We are a women’s liberation group committed to advancement of women and girls, and the protection of women’s and girls’ sex-based rights on the understanding that sex is a biological fact with material consequences for females living under patriarchy. We fight against patriarchy and how it is expressed through anti-woman oppressive structures and ideologies such as
- Gender identity
- (Hyper-) sexualised advertising
- Pornography
- Prostitution and sex trafficking
- Reproductive exploitation
- Control over reproductive rights/sovereignty
All of these things are based in male violence against women. All of these things enforce the oppression of women as a class. We did not agree to participating in or supporting this oppression and so we fight it.
Patriarchy
We are forced to take part in a system of power that values only men as fully human and that treats women as less than human. We live in a society where men hold legal, political, economic, and moral authority and where women are controlled, dominated, constrained, marginalised, and treated as incompetents. We live in a culture that excuses male violence, that normalises rape, and that incessantly denigrates, demeans, objectifies, and humiliates women.
This system privileges men and is not passive. This system is bad for women and girls. We fight it.
Gender identity
Gender is a social construction that assigns oppressive sex roles to females based on our sex. Gender identity ideology seeks to erase the sex category of female altogether. Being female is not a ‘feeling’: it is a biological state that determines women’s and girls’ material reality under patriarchy. As such, legal categories pertaining to females must be protected. Gender identity ideology allows grown men to claim ‘rights’ to legal, economic, and social protections set aside for women and girls. Gender identity ideology undermines the provision of proper health care to children, adolescents, and ill-protected others who are at risk of being captured by gender identity ideology. This is a failure in a duty of care to those who are immediately vulnerable by way of a lack of cognitive, emotional, and intellectual development.
Gender identity ideology is the ultimate misogyny, the ultimate hatred of the state of being female. We fight it.
(Hyper-) sexualised advertising
Sexualised — and now hyper-sexualised — advertising teaches girls that their sexualised behaviour and appearance are what is most important in our culture and society, and it teaches both boys and girls that females exist solely for the male gaze and male use. Such negative and distorted messaging in advertising leads to poor body image, mental illness, and a distorted understanding of what is healthy in relations between women and men. Through this type of advertising, girls learn to sexualise themselves and see themselves as objects. This is framed by our culture as choice, empowerment, and liberation for women. It is not.
This advertising is pervasive and destructive. It is an extension of pornography. We fight it.
Prostitution and sex-trafficking
The sex industry is run by pimps and brothel owners who have achieved ‘legitimate’ ‘business’ status thanks to their successful lobbying for the decriminalisation and legalisation of prostitution. Pimps and brothel owners traffic in women’s bodies for profit. This is organised. It benefits pimps and brothel owners (who call themselves ‘sex workers’) to promulgate the myth that prostitution is a job just like any other job. Prostituted women and girls are beaten, choked, raped by men who rent women’s bodies. Many of these women and girls are trafficked. This is not ‘a job just like any other job’. We support the Nordic model, aka the equality model, which decriminalises the person who has been prostituted, but criminalises the sex buyer.
Prostitution can never be made safe for women and girls — it can only be made safe for pimps and johns. Postitution harms all women. We fight it.
Pornography
The pornography industry eroticises male sexual violence against women and normalises this violence. Pornography contributes to and reinforces women’s subordination to men and sexualises that subordination. Pornography is based on the abuse and damage of female bodies and on the degradation and humilation of female personhood. Pornography is the use of technology to sell a woman and over and over again. It is filmed prostitution and includes the filming of females who are trafficked for sex.
Pornography grooms girls for sexual assault and grooms boys to commit that assault. This is a public health issue. We fight it.
The Women’s Action Alliance Tasmania fights these things.
We fight for women and girls.
We fight by honouring our feminist foremothers, the suffragettes and the second-wavers, and we remember our history through them. We remember that women before us had to fight for our right to vote and to own property, for our right to access birth control, abortion, credit, equal pay for equal work (ongoing, obviously).
We fight the impacts of neo-liberalism, capitalism, and individualism on women’s lives. We fight the propaganda that says that if a woman chooses it, it’s her choice. This circular delusion nurtures a false consciousness that plays directly into capitalist, patriarchal social structures.
We fight for our girls because they are being told that there is only one way of being sexual and that that way involves presenting themselves as a branded object to be bought, sold, and consumed. We fight against the damage that gender stereotypes and gender identity ideology do to girls and women and we fight against the erasure of women’s experiences qua women, as human persons raised under patriarchy in the sex class female, and who are thus condemned to be treated in certain, always-diminishing ways. We trust our instincts as women and we know what is bad for women and girls, despite sustained neo-liberal, anti-reality attacks on those instincts.
We fight using new — and especially old — ways to disrupt the patriarchy and we do this together. We run consciousness-raising groups, we distribute pamphlets, we march, we picket, we run seminars and conferences, we connect, we research, we organise debates.
We reclaim our energy as women in groups of women. We are pro-woman and pro-women. We fight for each woman and all women. We fight for women’s liberation and against women’s oppression.
We are WOMEN. We are ACTIVE. We are ALLIED.
Women's Action Alliance Tasmania 