The West must not use women's rights to justify war

Despite an international outcry, Iran seems determined to have Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, 43, stoned to death for adultery. Her plight has become a test case for the global community's response to Iran's barbaric, institutional misogyny. Tehran has responded by thumbing its nose at the rest of the world, forcing Ashtiani to confess her "crimes" on television. In Britain, our outrage is unanimous, and rightly so.

It seems curiously inconsistent, then, that, just a few weeks ago, the Home Office was quite prepared to deport another Iranian woman, Kiana Firouz, to certain execution in her native country for sexual unorthodoxy. Firouz made the film Cul-de-Sac to raise awareness of the oppression of lesbians in Iran, outing herself very publicly and embarrassing the state in the process: both crimes punishable by death in Iran. Nonetheless, it took a co-ordinated campaign by LGBT activists and solidarity networks in the UK to shame the Home Office into granting Firouz leave to remain.

Bita Ghaedi, another Iranian woman facing execution for breaking her marriage vows, also escaped to Britain -- where she was sent to a holding cell and repeatedly threatened with deportation. Ghaedi has been on several hunger strikes to protest at her treatment, but she still lives in fear of being sent back to Iran. Had the unfortunate Ms Ashtiani been smuggled to the UK, it is fair to assume that she, too, would currently be detained in Yarl's Wood, subjected to the indignity of pleading for her life to a government whose professed solidarity with Iranian women has not yet overcome its prejudice against immigrants to extend support to the hundreds of women who arrive on these shores fleeing violence every year -- all of whom, unlike Ms Ashtiani, we could actually do something materially to help.

State violence against women has long been used to justify military interventionism. The government of Iran is rather unusual in taking it upon itself to employ the executioners, but plenty of states with whom the US and UK have no military disputes currently allow men who feel their women have besmirched their family honour to carry out the killings themselves on the understanding that punishment will be minimal or non-existent.

Article 340 of the Penal Code of Jordan states: "He who discovers his wife or one of his female relatives committing adultery and kills, wounds or injures one of them is exempted from any penalty." Similar laws were struck down only very recently in Syria, Morocco and Brazil; in Pakistan, incidences of women and girls being slain by their families for sexual transgressions (including having the gall to be raped) are routinely ignored by police and prosecutors.

Moreover, across the world, 68,000 women are effectively condemned to agonising death each year -- 5 per cent of them in developed countries -- for the crime of wanting sexual and reproductive self-determination in states with sanctions against abortion. There has, as yet, been no systemic global outcry at their plight. And in at least one European country, the defence of "provocation to murder" -- the so-called "cuckold's defence" -- was enshrined in law until just two years ago, allowing husbands to plead for a reduced sentence if the wife they had killed was unfaithful. The country in question was Great Britain. Were the US or UK to launch a systemic offensive against every country brutalising its female citizens because of their sex at the level of policy and culture, it'd be World War Three on Tuesday -- and we would have to start by bombing our own cities.

In this context, it could well be construed that there is another, more sinister agenda at play beyond concern for women's rights. Yesterday, Iran told the west to butt out of its right to murder Sakineh Ashtiani, making it clear that this case is now less about the well-being of one woman than about moral and militaristic positioning between hostile states. There is clear precedent for this callous, ideological long game.

This month, Time magazine published a cover photograph of a young woman, Aisha, whose nose and ears had been cut off by her father-in-law. The cover ran with the unambiguous title, "What happens if we leave Afghanistan". However, as the Afghan women's rights activist Malalai Joya told France24, Aisha was attacked under western occupation and such atrocities have arguably increased since the 2002 invasion.

"Eighteen-year-old Aisha is just an example -- cutting ears, noses and toes, torturing and even slaughtering is a norm in Afghanistan," said Joya. "Afghan women are squashed between three enemies: the Taliban, fundamentalist warlords and troops. Once again, it is moulding the oppression of women into a propaganda tool to gain support and staining their hands with ever-deepening treason against Afghan women."

In March, WikiLeaks published a CIA briefing that outlined a strategy to counter growing opposition in Europe to participation in the US-led occupation of Afghanistan. It recommended using a narrative about the oppression of women in the country that highlighted the Taliban's misogynist violence while ignoring that of the pro-occupation warlords and the occupation armies. A similar story is now being disseminated about the plight of women in Iran and poor Ms Ashtiani has become a tokenistic figure in that absolving narrative.

Instead of the solidarity they deserve -- solidarity that might first be extended by treating asylum seekers with something less than contempt -- Iranian women are being co-opted into a Nato narrative whose trajectory seems to point inexorably towards invasion. That the state of Iran hates and fears women is not up for debate and if even one person can be saved from fascistic, fundamentalist woman-haters, an international campaign is more than justified. However, if, as seems likely, Iran executes Sakineh Ashtiani anyway, it would be beyond distasteful for Nato governments to cannibalise her corpse as part of the moral groundwork for further bloodshed.

The Sex Work Shibboleth

For feminists, arguments about sex work have become an ugly, obstructive shibboleth. The debate about whether feminism can ever tolerate the sale of sex has raged for over five decades, and in recent years the question has opened old wounds in the fabric of feminist unity, leading to such embarrassing flashpoints as the verbal abuse and police intimidation of sex workers and their allies at the Reclaim the Night march in 2009.

Many feminists, like Finn MacKay of the Feminist Coalition Against Prostitution, feel that the purchase of sex from women is always and only misogyny: “Equality for women is a farce in a society where it is considered normal for men to buy our bodies.

“We can't be free while so many of us are literally for sale. As long as I believe prostitution is a form of violence against women, then how can I work alongside anyone who promotes it as a job like any other?”

A Moral Quarrel

Furious debate about sex work and pornography dominated the discussion at the recent Women’s Question Time event in London, organised by the charity Eaves, where feminists were invited to put questions to prospective Women's ministers in the run-up to the General Election.

Pandora Blake, a feminist sex worker, attended the event. “I hadn't realised quite how aggressively hostile most of my sisters are to my ideals,” she said. “It’s worrying that so many of the best female politicians seem unable to see nuance when it comes to the sex industry".

At this event, like so many others, issues such as abortion rights and the pay gap were elbowed out in favour of monolithic tub-thumping about sex work that played out a worrying tendency on the part of contemporary feminists to moralise rather than strategise.

