives in Rojava during their quest for a life free from patriarchal fascism and its mercenaries under capitalist modernity.

Three years earlier, in March 2015, one of the first internationalist martyrs of the Rojava Revolution, the Black German communist Ivana Hoffmann, lost her life in the war on the feminicidal rapist fascists of ISIS. Together with thousands of Kurdish, Arab, Turkmen, Syriac Christian, Armenian and other comrades, these three women, in the spirit of women’s internationalism, insisted on being on the frontlines against the destruction of women’s lifeworlds by patriarchal systems. At the time of writing these words, more than three months on, Anna’s body still lies hidden under the rubble in the midst of the colonial, patriarchal occupation of the Turkish state in Afrin, Rojava.

At the heart of these women’s defense of humanity was a commitment to beautify life through permanent struggle against fascistic systems and mentalities. In the spirit of the revolution that they joined, they did not compromise their womanhood for the sake of a liberation that marginalizes the struggle against patriarchy.

Towards the end of last year, Kurdish, Arab, Syriac Christian and Turkmen women, together with internationalist comrades, announced the liberation of Raqqa and dedicated this historic moment to the freedom of all women in the world. Among them were Ezidi women, who organized themselves autonomously to take revenge on the ISIS rapists that three years previously committed genocide against their community and enslaved thousands of women.

Revolutionary women’s struggles — as opposed to contemporary liberal appropriations of feminist language — have always embodied the spirit of internationalism in their fights by taking the lead against fascism and nationalism. To stay true to the promise of solidarity, internationalist politics in the vein of women’s struggles, must understand that oppression can operate through a variety of modes, so that both the violence as well as the resistance against it do not have to resemble each other everywhere.

Today’s internationalism needs to reclaim direct action for systemic change without reliance on external powers — party, government or state — and must be radically democratic, anti-racist and anti-patriarchal.

Dilar Dirik

Dilar Dirik is an activist of the Kurdish women’s movement and regularly writes on the freedom struggles in Kurdistan for an international audience.

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diaryofaprodigaldaughter · 3 years

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I'm Katie (not my real name) and I used to be a pornstar. Well, I wasn't just a pornstar. I was an OnlyFans content creator, I was a cam girl, I did phone chat and escorting. I've done a lot.

Now let's just answer a few questions first. Before I got into sex work I was a church going good-girl. I was a prefect at school. I came from a good home where both my parents are still together. I'm twice university educated. I've never been addicted to drugs or alcohol, I've never been trafficked and I've never done anything unwillingly when it comes to my former career. I'm a 30 year old woman, I'm a big girl and I take ownership of decisions I made (even if those decisions were bad ones for me).

Until fairly February I thought I was happy, that working in porn was the best thing I've ever done. Actually? I wasn't happy and it wasn't the best thing I've ever done. The lie I continuously had to tell myself that I loved my job was a survival thing. I mean, I *obviously* enjoyed drinking urine from a guy's penis, or spending days shoving anusol up my bum after taking a rather large penis (or trying to take a rather large penis), right?

I stopped because I found myself. Re found myself. It took being hospitalised amidst a pandemic where I had to face days of just sitting with myself. A perfect opportunity to rediscover oneself. Or face oneself. The thing is that it didn't last. I started OnlyFans again to raise money to help my dad and found myself slipping back again. It was like as soon as I gave it an opening the industry tried dragging me back at full force. It was only thanks to two brothers in faith and God that I stopped completely.

I never intended to get into porn. I started OnlyFans content creation in my bedroom like a lot of other girls, just wanting extra money. I had medical bills to pay, a student loan to clear and my job as a trainee psychology practitioner just wasn't paying enough. Obviously potentially earning 20k a month was a lot more appealing to me than taking a part time job. Especially recently when trying to pay for my dad to have private cancer treatment.

The thing is that it very quickly slid when I was signed off of work with severe depression. It wasn't enough to just take some pics and some cheeky videos in my bedroom at home. I was having to work (or "collab") with other people. I found myself fast falling down the rabbit hole of sex work and doing much more. The things I was then expected to do became more extreme to get ahead of demand. I went from telling myself I'd never do escorting to escorting, from telling myself I'd never do porn to doing porn.

The porn industry isn't what most people think it is. Its not "glamorous", its not fast money and its not a monolithic machine. Its fake, its hard work and it takes a toll on both your body as well as your mind. I've had to do things on camera that outside of work I would never agree to do, get my body to do things on a set that I can't physically do without having to ingest certain chemicals (nothing illegal) or it being painful. You get tested, you shoot, you get paid, you go home and you deal with whatever fresh hell your body has gone through. That's pretty much it. I look back at pictures and films I was in...it breaks me. I look dead behind my eyes. Why? Because I was dead. Spiritually dead. I was in pain.

I was very lucky though. Everyone I worked with was lovely. From cameramen to producers and other performers. Others I know personally haven't always been; Co performers assaulting them (physically and sexually), directors getting handsy on set. The job itself is hard. Taking and commodifying for sale such an intimate act took its toll on me. It left me physically broken, I'd have to take time off because of the toll it played on my mental health. I know it does to everyone else too.

In my mind porn was what I was "made" for. I was great to work with on camera, I was great at my job. I was excellent at making men cum buckets and I was good at keeping them coming back for more. I had fans from the UK, the US, Brazil, Holland, Hong Kong and other countries. But porn wasn't what I was "made" for. That sentiment of being made for porn, being made to be an object to give men sexual pleasure came from a place of trauma. That's why a lot of us girls who get into the porn industry find ourselves there in the first place; we've been through trauma. That girl/woman you're getting yourself off to has been led to this situation from trauma.

I didn't have sex until I was 24 years old. But my first sexual experience was being sexually assaulted by the guy I was seeing at the time, so you could say I have a complex history with sex and ownership of my body. Then at 27 I was raped. That moment changed the entire trajectory of my life. It made me become hypersexual and left me with the feeling that a man would only ever want me for my body. Further experiences with some men I then dated just seemed to cement that false notion in my mind.

Doing porn, as I told myself, was "taking back control of my body". That I was "empowering" myself. But it's all bullshit. If anything I was still not the one controlling my body. I was renting it out for the sexual pleasure of others. Some that I could see (when escorting) but many across the world who I'd never even know existed. I wasn't empowering myself. I was exacerbating the emotional and psychological trauma that being raped had inflicted on me. Day in. Day out. Whenever a man got off to me, he was getting himself off to me reliving that trauma over and over. The most genuine feeling of empowerment I've felt was walking away from the industry. This feeling of freedom and empowerment continued when I walked away from it again recently.

To this day I still don't think I've met anyone in the industry who hasn't gone through an emotional or psychological trauma at some point in their lives. I don't think I know of anyone in the industry that hasn't got a battle with mental illness or addiction. The industry seems to attract us like little, beautiful moths to a flame. It then uses you up and let's you fall.

I just want people to know that the porn industry and sex work isn't all its made out to be. Its all illusion, its viciously competitive at times too and its soul crushing. Whilst I've met some lovely people, believe me the sweetest people I've ever met are all in the industry. All people I pray one day leave it too. It's selling a fantasy to people. Not a reality. It's making money off of exploitation, pain and trauma. When you watch porn or pay for an OnlyFans that is what you're doing...exacerbating trauma.

I'm going to finish this post here. The same way I ended my porn career. Abruptly. I'll post again soon.

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