Olenska

A WOMAN YES, BUT STILL FUNNY. (MAITLIN CORAN)
The Republican Guide to Female Anatomy

The Republican Guide to Female Anatomy

Yekaterina Samutsevich closing statement at the Pussy Riot Trial

Yekaterina Samutsevich’s closing statement in the criminal case against the feminist punk group Pussy Riot:

During the closing statement, the defendant is expected to repent or express regret for her deeds, or to enumerate attenuating circumstances. In my case, as in the case of my colleagues in the group, this is completely unnecessary. Instead, I want to express my views about the causes of what has happened with us.

The fact that Christ the Savior Cathedral had become a significant symbol in the political strategy of our powers that be was already clear to many thinking people when Vladimir Putin’s former [KGB] colleague Kirill Gundyaev took over as head of the Russian Orthodox Church. After this happened, Christ the Savior Cathedral began to be used openly as a flashy setting for the politics of the security services, which are the main source of power [in Russia].

Why did Putin feel the need to exploit the Orthodox religion and its aesthetics? After all, he could have employed his own, far more secular tools of power—for example, national corporations, or his menacing police system, or his own obedient judiciary system. It may be that the tough, failed policies of Putin’s government, the incident with the submarine Kursk, the bombings of civilians in broad daylight, and other unpleasant moments in his political career forced him to ponder the fact that it was high time to resign; otherwise, the citizens of Russia would help him do this. Apparently, it was then that he felt the need for more convincing, transcendental guarantees of his long tenure at the helm. It was here that the need arose to make use of the aesthetics of the Orthodox religion, historically associated with the heyday of Imperial Russia, where power came not from earthly manifestations such as democratic elections and civil society, but from God Himself.

How did he succeed in doing this? After all, we still have a secular state, and shouldn’t any intersection of the religious and political spheres be dealt with severely by our vigilant and critically minded society? Here, apparently, the authorities took advantage of a certain deficit of Orthodox aesthetics in Soviet times, when the Orthodox religion had the aura of a lost history, of something crushed and damaged by the Soviet totalitarian regime, and was thus an opposition culture. The authorities decided to appropriate this historical effect of loss and present their new political project to restore Russia’s lost spiritual values, a project which has little to do with a genuine concern for preservation of Russian Orthodoxy’s history and culture.

It was also fairly logical that the Russian Orthodox Church, which has long had a mystical connection with power, emerged as this project’s principal executor in the media. Moreover, it was also agreed that the Russian Orthodox Church, unlike the Soviet era, when the church opposed, above all, the crudeness of the authorities towards history itself, should also confront all baleful manifestations of contemporary mass culture, with its concept of diversity and tolerance.

Implementing this thoroughly interesting political project has required considerable quantities of professional lighting and video equipment, air time on national TV channels for hours-long live broadcasts, and numerous background shoots for morally and ethically edifying news stories, where in fact the Patriarch’s well-constructed speeches would be pronounced, helping the faithful make the right political choice during the election campaign, a difficult time for Putin. Moreover, all shooting has to take place continuously; the necessary images must sink into the memory and be constantly updated, to create the impression of something natural, constant and compulsory.

Our sudden musical appearance in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior with the song “Mother of God, Drive Putin Out” violated the integrity of this media image, generated and maintained by the authorities for so long, and revealed its falsity. In our performance we dared, without the Patriarch’s blessing, to combine the visual image of Orthodox culture and protest culture, suggesting to smart people that Orthodox culture belongs not only to the Russian Orthodox Church, the Patriarch and Putin, that it might also take the side of civic rebellion and protest in Russia.

Perhaps such an unpleasant large-scale effect from our media intrusion into the cathedral was a surprise to the authorities themselves. First they tried to present our performance as the prank of heartless militant atheists. But they made a huge blunder, since by this time we were already known as an anti-Putin feminist punk band that carried out their media raids on the country’s major political symbols.

In the end, considering all the irreversible political and symbolic losses caused by our innocent creativity, the authorities decided to protect the public from us and our nonconformist thinking. Thus ended our complicated punk adventure in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior.

