Why the Clinton/May Feminist Utopia isn’t good enough for me (#SorryNotSorry)

At least it’s better than Boris and Trump…

As obscene as this sounds, I chose to sit Brexit out. There was (still is) so much going on and enough think-pieces out there to make even the most die-hard of Guardian readers slump into a political coma. No one needed to hear my two pennies worth as well. I am of course, devastated, and once again disappointed that fear and ignorance have won over 52% of the country that I live in. From a gender perspective I am also devastated that we are turning back the clock and will be left without the much-needed human and women’s rights legislation the EU provides. I feel embarrassed and defeated but as the dust starts to settle I decided to write about something I do feel strongly about. As Wednesday evening Theresa May will be the next (unelected) Prime Minister of the United (the irony) Kingdom. She has reached this position mostly by sitting back and letting all of the ‘leave’ politicians and other candidates simultaneously self-combust in one way or another. Let’s get things straight, she has IN NO WAY reached this point because of her merit, gender or even less so a ‘feminist ticket.’ Conversely, across the pond, is Hillary Clinton, a woman who has arguably marketed herself on the feminist ticket and in some ways can be considered as such. She looks (god willing) likely to become POTUS in 2017. With the new all-female Ghostbusters film out this week some feminists could be led to believe that this is it, the turning point we have all been waiting for. There will be women in the oval office and number 10 and even the new Iron Man film will feature of 15 year old black girl. Surely we can all go back to the kitchen now?

At a surface level, these are, of course, achievements for the feminist movement. If only Clinton or particularly May had any intention of making other women’s lives easier. Much like Thatcher it looks like they will be breaking through the glass ceiling and taking the ladder up with them! Whilst Clinton has done some laudable work for inequalities and minorities in her own country it does not erase the fact that her campaign is and will continue to be propped up by questionable Middle Eastern financing including from Saudi Arabia where women are still yet to vote in their first elections. Meanwhile, her foreign policy record suggests she will continue the US tradition of reaping brutal havoc in the Middle East to the vast detriment of women and girls. Meanwhile Theresa May is no feminist. She is ultimately committed to the austerity model that has already torn apart rape crisis services in this country and most substantially disadvantaged women and girls. Furthermore her stint as Home Secretary has seen her show an incredible lack of compassion for refugees and asylum seekers whilst she reigns over questionable detention facilities such as Yarlswood where sexual assault and human rights violations rumours are rife. Don’t get me wrong, that women have reached these positions is progress but I don’t think we should be popping Champaign just yet. Perhaps I am wrong and should be more optimistic but that’s not really worked out so well for me in the last decade of British politics. Still, let’s see what happens. The image above is taken from a Torygraph piece entitled "The Women are Coming" which ha a certain euphoric yet apocalyptical feel to it that I kind of like...

19 May 2016: Feminist News Bulletins!

I’ve been too busy to blog recently so this is all I could manage this week but weekly posts will be back soon!

1 of 219 Chibok Girls Rescued from Sambisa Forest

Yesterday it was reported that the Civilian Joint Task Force (JTF) in Nigeria recognised and rescued one of the 219 missing ‘Chibok girls’ from the outskirts of the Sambisa forest. Amina Ali Nkeki was 17 when the Boko Haram insurgents abducted her from her school in Chibok, she is now 19 and has a two year old child. Her father passed away while she was away from her family. She reports that most of the other girls are still alive and being held within the Sambisa. Unfortunately, we already knew that from Christina Lamb’s expose of the silence around the girls. This rescue is a drop in the ocean of work that needs to be done for women and girls affected by the Boko Haram insurgency and Amina herself. The stigma surrounding her experience, particularly given that she has a child, fathered by (unfortunately likely by rape) a Boko Haram militant, means it will be difficult to reintegrate her into her family and community. This is a challenge faced by many women and girls returning to their homes after such traumatic experiences. A proper holistic aftercare programme needs to be put in place by the government alongside advocacy to reduce the stigma attached to survivors of sexual violence. We cannot see 1 of 219 as a success and we cannot underestimate the silences that remain from governments the world over about not just the Chibok girls, but also the thousands of women and girls affected by the Boko Haram insurgency.

Robin Wright’s Equal Pay Victory

Robin Wright who plays the honourable Clare Underwood in the American political drama ‘House of Cards’ has hit the headlines this morning for her equal pay victory. The actress who features in all 52 episodes of the drama, arguably as the main character is series 3 and 4, has fought to be paid the same as her co-star, Kevin Spacey. Those who have read this blog before will know that I have an undying admiration for Clare Underwood and House of Card’s feminist undertones so it is amazing that these politics are being carried off set by Wright herself. It also, once again, sheds the spotlight on the television and film industry’s pay gap problem. The fact that producers even tried to pay Wright less than Spacey staggers me given she is equally as prominent as him throughout.

