098 FiLiA discusses Sheila Jeffreys’ autobiography Trigger Warning

 Yağmur: After decades of activism, Sheila Jeffreys takes the time to reflect on her journey in her latest book, her autobiography, Trigger Warning: My Lesbian Feminist Life. I had the chance to talk to her about her activism and her views on major controversies within feminism. Her book is now available for pre-order on the Spinifex website.

 So I will start with the very simple question, which is, why an autobiography? 

 Sheila: Well, the reason I wrote the biography is that I have been wanting to do one for some time. There are really, in this country, there are no biographies of radical feminists, that just doesn't exist. And for young women coming new to feminism now, and the great thing is a lot are, and a new movement is arising, there's no easy way for them to access what the Women's Liberation Movement was about.

 I did do a book in 2018 called The Lesbian Revolution, but that was an academic book and that was about recording the history, because originally in my life I was a historian, I think history is absolutely crucial, but that was an academic book, so I couldn't talk about the lot of it related to my experience, I couldn't talk about what happened to me during that.

 I love biographies and autobiographies. I think they're a wonderful way to get to grips with a time, to find out what was really happening, and so an autobiography, it seemed to me was the perfect way.

 And I know it could look as if I'm rather up myself, “why me, why an autobiography?” But I actually think they're a really, really important way of recording history, talking about a time, and what it meant to a person.

 I went through that, it changed dramatically the way I am, I can't imagine being a person who didn't become a feminist and a lesbian feminist. I can't imagine what that life would've been. So the autobiography talks about how it changed me as well as how I went through those times. 

 Yağmur: What you say, it's not just about me, and you can - when I was reading your autobiography, I felt some parts that also related to me, you know, how I'm getting into the movement at the moment and this exhilarating feeling of meeting, you know, your feminist sheroes and discussing with them, and also the really… it was, you know, there's this whole, you discover the whole history of it.

 And what I found is that there's an exhilarating period you go through. So it's like the seventies and the eighties and there's this whole movement building in, and then there comes in the early noughties, and then it's kind of dying away. You call it the doldrums, actually.

 And then we arrive now where you see the movement is emerging again. But at the same time, as more women are getting into radical feminism, we also have this massive surge of this faux feminism. And so I was wondering, is it easier to get your points across now, where when you say feminists, you don't really know what you're talking about?

 Or was it, easier when there was this period in the early nineties or even before when it was clear, the values were clear? 

 Sheila: In the seventies and eighties, and to some extent in the nineties as well, there was an extraordinary feminist world that you could be in, you know, of culture and discos and meetings and conferences and communities. It was an extraordinary time. It was all women-only, and it was a marvellous, marvellous time.

 And in the doldrums period, it was really a period of grief about having lost all of that. I was not the only one. There were women in different parts of the world talking about what they had lost, and it seemed we had lost it forever. But what's extraordinary is that some of that is coming back now.

 We are in a new movement, but there are very different things about it. And the most different thing about it is we're facing an extraordinary backlash and battle with men, and that in the seventies and eighties, men were absolutely not interested in us.

 They didn't try to stop our meetings or our marches. They had no interest at all. We were totally women-only, men had no interest in our ideas. They didn't read what we said. They had no interest. And of course, there wasn't a transgender rights movement, which is really a men's rights movement, trying to stop feminist being feminists at all.

 And of course, there was not a big assault on the fact that we were even women, with men calling themselves women. We didn't have any of that. So now we've got a massive backlash against feminism by men, that's very, very active. Men are out there trying to stamp on us and stop us doing anything at all.

 But at the same time, we have an extraordinary rise of women coming together in feminism. It's intergenerational. Older women are coming back, younger women are coming in, and that's something quite, quite remarkable.

 I know we've got a hell of a long way to go, because we have to deal with the backlash first, before we can build the theatre and the novels and the community and the dances and all of those things we had before. Hard to imagine now, because we have to first of all fight our way out of this paper bag. We have to deal with the backlash, but it's wonderful that all these women are out there. 

 Yağmur: Now we can see a similar sense, with this queer culture where, you know, you can't go on a British campus today and not see someone with a ‘they/them’ badge pinned on their clothes. 

