IT’S tough to bring a roomful of activists to complete silence, but one speaker at the annual Radfem Collective conference managed it, with a powerful story of rage and grief transformed into action and social change.

Gemma Aitchison told the 70 delegates the story behind her setting up the Yes Matters group, campaigning for compulsory sex education. Her sister Sasha Marsden, then aged 16, was brutally murdered in 2013. Her stabbing was sexually motivated, and her sister set up the community group that year, getting consent onto the sex education curriculum. The community group teaches young people about gender stereotypes and “how damaging and limiting they are.

“Sexual objectification culture is in the air that we breathe, practically. The idea that objectification is ‘empowering’ doesn’t make sense. An object serves the need of the subject. There’s no need for a chair to consent before you sit on it,” she told the conference.

Objects, said Aitchison, are disposable. As she described the murder of her teenage sister, in its full horror, she said: “She was ‘disposable’. She was used to meet his needs of sexual gratification and toxic masculinity. And that doesn’t seem very empowering to me.”

Opening the event, Ruth Greenberg said that in this, their third conference, the focus was on theory “because theory helps us ask better questions, ones that are meaningful, innovative and relevant. Theory helped early feminists to ask questions the mainstream were not asking. [It] also informs our activism.”

Gail Dines, who has specialised in writing about and studying the porn industry for 25 years, focused on the battle lines between radical and liberal feminists. The former, she said, “embrace the structural view of inequality, and it owes much to Marxism.”

Drawing a distinction between empowerment and liberation, Dines said: ”Empowerment is ‘I’m fine. Fuck you.’ Liberation is ‘if I’m fine and you’re not, I will walk across mountains to make your life OK. That’s the difference.”

Stressing the importance of looking at class and race, she said: “The third wave [of feminism] think they discovered intersectionality! We had this in the ’60s — understanding the differences between race and class. What the third wave has done is drained out the political material realities and it’s all become about identity politics.”

Throwing around terms such as “empowerment” and “agency” was misleading, she said. “Whose agency?

“It’s normally women with agency and free will — who by the way use that free will NOT to work in the sex industry, are saying it’s OK for other women to do that.”

She said that when she came of age, as a young feminist: “When you met another feminist, you knew for a fact they were going to be anti-porn, they were going to be against the institution of prostitution. Now it’s the opposite. My assumption is that anyone who’s doing women’s studies — or gender, or queer studies, is that they’ll be pro-porn, and pro so-called sex work!”

Dines also called out Amnesty for saying that “sex work” did not infringe women’s human rights.

Neoliberal feminists now claimed that porn was about individual performers making individual choices. “What they forget is that it’s a multi-billion dollar industry.”

“Radical feminism,” she ended, “is the only thing that has the courage, the bravery, the theory and the activism to take down this system.”

Sheila Jeffreys, speaking on sexuality and radical feminist theory, reflected on ideas generated in the 1970s, when a pivotal point saw the policing of sex and sexuality shift from the church to sexologists. They reinforced stereotypes — males being dominant, females subservient, a role taken on nowadays by the porn industry. The two industries, she claimed, interact, with sex therapists sometimes recommending pornography.

“There’s nothing natural about sexuality. It’s not a hobby, like stamp-collecting, or a way to reproduce, but is intensely political. Women’s oppression is based on biological sex, but it is the mechanism of sexuality that functions to organise and maintain it. Sex is the explosive point between the oppressor and the oppressed.

“Sexuality is socially constructed… women are seen as liking toilet-cleaning, high heels, all that sort of stuff. The idea [in the 70s] that human behaviour was socially constructed rather than ordained, was revolutionary — in the best way.”

At one stage, Jeffreys asked her audience how many had not experienced incidents of indecent exposure by men; three women out of nearly 70 raised their hands.

Currently, she said, technology meant that men prowled in virtual space, “the dick pic is the more modern form of flashing.”

Jess F told the conference that the idea that lesbians are born lesbians was a destructive notion. “Lesbianism is patriarchy’s biggest threat,” she said, “[it] actively questions male supremacy.”

Rosa Senent revealed her research done for her MA thesis on masculinity and sex purchase online, “He who pays the piper calls the tune.”

Using examples of punters’ reviews of prostituted women, she cited several where the men had given higher scores if a woman smiled at them, or laughed at their jokes. These factors she termed “ego-related” services. Some had complained when women had shown indifference during sex, were unenthusiastic, dispassionate, or too businesslike.

This indicated that the buyers did not see the transaction as business, and undermined notions that this was “work like any other work.”

Top qualities favoured by those using websites to find prostitutes included young age, low price, being foreign or “exotic,” and an inability to speak the local language.

The “skill set” required for prostituted women was once defined as three key factors: “the ability to control your reflex to vomit, the ability to restrain your urge to cry, and the ability to imagine your current reality is not happening.”

Presentations from the two-day conference will be posted on the group’s website: www.radfemcollective.org.