Our power over their pleasure (short version)
We like to think we offer solidarity and empowerment to activists in the global South. It can shift into intrusion and co-dependency. A story about vibrators, among others.
Continuing from the full version.
In the early 2000s, a new field in international human rights work coalesced, from practices long common among human rights defenders: Defender Security. As so often, it became a thing - with a name, institutions, norms, handbooks and all the usual attributes - when Western governments and foreign aid donors came on board. This coincided with the hardening of the backlash against Western-funded NGOs across the former Soviet Union and other countries in the global South. The donor community came up with a name for that, too: the shrinking space.
So far, so good.
It meant there was growing awareness of the threats and risks activists were facing and that resources and mechanisms were required to fend off those threats. More funding became available, through more accessible processes.
I was working on Chechnya at the time, a desperately dangerous place for activists. Defender security became a major part of my work, taking up all or nearly all of my time for long stretches over the decade preceding the pandemic. My colleagues and I became early adopters of something called “integrated defender security”, a feminist, intersectional concept that centers human rights defenders as ordinary, complex human beings with full lives and elevates (mental) health care to the same level as “classic” threats like arrest by security services.
So far, still so good.
I’ve seen more activists give up because of burn-out than because they were silenced by the state or some such “classic” threat scenario. As prosaic as this may sound, integrated defender security is largely about work-life balance. This made eminent sense in our practice in the North Caucasus, especially once we were able to secure enough funding to take care of our team members according to our feminist, intersectional values, offering help with health emergencies and holding regular team retreats.
This is also where knotty issues first arose, along the following lines: if a retreat organized by your employer and paid for by foreign grants is the only vacation an activist ever gets, is that work-life balance? If only women who are designated “activists” (by virtue of drawing a salary paid from foreign grants) get to go on retreats, is that still feminist? If activists’ health, well-being, vacations, joy and pleasure depend on far-away, unpredictable, unaccountable grant-making institutions, is that empowering?
Meanwhile, in the years leading up to the pandemic, defender security became fashionable among a wider range of international organizations, foreign aid agencies and grant-makers of all shapes. Everyone started doing it.
Curiously, a sub-field - Women’s Human Rights Defenders’ security (WHRD) became an especially fashionable cause. I suspect because the WHRD is the perfect damsel in distress for 21st century Western diplomats, development aid officials and TED-talk organizers: as courageous as she is decorative at awards ceremonies, as emblematic of the diversity we aspire to as she is of democracy-promotion teleology, as inspiring as she is vulnerable and dependent on our, Western, protection.
The well-intentioned sentiment of wanting to provide first-rate R&R, well-being and work-life balance to activists at times veered into five-star syndrome - creating accidental elites that are increasingly alienated from the communities they ostensibly serve.
When I started working with Ukrainian activists in 2014, I realized that they faced enormous pressure, exhaustion, even “classic” threats due to their work, but no relief was coming. Defender security was simply not on anyone’s agenda for Ukraine, fashionable as it may have been for other countries. The Ukrainian activists I worked with were not aware that defender security was a thing: that they didn’t have to sacrifice their life, health or sanity to be true activists; that there were well-established, intersectional best practices for staying safe; that there were specialized organizations and emergency funders who were on their side and ready to provide support. In donor countries’ discourse, Ukraine had been designated as a little rough around the edges, but ultimately “free” and on the right track. Its “vibrant civil society” was its international calling card, so it couldn’t possibly be a place where human rights defenders faced threats.
We set out to change that, by showing our Ukrainian colleagues that they had a right to feel scared and exhausted, and that it was okay to ask for help, by connecting them with the institutions that would provide this help and by taking care of them. We managed to lay the groundwork for sustaining their activism, barely, just in time for the pandemic.
Here, we resume the full story:
Fast forward to the COVID pandemic. That it affected women and girls disproportionately and has set back progress on gender equality for decades has been widely reported (if largely shrugged off, despite the epic awfulness of this realization). The pandemic also stretched and strained women grassroots activists and their organizations to their limits and beyond, all over the world. Especially in communities where poverty, austerity, discrimination and political violence had long depleted healthcare and social services, women activists became the go-to, all-purpose first responders. They organized anything from food deliveries to volunteer ambulance services to online education and remote psychological support, keeping communities supplied and at peace during lockdowns, taking care of the sick and trying to fight against the explosion in domestic violence that accompanied the pandemic around the world.
In retrospect, the groundwork had been laid, just in time for the pandemic. Women activists from Ukraine, Moldova, Russia and beyond quickly found ways to talk to each other, vent, share advice and provide support. Activists in Chechnya set up “helping the helpers” group counseling, reaching their peers from eastern Europe to Central Asia online. I watched my colleagues being very clear and intentional about their indispensable role in their reeling communities and their own needs at the same time. They really came into their own.
Talk about indispensable: there is a handful of grant-making foundations that specialize in feminist, integrated defender security. I’ve mentioned them above, but I want to reiterate just how exceptional they are. They make fast, few-questions-asked emergency grants to women activists (and only to women activists), so the latter can protect themselves against threats, stay safe and sane, but also step up to save women and girls and entire communities around them in times of dire need or rare opportunity.
These women’s security foundations are unlike any other grant-makers I have worked with. These days, most donors swear up and down that they listen to their grantee partners and communities, lower barriers to access, introduce participatory processes, de-center themselves, cut bureaucracy and simplify procedures and communicate at eye level, and many of them mean it and try to do something about it, but from my perch, they largely fail.
Women’s security grant-makers, just a handful of them in all, are different in all the ways that matter. I won’t mention these foundations’ names here, because the women who work there deserve privacy, especially in the context of this story (the entire story, and the anecdote involving vibrators). They are true friends to the activists who turn to them for help.