 And how would you explain… And you can see, also, that they have the same sense of community, and the same sense of, you know, “we're building a political movement here,” but how would you explain to someone the difference between this rising queer culture, and explain to them how it's very different from the feminist culture they had?

 Because often people who are not really familiar with the debates think that they go hand in hand.

 Sheila: Well, I'm hoping this book will help, but the situation is, of course, queer elimination and elimination of lesbians… it's not under community. If you are a lesbian, you have to pretend to be something else, queer or non-binary or some weird term, which means you can't recognise you're a woman.

 The men don't really have to do this. Men go on being gay. They have their gay clubs; they have their gay everything. Nobody is telling men they're not really men, but it's extremely difficult to be a woman.

 I mean, our badges always used to think, say things like, “how dare you presume I'm heterosexual?” I mean, you know, we had great badges. But what's going on now is a backlash against us. You cannot seriously be a feminist or a proud woman or a lesbian in that community. 

 Yağmur: So this backlash that you're mentioning, you faced a lot of it personally. In the autobiography, it's surprising the amount of situations you've gone through.

 You've had activists… all sorts of different, different things. At some point there's a…to me, the one that really made me gasp is this dildo named after you. And how does it make you feel at this time when you have all these personal attacks? What do you think, what do you feel, and how do you find the strength to carry on? What made you keep going on in those moments? 

 Sheila: Well, back in the seventies and eighties, of course there was a community. There were a lot of us. There were still groups and other women from whom you drew strength. 

 But what was difficult for me, even in those days, particularly from the nineties though, was that I was seen as very radical and very extreme, and so I did have experiences, quite a lot of them, particularly in the doldrums years, where women would sort of draw away from me.

 They'd sort of pick up their skirts and draw themselves away from me, because I was so frightening because of the ideas I represented, which were obviously radical feminist ideas about sexuality and heterosexuality, and so on. So you are saying, how did I get through all of that? Well, I don't know. That's a very good question.

 I've always been a bit obstinate and feisty. And as I say in the autobiography, when my teacher, when I was 10 years old, said I should call him Sir, and I was not used to doing that. I refused, and he made me get on my knees in the classroom until I would call him sir, and eventually had to let me get up.

 So I have always been obstinate. And I think that's a very good trait, but it can lead to loneliness. There's no question about that. I can't just go into a meeting or a conference and assume that women will want to talk to me. Sometimes they would know who I was, but deliberately will turn their backs.

 I mean, that was the situation. This is much improving now. In fact, it's improving hugely now, in this new movement that is developing. I'm developing friendships with women of all ages in many different countries. It's fantastic actually. 

 Yağmur: So I would like to now go and… the specific topics within feminism.

 As you said, your book is a great way to understand, both the history and specific topics that are deemed extremely controversial. So perhaps I will start with, the title. So, because you say, ‘My Lesbian Feminist Life’, there's a whole chapter dedicated to choosing to be a lesbian. And today, where we have a whole culture with, you know, Lady Gaga ‘Born This Way’, this is unthinkable.

 So how do you explain that to your younger audiences?

 Sheila: So yes, the question is about why choosing to be a lesbian is controversial today, because it wasn't controversial in the seventies and eighties. Not very anyway, because thousands and thousands of women in many, many countries were choosing to be lesbians then.

 It was an ordinary part of their revolutionary progress, really, which is having pointed out who and what men are and what they do to women. A lot of women decided to simply withdraw and build their community and their love with other women, and are still doing so, as I am doing so. 

 But in those days, that was not difficult to imagine because the Women's Liberation Movement, like the Black Rights movement and so on at that time, came out of a very revolutionary time, when sociologists were talking about how everything was socially constructed, basically, because the way of keeping people down is to say that everything was biological.

 I mean, there was a time when Black people were considered to be less intelligent and there were all these sort of intelligence tests done to prove that that was the case. And there were tests done to prove that women were better at certain kinds of work, than other kinds of work and so on.

 So, great belief in the 1950s in all of those things. Even in the fact that, you know, the working class were just less intelligent. These ideas were that these things were biological, were about social control and keeping people down.

