I’m a slut

but  but

but I’m not  I’m not

I’m a slot

I’m a slut

but but

what what could it mean

am I a slut?

but but

he said you’re a slut

he said look at your butt

you’re a slut

I said

but but

she said she’s a slut

no buts about it

just a slut

all smut

they all said she’s a slut

no doubt about it

but but I said

I said but

I’m no slut

I’m no slit for your bit

I’m not here for you

so fuck off and stop doin me in

he said but but

no slut here

no fear

he said but but

she said but but

they said but but

I’m not the butt of your names

your words are not my words

no fuckin way

so shut up

I’m no slut

I’m no slut walker

I’m a walker but bein a walker

don’t make me no slut

so butt out

get outta my mind

I’ll think what I want

I’ll do what I want

I’ll walk at 3 am if I want

I’ll wear big boots and kick butt

I’ll cut my hair short

I’ll leave it long

but I won’t do pussy on the street

because I’m not here for you

you pussy stalker

cos I’m no slut

you say but but

you look like a slut

you must be a slut

if you’re out a 3 am

if you don’t look girlie

you must be a fuckin feminist

they’re all sluts

that’s what they are

and I say

you got it boy

you got it girl

I’m a feminist

now fuck off

I’m no slut

d’you hear

try again

I’m no slut

they all said but but

Susan Hawthorne is the author of six collections of poetry including Cow and Earth’s Breath.

A "sex scandal" broke open at a military academy in Canberra, Australia, when some cadets viewed via Skype sex between a male and female cadet.  Newspaper accounts refer to the event as "consensual sex."

How can sex be consensual as claimed in this case when, as part of the act, the male cadet had arranged for other male cadets to watch in another room which was then streamed via Skype.  That turns the "consensual sex" into voyeurism and forced pornography.  But how can we count how many crimes were committed here when the initial premise of consensual sex is so flawed?

No worries – as there has been no discussion of charging the boys involved (one was under the age of 18, none behaved with adult maturity).  But the woman cadet upon whom sex for public viewing was had, was brought in on a disciplinary hearing on supposedly unrelated matters right after the event was made public.  She was even made to apologise to her peers which was interrupted only when one of the male cadets shouted ‘Slut’. And for days afterward, the Australian Federal Police had not yet determined if any laws had been broken.

But since the Skype scandal broke in early April, and it has been called the Skype scandal as if Skype had violated the law, the woman and military regulations, as if the voyeuristic boys and their buddy in bed in front of the Skype camera had no responsibility or involvement in the incident. Neither their names nor any other reference to them appear in Australian media accounts which name the woman by her first name and do not hesitate to represent her previous behavior as if it were the cause of this invasion of her right to privacy.   

Defence Minister Stephen Smith has been the public voice of reason and has expressed sensitivity to the woman cadet.  An investigation was immediately launched and six enquiries are currently ongoing.  But as of late April there still have been no arrests of or charges filed against the boys. 

A military culture of rape? some wonder.  The culture of rape is so normalised, so accepted that, in this case, we have yet to see a question of the boys behaviour or action on the number of sexually related crimes they have committed.  But if you follow the Australian reporting on this case, and if Australian media at all reflects its society, the military culture of rape is a reflection of an Australian culture of rape. 

There is more to the question of rape in the military than that.  The military's goal in training cadets is to produce killers and to do that, killer soldiers are trained to be remorseless for the act of taking the life of another human being.  Remorseless killers are grunts, they carry with them the gang mentality one might find on the streets, destruction for the sake of itself.  Whatever kinds of human beings these cadets were before they entered the military, their training for war, for why else do we have militaries but to fight wars (in the US our government makes up wars for our soldiers to fight and our armament companies to do business), dehumanises them to bring out the worst of human behaviour – the killing of another human being. 

While those of us outside the military tend to see the precision of military parades complete with smart, perfectly fitted uniforms, those representations are meant for us to gloss over the grunts underneath that come out in combat, not because they were born that way but because the military trains them. 

