But if you’re stil parrotting the line that voting doesn’t make a difference and politicians are all the same – implying that you’ve never actually looked too hard at John Redwood- there is now an alternative. You can give your vote to someone who does care, someone in another country affected by Britain’s policies on trade sanctions, climate change and military interventionism, someone who doesn’t have a voice in these elections, but who just might deserve one.

The Give Your Vote campaign is one of the maddest, most mind-boggling, most potentially revolutionary ideas to come out of the internet age in Britain so far. The concept is simple: if you don’t see the point of using your vote yourself, as is the case for many Disaffected Yoofs, then you can sign up to recieve notification of how one real person in Ghana, Bangladesh or Afghanistan would vote in your place, if they could. And then you get off your arse and you cast that vote. Due to launch today, this drive to combat voter apathy and build international solidarity has already gained several hundred Facebook followers, many of whom appear to be more than caps-happy flamewar faff-merchants, and several of whom have already pledged to donate their unused votes to people in developing countries whose livelihoods, homes and families have been imperilled by the decisions of British governments.

The scheme seems to be surprisingly thought through, with manifestos and focus groups in each of the target countries and an open-source system based on the efforts of volunteers to co-ordinate the proxy votes on election day. I spoke to the Give Your Vote campaigns organiser, May Abdalla, who is evangelical about creating a climate of global democratic involvement in an age where politics is disconnected from the reality of young people’s lives:

“The internet means we can conceptualise communities that aren’t just geographical, and start imagining democracy that isn’t just limited to within borders,” she said. “Young people understand that our ‘neighborhood’ is now global, but the campaign is aimed at everyone who feels passionately that people should be allowed to be part of the decisions that affect them. And we’re not the first to have this idea. During the US election, people started questioning the breadth of US influence; when we see so many so-called international organisations dominated by a few countries, whilst at the same time ‘democracy’ is held up as something so valuable that our country will fight for another nation to get it, we have to question how there can be real responsibilty in their actions if those they affect can’t hold them to account.”

“Give Your Vote is the mobilising of a transnational civil society through new media,” Abdalla explained. “People in Ghana and Bangladesh have respnded so well to the idea that they can represent themselves, rather than acting through an NGO that has its own objectives or requirements. The internet has a capacity to be used as a democratising force – because we can allow that diversity of opinions without the need for gatekeepers and be active in that process.”

All very sweet and utopian. But aren’t they worried about being slung in jail for electoral fraud? “It’s entirely legal, because we are not forcing anyone to vote in a particular way – jut encouraging them to allow others to use their vote as a platform,” explained Abdalla. “Anyway, David Cameron tells us who to vote for all the time.”

Most media outlets I’ve spoken to have dismissed Give Your Vote as a deranged student movement, and that, more than anything, is what excites me about the scheme. As a rule, any idea that makes nice people from both sides of the bourgeois political spectrum immediately and furiously dismiss you as a mental person generally has currency, because it almost always threatens unexamined orthodoxies. Orthodoxies like geography as the sole organising force for solidarity and fellow feeling. Orthodoxies like the inalienable right of the West to operate for its own profit or pride in the third world without being held to account by citizens of developing countries. Orthodoxies like East and West – them and us – rich and poor.

I will not be taking part directly, because I’m already planning to use my own vote to assist one of the liberal PPCs in Leyton and Wanstead. But if you’re not planning to vote yourself, I absolutely encourage you to sign up to the Give Your Vote scheme. If you can’t be arsed to tick one box once every five years to hold your government to account, you now no longer have the option of whinging that it won’t make any difference, because if even a few hundred votes can be cast by proxy in this election by people in countries affected by British policymaking, that will send an important message about international solidarity. I say this as a British patriot – yes, I’m on the left, and I’m a patriot and I’m proud, a patriot who believes in no borders. I love the British, and I also love my planet, and I believe that global thinking and global policymaking are the only paradigms that will count in a world that is increasingly connected, facing more and more problems that cross international borders, and approaching the singularity threshold. I believe in an international struggle for the liberation of workers, of women, of the disposessed. And lots of other young people believe in it, too.

The Give Your Vote scheme is exciting because it’s a whole new way of thinking about politics and online democracy, and that’s frightening for the old people who are currently sitting on all the power and all the money in this country. It’s frightening enough that this time round, Give Your Vote’s impact will remain small, and they will doubtless be dismissed by everyone as a bunch of idealistic, utopian, lunatic do-gooders, which is precisely what they are. But so were the first suffragettes; so were the early civil rights activists; so were the Diggers, the Levellers, and all the weirdos and fringe gangs in this country and elsewhere who dared to dream of a freer, fairer world.

Most of the people reading this blog only have rights today because someone, tens or hundreds of years ago, had the crazy idea that we deserved them, and was prepared to be dismissed as crazy and hounded as a dangerous freak because of that powerful, paradigm-bended idea. Someone always has to do it first. And maybe, just maybe, this is another one of those first times.

There are more young men on each of the pages that follow, naked or scantily clothed, poreless, flawless, with broad shoulders and rock-hard arses and muscles that bunch and gleam under oiled skin. You are used to the sight of these young men; these days, they hardly even arouse you. Their glassy eyes follow you on public transport, on the internet, on television, in the fashion spreads of magazines.

Picture this. Every one of the men and boys whose images you see repeated thousands of times a day is impossibly perfect, hewn from some arcane piece of rock on the platonic plane. Not one of them is over thirty-three. In the shadow of their hard, robotic masculinity, the possibility of paunches and puppy fat and male-pattern balding is unthinkable . They rarely speak, and when they do speak, they ventriloquise; they implore you to look at them, to understand their silent semiotics of commercial masculinity; they threaten and seduce you in a boring parade of billboards, adverts, music videos.

These men don’t seem to be doing very much. Usually, they are moronically thrusting and jerking around cereal boxes, insurance packages, bottles of shampoo and soap. They seem to beg to be penetrated, but it is they who have invaded your body and brain, as if the images were trying to force themselves out through your skin. Some of them are known to you by name or sobriquet, as singers or actors, or as the sons or lovers of powerful women. They grimace beautifully as they drape their impossible bodies over stages and sets, showing off watches and shoes and beautiful clothing that hangs from their perfect torsos in artful folds and flutters in artificial winds. Their images cluster in everywhere , unseeing, bored, as if they can’t quite decide whether to fuck you or punch you.

You know that it’s not real, of course. You understand vaguely that the real men and boys who pose for these images are almost all on punishing diet and exercise programmes; cocaine and steroid abuse and compulsive weightlifting are endemic in the modelling and media industries.You know that in order to make your body resemble the bodies you see around you you would have to push it to its limits, to the exclusion of all else. And yet the idea occurs to you, almost daily, oozing out of every advertising surface. You see more images of perfect men, on a daily basis, than you meet ordinary men in real life. Your sense of reality, of what gender and beauty and power mean on a day-to-day basis, becomes warped. They are the real men, not you: if you don’t look like them, you’re not trying hard enough. Other men in your peer group clearly are trying, perhaps not hard enough, but hard enough that they don’t seem invisible in this glossy, thrusting semiotic stream of plastic masculinity. So you try harder, too. You start to eat less, go to the gym more, maybe play around with taking some steroids – everyone’s doing it, what harm can there be? And maybe you succeed, maybe you don’t. At least you’re trying. At least you’re buying things. Isn’t that the point?