On the other side of the debate, many pro-sex work feminists believe that the protection of sex workers should be the only consideration.

“Criminalisation of kerb-crawling, to take one example, is harmful to sex workers because ultimately they are the ones who suffer,” said Nine, a former support worker for Edinburgh prostitutes. “Sex workers who still need to make their money are faced with doing business with clients they would ordinarily have rejected. It concerns me greatly that the mainstream feminist movement refuses to look at the harmful effect of laws like these, which they support simply in the name of sending a message to men.”

Giving space to abusers

Unfortunately, tolerant attitudes such as Nine’s are too often manipulated by patriarchal apologists concerned with maintaining a status quo that constrains and commodifies female sexuality. Easy examples of such apologism can be found on the popular networking site for johns, Punternet, which rates and reviews prostitutes as ‘pieces of meat’. Worryingly, the International Union of Sex Workers (IUSW) recently recruited on the site, encouraging punters to write to their MPs to safeguard their favourite hobby.

If the exclusionary tactics of abolitionist feminists are unsound, the unscrupulous attitudes of organisations like the IUSW are hardly more laudable. The attitude that abusive punters are an inevitability, and the related reasoning that one cannot fight the misogynist meat market, hardly offers an answer to people like Rebecca Mott, a former prostitute and abolitionist activist:

“The torment of being prostituted has never left me. On the first night, when I was fourteen, I was gang-raped for many hours. That was the test to see if I was suitable material for prostitution. You learn that your body is there to be damaged. That you have no right to say no. That your purpose is to service men in any and every way they can think of. It is so much easier to speak only of women who appear in charge of their own working environment, rather than the reality.”

Too often, the pro-prostitution lobby is guilty of silencing the voices of women like Mott – just as the abolitionist lobby refuses to acknowledge sex workers whose experiences differ. The sex work debate is a sea of unheard voices, private tragedy and misinformation in which moral squabbling obscures the real-life concerns of many vulnerable women.

A legal no man’s land

The net result of all this wrangling is that the legal status of sex work remains an unworkable, precarious Jenga tower of muddled laws and moral equivocation. Recent changes to the law in Britain have altered that situation very little. Welcome efforts to focus police attention on those who buy the sexual services of abused women, such as Clause 14, which makes it a criminal offence to buy sex from ‘a woman controlled for gain’, has been balanced by more regressive and punitive sanctions against soliciting.

In Britain, as in many other developed countries, women who work as prostitutes are stranded in a socio-economic no man’s land, their work just about legal enough to offer a seedy but acceptable outlet for restrained bourgeois sexual mores and an economic option for women in desperate financial circumstances, and just about illegal enough that the market for commercial sex remains illicit and underground, depriving sex workers of public dignity and of the full protection of the justice system, and satisfying the prudish public drive to punish those who sell sex.

Amongst all of this moralising, misogynist apologism and equivocation, it is stupendously difficult to have a productive conversation about sex work. “There are very few spaces in which feminists with different perspectives on this issue get together and talk about it and find points to agree on,” said Nine. “There frequently isn't even room for debate at all, just point-scoring and shouting over people.”

The stagnation of the sex work debate around a brutal moral binary can be seen as the greatest extant danger to the future of feminism, particularly if one believes, as I do, that if we all stopped shouting at each other for a while we could hold the revolution tomorrow.

Belle De Jour: a misleading cipher

The keenest example of this unimaginative binary thinking is the Belle de Jour problem. Dr Brooke Magnanti of Bristol was recently forced to out herself as the former PhD student and prostitute behind the blog which turned into the book which turned into the lucrative, trashily unchallenging ITV adaptation, Secret Diary of a Call Girl, in which Billie Piper wears a variety of rump-revealing latex dresses and does a lot of heavy breathing.

The show, now in its third series, has become the dominant vehicle for the Belle De Jour meme, stripping out everything that was realistic and challenging about Dr Magnanti's blog and leaving a deodorised husk of middle-class male fantasy in which a massively undercast Piper perkily advises the audience to “'work out what the client wants, and give it to him as quickly as possible”.'

Feminists have justly denounced the show as duplicitous, portraying sex work as entirely safe, glamorous and lucrative for all those prepared to devote themselves entirely to the sexual service of rich men. However, commentators from Kira Cochrane to India Knight have failed to notice that Secret Diary of a Call Girl is ITV's convenient fiction, and not Dr Magnanti's reality.

Dr Magnanti herself was working in the elite eschelons of the sex trade, with no pimp or drug habit to worry about, but even so, critics have failed to notice that the show bears about as much resemblance to the blog as Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves might bear to the life of a medieval peasant.

Poor Dr Magnanti. All she wanted was to develop her writing and discuss her experiences. Instead, she has been distorted, idolised, victimised and vilified by anyone and everyone with a barrel to beat about prostitution. From glamorous courtesan to tragic victim, it’s not just Belle's body that can be bent into any position you fancy.

The one thing that almost no-one has asked is why a PhD student might find herself selling sexual intercourse to fund her studies in the first place. Commentators are slow to connect Belle with a bankrupt higher education system in which indebted students routinely live well below the poverty line to afford the degrees their future employers increasingly demand. Just last week, a report by Kingston University suggested that since the abolition of the student grant, the number of students funding their degrees by working as prostitutes and strippers has increased fivefold. Basic socio-economic analysis of this kind is what is missing from both sides of the contemporary conversation about prostitution.

There is a trench of faff and fighting at the core of the sex work debate where a rigorous analysis of work and capital should be. Sex work is an economic question, not a moral one: in a world where shame and sexual violence are still hard currency, the normalisation of the sex industry is a symptom not of social degeneration, but of the economic exploitation of women on an unprecedented scale, in a feminised labour market where all working women are expected to commodify their sexuality to some extent.

Nothing obscures this crucial approach so much as the dogmatic insistence, on both sides of the debate, on the primacy of a faux-feminist notion of ‘choice’.

With sex work, as with many other feminist flashpoints, the notion of ‘a woman’s free choice’ is fetishised and taken out of context in order to obscure useful analysis. The word ‘choice’ has been manipulated by the neoliberal consensus in order to erase the influence of brutal capitalist paradigms on the deeds and decisions of poor people, and of poor women in particular.

