Susan McKay Speech at the Dublin Writers Festival on 5 June 2010

Posted on June 11, 2010 at 01:00 AM

My daughter was telling me about a Justin Timberlake song in which, she said, he compares the girl with a takeaway. I looked up the lyrics "Take my order cause your body's like a carry out..." Ads flashed across the screen, 'Hot ladies in Dublin on the prowl for fun...meet them today.' "Gorgeous Asian women looking for love..."

The takeaway song reminded me of something horrible.
A murder in fact. The naked body of a young woman had been found on a beach near Portrush on the north coast. I'd been sent up to write about it. Julie Hamill had been at Kelly's nightclub. She wasn't a drinker but when she'd left that night she was with a man and she was almost incapable of walking.

I went out to the club, past the beautiful Atlantic strand and the caravans. It was nicer than I remembered. Macy Gray's song was playing:
'try to say goodbye and I choke/try to walk away and I stumble....I may appear to be free/but I'm just a prisoner...' My daughter was small at the time, and she used to sing that song, but where the lyrics say, 'my world crumbles when you are not here" she'd sing, "I wear goggles when you are not here." Now the song has lost its innocence for me. Its sweetness and romance are tainted by brutality.

That night I stayed in a hotel in the town. The basic sort of hotel my newspaper considered suitable for its reporters. I went into the bar. A man was sitting up at the counter. I glanced at him, smiled briefly, then bought a bottle of water from the barman and left. As I got into the lift, I realised the man had followed me. He looked at me and I suddenly knew that he intended to come to my room. I stopped the lift at the next floor and got out. He said something but I ran down the stairs and I didn't hear it.

I was frightened, but I was also annoyed at myself for smiling at him. He'd taken it as his cue, a signal that I was available. I told the police about him, but I think they already knew who the killer was at that stage and it wasn't him. Which brings me back to the song about the woman as a takeaway. The man who murdered Julie Hamill had spiked her drink with horse sedative before driving her to the beach where he beat her up, raped and strangled her. Then he returned to Portrush and got himself a burger and chips.

I had my own not so great memories of a night at Kelly's. When I was a schoolgirl in Derry in the seventies I'd accepted a lift with a considerably older man called Les who was well known among us girls as what we called 'a wolf'. He was one of those sixties men for whom the sexual revolution meant just one thing - that all females were available, especially 16 year olds. It was entirely unwise of me to accept his offer, and entirely opportunistic. Thin Lizzy were playing, Portush was 30 miles away and Les had a car. It was, as it happens, an orange MG Midget sports car, something which meant a lot more to him than to me.

After the gig at which I allowed Les to ply me with multiple vodkas, we set off. But instead of driving me home, he drove to the beach. There, without preamble, he lunged. This was no teenage playing around. He was unzipped and on top of me in seconds. After a brief wrestle, I told him I was going to be sick and he let me open the door, no doubt fearing for his cars upholstery.

I sat on the sea wall, wondering what my stern Presbyterian granny who lived just up from the seafront would say if I turned up at her door this late, in this state. It wasn't a promising scenario. After a while Les rolled down the drivers window and said angrily that he'd take me home. I got in the car and we drove back to Derry in silence.

The next day I told my friend and we fell about laughing.
Our reckless pursuit of good time sometimes had worse outcomes, which I won't go into. By 1981 I'd seen the light and was working with other women in Belfast to set up the North's first rape crisis centre.

Now I have teenage daughters, and my greatest fear for them has been that they will be like I was. When they and their friends go out at night they wear shoes that used to only be seen in the windows of sex shops, the sort of shoes Germaine Greer had in mind when she wrote about 'fuck me shoes'. Killer heels you couldn't run in, is what I think.

I know from my girls and their friends that the same values still apply, that boys want girls to have sex, but if the girl does, she's looked down on as a slut, whereas boys still boast about their prowess. I asked one of my girls why she didn't ask a certain boy out, and she said, don't be stupid mum, girls can't ask boys out, boys have to ask girls. Some of my daughters friends like rap music with its panoply of bitches and whores. But then back in the seventies, I didn't know Thin Lizzy had lyrics like 'I'm a mad sexual rapist' and I might have laughed it off if I'd noticed.

There are good reasons why most girls aren't interested in feminism. They haven't realised yet that a lot of what will turn out to be wrong or difficult in their lives is because of their gender. Some will, of course, sail along quite happily, but the risks are high.

