Category Archive

A pornography festival in London this weekend has been forced to relocate after protests.

Faced with the prospect of a picket, organisers of the London porn film festival, which describes itself as “celebrating queer, feminist, radical and experimental porn”, pulled screenings from the Horse Hospital, an arts venue in Bloomsbury. The three-day event will instead be held at a new location disclosed only to ticket holders.

Multiple complaints about the festival were made to Camden council. Local authorities have the power to permit screenings of uncertificated films.

Despite the festival’s progressive intentions, feminist organisations branded it demeaning. Janice Williams, chair of the activist group Object, said the films on show promoted “degradation and oppression”. Rude Jude, one of the festival’s organisers, disagreed. “This is the next step on from the moral panic and the rightwing conservative groups that protested this kind of thing before … Britain likes to think of…

Over the last few months I’ve received quite a few emails from people expressing their frustration about the lack of feminism they are receiving in their university studies, or asking me if I would be able to offer any teaching… and it got me thinking…

So, to mark International Women’s Day I’m announcing the first phase of The Institute of Feminist Thought, an online feminist school offering courses in feminist history and philosophy, which I hope will grow into a forum for all kinds of feminist thinking…

I hope as many of you as possible will join me on the journey.

Decent people don’t jeer at others who are functioning poorly in some part of life.

With religious belief holding such an outsized influence on our society, it is reasonable that atheists, humanists and other freethinkers push back against religious superstitions, outdated social scripts and archaic rules. But one way we often do this is by ridiculing believers themselves, which is less reasonable.

We give ourselves permission to sneer because we tend to think of religious belief as voluntary and lazy, irresponsible, and harmful. We often see believers as people who have chosen not to do the work of examining their faith and asking the hard questions that could show them wrong. Their sloppy thinking frustrates us, but what really gets us going is this: Having not done their homework, they seek to impose iron age beliefs and scripts on not only themselves and their families but on the rest…

I don’t know how to draw but I made this because I’m tired of people thinking we don’t need feminism. These are just everyday examples of patriarchy, sexism and toxic masculinity. The tip of the misogynist iceberg.