Open your Eyes!!!

Why everyone should get married!

Over five years ago I married the man I had loved for over ten years, and lived with for

almost eight. It was a wonderful wedding, one of the happiest and most beautiful days of

my life; but like many days in my life …. it was fake.


The first time, Graham proposed to me whilst I was on the toilet, naked. He proposed

mainly because to all intents and purposes I forced him to; I nagged him about it a lot and

then one day, when I saw loads of shooting stars in the sky, I told him and a friend that I

wanted, more than anything, for us to get married. He turned to me and said; ‘If England

win the Ashes, I’ll marry you’.


Well, against all the odds England did win the Ashes! We had been together for many years

and I guess I wanted evidence of a stronger commitment, and more importantly, at the

time, I believed that if we were married then he would be less afraid of me leaving him, like

his mother had at birth.


During this engagement, Graham started to search for his birth mother, (apparently it is

often at key moments in a persons’ life that they search for birth parents; a need to check

medical history etc) anyway, he found her surprisingly quickly and things became somewhat

crazy. The final straw came when he threw a chair at me (!), at which point I fled with the

dog to the safety of my parent’s house in France in my rover metro.


Several months and some counseling (on his part) later, we lived together once again

and things seemed to have improved. About another year after that, Valentine’s day was

approaching and seeing that it was a leap year, and it had been he who had proposed the

previous time, (and I had cancelled the wedding when I left!), I thought it sensible that it be

my turn.


I walked to a spot we often passed on dog walks and tied a heart to a tree with a note on it

asking ‘Will you Marry me?’. Sadly later that day when we walked past it, he didn’t actually

see it, so I had to point it out and then argued with him about how he should be the one

to go and see what it was – how very romantic! However, he said yes and once again we

planned a small but beautiful wedding at my parent’s home in France.


We had agreed not to see each other the night before the wedding and so slept in separate

houses. However, on the morning of the wedding, Graham stuck his head though my door

and said ‘Sorry! I’ve run out of weed.’ I couldn’t believe it! Couldn’t he have sent someone

else? I was really angry but calmed myself (probably, though I can’t remember by smoking

a joint myself) and tried not to think about it. The day progressed beautifully and we

consummated our marriage in style.


Two days later I was driving people to the airport to fly home, when I received a text from

his birth mother, Sarah, asking to see me. ‘How lovely’, I thought and text back ‘Yes of

course’.


When I arrived at the gite where she was staying, the first thing she said to me was ‘I’ve

always liked you…’. How nice I thought, smiling, ‘…or thought I liked you…’ hang on, what?

 ‘Or liked what I thought I knew about you.’ What the hell?


She went on to detail how I had let her down. How it was my fault that she had such a bad

relationship with her son and how I clearly did everything I could to keep him away from

her. How could I tell her that Graham never wanted to speak to her? That I had to force him

by always saying that yes, he was home when he would be desperately shaking his head

and that it was always me that encouraged/forced getting together. I had so much respect

for the woman for not having had an abortion (as I had done at her age) and I felt that the

only way Graham would get over his ‘issues’ was by improving his relationship with his birth

mother.


Driving away from her that day my whole life seemed to change shape. I relived so many of

my experiences again but saw them through other people’s eyes. Since the age of 15, when

I was raped, I had been doing everything I could to ignore myself. I hated myself and so

put everyone else ahead of me. I felt they were much more important.


Realising that I had not only failed but I had clearly done more harm than good hit me hard.

If this was how Sarah saw me, what might other’s think? Why keep living a lie? I promised

myself to keep my head clear and to try to understand what I really wanted. To live for me.

The alternative had so completely backfired.


I got back to my parent’s house and explained what had happened to my husband, who

said something along the lines of ‘oh well she’s a stupid cow anyway.’ ‘What? So you’re

not going to explain to her how wrong she is and that it was your fault that she feels

completely shut out by you? Even now you won’t explain that you put her birth family in the

background because you wanted the parents who had bought you up all your life to be the

centre of attention? – totally understandable but she just needs you to tell her’. ‘Nah’. Oh

my god, I was so angry but what could I do?


When we returned home, I threw myself into my new job. Driving the five hour commute

twice a week. This commute gave me a lot of time to consider my colossal mistake. Was I

really accepting this treatment and lack of care for the rest of my life? Seriously?

They say love makes you blind and marriage opens your eyes. Well that was certainly the

case for me. Everyone should marry, if, for nothing else, simply to check that love has not

made them blind.


I left him three weeks after marrying him and nearly four years later, can say with total

conviction that it was the best thing I ever did.


Going forwards I fell in love with Claire and lived happily as a lesbian. It is thanks to her

that I now know what I want. That I have stopped long enough to ask myself that question.

That I have given myself the time necessary to heal from my past.


Going backwards, I was once videotaped having sex against my knowledge which was

subsequently shown to many of my friends at the time. The guy in question then used the

tape to blackmail me when I got pregnant with his baby.


Further back, I was sleeping with someone ten years older than me at 13, who

then ‘cheated on me’ with two of my ‘best friends’ in a threesome.


It is only recently that the word Pedophile has entered the equation for me. It wasn’t only

the rape that negatively affected my life but sex with men that had a detrimental impact.


Now sex is about what we want and how we like it. Certainly for me, I needed a woman to

teach me how to do this. I am no longer a sexual object but a sexual subject.


Life has had its ups and downs, however as Frank Zappa once said: ‘Better to have

something to remember, than nothing to forget’.

Feminism

https://soundcloud.com/emma-crews/andthetapdripsemma

Radio Interview

274....par jour a l'hexagone!

https://soundcloud.com/emma-crews/dance

Genius people!

