Mutiny puts Work on Trial on 4th July

In the wake of the huge public sector strikes over pensions on 30th June, Mutiny puts work on trial.

Hosted by journalist Brendan Montague and featuring Green politician Sian Berry, Selma James, author of several seminal texts on sex, race, class and work, founder of the International Wages for Housework Campaign, first spokeswoman for the English Collective of Prostitutes and coordinator of Global Women’s Strike, activist Anne-Marie O-Reilly from Boycott Workfare and London Coalition Against Poverty, trade union representatives and a host of other special guests, Work on Trial is a carnivalesque evening of live entertainment and discussion providing a whistle-stop tour of contemporary political issues at work. The night begins with speed debating, followed by three interactive debating sessions interspersed with performance poetry, theatre, readings, and live music. Set in the East-End's avant-garde Resistance Gallery against a backdrop of topical art displays, Mutiny's Work on Trial promises to be a political event like no other.

So how do we win the fight against racism, sexism and anti-immigration attitudes in the workplace? Must our experience of work be one of exploitation and frustration? Is work the moral issue it's often made out to be, and if so what does this imply about those unable to participate? Can we imagine a better system for creating value and providing life's essentials? Could trade unions really be the driving force behind implementing a more utopian vision of work? What would *you* do, given a genuine choice as to how much to work and what on?

'Work on Trial' begins at 6pm on Monday 4th July at the Resistance Gallery in Bethnal Green.

For more information, visit our website and sign up to the facebook event at:https://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=129691263775075.

Tickets available buy-one-get-one-free £5 from www.jointhemutiny.org.

Attend, debate, perform, organise: Join the Mutiny...

Prophylactics and the Pope: Why I'll be protesting on Saturday

Pope Benedict XVI begins his costly state visit to the UK today. Activists will be using this opportunity to make their voices heard about LGBT equality, abortion rights, child abuse within the church and the Vatican's powerful and inaccurate stance on condoms.

The Vatican's position on sex education and condoms is outdated and damages international efforts to promote safer sex practices to prevent the spread of HIV, STIs and unintended and unaffordable pregnancies.

The Pope's well-reported gaffe last year that distributing condoms 'aggravates' the HIV/AIDS epidemic was not an isolated incident, but indicative of a core problem with the Vatican's position on the provision of contraception. The Vatican uses unsubstantiated claims about the permeability of condoms and promotes abstinence and fidelity as the solution to the epidemic. While it is fair to say that if you don't have sex, you will be less likely to be exposed to sexually transmitted HIV, telling people that condoms do not work prevents them from accessing life-saving information to protect themselves. Anyone who believes that proclaiming fidelity will prevent infection would do well to read Jennifer Hirsch and colleagues case studies of migration, fidelity and HIV risk.

Research exploring the efficacy of abstinence-only education in the US has found that it provides false information and does not reduce unintended pregnancy and STIs. I am not suggesting that HIV prevention can rely solely on condom distribution. In order to have enjoyable, consenting and safer sexual relationships, people need information about both risk and pleasure, and how to negotiate and use condoms and other forms of contraception to protect themselves.

The Vatican's position on condoms is damaging as it spreads false information about the fact that condoms are, if used correctly and regularly, effective. Research into regular use of condoms for vaginal intercourse has found an 80% reduction in HIV transmission (these studies were not able to examine whether condoms were used correctly). Most of the research looking at whether availability of condoms increases sexual activity finds that availability of condoms does not increase sexual activity.

Pope Benedict XVI represents a damaging view of sexual safety that affects millions of people's lives as health agencies attempt to provide accurate information and services across the world. We should make a stand during the Pope's visit in favour of comprehensive, accurate and consistent sex education and provision of adequate contraception globally. While anti-retroviral drugs certainly help survival for some sufferers of HIV, the 2008 UNAIDS report on the global AIDS epidemic painted a devastating picture in which 2 million people died because of AIDS in 2007, with global health disparities affecting the kind of support those living with HIV are able to access. Such inequality points to a much greater problem faced by the global community. Protesting about the Pope isn't enough. We need a fundamental change to a system that exploits those with less for the profit of the few. And that change needs to start at home.

What's the alternative to Trident?

Report from the CND TUC fringe meeting.



By scrapping Trident Britain could become a leading expert in tidal
and wave energy, Professor John Foster told the CND fringe meeting at this years TUC. The UK is currently a key site for research in this area but lacks the funding to put the sustainable plans into practice. Scrapping Trident would enable workers skilled in marine technology to use their skills to manufacture and support green energy, reinvigorating industry in the UK.

Professor Foster, along with UNISON's Heather Wakefield and CWU's Tony Kearns were speaking at the launch of CND's report on the impact of scrapping Trident on jobs and the UK economy. The panel argued that the Government is in a unique position to fulfil international
commitments on climate change and nuclear non-proliferation in addition to releasing public funds that could be better spent on
providing vital social housing, hospital staff and social workers.

