Social event to celebrate our love of life, our bodies, and our passions— all welcome!

The date to tie in with the prestigious Woodhull Sexual Freedom Summit in Washington DC, USA:

Monday 24th September 2pm-6pm

FREE (donations welcome)

We are using the accessible and lovely waterside
Doodle Bar near Battersea Park, just south of the Thames
33 Parkgate Road
Battersea Bridge Road ~
London SW11 4NP

Plenty of Parking
15 mins walk from Sloane Square, Clapham Junction &
South Kensington,
Buses stop right outside: 19, 319, 170, 49 & 319 stop at Parkgate Road
170 stops at Battersea Bridge/Hester Road

Attractions:
• Waterside Bar and other Indoor and Outdoor areas •
• Mikey Argy • Jo Quail • Mouse • Maria Odoshi •
• Drinks & Snacks •
• Tactile Fashion Show (models wanted) •
• LGBTI Grotto • Peer Support (BYO Expertise and Doubts) •
• Debate: “Should people work hard to seek romance and enjoy sex, or should it all come naturally?? •
• Performances • Japanese Rope Play •
• Networking • Fun Fun Fun

http://www.facebook.com/events/391099104285880/
http://www.outsiders.org.uk/

“The Muslim community have taken it upon themselves to rid the streets of evil. This is just how the Taliban started in Afghanistan. For all intents and purposes, you are witnessing the emergence of the Taliban in Walthamstow.” — Website, Islam4UK

With East London hosting the world during the Olympics, a group of Islamists associated with Anjem Choudary and his group, Islam4UK, have taken the law into their own hands.

Over recent weeks the group has launched a vigilante campaign in Waltham Forest, close to the main Olympics venues, to target “Pimps and Prostitutes,” part of a wider campaign by Choudary’s associates to launch their own vigilante campaigns, based on a narrow interpretation of Shariah law. Last year, the group put up stickers around parts of East London declaring it a ‘Shariah Zone.’ It warned women to observe strict dress codes, and local residents against drinking alcohol. Homosexuals were also threatened.

“Pimps and Prostitutes” is a new campaign. Of course, few would argue with a genuine civic movement to clear the streets of prostitutes, but Choudary’s men are not motivated by public spirit. They want instead to assert Islamist principles and practice over parts of public life in London, in the hope of carving out enclaves for themselves. “As Muslims in your local area it is our duty to invite you to embrace Islam” the group states, “but we also want to share with you some of the great projects we’re involved in that can make a real change to the area.”

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3237/islam-olympics

and see http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=rdcx7rDsqKk

Egypt’s “first sex-slave marriage” took place mere days after the Muslim Brotherhood’s Muhammad Morsi was made president.

Last Monday, on the Egyptian TV show Al Haqiqa (“the Truth”), journalist Wael al-Ibrashi showed a video-clip of a man, Abd al-Rauf Awn, “marrying” his slave. Before making the woman, who has a non-Egyptian accent, repeat after him the Koran’s Surat al-Ikhlas, instead of saying the usual “I marry myself to you,” the woman said “I enslave myself to you,” kissing him in front of an applauding audience.

Then, even though she was wearing a hijab, her owner-husband declared that she is forbidden from such trappings and commanded her to be stripped of them, so as “not to break Allah’s laws.” She took her veil and abaya off, revealing, by Muslim standards, a seductive red dress (all the other women present were veiled). The man claps for her and the video-clip (which can be seen here) ends.

The man, Abd al-Rauf Awn, who identified himself as an Islamic scholar who studied at Al Azhar and an expert at Islamic jurisprudence, then appeared on the show, giving several Islamic explanations to justify his marriage, from Islam’s prophet Muhammad’s “sunna,” or practice, of “marrying” enslaved captive women, to Koran 4:3, which declares: “Marry such women as seem good to you, two and three and four… or what your right hands possess.”

Though the term malk al-yamin literally means “that which is owned by your right hand,” for all practical purposes, and to avoid euphemisms, according to Islamic doctrine and history, she is simply a sex-slave. Linguistic evidence even suggests that she is seen not as a human but as a possession.