You begin to forget what real men look like. Older men, overweight men, plain men, scrawny men seem to shrink and fade as you look past them, unsure how to react to the freakish weight of their humanity. Images of men over thirty-five are such a rarity that when you glimpse real elderly men, they seem obscene, the lines and trappings of years a monstrous deformity. The few much-photographed men who have been permitted to age are known to have undergone extensive, brutal surgical procedures and to spend thousands of dollars a year ‘maintaining’ their appearance. Whatever their age, they all have full heads of hair -male-pattern balding becomes an obscenity, and the hair loss and implant industry is worth billions each year, as is the dangerous and murky skin-lightening industry, because these men aren’t just all lean, perfect and young, they’re also all white.

The small proportion of images of men from non-white backgrounds features young men who have typically Caucasian features, from height and straightness of hair to pale skin and blue eyes. Airbrushing helps here, too, bleaching faces, hardening the lines of lips and noses and erasing epicanthal folds. The pop-star Kanye West appears on a box of Rogaine looking suspiciously pale, but the firm denies altering his appearance, and the singer is contractually bound to shut his million-dollar mouth and keep on smiling.

Across the country, young boys are caught in this stream of images, and being young, they make the mistake of trying to swim. Young black and asian boys bleach their skin with illegal creams and dyes and turn up at hospital with third-degree burns; young boys of all backgrounds, some as young as five and six, are embarking on diet and exercise regimes to try to look more like their favourite male models, actors and porn stars. Boys of seventeen and eighteen are having surgery on their penises, their pectoral muscles and their faces to make them resemble the ideal. Fully half of teenage boys are on a diet, and some begin to take the process too far, cutting out snacks, then meals, then sustenance altogether. They pump iron for hours everyday, their infant muscles screaming with pain. By the time they arrive at university, one in ten of the best and brightest young boys are already racked by anorexia, bulimia, compulsive exercise and steroid abuse. They drop like flies, and you can do nothing to save them.

But there’s more. Something strange is happening to many of the boys who have managed to continue to feed and nourish themselves, the boys you thought were safe. They spend hours in front of mirrors fretting about their appearance, applying make-up, spending money they don’t have on clothes that might make them resemble the images they see everywhere around them, the images that everyone knows are false. They stop doing their work, abandon their studies, dumb down their intelligence, desperate to be accepted as that vital thing – handsome. They want you to notice them, they want to be allowed to exist in a culture which only allows them full purchase if they look great, gorgeous, glowing, up for it. They learn to erase their sexual identities. They learn to flirt, to give the impression of putting out, at every opportunity. They learn to be silent. They learn to stick their arses out when an important woman is in the room. They learn to smile.

These young men know that their chances of getting a decent job will be massively improved if they invest time, money and hours of pain and anxiety in their appearance and give an impression of sexual availability. These men want full, whole lives, they want what everyone wants – to be able to walk in the world as human subjects – but they understand that the culture of beauty fascism isn’t going to change soon, and that means that they also have to be accepted as physical objects, and for that they need to prove their worth in the relentless economy of white, lean masculine beauty. The plea, on a fundamental level, is a plea to exist. These young men are crying out for truth and understanding, but in an economy built on lies, how can they be expected to fight the tide on their own?

What is the response of the government, of the media to this trend? They say nothing. These silly young boys don’t know any better than to copy what they see. And anyway, women have to worry about what they look like too! Granted that it’s the men, not the women, who are judged on the basis of their appearance in public life – but then, there are so few men in politics and in business that we’re bound to look at them a bit funny, aren’t we? It’s all in good fun, isn’t it?

And so government remains silent, as legions of young men drop out of the system, fail to fulfil their potential or grow up into miserable, half starved adults. It doesn’t matter, not really. The men’s groups kicking up their silly little boys’ protests don’t understand the logic of the market. Images of lusty young men sell products – that’s all there is to it. Red blooded women like to look at hot young men – and that’s evolution, that is, and evolution means never ever changing, and that’s all there is to it. And after all, women find it easy to develop individual personalities, unconstrained by silly, masculine, frivolous worries about their bodies. What is it about young men that they can’t do the same? Are they defective? They must be. Come on, let’s talk about women’s problems some more.

Conservatives and a small number of high-profile feminists are unanimous in their assertion that contemporary culture has made desperate sexual victims of all women under thirty. The reaction to the Home Office report into the ’sexualisation of children’ has been gleefully priggish, with Conservative leader David Cameron telling the BBC that: “We’ve all read stories about padded bras and Lolita beds…children are growing up too fast and missing out on childhood.” Oh David, with your nice hair and your nice wife and your house in Knightsbridge, only you can save Broken Britain from the march of the underage slags.

Press rehashings of the Home Office Report and of Natasha Walter’s new book, ‘Living Dolls’, are stuffed with horror stories of young girls’ wanton, soulless sexual promiscuity. Pre-teens who should be drinking ginger pop and going on picnics are wearing thongs and listening to Lily Allen; toddlers are now born with the Playboy Bunny image tattooed onto their eyeballs.

Walter is a thoughtful and empathic feminist, and her concern for young women is genuine. Her book (to which, in the interests of full disclosure, I contributed) is far more forgiving to young women who blandly objectify themselves or work in the sex trade than several stern, moralising editorials and reviews might lead one to believe. Dr Papadopoulous, likewise, reminds readers of the Home Office report that it is normal for children to experiment with their sexuality.

And yet the automatic conflation of all sexual images and ideas with misogyny by media outlets reporting these pieces of research is evidence of a dangerous trend in contemporary thought: the idea that women and girls need to be protected from any and all sexual images and tropes for the good of our moral health. The notion that young women have no sexual agency of their own: that we can only ever be ’sexualised’.

Young women and girls are blamed for their concessions to misogynist, ‘pornified’ sexual culture even as we are told that we’re so thick we can’t help but be complicit. It’s sounding less like genuine concern, and more like good old-fashioned slut-shaming.

I’m not arguing that raunch culture does not hurt young women. It hurts us deeply. It encourages us to lessen, cheapen and diminish ourselves, to think of ourselves as vehicles for the sexual appreciation of men who still hold economic sway over our lives. It makes us understand that what we look like is as important or more important than what we do, and sells us a fake, plasticised image of empowerment that, for most of us, is deeply disempowering – as many wealthy and powerful middle-aged men and women have recently observed.

I am not asking for us to pretend that raunch culture is unproblematic, or that it’s uncomplicatedly fun to be a Southend lap dancer. I’m asking for honesty. I am asking for an analysis that addresses itself to young men, who also consume and are affected by the brutally identikit heterosexual consensus. Most importantly, I want an analysis that actually gives a voice to young women, not just those who work as strippers or glamour models, but to all young women and girls growing up in a culture steeped in this grinding, monotonous, deodorised sexual dialectic.

