Socialism, Sexism & Sexuality [Liner Notes] White Town

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An Idiot Writes

When I was young, no more than five or six, I had a friend called Catherine. She was a loud, proud tomboy and I loved her. Most of the kids would play the old 'I'll show you mine if you show me yours' game but Catherine was the most infamous exponent. She was always intrigued by my tiny cock because it was the only brown one she'd ever seen. We used to play in this fashion for hours. She'd demand I expose myself and I, scaryfyingly excited, would pull my pants down. She'd always coo at the colour (What was I meant to havе as a little Indian boy? A pink one?) and then, fulfilling thе kid law, would show me her hairless pale cunt. Sometimes we'd touch each other, fuelled by a heady mixture of kid-sex and simple curiosity. Other times we'd pee in front of each other. One time I distinctly remember trying on her knickers and both of us nearly dying of laughter because we already knew, at that tender age, that only girls were meant to wear flowery underwear. Eventually when my family moved from Norwich, I cried for days, mainly because I missed Catherine. And also because Bristol was even more overtly racist than Norfolk had been

I loved Catherine for the way she saw me as just another kid, to the other girls and boys I was nearly always just a smelly paki, a nigg*r, a coon, or at best a darkie, similar to the charming submissive stereo-types so popular in those children's books mostly written by fascistic upper-class imperialists. The other children would point at drawings of smiling Indian women in gorgeous saris, waving Union Jacks at visiting British royalty, and say "See! We gave your lot railways! Without us you'd all be in mud huts! Stupid coons!" But to Catherine I was a friend. We were both outsiders. She was shunned for her boyishness (especially by the most coquettish, girly-girls) and obsession with 'down-unders', I for the dreadful social faux-pas of being born, (white) god forbid, with the wrong colour skin. Looking back, the most important component of my friendship with Catherine was that we were equal. Nothing we ever did sexually was dirty or sinful in that uniquely adult way. Even the urination was only us, er, pissing about. Now, as then, I never once think of Catherine as being a slut, whore, slag, tart, or any of the other names the 'normal' kids branded her with. She wasn't 'dirty'. Our sex wasn't 'dirty'. She was just a little girl. And she was my friend.

So what's happened to me in the last twenty-one years so that I now feel compelled to sit and type out happy personal memories I'd rather not share at all? Is it merely rampant egomania? Is it just a cutesy-wutesy way of packaging yet more indie-boy angst? No

Being Bolshy

What's happened is that I can't be silent any longer. I've taken enough beatings from fascists, I've listened to too many male judges condoning rape and child abuse. I've sat eating while on T.V. African babies shit themselves to death as a direct result of Western foreign policy, only to hear some smug Tory bastard suggest that 'perhaps these women should be sterilized if they can't afford children.' Hitler would be proud of you, you fucking racist, sexist idiot! I've had three girlfriends and two of them had been bullied viciously as girls, one had been physically abused by her father and one had been raped at fifteen. Of my female friends, the overwhelming majority have been pressured into unwanted intercourse by their 'lovers', subject to incestuous sexual abuse, or simply raped outright, often by husbands or long-term boyfriends. Now, whenever I meet a woman for the first time, a part of me is thinking, 'What horrors have you been through?' And reading through books like Marilyn French's 'War Against Women' or Andrea Dworkin's 'Intercourse' only confirms that the women I know are experiencing the 'average' atrocities women experience around the whole world, within every subdivision of race, creed or class

Because I refuse to be silent about the war against women being waged both by capitalist patriarchy and individual men, I get a lot of flak. Precisely from those men with the greatest vested interest in the subjugation of women - priests, politicos, bosses, boyfriends. I am sick and tired of being told by yet another 'revolutionary', 'Marxist' boy that feminist is only one small part, like anti-racism, of the great, mucho-macho fight against capital. How can you possibly call yourself a socialist if you believe that four thousand years of ingrained, carefully nurtured exploitation of women is going to vanish with the glorious revolution, like some nasty old cobwebs before the bright, red duster? Isn't it obvious that the worker's revolution will never happen without the empowerment and liberation of the half of the human race that does most of the work? Explain to me exactly how these parties can have the effrontery to call themselves revolutionary when they are vastly male-dominated, authoritarian institutions. They would rather engage in macho picket-line adventurism than organise a creche rota that would enable female comrades with children to actually be heard, instead of talked at and ghettoised as another 'single issue.' Unless a party has at least 51% active female membership, (or is trying it's damndest to achieve this) it is fundamentally not revolutionary, Trotskyist, Leninist, Marxist, or socialist. I've always thought that 'fighting fire with fire' was a scientifically dubious metaphor. I'm politically certain that patriarchy cannot be defeated by organisations which, no matter the fiery incentive they use, are in themselves patriarchal

I Was Trotsky's Nun

When I was young, no more than twenty, I met my first lover. She was everything which a boy romantic looks for in an older woman. When she first kissed me I couldn't stop my hands from trembling and I was crying so hard that my breath caught like a child's. For the past couple of years I had been a political activist, marching for this, against that, organising demos and hawking Trotskyist papers in town every Saturday. Behind all this right-on fervour I was just as obsessed with love, women and sex as I am today. But left-wingers are adept at self-censorship. I'd valiantly condemn sexism while never confronting my own. I'd preach from that moral high-ground that only virgin men can occupy. I had never and would never hurt a woman. Oh no, not me. Ohh, all that sexual energy I had. What could I do with it but redirect it into hairshirt socialism, convert it into hatred for 'our enemies' or, inevitably, purge it with a guilty wank over a porn mag I'd swopped at school? I was the epitomy, the blazing ideal of the feminst man. If the world had valued hypocrisy I would have won the Nobel Prize

But when she kissed me something changed forever. I'd never, ever been wanted sexually by a woman before. And the way she wanted me - that went against all the homely little cliches I used to trot out about 'what women really want.' I couldn't understand it. She gave me ten quid and forced me to buy some medium-core porn from the local newsagents. I was so fucking scared that someone from the Labour Party might see me. What if they told my feminist comrades? They'd lynch me! When I tried to lecture her on the wrongness of porn she promptly told me to fuck off and proceeded to have a wank over the women whose footwear annoyed her the least. She fancied women more than I did and she liked men. Until then, having only understood two extremes, I thought women only came in two flavours, gay or straight. She loved fucking both sexes

A lot of the time I'd be impotent because she literally scared me limp. She was so powerful, so fucking intelligent, so sexual that I felt lost and pathetic in comparison. One or two times, when she was pissed or stoned, she'd try to force me to do things I found too disturbing and I'd refuse. She'd shout at me or taunt me until I started crying, then she'd relent and hold me and tell me that she loved me really. Sometimes she said that if I lost weight, I'd look like Sal Mineo in Rebel Without a Cause. She thought I was pretty

The Shape of Love