Feminism and Occupy Portland

published at Occupy Patriarchy  Nov 6, 2011

I arrived at Jamison Park on a rainy Sunday afternoon with concern that interviewable women might be hiding from the weather in their tents, but there were some milling about.

The first woman I spoke with was part of a man and woman team organizing an open mic poetry session. She didn’t know much but expressed disappointment that it was mostly men doing the speaking while men and women were sharing duties on practical matters like food preparation and providing information.

As if to prove the point, then I came across the info desk being staffed by a woman and we talked. Her perspective is that the inter-gender problems she’s seen have involved people bringing their personal problems to camp. “What used to be kept behind walls comes through tents,” she told me before suggesting I inquire at the med tent.

To get to the med tent I had to cross the street, and on the corner waiting with me for the light to change were two policewomen. I asked if they knew anything about the known sexual assault or other gendered violence, and one of them rather unhelpfully told me to go to the city website for information about “assaults against women and MEN.” The other policewoman repeated the suggestion that I ask at the med tent and pointed it out to me, and just in case I missed it the first time around First Cop reminded me that I can get information there about “crimes against women and MEN.”

At the med tent a man with a long and bushy white beard told me the camp is much calmer now than three weeks ago. Portland’s mild weather and abundance of social services has garnered it a larger than average homeless population, and some of the more mentally ill and alcoholic homeless men were being disruptive. Local soup kitchen Sisters of the Road will not serve noticeably drunk patrons so they were going to Occupy Portland’s kitchen and causing a ruckus. He explained that there are still a fair number of homeless people at the camp but the scary, violent ones had since been ejected.

Someone had donated mace and loud horns that the medical tent handed out to women who said they felt unsafe.

Santa Cause also said there was an incident about a week ago with a pregnant homeless woman getting beaten up by the baby’s father. The abuser was seen kicking the woman in the stomach and her face was scratched up. She is still at the camp but he hasn’t been seen for a week, and word had gotten out that he was a known perpetrator and would be ejected if seen again.

There is a tent designated with a sign as the “Sexual Assault Response Team” but when I inquired about it he didn’t have much information.  All he knew was that the one woman whose effort it seemed to be was barely there. On a small dry erase board was the woman’s name and a request for sexual assault volunteers, but there has been no response to my email four days later. I get the sense that a few people are trying to form an organized response but they haven’t had much support.

Next I headed for the Food Not Bombs tent to drop off the sack of apples I’d brought and to speak with the two women running that show. The talkative one said she stumbled across a meeting of women some days ago and thought they might have been having regular meetings, but didn’t know more than that. By day’s end I couldn’t find any postings or announcements about such a group, and I really, really looked. She also expressed disappointment that while other radical media outlets in Portland had an Occupy presence, local women’s bookstore In Other Words was MIA along with the city’s Radical Women socialist group.

My final noteworthy interviews were with two young women hanging out behind the makeshift kitchen. One of them had been there that early day when the rape was reported, and her impression was that the community response was surprisingly quick. “Dealing with that was prioritized at a chaotic time when a lot of construction was going on,” was her take on it. She had just been in Oakland and said that both there and in Portland far more men are taking the public megaphone than women.

Our interview was interrupted by a young woman who had been cleaning the kitchen for the past ten minutes. She came over and calmly said with an air of exhaustion, “There’s a lot of vegetables over there that need to be turned into something.” The less talkative of the pair reacted with a completely unnecessary and haughty, “I don’t react well to being ordered. It’s oppressive, and personally I just don’t respond well to that. If you want to ask me to do something I’ll consider it, but don’t order me around.”

The weary worker asked in a conciliatory tone, “Did you feel that I was ordering you?”

“Yes I did.”

“Well I’m just saying there’s vegetables over there. I mean, I don’t care because I cleaned and now I’m done but anyway…”

Ah, the familiar smell of horizontal hostility. Awkwardness aside, to their credit the two of them de-comforted from their chairs and we said our goodbyes as they headed to the kitchen.

Samantha Berg is National Coordinator for the feminist organization Stop
Porn Culture and founder of http://www.Genderberg.com, an anti-prostitution
activist community since 2005. Her newest website is www.Johnstompers.com

Three days of radical feminist SCUM

published at SistersUnderground, Oct 25, 2011

“THRILL SEEKING FEMALES UNITE”

The SCUM conference announcement dared me.

Sold and sold! I was ready to go. Then I saw it.

“Perth, Western Australia”

Damn.

So I left a wistful comment wishing them the best of luck then prayed to gods I don’t believe in for the miracle it would take to get me there. The miracle turned out to be feminist sisterhood.

The organizers met my tossed off hope of attending with hundreds of dollars for airfare, a place to stay, and a spot discussing my radical activism. Once these two generous women gave form to my sojourn, women’s donations filled in the gaps and built a matriarchal microcosm of gift-giving economy.

SCUM came on the heels of Amazon Mancrusher  and Allecto’s success organizing a shadow conference to the tragic Feminist Futures conference (details here and worth reading if this is new news to you.)

That ad hoc radical feminist meeting exceeded expectations, and thus began a thirst to see just how far they could take the radfem resurgence they had stoked.

A core of thirty women spent three radfemtastic days in Perth, a city infamous for its relative isolation from civilization. About five of the women were under 35 and at least ten were over 60, making for quite a multi-generational meeting if you disregard that no teens attended. Younger women were prominently dressed in black and the elders were a living homage to varying shades of purple.

The community hall Allecto and Amazon Mancrusher (I could happily type that name a hundred times) selected was perfect beyond expectation. The pink adobe-like venue sat cheerfully among permaculture gardens and hosted environmentalist standards like a solar powered fountain and art made from recycled materials. Inside was a well supplied kitchen, a bathroom with a shower, and a meeting room for fifty people scented with what I’m almost sure was a jasmine tree near the front entrance.

For the three nights of conference I could choose to either sleep in a proper bed back at the house or at the hippie paradise of the Earthwise center with other overnighters, which wasn’t so much a choice as a gift from goddesses I don’t believe in. I would have slept on what turned out to be a very comfortable mat just for the jasmine, but the assembled women were as charming and hilarious a sleepover crew as ever did play Balderdash.

We began the first morning’s business by listening to Nyungah elder Doolan Leisha Eatts speak about Indigenous Australia’s infamous stolen children. Families ripped apart by racism isn’t a new story, but what shook me was how recent and raw the crimes felt when sharing the air with a woman telling breathless truths. Carbon footprint guilt aside, sacrifices were made to bring me to the other side of the planet and I had considered Skype as an alternative, but there really is something magical about women gathering in a space together.

Later, Iranian-born activist Noushin Aref-Adib gave a solemn lecture about women’s especial vulnerabilities in war and in refugee situations. Sadly, Ms. Aref-Adib was crunched for time and skipped out of work to barely attend her own session before bolting back to her responsibilities.

Lyn Ariel dipped into feminism’s plentiful herstory with a recap of the bumper stickers, buttons, and protest signs that consolidated the conscience of the women’s liberation movement. We talked about the original meanings of phrases like “the personal is political” and “sisterhood is powerful” while contemplating how interpretations have changed. Then Betty McLellan upped the ante a few notches by focusing on the biggest one word feminist motto of all, “revolution.” read more