I’m sorry my life doesn’t fit your narrative

So someone tweeted this blogpost from The F Word yesterday about the need for gender-neutral toilets. The article made some good points about the need for more gender-neutral toilet provision – for example to help out parents with opposite sex children, people caring for a member of the opposite sex, and also for trans or non-binary people who are concerned about being misgendered and the violence that can follow this. To me, this is where the debate about gender-neutral loos is surely meant to be sitting – there simply isn’t enough public toilet provision anyway, and we need to increase that provision to ensure everyone’s needs are met. 

And then I read this paragraph: 

The shelter, relative privacy and access to running water that public toilets provide have made them useful places to have sex when folks have nowhere else to do it, but they don’t particularly lend themselves to sexual assault. In the Ladies, women remain fully-dressed outside locked cubicles. These are rooms where people may walk in at any time. Currently, there’s nothing stopping men entering the Ladies (and indeed, the laws proposed in the US would force trans men to do so) but these aren’t common locations for sexual violence; outside of horror movies, ongoing drug deals and norovirus epidemics, public toilets are pretty safe.

The paragraph has now been removed from the article, after an exchange on Twitter where the editor apologised to me. I really appreciate the apology and the acknowledgement that this paragraph could result in upset and hurt. However, I started this post so I’ll finish, as the article isn’t the only place I’ve seen this dismissal…

What I want to address is the sweeping statement that women’s loos ‘don’t lend themselves to sexual assault.’

Because that, quite frankly, is bullshit. 

A few years ago, a man followed me into the women’s toilets and tried to sexually assault me. Luckily for me I was able to fight him off – I pushed him away and said very clearly ‘you are in the wrong toilets.’ Again, luckily for me he wasn’t all that committed to assaulting me, grinned, shrugged and left. I wrote more about this incident here in terms of leading men on/victim blaming. Needless to say however, I was pretty upset, a bit shaken and absolutely furious that some arsehole had followed me into the women’s loos to try and assault me. 

So to read that the ladies toilets don’t lend themselves to sexual assault is quite a kick in the teeth – to me who has dealt with an attempted assault in this space, and to the many, many women who have survived far worse violence while trying to go to the loo. 

Who are these women? Well, here’s one. Here’s another. Another. Another. Oh look! This one’s in Bristol, the city where it happened to me! And then there was this news story from last week, where a trans woman was raped in a public toilet in New York. Then of course there is the well-documented issue for women accessing toilets in the developing world – where the lack of safe and secure toilets mean that women regularly experience violence and harassment in numbers that should be an international disgrace. 

I’m sorry that our experiences don’t fit into a cosy narrative that women have nothing to fear from men in public loos – that women’s toilets ‘aren’t common locations for sexual violence.’ I’m sorry that our lived experience doesn’t fit into the narrative that women have nothing to fear from gender-neutral toilets as opposed to single-sex loo provision. I’m sorry that the fact of a man trying to assault me in the women’s toilets is inconvenient. But the fact is, this happened to me. And it’s happened to other women. And everyone knows that this happens to women. And everyone knows that one of the reasons we have men’s toilets is because some men choose to be violent against women. 

No argument for gender-neutral toilet provision is served by ignoring the fact that the threat of male violence is something all women have to deal with, and the incontrovertible fact that many, many women will have dealt with it in this specific setting. 

One of the huge problems facing women is that we aren’t believed when we talk about the violence committed against us. Our experiences are dismissed and minimised. We’re not encouraged to report our assaults. We’re told that we were probably leading the guy on, or that our behaviour provoked his violence. Even me, with all my feminist training, sat there after the attempted assault debating whether it was me who had caused it, because I’d been chatting to the guy beforehand. 

So to read on a feminist website that the thing that happened to me and happens to girls and women the world over, is unlikely – well, that hurt. To read that my fears and misgivings about public toilets are silly, to read that the thing that happened to me is not important, is easily dismissed – it stung. 

After all, feminism is the place we go to where we are believed. Where our fears aren’t dismissed. It’s the place where women are listened to. The place where we can say how messed up it is that men invade our spaces to harm us, and share our anger that women are so violently and brutally excluded from public space. Feminism shouldn’t be a place where we’re told that our fears, our founded fears, aren’t based on anything; not when we know our fears are based on what we experience – on what happens to women every day. 

To have the violence I experienced dismissed in order to make a point about a cause I actually support – well, that is hard to deal with. Because again, the cause to create safer toilet provision for all women is not served by dismissing and ignoring the voices of some women – the women who have experienced male violence, who know what violent men will do. 