Recommendations that sexualised images in advertising and music videos should be censored or age-restricted and the associated notion that all sexual messages are inherently damaging to women assume that our current plasticised, heteronormative, restricted social vision of female sexuality is in some way normal. Our sexual culture isn’t the logical conclusion of social libertinism: it’s specific, it’s deeply weird and it isn’t, actually, all that permissive. But commentators, including feminist thinkers, are making the dangerously recalcitrant assumption that any sexually explicit culture is automatically misogynist, and that rather than working to challenge the sexual consensus, we should simply prevent women and children from coming into contact with it.

Censorship should never be an alternative to challenging the roots of patriarchy. Instead of slapping a blanket ban on pictures of tits, we need to look harder at the economic basis for sexual exploitation and at the reasons why many women make the choice to comply with raunch culture.

Today’s young women are neither soulless slags nor tragic victims: we are real people with real desires and real agency, trying to negotiate our personal and sexual identities in a culture whose socio-economic misogyny runs far deeper than conservative commentators would have us believe.

Fifty core members of provocative far-left group The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) resigned their membership yesterday in a dramatic public walkout that has sent shockwaves through the British far-left.

The catalyst for the walkout was the resignation of party stalwart and recent Mayoral candidate Lindsey German after members attempted to block her appearance at a local Stop The War meeting, amid ferocious internal debates.

“Such sectarian behaviour does enormous damage to the standing of the party in the movement, [and] fits into what is now a well-established pattern,” conceded the fifty former SWP members in their joint resignation statement.

They are right: sectarianism has crippled progress on the left since the formation of Respect in 2004, and has prevented any genuine electoral alternative to the three central parties from forming.

The SWP has been at the forefront of every attempt to scupper cohesion on the left over the past decade, gaining themselves a reputation for petty squabbling that, for many, overshadows their valuable work in opposing the Iraq war and propelling the anti-capitalist mobilisations of the start of the decade.

It’s almost enough, in the words of singer-songwriter Frank Turner, to make one hang up one’s banner in disgust and head for the door.

The inertia that inevitably results from destructive leftist squabbles is heartbreaking for anyone who believes in progress, but there is something to be said for infighting – within reason. The nature of the left is multifarious. We are progressive not in spite of our differences, but because of them: we are progressive because we have the imagination to think beyond the good old days or the status quo, and sometimes that thinking will take us in different directions.

However, radical politics, like romance, isn’t a thought or a feeling – it’s something that you do. The usefulness of the British Left will not be judged by the purity of our ideals, but by our actions, and by what we manage to achieve together for the benefit of ordinary people.

Factional splitting is hardly unheard of on the left, but yesterday’s walkout offers genuine cause for hope. Most significantly, the mutineers acknowledged the need to prioritise agitation over irritation, saying that “the most glaring mistake has been the SWP’s refusal to engage with others in shaping a broad left response to the recession, clearly the most pressing task facing the left.

“Even valuable recent initiatives, like the Right to Work campaign, have minimised the involvement of Labour MPs, union leaders and others who have the capability to mobilise beyond the traditional left,” said the mutineers, who recognised the achievements of the SWP in their statement. Their call for unity in action could hardly be more urgent.

Were we living in a period of peace, stability and economic ease, without the pressing necessity of a response to climate change, the left could be forgiven for allowing itself the luxury of protracted ideological self-scrutiny – a pastime that has never overly troubled the British right.

But we are cowering on the tracks of a cultural crisis, and there is a train bearing down upon us, and it is brutal, and relentless, and recalcitrant, and intolerant, and if we don’t hold it up it’s going to roll right over us.

If we want to halt the approach of a grim Tory future riddled with fascist pressure groups, the left needs to prioritise action over solipsistic squabbling – because if we don’t, the far right will.

[adapted from a talk given at Mutiny:Love on Trial last week and cross-posted at The Samosa]

“Not many women are really involved in blogging, because the blogosphere is quite pugnacious.”

In other words, this brave new world of ideas is much too rough for girls. In other words, keep to your corner of the playground before the nasty boys push you around any more.

When men are telling women why women don’t write about politics, they have a tendency to think of feminist politics as a niche subject, a fad, a schema somehow separated from the rest of political thought and action by a magical door of selective oversight. Coincidentally, whilst the New Media panellists were debating the apparent lack of female involvement in this new age of online activism, Matty Mitford was describing the progress of the Boris Keep Your Promise campaign in a much less well-attended Capital Woman session next door.

Boris Keep Your Promise is a multi-platform feminist, liberal coalition designed to embarrass the Mayor into keeping his election pledge to save London’s rape crisis centres. The internet has been essential in this campaign: activists blogged, tweeted and made a massive hypertextual fuss, pointing out that the amount of money required to save London’s one remaining rape crisis centre was exactly the same as Boris Johnson’s £250,000 yearly salary from The Telegraph, a sum he described as ‘chickenfeed’.

Mayor Johnson’s 2008 manifesto, in which he had pledged the rape crisis funding that City Hall officials were later forced to admit had not been prioritised, was quickly removed from the internet – but to no avail. On the 21st of October 2009, The London Assembly voted by a large majority to demand that the Mayor of London deliver the £744,000 a year he promised in his election campaign. Boris Keep Your Promise has been a coup for the left in London, it has been a flashpoint for internet activism in Britain, and it has been a victory for practical feminism. By challenging the right on small matters like whether they believe funding rape crisis centres is less important than keeping £750,000 in the City Hall PR budget, the Left can win victories. This is valuable campaining territory that is being lost in the wash of misogyny that pollutes the liberal blogosphere.

The offhand way in which Newman’s comment was made was what truly shocked me. Even if it were true that women don’t blog, even if it weren’t the case that thousands of brave, brilliant women from across the country and the world are right this minute raising their voices and debating online despite a great deal of targeted misogyny, Mr Newman and others on the panel made it seem that the presumed non-presence of over 50% of the population in the biggest conversation on earth was somehow a side issue.

Of course, the political blogosphere is pugnacious. It’s ugly, and it’s relentless, and it’s full of spiteful misogynists, rampant rape-apologists, slut-shamers, and bitter men in lonely bedrooms across the world whose idea of a great night in is to shame, decry and otherwise tear apart the very personhood of remote, virtual women who they’re never likely to meet. Nearly every female blogger I know has at some point spoken to me, half-amused, about her ’stalkers’, and the strange and cruel things they’ve emailed to say they want to do to them. There is a reason that women bloggers moderate their comments, a reason why the majority of female World of Warcraft players choose male avatars, a a reason why we often feel unsafe in spaces where, as liberals or as conservatives or music fans or uploaders of inane vlogs about our cats, we should not have to expect hostility.

But when that hostility occurs, as it has for women since the internet began, most of us are big enough and tough enough to handle it, and handle it we do, quietly, exhaustively, relentlessly, fending off the misogynist attacks that any woman with ambitions to raise her voice above a whisper learns to handle. I have been called a cunt, a cow, a whore, a stupid little girl, I’ve been told that I deserve to be raped and beaten, I’ve been told I need to be taken in hand by a man who will fill me up with the babies that are the only thing my body and brain are good for, and I’m still here, I’m still writing, arguing and debating, and they haven’t managed to shut me up yet.