Liberated sex workers insist that their work is ‘a free choice’, whilst abolitionists and many exited sex workers claim that prostitutes suffer such abuses that the very notion of ‘choice’ is anathema. The term has already been devalued by wider society to the extent that any sexual choice made by a woman is assumed to be an empowering act of autonomous agency – especially when the net result of that choice is financial exchange.

Abolitionist feminists unwittingly play into this misleading rhetoric of ‘choice’ with their insistence that women in the sex industry have none, that, as Finn Mackay puts it, ‘prostitution is non-consensual sex’ - as if choice and consent are ever enough to justify industrial abuse. As if choice were something made in a vacuum, unconstrained by socio-economic conditions.

The underlying assumption of this analytical cul-de-sac - that any woman’s sexual choice, however restricted, is positive and empowering - could only have currency in a world where female sexual agency is still seen as abnormal.

Decriminalisation: a way forward?

The supreme irony of this sociological stalemate is that, on many counts, the ultimate goals of pro-protection and abolitionist feminists are one and the same. Both camps, for example, believe that women and men who sell sex should not face legal sanctions, and both factions understand that the persecution of prostitutes by law enforcement officers is a form of state violence against women that needs to be eradicated as a matter of urgency.

But achievable aims like these are sidelined by partisan squabbling. So intense was the debate around Clause 14 of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill that practically no opposition was brooked against other, more directly damaging clauses of the Bill, such as those that gave police greater powers to raid brothels and confiscate any earnings found on the premises. “Women are being turfed out onto the street in their scanties,” observed feminist academic Dr Belinda Brooks-Gordon. “Does anyone have an answer to this?”

Even in this bitter debate, however, occasions for hope do occur. A recent collaboration on the Guardian’s Comment Is Free blog between Thierry Schaffauser of the IUSW and Cath Elliott concluded that feminists should work together on decriminalisation:

“While we've all been busy arguing over other things, those most in need of our help continue to suffer violence. We believe the criminalisation of sex workers/prostitutes helps to legitimise those who attack them. Criminalisation of soliciting is a sexist law.”

Ultimately, all feminists believe that vulnerable women need to be protected from abuse, violence and stigma, and all true liberals oppose cultures that brutally shame and commodify female sexuality. If our goals are to be realised, the sex work shibboleth must be broken. Feminists need to put aside ideological differences and work towards a radical restructuring of neoliberal attitudes to sex, to work and to sex work.

It is not enough to seek to criminalise prostitution at the expense of vulnerable women, and neither is it enough to cede responsibility to misogynist market forces and offer protection within an imperfect, abusive sex industry as the only realistic alternative.

If we want a world where women’s bodies are more than just commodities, feminists need to get radical, we need to get smart, and we need to be prepared to lay down our weapons and take the fight to the real enemies. If we stop fighting each other and turn our energies on the pimps, the abusers and the superstructure of misogynist free-market capitalism, there are exhilarating victories to be won.

This article was published at The Samosa on the 25th of March, 2010.

Does Simon Jenkins shit in the woods?

... I feel that the best response to the careening unexamined prejudice of the esteemed Mr Jenkins' latest article on Comment Is Free is a line-by line takedown.

The pope is right and ­Harriet Harman is wrong.

I'm on tenterhooks, Simon, please explain.

I might prefer the ­opposite to be the case but, on the matter in hand, Voltaire's ­principle should apply. The ­Roman Catholic church may be a hotbed of religious prejudice, indoctrination and, somewhere in the United Kingdom, social division.

...and sexual discrimination, intolerance and ugly homophobic dogma.

But faced with Harriet Harman's equality bill and her utopian campaign to straighten all the rough timber of mankind, the pope's right to practise what he preaches needs defending.

Last I heard, it wasn't Harman who was anxious to straighten out her constituents.

The pope's complaint, in his outspoken announcement yesterday of his visit to Britain in September, is that Catholics are being denied an important human right: to decide their own employment criteria

Extremely original interpretetion of human rights, Simon, well done.

...for those working in churches and schools or applying to Catholic adoption agencies. The particular issue is homosexuality. Regarding homosexuals as unsuitable may be outdated, even odious, but it does not require the state to force private institutions to employ those whose character or habits they regard as not for them.

Regarding homosexuals as unsuitable is outdated, and it is odious, and 'freedom of speech' is no defence against bigotry and intolerance. Last I heard, it was beneath our ambition as a country to tolerate recalcitrant, ugly prejudice in any part of our infrastructure - and the Catholic church is a huge part of our national infrastructure, operating as it does as a sanctioned educational provider.

An idiot objection is that anyone who defends a pope is defending the comprehensively indefensible. Certainly I disagree even with the terms in which Pope Benedict expressed his dissent. I do not believe that denying him an aspect of his religious freedom is "contrary to natural law" or even inherently "unjust". No one, as the pope implied, is "disputing the gospel's right to be heard".

Oh noes! They be stealing my right to an unassailable dogmatic platform!

I deplore the attitude of the Catholic church to homosexuality...

Glad you got around to saying that, Simon, because I was wondering if you were about to imply that rampant, institutionalised Catholic homophobia is irrelevant to the debate, and suggest that forbidding gay people to work in one's institutions or benefit from one's services is just another harmless example of'free speech'.

That is beside the point. It might be comfortable for liberals simply to grant the pope the "human right" to express his views and no more. But a truly free society is not like Solzhenitsyn's Soviet asylum, where freedom of speech is permitted only to those safely certified and incarcerated in prison. Tolerance must be shown not just to an opinion but to the personal and group behaviour that results from that opinion.

...oh.

That the pope might support the suppression of abortion clinics does not justify Harman's suppression of Catholic adoption agencies. But then I have little doubt that if Harman were a Catholic she would be stamping out clinics with the most draconian of powers.

Because she's an eeeeevil feminazi, OMG.

The avowedly socialist drift of her bill is "not only to build a new economic order but a new social order", a social order of her own devising.

Women's rights, racial and sexual equality, protection for the elderly, the disabled and the poor might not be interesting to you, Simon, but then hopefully we won't be living in a world run almost exclusively by people of your particular age, gender, race and social and sexual demographic for much longer. Till then, just you carry on believing that Harriet Harman invented feminism all by herself just to piss you off.

People with such ambition are usually intolerant of others, and often dangerous.