 So there was a revolution in the fifties and sixties when sociologists were upturning all of these ideas, and we were realising that these systems of oppression actually were socially constructed. And that actually these ideas that the inferiority was innate was simply a load of balderdash and just ideology.

 Well, that meant that we understood that sexuality was socially constructed too. Because if you say that lesbianism is innate, it means heterosexuality is innate. Clearly it's not. I mean, thousands and thousands and thousands of heterosexual women actually become lesbians all the time, who are apparently heterosexual, so that doesn't make any sense.

 But also it's a way of making heterosexuality inevitable and keeping male supremacy going. Because of course it's in heterosexuality that women's labour, but their sexual labour, their emotional labour, their physical labour, their reproductive labour, is extracted under the control of men. So heterosexuality is an institution fundamental to male supremacy.

 It's obviously not about choice, because women have very little choice about what they do. Children are not taught in schools, “actually, you know, you might choose to be a lesbian, or have relationships with men, or not have relationships with anybody.”

 Sex is absolutely compulsory, and it's absolutely assumed that it will be with men. So there are no choices given to anybody about any of the these things. So at that time we understood all of this and so it was possible for women to change. We're now in a really, really, really conservative time, and lesbians are hunkered down, trying to survive the onslaught.

 It's extremely difficult for lesbians and young lesbians right now, and I can understand why some of them have backed themselves into a corner where they're saying, “we're born this way, that's just how it is, don't you dare say anything else,” as a kind of self-protection.

 But unfortunately, it means we can't have the revolution because the revolution means accepting, realising, that heterosexuality is indeed politically constructed, and that women can get out of it and embark on the revolution.

 Yağmur: Talking about revolution, you start out by saying how you were involved in revolutionary feminism. And it's not something I personally was much aware of, this strand of feminism, I don't know how you would define it yourself. What are the values? How is it different from radical feminism, in what ways? 

 Sheila: Well, when I first became a feminist, I was a socialist feminist, and so I came from the left. I don't really know much about radical feminism, but in the sort of early seventies, I came across radical feminism a bit, and I didn't think that it was particularly revolutionary at that time.

 And indeed, I wrote a paper in 1976 called the Need for Revolutionary Feminism, which is online, and which you can find, which I wrote for a conference. And I said that, you know, I couldn't really work out what radical feminism was, but I thought what we needed to do as revolutionary feminists was actually take a, sort of, a Marxist approach if you like, work out who the oppressors were, what were their strengths, how did they organise, and what could we do against it.

 And I said that what was revolutionary for women was taking control. Control of our bodies, taking control of our reproduction, because it was in all of that that our oppression lay. I wrote a paper and quite a lot of women really liked it, and they started calling themselves revolutionary feminists. So without really meaning to, I’d somehow started what in those days was called a tendency within feminism, a particular way of thinking.

 At that time, I wasn't even a lesbian. But pretty much all of the other women who decided there were revolutionary feminists were, and so a meeting was held on whether you could be a heterosexual revolutionary feminist.

 And I received all of the arguments. I knew that, “actually we should be putting our energies into the solution and not into the problem,” and so on and so on. So I went to the meeting and said, “you are right.” So that led to me becoming a lesbian. 

 But basically revolutionary feminism was based on recognising the crucial importance of sexuality in keeping women down on, on lesbian feminism, on women becoming lesbians, the critique of heterosexuality, and fighting violence against women.

 Lesbian feminists were absolutely fundamentally involved in campaigning against pornography, rape, all forms of violence against women. That was the main work we did, so we concentrated on male violence and sexual violence, as the main problem in the oppression of women. 

 Yağmur: How did it fade out? Is it because it kind of merged into the rest of radical feminists or, like, the group?

Sheila: No, I think that probably by the nineties fewer and fewer women were calling themselves revolutionary feminists. My early books actually say Sheila Jeffreys is a revolutionary feminist. And indeed a book that we wrote in 1984, The Sexuality Debates, looking at it yesterday it says, “we are all revolutionary feminists.”