Renewing this weapon of mass destruction would cost in excess of £100 billion, Wakefield told union representatives. Scrapping Trident on the other hand will free up public funds to retrain workers and invest in renewable energy to protect our future.

The Government decision to make the MOD pay for Trident will destroy communities that rely on shipbuilding and manufacturing in favour of an outdated and dangerous US-led foreign policy, Kearns argued. The CND report presents the Government with a progressive, sustainable and safe alternative.

Worries about job losses were raised at the meeting by a former
Faslane worker and member of Prospect Union. The ensuing discussion showed the importance of dialogue between workers and campaigners against nuclear weapons. Only through dialogue can common ground and shared goals of safe, sustainable jobs for all be expressed.

General Secretary of CND, Kate Hudson, urged union representatives to affiliate to the campaign and communicate to their members that scrapping Trident would lead to more jobs and a sustainable economic
future.

This report on Trident and Jobs comes at the same time as the TUC voted to back the PCS and CWU led campaign for 1 million green jobs. Unions and the peace movement have shown that there is undeniably a
viable alternative to cuts and war.

Out of the bars and into the streets? Pride in San Francisco

Rainbows are lining the streets of the city that gave birth to the famous flag back in 1978. In the 30 or so years that have passed since then, Gilbert Baker's beautiful creation has become a powerful symbol of LGBT empowerment across continents.

I was excited to be in Harvey Milk's city, held up as a place of progressive politics and radicalism, critical mass, the beat poets and the summer of love. But while I enjoyed the partying as the sun broke through the fog, the politics of pride still left me feeling a little cold.

The Trans and Dyke marches on Friday and Saturday were peppered with banners and placards, and the queer community took to the streets together, joined in solidarity with a sense of common purpose. This was reflected in many of the countless arts events, workshops and the huge frameline LGBT film festival over the past month.

Sunday's parade was a theatrical affair, where organisations drove floats and walked (or danced) the spectator-lined Market street to the packed celebration in the Civic Centre Plaza.

Being a parade spectator is markedly different to taking to the streets on a demonstration.
Behind barriers we watched the beautiful, sparkling spectacle and danced to the music as the floats drive by. Many of the placards called for gay marriage, recently outlawed in California by a constitutional amendment ruling that "only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California." One group carried a rainbow Israeli flag with flyers outlining Israel's sexual equality legislation, while another pointed to the human rights abuses in Israel calling for 'queers against Israeli Apartheid'. Political placards and advertisements for banks and corporations sat uneasily together. While some were protesting, it was certainly not a protest.

But why not just have a parade – a celebration? There are many gains for the US LGBT movement to celebrate. In a city which 30 years ago suffered at the hands of violent homophobic policing, SFPD cops walked hand in hand wearing rainbow sunglasses. Where Harvey Milk was once assassinated as the first out gay man in Californian public office, out LGBT public officials and candidates rode in open-top cars and high-fived the crowd.

The most extravagant floats were sponsored by big banks – glittering on the streets which on any other day are the homes of people who have nothing but the items in the shopping trolley they are pushing. The bankers' crisis is hitting the US hard, where the public sector faces draconian cuts, and where the welfare system is unable to provide support for many people living below the poverty line.

As pride parades in many countries become part of the establishment, the message of system change gets replaced by one of individual expression through consumption. We are what we buy. We buy what we are.

Such an individualised model of sexual liberation will only ever deliver freedom for the few. It does not take into account the structural ways that LGBT people are oppressed differently across axes of racism, sexism and class discrimination. We should fight for a world in which we all have freedom. This bank-sponsored liberation on offer through consumption is reserved for those who can afford the price tag of pride.

Back to Basics: What about women?

Equality minister Harriet Harman last night attacked Tory plans for married couples tax breaks, accusing the Conservatives of "Back to Basics but with an open neck shirt and converse trainers".

The Fawcett Society and LSE Gender Institute election debate was more engaging, witty and intelligent than the televised leaders' debates have been. But fundamentally Harman, Theresa May and Lynne Featherstone floundered on how they would protect women from sweeping public sector cuts after the election.

Questions on issues like the gender pay gap, division of labour in the home and violence against women were put to the panellists. All women claimed a commitment to increasing women's participation in parliamentary politics, with Harman arguing for all-women shortlists, May promoting careers advice and mentoring, and Featherstone asserting the egalitarian potential of electoral reform.

However, Harman's grand claim to stand "shoulder to shoulder with women in the developing world" conflicts with her pro-war voting record in parliament which has had a devastating effect on the lives of women in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As I heard Harriet call us "sisters" from the stage, I wondered how she thinks of the women's rights campaigners in Afghanistan whose struggles are knocked back with every day the military occupation continues.

