Name: Samantha Jones
Sex: Female
Occupation: TV journalist, erotic writer, lover
 
1.) Are you a feminist?
Yes. How could I be anything else?

2.) What does feminism mean to you?
Being a feminist is being pro-life and I don’t mean it in the silly way the anti-abortionists do. Being a feminist is like being anti-racist or anti-homophobic. To me, it’s simply a movement which works for equality and legal protection for  all people, female and male. It’s anchored in liberal democracy and human rights and decency and honour. I can’t imagine not being a feminist.

3.) Who is one female (other than your mother) you admire, and why?
Oh, the list is long and fairly predictable. Sojourner Truth, of course. Gloria Steinem, Berry Friedan, Angela Davis, Simone de Beauvoir and Germaine Greer come to mind. They were the women to led us into a shining new country which we’re still trying to settle.

4.) Are there enough women in leadership positions in your field?
Erotic writing seems to be run by women. At least, the groups I’ve come across are. Maybe men do pornography and women do erotica? I don’t know. But in my other life, TV journalism, women are doing very well on-camera and in middle management in both Canada and the U.S., but not so well at the top yet. We’ll get there.

5.) Are men and women being paid fair and equally in your field?
Don’t be silly. No writers, whatever our plumbing, are ever paid fairly or equally although we’re probably equally underpaid. In journalism, it’s probably pretty close except for the big boys who take all the cream in any profession.

6.) How do media generally portray women? What is a good example of this?
I hate to be positive in this, but I think over the twenty years or so I’ve been a broadcast journalist, media depiction of women has improved so much there’s hardly a discernible, significant difference left. Now, don’t get me wrong, the ridiculous right still thinks we should be confined to kitchen and bed but even that’s dying out. Anyway, there’s really no such thing as “the media”. The various outlets range from fascist left to fascist right with every shade in between.

7.) What can men and women do to reduce violence against women?
Abuse of power is to me one of the most awful of all crimes. Most women don’t have the same upper-body strength as most men and never will. Which makes us terribly vulnerable to male violence all our lives. It should be the sworn duty of every woman and man to educate children — our own and everyone else’s — to abhor violence against women and to make sure that it gets to be seen as a repulsive, despicable crime punishable by very harsh sentences.

8.) How do you achieve balance between work and personal/home life?
I don’t. It just happens. I have a lover — well, a few lovers — but no husband at the moment, don’t have kids so that leaves me lots of time to do the TV thing and write and party when I want to. I think the art is to balance the person so everything else falls into place.

9.) What is the one thing you’d like to see happen for women in the next 5 – 10 years?
I’d like our daughters to understand that their freedom now is because other women over the centuries fought and sacrificed so we could be free. Feminism is like the civil rights movement — when it’s not front and centre and obvious, people tend to forget it exists. We owe an incredible amount to feminism and we must, must pay it the respect it deserves so that it thrives and doesn’t just dwindle, fade away.

10.) What is the one piece of advice you’d like to give to young girls today?
We still have to liberate ourselves from the male-driven religious nonsense that demeans us and forces us to play second and third-class roles in life. Don’t fear your sexuality. If I wasn’t a fervid atheist, I’d say our sexuality is god-given and an incredibly important part of our lives. For instance, to orgasm is to live. Orgasm is the closest we come in life to touching death. We should teach our daughters how to make love and masturbate and orgasm and live every facet of life to its very fullest.

Samantha Jones is a Canadian journalist publishing her erotic memoir at www.lulu.com)
 
 


I believe that feminism means much more than merely demanding equality, regardless of gender, race, religion, ethnicity, sexual preference or any of those other bad things we're supposed to be regardless of.

Surely, to have real meaning, feminism also has to mean liberation from the ancient male God-ordained, male-serving insistence on female virtue and subservience. Male ownership, in fact.

For thousands of years, male representatives on earth of male gods in heaven have relied on upper-body strength to enforce dominance over females. It's a simple case of "I’ll keep beating you until you do what my ever-loving God tells me to tell you to do."

But the rise of feminism has freed us to live our lives — particularly our sex lives — the way we want to, not the way we're told. This means ignoring those self-serving male gods invented by men back there in those miserable deserts so very long ago.

Anyway, which of the multitude of gods to listen to? Judaism and Islam have one each and can't live on the same patch of desert without slaughtering each other. Christianity has three and a long history of murdering people who don't do what the threesome tells them to do. Hinduism has something like 10,000 and is based on a brutal caste system which damns millions of Dalits (Untouchables) as less than human. Buddhism (thankfully) is more a system of beliefs and practices than a religion. The only similarity these faiths share is that, by and large, they fear and despise women and fantasize endlessly about keeping us chained to the kitchen and bedroom.

If I have to choose a god, I'll go with the females — Isis, Ishtar, Aphrodite, Cybele and Mahimita — with the vague and desperate hope that they, at least, will favour love over war. Even here however, I have to remind myself that religion, like power, has a nasty tendency to corrupt even the best.

Meantime for divine guidance, I study Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch, Machiavelli's The Prince, Sun Tzu's The Art of War and anything by Gloria Steinem, Bill Maher and George Carlin.

(Samantha Jones is a Canadian journalist publishing her erotic memoir at www.lulu.com)