 So that became, as feminism faded out really, and feminism became less strong, I guess there was a sense that nobody understood what revolutionary feminism was anymore, and we were kind of huddling together for safety in a way. So I huddled under the umbrella of radical feminism.

 So radical feminism, much, much bigger than revolutionary feminism, and of course it's not specifically lesbian, there's no question about that. So these days I tend to call myself, in a shorthand way, a radical feminist because I'm certainly no longer a socialist feminist or a liberal feminist, although of course I am still a socialist. So, yes, I guess that's how it happened.

 Yağmur: Another really important topic is queer politics. So you say in your autobiography that when you published Unpacking Queer Politics in 2003, it didn't really receive much attention back then, but then it kind of got a new life of its own. And can you explain why that happened and what you talk about in this really important book?

 Sheila: Well, queer politics only started in about, sort of, in the late eighties as a result of the development of the AIDS epidemic, and some men in America in particular deciding they needed to be angrier and adopt a new term and call themselves queer and so on.

 It was always a disaster for lesbians because lesbians are simply not included. The very simple, obvious way they're not included is that lesbians had to have the word queer in front of their name. They had to be, sort of, they had to be queer women or queer lesbians. Whereas gays were just gays and queers were just queer. Queers became just men. As gay had meant just men. Any of these umbrella terms actually mean just men.

 But I wrote that book, so I wrote quite a bit about, in the 1990s, about how disastrous queer politics was, because it was men's politics, for the existence of lesbian feminism, and it rejected lesbian feminism. We were seen as anti-sex, and really a problem because we were critical of male sexuality.

 But I wrote Unpacking Queer Politics because it had become clear by 2003 when I did that book, that queer politics was actually about the promotion and enforcement of all the worst aspects of specifically male sexuality. The defence of prostitution and pornography, of aggressive and objectifying sex, and so on, and very, very specifically, against the interests of women, feminists, and lesbians.

 In fact, I explain in the introduction to that book that the National Lesbian and Gay Task Force Conference, in the US a couple of years before, had actually had a workshop on the ‘Ick Factor’. Ick factor meaning you feel sick. And the ick factor was gay men feeling sick at having to see women's bodies and lesbian bodies.

 It was about how if they were on a nude beach and they saw a woman's body, they'd feel physically sick. They would retch and feel physically sick. Now, this is a hatred and horror at women, which is quite extraordinary, but it's not so surprising that so many gay men had it. And these were the activists, the political ones who were talking about it.

 What's extraordinary is that they felt they could just have an open workshop and discuss it in a perfectly ordinary way. Now that kind of hatred would never be accepted around antisemitism and racism and other forms of oppression. But it was accepted. Well, I mean, they thought it was a problem, but the fact is they thought it was okay to just go out there and talk about, basically, how much they hated women.

 So that was where queer politics had got to, by the very early 2000s, and I thought I needed to write a book about that. But I think the problem was feminism was so far gone at that time, 2003 was in the doldrums, that the publisher, Polity, basically said, you know, wasn't selling very well, they wouldn't take any more books from me.

 And indeed it wasn't noticed at the time that lesbian feminism barely existed. Feminism barely existed. What's exciting to me is that now that book is getting a new lease of life, particularly among young women and young lesbians who want to understand what the hell hit them, how queer became the whole culture, how feminism disappeared, and what the hell's going on.

 And I get emails, and I get women coming up to me, and saying how important that book has been because it explains what they grew up in. An extraordinarily anti-woman, anti-lesbian culture. 

 Yağmur: Invaded the whole of academia where it's just routinely taught without any criticism of it. And again, in Trigger Warning, you explained really well how the whole culture of university has changed, becoming really like the corporatisation of university.

 And you also talk about  wanting to rebuild open universities for women, and is that project underway and what can we expect from that?

 Sheila: Okay. Well, I was expressing a wish, back in the early 1980s. I was in the Southwest London Women's Studies Group. We all taught, evening classes, extramural classes from universities, or a worker's educational association classes at our local community centre. And that's how what became women's studies and eventually went into universities came from.

 And then of course, that became gender studies and became about men and male sexuality and women's studies completely disappeared and the feminism disappeared. So I was thinking we need to get back to something like that where we can have actual feminism taught.

