The Trouble with Sexism Lynne Segal

The 1950s: “Happy” Families The Man’s Book of 1958, full of flagrant, murderous misogyny: “No man regards his wife with pleasure, save twice: in her bridal bed, & in her grave” “Here lies my wife, here let her lie: Now she’s at rest/& so am I” “A gentleman is a man who never strikes a woman without provocation” “But Eve from scenes of bliss/Tranported him for Life/The more I think of this, the more I beat my wife” … ad nauseum

Predators and Prey: May 1968 Some comrades from…the occupations are going to come & fuck me violently. Judging by their practice, their theories must be truly radical.

Sheila Rowbotham, at 25, 'Women: the struggle for freedom', Black Dwarf, January, 1969 'Men … you have nothing to lose but their chains …You will no longer have anyone to creep away & peep at with their knickers down, no one to flaunt as the emblem of your virility, status, self- importance, no one who will trap you overwhelm you, no etherialised cloudy being floating unattainably in a plastic blue sky, no great mopping up handkerchief comforters to crawl into from your competitive, ego strutting alienation, who will wrap you up and SMOTHER you... [but women] who will understand you when you say we must make a new world in which we do not meet each other as exploiters and used objects. Where we love one another and into which a new kind of human being can be born'

Language as crucial instruments of domination: Rowbotham, 1972 'As soon as we learn words we find ourselves outside them... The underground language of people who have no power to define and determine themselves in the world develops its own density and precision... But it restricts them by affirming their own dependence upon the words of the powerful... There is a long inchoate period during which the struggle between the language of experience and the language of theory becomes a kind of agony.’

Meanwhile..Spare Rib was tracking sexism: Tooth & Nail

And Feminist Graffiti Artists fought back: Photograph Jill Posner

Campaign against sexism often went go together with a new sense of women’s power

Visual Pleasure & Narrative Cinema Laura Mulvey

Feminism& Cultural Studies Angela McRobbie

Conflicts & Contradictions tackling sexism Early feminist reclaiming of pleasure soon collided with more pessimistic critique of any form of heterosexual desire or agency, with sexist representation increasingly reduced to sex, & the ineluctable objectification of women’s bodies. Evident in the significant appeal of Dworkin & MacKinnon, & the feminist ‘sex wars’ around ‘pornography’.

1980s was the Height of the feminist Sex Wars: Exploring Women’s Sexual Fantasies & Practices itself now dangerous

Demonization of Older Women: Goya’s obsession with witchcraft & superstitions

The (old) Lady Vanishes In the BBC, 82 % of broadcast presenters over the age of 50 are men, only 18 % are women. The Commission on Older Women, 2013 Unemployment amongst women aged has increased by 41 % cent in the last two and a half years, compared with one per cent overall. Commission on Older Women, September 2013.

Collective action against Sexism

‘ It's our time to have wage equality once & for all, & equal rights for women in the USA’