Our power over their pleasure
The pandemic experience prepared many Ukrainian activists for the full-scale invasion that came in February 2022. Scratch that; nothing can ever prepare for war. What I mean is that Ukrainian activists, at home and together with their peers from Moldova to the North Caucasus, Belarus to Kyrgyzstan, had built region-wide virtual support networks, were able to set up Zoom calls, had come to appreciate each other’s wisdom and support, knew whom to message when they needed help.
Most importantly, Ukrainian activists, who’d been stuck in that parallel universe of their “vibrant civil society” that supposedly faced no threats, had by then absorbed the message that it’s okay to ask for help. That they could ask for emergency grants not just to save others’ lives, but also their own. That they deserved psychological counseling, breaks, help with living expenses. That they could get money to flee the war for good, but also to take breaks from war if they chose to stay in their communities and continue to serve them.
When Russia invaded Ukraine, the women’s security funds stepped up to the plate like I’d never seen before. They put millions in the hands of hundreds of Ukrainian women activists, faster and with more freedom for their use than ever.
A few months into the war, Ukrainian activists started planning retreats for themselves. They’d been in overdrive for months, their nerves and health were shattered. Many of them had not seen their colleagues since the start of the war, their lives having taken a peripatetic turn: fleeing missiles or occupation, finding refuge abroad, but getting restless and returning frequently to their home regions or setting up shop in another city in Ukraine, then leaving again for advocacy across Europe. One of them told me last month, more than a year into the war, that she had not stayed in any one place for more than a week since the war started. Another, from a now occupied southern city, opened a new office in Odesa; a city she - a middle-class woman nearing 50, with her own car - had never been to before the war.
A gift of vibrators
In summer 2022, in a regular Zoom meeting with these women’s security funders, a Ukrainian activist told us how their first retreat had gone. She was excited, glowing with that post-retreat high. It had been real, raw and meaningful, exactly as she had hoped. The participating activists had arrived exhausted. They were living as refugees in Europe, in often cramped conditions. This had been their first me-time since the start of the war and probably much longer. They loved that someone took care of them, that there was time to sleep in, that they had privacy.
The funders and other activists on the call nodded, sighed, oooh-ed and aaah-ed. This sounded exactly like what we all believed in. It made us feel vindicated and moved, vicariously.
The activists, the retreat organizer continued, had complained about their non-existent sex life. This was a good sign, it meant they were opening up, comfortable around each other, going deep into the “integrated” part of integrated security, into the work-life balance stuff. Most of them had not seen their husbands or partners for months, since men were not allowed to leave Ukraine. Some of them had their marriages unravel under the unbearable stress of war. In their refugee accommodations, they had to share rooms with others, sometimes with strangers. They were too tired, shell-shocked, overworked to think of sex.
More oooh-ing and aaah-ing around our Zoom group, faces on the screen scrunching up with empathy. Good job. These are the conversations we want activists to have. This is how we learn from them about the manifold, unexpected, granular ways in which war impacts women. We want them to be explicit and intentional about all of their needs. If women insist on their pleasure, instead of sacrificing it as they have been taught they must, you’re doing something right at your retreat.
“So”, the retreat organizer continued, beaming, “we thought that at our next retreat, we should gift them vibrators.” Giggling, whooping, applause all around our Zoom group.
One of the lovely, thoughtful, kind women from a women’s security foundation, smiling broadly and proudly, said “Go ahead, when you write the grant budget for the next retreat, put vibrators in it, we will pay for them, we want you to do this.”
It was a small moment in a long year of war, but it stuck with me. Something felt not right.
There was, once again, the haphazard elite formation. At a time when millions of Ukrainian women are refugees, lonely and sad, a dozen or so will get the gift of a vibrator from a feminist foundation. With all the feminist, sisterly love and giggles we try to send their way. Beyond those lucky few, several dozen or maybe hundreds more will be invited to any feminist retreat, where their hosts will do their very best to make them feel safe, comfortable, whole, taken care of and supported.
Millions of Ukrainian women will not go to a feminist retreat, or any retreat, let alone be gifted vibrators. But they are women just like us, my Chechen colleagues had said when they wanted to bring their friends to our retreats. They support other women and girls. They need this, too.
There was, once again, the issue of work-life balance. What a plodding, pedestrian term for something so fundamental and intimate. These activists would be given vibrators because of their work, from people they work with, paid for by institutions to whom they are visible only because of the work they do. They’d be presented with vibrators while sitting in a circle with their work colleagues.
There was the dependence on far-away, unknowable institutions for things that are not just existential (security, evacuating from a war zone, money for rent and food), but for the most private and indeed intimate needs. These institutions had already paid for these activists’ psychological counseling, cake and yoga. Now they would pay for their orgasms, too.
We like to think we seed empowerment, but this is its opposite, it is creeping intrusion and co-dependency.
An empowered woman would have her own disposable income, to spend on everything required for a safe, healthy, dignified, joyful life as she sees fit, with autonomy and privacy. Should we, then, aim to pay every Ukrainian grassroots activist a sufficient salary, so she could buy herself vacations, cake or vibrators? Of course not. Singling out activists for preferred treatment, livelihoods and lifestyles far above those of the communities they ostensibly serve, isn’t just unfair. It creates elites where there should be equality, solidarity and liberation for all, and estranges them from their communities.
The feminist activists who practice integrated defender security have been trying hard to get it right. We’ve come very close. Up to and including the wrong kind of close: too close for comfort.
The cost of our success is our failure.