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Coming up on January 23, the feminist event I least want to go to all year! Object’s annual conference will see Fiona MacTaggart MP as ’special guest speaker’. Why not pay £7.50 to hear a women whose parliamentary record looks like:

Obviously being Blairite to the core doesn’t matter if you help Object pass anti-sex worker laws. Over to some Eagleton I’m reading:

Much feminist criticism to date has arisen from within what in Britain is termed a ‘radical-feminist’ problematic; this must be unswervingly opposed. Anti-theoretical, rampantly idealist and frequently sectarian, such ‘radicalism’ represents the presence within the women’s movement of a familiar brand of petty-bourgeois ideology. The facility with which a callous middle-class indifference to the political fate of the global masses may be tricked out as a jealous defence of feminist ‘autonomy’ – separatism in fact – is a scandal that any revolutionary, woman or man, must surely denounce. Terry Eagleton, “Walter Benjamin or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism”.

If this isn’t an example of callous middle-class indifference, what is?

I’ve been thinking a lot about authenticity since Reclaim the Night (for anyone who’s not aware of what happened the Feminist Fightback statement is here). No matter what your politics on the sex industry, the preferred method of expounding them is to get someone with a personal experience to speak; that’s authenticity. And it’s important, of course. Gone are the days (in the main, we like to think) when white middle class feminists spoke, or at least claimed to speak, for ‘women’ as an indivisible whole, a whole that looked suspiciously like their experience and theirs alone. Feminist movements have been (should have been?) educated through the criticisms of black feminists in particular to realise that there are multiple female experiences, experiences that are intersected by class and race, and those best placed to speak on those experiences are women who’ve lived them.

There are problems with this though. Although personal experience needs to be recognised and incorporated, particularly by those with the traditional privileges (white, middle class women for example), it can’t be allowed to determine rank; personal experience doesn’t determine validity of argument. We’ve all had political arguments where someone’s effectively shut everyone up by appealing to experience; “My granddad was a miner so I know more about Marxism and why it won’t work than any of you” from Tories springs to mind. Even worse, there’s the “I know loads of ex-sex workers who aren’t here but if they were they’d be disgusted and angry at your arguments for decriminalisation”. To clarify: recognising there are multiple narratives of oppression that intersect, good. Using the logic of this to undermine political debate by appealing to authenticity to trump everyone else, bad.

So to Reclaim the Night, and abolitionist feminism in general. One of the things we get slated with on the sex worker rights side, with depressing regularity, is the experience of many women who’ve left the sex industry, often former street workers, who now campaign on the abolitionist scene (note: I’ve never met any such women, the slating we get is by proxy). Bring up a sex worker rights perspective, and you’ll get told your politics are an affront to women who’ve suffered in the industry, often horrifically, through drug abuse, beatings, rape, coercion. It’s pretty difficult for even the most hard-headed activist to continue in such circumstances, particularly since no feminist with a sex worker rights position ever seeks to deny such experiences exist. Their appeal to authenticity shuts us up.

Pro-sex worker rights feminists appeal to authenticity too, in the sense that we work with sex workers, we listen to sex workers, we campaign alongside sex workers, and we are sex workers (I don’t want to draw a feminists/sex workers distinction – the two can and do overlap). Feminist Fightback has had conferences where sex workers have spoken about their experience (but mostly about their political opinion). Curiously, when we do this, when we relate personal experiences just like the abolitionist side, we are silenced. And I don’t just mean by other feminists, though that happens too (anyone on the LFN list see me get told I have ‘blood on my hands’ for the umpteenth time by Finn McKay’?). Cast your mind back a few weeks to the Belle De Jour controversy; it seems like every time a sex worker who isn’t telling of beatings and rape and abuse speaks, they get accused of perpetuating some ‘happy hooker’ myth, that their experience isn’t valid, and to retell it might even be dangerous.

I’d suggest this is because the ‘happy hooker’ myth doesn’t really exist, not in the news, not on TV and film and certainly not in politics. No one subscribes to this view; it only gets mentioned when a sex worker gets uppity enough to dare to say actually, hang on, my life isn’t like the grim picture you’re all painting. Then it’s used to shut her up.

Here’s where the authenticity part gets interesting. So far we’ve established both the abolitionists and the pro sex worker rights activists involve current and former sex workers, who lend authenticity to their politics. But what makes the pro-sex worker rights side different? We have room for multiple authenticities. While the abolitionist side might wheel out story after story of the abuses of the industry, of which there are many, their theory cannot incorporate a single sex worker who does not have that experience. Any sex worker speaking out about their lived experience, where that lived experience does not tally with the idea that the sex industry is always and forever a tool of violence against women and must be stamped out, is silenced. In the case of Reclaim the Night, by being called a pimp, but that’s another story.