Yes, an investigation is taking place, but until we rethink the entire venture of making militaries and turning out killing machines named "the troops" for combat, we can expect little to change.  That is why in my latest book I've called for both ‘unmaking war’ and ‘remaking men’.

Kathleen Barry, feminist, sociologist and Professor Emerita of Penn State University is the author of five books, the latest – Unmaking War, Remaking Men: How Empathy Can Reshape Our Politics, Our Soldiers and Ourselves is published by Spinifex, Australia and Phoenix Rising Press, US.

First, we want to thank you for your stated commitment to ending men’s violence against women and children. We waited a long time for men to come on board and join us in this fight for real equality and justice, and you have pledged to do just that. We thank you for talking the talk. We write today to plead with you now to walk the walk in more obvious ways.

On New Year’s Day, 1 January 2011, media reports reminded us that the slaughter of women and children is continuing unabated.

In Canley Vale in Sydney’s west, a 32-year-old man was arrested and is under police guard at Liverpool hospital. When police arrived at the block of units, they found a 24-year-old woman with stab wounds to her stomach and shoulder on the stairwell. Her partner had barricaded himself in the unit with their 2-year-old daughter. The police broke in and arrested the man and found the 2-year-old unconscious. She later died of stab wounds at the Westmead Children’s Hospital.

Also on New Year’s Day, in what the media called a murder/suicide, a man in the Northern Territory shot his wife with a crossbow and then set the house on fire. The bodies of the victim and the perpetrator were later found in the burnt-out house.

We plead with you, White Ribbon Ambassadors, to do more to stop the slaughter of women and children. It’s one thing to wear a white ribbon, to stand up on White Ribbon Day and declare that you are men who abhor the violence of other men, but it’s quite another thing to take practical and determined steps to stop it. We know it’s a difficult task, but we’re depending on you, because we know that violent men are much more likely to listen to you than to us.

In 2008, the Federal Government under Prime Minister Kevin Rudd funded the White Ribbon Foundation to the tune of $1 million for four years to expand into rural and regional areas. In light of the continuing slaughter of women and children both in the city and the bush, we are seriously wondering how that money is being spent. If government funding doesn’t result in fewer murders and less violence by men against women and children, then surely the Australian White Ribbon movement must be called to account.

We, feminists with decades of experience in research and activism in the area, stand ready to work with you, and would welcome any request from you to work in partnership. With men’s violence against women and children escalating year-by-year, you will agree with us that the matter is extremely urgent.

Sincerely,

Coalition of Feminist Voices  

Spinifex has been attending the Frankfurt Book Fair annually since 1992. Each year our appointments with agents and publishers grow and over the years we have built up a significant contact list. Our stand is part of a joint one organised by the Australian Publishers Association, along with many other Australian independents. It’s a great opportunity to talk to friends and colleagues – from home and abroad.

The thing about Frankfurt – or any book fair for that matter – is that it’s a beginning place for discussions. Sometimes it is about closing a conversation that started a year or two beforehand; sometimes opening doors with new agents; sometimes continuing conversations that have gone on over many years, finding the next project that will work with international colleagues.

The work we began in 2009 continued this year. In 2009 discussions started with a new Polish agent, AFK Agency, about Betty McLellan’s Help! I’m Looking for a Man Boy. In 2010 this book has now been sold to a Polish publisher. It is the sixteenth language for this title, as well as a second edition. Other books are now on offer to Polish publishers. We also hope that a new arrangement with a Turkish-language agent, Anatolian Literary Agency will bring new books to our attention and the chance to have Spinifex books translated in Turkey.

It was at Frankfurt in 2007 where we first came across the work of Turkish human rights lawyer, Fethiye Çetin, whose book My Grandmother was published this year to coincide with the Melbourne Writers Festival. The conversation continues.

We have had a long association with Fernwood Publishing in Canada and this continues as they have bought rights to Maria Mies’ memoir, The Village and the World: My Life, Our Times. It is an extraordinary personal history of Maria’s life and her involvement in a host of political movements. She was a forerunner of the women’s movement and her experiences have much to teach about what it is that makes activism successful. Maria has been an inspiration to activists in the anti-globalisation, peace and food security movements, not to mention her incredibly important work in resisting reproductive technologies, free trade rip offs and critiques of colonisation and development. Catching up with Maria and translator Madeline Ferretti-Theilig in Cologne after the Frankfurt Book Fair was, as always, full of passionate conversation.

