Feminism

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

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

‘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

Imagine if a Ukip politician wrote about being on an aeroplane that was ‘heaving’ with black people. Imagine if he described becoming suspicious of them, and assuming, on the basis of no evidence, just a hunch, that they must be flying overseas to get up to no good. Imagine if he complained to British police about this ‘heaving’ group of dark-skinned air travellers, and the police agreed to interrogate them upon their return to Britain. There would be outrage. We’d see this as racialised suspicion. In which case, why has there been no outrage, not so much as a raised eyebrow, over what the Lib Dem Baroness Jenny Tonge did at the

Today the Prime Minister has set out to ‘end the gender pay gap in a generation’. It would be an ambitious goal, if a wage gap actually existed. According to the latest ONS figures, women between the ages of 22 – 29 earn 1.1 per cent more on average than their male counterparts and women between the ages of 30-39 are also earning more. And it doesn’t stop there. There’s evidence that when men and women follow the same career path in the UK, women tend to out-earn and out-perform men. There is growing evidence that if you control for similar backgrounds, women actually tend to get more aggressively promoted than

Earlier this month, a review published by the Cochrane Library criticised the idea of ‘eating for two’ while pregnant, suggesting that doing so would affect foetal development and increase the likelihood of obesity in the child. At the weekend, the British Medical Association said it plans to revise all previous advice given to pregnant women, and will now inform them that the consumption of any alcohol while pregnant will have a negative effect on the child. Why doesn’t the BMA just come out and say that it doesn’t want pregnant women to have any fun? The continual revision of medical advice to make it fit with our health-obsessed culture is impacting

Over ten years ago, the satirical American magazine the Onion published an article under the headline: Women Now Empowered By Everything A Woman Does. If you’ve ever heard someone insist that pole dancing is empowering, the Onion predicted it. In a take-down of the lazy gluttony of ‘choice-feminism’, it told us: ‘Whereas early feminists campaigned tirelessly for improved health care and safe, legal access to abortion, often against a backdrop of public indifference or hostility, today’s feminist asserts control over her biological destiny by wearing a baby-doll T-shirt with the word “Hoochie” spelled in glitter.’ I thought I was reading the Onion all over again yesterday, when I stumbled across the

Forget the selfie or the belfie; the latest craze to hit the internet is the ‘tampfie’. Twitter users are raiding their bathroom cupboards to show solidarity for the hashtag #JustATampon. It’s in aid of the charity Plan UK, whose campaign hopes to start a conversation about periods. Arguing that ‘stigma and embarrassment attached to women’s periods contributes to gender inequality worldwide’, Plan UK aims to teach menstrual health and hygiene to young women in developing countries. This moral crusade has reinvigorated UK activists who failed to get tampons on to the political agenda earlier in the year, with a petition calling on the government to remove the tax on sanitary products. More disgusting

Imagine if Education Secretary Nicky Morgan went into a mosque and told the praying blokes to put their shoes back on. Or if she bowled into a Catholic school and said: ‘The look of anguish on Christ’s face in that crucifix hanging on your wall could upset children. Please take it down.’ We would be outraged (I hope). We’d wonder what business it is of politicians to tell people how they may express their religious convictions. So why isn’t there more discomfort over Morgan’s launch of an investigation into a Jewish sect’s decree that women may not drive children to its schools? The Belz sect, which is ultra-Orthodox, runs two