This weekend, the Dublin branch of the Connolly Youth Movement held a day-long seminar on the question of women’s emancipation. The seminar began with a presentation looking at the emergence of women’s oppression with the first economic division of labour in the late stages of feudalism. The seminar centred around the resolution on women’s emancipation … Read more
I sat yesterday in front of a blank word document for hours as I struggled to put to page what I wanted to say today. I had a little essay plan, like the good student I am, with the key points I wanted to thread through the story, but they didn’t make sense. I couldn’t … Read more
AR, Béal Feirste Cover Photo Credit: Ciara McMullan Photography In January 2017, the leading parties in the Stormont executive, the DUP (Democratic Unionist Party) and Sinn Féin, split over the DUP’s handling of a green energy scandal, causing the executive to collapse. This meant that, in the absence of executive ministers, civil servants were running the country. However, because … Read more
The socialist roots of International Working Women’s Day have been consigned to the history books, supplanted by a liberal feminist celebration devoid of a class character. Gone are the days of mobilisation for women’s liberation; in their place are shallow displays of white feminism – the alienation of exploited, marginalised women and the upholding of the patriarchal capitalist system. This is a call to reclaim the origins of a celebration, a day recognising the power of working women from all backgrounds to change the world as they have done in the past and will do again.
“Have you ever heard of the “Warm Bath Theory”? It was an idea published by Talcott Parsons, a sociologist who created this idea that the nuclear family prevents its adult members from behaving in dysfunctional ways and encourages them to conform to social norms. The warm bath theory suggests that a man could come home from a stressful day at work and relax into his family/wife, like a warm bath, relieving his stress.
However, as communists, we know that this theory is outdated and quite frankly, full of shit. Fran Ansley, a Marxist-Feminist rephrased it as women being “takers of shit”, in other words when men come home and try to relieve their stress from working in a capitalist system, they do so by taking their frustrations out on their wives.”
Porn is not feminist, and no reforms or measures are ever going to change that. Not porn made by women, not porn that’s paid for, nothing. This is because nothing will ever change who is hurt by porn, and who benefits. Overwhelmingly women are the ones hurt by porn, either directly by starring in it, or indirectly by experiencing abuse that men have learned from excessive porn consumption and men benefit (sexually and financially). Content made to satisfy men at the expense of all women is not feminist, even if the women are smiling in the thumbnail.
With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, suffragette movements across the world followed in behind empires that had beaten them for decades but not Irish Suffragettes.