Tree

I don't know your story - 
who ever could?
all that I know is
you're more than just wood.

You sheltered bees
in a world where they're dying.
Now for your crime,
you're sentenced; I'm crying.

Cockatoos and galahs
shrieked - it seemed in dismay
at your pruning; but now this:
what will they say?

The hive hollowed you out
so in spite of your shade,
your sequestration

of CO₂ someone made,

what you give to the birds,

what you give to the bees,

you're being cut down

in the City-Bush squeeze.

They say not only might you

drop a limb on someone,

but you're in the way

of the badge, car and gun.

Constable Care, it seems,

needs more space,

and a driveway, a heat sink,

is taking your place.

I grieve at your falling,

mourn I could not stop it,

add my voice to those calling

A tree! Do not chop it!

Mad Fucking Witch

 

I'm a mad fucking witch, and there's a minister I hexed
For his everyday misogyny, not just that one text.
I'm a mad fucking witch, I'm angry to the core
As I shriek my words, I seek to settle a score.

Peter Dutton, you stand accused
Of failing to protect the women abused
In Australia's black sites for refugees
On the mainland, and overseas.

Women like "Abyan", pregnant from rape on Nauru.
You refused her abortion - what is she to do?
She is detained; her rapist is at large;
Just like you, he hasn't yet been charged.

Nazanin, who became suicidal,
Assaulted on Nauru. You did worse than stand idle.
You separated her from her family who loved her.
They wanted to be near, so they could support and hug her.

So many others, more than I can name,
Strip-searched by guards, forced to feel the shame,
The leering eyes, the threatening hands,
As they said they were looking for contraband.

Official abuse, you turn a blind eye,
You cover it up - or at least that's what you try.
But the truth is out - it wasn't just your text,
And this mad fucking witch knows what should happen next:

You should get the sack, and be made to stand trial
For failing to prevent these deeds so vile,
For failing to uphold the rights of detainees -
Of asylum-seekers and refugees -

For failing to protect those who've sought our care,
Who came the only way they could, by boat, not air.

I'm a mad fucking witch, enraged at what I see,
And I will fight till all the refugees are free.
 

Work like any other

This is a slightly edited piece I wrote as a contribution to an internal pre-conference discussion in the Australian Socialist Alliance, focused on understanding the nature of sex work and its relation to women's oppression. It forms part of a response to an argument that sex work is not work "like any other." Several other pieces were submitted to the written discussion (and there was lively - often overly personal - discussion on social media), taking up important faults in the original piece, and this was an attempt to address only one part of the discussion, what's at stake.

*********

Since no job is exactly like any other job, what are we really asking when we ask is sex work “work like any other”?

I think there are two important things that are being conveyed in the statement “sex work is work like any other work.”

The first is that sex work is work, not the sale or rental of the sex worker's body or self (any more than any other work constitutes the sale of the body or self). To indulge in the use of Marxist language, sex workers who work for a boss sell the commodity labour power, as do all wage-workers in a capitalist economy. Their labour power produces sexual services, a personal service commodity different from others in use value (as all commodities differ from each other in use value), but still a commodity like other personal services under capitalism. To skip the Marxist language and put it simply (which to be honest, I prefer), sex workers work for their living, like other wage-workers and self-employed people, and are not selling themselves but their ability to provide a sexual service of some kind(s) to their clients.

The second thing this slogan conveys follows from the first: since sex work is work like other work (and not the sale of self or body any more than any other kinds of work), violence, rape, objectification and disrespect are no more acceptable when directed towards sex workers than they are when directed towards any other workers in any other industry – whether by clients, bosses, police, intimate partners or random strangers.

Like all work in a capitalist economy, it exists in a society marred by sexism, homophobia, transphobia and racism, where workers are forced by economic need to enter the marketplace to be exploited for capitalist profit, in the course of which, they experience alienation. This context – of experiences of poverty and oppression – shapes and pervades sex work just as it does other work, it shapes the options available to sex workers like all workers. But it is not the cause of sexism, misogyny and the sexual objectification of women, any more than nursing or social work as professions are the cause of women being cast primarily in caring roles. The preponderance of women in each of these and other industries indicates what kind of roles are generally assigned to women in the gendered division of labour, but is not the primary cause of this division.

Like every phenomenon, this statement can be contradicted. As I began, every job is different from every other job, and sex work is also like this. Mining is different from teaching; dentistry is different from cleaning; sex work is different from working in a textile factory. All have distinct risks, forms that alientation takes, rewards, pressures to take part. Sex work is like other work in having distinct features. Unlike most work, sex workers are stigmatised; in many cases they or their clients are criminalised; because of the stigma attached to their work and the misogyny and transphobia in society at large, they are frequently the victims of violence, including sexual violence; because of the diversity of human experiences of sexuality, they may find the work itself harmful; they may be excluded from traditional forms of working class organisation like unions. In this, they face a particular form of oppression that makes their struggles for their rights at work harder.

Sex workers who are organising for their rights, in diverse countries with diverse laws, are finding this slogan a useful one for mobilising to organise for and assert their rights. Rather than clinging to a formulation and ways of labeling commercial sex and the workers in the industry that reinforce the stigma sex workers face, and the assumptions that clients, bosses, police and strangers are entitled to perform sexual acts to sex workers without their consent, socialists who wish to engage in solidarity should revisit their theoretical approach and use the formulations found by sex workers to be most useful in asserting their rights.

This approach can be likened to the campaign to end intimate partner violence – a campaign that doesn't locate the problems of intimate partner violence in the existence of intimate relationships, or heterosexuality, but which struggled/s to identify and assert that no matter the origin of marriage as an institution, women do not now accept being male property, and to identify that rape in marriage is a thing: that women don't lose their right to withhold consent to sex by virtue of getting married. In a similar way, locating sex work as work helps sex workers in the practical struggles to end criminalisation, stigmatisation, violence and the other barriers to living with safety and dignity.