I now have mixed feelings about this trial. On the one hand, we now expect a guilty verdict. Compared to the judicial machine, we are nobodies, and we have lost. On the other hand, we have won. Now the whole world sees that the criminal case against us has been fabricated. The system cannot conceal the repressive nature of this trial. Once again, Russia looks different in the eyes of the world from the way Putin tries to present it at daily international meetings. All the steps toward a state governed by the rule of law that he promised have obviously not been made. And his statement that the court in our case will be objective and make a fair decision is another deception of the entire country and the international community. That is all. Thank you.

EDIT: This was taken from Chtodelat News (https://chtodelat.wordpress.com/2012/08/08/yekaterina-samutsevich-closing-statement/), whom yesterday I forgot to put acknowledgment too, apologies! I just noticed it wasn’t on Tumblr as well so wanted to make it able for reblogs and such. All credit goes to them

Reddit and the Rapists: a disturbing commentary from the anoymous

A recent thread on Reddit asked rapists what their motivation was for carrying out sexual assaults and if they regretted it. Whilst what personal qualities or circumstances render somebody capable of rape is a serious and worthwhile issue to explore, the internet isn’t a suitable place. Opportunities to hear rapists should be taken away from the public eye, by trained professionals, not by Reddit. We might as well start compiling 4chan into an encyclopaedia.

The internet is such an open forum that anonymously written rape stories can be written to be more shocking or unique than others, in the most depressing style of one-upmanship. Marketing rape into a sensational story just makes it more dangerous.

The stories become an encyclopaedia of how to rape women, what to look for. It overshadowed the sobering acknowledgement that rape is often committed by somebody close to the victim, as users talked about what they looked for in victims;  “I wanted the thrill of the chase, and that’s what led me to forcing myself on girls. I would find attractive girls that were self-conscious about their looks. Girls who were pretty in their own unique way, but not the outgoing sort, mostly introverts, and girls that didn’t party or do wild things. Hopefully a girl who was a bit damaged, had a shitty ex-boyfriend, or family issues, came from a small shut in town, that sort of thing.”

“Picked her up at a bar, bought her drinks, took her home with me. We do some foreplay and then she tells me that she should really get going because she made a huge mistake. Well too fucking bad. I wasted the last 5 hours baiting this fish, and now it wants to escape. Nope.”

For victims of rape, reading this thread would have been a triggering event, as ultimately, its not the rapists story to tell. To find that your rapist gets upvoted for roughly raping you at knife point highlights why this thread was dangerous. A recurrent point was “‘woman use their sexuality to economically exploit men.” IF YOU BUY ME A JACKET POTATO AND EXPECT ME TO SLEEP WITH YOU, I WILL NOT SLEEP WITH YOU BECAUSE OF THAT. NOT EVER.

This wasn’t a useful analogous exercise providing an insight into rapists thoughts and activities, it rather became a forum of rape apologising, where people were lauded for carrying on, past the point of ‘No’.

The thread raised an interesting point overall, that rape does need to be discussed and looked at differently, it does need to be a part of a wider discussion that goes beyond the idea that all rapists are strangers in dark spaces. Norwich Rape Crisis shelter predict that over 13,000 women are raped at work each year and that four out of five victims will know their rapist. In short, roughly 90% of victims are raped by somebody they know.

Rape does have to be discussed away from the current hysteria it often possesses when brought up in public; “Don’t drink too much! Or walk down a dark alley! DON’T WEAR A LOW-CUT TOP YOU FLUTTERING HUSSY!” West Mercia Police recently apologised for their recent campaign posters, which highlighted a women’s responsibility for not drinking too much, but said nothing about saying no.

However, when the rapists story becomes more interesting than the victims story due to its anonymous fictional content than we have a problem.


This photo makes me smile every time I look at it. Me (holding the gin bottle obviously) and my friends after a gin picnic. WHICH IS A THING.

This photo makes me smile every time I look at it. Me (holding the gin bottle obviously) and my friends after a gin picnic. WHICH IS A THING.

The sheer wrongness of strip clubs

To paraphrase the excellent Caitlin Moran, it’s the year 2012, and strip clubs - for so long regarded as the holding pen for the last few sad sweaty fucks on earth - have become acceptable again. I don’t see strip clubs as glamorous and empowering for women, I find them offensive, unnecessary and sexist. I think more women need to stand up and say this; that actually, they are uncomfortable with them, rather than letting it slide for fear of being called a kill-joy. Strip clubs entrench detrimental ideas about women into society’s way of thinking - nobody would put up with it in any other setting, so why are we supposed to accept it purely because it’s happening in a purpose built club?