 And these days, of course, we have technologies that enable that to be more possible. And I'm meeting more and more women, feminists, lesbian feminists, academics as well, from, you know, countries all over the world.

 I think it would absolutely be possible to put forward, not for accreditation, but then the evening classes weren't either, but it would be possible to put forward actual courses on different topics with women from different countries lecturing in it, do them by Zoom, and create that for women. I think that would be a wonderful thing to do. 

 Yağmur: Any listeners, will be willing to join. It's an open invitation, I imagine.

 So since we're talking about feminist teaching, theory, the role of theory within feminism, I thought that there was this beautiful line in your book, which you say, “we wanted theory.”

 I am a fan of theory as well, so I can completely understand that. But then I was so surprised when I read that you were accused of being too logical. So why do you think that was the case, and how do you explain the central role that theory plays within feminism? 

 Sheila: I think that back in the day there might have been a sense that theory was something that men were into particularly, that it was objective and separated from experience, and that actually feminists should get into just, sort of, being together in the woods and having a campfire and having lovely feelings, which is important as well. But there was a bit of a rejection of theory.

 In fact, of course, theory and consciousness raising, we used to argue, go completely together. There's consciousness raising, and then there's theory. Because the women talk about their experience, which is why of course male theorists cannot, of course, do anything to do, have anything to do with feminism.

 Women's theory comes from their experience. You discover it through consciousness raising, do the theory, and then you work out what the action is. You need the theory, we considered, in order to be able to work out what to do. And of course, I did come from the left, I'd done, you know, courses and political theory at university, I had a lot to kick off from.

 I think that the problem now is that young people, yes, they've had the rubbish of queer theory at universities. They haven't had structuralist theory talking about race, sex, and class in a structural way, trying to work out how do these oppressions work? How are they enforced? How do we deal with them? How do we pull away the bottom brick so that the whole edifice falls down?

 Those discussions, I think, are completely foreign for huge numbers of people, young people today, who've been to university and indoctrinated in all the woolly, deliberately anti-structural post-modern theory, queer theory, and so on.

 Young people, you know, they don't have the weapons, they don't have the tools to begin to try and understand and analyse the world. So I think, yes, feminist theory is absolutely crucial. But it's not something that's necessarily, you know, separate from our experience, it comes from our experience and we can create it together.

 Yağmur: Some of the theories you have exposed and explained have been deemed so provocative that, you know, they rise to the title of your book, ‘Trigger Warning,’ because there are many episodes in which you are completely excluded from certain spaces, because of what you say, your analysis.

 There's a really nice one, where you're in this feminist retreat in Italy, and then you say that it was not really the best of ideas to have feminist theory taken from a man who has killed his wife. 

 Sheila: ... Yes. 

 Yağmur: Certain… that is now so popular. What do you make of this current culture of ‘trigger warning’? Because now, I guess, it's even more than what you had back then. What is its political significance and how does it affect feminist activism? 

 Sheila: Well, ‘trigger warning’ is a phrase that I only really became aware of in the 1990s when I visited the States and discovered that women survivors of prostitution and various forms of the sex industry in particular, were using this phrase, they were saying that certain things triggered them and made them relive the terrible violence that was done to them.

 So I understood it in that context, though I was not completely happy with the use of the term. But since then - because it comes from therapy, and as you'll know from the book, I completely reject therapy and psychoanalysis and all of those things. 

 But in the last 10 years or so, ‘trigger warning’ has taken on a completely new meaning, which is that in universities teachers are expected to give ‘trigger warnings’ to students. There are ‘trigger warnings’ on television programs. ‘Trigger warning’ is used everywhere.

 But in terms of students, it seems that what they needed to be warned about was feminism, very specifically feminism. And I discovered when I was online some years, a few years ago, that my book Anti-Climax from 1990, which is about the politics of the sexual revolution after the Second World War and into the seventies and eighties, somebody, some foolish young person has said, “it needs a ‘trigger warning’”.

 In other words, that book worried them. That is the point. The point of feminist works is to make it clear that we need a revolution and to get women really furious. I mean, that is the point. But that sort of thing now… I mean, in the 1990 it was seen as an important book. It was a worrying book.