Even stripping the sex-slave of her hijab, the way Awn did, has precedent. According to Islamic jurisprudence, whereas the free (Muslim) woman is mandated to wear a hijab, sex-slaves are mandated only to be covered from the navel to the knees—with everything else exposed. Awn even explained how Caliph Omar, one of the first “righteous caliphs,” would strip sex-slaves of their garments, whenever he saw them overly dressed in the marketplace.

Awn further went on to declare that he believes the idea of sex slave marriage is ideal for today’s Egyptian society. He bases this on ijtihad, a recognized form of jurisprudence, whereby a Muslim scholar comes up with a new idea—one that is still rooted in the Koran and example of Muhammad—that fits the circumstances of contemporary society. He argued that, when it comes to marriage, “we Muslims have overly complicated things,” so that men are often forced to be single throughout their prime, finally getting married between the ages of 30-40, when they will have a stable career and enough money to open a household. Similarly, many Egyptian women do not want to wear the hijab in public. The solution, according to Awn, is to reinstitute sex-slavery—allowing men to marry and copulate much earlier in life, and women who want to dress freely to do so, as technically they are sex-slaves and mandated to go about loosely attired.

The other guest on the show, Dr. Abdullah al-Naggar, a professor in Islamic jurisprudence at Al Azhar, fiercely attacked Awn for reviving this practice, calling on him and his slave-wife to “repent,” to stop dishonoring Islam, and arguing that “there is no longer sex-slavery”—to which Awn responded by sarcastically asking, “Who said sex-slavery is over? What—because the UN said so?”

In many ways, this exchange between Awn, who advocates sex-slave marriage, and the Al Azhar professor symbolizes the clash between today’s “Islamists” and “moderate Muslims.” For a long time, Al Azhar has been engaged in the delicate balancing act of affirming Islam while still advocating modernity according to Western standards, whereas the Islamists—from the Muslim Brotherhood to the Salafis—bred with contempt and disrespect for the West, are only too eager to revive Islamic practices that defy Western standards.

While this may be the first sex slave marriage to take place in Egypt’s recent history, it is certainly not the first call to revive the practice. Earlier, Egyptian Sheikh Huwaini, lamenting that the “good old days” of Islam were over, declared that, in an ideal Muslim society, “when I want a sex-slave,” he should be able to go “to the market and pick whichever female I desire and buy her.” Likewise, a Kuwaiti female politician earlier advocated for reviving the institute of sex-slavery, suggesting that Muslims should bring female captives of war—specifically Russian women from the Chechnya war—and sell them to Muslim men in the markets of Kuwait.

And so the “Arab Spring” continues to blossom.

Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and an Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum.

Whilst the CPS has said that it accepts the jury’s verdict this may not be the end of the matter – only appeal judges make precedents.

Practitioners of BDSM need to seek the advice of specialists if they are ever charged with an offence. What is becoming abundently clear is that duty lawyers do not understand the legislation and are advising clients to plead guilty. But the advice of specialist lawyers like Myles Jackson is essential before any decision is taken. To find these, see those listed on this site or on the Backlash and Spanner websites.

http://moronwatch.net/2012/01/strippers-are-people-too.html

Tim Hemming – owner of Simply Pleasure in Soho and 34 other licensed sex shops – plans to mount a challenge to Westminster Council’s charge of £35,000 to license shops as the fee is supposed to cover expenses but not to contribute to council funds in general.

http://www.melonfarmers.co.uk/ssshop.htm#Simply_Asking_10674

And the musical performance kick-ass group, The Correspondents, is singing loud and clear “what’s happened to Soho — where can all the reprobates go?”

See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZ0dRnkMIy8

Today is a great day for English sexual liberties. In the case of R v Peacock, in which defendant Michael Peacock was charged with six counts of obscene publication – gay-porn DVDS which featured acts all legal to perform but not legal to depict – the jury found him unanimously not guilty on all counts.