For pro sex worker rights activists the story isn’t the same. There is nothing about wishing to decriminalise and unionise sex work that cannot incorporate multiple, even opposing experiences of sex work. In fact, next time I get shouted at by an abolitionist about women who’ve been abused, as if I’m saying they haven’t, or worse that I don’t care, I’m going to tell it straight, and proudly; our politics are a better answer to that abuse than yours. Working alongside sex workers who don’t have those experiences of the industry (though that’s not to say they don’t have any criticisms, far from it) is not by default saying “we think this is the only experience” or “we don’t care about other experiences”. We can, and do, and will continue to realise that women working in the sex industry have as complex, shifting and sometimes opposed experiences as women in any other walk of life or place of work. The ball is your court, sisters: when will you?

Chris Addison wrote a column in the Evening Standard this week about the bizarre phenomenon of men’s groups popping up on campus – I’m reminded to post about it by Reuben’s piece at the Third Estate.

Addison basically takes issue with the feminist derision of, and hostility to, the men’s society movement on the grounds that these groups aim to “explore what it means to be a man in the modern world”. Reuben takes the same statement from the Oxford Men’s Society and wonders whether it’s not a step forward for men to be questioning masculinity, and how gendered roles adversely affect them.

So far, so reasonable. But all this relies on the assumption that this is really what these groups are about, and on forgetting (or never knowing, Chris Addison) the history of attacks on women’s self-organisation in student unions.

So, an elucidation for those who’ve spent less time in the wonderful world of student politics. Men’s groups or societies have a less than proud history of being set up by reactionaries to undermine women’s groups. The public logic goes something like this: there’s a women’s group that’s women-only! That’s sexist! We should have a men’s group! Cue confused reaction from sabbatical officers who’ve forgotten why the women’s group exists in the first place. Pointless debate at student council. Repeat ad nauseum. And of course the private logic is often “feminazis! attack!”

To put a group (men’s) that’s formed to discuss a perceived identity crisis on an equal pegging in terms of political importance with a group (women’s) that exists to fight for liberation is patently ridiculous. It’d probably be quite interesting to discuss what it means to be straight with a bunch of straight students. Student Unions would not, and should not, create a ’straight’ group in the stable of liberation campaign groups (LGBT, Women, Black, Disabled Students are the standard set). If these lads want to create their own club outside the democratic structures of the union, they can go ahead (and they’ve been doing this for years at Oxbridge, they’re called drinking societies).

Lurking underneath this whingeing at SUs to create men’s groups (almost always spearheaded by right-wingers hostile to feminism) is a threat to women’s officers. Not that there are many left to threaten – when I was on the NUS exec it was around 5 in terms of full-time sabbatical officers, and part-time women’s officers were being shunted off exec teams constantly. Logic, again: the women’s group has a full time officer! The men’s group doesn’t! That’s sexist! Reaction from sabb teams: we can’t afford another full-time officer. But hmm, maybe it is sexist. Let’s have a general equality sabb, or even better, bump the women’s officer to part-time exec.

On the flipside, of course, any good women’s group ought to be organising events men can participate in; after all, we want them on our team, right? But however much Patriarchy Hurts Men Too, there simply isn’t a single campaiging issue that a men’s group could take up that wouldn’t either already be covered by Welfare and charities work (testicular cancer is often cited), or already be covered under working with the women’s group (I can’t think of a single childcare campaign that wouldn’t welcome input from single fathers, for example). There was a great pamphlet on this doing the rounds when I was at Cambridge that expanded on this in the form of FAQs, which I think is still being used by NUS, but doesn’t seem to be on the web.

Fundamentally, denying men a self-organised group within a student union structure is not discriminatory; self-organised groups exist to fight systematic oppression, and there simply isn’t systematic gender discrimination against men. On the other hand, even having the debate at union meetings puts women’s groups/officers in the position of constantly having to defend themselves against accusations of sexism or illegitimacy; really, we’ve got enough to do without all this bollocks to counteract too.

Underneath it all, I can’t help thinking the depoliticisation of students’ unions and of feminism might have a part to play in the birthing of men’s group proponents. When the arguments for women’s groups were fresh in student officers’ minds, this shit wouldn’t have got so far. But identity politics has got a firm hold on liberation campaigns in student unions; they’re forgetting that campaigns groups should be about campaigns and be active, political, democratic space, and instead many are turning into vague support groups. I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve been invited to a showing of the Vagina Monologues or a photo exhibition about violence for International Women’s Day, organised by the women’s group. “Diversity” campaigns “celebrate” Black History Month whilst failing to get on the streets against the fascists, or to protest racist attacks (see this week’s Education Guardian here). In this context, it’s no wonder men’s group proponents can make themselves sound reasonable; if the self-organised campaigns are just a space for reflecting on a shared identity, why shouldn’t men have one?

Of course, they’re not, and they shouldn’t, and even when liberation campaigns are strongly political and active right-wing students will attack them. And Reuben and Mr Addison are playing a naive game countenancing men’s groups outside the context of the day-to-day reality of SU politics. And I’ve got a lot more to say on identity politics that should probably form the content of a more coherent post. But maybe, if we got our house in order in the student feminist movement a little more, we’d be better placed to fight this rubbish.