Saturday 20 March 2010

A Vindication of the Rights of Women's Association

Hi,

We're Eddi and Debs, and we are the Co-Chairs of Womens Association :-) We have three points that we wish to raise:

1. We are not radical.
2. We are not man-haters
3. We have an obligation to speak up on behalf of women on campus

Now, many of you may be aware that we wrote a letter of complaint to Redbrick concerning the collumn, Bloke De Brum, on February 14th.

Contrary to popular belief, this was not because we can't take a joke and wish to push our overtly feminist weight around. Rather, it was because the standard of writing of this collumn was poor and lacked the satire it was desperately attempting to create. Instead the "satire" failed miserably and was actually putting across quite offensive connotations.

Even the OTT Jugular manages to portray satire to a higher standard.

Furthermore, after speaking to many of our male friends, we discovered that not all men found the collumn to be hilarious. In fact, one or two of them were more offended than we were - they hated that it perpetuated a stereotypical, stupid, predatory male from whom all women must flee, and they also thought it to be degrading to women.

No one in Women's Association was asking for the paper to bin the Bloke and bring in another Belle, and neither were we calling for "Jack" to start writing about "sparkling blue eyes" and "The One". We were simply calling for a better standard of prose.

As an Association we face a difficult and somewhat confusing task. Adhering to the label feminist, or even simply supporting feminist goals, is hard to achieve as we receive resistance on all sides.

At university we are seen as man-haters, desparate to make a point and/or causing disruption to non-feminist women's lives (just ask Redbrick).

At national women's conferences and unions, we are too liberal and middle ground. Recently at the NUS conference, we were only one of a very small minority of university's that opposed a ban on future Men's Associations and Men's Officers. The University of Hull stated that women's groups should be prevented from conducting "stereotypical women's activities", which we found a bit disconcerting to say the least. Some university's womens groups are campaigning for a ban on lads mags being sold on campus.

These are things that we are not attempting to implement at all, and neither do we have any intention to do so.

In short, we cannot win!...BUT we maintain that we should stand by our beliefs and keep attempting to represent the women around us at university.

We are trying to give a more positive message to both ourselves and the women on campus about our work. Rather than incessant 'no' campaigns, we are trying to create discussion, formulate questions and find out about different women's experiences on campus.

Thus we provide drop in coffee sessions on Wednesdays; organise panel discussions to whom anyone can attend, regardless of gender, for no fee; we offer the chance for women to say what they LIKE about being a woman; we talk to the Islamic Sisters and find out their side of the story and what we can do to help; we organise raising money for charity through bucket shaking and through our cake sale (at which we had the good humour to embrace the irony of our association baking and dress up as housewives)......The positive list goes on.

Now, perhaps this is all too middle for some and we are not taking a hard enough feminist line. For others, our letter to Redbrick is a signal that we surely must hate all good humour on this earth and that we burn our bras in every meeting.

No, we are a group of women looking to make friends and make a difference by creating choice, equality and awareness on campus. And that is something we feel is worth fighting for.