If my boyfriend was to go to one, my main objection isn’t that he’ll be looking at other women (although, to be honest, I think that if anyone is paying someone to dance for them in underwear then it basically counts as a sexual encounter, and thus infidelity, albeit on a lesser scale). I just don’t understand why men, perfectly decent, bloody funny, thoughtful young men, who would never dream of harassing a women on the street, or shouting racist behaviour at a football match, no matter what anybody else is doing, would think nothing of engaging in sexist behaviour because “that’s what happens on stag nights” or on a lads night out.  Why is sexism and treating women as commodities okay whereas other forms of discrimination are utterly unacceptable? It royally pisses me off that this sort of sexism is seen as not that big a deal.

Strip clubs defended as a sort of ‘female empowerment’, as if stripping down to your thong in front of some fat pervy geezer is empowering. I refuse to accept this as an argument, stripping for payment will never be the way I choose to get my kicks, nor should it have to be. The line of defence “it helps women funding their way through education” is so utterly redundant it makes me want to cry whilst raging, in order to save time by combining my stages of grief. IF WOMEN ARE HAVING TO STRIP IN ORDER TO GET AN EDUCATION, THEN WE ARE UTTERLY FUCKED.

The entire culture makes me sad for men and women. I hate the macho, laddish stereotype and think it disempowers men just as much. The fact that strip clubs have somehow become an acceptable everyday thing is an example of how much the attitude still prevails that women are primarily there to be looked at. When can we, as a society, collectively get past the idea that women aren’t there to be looked at?

In short, it’s a commodification I won’t support.

Nick Minaj deconstructs sexism whilst applying her eyeliner

‘We don’t mind a sex kitten but nobody’s interested in the cat’

Female sexuality is slowly creeping out of the dark dark cave it’s cowered in for may years, hiding behind the general assumption that women don’t like sex as much as men, nor can they talk about it openly. It’s not for ladies to talk about wanking.

This is of course, what rational-minded people would straightforwardly dispute as bullshit. Women have just as many sexy feelings as men, and act them out singly as well as with a partner. Just read Caitlin Moran’s ‘How To Be a Woman’ to read about the wide range of women’s wank fantasies. However, women still have societal dictates to comply with, whereby being a goddess in the kitchen and whore in the bedroom is somewhat expected by men and women alike. Anyone who has tried my salted caramel sauce has lustful urges so strong that I think it should have its own section of fan fiction on the internet. However, it doesn’t form part of a goddess character, rather it’s just a really good caramel sauce. The expectation of societal roles extends to elderly women, who should be sugar and spice and all things nice. Certainly they shouldn’t be HAVING SEXY THOUGHTS.

Sadie Hennessy’s exhibition at the WW gallery confronts the bullshit right on - why is women’s sexuality such a taboo topic, especially older women’s sexuality? We have dirty old men, where are all the dirty old women? Why can’t women get old disgracefully? There seems to be three society-dictated time periods of being a woman; before marriage and children, married and with children, elderly. Actually, these are all transitional things, I might someday be with children and unmarried. I might be married and not having children. Or I might sod the lot and travel around Italy eating excellent food. I don’t know. Whatever the case, I don’t think women stop having sex, or having fun once they’ve passed the menopause. Women don’t ‘heal over’ and their ovaries don’t become a kitsch accessory, painted pink and dipped in glitter.

In the exhibition, almost pornographic pictures of women lie on high shelves, similar to the positioning of male magazines in supermarkets where woman have their tits out on the front, contorted into the sexual positions that porn publicises as normal, as if every woman can get her ankles behind her head. If I ever do the splits, it’s in a very tequila-induced state and I can’t walk for a week after. I once did such an amazing jump across a dance floor that I genuinely believed I was flying. Everything whirled around me as I hurtled forward into the unknown (the gin bar in the corner). The experience repeated itself a minute later as the bouncers threw me outside. I didn’t have men lust after me me, rather I had rubbish strewn around me and a headache for 3 days. Most pornographic pictures of women fall into two categories; they are either graphic, with the women displaying every secondary sexual characteristic she has, or the women is portrayed in a childlike innocent matter, again sugar and spice and all things nice. Either way, it ends up being a ridiculously unrealistic portrayal that does all us women a disservice. The pictures aren’t quite pornographic in this exhibition thanks to one notable exception - anything that would make the picture truly graphic is blurred out, these woman have become true to form Barbie dolls. I wish I had a picture to show of it, but my short arse stature would no more let me do that, then my non-bendy legs would let me contort myself into the downward dog. It raises the point that those sort of pictures are so anti-women in the first place, they are about male attraction and desire, and without the key feminine parts on display, the photos, and the women in them, become redundant.

