Feminism

Saturday

Melanie McDonagh

The brutality of China’s one-child policy is still shocking

So, China’s Communist Party has radically modified its one-child policy in favour of a one-or-two-child policy. For most politically minded Brits, it was a useful reminder that the policy actually existed. It has, says the Communist party with characteristic opacity, prevented about 400 million births in the decades since its introduction in 1979.  Some 330 million of those births were prevented by abortion. It may be that I somehow missed all the moral outrage over here at this flagrant violation of human rights from feminists and human rights organisations in those three decades. Or possibly there wasn’t much. Maybe there were any number of women’s groups picketing the Chinese embassy

Thursday

Claudia Massie

Hanging offence

Modern Scottish Men, a new exhibition celebrating the achievements of male artists in the 20th century, opens next month in Edinburgh. Men only; no women. Bold! Only joking. That show would never happen today. How could it? Where would an exclusive, specifically male-only exhibition be tolerated these days? A women-only show, on the other hand, would be fair enough; we need to point out that the wee dears can paint too. And so we have Modern Scottish Women: Painters and Sculptors 1885–1965. Should we perhaps be feeling patronised, ladies? The recent death of Brian Sewell has again thrown up his old allegations regarding the inferiority of women artists. ‘Only men

Melissa Kite

Forty is a feminist issue

If Emily Hill is right in her cover piece for the magazine last week headlined ‘The end of feminism’, then women like me are in a whole world of trouble. And by women like me, I mean women over 40. The nub of Ms Hill’s argument was that all the big battles are won. She quoted the sparkling achievements of ‘women in their twenties’ and also ‘the under-40s’, who are out-earning men. What happens to women after they have broken through the glass ceiling is a question for an older, more cynical female writer. At your service. While agreeing with a lot of what Ms Hill says about the pettiness

Friday

Brendan O’Neill

Germaine Greer can say whatever she likes about trans politics

If you want to know how crazy, even Kafkaesque, this young millennium has become, consider this: yesterday it was reported that a person with a penis — Caitlyn Jenner — will be named Glamour magazine’s Woman of the Year, while over at Cardiff University a woman who has done more than most to secure the liberation of womankind — Germaine Greer — was denounced by a swarm of Stepford Students as ‘transphobic’, someone who should make all right-minded people feel ‘sick to [their] stomachs’. This is the world you live in, folks. One in which a bloke can be globally celebrated as an inspiring woman — and heaven help the

Thursday

Sebastian Payne

Podcast: the decline of feminism?

Has feminism won the battle and is it time to move on? On the latest View from 22 podcast, Emily Hill and Charlotte Proudman debate this week’s cover feature on the decline of feminism. Instead of fighting for equal pay and rights, has feminism become about pointless attention seeking? Is Margaret Thatcher a role model for women to look up to? And is Proudman’s case of a fellow professional sending her messages on LinkedIn an example of how feminism has declined? James Forsyth, Isabel Hardman and Fraser Nelson also discuss whether Theresa May will campaign for Britain to leave the EU and whether this makes her the most interesting figure in the Cabinet. With one of her key advisers going to

Cosmo Landesman

Women’s issues are for everyone now, not just feminists

Like all right-thinking lefty men who came of age in the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s, I always thought of myself as a feminist. But now, thanks to Meryl Streep, I’ve been liberated from the label. Last week I heard her on the radio promoting her new film Suffragette. Asked why the story of the suffragettes hadn’t been made into a film before now, she said that in Hollywood the men with the power to get films made didn’t see this subject as anything to do with them. ‘It wasn’t their fight,’ said Streep. But now things were changing. ‘Increasingly we think that women’s issues and women rights are

Emily Hill Emily Hill

The end of feminism

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thedeathoffeminism/media.mp3″ title=”Charlotte Proudman and Emily Hill debate whether feminism is dead” startat=35 fullwidth=”yes”] Listen [/audioplayer]It would be easy to believe from the papers these days that women have never been more oppressed. From the columnist Caitlin Moran to the comedian Bridget Christie, a new creed is preached: that we are the victims, not the victors, of the sex war. Feminists claim we are objectified by the builder’s whistle, that a strange man attempting to flirt with us is tantamount to sexual assault. Suddenly, just as it seemed we women were about to have it all, a new wave of feminists has begun to portray us as feeble-minded — unable