Women with any ambition are nearly always seen as dangerous.

The cabinet of which Harman has been a member for a decade has promoted and subsidised faith schools, allowing them to do what she is banning the Catholic church from doing – that is, use religion as a tool of human discrimination. Many people regard the consequence of faith schools as more widespread and communally divisive than the hiring practices of the Catholic church. Why is Harman doing nothing to end them?

Except that Catholic schools are faith schools. Do you want to ban all faith schools, Simon, or just the non-Christian ones?

There are still large numbers of Britons who are uncomfortable with those whose behaviour diverges from what they see as traditional norms. These conservatives have swallowed much this past half-century, as authoritarianism has been steadily eradicated by liberal legislation on homosexuality, abortion, divorce and free speech.

How terrible for them. My heart bleeds, it bleeds, just like a terrible cunt, which coincidentally, Simon...

Occasionally the liberalism has looked more like intolerance, as over smoking and aspects of "hate speech". Indeed to some people, liberalism's onward march has seemed more like a jackboot in the face.

All liberals R Nazis!!*$!

Harman is one of those Labour ministers whom no one would describe as a defender of liberty. Her campaign against domestic violence stands to her credit, but she cannot walk down a street without screaming for a policeman to find out what the world is doing and telling it to stop.

...the screeching, hysterical bint with her horrible ladybits all over the nice Deputy Leader's seat.

British liberalism has had a good half-century, but has begun to lurch into the intolerance it purports to oppose. It should loosen up and acknowledge that some communal space must be allowed the old illiberalism.

Communal space, perhaps. Unilateral control over the education of children or the provision of adoption services, no.

In reality, 11 Catholic adoption ­agencies out of 480 were hardly a monument to bigotry. A celibate Catholic chaplaincy or a Christian school headship is hardly a knife at the heart of social equality, any more than a men's club

Those harmless men's-only clubs that, until recently, helped to keep all women from positions of power for centuries.

or some miserable smokers loitering outside an office block (on whose freedom the ­government also wants to stamp).

This whiny attempt to curry favour with the chain-smoking wingnut libertarian contingent of Guardian readers just makes me want to stub out a fag in your face, Simon.

The ailing Catholic church, like most hallowed institutions, does much good work, and it does bad. But the bad is not an incarnation of such evil as to merit state persecution, as if this were still the 17th century.

Oh woe, the poor Catholic Church, with its insignificant, persecuted 1.3bn adherents. The poor Catholic Church, one of the biggest enforcers of punitive ideology and state-level persecution of anyone who happens to be a little bit different. Who will protect it?

Pre-protest faff-laden filk-off-athon of doom (or: why the London feminist scene is quite depressing at the moment)

The only people we hate more than the patriarchy are the London Feminist Network!!!

No, really. This week, in between typing until my posh pansy fingers bleed for fun and profit, I have been watching in awe as one of the most serious feminist issues of our time has unfolded online. I speak, of course, of the great London Protest Chant Row of 2009.

It's the annual Reclaim The Night march tomorrow, which means that up and down the country, earnest sisters are getting ready to have a massive shout at each other. What'll it be this year, ladies? Trans people insulted in the street? Screaming matches outside Spearmint Rhino? Punches thrown over podium space (no, really) ?

Apparently, this year, it's protest songs. We're not content anymore with trusty old numbers like the women! -united! - will never be defeated! - direct, idiot-proof, and easily slurrable for those discerning gentlewomen who like to take a hipflask or two to such events, naming no names. This year the various feminist factions who've come to (literal) blows in the past over issues like prostitution, lapdancing clubs and transmisogyny are actually literally writing actual protest chants to piss one another off. Bad ones. Here's this, from Object, to the tune, and I'm deadly serious, of John Brown's Body:

The women who’ve been bought and sold

They need to have a voice,

If you’ve been pimped or trafficked

Then you haven’t had a choice.

It’s time to tackle punters,

And to show them what we mean,

Begin with Clause 14!

Women’s bodies not for sale (x 3)

And we won’t be for sale no more!

Look, I'm a fan of Clause 14, and I'm glad it wasn't thrown out when it went through the Lords last week. With proper sanctions it sends the right message - that people who use prostitutes have a responsibility not to fucking rape them. Right. Good. But whatever you think about the scansion of this verse, written after the event, it is no more or less than a massive, throbbing screw-you-in-the-eyes to the sex workers' rights groups that fought long and hard to make their voices heard over this Bill.

Yes, these shitty lyrics are right: sex workers need a voice. Unfortunately, both factions in this debate are prone to make the claim that the other faction denies sex workers a voice. What actually happens is that both groups, in the events they organise and the propaganda they put out, select a few speakers that they deem to be the 'authentic' voices of prostitution, wind them up and point them at each other rather than at the forces of patriarchy. On hearing about the proposed - for want of a better word - song, one member of the socio-feminist workers' forum Feminist Fightback said:

"Looks like we need to get on it with our own chants. Does anyone have a megaphone we can take?"

One of the proposed retort-songs is:

I sell sex/ Get over it.
I have a Brain/Get over it
I will win/ Get over it

And this time Feminist Fightback are actually looking like the mature ones. I'd join in, but, yknow, I don't ....actually sell ....sex.

Not to sound crass, but come on, sisters. We can do better than this. We need to do much better than this. We're meant to be symbolically reclaiming the night from enforced fear of sexual and physical violence, not taking cheap shots at each other. There is goddamn work to do. Right now, today, we live in a goddamn rape culture (hat-tip to Shakesville; trigger warning). Women and girls are abused, beaten, raped and murdered every day by violent partners. Women all over the world are still second-class citizens. Another generation of women in this country is growing up cowed, objectified, pressured to perfect themselves, to erase themselves, to starve themselves. We should be worrying about the pay gap, not the megaphone gap.

There is work to do. And if there are things we can't agree on, then we need to bloody well sort out what we can agree on and learn ways to work with each other, otherwise we're going to get laughed off the ideological playing field, and we stand to seriously let down those thousands of women in this country alone who really don't have a voice. I'm laughing right now, but not in fun. Come on, guys. Get it together.