The exhibition had a great display of lighthouse postcards, but in every picture, the lighthouse had been replaced by a penis, as if Virginia Woolf had released postcards commemorating ‘To the Lighthouse’. Another picture, showed the women holding onto a penis the size of her, whilst a man watches from the other side of the room. The penis is not only metaphorically the elephant in the room, it also is physically.

Hennessy also focuses on older women’s sexuality with the piece ‘Big Night Out’, the Zimmer frame becomes an object laced with sexual meanings: it becomes a controversy thanks to the addition of boots and a handbag. Hennessy presents it in a humorous manner but the message is clear; older women’s sexuality is more taboo than any pornography out there. It’s far more acceptable to see a women stripping, then an older women getting her kicks.

Hennessy confronts an important point of bullshit societal taboos, but the exhibition has a wider focus, it challenges wider evils as she presents a matchstick box filled with children’s name tags, but these are the name of dictators. It confronts the actual elephant in the room - all these people were children at one time, but grew up to be so detached from the childlike state of innocence that we might as well declare it null and void.

One of my favourite parts of the exhibition was the 1950s glamour magazines, where the women were staring dreamily into the distance, as if they DID NOT KNOW THAT WE WOULD STILL BE DEALING WITH THIS SHIT IN 2012. The magazines are superimposed with headlines from today’s magazines, ‘The NO-KNICKER GIRLS’ and such, as if that’s the burdening point of women’s concerns, whose wearing knickers. WOMEN ARE THE BIGGEST VICTIM OF CUTS TODAY, AND MAGAZINES WANT TO KNOW WHO IS WEARING KNICKERS. At some point in the future I forsee myself burning mine, in order to stay warm, whilst the bankers feast on pheasant and Bollinger.

In short, the exhibition is very very good. It confronts a lot of taboos in a light-humoured way and I wish I could have stayed for longer. There’s many brilliant pieces I haven’t even focused on, so if you can go see it, please do. It is at 34/35 Hatton Garden, Clerkenwell, London EC1N 8DX, and is open Weds, Thurs, Fri 11-6pm and Saturday 11-4pm. It’s on until the 14th July. (http://www.wilsonwilliamsgallery.com/)

I really enjoyed it, and many appreciations to the excellent ‘Thirty-something Art Dealer’ (http://diaryofathirtysomethingartdealer.blogspot.co.uk/) who provided the title. Many thanks also to Francesca Brooks, the Press Officer who alerted me to the exhibition (http://thepilgrimages.wordpress.com/)

Running into danger: the culture of street heckling

I don’t particularly like running. By that, I mean that in the scale of ‘great things that I like’, it perhaps lies just above dropping a nail gun on my foot, but far far below eating Kettle Chips on the sofa. However, I like to eat pizza and this seems like the best way to ensure my body shape doesn’t engorge to vast proportions, like Violet in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

The most off-putting part of running now is the heckling you get from men when all you’re trying to do is run as fast as you can to Eye of the Tiger goddamit. It feels as if heckling lone women out running is becoming an acceptable activity; casually walk to the pub, chat with your mates, get a drink in, repeatedly scream “OI SLUT!” at the top of your voice at the female running past, return to your conversation, get more drinks in.

The idea that this is acceptable feels completely alien to me, but apparently not to the strangers who have shouted at me about my tits, or my arse, or that I should lie down on their lap. I respond with a poker face, to not give anybody the pleasure of seeing me flustered but sometimes I want to stop and challenge them because I’m not sure they realise how utterly terrifying it is for me. It’s not harmless banter, it’s a group of men baying at a twenty-year old whose primary motivation for running is to stave off becoming Channel 4’s next insensitive documentary topic.