Translators play an important role in taking Spinifex titles into the world and in September Karin Meissenburg, the translator into German of Cathie Dunsford’s Cowrie novels, was a guest of the University of South Pacific in Fiji, along with Cathie and Susan Hawthorne at a conference on creativity and climate change. Artists, academics and activists from a dozen or so countries attended this stimulating event.

One book that piqued a lot of interest this year is My Sister Chaos, debut fiction from Lara Fergus and it is currently with several publishers. Even poetry generated interest this year, with Susan Hawthorne’s Earth’s Breath being considered by a UK publisher.

While we don’t have world rights on Gail Dines’ Pornland, the interest this book generated suggests that our 2011 book, Big Porn Inc will find international co-publishers – a great way of doing business.

2010 has been an important year for making international contacts and following Frankfurt, we attended a meeting in Paris with the International Alliance of Independent Publishers to discuss a range of activities we hope to generate in the next few years. Publishing is often a long-term game, but it is always worth the wait when important books can be released in several markets simultaneously. That was the case this year with The World According to Monsanto which was published in the USA by The New Press, India by Tulika and Australia by Spinifex Press. In Paris, we met with the author, Marie-Monique Robin and were impressed by her passionate involvement in tackling difficult areas of investigative journalism. This project was supported by the Alliance and we look forward to future projects.

In the middle of 2010 we travelled to the USA where we met with The New Press just prior to the release The World According to Monsanto in Australia. It was in Boston, at the Stop Porn Culture conference, where we met up with Gail Dines and realised that we might have the opportunity of releasing her book, Pornland in Australia. And we look forward to her visit to Australia in 2011 for the Sydney Writers Festival. And in California we caught up with Kathleen Barry, whose book Unmaking War, Remaking Men, a critique of masculinity and war is making waves in both the USA and Australia.

From our meeting in Paris has come another co-publication opportunity, with Indian publisher Women Unlimited for a South Asian edition of Kathleen Barry’s Unmaking War, Remaking Men. We have worked with Women Unlimited over many years, including publishing co-editions of Soil Not Oil and Staying Alive by Vandana Shiva who recently visited Australia to receive the 2010 Sydney Peace Prize. This is an indication of great interest in her work and that of other activists. We first published Ecofeminism, jointly authored by Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva in 1993 after visiting Frankfurt Book Fair. It is as if the circle has turned full circle.

Spinifex would like to acknowledge the funding support we received from the Australia Council to travel to Frankfurt and Paris. We are most grateful for that support.

Watching the ABC’s Four Corners programme, Heart of Darkness last night I was struck by the fact that this massive level of rape going on in the Democratic Republic of Congo is really a civil war against women. The DRC has been continuously exploited as a nation for its mineral wealth by Western countries and the minerals that make our mobile phones vibrate are just the latest theft of wealth (background reading on the Congo).

The DRC is not alone in its high levels of rape against women. In Nigeria women fear to use the communal toilets because they fear sexual assault. And what about our own countries where despite laws on the books against rape, it is a crime that occurs daily?

The UN is ineffective. They have reduced the word rape to a bureaucratic acronym that makes you feel nothing: GBSV. I’ve had many a friend scratch their head wondering what this might be short for. Amnesty has put out many press releases about violence against women all around the world. Still nothing happens.

In the meantime, pornography is sold on street corners and in milk bars and petrol stations. Girls and women are increasingly sexualised. So-called progressive males keep up their call for an end to censorship so they can get their rocks off. They call for legalisation of prostitution so women can be legally sold a hundred years after the end of slavery.

And that acronym: gender based sexual violence. Let’s call it for what it is. A perfectly good and understandable four-letter word: RAPE. It is violence against women. It is a war against women. On every level of civil society: between nations, within nations, within communities and families – it is a civil war against women.