Why is that so important? For one, Peacock is the only person to have pleaded not guilty to a charge under the Obscene Publications Act 1959 (OPA 1959) and won . He is the first person to have challenged the notion of obscenity in law, a law that was last updated in 1964, and has stood since. A law that is expressly designed to tell us what is “deprave and corrupt” – defined by Justice Byrne in 1960 as “to render morally unsound or rotten, to destroy the moral purity or chastity; to pervert or ruin a good quality.”

Hence the OPA 1959 is nothing to do with prosecuting the potential or actual sexual or violent harm caused to others by the material in question, nor about preventing children or vulnerable adults being subjected to inappropriately explicit material. It simply and absolutely passes moral judgment. Thank god the jury had sense to see that in 2012, telling others what is depraved – and prosecuting them for “debasing” your mind if they publish material featuring it and you are privy to it, is as absurd as it is anachronistic.

When the jury were first shown the material, they were, in some cases, visibly alarmed. A day spent viewing back-to-back evidence tapes of full-hand gay fisting, urination, staged kidnapping and rape, whipping, and smacking of saline-injected scrotums would probably tire most of us, whatever our sexual predilections (believe me – I used to work for a sex magazine, and when you’ve been editing hardcore porn all day, all you want is a cup of tea in front of Frozen Planet). But even if the jury did think the acts were wrong, they correctly understood what prosecuting for obscenity required them to do, and that was to decide whether knowledgeable customers with particular sexual peccadilloes, who had then sought out, ordered and paid for DVDs featuring a specific niche of porn would be corrupted by it.

Of course, like every good English discussion about sex, there was plenty of tittering, normally when the well-spoken, middle-aged male and uprightly English recorder asked for clarification on kinky sex terms. Hence, a butt-plug was defined as “an ear plug, but for the butt”, and an “experienced bottom” as one who likes to receive certain sexual acts. I do wonder how many BDSM novices will adopt “toaster” as their safe word on their first travail into sexual kinkdom. But for those incredulous that there could still exist in a law a discrepancy between what you are allowed to do and what you are allowed to publish yourself doing, the laughter was necessarily cathartic.

Throughout the trial, the court had carefully warned the jury against sentencing out of any impulse of homophobic disgust. So it was disturbing to hear the prosecution lawyer invoke towards the end of his address the following example of the likely audience for the “obscene” material: “a man, in his 40s, married, with a wife who doesn’t know of his secret sexual tastes”, especially considering the defendant’s testimony that his customers were mostly gay men.

How ironic that the defence had begun his closing by trying to distance this case from the R v Penguin Books (1961) trial (commonly known as the Chatterley trial), which the recorder had already referenced to as precedent. That trial, in which the infamous test of the book’s obscenity was whether you would let your wife or servants read it, exposed everything that was wrong about the way those who held power and privileged pronounced on the sexual tastes and liberties of the population. Here was that same example of the white middle-class, privileged patriarch, no longer guarding against the sullying of his goods and chattel, wife and servants, but fearing for his own depravity.

Thankfully, the jury did not fall for it as a tenable argument. For gay rights campaigners and for everyone of us that believes in social and sexual liberty, it’s a day to make a five-digit victory sign.

This was taken directly from The Guardian, the paper which is normally against sex and yet sees this as a triumph.

Hi Everyone

I spoke at a ‘debate’ on Tuesday called Lap-dancing – a choice or exploitation?

It was sparked by the current Nil Policy consultation in Tower Hamlets but billed as a general debate. The stated aim of the organisers is to close down every SEV in the UK and for stripping to be banned completely as it is in Iceland. (These were the words of Kat Banyard and Object) A few of them mentioned ‘that big one on the corner in Hackney’. I think they mean Browns and I think they are pretty pissed off they didn’t mange to shut it down last year. BEWARE, they will try again.

Well, after being told it was an invitation only, women only, private event; it turned into a very public, very mixed and absolutely not private event. People taking photos and filming – something I hope does not come back to haunt me.