 As you'll have read from the autobiography, there were some who saw it at the time as too extreme, but it was looking at the construction of female sexuality to be about eroticising women's subordination. It was too extreme for some, but now, what was seen then is simply a worker theory that you talked about and possibly disagreed about, has now become something that… people should really be scared of.

 So at my university, fortunately, because I retired in 2015 I was never under pressure to do ‘trigger warnings’. I mean, there are some situations in which I think that students do need to be warned. If you're going to show, I didn't show to my students because I thought it was too much, pornography, like the Women Against Pornography slideshow from the 1880s.

 I showed that as an activist in Britain, but I will always show it with the lights on, telling women - I would only do it in women-only as well, I don't want women to have to see anything to do with pornography with a man who's possibly having an erection next to them, obviously that's out - but I would say women can leave at any time, and so on.

 But I realised in the States it was quite different. They were showing that, you know, in the dark, in mixed groups, without any kind of warnings. So there are some things that one needs to be careful. And when I did show examples of pornography to my students, they were very mild, from Diana Russell's book, for instance, on pornography. They were in black and white and often, and really, I don't think I even used examples, I used cartoons from the pornography.

 If you look at Playboy cartoons, they tell you everything. So there are situations where I don't think women and students need to be confronted with the actual pictures necessarily. But that's very different from being able to have quotes from women about what they felt like when they were raped, what prostitution was all about, all of those sorts of things.

 So I guess, I mean, you know, there are some things that one needs to be careful of, but we to be able to talk about the experience of women. Feminism cannot exist if we can't do that. So ‘trigger warnings’ are a way of shutting us down. And I think we need to get rid of that term altogether. We need to make it possible for people to talk politics.

 I mean, we are in a culture constructed by pornography. Pornography so horrendous that even describing it, let alone showing it, causes people to be very, very disturbed. The vast majority of women have no idea what's there. No idea what’s there. That pornography is extending into popular culture, not just movies, but you know, on the television in Britain at the moment, there's a program on called Harlots, and so on.

 So these values are going into the general culture. There's no ‘trigger warnings’ about these things. They're just ordinary men's vicious, aggressive culture towards women. And nobody says that any women need to be warned about it. It's feminism that they think requires a warning 

 Yağmur: I'm glad you mentioned how you showed pornography because I feel that's something that we're really stuck with, within the activism, because there's a, I think there’s a legitimate desire to kind of protect ourselves from what is…

 The situation that I heard from the activists from Persons Against Non-State Torture, so Jeanne Sarson and Linda MacDonald, where they say that they come to the situation where they had their book rejected, where they're telling the experiences of victims, because it's too much for women to know.

 But then we need to tell as well, you know, we need to get it out there. So I'm glad you explained how it's possible to do so.

 There are two other topics that I would like to cover. So, one of them is religion and you've written a wonderful book called Men's Dominion, and it was again, like Unpacking Queer Politics, kind of, didn't receive the attention it deserved, although it highlighted something that is really essential and urgent problem.

 And I think specifically in the UK where religion is really, you know, again it's like queer politics in universities. I remember in my final year at university I had. Someone from… which is an Islamist organisation that is forbidden in so many countries, talking to me about women's rights.

 So can you tell a little more about that book and about the rise of religious fundamentalism? 

 Sheila: Yes. Well, back in the 1970s, I had of course been an atheist since I was, you know, 11 or 12 years old. But feminists were atheists. There's no question about that, because we understood religion to be the fundamental and most crucial way in which women were controlled.

 All of the religions of significance came out of a particular cradle of patriarchy in the Middle East. They were all extremely similar. Christianity, Islam, Judaism, the values about women are all extremely similar, or pretty much the same. And it's through those religions, we understood, that states operated and controlled women and that that has always been the case.

 Religion was control of the populace, but particularly women, so we absolutely rejected religion. It wasn't really until the 1980s that, you know, some women started saying, “well we are Christian feminists,” or, “we are Jewish feminists,” and so on. We just completely - I didn't know anybody who had any attachment to, or a decent word to say for, any religion in the 1970s, I knew thousands of feminists, right.