The ways that gender, race and class operate as systemic oppression in society went curiously unspoken by the representatives, despite the repetition of 'fairness' and 'change' throughout their election rhetoric.

I enjoyed Harriet's sideswipes at the Tories, but such claims to sisterhood will always be empty while the wealth and power rests in the hands of a tiny global minority.

Shame on mooncups

I am a die-hard mooncup fan. I'm one of those women who graffitis toilet walls urging women to get one. But the latest swarm of advertising for menstrual cups is making me see red.

Mooncups have launched a poster and online campaign to encourage more women to use their eco and body-friendly product. The premise is that they want women to 'love our vaginas', asking us to vote for what we 'lovingly call' ours.

Now, I'm not against us loving our (or other people's) vaginas. But seriously, I have only just recovered from Bodyform's 80s neoliberal take on us hiding our bleeding from the world. It was a long time ago when I sat guffawing with my mum at a Jo Brand sketch in which she ridicules 'panty-liners' by nicknaming them 'fairy cradles'. While Bodyform encouraged us to get rollerblading in white trousers, using doilies, fluff, flowers and glitter circling euphemistic names for vaginas still reflects prevailing cultural representations of menstruation as something that needs to be talked of in hushed tones: as something fundamentally 'unclean'.

Part of me feels I should just be happy that the word 'vagina' has even appeared on a poster. Particularly given the recent news that a Kotex advert was banned in the US for using the V-word.

But it seems to me that while the mooncup adverts purport to engage women with their bodies (by asking them to give their vagina pet-names), it maintains the usual media silence on the fact that menstruation is about a bodily function: about bleeding.

It is perhaps more upsetting because the way that mooncups work involves a very real engagement with your body. You fold and insert the silicone cup into your vagina, and empty and clean it. It is far removed from the blue-inked dry-weave topsheets and individual floral wrapping of most menstruation products.

Until now, they have languished outside the mainstream, caricatured as a 'hippy' product. Whenever I have heard them discussed in person or online, their mention is usually met with a barrage of revulsion and squeamishness. It is this reputation they are trying to combat when they soothingly joke with us on the website: "We bet you winced when you saw this, everyone does."

Euphemistic advertising about menstrual products is a symptom of a much wider issue in cultural representations of women's bodies. While it is deemed appropriate for Marks and Spencer to devote billboard spreads to disembodied breasts (to high media coverage last year and again now with their nautical 'hello buoys' billboards), women's bodily functions continue to be represented as things that should be hidden: where lack of control is seen as a symbol of failure. Comics Mitchell and Webb have produced a fantastic sketch that parodies the gendered imbalance in advertising.

Hyper-capitalist society commodifies our bodies into parts that need constant perfection. It creates ever-expanding markets of self-improvement and grooming, stoking our anxiety that we will be found out as leaky, unclean and failed women instead of the perfect consumer citizen: forever improving on her worth by buying products from the cosmetic industry and living up to the normalised white, wealthy, thin, young and able body.

Mooncups, in some ways, offer a challenge to this rhetoric. The silicone cup lasts for years - a very different model to the hoard of disposable products such as tampons and sanitary towels. It also doesn't shy away from the function it serves, in catching blood.

But instead of competing with dominant notions of femininity as alienated from our bodies (as either mysterious gardens of eden, or hypersexualised sex machines), the company who create mooncups stick to safe ground in an attempt to get their share of the squeamish market.

It is unlikely that any company will take on the powerful constructions of femininity that dominate mainstream media culture. As we challenge the capitalist premise that we are commodities for upgrading, improving and marketing we must remember to challenge the shame and secrecy historically associated with our bodies.

Instead of floral advertising, I'd love to see mooncups given out to women for free: a cunt-cup for life.

Sex, sales and morality tales: the 'sexualisation' of young people

Sex is everywhere. I did an actual double-take when I saw an arched and airbrushed woman on the back of a Manchester bus promoting their new environmental fuel, with the tagline 'Green is the new Black'.

So you would assume that I'd been jumping for joy at the recent independent Sexualisation of Young People Review commissioned by the Home Office.

Psychologist Dr Linda Papadopoulos led the year-long consultation for the review, which included a literature review of the field, focus groups and evidence sessions with practitioners, academics and activists.

I had to think quite hard before writing this piece, as I am troubled by the overwhelmingly homogeneous notions of sex, sexuality and gender that confront me every day. The kind of images that present the goal of femininity as white, heterosexual, slim, pubescent, rich, hairless, and up-for-it (but not too up for it).