Media lies and the 'Me First' generation

Ooh, look. Here’s some probably-quite-new-fairly-meaningless statistics about youth, gender and mental health from which people with no knowledge of psychiatry and little conception of the complexities of mental health difficulties and young people’s lives can extrapolate almost anything they fancy. What fun. Let’s see how insensitively we can completely miss the point, shall we? That’s probably what I’d be thinking to myself were I an overpaid broadsheet grunt; as it is, I’m an angry blogger, and a youngish woman with mental health difficulties to boot, so all I can do is stand at the sidelines with my modicum of inside knowledge and carp at the immense cocking stupidity that’s been hashed out in the press over the past few days.

Let’s start with the earth-shivering ‘revelation’ that gets wheeled out every year or so: that feminism has failed to make women happier. It’s been standard Mail and Telegraph fodder for ages, but now the Graun have stepped in too, spinning Madeleine Bunting’s piece on how ‘consumerism’ is ‘damaging’ women for all it’s worth. Bunting’s moderate article is drawn from the more thumpingly derivative conclusions of smug pop-psychologist Oliver James, whose job is to travel around the world being surprised that people as rich as he is aren’t happy. He, too, is deeply concerned for the moral and spiritual health of young women, given that recent studies have shown that – shocker – some 15-year-old-girls aren’t very happy and also like a drink. He deplores the fact that “Victoria Beckham [is]consistently the girl they most want to be during this era”. Yes, that’s right. Because as far as Mr James is concerned, Victoria Beckham – 35 years old, world-famous model, fashion designer, businesswoman, former singer and mother to three children – is still nothing more than a “girl”.

James, like Bunting, is simply appalled that women and girls aren’t happy. After all, what more could we want? Haven’t we got the vote now, and the right to work almost as good jobs for almost as much money as men whilst still carrying out 80% of unpaid cleaning and caring duties? Haven’t we got the right to behave however the hell we like as long as we’re not old, or ugly, or overweight, or lesbians, or left wing, or non-white, or happily unmarried, or disabled, or poor? If we’re not all gurning beatifically now, surely that means that we were wrong all along? Shouldn’t we get back to the kitchen and find husbands to bear cookies and bake children for, if we’ll be happier that way?

If you hadn’t guessed, I find all this gawping media speculation about women’s mental health disgusting, if far from surprising: down the centuries, casting aspersions on our mental health has been the number one way to keep women in check and limit our choices, from lobotomies for ‘nymphomania’ in the 19th century, to forced hysterectomies for hospital inpatients in the 1970s, to today’s handwringing over the mental health of women who choose to have abortions, as if women weren’t mature enough to take that risk.

Our choices are pathologised and moralised and muddled together with the very sensitive, completely separate subject of mental health difficulty in ways that are achingly archaic and damaging. Not to mention demeaning, because as well as leaping to the assumption that ‘Women’s Liberation’ has actually achieved its aims, the attitude presumes that what women want – politically and personally – is to be ‘happy’. Who said we want to be happy? I thought we wanted to be free, to be fulfilled, to have the power to make our own choices and to lead our own lives, to be happy or miserable on our own terms. The suffragettes didn't fling themselves under the hooves of royal horses for 'happiness'. They had much more important things to fight for.

Ah well. At least the same sort of crass, derivative statistic-bending media hypocrisy isn't being applied to the mental health of young men as well this week. O hai, Anne Perkins.

New statistics from Childline show that the proportion of boys calling the helpline to seek support for abuse, bullying and other distressing situations has doubled, from one in five to one in three. Rather than something to be applauded - suggesting that the millions of hours poured in by teachers, care workers and child psychologists trying to make boys more comfortable with seeking help have not been wasted - Anne Perkins suggests that this is in fact a sign of the moral weakness of our generation, what she calls "the 'because I'm worth it' generation'" in her rather unfortunately titled article When self-love is out of control.

Perkins' analysis of what makes boys unhappy is no less sexist, patronising and hateful than James' summation of the "toxins" ruining the lives of the young girls whose periods, let's not forget, are according to Mr James dependent on how attentive their fathers are:

There is a long list of candidates: laddette culture, Wags as models…and a massive sense of relative deprivation – always feeling you deserve better than what you have got, be that your boyfriend, MP3 player or your body. This was the It Could Be You era, one stoked by the advent of reality television in which girls such as Jade Goody, who would never have had a chance in previous times, became rich and famous just for appearing on Big Brother.

It was James, Perkins and their ilk in the first place, gangs of privileged media pundits from older generations, who decided that we were the generation that ‘had it all’, rather than, say, the generation who were trying their damn hardest to remain human despite being saddled with the highest expectations and least support structures of any group of young people in living memory. Not that that’s news, of course. Every generation tries to embody in its young its worst fears for itself, and our narcissistic, materialistic, addicted, self-centred, phenomenally up-fucked parents’ generation pointing the finger at us and telling us we’re moral degenerates is hardly news.

In fact, we are one of the less socially mobile generations of the past century; the real ‘It Could Be You’ generation, the generation with the most genuine opportunities for kids from lower income families, is the generation now making these ridiculous pronouncements: Oliver James and Anne Perkins' generation. To recap:

1.We didn't signed up to the women's movement to get happy; we'd rather be miserable on our own terms than Oliver James' fantasy grinning bovine housewives

2.The mental health of women and girls cannot be morally measured, and to suggest otherwise is highly offensive

3.The mental health of men and boys has no cultural value: it is not a sign of weakness or even of increasing distress that more young men are seeking help. In fact, the Childline statistics are to be welcomed

4. Mental health is not a gender issue: your mental health is not related to, or a predicter of, how good a little boy or girl you are. External arbiters of gender are, in fact, something that implicates your mental health rather than the other way around. Mental health difficulty has no moral value, and it cannot be placed on a map of social or gender deviance: it's simply a problem that a lot of young people, as well as a lot of not-young people, are trying to deal with from day to day.

5. Columnists: take your jealous mitts out of your cloth ears and try, please, to understand that the generation you so readily dismiss as narcissistic and frivolous has problems of its own that you can't even begin to comprehend, mainly because so far you haven't bothered, unless you're Nick Cohen.

Here ends the lesson

Perfect slaves?