 So, what's happened recently is that obviously the radicalism has gone, and a lot of people have gone back and retreated into religions in various ways. But what I became aware of and I wanted to talk about in that book, is the new way in which states control through religion.

 It's not because they enforce a religion on the populace, a particular religion. But in countries like Australia or Britain, patriarchal states rule through what they call multiculturalism, which is that they delegate, to the particular powerful men of different religious groups, responsibility for controlling their population, and particularly women. 

 For instance, in some states, there's even an acceptance of some elements of Sharia law, which is just absolutely extraordinary. So, state governments in multicultural states withdraw from the responsibility of having equal rights for their citizens. Women and children are tossed into religious enclaves, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and control over them is given to powerful groups of men.

 I call it a gentleman's agreement, by which the gentleman running the government in Britain, organise through the gentleman of other religions too. So, “if you can do this in your way, we'll do this in our way.”

 So I was horrified to discover how far that was going, particularly under Tony Blair in Britain, who actually destroyed the state education system by setting up all of these state schools, which was absolutely horrifying to me because I have been a teacher and you know, education is important to me.

 So I particularly wanted to look at the way in which there's been not just a resurgence of religion, but it becomes almost impossible to talk about what the problem. You were supposed to think that the covering of women, for instance, was something that could be something to do with feminism. I mean, extraordinary.

 You weren't supposed to criticise the veil, the covering of women, which removes their humanity. And it's obviously about subordination. Men don't have to do any of those things.

 So I was astonished that there were feminists who are prepared to say that we shouldn't simply reject the covering, or the snuffing out, as I would say, of women. So we've got to this very difficult position where a lot of people were accepting that we should respect culture and religion.

 There's no way in a million years I could respect culture and religion, I'm a feminist, I gave both up, very, very early. You know, western culture is horrendous for women. All the makeup and the showing the backside on the beach, and it's just… Western culture is horrendous for women.

 Just totally, totally sexualised, beyond all imagining. Women are being taught beauty practices by RuPaul and drag queens and so on. So it's a horrendous culture in the west that women are in, and all cultures have to go because all cultures are patriarchal. Where the hell do they come from? What are they about?

 You know, I mean, it's not just about liking certain food types or a particular dancing pattern. Culture is about politics and the enforcement of values and the subordination of women. So obviously feminism is about getting rid of all culture because all culture is patriarchal now. 

 From the roots up, we have to absolutely eradicate culture as we know it. and start to create something, as I think we were doing in the seventies and eighties, which is more liveable for women, more friendly to women's interests.

 So that's what I needed to write about, in 2012 when it was published. I think one problem is that the publishers changed the title. I wanted to call it the Devil's Gateway, which I think is what Saint Augustine said about women that, you know, we are the devil's gateway cause the devil enters via our vaginas, which is just a lovely idea.

 I really like that and I liked the title, but the publishers didn't. So I had to choose this boring title, Man's Dominion, which I think did not excite people very much. But also astonishingly, and it was astonishing to me, there was just no interest in the book. It wasn't reviewed. Nobody found it. Nobody was interested.

 Why? I think it's because for an awful lot of feminists, they think, “well, religions, I'm not interested in religion, religion is unimportant,”  without any understanding of the crucial role it plays in the lives of millions and millions and millions of women.

 There are religious laws in the Lebanon, for instance, for all the different religious groupings, which say that women may not leave the house without a man's permission and so on. We need to care about that.

 So I think an awful lot of feminists didn’t understand, and had no interest in, the importance of religion. I have to say unfortunately, excitement about that book is not returning. There's no real discussion of religion going on in this wave of feminism we're creating now.

 I mean, there are other things that are not being looked at either, like psychiatry and therapy and so on, but there's no real examination of religion right now, and that worries me very, very much. It's dangerous, I realise that, but so are all the other things that we're critiquing now, transgenderism and so on.

 So yes, I'm waiting for that book to have its day. I think that everything that I wrote about is just as dangerous, if not more so, now. None of it has gone away. So I am just, I'm hoping and I'm waiting, because sometimes I write books that I think are crucially important at the time, but they're not on the crest of the wave of what other people are thinking is important then.

