Girls Only
Guest post by Ruth Lukom
A new coffee bar has opened at the bottom of our road. It is modern, stylish and the smell of coffee and cakes is very inviting. It is a Women Only café.
I live in Waltham Forest, an area with a high Muslim population. For the past 20 -30 years they were predominantly from Pakistan. But during the last 10 they have been joined by people from North Africa – Moroccan and Algerians. These have brought with them their cafe culture. Dis-used pound shops are now intimate, quirky little coffee shops. They have cake displays with sticky gooey tarts that leave you salivating. Sometimes, with barely any room, they will place small tables and chairs on the grubby, chewing-gum (and worse) strewn pavements outside. People – men- sit and smoke and idly watch the world go by. My favorite is the one near my home which faces a busy junction. Traffic lights in east London are thought of as wallpaper. They are an interesting backdrop but should not directly influence your actions. The customers nonchalantly sip and smoke like Roman Emperors at the Coliseum as cars collide, drivers shriek abuse and pedestrians run for their lives.
More importantly – the café culture has brought us people who understand coffee. Coffee in cafes and restaurants in Waltham Forest was served from tired, badly-maintained filter machines and the colour of an east London puddle. At our local fast food curry house where they do wonderful things with chickpeas and chicken we once ordered coffees with high hopes as we saw an authentic expresso machine. The waiter dumped a spoonful of Nescafe in a cup with some milk and used the machine to froth it up a bit. Now you know you can walk into any of these cafes and be served with something that is direct from a coffee bean. The steam and aroma is intoxicating. The coffee is scalding and will land on your nervous system like a guided missile. So ‘yeah baby’ for these cafes and ‘good – serves you right for your frappo, frothy nonsense’ to the Starbucks/Costa places which play John Coltrane because the marketing people told them it would give the place a cool ambience.
But only men go to these cafes. You never see any North African women. European women will go in and be treated with smiling courtesy but where are these café-goers wives, sisters, and mothers?
This same culture that nurtures and respects coffee, conversation and a civilized social interaction that doesn’t need alcohol or a computer will not allow their women to participate. So the women have opened their own café. What do I think ? Do you know – I’m not sure. I always hated male strippers because they legitimized female strippers. I loath and despise all forms of segregation. Will this café reinforce this oppressive structure ? Maybe. But cafes have always done something much more than serve snacks. Artists and writers and revolutionaries meet in cafes. They argue and develop ideas and gain strength from each other. Go for it girls and serve it up hot and strong .
Reader Comments
I was completely drawn in by your imagery Ruth, I had to read it again because I started to get hungry for coffee and cakes, I realised I’d started daydreaming.
Your wider political point is something I share wondering about. I live in Kilburn in North West London, and coffee-shop segregation is a reality here also. I’ve always tried to tell myself that women would simply prefer not to go into these places, but I think perhaps I’m lying to myself, to convince myself that multiculturalism has no flaws, that tenets of some cultural traits give me cause for concern – often a very hard thing to swallow for a leftist.
Perhaps the only way forward for conscience is to convert an existing coffee shop into a socialised one, but that is going too far isn’t it?
Excellent article ruth. Sensitively written and i find myself agreeing with your conclusions.
Yet i do find myself in disagreement with your reference to “civilized social interaction that doesn’t need alcohol or a computer”. What is wrong with social interaction being facilitated by a computer – not least because this allows individuals to break with the tyranny of geography and engage with people with whom they are not in close physical proximity – and made more enojyable by alcohol. Down with primitivism and puritanism
Thanks for your comments Carl. I’m an optimist and truly believe these women, though segregated, will forge their own path to emancipation. And we’ll be there to greet them.
Reuben. You are right about the tyranny of geography and I thank the computer for liberating me from the tyranny of picking up the phone when I’m knackered and allowing me to have a chat with a mate. And every email I get I see their face and I hear their voice. People I have sat with and made eye contact with. Why would you engage with someone you have never met ? Have you noticed how very quickly chat room debates descend into abuse?
Now go on – bugger off to the pub.
“Why would you engage with someone you have never met?”
- Every friend anyone’s ever had started off as someone they’ve never met. The question is, why wouldn’t you engage with them? And who uses chat rooms anymore? You don’t have to move with the times if you don’t want to Ruth, but I think one has to accept that the internet has changed the nature of social interactions. Much of it, I would say, is for the better.
I’m with Ruth
As the Liberty lads o’er the sea
Bought their freedom, and cheaply, with blood,
So we, boys, we
Will die fighting, or live free,
And down with all kings but King Ludd!
When the web that we weave is complete,
And the shuttle exchanged for the sword,
We will fling the winding-sheet
O’er the despot at our feet,
And dye it deep in the gore he has pour’d.
Though black as his heart its hue,
Since his veins are corrupted to mud,
Yet this is the dew
Which the tree shall renew
Of Liberty, planted by Ludd!
“I’ve always tried to tell myself that women would simply prefer not to go into these places, but I think perhaps I’m lying to myself, to convince myself that multiculturalism has no flaws, that tenets of some cultural traits give me cause for concern – often a very hard thing to swallow for a leftist.”
You have been lying to yourself. In the large majority of cases, women don’t enter the cafes because within their cultures, particularly if they come from – as many of the Maghrebi and Arab residents of say, Kilburn and Waltham Forest do – the less moneyed classes of their societies, the right to have a social life is exclusive to men. I know it hurts Carl! I know it hurts! You wish you could have your little touristic window into these other cultures, admiring their authentic, earthy primitivism, the alluring, intoxicating aromas of their organic coffees from the comfort of your own home while abstaining from having to deal with the messy business of treating them critically and looking like a xenophobe.
But why ‘as a leftist’? Isn’t the basis of leftist thought and action a critical assessment of the power relations in existing economic and social orthodoxies? So what’s the problem in saying that some other cultures, many of which are those are influenced by Islamic thought and practice, are extraordinarily backward when it comes to treatment of women, and that the embracing of them under the gossamer, unctuous banner of ‘multiculturalism’ is – while well-intentioned (I think most people who use that term do so because They Just Want Everyone To Get Along) – deeply superficial and cowardly. There are fundamental contradictions in how cultures conceive of the optimal ways to treat each other. Westerners should not go soft on intolerance or stupidity because they feel guilty about Colonialism or the desperate and/or tyrannical economic and political situations in countries like Algeria or because they feel an uneasy twinge of jingoism when espousing the tenets of democracy.
The dominant Western conception – in law, and culture – of how to treat women is superior to that dominant in the Arab world. It’s good (if also slightly alarming) that we’re in a country which can facilitate social interaction between women in the way this article describes, but we should be doing more to examine and act against principles which contravene hard-earned, searingly powerful notions like gender equality rather than doing these people the disservice of condescendingly placing them under the relativist ‘hey, they’re different from us, but let’s just celebrate all different cultures, who are we to say what’s best?’ banner. All that does is perpetuate the desperately tyrannical patriarchy of the social, religious and political orders which have plagued North African and Middle Eastern countries for so long.