But the Sexualisation of Young People Review also troubles me. The review may well have implications for policy – David Cameron and Gordon Brown have both weighed into recent moral panics about childhood innocence, and the report carries nine pages of policy recommendations for education, media, business and research. Yet it is confused, simplistic and fails to situate sexual representation within a historical and social understanding of power and inequality.

What is 'sexualisation' anyway?

The term 'sexualisation' has been flying around the research world for a few years, but academic Feona Attwood has argued that it is more of an umbrella term than a straightforward definition. Broadly, it tends to be used to describe the process of something becoming sexual – whether that be the increased mainstreaming of sexualised images and texts, or the 'imposition' of sexuality onto a group of people, for example children and young people. As with many broad terms, the word is often used in different ways by different people, which has important implications for any claims being made by researchers, or attempts to compare research in this broad area.

The term is central to an often polarised debate about the 'pornification' of culture, in which feminists are divided over whether an increase in sexual representation is about empowerment and choice, a form of 'retro-sexism' or something more complicated.

What was the purpose of the review?

The review is situated within the Home Office's Together We Can End Violence Against Women consultation. As such, it sets out its scope as “how sexualised images and messages may be affecting the development of children and young people and influencing cultural norms, and examines the evidence for a link between sexualisation and violence”.

This is an ambitious goal. Researchers across disciplines have been divided over the possibility of determining the impact of representation on attitudes and behaviour. The review is part of a heavily contested debate about the relationship between our development as human beings and the world around us.

Troubled

While Papadopoulos is clearly aware of the theoretical debate about what sexualisation means, she decides not to engage with complexity and uncertainty, presenting instead a dazzling 'review' of literature that leaps across the subjects of body image, objectification, child sexual development, pornography, media consumption, eating disorders, the sex industry, bullying, adult sexual violence and child abuse.

Unlike the recent research on Sexualised Goods Aimed at Children conducted for the Scottish Parliament, the Sexualisation of Young People Review rarely critically evaluates the existing research, but rather combines the findings of work from different national and historical contexts, amalgamating research on adults and children as transparent 'facts' to illustrate the growing menace of sexualisation for the monolithic group of 'young people' in the UK. Most noticeably, the review presents a range of statistics about music videos that spans over 20 years as a reflection of current media culture.

Dr Linda's underlying premise is one that I identify with: the constant reproduction of sexual, racial and gender stereotypes must surely be related to how we can make sense of the world: it can open up or limit who we can be, and how we can behave.

But this research feels like the journalism that I get so fed up with in the news – where a premise is decided upon and research is found to 'back it up'. Although the review engaged with qualitative research with focus groups, including with young people, we don't get to evaluate the methodology, the kinds of questions asked or how the sample was devised. All research is necessarily partial and involves decisions about what is included, so this process should be out in the open.

The questions posed for the fact finding review (which are not published in the final review) illustrate why it is important for methodology to be transparent. For example, contributors were asked to consider 'how young people's exposure to overtly sexual and other media content negatively affects them' (2009, Invitation to evidence sessions). In contrast, Sara Bragg and David Buckingham, who worked on the Scottish review, have done some great work with young people that examines the often multiple and complicated readings that young people have of media representations.

Ghettoised panics

The flaws in the way this review was conducted and presented reflect a much bigger problem in this debate, which was articulated brilliantly by Nina Power at the launch of the Feminist Manifesto for the 21^st Century. When we take the debate on sexualisation in isolation from a structural analysis of power, as feminists we end up as uneasy bedfellows with the moralistic arguments of the right. This leads us to categorise and police 'healthy' and 'unhealthy' sex, which is particularly evident in the review regarding sex outside of a long-term monogamous relationship.

We cannot examine the impact of sexual representation, whether that be consumed by children, young people or adults, without contextualising it within the changing structure of identity in late capitalism. In a society increasingly characterised by the requirement to improve ourselves and find identity through our consumption, the commodification of sexuality is intertwined with unequal power relations.

This has an impact on the kinds of recommendations we can make for change. As the authors of the Scottish review argue, the limited framing of the debate “may distract attention from other, more fundamental – and perhaps more intractable – social problems”. In that sense, the Sexualisation of Young People Review is a classic New Labour product – it gives the impression of 'seeming to' make change, without having to deal with the inherent inequalities of a hyper capitalist society.

Finally, the review raises questions about the role of the academy in policy. The Government has begun to slash the budgets of our universities. This destruction takes place within a much longer-running managerialisation of the Higher Education sector, in which research is only deemed useful if its 'impact' on society can be measured. We must fight back against this simplistic view of research and education, or we will increasingly find that universities will be called upon to use their research to provide simplistic buzzwords and justifications for the decisions made by government.

I was lucky to have on hand the excellent guidelines put together by Dr Petra Boynton for reading and assessing consultation papers. I recommend that you read the report yourself, and post your conclusions here.