Les femmes ne meurent pas a cause des maladies que nous ne pouvons pas traiter, les
femmes meurent car la société n'a pas encore décidé que leur vie est digne d'être sauvée.
Women are not dying because of illnesses we cannot treat, women are dying because society 
has yet to decide that their lives are worth saving. 
Mahmoud Futhall, Egyptian Doctor

"En fin de compte, nous nous souviendrons non pas des mots de nos ennemis, mais le silence de nos
amis"
"In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends"
Martin Luther King, Jr

We haven't yet ended or deconstructed patriarchy, we remain constantly at risk of having our victories reversed, we have not yet been freed nor freed ourselves from the social system in which the male acts as the primary authority figure determining social organisation and where the father maintains authority over women and children. Essentially we still live in a world where men rule and have privilege and women have less and are subordinate and of course violence, coercion, intimidation and terror and the tactics and methology that keep this privilege and authority in place.

Essentiellement nous vivons encore sans un monde ou les hommes ont le pouvoir et les
privilèges et les femmes ont moins et sont subordonnée et bien sur la violence, la coercition,
l’intimidation et la terreur sont les tactiques et la méthode (méthodologie) qui maintenir les
privilèges et l’autorité en place.

One in three women will be beaten or raped in her lifetime - that's one billion plus - a UN statistic.

The violence impacts us in so many ways visible and invisible, it destroys our bodies, our self-esteem and our souls, it obliterates confidence and limits our dreams. It's a term that determines how far we can travel and who we can become, so now we must go further and we must go the distance, we must unravel patriarchy and domination and violence once and for all, we must escalate the stakes, push the edges and we must MISBEHAVE.

The future of the body of the earth and the bodies of women are one and the same.

• ·        We are rising to tell religious leaders and governments that the time has come to direct their energies to feeding, healing, housing the people rather than obsessing about our vaginas.
• ·        We are rising so the marjinalized majorities step into equality, voice and power.
• ·        We are rising because we are over the over regulation of women’s health clinics and women’s bodies and vaginas.
• ·        We are rising because we are over brilliant, passionate remarks by women being called tantrums and outspoken women being called crazy, slut, inappropriate, and lacking decorum simply because they disagree.
• ·        We are over rape culture, rape mentality and rape joks.
• ·        We are rising because we are over people not understanding that rape is not a joke.
• ·        Over being told we don’t have a sense of humour when most of the women I know are really fucking funny.
• ·        Just don’t think an uninvited penis up our anus or vagina is a laugh riot.
• ·        One in three us military being raped by so-called comrades
• ·        Are rising so women can stop being silent about rape because they are made to feel it is their fault or they did something to make it happen – or it’s really not that bad!
• ·        We are rising so that the violence against women act be finally past, done once and for all.
• ·        The destruction and muting and determining of women is the destruction of life itself NO WOMEN-NO LIFE-DONE
• ·        We are rising because we are over some powerful men pretending this deep love of fetuses or babies and life when really it's a guise for their terror of our sexuality and power. If you cared so much about life you would ever consider letting a woman die rather than performing an abortion, you would ask the life givers, the women themselves what they need and want and you would honour their decisions and trust their decisions and believe that they were thought out carefully with depth because that's how women are and you would maybe even worship their vaginas, you would cherish the word vagina and you would know that there was nothing dirty or disgusting about the place where all life comes from.
• ·        We are rising because we are over people talking about the weight of our bodies rather than the weight of our ideas
• ·        We are rising and we are calling the good men to rise with us. There are plenty of good men, you live with us, make love with us, father us, befriend us, brother us, get nurtured and nurtured and mothered and eternally supported by us so why aren’t you standing with us? Why aren’t you driven to the point of madness and action by the rape and humiliation and censoring of us?

 Even Ensler 'Now Conference' 2012

274...par jour dans l'hexagone

• Le nombre réel de viols a 100,000 par an = 274 p/jour en France
• 67% des viols ont lieu au domicile de la victime ou de l'agresseur
• 74% des viols sont commis par une personne connue de la victime
• 25% des viols sont commis par un membre de la famille
• 45% des viols sont commis de jour
• 10% seulement des violeurs souffrent de pathologies psychiatriques (selon les expertise judiciaires auprès des tribunaux)
• 96% des auteurs de viol sont de sexe masculin
• 91% des victimes sont de sexe féminin (statistiques concordantes du ministère de la justice et du collectif féministe contre le viol)
• 9.3% des victimes portent plainte, notamment parce que dans
• 80% des cas l'auteur des viols est connu de la victime, ce qui pourrait amener selon certains associations
• Sur environ 10,000 plaintes déposées chaque année
• Seules 1,300 débouchent sur une condamnation 

Clémentine Autain 'Elles se manifestent' Don Quichotte éditions, une marque des éditions du seuil, 2013

Le théâtre est le seul endroit au monde et le dernier moyen d'ensemble qui nous reste d'atteindre directement l'organisme, et, dans les périodes de névrose et de sensualité basse comme celle ou nous plongeons, d'attaquer cette sensualité basse par des moyens physiques aux quels elle ne résistera pas.

...je crois que le théâtre utilise dans un sens supérieur et le plus difficile possible a la force d'influer sur l'aspect et sur la formation des choses.

...senti directement par l'esprit, en dehors des déformations du langage et de l’écueil de la parole et des mots.

...le spectateur dans le spectacle cherchant sa propre réalité  permettre a ce spectateur de s'identifier avec le spectacle, souffle par souffle et temps par temps.

...difficile et cruel d'abord pour moi-même.

Antonin Artaud, 'Le théâtre et son double', Editions Gallimard, 1964

'SI LA NON-VIOLENCE EST LA LOI DE L'HUMANITE, L'AVENIR APPARTIENT AUX  FEMMES.' 

                         GANDHI

WTF?

Danse du viol

First attempt; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ws60yne_YX8 - improviser!!!