I feel really uncomfortable writing this blogpost. Not just because it means dragging up an unpleasant experience that isn’t a happy memory. But also because any argument about access to toilets is seen as an attack on trans women’s and men’s rights to safe spaces too. And yet, for me this isn’t a trans vs not issue. Because everyone knows that trans women aren’t safe from male violence in gender-neutral loos either. That’s why it’s so important for all women to have access to safe and secure toilets which violent men can’t easily access – where women can challenge and say ‘NO’ to their presence. 

Airily dismissing the idea that women’s loos are spaces where violent men attempt to assault women in order to advocate for more gender-neutral toilets doesn’t help anyone. It ignores women’s voices. It silences women’s experiences of male violence. And it does nothing to stop male violence – violence that all women live in fear of, violence that many, many, many women will have first-hand experience of. 

Listen! Me at Bristol Festival of Ideas on the End of Freedom of Speech

Listen! As Spanky Wilson sings at the start of Light my Fire.

On Saturday I was very honoured to join Julie Bindel, Maryam Namazie and Sarah Ditum at Bristol Festival of Ideas to discuss no-platforming and freedom of speech.

Listen now

I spoke about my activism work building platforms for women to speak from - including the Bristol Feminist Network, Ladyfest Bristol 2007, Reclaim the Night rallies and The Bristol Women's Literature Festival.

My two favourite bits were when Maryam Namazie said:

'I did not flee Iran to be banned in Britain'

And when I said something like this, VERY LOUDLY:

'Every day, women's voices are brutally and violently silenced. There are 90,000 rapes in the UK every year, every week two women are murdered by men. We are already being silenced and it makes no sense to me that no-platforming movements are trying to silence women again.'

I mean, I paraphrase. You can hear what I actually said for yourselves.

It's a shame you can't see the footage as I can assure you I was wearing a BRILLIANT OUTFIT.

Thank you to everyone at Festival of Ideas for inviting me, and to my fellow panellists for refusing to allow marginalised voices to go unheard.

For the Heroine Collective: Djuna Barnes

I'm writing a series for the lovely team at The Heroine Collective about the women of 1920s Paris.

This month I focused on Djuna Barnes.

And if you missed the last one, it was all about Janet Flanner, who is the woman I would have a drink with if I could go back in time and have a drink with anyone.

Madness and obsession: my short life as a ballet dancer

I’ve thought about writing this piece for years, and somehow never quite plucked up the courage. I didn’t talk about my life at ballet school for a long time; when I started talking about it my friends would express surprise at this part of my life they knew nothing about. I too was shocked at their surprise – surely this is something everyone knew about me? It’s so close to me. It was, is, so huge to me. 

So I wanted to write this piece for a long time and then reading Sarah Ditum’s excellent article in the New Statesman today on adolescent girls’ bodies gave me the kick to write it. 

Because I was reading her powerful words about girls becoming divorced from their body, as our body becomes not a subject that does things but an object to adorn, and it made me think: when did that happen to me? When did I start to feel that detachment from my own body? And what impact did it have? 

And I thought about ballet school. 

I didn’t go to ballet school full time. Between the ages of 12 and 15 I think it was, I attended a Russian ballet school after my real school. It started off three times a week and then it was every evening. So by the time the school closed down in a blaze of bankruptcy and misery (and, as I found out much later on, something worse), I was training semi-professionally every weekday and some Saturdays too. 

You can read more about the school, company and its history in this Independent article. There’s also a BBC documentary floating around somewhere. (France Byrnes, if you’re reading this, please please get in touch. I would love to see that documentary again, featuring me, tutu-ed up and pointe-shoe wearing, in Giselle!)

Ballet school was an intense and frightening place. I had two teachers, both who had trained in Russia, who took every stereotype of a Russian ballet teacher to its extreme. Lessons would be spent with being screamed at until I would break down and cry. It was easy to get things wrong, but after a screaming session you didn’t get it wrong again. Sometimes, so angry at my inability to stand in a straight line, she’d scream at me in Russian, remember I didn’t speak Russian, and scream at me again in English. And then I’d cry. 

My mum worried about me. She wanted me to leave. I’d scowl, dry the tears, go back again, and try harder. 

We worked hard. So hard. By the end of half an hour barre work we’d be sweating. Then floor work, where my jumps were especially praised (get me pissed enough and I’ll show you how good I am at jumping!). My arches are high, so when I jumped it looked as though for a moment I was suspended in the air. Pointe work – we would courir until our toes were bleeding right through to the gel pads I used to protect my poor, battered feet. 

Today my posture is great. If I slouched, my ballet teacher would slap me with the side of her hand against my spine. ‘Don’t slouch!’ shouted in a cut glass Russian accent, a sexy villain’s voice. The second teacher cried tears of joy when I first got injured, because she was so proud of me. Our pain, our blood, our twisted muscles and deformed toes were badges of honour that we showed off. To be proud of our injuries! Straining to reach the goal of ‘wearing down all the cartilage in our hips to achieve perfect turnout.’ 