Tuesday

Sebastian Payne

George Osborne: Corbyn is not the cause of Labour’s problems

George Osborne was interviewed by Kath Viner, editor of The Guardian, this afternoon and offered some interesting thoughts on Jeremy Corbyn. The Tories have generally kept schtum about the rise of the new Labour leader, focusing instead on the message that he is a danger to Britain’s national/economic security. Echoing the thoughts of Labour’s Jon Cruddas, the Chancellor said Corbynmania is not about the man himself: ‘I don’t think it’s actually about personalities in this sense which is, you know, Jeremy Corbyn is not the cause of the Labour party’s problems, he is a symptom. He was elected by the great majority of Labour members — not just the new people who joined,

Thursday

Melanie McDonagh

That LinkedIn photograph has served Charlotte Proudman very well, hasn’t it?

Gosh, she’s done well out of notoriety, has Charlotte Proudman. After emerging from entire obscurity after outing an older male barrister for inappropriate remarks about her photo on LinkedIn – I don’t need to remind you about it, do I? – this young lawyer has now come into her own as a columnist on the Guardian today. There was me, thinking she was safely in a university environment doing more sterling work on FGM. Which, obv, I’m against. I mean the practice, not Ms Proudman’s efforts to rid the world of it, which I don’t expect is going to change much. And, wouldn’t you know it, she’s dissing Jonathan Sumption,

Thursday

Damian Thompson

Deadlier than the male | 17 September 2015

Last week a 17-year-old girl forced the Edexcel exam board to change its A-level music syllabus to include the work of women composers. Jessy McCabe, a sixth former at Twyford Church of England High School in London, started a petition after studying gender inequality. Good for her, you might think. But is it good for A-level students? A delicate question lies at the heart of the subject of female composers, and it’s not ‘Why are they so criminally underrepresented in the classical canon?’ It’s ‘How good is their music compared with that of male composers?’ Ms McCabe told the press that ‘I’d quite like to learn about the music of

Wednesday

Damian Thompson

There’s a good reason why there are no great female composers

Last week a 17-year-old girl forced the Edexcel exam board to change its A-level music syllabus to include the work of women composers. Jessy McCabe, a sixth former at Twyford Church of England High School in London, started a petition after studying gender inequality. Good for her, you might think. But is it good for A-level students? A delicate question lies at the heart of the subject of female composers, and it’s not ‘Why are they so criminally underrepresented in the classical canon?’ It’s ‘How good is their music compared with that of male composers?’ Ms McCabe told the press that ‘I’d quite like to learn about the music of

Agnieszka Kolek

Few feminists dare criticise Islam. To see why, look at the ones who do

Over the weekend, a Muslim conference held near Paris was interrupted when two Femen activists stormed the stage during a talk given by two fundamentalist preachers. The focus of the talk was on the role of women in Islam and, according to Inna Shevchenko – Femen’s founder member –  they were discussing why husbands should not beat their wives. The topless activists were then forcibly removed from the stage and kicked aggressively by a number of the event organisers. Irony doesn’t even cover it. It’s easy to dismiss this as yet more bare-breasted attention seeking from Femen protesters, and in a way, it is. But you can’t doubt that they often get their targets right. Back in Ukraine in 2008, Femen activists fought

Tuesday

Kate Maltby

Like Cameron, Corbyn also believes in the merits of ‘token women’

In the early hours of Monday, it dawned on Jeremy Corbyn that no women in his team would be shadowing the four Great Offices of State. ‘We are taking a fair amount of shit out there about women,’ his advisor Simon Fletcher was heard saying. ‘We need to do a Mandelson. Let’s make Angela shadow first minister of state. Like Mandelson was. She can cover PMQs.’ Of course, if you’re reading this, and you’re a deep-set Corbynista, I doubt you believe a word of it: it’s the testimony of Darren McCaffrey, Sky reporter, spawn of the evil Murdoch empire. Therein lies the central challenge of our polarised body politic. How can any

Thursday

Brendan O’Neill

A compliment isn’t misogynistic. Why can’t feminists understand this?

