‘He’s a Stud, She’s a Slut (And 49 Other Double Standards Every Woman Should Know)’ looks like one of those rather meaningless “gift books” that you buy for friends when you can’t think of anything else they’d like or you’ve only just remembered that it’s birthday drinks you’re heading to when you get to the train station with two minutes to spare.

But we know Valenti better than to expect anything so simple. Inside, chopped into sassy bite-sized chunks Valenti presents an overwhelmingly compelling case for the existence of a double standard for women in every branch of society.

(from an Observer interview published today)

The focus is on both the media and public attitudes, as she dissects why women politicians are so over-scrutinised for their appearance and why praise is heaped on men who make the slightest effort to involve themselves in the lives of their children while mothers doing the same are at best taken for granted and at worst left out of a job.

The tone is witty and sassy and it comes with lashings of true stories from Valenti’s own life from the toys she had as a child to her early relationships and recent media appearances.

Instinctively you find yourself trying to come up with more examples of double standards to add to Valenti’s fifty. The “fluff” appearance of the book, no doubt soon to be appearing on every thinking woman’s toilet shelf, is part of it’s brilliance. You really could give it as a fun little inexpensive (£7.99 in the UK) gift to someone who’d never thought about women’s rights before.

‘The Purity Myth (How America’s Obsession with Virginity Is Hurting Young Women)’ is a much more serious piece, though certainly not stodgy or academic. It’s a systematic critique of the increasing obsession with purity and virginity in modern America and the impact this is having on young women the country over.

As a nation we continue to subscribe to old-fashioned notions of purity. For example, during the scandal involving Russell Brand, Jonathan Ross and Andrew Sachs, the furore centred on the offense caused to Sachs. No-one seemed to be asking why exactly a man should be upset to discover that his own granddaughter, who is well over the age of consent and living her own independent life, has had sex. And no-one seemed to be wondering what exactly it was about said sex that somehow sullied the woman in question – Georgina Baillie – but didn’t do anything to damage the reputation of Brand.

These are exactly the attitudes that this book does a wonderful job of myth-busting. Starting with the fact that virginity has no meaningful medical definition. Valenti addresses the sinister nature of the abstinence-only lobby in the US but also tackles the fallout from this for women who choose not to remain “daddy’s little virgin” and are suddenly considered “immoral” and “fallen” women regardless of their hard work, their studies, their volunteer work, their political activism, their ability to care for others and countless other contributions they make to the world.

She also discusses how the attitude of contempt for women who choose to have sex hampers our ability to deal with real problems in society like teenage pregnancy, STIs, rape and the abuses that go on within the sex industry. So as long as our distinguishing line is between disgusting women who have sex and pure women who don’t we cannot progress to seeing the nuances of what kind of sex women are having – is it satisfying, is it safe and is it consensual? And while we dismiss those who have sex as dirty it is also impossible to objectively tackle the abuse of women in the sex industry.

On this final point Valenti and I disagree somewhat. In fairness she doesn’t reach a conclusion on the subject, she merely says that attention needs to be paid to the issue and suggests that in dealing with it it is important to listen to the voices of the women who work in the industry rather than marching in with ready-made solutions that may not fit the problems. On this I agree, but worry that the issue is more complicated than it may at first seem.

In Britain many groups exist claiming to speak for the thousands of women working as lap dancers, prostitutes, escorts, and so on. The problem is that many appear to be astroturf campaigns (i.e. grass roots campaigns, only fake) run by the club owners, agency managers and pimps promoting an agenda which largely ignores the horrors of the industry – rape, violence, abuse, addiction and human trafficking and instead demands only continued liberalisation in the hunt for ever-soaring profits. We need to be sure that we are hearing the real voices of women working in all areas of the sex industry. Maybe it is less of an issue in the US, but in the UK there is probably a need for a disclaimer on that chapter.

The rest though is bang on and will undoubtedly become compulsory reading for the next generation of pro-sex feminists.

A longer version of this review is at Kate Smurthwaite’s cruella blog

For instance a woman who was told after having a child that if she became pregnant again she could lose her eyesight. Then her contraception failed but under Northern Irish law since she only MIGHT go blind she was not able to access abortion. Instead in desperation she borrowed money from a loan shark to pay to travel to England for a private abortion, leaving her life further at risk from trying to pay back the cost (which typically ranges from £600 to £2000) at interest rates of 150%.

Another story was about a pro-choice meeting in a poor urban area to which a large group of young women came. One of them was heavily pregnant, the rest her family and friends. She had been told by doctors months earlier that the child she was carrying was so seriously disabled that there was no way it would survive at all after birth. But since it wasn’t putting her life at risk she was not allowed an abortion and was being forced to carry the dying foetus to full term.