There's been a rash of horrible articles recently, along with some great ones, about dieting, body image, self-harm and eating disorders. I can't look away from this stuff, especially not when I'm physically ill and my own body is just not behaving. Five years after I was hospitalised for anorexia as a 17-year-old, I still have to keep an eye on the way I'm eating: when my appetite goes, as it has now as a result of the deathflu, I can't just sip milkshakes and grumble like a normal overgrown student; instead, I have to battle it out between the little voice which wants to take the opportunity to avoid food for a few days, to lose some of that hated flab from my hips and tummy, and the other voice that doesn't trust me to eat properly on any day. On days like these, forcing a sandwich that I can't taste into my gland-swollen face, the whole tricky business of actually giving a damn about myself is hard enough already without being bombarded on all sides by images of thinnness, 'beauty' and trauma.

I've written about this many times before. This article at The F Word in 2007 and this article for the Guardian in March this year explain just what depresses me so much about the constant saturation of news and comment about women's weight and body image in the information market over the past few years, particularly its pretence at 'concern' for our 'wellbeing'. Come off it. If mainstream media outlets really wanted us to feel better about ourselves they would commission fewer young female journalists to starve themselves as part of 'professional investigations into the mindset of thin'. Liz Jones' latest Daily Fail offering is as horrendous as it is heartbreaking, and makes me want to throw up in so many more ways than one.

I've just been watching Meera Syal's documentary about self-harm, in which she asks, amongst other things, why Asian women in particular are so very high-acheiving and yet so desperately unhappy - being the group statistically most likely both to graduate with high honours and to deliberately hurt their bodies. And now I can't stop thinking, about femininity, perfectionism, and what it is to be young and a woman today.

Perfectionism just doesn't cover it. Most women I know who are around my age are, to some extent, perfectionists. Why would we not be? We're told from the word dot that perfection is the only thing we can and should expect from ourselves, and that if we don't have the perfect body, the perfect face, the perfect hairdo, perfect exam results, a perfect job, a perfect boyfriend, perfect clothes, perfect friends and the perfect family - heaven forfend that we're gay, disAbled, tall, short, overweight, less than bright, non-white, poor or in any way average - then we've failed, utterly and totally failed, and we are worthless as human beings and as women. Furthermore, we are reminded at every stage that we are in constant competition with every other young man and woman in our peer group for a finite set of life's prizes. Perfectionism is no longer an infrequent personality trait: it is an universal standard for living.

Me, I'm susceptible. I'm frightened of failure; more frightened of personal and professional failure than I can possibly explain or even understand. Part of this is because I've already had, for my own twisted understanding of the term, to accept failure on a physical level: I chose to recover from anorexia, and to live, and in order to be functional I now need to eat. I weigh almost nine stone; I have fat on my upper arms and the beginnings of cellulite on my bottom; I have d-cup breasts, which I despise, and a tummy which no amount of sit-ups will flatten. People tell me that's not failure: but look around. Look at the news; look at any magazine or billboard you care to glance at. Thin is part of our lexicon for modern living. I'm not, and will never again be, thin: I have failed as a person, on one level at least.

If you think that's stupid, you're right. If you think that that's a trivial and appalling thing for someone as clever and as lucky as me to waste time worrying about, then you're right. But I'm not unusual in being subsceptible to perfectionism and control-freakery: I just happen, in the past, to have been dangerously more successful at it than most. Actually, this is something that most young women understand. The will to push yourself and the impetus to damage yourself are very close cousins, and they are deeply, politically enmeshed in the culture we have created for ourselves.

Poor Liz Jones. What's so upsetting is that she knows perfectly well what her own illness means, for her and for so many other women, anorexic, bulimic, dieting or merely obsessing over the size of their thighs like good little consumers:

Making us think about what we ate today and what we will eat tomorrow is a great way of ensuring women don’t have the energy to succeed. We don’t need ‘gender pay audits’ – to be announced tomorrow in the Equalities Bill – to find out why on earth women are paid less than men. (Liz Jones, Daily Mail, April 2009)

Young women today are brought up knowing exactly how much they stand to lose every second of every day; we are raised in panic and competition; no wonder we attempt to violently and cruelly control our messy selves, to inch ourselves into small, safe worlds of pain.

Yes, it's fucking political. I'm sorry, but it's fucking political, and it IS relevant, and it is urgent. I'm not just talking here about girls like me who are crazy enough to take the hurt and the horror right the way down. I'm talking about everyone: we all, to some extent, have to fight the urge to hurt ourselves, to work ourselves into the ground, to force ourselves towards perfection. Right now I've been an invalid for almost three days and I'm practically clawing at my bedroom walls with worry at the work I haven't done, the bits of my house I haven't cleaned, the inches I might be putting on that seem somehow to symbolise all the rest of it, all of that awful wanting, needing, longing. How sweet it would be to never be hungry again: never to have to hunger for life, for love, for achievement, for happiness, for the hundred little daily human longings that are too brief and too quickly grieved to even be named.

My whole life, all I've ever wanted has been for someone to tell me that I'm fine just the way I am. By the time people started saying it, it was already much too late: and besides, didn't every advert, every exam score, every magazine and tv show and book and film and friend and teacher prove them wrong? Nothing about us, as young women, is 'fine just the way it is'. Nothing about us can just be let be, to grow naturally and imperfectly into its whole self.

I make tea obsessively and drink it compulsively. Along with the cigarettes, it's the one little addiction I allow myself: imperfection, creeping in round the edges, staining my teeth, soiling my health and reminding me how gloriously unfinished and fragile and wild we are as humans. Perfection as anathema is awfully hard to hang onto, especially for women. I might still be a little feverish. But I'm trying my hardest to reject perfection. Not just to accept that I can't have it: to actively reject it, to refuse it, to stand and say that I will not serve. I refuse to serve a vanishing feminine mythos that keeps us all, one way or another, in chains. So I will: I will refuse to serve. Ask me how many calories there are in a mars bar and you can bet your life I'll pretend not to know.

Humourless feminazi *2: why it's not about you.

Yesterday I was interviewed by Natasha Walter for her upcoming book 'Living Dolls'. I absolutely adore talking to feminists who are a bit older than me, and as we bounced ideas off each other I found myself being asked, time and time again, why I was sounding so cynical, so resigned. And that got me thinking.