A final point is the impact of getting this wrong.

We have developed our policy on solidarity with sex workers struggling for their rights in collaboration with sex workers who are members of the Socialist Alliance, and others from the main activist network of sex workers in Australia, Scarlet Alliance. The original discussion contribution was treated as problematic in many ways by these collaborators. Among the numerous issues raised by sex workers concerned about the piece were

• the fact that the arguments used to paint sex work as inherently bad for workers and different from all other work are the same ones that are used to justify criminalising it;
• the offensiveness and inaccuracy of saying that sex workers sell themselves/their bodies, necessarily feel a “loss of ownership of their bodies”
• the use of inaccurate arguments and characterisations that underpin the stigmatisation of sex workers

Sex workers are the ones who will fight for their rights, and they'll do it with or without socialists. Socialists are the natural allies of sex workers, since we are opposed to all sorts of exploitation and oppression, and of course we want a world in which sex workers and all workers, women, the LGBTIQA community, Aboriginal people, the poor and marginalised, have full rights and social inclusion. If our analysis and the language that flow from it put us on the opposite side of the barricades to sex workers in their struggles, they should be re-examined, and in this instance, rejected in favour of an approach that strengthens solidarity.

*****************

I would point people also to http://www.socialist-alliance.org/alliance-voices/policy-debate-sex-workers-rights, http://www.socialist-alliance.org/alliance-voices/sex-work-and-work-understanding-trafficking and http://www.socialist-alliance.org/alliance-voices/creating-culture-solidarity-sex-workers.

Montreal

Good-bye, Montréal,
It's so hard to leave you, now I'm gone.
Have to leave you anyway
I may cry, but I'm ok.
It's hard to leave your skies of blue
of white and grey and sunrise hue
your streets of snow, your air's breath-mist,
your trees alight, your anarchists,
"refusons l'austerité,"
et toutes autres luttes pour la dignité.
I'm warmed by your humanite,
Montréal.

The Little Death

Written and directed by Josh Lawson

This Australian-made film opens by explaining that in French, “the little death” is slang for orgasm. It then takes us on a light-hearted romp through the bedrooms, garages, parking lots and a few other places of a suburban neighbourhood, scratching its head, so to speak, at the lengths to which some straight, white, monogamous people will go in their quest for sexual satisfaction.

It’s a comedy. Though allusion is repeatedly made to sexual predation (in the shape of the new neighbour who offers home-made biscuits as a gesture to soften the disclosure he is obliged to make that he’s a convicted sex offender), the film never gets too dark.

And as a comedy, I guess it’s asking too much for it to have delved deeply into the community of kink, in its survey of fetishes from somnophilia (getting turned on by watching someone sleep) to role-playing to rape fantasy. Instead, it hovers around the edge of mocking without engaging, though maybe it’s what the audience brings that is decisive. Scenes I saw as poignant had others laughing aloud. How much is that the film’s invitation to ridicule and how much, the audience’s expectation that watching anything to do with kink will be funny? I’m not sure.

[Of course, from a certain perspective, just about anything to do with human sexuality – from the straightest of straight vanilla sex to the most latex-covered group rope or needle play dreamt up by any voyeur – has its ridiculous side. Here we are, hurtling through space on a planet that’s become more and more hostile to life as it’s currently evolved – and people put vast amounts of effort into all sorts of things for sexual gratification. And making and watching films about it, for that matter.]

And yet, there is the poignant side.

There’s Phil, the man threatened with the sack for sleeping at work – staying awake nights turned on by watching his wife Maureen sleep: a wife who, awake, has only criticism of him, seems to be unhappy because of him, never listens to him; a wife who accidentally drinks the tea he made for himself with a dose of the sedative drug given to him by his boss to ensure he gets a decent night's sleep. Finding he can tell her how much he loves her, he takes to deliberately drugging her – violating her trust not for sex, as such, but for a strange kind of sad, illusory companionship.

Or Rowena and Richard, having lots of sex to try to get pregnant – lots of incredibly boring, joyless sex, at least to judge by Rowena’s face. Told that the doctor has advised conception is more likely to happen if the she has orgasms, Richard objects dismissively, “but you have lots of orgasms,” leaving Rowena crestfallen, agreeing, “yeah… so I guess we’ll just keep on doing what we’re doing.” When she discovers she has a tear fetish – sexually aroused by her partner’s tears – how can she begin to explain?

She can’t.

And if there’s a recurring theme, it seems to be the hopelessness of imagining anything positive can come out of exploring kink. While not every scenario is pursued without consent, even where there’s consent (Maeve indulges Paul’s foot fetish; Paul attempts to indulge her rape fantasy… did I mention it’s a comedy? The results are pretty funny), only the strength of the relationship makes the disappointment of the unfulfilled fantasy bearable.

The closest the film comes to hope is in the midst of the absurd situation of Sam, a deaf man unable to sleep, making a call to a phone sex line answered by a worker who needs the money to look after her nan who’s had a stroke – with Monica, an Auslan interpreter, in between. The hope is not about the phone sex – which of course is pretty funny and kind of fizzles out – but for the warm connection made by Sam and Monica despite, or perhaps because of, the absurdity.

But kinky sex? Look, it was never going to be a substitute for Dan and Evie learning to communicate, no matter how hot their role-playing scenarios got. But really? No-one was able to negotiate their way to something consensual, intense, pleasurable and connecting?

I guess I’m still waiting for that film.

A tribute to the Rojava revolution and especially the women of the YPJ.

broken

here there is no music
only poetry
and steel