A few facts. Women are more at risk of poverty in Ireland than men, and the most vulnerable of all are older women. Women are concentrated in the lowest paid sectors of the workforce, and very few make it to the very top. Across the board, women earn 17% less than men. With just 14% of seats in the Dail held by women, we rank 87th in the world and falling. Women do 86% of the caring and most of the unpaid domestic work. One in ten Irish women has been raped, and domestic violence is at levels that have repeatedly been noted as a cause for concern by the UN.

The National Women's Council is an umbrella body for nearly 200 women's organisations and groups around the country. Through our members, we are involved in campaigns to change all of the above and a lot more. We work increasingly, for example, with migrant women including those seeking asylum here. Some of these women, already traumatised by experiences in conflict in their own country, are being held here in circumstances not unlike imprisonment for up to 7 years and rising, and that the majority of women working in the sex industry here are now migrants, some of them trafficked.

We try to get attention in the media for these issues, and we have some success. However, if you did a graph of our coverage for the past couple of months, you would see a peak. Was it the statement we issued in support of Senator Ivana Bacik's bill to criminalise female genital mutiliation? Our statement of opposition to a suggested cut to the minimum wage, earned predominantly by women? Coverage of our wonderful day on racial integration maybe? Something we said about a 43% rise last year in women seeking refuge from domestic violence? Our joint publication with Oxfam of a report on women and the recession?

No. It was about crisps. It was when we reluctantly responded to media queries about our reaction to a series of ads showing fantastically beautiful women in rugby gear posing sexily and with provocative captions. We were inundated with calls from newspapers, tv and radio journalists.

We said that it was tiresome to see this resort to retro-sexism. But we knew that we were playing the advertisers game. Just as predictably, at the end of a week of this, a columnist who has so severely run out of ideas that he is reduced to taunting us on a weekly basis in the hope that we will respond, demanded to know why the National Women's Council of Ireland had nothing better to do than to complain about crisp ads.

It was the same when we made similar comments after an airline published a charity calendar featuring page 3 type photos of its cabin staff. We said as little as we could, but it was enough to give the owner of the company the chance to rubbish us as an 'institute for ugly women...jealous of our good looking girls.'

We hadn't a clue, he said, about "how young women empower themselves." As journalist Jennifer O'Connell wrote in an excellent column in the Sunday Business Post, this man was undoubtedly aware that Irish internet users google the words porn and escorts more often than any other nation, that we are the 4th most enthusiastic googlers in the world of prostitutes, and second in the world for lapdancers. "I'm no prude," she wrote, "But being photographed in a bra and thong by your employer so he can flog the pictures to the very same groups of leery stag parties you may well end up serving beer to on their 99 cent flight to an airport somewhere near a city in Europe, is not empowering."

Linda Kelly, the outgoing equality officer with the Union of Students in Ireland spoke at our International Women's Day event in March this year about what its like to come in to work on a Monday morning and have your male colleagues saying things like, 'Anyone see any good porn at the weekend?" or, going through the newspapers and saying, 'look at the boobs on her.' Such comments are just as likely to be made about women in politics as women on page 3, by the way. During last June's local elections, one of the tabloids invited its readers to have a look at the women candidates and vote for the "best Babe".

The relentless trivialisation of feminism is notable also in the failure to apply its analysis. There's been a lot of attention given recently to the neglect of children in state care, but although recent research shows that in 2 out of 5 families into which there has been social services intervention, domestic violence is an issue. Why then do we continue to have one of the highest attrition rates in the EU in relation to violence against women? Why is it not a matter of controversy when RTE current affairs panels are made up entirely of men? When a recent reshuffle of the diplomatic corps saw 4 women appointed among more than 80 men? Women are so invisible in Irish public life that their absence is no longer even noticed.

I find myself increasingly turning to the writers I read back in the 1980's. The poet and essayist, Adrienne Rich, in particular. She in turn looked back, quoting the slave abolitionist Susan B Anthony, who despairingly asked in 1902, "How shall we ever make the world intelligent on our movement?"

Rich comments that 'the entire history of women's struggle for self determination has been muffled in silence over and over. One serious cultural obstacle encountered by any feminist writer is that each feminist work has tended to be received as if it emerged from nowhere, as if each of us had lived, thought and worked without any historical past or contextual present...so also is each contemporary feminist theorist attacked as if her politics were simply an outburst of bitterness or rage."