In the women's movement today, it is easy to feel that problems are insurmountable; that the tyranny of beauty culture and the ubiquitous rhetoric of misogynist pornography can be challenged but never defeated; that female poverty, unequal pay, violence against women and uncertain access to reproductive healthcare will always be salient facts of our societies. This feeling of perpetual frustration is, I believe, more typical of my generation of feminists, who no longer have the luxury of believing that we're dealing with a clear cut war which can be decisively won.

Let me explain.

For the women of our mothers' generation, patriarchy was the screaming head, projected to awesome proportions, the Wizard of Oz in all his terrible fury. Feminists could and did approach the throne confident that they would be able to simply pull back the curtain and drag out the real, shambling perpetrators: a gang of embarrassed men who had been pulling the controls all along and who would then agree to come home with us to a gender-utopian Kansas where we all belonged. But feminists today face a new problem: the horror of pulling back the curtain and finding noone there at all. The shock realisation that perhaps there never was a man behind the curtain. The terror of the absence of any tangible, flesh-and-blood enemy, whilst all the while the wizard's head continues to scream us into submission, a hundred feet high and running, seemingly, on automatic.

Last week, I wrote about date rape, and I felt that an opportunity for constructive discussion was wasted in wrangling over whether or not the particular incident was 'his fault' or 'my fault', when the entire point I was trying to make was that the whole situation was and is much more complicated than 'fault'. Over the past month, I have written about the equality bill, about sex work, about burlesque, and each time the debate has descended into a shouting match over whether or not I believe all men are misognynists, whether or not I'm 'prejudiced against white males'. For god's sake. Guys, it's not about you. Girls, it's not about them.

That's not to say that I think no man is ever culpable in individual acts of misognyny and gender hatred. What I'm saying is that I do not believe all men, or even most men, to be the footsoldiers of patriarchy. On the contrary: women are sometimes just as likely to perpetuate the misogynist lies that keep other women down. Look at Thatcher. Look at Anna Wintour, or Posh Spice, or Sarah Palin: sometimes the man behind the curtain is a woman. I'm not of the school of feminist thought that holds that you never ever point fingers at your own side - because I don't believe in 'sides'. I don't think this is about 'sides' anymore, if it ever truly was. Unfortunately, the notion of 'sides' persists, and is incredibly destructive. The belief by both men and women that activists of the opposite gender hate them, personally and indiscriminately, is a major stumbling block for progress.

So how are we to cut this Gordian knot of pointless conflict? Very simply. For a start, feminists of all stripes need to look carefully at our rhetoric whenever we fall into the trap of blaming *men* - as if *men* were an amorphous block of faceless privilege, rather than one whole half of the human race - for our problems. That doesn't mean that we need to stop calling out male privilege wherever we find it - but it does mean that as liberals we have to entertain the notion that what we're fighting might not be people, but ideas, which are much harder to crush.

Secondly, and even more crucially: men, you need to get over yourselves and stop being so damn paranoid about feminist ideas. It. Is. Not. About. You. Men need to stop interpreting every mutter of the word 'misogyny' as a personal attack: it isn't, not even for those feminists who DO see men as oppressors. We seem, for the most part, to be able to grasp the fact that the gay rights movements is not a direct attack on all straightpeople, and that anti-racist sentiment does not constitute an assault on whitey. Why, then, is it so hard for us to stand together as men and women against the forces of recalcitrance and bigotry?

It might come as a shock to some of you, but most feminists do not spend their time plotting ways to undermine men. Actually, most feminists care far less about men than men would like to imagine. What we want, as feminists, is freedom from the constraints of gender, and if you're a man, there's a good chance that that's not about you at all. We need to stop looking for that man behind the curtain - all of us - and get on with the real work of opposing gender tyranny, the real work of personal and social gender liberation. Are we clear? Good.

The R-Word

In a blandly pretentious Murukami nod, I thought about titling this post 'what I talk about when I talk about date rape'.

So an unspecified time ago, there was this guy, right, quite a bit older than me, and we went back to his room during a party to share a bottle of really quite nice rum. There was some snogging, and some toplessness, all of which had been anticipated pre-booze. Then, next thing I know, I'm coming to from an unspecified period of blackout, and penetrative sex was...happening, to me. And, and it really does make me cringe to write this, I felt sick and I didn't want to be rude, so I just lay there until it was over.

I actually can't give any more details than that, because I am still friends with this person, and we share mutual friends. Maybe I could have said more a year ago, but at the moment, for better or worse, I've got quite a large (and largely lovely) following of readers, and if I were to elaborate much more I could seriously inconvenience this man, who is on the whole a good guy.

Found out afterwards that he didn't use any protection. Had a serious STD scare, which entailed a fortnight of shaking in my bedroom at night feeling dirty, and ashamed, and scared, waiting for the results to arrive. Test negative, still felt cheap and used. Got into a bit of a downward spiral of drinking, anxiety attacks and one-night stands. Then, after a few months, I was alright again.

I'm finding this harder to write than I had anticipated. I don't think that I was criminally raped. Nor do I think I had consensual sex. What's in place here is a sliding scale of consent and domination, penned in by silence.

Penned in by silence. I still am, on this one. In the past few months, I've deliberately skipped out on a few big social events because of a worry that, now I've been thinking things over a bit, I'll lose my rag and start accusing this man in front of his friends.

Which is why it makes me so fucking angry, so very fucking angry that when a political party promises to lift court anonymity for victims of sexual assault, when a political party says 'innocent men who are falsely accused of rape have their lives ruined while their lying accusers cannot even be named', when a political party says those things *and is the BNP*, even then generally reasonable commenters let their paranoia overpower their common sense and start saying things like well some people do make it all up you know (for the record, 3% of reported rapes are false, same as for any other crime) and you're just trying to attack men, and what about the poor men who get accused of rape, have you thought about them for one single second you crazy feminazi bitch. That’s deeply upsetting. I've got an experience here which if you notice I haven't even categorised yet and I'm keeping my mouth shut. Partly out of personal shame; partly out of fear of social reprisals; mostly out of sheer consideration.

It may surprise you to know that I do not believe all men who have sex without another person’s permission to be irredeemably evil, violent abusers. I don't believe that all men who rape even know that that's what it is that they're doing. I think that sexual consent is a deeply fraught piece of semiotic territory in a real and ongoing ideological battle between the sexes, and – crucially – that sexual consent and non-consent takes place on a scale of abuse and trust that we currently just do not have the scale of legislation in place to deal with. Given that it’s only eighteen years since a man in this country could not be charged with raping his wife, our legal strategy for prosecuting rape – entirely separate from an acknowledged police and social bias against bringing cases to court at all – is manifestly not fit for purpose in today’s society. But that’s not the whole picture either.