The sort of repulsive, everyday abuse I’m talking about is perfectly anodine, and it’s entirely expected, and it has all occurred within the liberal blogosphere. This isn’t the nasty, evil Tories. This is the Left. The left urgently needs to clean its own house when it comes to misogyny and sexism online. The liberal blogosphere needs to stop marginalising women and condoning sexist attacks if we want our thousand flowers to bloom rather than strangling each other, weedlike, before we get off the ground.

Tonight, What Difference Does Political Blogging Make?, a debate hosted by the Westminster Skeptics, took place in central London. The panellists – Guido Fawkes, Iain Dale, Nick Cohen, Sunny Hundal and Mick Fealty – were all men. And it’s not like they didn’t have women bloggers to invite. What about Cath Elliot, or Harpy Marx, or Sadie Smith? What about Jess McCabe of that phenomenal political campaigning platform, The F Word? If there’s going to be any sort of future for the left, female bloggers need to be acknowledged as a central and vital part of the conversation.

The pope is right and ­Harriet Harman is wrong. 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 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?

All of this would have been pleasantly diverting if the entirety of the British left didn’t seem to be labouring under the same delusion. On the eve of what’s supposed to be a huge symposium of liberal thought and policy, can we please – just for one weekend – stop behaving as if the Conservatives were already the party in power?

Because the Conservatives aren’t in power yet. If Torygeddon does occur, if it occurs, it won’t be till after the election in May. After the election, not before. And yet both Labour and the liberal press are behaving like the ballots are already in.

This week on Labour List alone, we’ve had Alastair Campbell’s analysis of Cameron’s ‘grab a gay’ policy [ouch] and Ed Miliband’s mortifyingly concessionary open letter to Cameron on the environment.

The Guardian is the worst offender in the mainstream press, with Alan Rusbridger positively salivating over David Cameron’s tantalisingly unreportable remarks at the Davos conference today. But the blogosphere is by no means exempt. How much energy have we spent over the past six months offering responses to draft Tory policy plans? How much time have we wasted taking the debate to staid conservative social re-engineering projects like the Centre for Social Justice, rather than laying out our own plans for truth, justice and the revival of the job market?

The Conservative party’s ideas – sorry, their slogans – are nonsensical, but at least they have some. Broken Britain! Tax breaks for married couples! Character-building! We can’t go on like this! It’s service-station paperback political narrative, but it hangs together, and it’s reasonably compelling. Labour, on the other hand, after six months of lukewarm, weak-willed, quasi-theoretical equivocation, have just about decided that it’s okay to use the word “class”.

The government has come up with precisely zero policy platforms or post-election goals, almost as if it were hoping that twelve years of overseas conflict, widening inequality and educational meltdown would speak for themselves. It’s a very special blend of arrogant defeatism, and it’s not pleasant to watch.

It’s not as if the people of this country are out of progressive political ideas. The work being done by Power2010 and 38 degrees clearly shows that there’s a hunger not just for reform, but for liberal reform. Voting is open for the ideas canvassed at the public Power 2010 conference, which include an elected second house, votes at sixteen and capping political donations.

In the absence of any liberal narrative at all within the party system, young people of the left have had to invent a whole new kind of politics in an attempt to force attention towards the real nature of the public’s thirst for change. Meanwhile, the only strident politics coming from nominally liberal Whitehall parties over the past six months have been direct responses to Cameron’s trashy, pulpy politics. As if Labour and the Lib Dems were already in opposition. As if the left had nothing more to say.

It’s not pretty to observe the Sun and other such skin-flakes of the lumbering Murdoch empire drooling temporarily over the Cameroons, but it is expected. By contrast, it’s bloody embarrassing to watch the left obsessively picking over what ideas Cameron might or might not have about gay rights, the economy, the environment, the poor, the welfare state, whilst at the same time brazenly declaring that Cameron has no ideas.

We’re discussing his PR machine, his policy platform and his hairstyle with precisely the same sullen illicit exactness with which you might spend a lonely evening examining the vital statistics and profile pictures of your recent ex’s new squeeze on facebook, downing shots of cornershop vodka and wondering what she’s got that you don’t.

That sort of thing is perfectly acceptable behaviour for a week or two, but really, guys, it’s been months. It’s time for whatever part of the British liberal conference represents the Sensible Friend to turn up, take the booze and recriminations away, and force us into a long hot shower of self-analysis so we can move on and start laying out some coherent, practical ideas of our own.

The former Home Secretary quoted Aneurin Bevan, who described the Conservative party’s habit of using government policy to shore up the assets of the privileged as “sucking at the teats of the state”.

“That sums it up pretty well”, said Blunkett, who went on to describe how the evil, ghoulish Tories, are planning to reduce the size of the state by selling off central and local government functions to private companies in an effort to save money, because they, unlike Labour, care about money more than about people.

Mr Blunkett omitted to mention the small matter of the Welfare Reform Bill 2008, with its stated aim of saving cash by getting a million people off sickness benefits and back into work whether they are up to it or not.

This week, the BBC has exposed the inhumanities of the new ESA (Employment and Support Allowance) system, which requires all claimants of incapacity and other benefits to attend a ‘compulsory work-focused interview’ in order to assess their capability for work.

In almost all cases, the BBC found, after a series of humiliating interviews in which patients with terminal cancer have been asked to demonstrate how far they can walk, applicants were told that they were ineligible for state support and ordered to seek full-time paid work immediately.

After nearly a year of ESA, the government still cannot say how many people this brutal and dazzlingly expensive system has helped back into work, but it can say for sure that 44,000 people are currently waiting for the results of their appeals, costing the taxpayer additional millions.

Dr Chris Johnstone, whose work helped shape the ESA policy, criticised the system, saying,

I have no problem with a rigorous medical assessment done in a supportive fashion, but I think if you have a slipshod one done, as it appears to be anecdotally, that’s unfair for the people going through the system. It feels like some of it is done inappropriately and it’s almost being done to save money rather than to look after people.

So here we have a Labour policy that involves …well, it involves contracting out functions of the welfare state to private companies, with the explicit purpose of forcing a million people who are sick off state benefits, in order to save money. Which, by the way, they’re not even doing.

When I raised this inconsistency more-or-less politely with Mr Blunkett, he stammered for a moment before claiming that people attending compulsory medical assessments “should be entitled to a choice of providers” of this “service”. This is an outright fabrication.

Even where more than one private company does offer ESA assessments in an area, welfare claimants are not informed of their right to a second ‘medical’ opinion. But that’s not the clever bit. The clever bit of ESA, the really nasty, vindictive thing about this scheme, is that accessing the money one is entitled to now involves a fight, a fight that, according to Atos doctors, one is designed to fail:

“When doctors go in for the day’s assessments, they pretty much know the clients are going to be turned down…It’s really tough to qualify for ESA.” Sam, 32, a former research scientist, described his experience of applying for ESA, which was far from ‘empowering’:

”Jumping through the hoops to access my benefits took me six months, during which I was peniless and despairing. It’s not about ‘what you can do’ – what the DWP want to find out is just how incompetent and incapable you are. If you’re to stand any chance of getting the support you need, you have to fail hard enough to satisfy them. And if there’s ever anything calculated to institutionalise failure, that’s it.”

