First of all, we would like to wish you all a very happy 2024! We hope you had a good festive season and feel energised and enthusiastic for the year ahead. We certainly do and look forward to speaking to and hopefully meeting many of you over the next 12 months.
MANCHESTER SEV LICENSING
In December, along with a number of feminist organisations from across the UK, we objected to the request by two sexual exploitation venues (SEVs) in Manchester to have there licenses renewed. Unfortunately in both cases the licence was renewed.
We strongly feel that the existence of SEVs in Greater Manchester licence would also directly contravenes their 10-year gender-based violence strategy set out in 2021 by the Greater Manchester Combined Authority. The GMCA claims that the strategy was developed to “enhance the safety of women and girls, while preventing gender-based violence from occurring in the first place and challenging the attitudes and inequalities that enable it“.
As part of this strategy Greater Manchester is running a campaign called #IsThisOK. Despite evidence from feminist researchers has time and again proven that SEVs normalise men’s dominance of women, their control over women as well as the sexualisation of women and men’s consumption of women as sex objects, the licensing committee granted both licences. In doing so, the committee ignored significant research findings, prioritising the ‘right’ of SEVs to have their licenses renewed as there had been no legal issues.
You can read an article on Manchester Evening News about the renewal of the licence.
PETITIONING & OTHER SUPPORT
As we continued with our #16DaysOfAction throughout December, we mainly focussed on fundraising. We donated to the Build A Girl UK Christmas Programme, which we were pleased to see was fully funded by the time it closed.
We also extended our loans through the MACS Lend With Care micro-finance group, started during our 2022 #16Days, which gives women in low-income countries support to work their way out of poverty.
We also added our signature to Nordic Model Now’s important petition to the UK government, asking them to ban the online sale of women for sex.
PRO-FEMINIST BOOK GROUP: GRAHAM LINEHAN – TOUGH CROWD: HOW I MADE AND LOST A CAREER IN COMEDY
For our last group of the year we chose a somewhat lighter and more humorous book in Graham Linehan’s ‘Tough Crowd: How I Made and Lost a Career in Comedy‘. You can read the write-up of our discussion here.
NEXT DISCUSSION GROUP MEETING
The next group is taking place on Monday 29 January at 6:30pm. This time we will be discussing Robert Jensen’s out of print classic ‘Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity‘. In February we will be reading Sharron Davies’ ‘Unfair Play‘.
To find out more and to join our discussion group, please email us.
