STOCKWELL, LONDON:

The "Refuse and Resist Empowerment League" protest against Dance

Feminist Groups made a call to Government and the Recording Industry this morning asking for a total ban on all house music.

Linda Smith from the Stockwell Refuse and Resist Women's Empowerment league claimed house and dance music was derogatory, sexist in nature and offensive to Women.

"Dance music today is nothing more than a cheap compilation of gross misogyny, antigay vitriol, and continuous violence against women," she said. "And we cannot allow this kind of hatespeech to continue unabated."

Speaking at this mornings League of Women "Stop! The Sexploitation" Solidarity forum, Smith made a defiant call to end the sexist samples and disrespectful titles she claimed were prevalent throughout the dance music scene.

"The dance hit '9pm till I come'-is that not simply a double-entendre reference to the sexual needs of men, and clearly serving as little less than a cheap innuendo for the male orgasm?" she asked. "Or Signum's 'What you got for me" whose very title reinforces the view of women as subservient?"

Linda Smith: "Dance Music - a cheap compilation of gross misogyny, anti-gay vitriol and continuous violence against women."

Continued Smith: "When you listen to songs such as Da Hool's 'Met her at the love parade' instrumental, they are simply reinforcing the dominant and ultraconservative values of the establishment when the synthesizer hums about hating women."

Smith went on to make an impassioned plea to the taskforce members and women everywhere to boycott all forms of house and dance music, a genre she claimed only served to objectify women as sexual victims.

The group is not alone in their views. In a recent interview in "Femina" magazine, the long-standing hard-core feminist and Lesbian Rights campaigner Debra Collins suggested the very core of dance music was anti-women, anti-gender, anti-empowerment, and anti-gay.

"The beats and samples that constitute the heart of dance music are inherently misogynistic," she claimed. "As a musical genre 'Banging House' does nothing less than promote violence against women in the home. On a wider scope it all points to women as domestic subserviants- the term House itself is nothing more than a nasty masquerade for Kitchen as far as I'm concerned, and do you really think the "Hoover" samples used universally in hard house are a co-incidence? And even the basic recorded format is typical of the male obsessed domain- the music is all recorded onto '12 inch' vinyl. Surprise surprise."

"One thing is for certain however," she concluded. "When those sexist hatemongers Push released 'Universal Nation' they weren't referring to the kind of Universal Nation that included a gendered or lesbian perspective, that's for sure."