After Blunkett had finished pontificating about ‘choice’ and ‘empowerment’ and how much Labour ‘cares about people’, I waited for the red-eye to subside, made tea, and turned on my computer. Where I found that another friend of mine, Laura, 23, who suffers from severe mental and physical health problems, had received a letter from the DWP telling her that she no longer fulfils their criteria for being unwell:

… and therefore, I am no longer entitled to my Employment and Support Allowance. And as such I have no income whatsoever.

Now, when I read the letter I cried for half an hour. Cried so much my throat hurt. But now, now I’m just angry. I’ve spent months in psychiatric institutions, and I struggle every fucking day with feeling like a failure, and what this letter essentially says is, ‘you’ve failed a test you didn’t even know you were taking, and no, we didn’t consult your doctors, but as far as we’re concerned there’s nothing wrong with you, get back to work and stop sponging.

You can read the whole of Laura’s post here.

This is a policy that destroys lives, sometimes literally, sometimes inexorably, and always with the tepid tang of faceless beauracracy.

If Labour’s only election strategy is to accuse the Tories of not caring about ordinary people, something is badly amiss. It’s not merely a lie: it’s an untruth so fundamentally at odds with the last five years of policymaking that one suspects the cabinet of some terrible mass hallucination of integrity.

Labour’s callously outsourced welfare solutions demonstrate that the party has betrayed its core values of decency, fairness and support for ordinary people. In doing so, it has sold the ordinary people of this country, working-class and middle-class, skilled and unskilled, the Sams and the Lauras and you and me, into what could be a generation of failure to thrive.

This week, for instance, with the election months away and the Tory campaign bursting onto billboards across the country in all its terrible definitely-unairbrushed glory, it’d be nice if someone in government was making some sort of noise to persuade the people of Britain that they really do have a choice in their political leadership.

Amidst all the filibustering, the clumsy cloak-and-dagger backstairs plotting over a last-minute replacement for Gordon Brown, if it’s too much to ask that we actually be granted a degree of democratic self-determination, then it’d be nice if they were to at least pretend they have anything other than contempt for ordinary voters.

David Cameron’s new poster campaign is disgusting and fascinating, like a teenager’s sock drawer, or tertiary syphilis. Once you manage to tear your eyes from the spooky, ten-foot-high head-and-shoulder-shot of the Tory hopeful that dominates the frame, an image that absolutely hasn’t had its jawline articifially strengthened, its pores smoothed, its nose diminished, its hair filled in or its skintone adjusted to remove that pesky Eton flush that was so in evidence at the 2009 party conference, you start to notice the little things.

Like the fact that the words ‘Conservative Party’ are not prominently featured anywhere in the design. Like the fact that, despite their utter ideological disinclination to factor the lives of ordinary people into their policymaking, the Tories have recognised that the people of Britain want to elect a leader, not a party.

The Tories understand that whilst the brand of their party remains tarnished, their prospective candidate for leadership is by far the strongest part of their case to make the next government – not because of who he is, but because of what he represents. He represents, without any defined agenda, someone who wants the trust and respect of the people and is prepared to put his touched-up face on a giant poster saying so.

As Paul Sagar astutelyobserved at Bad Conscience this week, what the British people appear to want is not just a change of leader, but a change in the type of political leadership Britain has become used to: “not any-old-leader emerging through …back-stabbing, pole-climbing patronage structures, but a man (or perhaps woman) with charisma in whom they can believe and who is tested through the conflict of a national plebiscite.”

Put simply, Shiny Dave has had himself definitely-not-airbrushed all to fuck, but at least he seems to care.

This is why we’re going to start to see more dangerous smiling bastards like Boris Johnson and David Cameron getting elected to high office.

In a climate in which the machinations of politics are so thoroughly debased and the mechanisms of government are occluded and arcane, charisma can replace concrete policies. Charisma can look very much like the change we so desperately need.

David Cameron is not the change that his poster promises. David Cameron is a smiling wax dolly in a nice shirt standing in front of a bunch of terrifyingly illiberal old men with some really nasty ideas about poverty and privilege, which is why I will not be voting for him.

But the Tories have realised, as Labour did with more integrity in 1994, that change you can believe in is all very well – but it’s quicker and easier to locate belief we can change into. The British left needs to work out its response to the politics of empty charisma, before it’s too late.

A new campaign, launched on Monday, aims to deter “potential victims” from drinking too much – implying once again that women are to blame for rape. Dave Whatton, ACPO lead on rape, explained that “A large proportion of reported rape cases feature alcohol as a factor. Ultimately we want to prevent rape from occurring in the first place, by arming potential victims with key advice on how to keep themselves safe.”

The campaign, which also contains advice aimed at potential rapists, encourages women to “let your hair down, not your guard down”. News associations across the country, including Reuters, Associated Newspapers and the BBC, have predictably honed in on the message that women have a responsibility to protect themselves from rape by staying sober. This may be news to potential rapists, but most women do not need to be told how to protect themselves from rape.

The ’safety work’ that women do to avoid male violence is ingrained in young girls from an early age. We learn to choose clothes which will not ‘provoke’ men, to be sexually timid, to avoid walking home in the dark without an escort. We learn to mistrust men we do not know: better safe than sorry. Anti-rape activist Hilary McCollum explains that “Many women curtail their freedom because of their fear of violence, especially rape. Fear of rape limits women’s lives, as do stereotypes about who gets raped and when.”

I am all too familiar with how damaging these stereotypes can be. Three years ago, after drinking an unhealthy amount of white rum at a party, I was raped by an acquaintance of mine. What I found most distressing about the incident wasn’t the non-consensual sex, nor even the STD that I contracted as a result. In fact, what really left me traumatised were the subsequent years of guilt, silence and shame, fuelled by a deep belief that because I had been drinking, what happened to me was my fault.

For years, I didn’t mention that night to anyone, because I had internalised the message that girls who drink and flirt with men deserve to be raped. That message did not come from my parents, nor even from the man involved, who was appalled and apologetic when he realised what he’d drunkenly done. The message came directly from social propaganda, some of it as horrifically well-meaning as the current ACPO campaign.

The still-current idea that women who drink are wantonly putting themselves at risk of rape does untold damage, both to women and to men.

Alcohol is the short skirt of the 21^st century – an excuse designed to limit male culpability for sexual violence. Victim-blaming messages like the current ACPO campaign have been around for centuries, disguised as advice to help women ‘protect’ themselves – but with tens of thousands of rapes occurring each year in Britain alone, the strategy has hardly worked so far.

The ACPO campaign takes a step in the right direction by partnering these messages with adverts and posters reminding men that sex without consent is rape. But telling men that if they rape, they can expect to be jailed is of little use if, in the same breath, you also tell women that if they drink, they can expect to be raped.

It is never a woman’s fault if she is raped: not if she’s drunk, not if she’s sober, not if she’s standing on a table wearing a thong and baby oil. The responsibility for rape lies, always and only, with the minority of men who rape.

