#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.

Book Review: Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution By Mona Eltahawy

Over the bank holiday weekend I finally finished Mona Eltahawy’s treatise of misogyny in the Arab world. The issues comprised in her chapters dominate headlines every week implicitly and explicitly. As a follow up to her immensely controversial Foreign Policy article, it is sobering, shocking yet insightful mixture of fact and fury that highlights several of the struggles faced by women in the Middle East and North Africa region in a ‘post-Arab Spring’ era. Being Egyptian herself, many of testimonies from women and girls throughout the region explain the extraordinary way the Egyptian Arab Spring actually managed to further oppress women. In the book she comprehensively outlines the statistics and implications of several key issues facing Arab women today including FGM, child marriage, domestic abuse, street harassment and sexual assault. In doing so she paints a picture of women’s rights in the Arab world as a fairly dismal affair but coupled with stories of progress and calls for revolution it makes a compelling and rousing read.

One of criticisms of Eltahawy’s book has been that it makes several vast generalisations about the ‘Arab region’ based on her experience of Egyptian politics and this is perhaps one of its few flaws. Having said that her comparisons between those at vastly different ends of the poverty (Yemen, Saudi Arabia for example) or religious extremist (Qatar and Lebanon) spectrum clearly demonstrate her point that the common denominator here is not wealth, poverty or interpretations of Islam but in fact what unites Arab states is patriarchy. Those who have ‘judged a book by its cover’ will also critique her presumed Western arrogance in assuming she is denouncing the region for its cultural barbarity. In reality, the book actually contains one of the best handlings of the cultural relativism argument I have read to date. Her claim that she maintains the right to criticise her culture in ways she would reject from others allows her to resist reinforcing Western racism and arrogance surrounding women’s rights whilst simultaneously ensuring women’s dissent is not silenced by the desire to resist this racism. This has been a problem throughout history where women are silenced by their societies because they do not wish to support enemy stereotypes. It is so important that these binaries are deconstructed to tell women’s true experiences. This approach is probably my favourite thing about the book. I also particularly like the way Eltahawy explains that she refuses to call girls who have been through FGM or sexual assault ‘victims’ and rather prefers the word ‘survivor’ because it implies bravery and strength not victimhood.

Eltahawy writes ardently as she calls upon the Middle East to personalise its insurgency and take the state/street revolution into its homes and bedrooms. With this she is reaching to the heart of the original feminist trope the - personal is political - and calling on the courage of young girls to challenge centuries of traditional, religion and culture around their dining room tables. My only worry is that this is easier said than done and whilst I resist asking Eltahawy to ‘check her privilege’ the only pitfall of this book is perhaps her lack of acknowledgement of her own wisdom, experience and opportunity. Overall though, this is a must read for anyone interested in the transnational feminist project and emancipating women and girls from outright misogyny that remains veiled in religion and liberal cultural relativism.