 So that determines whether or not they get picked up at the time. And in fact, Gender Hurts, which was very important, about politics of transgenderism. That was 2014. I was originally thinking of writing it back in 2007 and submitting it to publishers and nobody was interested.

 I'm very glad they weren't interested. Because in 2014, that was the moment for that wave, and so that book is known about. 

 Yağmur: Well, I really hope Men’s Dominion gets picked up again, because otherwise, as you say, we're giving up on so many women, and I found that even in feminist circles, sometimes religion is even more taboo than transsexualism. It's still something we don't talk about.

 And I was so shocked when I heard people say, “oh, well, you know, the burka at least allows women to exit their homes.” For themselves, they would never say something like that.

 And what you say about Western culture as well, I don't understand why it's not crystal clear, the parallel between the rise in covering and the rise in nakedness… they go hand in hand. They're not opposed to each other. They’re the same system. So really, really… that it really gets picked up again.

 The final topic I would like to talk about is animal welfare. I kind of gave a generic title to it, I'm not even sure of precise terminology, you'll correct me.

 Because you say that the wealthy of animals is really close to your heart. In fact, in the book, it's really nice, we take a road trip in Australia, you take us, you make us discover the country as well, which is, a nice part of it.

 And you also say that you haven’t really written about that issue. Is there a specific reason for that? 

 Sheila: I always was interested in animal liberation and as I say in the book, when I was 14, I was in the Society for the Protection of Animals in North Africa, caring about donkeys, and I was in an anti-vivisection organisation, which sent me all these terrible pictures of, you know, things dropped on the eyes of rabbits in experiments - was nothing about ‘trigger warning’ then.

 So I was very concerned then. I was never allowed to have a dog. So I wasn't, I had stick insects, goldfish, all of that kind of thing. Newts, I had newts. So I was always very interested in animals. And I became a vegetarian very early, as a young hippie, at about 21 years old. 

 As soon as feminism began, I mean, it was wonderful writing in the 1970s about the connections between the situation of women and the situation of animals, and how women were treated in a way very similar to animals, because of course, women were reduced to the status of animals, women have been bred, and there’s many, many, many connections.

 So when I was teaching in the early nineties at the University of Melbourne, I was teaching on a first year course where I was able to do a week on animal liberation. So I did the five reasons, basically, why my students should be vegetarian. I looked at the way in which the violence against women often starts with violence against animals, and the importance of being - how women are controlled through violence against animals in the house, all of those kinds of connections.

 I looked at the way that women are bred and the breeding of sows and the breeding of women and IVF and all those connections. And of course I looked at the violence against animals, of breeding them and the simple cruelty involved in all of that. I also looked at the international economic connections of what it does to the countryside, and the environment, and the pollution.

 I looked at the health implications of eating meat and so on, so I did a whole course on this and I often thought that I should write it up. In fact, I was going to call the book Hen Pecking. Hen Pecking meaning, something that women are accused of when they make all kinds of problems, “oh, she's just hen pecking again,” you know, whining, henpecking. I didn't do that book because there were lots of other things to do, and I stopped teaching on that course and so on.

 But I am very concerned that that's not an issue for feminists now, since there are so many, many connections, and the Carol Adams book, the Sexual Politics of Meat, and her book on pornography and meat, these are crucially important books. It's a very, very important issue of lesbian and feminist ethics.

 I would recommend that, on the website online, Feminist for Animal Rights is still there. Hasn't been updated ever since feminism disappeared, but there's still lots of original, wonderful articles there. So I think that is something we need to be seriously thinking about again.

 But unfortunately, within this wave of feminism, there are some feminists who actually say that vegetables growing is the problem. “We should be eating meat because that is better for the planet.” Yes, I know, it's very difficult to understand, but there are feminists who say that. 

 So it's become actually quite a problem. I think meat-eating is even more enforced right now within feminism than it was, so yes, I think we need to think about that one again. I'm not going to write a book on it though, because there's too many other things.

 And the book I'm writing a moment is about male sexuality, and I'm completely absorbed in that. There's still lots to do.