April 21, 2012
by easilyriled
– From the Archives –
Okay. so here’s the thing. why is it that when I say “women in prostitution” people (especially ‘do-gooders’, liberals, men and trannys) hear “sex worker”? I don’t use that kinda demeaning, oppressive language. even if women in prostitution use it to refer to themselves. There is no such fuckin’ thing as a “sex worker” fer crying out loud. All women in prostitution are rape victims. And if they’re not calling themselves that it’s not because they’re not victims, it’s because they’re trying to not go fucking crazy. No one likes to say, “i was/am victimized”, but let’s face it, men have done some terrible things to women, and these women in particular, and they continue to do it, and for some of these women the only way they can manage to lurch from one moment to the next is to claim that ‘yes, this is my job and i’m gonna do the best job i can’. even though she would fight and kick and holler and lay her body down to prevent her little sister or her mom or her auntie or her friend from taking that kinda job.
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Posted in pornstitution, radfem 101 |
8 Comments »
February 20, 2012
by easilyriled
This morning I woke up to the radio, as I always do. A woman was reading the news. When i finally rolled out of bed, I called a friend who had called me the day before. We talked as I made fruit salad for a breakfast I was preparing for another woman who was coming over. I took out the garbage and called another friend about a couple of work shifts. C_ arrived for breakfast just as I put some music on my cd player.
and I realized that my morning had almost NO men in it. The host of the morning radio show was a guy, but other than him, there were no men. all of the music I played today was by women, all of the people i talked to were women, and if you look around my walls, almost all of the art is by women, the books are mostly by and about women (not all, but a big proportion)–my work is about women and our shared resistance against male domination, and our shared celebrations of each other. I sent a text to my friend, H_ to say “I had to tell someone, and you were the first i thought of to tell, I fuckin’ LOVE women. I woke up this morning, anxious, like always, but full of love and admiration for us nonetheless”.
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Posted in friendship, patriarchal institutions (medicine/religion/law), sisterhood |
8 Comments »
December 6, 2011
by easilyriled
It was a Wednesday. Four of us, (maybe 5?) were meeting together on the third floor of the big house that then (and now) serves as a rape crisis line and transition house, staffed 24 hours by women who volunteer their time and their best work to aid women to escape violence. Often, our best was pretty good. Sometimes it wasn’t. There weren’t many of us then, to do that work together. There are still too few, 22 years later, far too few.
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Posted in domestic violence, femicide, herstory, male violence, MRAs, sci/tech |
18 Comments »
September 23, 2011
by easilyriled
image by R&T
This post was originally published in radical feminist journal “Rain and Thunder” in its “Positive” issue #52 (Fall, 2011).
I am positive that we are in the midst of a glorious revolution. All outward appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. Listen. If you listen, you can hear us in revolt. Hear that? that is the sound of a door opening, a woman inviting a girl into her home. A woman asking another woman for help. Three women together making stickers to paste onto porn magazines. laughter. a splash as two women leap fully clothed into the ocean after a day of intervening in men’s brutality toward women (mostly women they are supposed to love). Listen, there is the sound of shovels in dirt; a match struck to light a torch; the clink of tools from a tool belt; a car starting up…voices, murmuring. muffled laughter, a shriek over there. We are plotting our liberation. There is a lot to do, there are many lives that hang in the balance. It is a fine balance between hope and despair and yet an enormous, yawning chasm between slavery and freedom. Can we even see freedom from here?
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Posted in herstory, male violence, sisterhood |
13 Comments »
July 27, 2011
by easilyriled
Can’t have one without the other, not really. I don’t think so anyhow. Lookit, why I’m thinking about this, is — a few weeks ago, my buddy K and I went to a women’s meeting in a suburb of our city. Sometimes we go to meetings in exotic places like North Van or Burnaby or Steveston even. Sometimes we cross a border, other times we cross a bridge (!) and sometimes we cross both.
So this was a small meeting, and the women were lovely, as they are, all were white, most were middle-aged, a couple had these really deep smoky voices. They sounded like they’d been dispatching trucks or taxis for years, and they looked all tough and no-nonsense.
And of the 10 or 12 of them, over half were on anti-depressants.
OVER HALF.
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Posted in harm reduction, health, sisterhood |
43 Comments »
July 18, 2011
by easilyriled
I was going to post on here about how you can have recovery without revolution, sort of, and revolution without recovery, sort of–but I don’t think we’ll be successful at either without both. But It was kind of too personal for the HUB (though political of course), so I put it on my blog and here I’m going to write something about the Women’s Worlds.
This here Women’s Worlds was a BIG conference in the summer of 2011–it is an International conference that happens every three years, and this year was the first year in Canada. I think. It was a very big deal, and I didn’t hear ‘boo’ about it, wouldn’t have heard a thing were it not for my alliance with the radical feminist anti-violence collective here.
One woman at our panel (I was part of a panel that I put together with the help of my friend and ally L, of aforementioned radfem collective) said, “you know, in my city, whenever we are expecting a large gathering of men, for a conference or a sporting event, the police have extra training, and there are more of ‘em working to prepare for all the men. I wonder if they received extra training to prepare for nearly 2000 women?”
Her question, of course, was facetious.
Posted in harm reduction, patriarchal institutions (medicine/religion/law), politics |
6 Comments »
May 20, 2011
by easilyriled
So, I recently traveled a really long ways away from home. I flew to Istanbul (!) and back again. And on the flight there, I watched a couple of TV shows.
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Posted in handmaidens of the P, media, motherhood, patriarchal institutions (medicine/religion/law), pregnancy, WTF? |
14 Comments »