I didn’t even realise until quite recently that the 1967 act which legalised abortion in England, Wales and Scotland did not extend to Northern Ireland. Abortion is illegal in Northern Ireland unless the mother’s life is at risk. There is no exception made for rape or incest victims. 6,217 women who gave addresses in Ireland had an abortion in Britain last year, others travel to Holland or Belgium and some have been known to order abortion-inducing medicines online, which is dangerous both because not all websites selling such things are safe and also because women convicted of causing an abortion in Northern Ireland can face long prison terms.

Since 1967 five women are known to have died as a result of backstreet abortions in Northern Ireland. This means of course that the system effectively just penalises those women without the financial means to go overseas for their termination. In the next two weeks we have a once-in a-generation chance to change that.

Diane Abbott has tabled an amendment to the HFE Bill which will be voted on on Oct 22nd which would extend the 1967 abortion act to cover Northern Ireland.

You can help to ensure that this legislation goes through. Firstly, and most importantly – write to your MP. Just click here and put in your postcode and the site will allow you to do it all online. Alternatively write to them at the House Of Commons, London, SW1A 0AA. You can put it in your own words or copy a model letter from the Abortion Rights website here.

And once you’ve done that there are three more people you can reasonably write to… You can write to Diane Abbott and thank her for putting the amendment forward, you can write to Gordon Brown (10 Downing Street and/or by signing this petition) and ask him to support the modernisation of the abortion law, he’s pretty desperate for public approval at the moment and his backing would make it much easier for other Labour Party MPs to back the amendments. And finally you can write to Harriet Harman (harmanh@parliament.uk) who is Minister for Women and urge her to put her weight behind the amendments (rather than wimping out and abstaining).

Oh and of course you can also forward this to your friends and family and encourage them to do the same. We have a two week window to sort this out, what happens now will be with us for years to come.

Thanks for reading this and taking action. It’s so important we do it right now!

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PS. Here’s some stuff you may have heard elsewhere:

7) The government will do the right thing won’t they? I can’t really make any difference can I? The tiny minority of anti-choice campaigners in the UK have massive resources and apparently limitless energy. MPs have been sent plastic foetuses in carrier bags. Mailbags are filling up with angry letters calling those who promote women’s rights “murderers” and worse. We are the majority and we need to let politicians know we support women’s rights, that the issue is important to us and ask them to do the same.

What a day – Mayday protests, an election and now I discover my own profession is being brought in to disrepute with those who care about women’s rights (lets hope that’s pretty much everyone).

I’m talking about Johnny Vegas’s behaviour towards an audience member during the show hosted by Stewart Lee at the Bloomsbury Theatre last Friday. I wasn’t at the show myself so I can only comment on reports from those who were. One audience member James Williams, posting on the NOTBBC forums said the following – and I apologise for the long quote but it is quite hard to locate the original post on the forums so easier to read it here, also I don’t want to quote pieces out of context without the disclaimers James himself includes:

It was pretty contentious, so I’m slightly concerned about misrepresenting what happened if you didn’t see it with your own eyes. I can’t give you the complete context without recounting the whole set, and that would take forever and I’d probably get it wrong anyway. With that in mind, I’ll try to explain what happened, but please take what I say with a pinch of salt and bear in mind that it’s my intepretation.

Anyway, fairly early on in his set, he stated that he had no material, and that he was there mostly to get laid; it came across as quite possibly the truth spoken in jest. He started chatting up girls in the front row in an exaggerated, slightly cartoonish way, and quickly focused on a girl who was about 18 or 19 and was very obviously unnerved by it. To cut a long story short, he fairly insistently press-ganged her into getting carried onto stage by six members of the audience, while pretending to be dead. The premise was that they would then lay her down on the stage and he would bring her back to life with a kiss, and he warned her that there probably would be tongues. Honestly, you couldn’t have found a nervier or more passive girl if you’d scoured all of London – she was like a rabbit in the headlights, but she was giggling and clearly somewhat enjoying the attention, so it just sort of went ahead without so much as a yes or no from her.

Once she was on the stage with the 6 ‘bearers’ lined up at the back, he told her to lie very still and he turned back to the audience for a bit. She couldn’t stop her nervous giggling, so he told her to shut up and look more dead or he’d kick her in the ribs. There was a menacing tone to his whole set, so I have to admit it didn’t come across to me entirely as a joke. There wasn’t anything funny about it anyway, unless you find that funny in itself.

Eventually he got down next to her and started stroking her breasts. That hadn’t been mentioned before, and in the light of of the repeated refrain of “don’t fucking move” it seemed like an abuse of power. She could have got up and walked away, but it would have taken a lot of courage to do that in front of a large room full of people, against the explicit orders of the famous guy with the microphone. Then he started running his hand up her leg and pulling her skirt up. Every time he looked up to address the audience, she’d reach down and pull her skirt back down, but he kept pulling it back up and ended up fingering her through her clothes for a second or two. Then he straddled her, completely pinning her to the floor, and kissed her quite full-on for quite a while. Then he asked if they could bring the curtain down, which they couldn’t, so there was an awkward minute until Simon Munnery came out and brought down an improvised curtain consisting of his coat.

