Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, April 07 2004 @ 11:34 PM CDT

u know i took my first Women\'s Studies college course last semester and i felt such a disconnect from the other women in the class. One day we were discussing women\'s bodies and sexuality being exploited in music videos and the media at large, and their collective \"solution\" was for the government to ban all forms of nudity or scantily-clad bodies on t.v. and for schools to institute stricter dress codes and for parents to have \"more control\" over what their children wear and their sexual practices...ALL of which i am opposed to!

And yeh one might say the groups sponsoring the March for Women\'s Lives are liberal and heirarchical but hell, i\'m gonna be there anyway, and i am really excited cuz this will be my first ever mass-demonstration.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, April 07 2004 @ 11:36 PM CDT

oh yeh and as a nice little 2-for-1 the IMF/WB protest is that weekend too:)

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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 08 2004 @ 05:21 AM CDT

this split is common. while you can point to the empire builders in liberal organizations, the fact is they do this to be pragmatic because the population at large is between 1/3 and 1/2 reactionary. the right wing has history behind it and is very organized, so while its nice to advocate non-hierarchy , groups from women, to gays, to people of color have often formed mass organizations which are not completely free but have a strict agenda.

the current more \'denentralized\' approaches owe partly to the internet which permnits it, but they still are centralized in some ways (ie the demos are at one time) (or, the internet itself requires a centralized military/industrial complex to function)
the real danger is when stuff like in the \'class\' occurs, and people take hierarchy as the goal. as opposed to just a temporary solution. many liberal groups for women, gays and blacks now for example want more CEOs which is not exactly a liberation goal. why being a CEO is not compatible with being \'feminist\' of course is a long discussion, and also open to dispute of course.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 08 2004 @ 11:32 AM CDT

ya i agree, these questions need to be asked and examined and different solutions experimented with.

i don\'t think it\'s the solution to reach for inclusion in their class structures and \'organizations\' of living but our collective responsibility to hold these class warriors accountable as well as our friends not to sell out by using the tactics of the ones that are in opposition to us autonomous radicals.

The internet is teaching us allot about decentralized organizing. The tools that are completely decentralized are just coming out , freenet, waste, mute for example. How actively you use them to communicate is quite often the sign of how effective we are at being able to create change. part of complete decentralization requires complete centralization of yourself as a individual node (each acting as a server and a client all at the same time) to me this says we would be good to all share and learn as many different DIY functions as we can in order to best be able to server our direct needs and those of the people we are in solidarity with.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, May 05 2004 @ 04:30 PM CDT

I think a lot of people don\'t realize the importance of simply teaching people the basics of how the systems involved work. It\'s more than sex education, it\'s teaching people how to deal with the health care industry, which is not really all that friendly to young and poor people. Women\'s clinics and abortion providers in general are caring businesses and individuals, and where they aren\'t so caring or competent there are processes in place like peer review boards and state licensing committees, etc, to provide oversight. We don\'t need anti-choice laws or regulations to make it even more difficult and expensive to provide care to young and poor people.

Still, the health care system is often setup to make it difficult, not easy, to get help. To respond to that we don\'t so much need a Jane Collective as we need an information collective, a committment to teach people the basics of how the health care system works and how to ask for help from one\'s friends locally and the health care system in general. That\'s more in the spirit of \"Our Bodies, Ourselves\", \"How to Have Intercourse Without Getting Screwed\", similar publications from the Montreal Health Press, or any number of other feminist and counterculture-oriented books from the late 60s and early to mid-70s.

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