Here’s a run down of the speakers and what was said:

Beatrix Campbell - feminist and communist (is what it said on the program)

She set the tone for the evening with high drama and sensationalism. She ad libed her speech. I will paraphrase her so you can get the general idea but do be sure to read this to yourself with a lot of drama, pity, mournful emotion and dramatic pauses.

“Can you imagine what it’s like?! Our young women….. surrounded by men……. having to take off……..ALL their clothes……… (big dramatic pause as see looks around at the audience, hoping her words are having the desired effect). “Being the only person in the room…… NAKED….. whilst the others remain clothed!!!”

Please note that because about 70% of the women in the were in burkas or niqabs, this did have the desired effect.

She then went on to tackle the subject that dancing is empowering, again with full drama and mournful emotion.

“People say……..Lap-dancing……is empowering! Can you believe that?!?! So I could be empowered by it?!?! ……. Me?!…… with my old and skinny body?!?! …… Are they really saying ….. I could be empowered?!?!”

I thought ‘no love you wouldn’t get any shifts but you could do Burlesque successfully if you had an ounce of imagination.’

Obviously not.

Kat Banyard and Object – this lot are the hardcore prohibitionists and a BIG problem.

Kat Banyard ran the ‘you can buy a woman like you can buy a cappuccino’ line which I was prepared for in my speech with – ‘You do not buy me, you pay for my performance. I am a performer.’

They obsessed about women even though there are male strip pubs and said the areas around strip venues were no-go areas for women. She talked about ‘choice’ but isn’t that what they want to take away from us?

She also touched on the stage fees issue. That fees are too high and there are too many girls on shift causing standards to slip and ‘extras’ to be offered. I’ve always been lucky enough to work at good places but we all know that this is an issue in our industry and the prohibitionists will continue to use this a a reason to ban dancing.

They get themselves all worked up. They are like the shouting, accusing children of Salem. Destroying the lives of adults with accusations. I want to send them all a copy of The Crucible by Arthur Miller!

It will be really hard to get them to listen. They have built there entire career on stripper bashing so there’s too much at stake. They have businesses, websites, book deals and funding all dedicated to pushing the idea that stripping is wrong. They make a parasitic living out of us. They can not afford to be wrong or budge an inch in their hardline stance because it will invalidate their career and earning potential.

Mahera Ruby

I think she was just someone from ‘the community’ who spoke a lot about being a mother and protecting the children. All quite irrelevant seeing as it’s the Adult industry that they were supposed to be discussing.

Me – Stripper

I was conscious when writing my speech (attached) to check all my facts, not use inflammatory language and back myself up with studies and statistics. However no one else did this. They were quite happy with vitriol, willful misinformation and blatant lies. I asked them to introduce me as a stripper because technically lap-dancing is not allowed. Lap-dancing involves contact and all SEVs are supposed to have a no touching policy.

I realised later that I should have kept my speech quite simple as I was talking to an audience of mainly simpletons. Unfortunately there was only me with five minutes to put the other side of the argument in a three hour witch trial, …. er ……. I mean ‘debate’. It was a general overview but I now realise it’s just important to repeat key messages again and again to them. Such as:

‘I chose to dance’ ‘No one forced me’. ‘I enjoy my job.’ ‘I am well looked after’. ‘I am a performer not a prostitute.’ ‘It does not lead to an increase in rape’.

Finer points such as freedom in general, if my freedom is taken form me you will be next etc… The concept of living in a liberal democracy, artistic freedom, freedom of expression etc were just not being received. I also asked, what about Bethnal Green Working Man’s Club with it’s Burlesque nights? It is stripping after all. Will this also be closed down? How about BJs gay bar that has male strippers, yes men dancing for men. Will this also be closed? My questions were not answered.

Kat Banyard called me and Caomihe propagandists! Haha!

Jennifer Hayashi Danns – ex-dancer and author of Stripped – the bare reality of lap-dancing.