As any fool knows, in this all-the-sex all-the-time society the only functional couples are the ones who are going at it like crack-addled bunnies night after hard-shagging night, whatever their age or personal preference. Your duty as a woman is to provide your male partner with the sexual release he needs. Don’t fancy sex with hubby tonight? Let’s not be silly enough to question mandatory heteronormative monogamy or a culture that frames heterosexual intercourse as the ultimate panacaea: the problem, little lady, is with you. You have a disease called Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder, and Filibanserin can fix you.

According to Boehringer-Ingelheim, which just happens to make and sell Filibanserin, HSDD is “a form of Female Sexual Dysfunction (FSD)” affecting around 10% of women. It is “a medical condition characterised by a decrease in sexual desire…. the condition can negatively impact a woman`s life and her relationship with her partner.”Yes, that’s right, girls: you’re sick, and now there’s a cure. After only six weeks of continuous pill-popping most of you should experience, along with pronounced sedation and other side effects that made 14% of test subjects quit the drug before the end of the trials, a slight increase in sexual desire, amounting to an average of 0.8 more ’sexually satisfying events’ per month. In fact, according to relationship counselling service Relate, the main cause of low sex drive in women is not a personal chemical malfunction, but difficulties in the relationship. But why address problems with your partner or discuss the changing nature of a relationship when you can swallow a sedative and smile all night?

Academic psychologist Dr Petra Boynton accurately predicted that following Boehringer-Ingelheim’s aggressive marketing drive, we could “ expect plenty of headlines … reinforcing the idea that women’s sex problems are ‘all in her head’, with a mix of science and the promise women who’re not sexy enough can be fixed.

“What you won’t see is questioning about the drug, safety and long term effects. Nor will you see any critical reflection on the construction of Female Sexual Dysfunction as a medical condition.’

Boynton, along with many other academics, suspects that the recent categorisation of HSDD as a disorder has been a result of agitation by drug companies eager to monetise female sexual anxiety. A researcher for the British Medical Journal in 2003 concurred that “corporate sponsored creation of a disease is not a new phenomenon, but the making of Female Sexual Dysfunction is the freshest, clearest example we have.” Nor is the medicalisation of female sexuality anything new: in the Victorian era, women who showed signs of enjoying sex were deemed ‘nymphomaniacs’ and treated with incarceration, lobotomy, cliterodectomy and other brutal genital mutilations.

Centuries of routine shaming of women’s sexuality have made hypercapitalist economies of female sexuality easy to create and exploit. Leonore Tiefer noted in the peer-reviewed PloS Medicine journal in 2006 that “a long history of social and political control of sexual expression created reservoirs of shame and ignorance, [and] popular culture has greatly inflated public expectations about sexual function and the importance of sex to personal and relationship satisfaction…this sets the stage for disease mongering, a process that encourages the conversion of socially created anxiety into medical diagnoses suitable for pharmacological treatment.”

Chris Grayling would probably approve. The idea that a sedative drug can be prescribed to calm perennial problems within the heteronormative, monogamous marriage model must be terribly attractive to a man currently employed to create the largest, flimsiest soapbox from which to shout about ‘traditional’ family values. Speaking to the Sunday Times this week, Grayling lamented that under Labour, marriage had become a “non-official institution” and pledged that a future Tory government would make it a priority to raise the status of married life. For all their proseletysing on the virtues of small government, it is the Tories, and not Labour, who are already making plans to pry into people’s most intimate relationships as an explicit strategy of social control – sorry, ‘fixing Broken Britain.’

The writing’s on the wall for women’s sexual and economic agency, unless the fightback begins today. Mandatory monogamous marriage and maternity are back on the agenda, and if we’d got a little too used to valuing our own wants and desires above the edicts of a hypersexed but bizarrely puritanical consumer culture, drug companies like Boehringer-Ingelheim will be only too happy to sell us a pill to numb our protestations. The message couldn’t be clearer: we’re going to get fucked anyway. We may as well lie back and learn to enjoy it.

Nearly a century later, at this institution founded on racist, patriarchal principles, straight white males account for less than 20 percent of the SOAS student body – a fact that has prompted calls for them to be recognised as a minority group by the students’ union, and granted their own exclusive welfare strategy. On Thursday 19th November, as part of their Diversity Week, SOAS will debate whether or not to appoint a ‘Straight White Men’s Officer’.

University life often comes as a shock to the privileged sons of this country. Higher education is the time in their lives when young men are most likely to experience minority status; white men may dominate the world of work, top-level management, politics, administration, the arts, culture, the military and the media, but as undergraduates they make up only 36 percent of the student population. White males are also less likely to graduate with a first or upper second class degree and find immediate employment than their female classmates, where by contrast, less than thirty years ago, white males appeared to dominate every mixed-gender campus. At university, unlike in other environments, straight, white young men cannot pretend that they represent the standard for normal humanity – instead, they are required to confront their roles as members of a privileged minority on the world stage. Nowhere is this sea-change more evident than at SOAS.

Many have opposed the motion to appoint a ‘Straight White Men’s Officer,’ pointing out that white, straight males do not face discrimination on the grounds of race, sexuality or gender – and that to suggest they do marginalises the experiences of oppressed groups. SOAS students’ union women’s officer Elly Badcock said: “Women have a women’s officer because we’re fundamentally disadvantaged in society, and liberation campaigns exist for those who have been systematically and structurally discriminated against, specifically because of their sexuality, gender or race.

“Straight white men have never been discriminated against on these fronts, so claiming that they are an oppressed group smacks of whingeing.”

Indeed, whilst white, straight males are now in the minority at SOAS, no evidence has yet come to light of such students facing racist, sexist or heterophobic discrimination on campus. James, 25, who studied Arabic at SOAS, told me that “as a white male in an aggressively diverse environment, I never felt anything other than welcome, really.”

Like other white, male students, however, James saw the need for a white men’s officer to address issues other than discrimination: “It’d be useful, if only so that we can identify as a minority group alongside other minority groups, and if and when we need slapping down, it can be done by one of our own. That, and they could organise Bruce Springsteen appreciation nights.”

At SOAS, straight, white young men are confronted with their status as a minority group, albeit a privileged one, in every classroom and hallway. That white, straight males are finally recognising themselves as the minority group they have always been in reality is a positive development, and the appointment of officers to oversee this difficult process of recognition could well help the white, straight young men of today identify and position themselves in solidarity with women, queer people and other minorities.

The needs of straight, white males are different to the needs of other minority groups, and should be treated as such. But being born a privileged son does not mean that one deserves to be denied support in the process of finding and exploring one’s identity, especially as growing up white, straight and male in Britain today is so often a confusing and painful experience.

Today’s white, straight men too often mistake the work that equality activists do to oppose the worst consequences of white, male, heteronormative privilege as active discrimination against themselves as individuals. Attacks on unearned privilege are not the same as discrimination, nor are they something which any ‘Straight White Men’s Officer’ should waste his time opposing. Instead, such an officer would best serve his community by helping students explore positive ways of expressing a straight, white, masculine identity in a society thoroughly sick of being dominated by straight, white males.