EU Referendum Politics

Is anyone sick of the EU referendum yet? I am. I also completely agree with MP Steve Baker’s claim today that the debate has transcended into petty smears and playground politics. As I have written before it makes absolute feminist sense to remain in the European Union but I also want to see women’s voices heard. I am sick of opening the papers to see yet another ‘male, pale and stale’ member of society voicing their opinion on the referendum! Women have opinions too and there are many high profile women such as Karen Brady who are very involved in both the in and out campaigns.

High heels at work

As a closure can we just all agree that forcing women to wear high heels at work is absurd and belongs in the 15^th century? How anyone could think that wasn’t sexist is just beyond me. I guess that’s what happens when you live in a cushy feminist bubble.

Over and out.

#WhenIWas 21 I was horrified by Twitter

Yesterday the Everyday Sexism project started a #WhenIWas thread on twitter which asked (mostly) women and girls to document the sexual harassment they can remember from ages as young as 5 or 6. It exploded on twitter and ended up trending worldwide. Feeling shaken by some of these tweets I decided to cook myself dinner because I find cooking weirdly therapeutic. While I was cooking I turned on my radio, it happened to be tuned into Radio 1’s evening ‘Newsbeat.’ The two top stories were Lily Allen’s interview detailing how she was stalked and consequently victim-blamed by the metropolitan police and the enquiry launched yesterday by the UK government into sexual harassment in schools. A government that, by the way, recently announced that sex education would no longer be compulsory in schools. However, this is not tory-bashing blog post for once it is a reactionary and perhaps emotional call to action:

I already knew that the sexual harassment reported under the #WhenIWas thread existed; of course I did but for some reason it still shocked me. It still shocked and appalled me that girls as young as 10 years old can recall being sexually harassed as they walk down the road in their schools uniforms, it still shocked me that there were almost 20,000 tweets reporting situations where rape was absolutely insinuated. It still shocked me that Lily Allen was essentially told to ‘hush up’ about the way she was victimised and stalked by a man who broke into her home, where her children were sleeping. It still shocked me hearing the reports from teachers and students, female and male, about their experience of sexual harassment in schools. The #WhenIWas tweets revealed just how normalised, prevalent and accepted rape culture is in the UK today and around the world. From telling girls in schools what not to wear on non-uniform day to avoid being ‘distracting’ to boys and teachers to being cat-called on the walk home from school, to being groped in public spaces or sexually assaulted in private ones, these tweets paint a picture of modern Britain that frightens, restricts and angers women. Rightly so.

(N.B. Of course, sexual harassment does not just affect women as a troll so kindly pointed out to me. The #WhileIWas thread predominantly documented and targeted women’s experiences and women do tend to experience harassment more widely. BUT reconceptualising gender roles in regard to sex would also involve removing the stigma and silence that shames men also.)

Everyone remembers the first time they are cat-called walking down the road in their school uniform or groped in a night club. That’s just part of being a girl, right? And everyone remembers the first time they try and speak out about it to ripostes of: “Don’t take yourself so seriously” “It’s a compliment” “Oh boys will be boys” or worse, “Don’t be so frigid.” From the minute to the very extreme, rape culture joins the dots between girls being groped on public transport from as young as 13 years old to grown women being silently raped in their bedrooms. This is not a world where I want to raise a child. In a world that boys are taught that sex and women are public property they are entitled to and girls are taught that their sexuality can be reduced to feeling ‘flattered’ by an old man in a white van honking his horn. I fear for my 17-year-old sister although she’s probably already experienced some of the above, I fear for any young boy assaulted at school and silenced because he ‘got some action’ and ‘should be proud.’ Whilst the enquiry launched by the government is a step in the right direction it is nothing without education. Consent education, sex education, and relationship education. Education that teaches girls and boys not only that to rape or be raped is abhorrent but also that lifting a girls skirt up on the stairs on the bus ‘as a laugh’ or calling boys ‘frigid’ for ignoring advances from their teacher is also wrong. The taboo surrounding sexual harassment in this country must be broken and education is the only way to do that. Only by breaking that taboo and teaching girls and boys, women and men about sex properly and publically will the #WhenIWas horrors be stopped.

Two important questions to ask this week

Why do the Panana papers matter?

Should (could) the new UN Secretary General be a woman?

