March 18

This weekend is the third anniversary of invasion of Iraq. So I hope you spent at least some of it at an anti-war protest (unless you support the occupation, in which case).

The Wellington demonstration was fantastic. The numbers were up on last year. While 250 people doesn’t sound like that much (particularly if you live somewhere big), our numbers are up on last year (which ruins a perfectly good theory of mine about the relationship between activists involved in organising a protest and people who turned up, oh well won’t stop me using it). There were even people there who I didn’t recognise, but what really excited me is that some of those people’s didn’t just turn up, they had organised to do stuff.

But that’s not the main point of this post, because towards the end of the protest someone got arrested and this lead to the usual chain reaction and four more people were arrested (even that isn’t the main point of the post, however frustrated I may be about protesters inability to count. If the police outnumber us then they can do whatever they want and the best idea is to get out of their way as soon as possible). What I want to write about is the gendered insults protesters were yelling at the police.

The police were all men, and both male and female protesters were playing up the way they were acting was a sign of failure of their masculinity, some of the comments were actually about the size of people’s dicks.

Now feelings were quite high. I’d made ‘Louise Nicholas is a Hero’ patches and given them out to a bunch of people on the demo. The police were even more violent than usual (and I’m semi-used to police attacking my friends).

But to me that’s all the more reason to reject traditional ideas of masculinity (and I think it’s just plain stupid to taunt overhyped, specially trained, violent cops about their masculinity).

Also posted on my blog.