If you were in any doubt that we live in mean-spirited and vengeful times, then Complimentgate should put you straight. Complimentgate is the name I’m giving to the naming and shaming of a solicitor who had the temerity to say something nice about a woman’s looks. For doing this, for paying someone a compliment, he has now become an object of Twitter-ridicule, fodder for the insatiable global outrage industry, which rails not only against people who are abusive online but also against people who are nice. No one is safe from their virtual slings and arrows. The man in question is Alexander Carter-Silk. Via LinkedIn, he sent what the press

Monday

Freddy Gray

Is Nicola Sturgeon trying to have her feminist cake and eat it too?

Nicola Sturgeon is fed up that ‘literally every time I’m on camera’ people discuss her appearance. She’s so fed up, in fact, that she’s done a photo-shoot with Vogue to prove how ‘inured’ she has become. Yup, that’s right, Vogue, a magazine that is all about policy and principle; a magazine that has no truck with our image-obsessed age. The endless commentary on her appearance is, she says, ‘hideous and quite cruel’. Is it? Perhaps I have missed something — and no doubt nasty Tweeters have said many horrid things to poor Nicola — but I’ve always been struck by how generous the media has been about Sturgeon’s looks and

Friday

Tom Slater

Why is the Home Office giving in to illiberal youth by banning rappers like Tyler, The Creator?

In a 2012 interview on Newsnight, foul-mouthed LA rapper Tyler, The Creator told a churlish Stephen Smith that the point of his music was to ‘piss old white people off like you’. Now, the old white people at the Home Office seem to have proved him right, by banning the rapper – real name Tyler Okonma – from entering the UK for the next three to five years. Okonma’s manager, Christian Clancy, wrote in a blog post that he received a letter stating that the rapper would not receive a visa because his work ‘encourages violence and intolerance of homosexuality’ and ‘fosters hatred with views that seek to provoke others

Thursday

Mary Wakefield

The contagious madness of the new PC

It’s becoming pretty clear, as the year rolls on, that some of our brightest youngsters have gone round the bend. It’s as if they’ve caught a virus, a mental one, a set of thoughts and ideas that might loosely be called political correctness, but seem to me weirder and more damaging than that. Back in the 1990s, PC students would stamp about with placards demanding equal rights for minorities and talking about Foucault. This new PC doesn’t seem to be about protecting minorities so much as everyone, everywhere from ever having their feelings hurt. It came from America, this virus, incubated in the closed minds of the Land of the

Wednesday

Rod Liddle

Jeremy Corbyn is right – it’s time for women-only carriages on trains

What can we as a society do about the relentless harassment of women by terrifying men? Menacing men, threatening men, priapic men. Something must be done — and quickly. I reached this conclusion after reading a deeply distressing article by the Guardian columnist Daisy Buchanan, who announced that she has imposed a curfew on herself after a series of deeply unpleasant incursions by bestial males. ‘I can’t believe women have to live like this in 2015,’ Ms Buchanan lamented, having revealed that she has also given up dancing in case the same sort of thing happens when she is on the way home from wherever it is she dances. I

Friday

Ella Whelan

If Hillary Clinton keeps playing the gender card, others will too

The American presidential race seemed more like a playground fight than a clash of politics this week as would-be Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton drew her claws on her Republican counterpart Donald Trump. The rumpus was sparked by Trump’s comments on Megyn Kelly’s tough approach towards him during a recent Republican Party debate. ‘You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever,’ he said. The possibility that Trump was blaming Kelly’s harsh tone on her menstrual cycle predictably sent social media into meltdown. Never too far from a scandal, Clinton seized her chance. In a public statement she described Trump’s comments as

Thursday

Ella Whelan

Feminists want to be both whistled at and ignored. What’s a man to do?

‘Seasoned feminist’ Jessica Valenti has written in the Guardian about catcalling and the detrimental effect it is having on her self-esteem as she grows older. Valenti mourns ‘the hellishness of my teen years’, ruined by unsolicited comments from strange men, and feels even more sorry for herself now, a slightly older mother who gets fewer catcalls and feels like she is becoming ‘invisible to men’. Feminists are never happy: whistle at them, and it’s an act of abusive male entitlement; don’t whistle at them, and you’re ignoring women, treating them as invisible. What are men to do? Our relationship towards social interaction is changing. Strangers avoid speaking to each other on the