It was pretty hard to know what to make of the whole thing. I came away with the distinct impression that she was given very little chance to say no, if at all. The six ‘bearers’ made it even more grim, as it seemed their sole purpose was to make it look more acceptable – more endorsed, if you will. If it had just been him and her on the stage, I think it would have been rather harder for the half of the room who laughed through it to do so.

I say half, as my impression at the time was that people were going along with it and broadly enjoying the set, but on leaving, I heard nothing but “that was disgusting”, “that was practically assault”, and so on. My girlfriend was quite upset that she’d sat through it and not done anything, but I’m not sure what she could have done – walk out, I suppose. I was just fucking confused by trying to find a way in which it was acceptable. I don’t like to think that any area is out-of-bounds for comedy, even if the comedy is lazy nonsense (which on this occasion, I think it mostly was) – but that really only applies when you’re talking about words and ideas. Once you’ve got someone pinned down on the stage, it becomes a rather different matter.

There’s also outrage over at The F Word. Reviews posted by the Evening Standard and Chortle make much less mention of the incident.

Now here are my points:
1) Why has no-one been to the police? Surely with several hundred eye witnesses, someone has the decency to contact the police.

2) Why is anyone asking what the boundaries of comedy are? Yes, it’s ok for comics to say offensive things – that’s because we all have freedom of speech. We all have the right to say offensive things if we want to. Personally I think we shouldn’t reward comics who make sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic or ableist jokes, and in some cases there may be a case to be made against them for inciting hatred or crime, but that’s a totally separate issue. None of us, including comedians, have the right to rape or sexually assault. That’s nothing to do with comedy, that’s everything to do with the laws of this country. Would we be having this “discussion” if a comedian had injured someone physically on stage? Of course not.

3) Most frightening of all are some of the comments on the various websites. Of course these aren’t necessarily representative of what the public at large think, but they are representative of what the people who posted them think. Comments suggesting that the woman’s nervous giggles indicate that she was “having a great time” throughout suggest to me that people don’t understand what rape is – giggling is not consent, and without consent penetration of any kind is rape.

This brings me back to a point I have been banging on about for a very long time: We need education about women’s issues and women’s rights to be compulsory on the national curriculum. Now.

He knew he was a burden to those who cared for him, he knew what was happening to him and it broke his heart every day.

Important research into potential treatments for Alzheimer’s include research on the use of stem cells harvested from blastocysts – clusters of pre-embryonic cells. At present such research is slowed considerably by the limited supply of such blastocysts, which are made using donated human eggs. The egg donation process is non-trivial and involves a woman taking fertility drugs to cause the eggs to mature and then having them surgically extracted.

However brilliant scientists have come up with a way to create very similar blastocysts using eggs extracted from large mammals, like cows. Obviously this allows many more eggs to be harvested and thus many more blastocysts created and available to researchers. Here’s the catch, since the blastocyst has 100% human cell DNA but with bovine mitocondrial DNA it’s technically “a part human, part animal” hybrid, which scientists are legally not allowed to create.

So step in Gordon Brown with the new Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill which includes a special clause to allow the creation of human-animal hybrid blastocysts so long as they are destroyed before they reach 14 days “old”, i.e. long before they have developed into even an embryo. Problem solved.

Except finding cures and treatments for horrid debilitating diseases is something the Catholic Church really hates. Suddenly we’re told MPs have been consulting their local churches about this (Which MPs? And have they also consulted the Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s sufferers in their local care homes and hospices? Also I had no idea how many Catholics there are in parliament, didn’t Henry the Eighth get rid of them a few centuries back and replace them with the cub scouts?).

And after much debate they’re now being given a free vote on that clause…

Now a part of me thinks a free vote is the right choice because at least we’ll all know which MPs not to vote for next time round.

But another part of me thinks this: I’m an atheist. I’ll bet you good money most of the researching scientists are atheists. I don’t want to suffer like Granddad did.

So I propose that the atheist scientists get on with the research and if the Catholic Alzheimer’s sufferers of the future prefer not to use the resulting treatments on principle – fine. You see the law isn’t saying anyone would be forced to create hybrid blastocysts, only that they can if they want to. Those people who object to their creation are welcome to not create them.

And isn’t this the trouble with religious-based laws?

I mean if you’re religious about it, don’t get an abortion, don’t get a gay marriage, don’t adopt children into your lesbian family (another clause they are being allowed to opt out of) but don’t try to pass laws telling me how to live my life.

If it doesn’t go through, I might go offer to donate some eggs to researchers. Anyone know how to do this? Anyone else coming?