Gay, female and non-white people, at SOAS and elsewhere, have every reason to be wary about allowing straight, white males any more exclusive identity clubs: historically, there have been few models for such spaces that did not define themselves violently against everyone who is ‘different’. Having fought to create spaces in which our own identities as women, homosexual people and/or BME people are celebrated rather than attacked, it seems disingenuous to suggest that white, straight men might make positive use of such safe spaces.

But in a diverse community like SOAS, where white, straight men are already compelled to recognise and adapt to their minority status, a ‘Straight White Men’s Officer’ with an agenda to support students in avoiding the pitfalls of prejudice and negotiating their own identities might well be a positive appointment.

The gradual movement of today’s young, white, straight men towards a positive identity model deserves all the support it can garner. Last week, Courtney Martin reported in The American Prospect on a recent conference, led by men, on the fight to build a new ‘feminist masculinity’: “There are legions of progressive men … who are struggling to redefine masculinity and live that redefinition every day. They have the opportunity to shed their socialized skin and all the anxiety that comes with trying to be a ‘tough guy’ and make a happy life defined, not by their paycheck or their size, but by their humanity. Fighting against the world that we don’t want is a critical first step, but fighting for the world that we do want is where liberation truly begins.”

SOAS was established a century ago to train white, straight young men in the arts of domination and subjection. With a little imagination, it could well end up training the next generation of white, straight young men – struggling to find their place in a world that orders them to dominate and then blames them for doing so – in the arts of listening, sharing and solidarity.

Cross-posted at The Samosa.

When a Sun photographer snapped Knickers Girl – aka 20 year old teaching assistant Sarah Lyons -cavorting in Cardiff centre with a pair of pants around her ankles, she instantly became the face of female reprobation up and down the country. Never mind that she wasn’t exposing any naughty bits; never mind that dancing with a pair of knickers around your ankles is perfectly legal behaviour; never mind that the pants in question weren’t the ones she’d been wearing, but a comedy pair of David Hasselhof knickers a mate had picked up in a bar.

Never mind that poor Ms Lyons was on a course of antibiotics and hence was actually stone-cold sober at the time: the new postergirl of binge-drinking ladettes everywhere has been suspended from her job pending a disciplinary inquiry, for the dubious crime of having fun in public. And they say sexism in the workplace is dead.

Knickers girl also has a starring role to play in the latest rotten misogynist egg Quentin Letts has laid in the Mail, although Letts has to satisfy himself with a slavering description of the picture, as the Sun is damned if it’s going to share the rights to such a juicy piece of moral propaganda. In his article, Letts blames feminism – and Germaine Greer in particular – for spawning ‘an entire generation of loose-knickered lady louts’.

“British girls have become fat-faced ‘ladettes’, goose pimples rising on the skin of their exposed thighs as they clack-clack-clack along the pavement en route to the weekend disco, destination bonk…Older generations would call these women ’slappers’ – and they would be right.”

Yes, this is the same Quentin Letts, writing for the same newspaper that regularly shames Muslim women for choosing to wear the veil. Clearly, signifiers of female modesty and social repression are fine and dandy as long as they’re not foreign.

Letts goes on to declare feminism the source of all social ills, taking detour after spluttering, purple-faced detour through teenage pregnancy, the decline of traditional marriage, drugs, free love, immigrants and, for some reason, the Mitchell Brothers’ haircuts, in 2,547 words of the runniest excrement I have ever read in the Mail. It’s not hard to call out the Mail group for misogyny and double standards, but, sadly for us, today’s free-for-all on young women doesn’t stop at the tabloids.

Every major news outlet in the UK has recently run stories on this supposed pandemic of female degeneracy. It doesn’t matter that the hordes of drooling young amazons apparently roaming the streets of our glorious nation in a savage rut of bleary, boozy, bottle-brandishing dick-frenzy aren’t, actually, bothering anyone much: although offences by young women are rising, this is partly due to the changing nature of police prosecutions, and women still commit only 14% of violent crime, which is steadily decreasing in city centres.

It doesn’t matter one bit: we’re still blamed for social unrest, blamed for violence done to us, shamed if we cover up, shamed if we bare our skin, shamed if we have sex, shamed if we don’t, shamed if we excercise contraceptive choice, shamed if we carry pregnancies to term, shamed if we choose to work and have children, shamed if we don’t, shamed if we’re old, shamed if we’re young.

It seems the only choice that women can legitimately make is the choice to shut up, slim down and strip off for money.

It is deeply insulting to suggest that by growing up, having fun, exploring our boundaries and taking risks we are somehow engendering social breakdown, when all we ever wanted to break down were the walls of judgement and repression. Pants off to you, Knickers Girl.

“I’m in a board meeting. Having a miscarriage. Thank goodness, because there’s a fucked-up three-week hoop-jump to have an abortion in Wisconsin.”

That right there, in >140 characters, is possibly the most succinct and effective piece of feminist gonzo journalism I have ever read.

Personal, factual, shoving the meaty political details of women’s everyday life right up in your face. Plus, it quite delightfully manages to combine in 32 words most of the big taboos of modern misogynist thought: women bleeding in the boardroom. Women being candid about the parts of our physical lives which aren’t to do with fucking but also matter to us. Women’s bodies being, in fact, more than just tools for baby-making and delivering sexual pleasure to men.

Women being outspoken and proud about reproductive self-determination. Women reacting to the termi,nation of unwanted pregnancy not with horrific, life-stomping mental breakdown but with what most of us actually feel: relief. The radical truths that women, with their bleeding, messy cunts, can hold high-powered jobs, make decisions about our own bodies, own our own moral compasses and face pain and humiliation with our heads held high.

Still, Ms Trunk was somewhat surprised at the vehemence of the uproar that followed. “Television, blogs and newspapers around the world reported what I had written. People posted critcisms on my blog. My boyfriend’s extended family called to make sure he was dumping me… I was even interviewed on CNN where the news anchor asked me, “Young lady, do you have no shame?”"

To which the obvious retort is: why, was she expected to? Was she expected to be ashamed? Of what? Of suffering through a miscarriage? Of not wanting a third child? Of doing both of these things whilst having the temerity to have, gods forbid, a job?

Shame about our bodies and our choices is inculcated in women from birth. We like to think that, because you can turn on MTV or open a newspaper on any given day and look at scantily-clad ladies gyrating appealingly for the camera, we live in a sexually open society.

We do not. And there are certain aspects of bio-female experience – miscarriage, for example – which are still horrendously taboo, about which we are still expected to feel shame – moral shame, physical shame, political shame. We are expected to shut up about it, get on with it in private, clear up our own mess and not ask for any help or understanding, because we are women, and shame is our birthright.

Well, fuck that, and fuck the thousands of busybodies who saw fit to try and foist upon Penelope Trunk the shame that she so bravely and publicly refused to own. This is not about privacy, or modesty, but about shame, and what we are and aren’t expected to feel shameful about.