When I AM invited onto panels to talk about feminism, it is rarely possible to get beyond the basic question of why there should be any need for a women's movement. Likewise, any attempt to argue for affirmative action like quotas to get more women elected into politics is met with the myth that 'women don't vote for women.' In reality, in a great many constituencies in this country voters do not get the chance to vote for women as none are presented.

I come from what I call the 'ACE' generation of Irish feminists. ACE stands for action for community employment - it offered low pay for a year to someone who had come off the dole, and it was just about the only way women's groups could pay their staff back in the early 1980's. Similar schemes existed here in the Republic.

We came AFTER the glory days which were recently nostalgically and patronisingly celebrated by the Irish Times in a truly infuriating supplement a week ago. More people will soon be claiming to have been on the Contraceptive Train of 1971 than were in the GPO for the Easter Rising in 1916. It is as if that was feminism and this is now. In reality, those brave women who took Ireland's sexist institutions by storm in the seventies were the precursors for a movement that has never looked back.

Feminists in the 80's and 90's opened and ran refuges and advice centres and women's sections, wrote books and policy documents, and raised funds. Now that the economy has collapsed, feminists are fighting to stop the government abandoning such commitments to gender equality that have been made, largely under duress from the EU, over the past 40 years. In 2007, the Irish government launched a National Women's Strategy, claiming it would present a 'shining light to the world'. Last year, they took an axe to its funds, claiming that with prisoners to house, garda overtime to pay, and asylum seekers to feed, they just couldn't afford it.

No wonder retro sexism is in fashion. But I am optimistic. The women's movement is still alive and well, though in dire straits, even if its contemporary leaders aren't rated by the Irish Times. I recently spoke at a debate in Trinity College on the subject, Does the contemporary Irish woman need a woman's movement?" Mary Robinson chaired, more than 700 students attended, and a lot of the speeches made by both young women and young men, were passionate and brilliant.

What was particularly heartening was that even those who said there was no longer any need for such a movement said so on the basis that women's rights have been won already in this country. There was very little blatant sexism. Oh, and our side won.

We need young women to get involved in feminism, and we need to listen to the wisdom of our elders. Sylvia Meehan, who is in her 80's is one of Ireland's most venerable feminst activists, with decades of campaigns behind her. Her advice at our International Women's Day event was simple. Get what we never got yet - political power.
I'll finish by reading a poem I love by Imtiaz Dharkar. She's from Pakistan, reared in Scotland and now living in India. Every feminist is familiar with feelings of alienation, and while this is a condition which often makes us feel miserable, furious and impotent this poem celebrates it.

THEY'LL SAY: 'SHE MUST BE FROM ANOTHER COUNTRY'

When I can't comprehend
why they're burning books
or slashing paintings,
when they can't bear to look
at god's own nakedness,
when they ban the film
and gut the seats to stop the play
and I ask why
they just smile and say,
'She must be
from another country.'

When I speak on the phone
and the vowel sounds are off
when the consonants are hard
and they should be soft,
they'll catch on at once
they'll pin it down
they'll explain it right away
to their own satisfaction,
they'll cluck their tongues
and say,
'She must be
from another country.'

When my mouth goes up
instead of down,
when I wear a tablecloth
to go to town,
when they suspect I'm black
or hear I'm gay
they won't be surprised,
they'll purse their lips
and say,
'She must be
from another country.'

When I eat up the olives
and spit out the pits
when I yawn at the opera
in the tragic bits
when I pee in the vineyard
as if it were Bombay,
flaunting my bare ass
covering my face
laughing through my hands
they'll turn away,
shake their heads quite sadly,
'She doesn't know any better,'
they'll say,
'She must be
from another country.'

Maybe there is a country
where all of us live,
all of us freaks
who aren't able to give
our loyalty to fat old fools,
the crooks and thugs
who wear the uniform
that gives them the right
to wave a flag,
puff out their chests,
put their feet on our necks,
and break their own rules.

But from where we are
it doesn't look like a country,
it's more like the cracks
that grow between borders
behind their backs.
That's where I live.
And I'll be happy to say,
'I never learned your customs.
I don't remember your language
or know your ways.
I must be
from another country.'

Susan McKay is the CEO of the National Women's Council of Ireland.

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