Comments on: Solidarity for the Few

By: No-hawk occupation of Toronto | Taiaiako'n Historical Preservation Society

No-hawk occupation of Toronto | Taiaiako'n Historical Preservation Society — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 03:05:40 +0000

[...] Solidarity For The Few [...]

By: Jacqueline S. Homan

Jacqueline S. Homan — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 05:30:56 +0000

You don’t have to legalize male oppression and exploitation of women in order to decriminalize the women being prostituted. Like I said before, women deserve REAL equal opportunities. Reducing women to commodities that can be bought or sold, raped or murdered at the purchaser’s pleasure does women NO favors.

I also don’t agree that these Occupiers are really confronting governments. I think it’s a counterfeit revolution to quell the possibility of a real one. If they really wanted to take down the 1% and confront the system, they would be occupying the Interstates to shut down trade and commerce, which would hit the 1% in the wallet. And they’d be occupying all the vacant foreclosed homes and putting real poor and homeless people in those homes, not turning them into off-campus frat houses for partying it up.

By: lkj

lkj — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 00:17:55 +0000

It is really no wonder that the problems that exist in society as a whole manifest in these urban encampments. Many people are there for many different reasons and it is next to impossible to control in my experience. Unfortunately rape happens everywhere. I don’t think the fact that it happens is a reason to write off the whole movement. Women can barely get help when they are raped in the world outside the Occupy movement let alone inside that world. As a woman, and someone who has done prison solidarity work and known women from the Association for the Safety of Prostitutes I support the decriminalization of prostitution. Decriminalization would reduce the victimization that women who work in the sex trade experience with the added assault of the injustice system including rapes and discrimination by police. Vancouver has a very active, women run sex workers rights movement. I highly doubt that the Occupy Vancouver demand for the decriminalization of prostitution is motivated by male desire to sexually exploit women, after all, criminalization increases the exploitability of women. Unfortunately in this capitalist society we just don’t learn a lot of important social skills that are needed in order create a functioning community – we have institutions that are supposed to do that for us, and surely they just reinforce oppressive structures. In my own experience women are not that much better at creating community, the possibility of a women’s movement itself is rift by classism, racism, even violence. I have been personally physically attacked on the job in the context of a women’s worker co-op and sexually assaulted by women (w/in gay relationships). Yes we are victims of patriarchy, and as victims we carry trauma just like working class people, those subject to racism and colonial history. It’s humbling to try to get past all this legacy of fucked upness, I feel for people who are camping out, trying to confront our governments with really important issues and trying to make a functioning community at the same time. I don’t want to erase the positive and wise voices by only focussing on the problems, the problems are always there, the good stuff pretty hard to come by….

By: Leslie

Leslie — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 19:05:52 +0000

Jacqueline, I spun off your insightful article here for a letter to Occupy Los Angeles. Please email me if you’d like a copy.

By: Michael J. McFadden

Michael J. McFadden — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 06:36:58 +0000

Jacqueline, thank you for the thoughts and insights on what’s going on with the Occupy folks. I’ve been pretty concerned about them since the start: there was a lot of experience, training, and hard work that went into the movements in the 70s, and I don’t think there are enough dedicated and well-trained people out there today to support what they are attempting on such a wide scale.

I’m surprised and saddened to hear of the amount of problems for women at the sites. Unfortunately those and other problems will probably get used against the movement as a whole as the “powers-that-be” use them to justify a “clean-up” that the general public will then swallow as “necessary.”

:/
Michael