She is intelligent and articulate but very anti-stripping. She had worked in a lap-dance club in Liverpool to put herself through university. It made me think, ‘Well you paid for your degree, you’re alright, but is no one else allowed to do that?’ It seems quite unfair.

She related a story from her book about a dancer, who also did all the other things like music video shoots etc, that went from tragedy to tragedy. The two main points of the story were that the dancer had been shot and at some point had gone to a party with some other girls, got off her head and then woke up having sex with someone. Neither of these things happened at work, they happened else where, but she got the effect she wanted. The crowd only heard ’shooting’ and ‘rape’ in association with lap-dancing and all their prejudices were confirmed.

She said the dancer didn’t go to the police because she knew she wouldn’t get help. She knew the stripper stigma would prevent them for taking her case seriously. In my opinion this is a reason against the nil policy and further criminalization. It just reinforces the divisive and spiteful view about women being ‘good’ or ‘fallen’. Meaning that those women who are ‘bad’ don’t deserve help.

She ended with the rallying cry ‘There is no place in our society for lap-dancing!’ There was wild applause.

Eileen Short form CAPE (Communities Against People Exploitation)

Apparently she’s offended by people pulling up in big black cars outside of Metropolis. Huh?! If she is offended by cars she needs to go and live in the woods.

Anyway, the jist of her argument was that the SEV venues caused a lot of noise and disturbance. Why she specifically thinks strip clubs are more prone to this than any other club, I don’t know.

She also did a lot of the ‘poor girls, who are drawn into working in these terrible places, we must help them! routine. With a lot of drama, lamenting and wailing. (Some of these people deserve an Oscar!) She assumes everyone was forced into dancing even though I made sure to say in my speech I had CHOSEN to dance.

We spoke to her afterwards and pointed out that other bars and clubs cause more problems with noise and drunkenness than strip venues. This only served to make her complain about how the whole of Shoreditch and Hoxton were so unpleasant and people were drunk everywhere. She was utterly ridiculous. One of the stupidest speakers there.

Phillipa Boardman – Church of England female priest

I was sitting next to her and she kept turning to me and smiling sweetly. She said things like, ‘It’s so interesting to meet someone like you’ and ‘I never looked at it like that’. My impression of her is that she is well meaning but really had no clue.

She spoke about Jesus and how he loved everyone. How he had accepted women in his group, which in those days was unheard of, so Jesus supported women’s rights. What about my right to choose? What about me and my friends being free to do the job we want to?

She also spoke about the ‘dignity of children’ and dignity in general. Again, it’s the Adult industry, what do children have to do with it? Children don’t go into their parents room and watch them have sex and nor should they go and watch strippers. Parents have sex – that’s how families happen – and it’s kept from children. Erotic dancing happens in SEVs – and righty it’s kept from children. Yes crazy people … sex exists.

Safia Jama – Somali Integration Team

This woman was intelligent and dynamic but very devout. She was fully veiled and spoke as ‘a mother and community organiser’ about the plight of the poor dancers. She ran the ‘dancers are victims of wicked men’ story with a passion.

Dilwara Begum – ‘writer’

This one is as mad as a hatter! As daft as a brush! She ramble incoherently around so many subjects. She was totally unaware of how much she contradicted herself and totally stupid! I was looking at her biog of ‘writer’ and thought ‘yeah right! The only thing this woman writes is the weekly shopping list.’ I may be a stripper , but next to her, I am an intellectual giant!

She babbled around SEVs, the Iraq war, the war in Afghanistan, class war, corruption in business, unemployment, rape, family break-up, divorce, human trafficking etc. At one point I held my breath as she rambled on about the government cuts; ‘OMG!’ I thought, ‘This woman, with the IQ of a fruit fly, is now going to try and tackle the subjects of global finance and the sovereign debt crisis! Please NO!’ Fortunately, Rania Khan, the organiser and chair asked her to leave the stage.

She said lap-dancing was a violation of human rights and girls were forced into this work. She could not comprehend how anyone could choose it. She said it was exploitation of poor unemployed girls and all the governments fault as they were not providing enough jobs.