RunnersWorld.co.uk has a list of ‘30 Things Every Woman Should Know About Running’. Six of the tips relate to how women can keep themselves safe whilst running; such as not to wear jewellery, or run at night, to carry a personal alarm and leave a route of where you’re running when you leave the house. The advice that we’re given is to protect ourselves, rather than for the culprits to be taught not to harass, but in practical terms it feels like that’s all I can do -  the onus is always on us to protect ourselves by running earlier, or running with a partner, rather than for certain men to change their behaviour. It’s an entirely different sort of abuse that women receive too, it always seems to be much more personal; the comments are often aggressively sexual or about the women’s body (it’s too fat, it’s too thin, my tits are too small to be wearing a running bra), and I don’t think the comments men receive are often of that ilk.

It’s a dispiriting realisation that you have can do absolutely nothing about the heckling without potentially putting yourself in a dangerous situation. Very little can be done about others’ lack of self-control unless they physically assault you, and by then it’s too late. It’s 2012 and there is no better protection for women to protect them from heckling. I always want to stop and ask how they would react if they found someone had made the same comment to their daughter or mother. On the few occasions I have stopped and confronted them, I’ve been told it was a joke and nothing to be taken seriously.

The idea that I should be flattered by the braying of these cretins who have singled me out is ridiculous. I don’t run for self affirmation and I’m not looking for compliments from the fat pisshead who’s just commented on my tits. It’s certainly a minority of men that harass women, but other men need to step in and point out that it’s not acceptable, whether the comments are meant to be insulting or not - I feel that if I stand and confront somebody I’ll either be laughed at or punched.

In the meantime, I just like to run faster and harder, stamping their stupid faces into the mud.

FLIRTING AND WHY IT NEEDS A SPECIAL HAT

Flirting is a myth to me, like bikini bodies or the theory that flicky eyeliner is achievable, and not a wistful dream, shrouded in regret and cataracts. In short, I think I have more of a chance for the Olympics then ever understanding any sort of flirty behaviour. I don’t think I’m especially remedial but if everyone wore a hat when flirting, it would make life a little easier.

I realise this demand might initially come across as slightly certain-historical-figures-insisted-on-this-and-segregation-based-on-arbitrary-characteristics-and-behaviour-is-tiresome. You might also point out that Hitler didn’t actually make anyone wear a hat, but I think we can all summarily agree that he went a lot further and this whole flirting debacle doesn’t need to go there. IT JUST NEEDS A HAT. Or a hand gesture.

Unlike dogs with their intuitive ear-satellites (I’m not a vet), I don’t understand when somebody’s flirting with me. I could sit there awkwardly chatting to somebody for twenty odd minutes on a night out, without realising he is APPARENTLY MAKING A MOVE. Braille would be clearer at this point of cluelessness.

I’m a fairly (overly) chatty person, and I assume most conversations with strangers on a night out are just a way of avoiding dubstep, whilst being able to smoke heavily and still drink gin. Therefore, any conversation will be enthusiastically taken up by me, and any chance of romance is ruined, as the advance turns into an enthusiastic Q&A hosted by me, peppered with my thoughts on politics and feminism.

Very quickly the advance is ruined as I relentlessly field questions about your chosen topic. It’s essentially a drunker version of Mastermind. One particular highlight of mine is when a boy invited me out to the smoking area, and I talked about my interest in goat farming for twenty minutes. I’m not entirely sure when I last saw a goat that wasn’t part of an internet meme, so I don’t know where that particular desire stemmed from.

However, if a guy came up to me, sporting a SPECIAL FLIRTING HAT then I would immediately know. To be fair, on the extremely rare occasion that I have understood flirting, I am able to extrapolate suitable candidates (as I write this it is becoming inherently clear to me that I perhaps run my love life according to bad game shows) on the basis of a few interests: gin, feminism, doctor who, pizza, politics or books. An interest in one of those is suitable, and a crossover is EVEN BETTER (although I don’t know what feminist pizza looks like - patriarchal pepperoni?).

However, a flirting hat would be a loud FLIRTING KLAXON and we could go from there. As it stands, I panic and accidentally talk about ghosts. Potentially with a crossover into goats. Donations for some sort of counselling are gladly received, gin is even better.