I couldn’t decide which of these headlines to write about this morning. The former is currently dominating our media in the UK whilst the latter is something very close to my heart. It was as I weighed up these options that I realised the two aren’t so very far apart. Both reveal and challenge the lingering international male elite. As a cynical student, the Panama papers did not surprise me: the fact that Western neo-liberalism in the twenty-first century makes the rich richer and at the expense of everyone else is hardly a revelation. Unfortunately, what also did not surprise me was that every single prominent figure and head of state implicated in the Panama papers so far has been a man. The papers demonstrate that the global elite is still constituted overwhelmingly by middle class, middle aged, straight men. Whether it be men in charge of whole countries or men in charge of large global corporations the powerful global elite who make the decisions that affect everyone else remain completely unrepresentative of the rich diversity of the international population.

Many people in the UK have argued that the scandal with our own prime minister’s involvement in the tax evasion has distracted from the real debate that needs to be had. I do to some extend agree but I think it matters that Cameron lied about his tax affairs because it is emblematic of everything that is wrong with this government and our political system in the UK. How can Cameron say he hasn’t benefitted from his fathers tax evasion when it likely paid for his fees at Eaton without which he would not have got into Oxbridge or met the people he needed to meet to get into the upper echelons of the British conservative elite. More significantly, this government tenuously balances on a rhetoric of victimising ‘benefit scroungers’ and ‘benefit tourists’ who supposedly ‘steal’ from the British economy. It is that narrative that they have thrived off by creating fear and hatred in British society. It is this hypocrisy that really gets to me: this government line their pockets while they rip apart the pockets of our most vulnerable including women, disabled people and refugees.

We’ve come some way from the selection of a new United Nations Secretary General! The UN ostensibly exists at the other end of the moral spectrum from the likes of Vladamir Putin but in reality it is a deeply troubled, bureaucratic, corrupt and paralysed organisation in need of reform. That is not to say that UN does not do good work but, unfortunately, I’m sure one would not have to bust a gut to join the dots between those implicated in the Panana papers and the UN organisation. So what does this have to do with the SG? A woman SG would take step towards challenging this global male elite as well as having all other cited benefits of equal representation. That is not to say that a woman would absolve corruption and not be at risk of corruption herself but can we at least have equality in the corrupt global elite! (I joke.) I’d like to think that a woman SG would also heighten the work of UN Women on the UN’s agenda particularly in development and conflict arenas as well as tackling the hideous problem of sexual violence perpetrated by ‘peacekeepers.’ What these two prominent headlines have in common this week is that gender still matters, patriarchy still matters and feminism still matters in global politics. The power and money remain in the hand of one set of people who do not represent the rest of us.

Jeremy Hunt's Assault on the Junior Doctors is also an Assault on Women and Gender Equality in Medicine

In the UK, where the National Health Service has since the mid twentieth century provided free health care to UK citizens, there is a currently a nationwide uproar about the enforcement of a new contract on our Junior Doctors. Or there should be. Jeremy Hunt (our aptly named Health Minister) wants to force a new contract on Junior Doctors that will see them being paid just under £23,000 salary including all anti-social hours. Yesterday the Junior Doctors walked out on strike to protest. This is yet another money-saving measure being enforced by our austerity government while they go and hide their money in Daddy’s Panamanian tax haven! I have said it before and I will say it again: austerity is sexist. Poverty is sexist. The Junior Doctors scandal is an attack on some of Britain’s hardest-working, most selfless young people who dedicate their youths to saving people’s lives. It is the deconstruction of British society and it will demotivate young people to becoming doctors leaving us with an undersupplied health service under strain. When doctors work too hard, they make mistakes. This is something I’m sure Jeremy Hunt does not worry about when he visits his private health care provider who is paid triple to work sociable hours. Junior Doctors are emblematic of the way this government views young people generally: as unimportant creatures to bear the brunt of austerity.

The Junior Doctors crisis is also yet another attack on women. Just in case sexism in medicine wasn’t bad enough with the gendered division of labour casting women as nurses and men as doctors or surgeons. Working antisocial hours for less money will absolutely disproportionately affect female junior doctors. First of all there are simply more junior doctors with 77% of NHS staff being female. Secondly, how are single parents (of which there are overwhelmingly more women) and all mothers expected to take the primary care role meant to cope with raising children and working night shifts? Who cares for the children during a 36 hour weekend shift? The childcare afforded with a £22,000 salary?! I think not. The worst thing about this is the Department of Health explicitly admitted this in their evaluation of the Junior Doctor contract:

This government is turning back the clock on gender equality. It is forcing women out of public spaces and silencing their voices. The Junior Doctors crisis is just another example to add to the pile. The Junior Doctors will strike today and then it will be the steel workers, the teachers, the nurses and the police officers. Cutting public services at the expense of the majority whilst lining the pockets of the minority will not work and will not be tolerated. Support the Junior Doctors strike, for the NHS, for young people, for women and for the preservation of what we have to proud of in this country.