She ended with the rallying cry, ‘our boys and girls are not for sale!!!’ People cheered but hello people, unless you’ve won the lottery or come from riches we are all for sale. We trade our services and labour for wages. It’s how it works. A complete dumb ass!

Ruhan Ali - TELCO

I got the impression that she was intelligent and well meaning, just naive. She was one of the many who said, ‘Oh I never even knew there were these places in Tower Hamlets!’

She described her work with schools and colleges and said there was no place for the sex industry in our society. She said there are nine churches and five mosques and none of them want this to go on.

Well tough, religion is going to have to co-exist side by side with the liberal secular majority. I would not petition to have churches or mosques closed down. I would not go to them, and I don’t feel comfortable with them, but I would respect the freedom of choice of others if they wish to do that.

Rachel Saunders – Labour Councillor

I found this speaker to be one of the worst. As an elected representative she needs to understand the subjects she has decided to speak about. She directly accused stripping of leading to increases in rape and causing human trafficking. There were no caveats and nothing ‘allegedly’ about her sweeping statements, none of the usual cautionary language that politicians use to cover themselves. I found her astoundingly irresponsible, as an elected official, to be telling blatant lies.

Warning – it is tempting to contact her and put her right but she is a sensationalist and drama queen. If she is contacted she will scream, ‘The sex industry is harassing me!’ She will use it to imply that she is brave and her stance is heroic. It is better to get the Labour party to discipline her for defamation and irresponsible conduct.

Caoimhe tried to catch her out on the rape issue at the end during the rather chaotic Q&A session. She avoided the subject and would not answer questions directly. The simple reason for this is that she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. I made sure when I wrote a feedback email to the organisers the next day, to tell them full stripping only began in the 80s, has rape only existed since the 80s?

Recommended reading for her is Folk Devils and Moral Panics by Stanley Cohen!

Sarah Castro MBE

This final woman was intelligent, worldly wise and sane. (Thankfully!) She was a friend of Rania’s and hadn’t really thought about lap-dancing being a problem or had given much time to the subject. She also commented on the low profile of the clubs.

She thanked all the speakers excluding me!

She basically said she didn’t agree on banning anything.

Conclusion

There was so much ignorance in the room and willful misinformation peddled by the speakers. One thing I found really offensive is that these people suppose that they can tell me what I can and can’t do with my life. I would never dream of interfering in their lives as much as they feel they can with me. I just wouldn’t waste my time or be so presumptuous.

Another thing I briefly attempted with one of the women that chatted to me afterwards, was the whole Burka issue. I watched a Kat Banyard interview where she was asked how she felt about the Burka as a feminist. She skipped around the subject dodging the question and then said, ‘the problem is, is that women’s bodies are being used as a battleground.’ Well isn’t that what she’s doing with strippers? So I tried to talk about how my choice to dance, is the flip side of the same coin, as your choice to wear the burka. It’s all about external authorities trying to control what you do as a woman. I wouldn’t wear a burka but would never support any law banning an item of clothing. That’s because it’s about freedom and once you start banning one thing, where does it end? It was impossible to get them to see that the issues were related and about freedom.

Another scary thing about all of this is that the Coalition are pushing a localism agenda. If this is the caliber of our local representatives then we are all in trouble! From what I gather from the Hackney campaign is that there is no right of appeal once the Nil Policy has been passed. This is very scary as the fanatics will win and the people just getting on with things will find themselves out of work. At least when things are decided at national level there are educated advisers and therefore more chance of sanity. (No guarantee though).

Well we knew the panel was heavily bias and calling it a ‘debate’ was laughable. Debates are supposed to have opposers and proposers and a balance of arguments. There was none of this. If I made only one person change their mind then it was worth it!

Unfortunately these people are not going to go away and will keep on pursuing their goal of shutting down all SEVs in the UK. They are bullies have to be stood up too because if one borough falls the rest will too. I guarantee if they ban dancing in Tower Hamlets, the prohibitionist will try again in Hackney.

Edie