Where’s the line for women-only events?
There is more than one way to stick it to the man.
Some women take to social media to pillory the patriarchy. Some take to the streets. Others retreat — not to the kitchen or the bedroom, but to the woods, for a mere 225 £, or $390 Canadian.
This August the U.K. will host its first ever women-only festival, Woman Fest, in the picturesque town of Frome, Somerset.
The four-day event will feature everything from story telling to music making to salad eating to “yoni steaming” — the allegedly detoxifying practice of squatting over a pot of boiling hot, herb-infused water and allowing its steam to make contact with your genitals.
According to the festival’s website, Woman Fest was “born out of an intention to rekindle gathering spaces for Woman.” And rekindle they will.
The event offers gathering spaces galore. Among them: the Embodiment Tent (for yoga and circus workshops) the Womyn Rising Tent (for healing, learning, loving, and thinking), the Creativity Tent (for “ancient, nature based crafts” such as “basket weaving” and “cloth making”) and the Healing Area (for “shamanic journeying and more”).
There is also, according to the website, a “beautiful Tipi nestled in the woodland. It doubles as our Red Tent for those on their moon.”
In sum, Woman Fest is precisely the kind of event about which no one has ever said or will ever say “there’s something for everyone.”
But that’s ok. The women behind the Fest do not claim to speak for all female identified people. Rather, they appear to be a group of eccentrics wildly out of touch with modern feminist mores. And they are paying for it.
Woman Fest, like several other pricey, women-only events popular around the world right now (for example, a trip to SuperShe Island, a women’s retreat off the coast of Finland, will cost you at least $5000 U.S.) is under immense scrutiny from voices on both the left and the right.
Feminists on the left are critical of the event because they believe it is elitist. Though the proceeds of Woman Fest will be shared among various charities, the price is arguably out of reach for many.
Guardian columnist Arwa Mahdawi writes this month, that she finds “the trend for high-priced, women-only networking spaces nauseating, particularly as these often use feminism as a marketing device … while seeming only to care about bettering a few already wealthy women.”
Meanwhile critics on both the left and right have deemed Woman Fest and events like it prejudiced because they exclude men, transgender men among them.
From the festival website: “We invite all Woman! This includes trans-women and non-binary folk with Vaginas.
As we are a woman’s fest, we do have to draw the line somewhere though: sadly that means that anyone in a male body that doesn’t FULLY identify as a woman cannot come, we see you and love you, but the woman’s work we are doing would be disrupted if there was male energy in a male body (this extends to trans-men too).”
I asked Woman Fest cofounder Tiana Jacout about this particular policy and she doubled down.
“YES! I drew the line,” she wrote to me in an email this week. “NO! I don’t give a DAMN what’s in their pants! But let’s get one thing clear: WE ARE A WOMAN FESTIVAL. We have had Binary genders and patriarchy for a VERY long time. We can call ourselves anything we want but we suffer the consequences of those thousands of years at an alarming proportion… we tend to forget the journey it took us to get here.
And there is an enormous amount of people that have an enormous amount of healing to do, around being a WOMAN.”
The question is why does Woman Fest have to draw the line at all?
The separation of sexes and gender identities isn’t just outdated and in this era mind- bogglingly complex; it’s incompatible with a feminist future that embraces blurred identity lines.
But perhaps it’s unfair and unrealistic to demand “wokeness” — i.e. ideological purity from a women’s retreat that appears more interested in the arts and leisure than social justice.
There may be a sexist double standard at play here, where we demand moral perfection from women’s groups that we don’t demand from men’s groups, or co-ed groups. Of course Woman Fest and SuperShe Island and the like are elitist and out of touch, but why must every women’s event cleave to the feminist norms of the day? Why can’t women embrace for a weekend, the sex-segregated elitism men have enjoyed for millennia?
Personally, I prefer to socialize with mixed company (perhaps it’s because I’m married to a woman and therefore every day is a kind of Woman Fest for me).
But I don’t think there’s anything “nauseating” about a group of like women — or womyn — paying a small fortune to pitch a few dozen tents and in the process raise a heap of money for charity. One overpriced yoga retreat will not dismantle the feminist movement nor set it back an inch.
But if they aren’t careful, someone might burn their yoni.