We must have been mad. 

We were mad. There was an atmosphere of madness around it – the madness of absolute obsession. Who could best do the splits up the wall? Who could bend backwards while lifting up her leg to make a circle with her head? We’d take a break from pointe work to try on the beautiful hand-stitched tutus the company attached to the school wore. My favourite was from Le Corsaire, its pastel coloured layers of lace like something from a fantasy novel.

It all has an element of fantasy now. The smell of battered satin and sweat and hairspray. The tape player with its collection of classical scores, the Vaganova method, the wall length mirrors, the stickiness of resin, the flirting with our reflections. 

Ballet school bred an obsession in us (and now I’m going to get to the point that links my odd memories with Sarah’s article) and that obsession was with our bodies. 

Everything was focused on our bodies. My body and what I could make it do was my obsession. I’d go home from class, put an iron (yes, for ironing clothes) in a plastic bag, put the bag round my ankle and do leg lifts. I practised doing the splits every day for three months before I got it right, and then I did it every day for years. I even drank milk (those who know me will know how much that cost me). What could my body do? How far could my body go? Could I stand en pointe for longer, could I stand en pointe without shoes? How long could I stay suspended in air? How high could I hold my arabesque? How pretty could I make my attitude? 

As a ballet dancer, all my energy was focused on what my body could and couldn’t do. It was about extending my body’s reach – about turning it into something that could achieve amazing, gravity-defying, awe-inspiring things. Isn’t that something? To know that your body can do something wonderful for you and for other people? To work your body so hard because you can do what’s beautiful? Not to care about the pain and the blood and oh-my-god all those fucking tears, because at the end of it, I was standing on stage in Giselle, tutu and corset, creating patterns with my arms, my face smiling under a mask of clumsily applied stage make-up? 

It wasn’t healthy because it was an obsession, and obsessions are never healthy. But it was different to what would come later for me, and what was affecting my friends. As a young adolescent, my body wasn’t an object to adorn. In some ways my body was still an object – the tool of my trade. But at the same time my body was a tool I fully inhabited. I felt every stretch, every bend, every pain and every intense pleasure of getting it right. All my focus was on my body it’s true, but my focus was on what my body could do. When I looked right it was because I was doing something right. And my body could do some amazing things. 

It all ended with Giselle. The school had imploded, and the teachers were on the warpath. We unsuspecting students didn’t know the company had been taken over and we were sent by our teachers to go and perform – to the company’s surprise. They were lovely; they couldn’t let our ballet school hearts down, so they let us dance with them. There it was, my glittering career – for one night only. The next day I dumped my costume on my ballet teachers’ front door step and my life as a ballet dancer was over. I’d never join a company. I’d never master a pirouette. My feet wouldn’t bleed anymore and, luckily for my hips, I’d never wear down my cartilage enough to achieve perfect turn out. 

And so, a little bit later than everyone else, my body stopped being my wonderful body that did. More and more it became the thing that other people (well, men) looked at. The object to the flaneur’s gaze. 

There’s not really a point to this blogpost is there? I’m not trying to extrapolate from my experience of ballet school to make a wider point about girls’ bodies. I don’t think my time at ballet school was healthy and the impact of what was quite a frightening situation stayed with me in lots of negative ways. But I am glad that I had those years of ballet school – those years of realising what my body could do, what my body could mean to me. That for a while at least, my body was a subject before being a girl in a patriarchal society took that full ownership away from me. Losing that ownership led me to some very dark places and some very destructive behaviours that are not to be shared here. And it took a long time before my body became my own again. Before I inhabited my physical subjectivity again.  

I wish I could still make a circle between my foot and my back though. 

Madness. 

For Politics.co.uk: Marginalised voices are the first victims of no platforming

I'll be debating no platforming and the impact on freedom of speech with Julie Bindel, Maryam Namazie and Sarah Ditum this Saturday as part of the Festival of Ideas. The event is called The End of Free Speech? You can book tickets here.

In the run up to the event, I wrote about the subject for Politics.co.uk. Have a read!

For 3am Magazine: Review of Danielle Dutton's Margaret the First

My first but hopefully not last review for 3am Magazine is of Danielle Dutton's superb new novel, Margaret the First.

It was a joy to read and a pleasure to review. Have a read!

Shh!

The thing I wrote to post today I'm liking a bit too much, and think I might enter it into a competition rather than share it here.

So I can't post it, as most competitions have a rule about pieces not being published before entry - even if it's just published on a blog.

Sorry about that. I haven't failed in my self-imposed challenge but this one might find another home.

I'll make up for it tomorrow.

It's called The Holiday, by the way.

It's about skiving.

If I lose, I'll post it here another day :)