Some political lobbies want to paint false rape accusation as a real, and widespread, social problem. It isn’t (I repeat, 3%). But it IS a real, and widespread, fear – and one that deserves to be acknowledged and understood, rather than simply dismissed. As a male friend of mine explained to me recently, ‘from the age of thirteen one of my biggest fears was that I would make a fool of myself in bed – that I’d in some way underperform, or disappoint her – and she would claim I’d raped her, and I’d go to jail, where I might be targeted and even killed. It’s still a fear that preoccupies me. I know there isn’t some clichéd conspiracy of women out to falsely accuse men of rape – that just isn’t happening. But it was, and is, a fear – I think it’s a natural, normal thing to worry about that.’

Men’s sexual vulnerability is not widely discussed – not in public, and not between men. A lot of the anxiety that’s expressed by right-wing lobbies over ‘lying women crying rape’ can be traced back not just to a creeping paranoia about female power, in the bedroom and out of it, but to genuine male sexual vulnerability as men find themselves without models of behaviour to draw upon in this new age of equality, where the old rulebooks for how to prove yourself a man have been roundly tossed away.

‘I believe that what most men and boys want, really want, is consensual sex,’ my friend tells me. ‘Yes, at my school like at any other, there were a number of boys who everyone knew would deliberately get girls drunk and rape them, and boast about it afterwards. Everyone hated them, and avoided them – because they were normally the same people who were vicious and inhuman in every social context. Some of these guys beat a friend of mine almost to death with iron bars,’ he said, non-committally.

Indisputably, a minority of men and boys are damaged enough by their culture and their upbringing that they are incapable of non-violent relations with any human being at all. I believe that there are men who hate women and hate their own lack of power enough to rape deliberately, premeditatedly, as punishment or revenge. And I believe that this happens hundreds of times every day in England alone. Violent rape, whether by strangers, friends or a partner, cannot and should not be excused, and nor should less violent rapes and assaults, whether or not the perpetrator was aware of his transgression. However, I believe that it is appropriate for the feminist movement to step away from absolute, categorical condemnation and try to understand why men rape. In a world where almost all sexual offences are committed by men, if we don’t try to understand the modern male sexual psyche, we cannot hope to legislate properly when its owners go feral.

I’m not trying to do a backdoor John Redwood here and suggest that we should prosecute on a ‘sliding scale’ of rape. I’m not suggesting that date rape is somehow not as bad as stranger rape, or that ANY rape is less damaging, less painful, less fucking insulting than any other. What I’m saying is that there are many, many instances of sexual assault, of non-consensual sex, which whilst damaging to their victims are simply unproveable in a court of law. What I’m saying is that we need, as a society, not only a more effective system for rape prosecution but a language for sexual consent that extends beyond the parameters of a courtroom. What I’m saying is that this is far more complicated than rape-or-not-rape; if it weren’t, men wouldn’t have to get so damn paranoid. As it is, with our limited grasp on the legal-rhetorical overlap, too many men , and women too, see rape purely in terms of whether or not something can be proved in a court of law.

What today’s young men need, and what we desperately need them to have, is some form of guidance on how not to become a rapist. Because this is something men and boys just do not have – and now, in a culture where non-consent can come in many forms and the rape epidemic is acknowledged as a problem, they need that knowledge, and we need them to have it. It doesn’t come from nowhere. On one side of these boys is an increasingly widespread expectation that they should instinctively know how a decent person behaves. On all other sides, young men are bombarded by a culture that glamorises sexual violence and objectifies women, a culture that makes it cool to treat sex as a competitive sport with women as the dumb racing animals, with lads’ mags, rapstars and rape played for laughs in Hollywood blockbusters, with rape-role-play video games and commercial fantasies of male sexual dominance leering at them from every billboard.

And I think it’s stunning that, even hemmed in by captain commercial’s xtended rape-o-rama culture jam, even with boys as young as 14 committing brutal gang-rapes in this very city, no teacher is obliged to sit down with a class of young boys and go through with them just how to tell if a girl (or boy) is too drunk to consent, or for that matter if they themselves are too drunk to consent; I think it’s stunning that noone thinks to ask young boys what they feel is appropriate force to use in persuading a girl to have sex with them. How in hell are they supposed to know, when the question is never raised?

We have allowed generations of men to grow up without giving them the tools to learn how a decent person behaves in the bedroom, in a culture that tells them that non-consensual sex is acceptable, even cool. This doesn't excuse rape, but it might occasionally, partially, sometimes explain it. And explanations deserve attention when there are problems to be solved and heads to bang together.

The language of consent and abuse is complex, and it is painful. I, for one, no longer want to live in a world in which men are encouraged to see sex with women as something they either do or do not ‘get away with’. More than anything, I want there to be real discussion of what rape is and why it happens. Only when girls and boys and men and women can have full and frank discussions about this, between themselves and with each other, will we come close to achieving real sexual and social maturity in this culture.

Damn lies and statistics

Today I discovered that I am a migrant! Who knew?

Did North London secede overnight whilst I wasn't watching? (Again?) No, but since all the new jobs in Britain have gone to migrants since 2001, I must logically be one - three times over, in fact. Alan Green, Field and Soames' 'Balanced Migration' campaign is scantily concealed racism doing a desperate recession striptease to garner the 'send em home' vote with little regard for minor fripperies such as actual facts. As anyone giving the plans a cursory glance can tell. However, the distortion of its already distorted statistics by the right-wing press takes the cake.

The logical step at this point, being a patriotic soul, would be to follow general advice and 'go back where I came from'. Perhaps Ms Neeson and Mr Desmond, the Daily Star proprietors, could even pay for me? Islington is only ten minutes away on the bus, and I could visit a selection of its many fine coffee-houses with change for a tenner.

Are you a migrant, too? Take the frothing racist lies test to find out!

ETA: Because I didn't make it clear enough, this is a variant on a meme started by jacinthsong and theoxfordgirl over at livejournal. Meme, not original post. Propagate, spread, disseminate, internet children!