Hundreds of thousands of women use the internet to discuss their sexual exploits in detail and are not condemned. Belle De Jour talks about her experiences as a middle-class sex worker, and there has been no witch-hunt over her lack of ’shame’ – indeed, books and a TV series have been made about her life. Penelope Trunk posted about experiencing the pain of miscarriage at work and the emotions that that stirred in her in the same way that she posts about her life on a farm in Winsconsin, her upcoming marriage, her work as a journalist and mother. All of these things are part of her life; why should she feel shameful about them?

Down with shame. Down with ignorance, secrecy and silence, down with female experience being lived in fear and embarrassment, and down with shame. Penelope Trunk should be considered a feminist hero for her contribution to telling women’s truths without apology or embarrassment, as John Stuart Mill advocated in The Subjection of Women:

The knowledge which men can acquire of women …is wretchedly imperfect and superficial, and always will be so, until women themselves have told all that they have to tell.

“And that time has not come; nor will it come otherwise than gradually. It is but of yesterday that women have either been qualified by literary accomplishments or permitted by society to tell anything to the general public. As yet very few of them may tell anything whic men, on whom their literary success depends, are unwilling to hear.

For anyone who still thinks that Penelope Trunk is unfittingly ’shameless’, immoral or simply self-promoting, I’d ask you to consider that George Orwell was talking about women as well as men when he said that “if liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

More unnatural than the death of 38-year old Siobhan Kearney, whose former husband this week lost his appeal to be acquitted of her murder.

The judge confirmed that in 2006, Brian Kearney strangled Siobhan in her room then used a Dyson Vacuum cleaner flex as a ligature before trying to hoist her over the en-suite door in her bedroom in an attempt to make it look like a suicide. He then left the house, leaving their three-year-old son alone downstairs whilst his mother’s body slowly cooled.

More unnatural than the death of Kate Ellerbeck, who rowed with her mutually unfaithful husband and asked for a divorce, attacking him in a rage when he refused.

HSBC investment banker Neil Ellerbeck, who was this week convicted of manslaughter, told police that restrained his wife “forcefully”, pinning her to the ground with his entire 15stone bulk until she stopped “wriggling and kicking”, and left her corpse in the hallway. He then texted his lover, bought a lottery ticket, and went to pick up the couple’s ten-year-old daughter from school, telling her “Mummy’s not here because she’s gone shopping”.

And definitely more unnatural than the death of Sally Sinclair, 40, a top business executive at Vodafone. A jury heard this week that when Sally confessed her affair to her husband Alaisdair Sinclair, he attacked her with a kitchen knife, stabbing her more than thirty times as she fell to the ground and sawing at her with a serrated breadknife as their children stood by, screaming. Alaisdair denies murder: the trial continues.

The Daily Heil has not neglected to report all these stories, bundling them all up together in an article whose main thrust is how ‘a worrying proportion of violence within relationships is perpetrated by women’.

The article veers away from discussing the actual trials taking place this week (including one in which a woman is accused of murdering her husband, to which the bulk of the article is devoted) to remind us that some serial killers, such as Mary Cotton in the 1860s, have been female; that Vanessa George is a paedophile; and that up to 10% of violent crime is committed by women: “in contrast to the traditional gentle female image, the figures who lurk in these pages are savage matriarchs or brutal mothers, their menace all the more terrifying because of their gender.”

The fact that two women a week are murdered by their partners or former partners, the fact that three men were in front of judges this week in the UK alone for the savage slaughter of their wives, does not pass muster.

At the Labour Party Conference I watched Tim Montgomerie of Conservative home tell delegates that “studies show that there is something very, very special about marriage”.

Tell that to Sally Sinclair, Kate Ellerbeck and Siobhan Kearney. No wait, you can’t! This “specialness” was given as justification for tax breaks for married couples after the encroaching Torygeddon and cementing of public prejudice against queer couples, unmarried partners and single parents.

I suggest that before we start signing up to the drooling Tory family fetish, we all have a good, hard think about what a ‘traditional, stable’ family really looks like – and interrogate just what we mean by “natural”.

Thanks to a new book, ‘The Lolita Effect’, a kiddy-sized pole-dancing kit marketed to six year olds that got attention on both sides of the pond and, of course, Miley Cyrus, the ’sexualisation of young girls’ is in the press again. Cue a great deal of handwringing and think-of-the-children-isms in the same international press that, this same week, gave a good deal of coverage to child-rape apologists.

All of these stories are just begging, just laying back like the wanton little semiotic nymphets they are and begging to be illustrated with faux-naive photos of young girls in suggestive states of undress – or, more frequently and legally, parts of young girls. Merely, of course, to demonstrate how awful it all is.

Western society has a curious doublethink going on over young girls and sex.

Whilst young boys are acknowledged as having and acting upon sexual desire from a young age, the notion of young girls being sexual is still shocking – but it’s also exciting. From the pages of playboy to music videos to porn, girlhood is sexualised and undeveloped female bodies fetishised as the ultimate in naughty fantasy. This trend has been going on for decades, and yet when real little girls do what they’re told to do and play sexy, the hollow hypocrisy of the commentariat is deafening.

Nobody has yet thought of asking young women and girls themselves what they want. What a silly idea: everyone knows that young girls are merely ciphers for the steamy fantasies of artists, advertisers and pop psions: they have no personalities of their own, and no agency to speak of. They are told what to want, and they’ll damn well like it; they are the embodiment of patriarchal desire, and as such their own desires are irrelevant.

Curiously, I don’t remember myself and my schoolmates morphing into vain, vacant sex-dollies between the ages of twelve and seventeen. As far as I recall, we were all people then, no matter how many parts of our growing selves were stamped down, stretched out, primped, polished, squeezed into shape or mercilessly stifled, and with any luck we’re all still people now. I do, however, remember being judged relentlessly on the way I looked, and being miserable because of it. I remember how my body and desires and the bodies and desires of every young woman I knew were ruthlessly policed, and how that process informed my feminism.

I was not a good-looking kid, and every magazine and advertisment I saw, every programme I watched, every message I got from parents and my peer group and the few friends I had told me that my selfhood was irrelevant because I was not beautiful, that my life would be immeasurably better if I looked more like those girls who were. I am reliably informed by my teenage sisters that the message has not changed in the past six years: if you’re a girl and you’re not sexy, you may as well go and lie down in a skip right now, because you’re worthless and nobody will ever love you.

Note that I said sexy, not sexual. We were expected to look sexually available at all times – but if we actually were sexually available, we quickly developed reputations as slags. None of the effort we put into our appearance and behaviour was actually meant to result in any actual sex for us, because that was dirty. We were supposed to look good, not feel good. For all of us, whether we were pretty and popular or library-dwelling trolls – looking sexy was a game you had to win, whereas sex itself was forbidden. More than that: sex was dangerous.

You see, we were surrounded by rape. Not just rape as an airy warning, something that meant that you shouldn’t walk down Eastern Road in the dark or catch night-buses on your own, but rape as a real, tangible thing, that had happened to people we knew. In year 9, after a school disco, one of my classmates claimed to have been raped by the class stud in the nearby park. Both she and the boy were immediately expelled. I still remember vividly how, in that same term, a girl broke down in a Maths lesson because she had been raped as a child by her stepfather. Eventually, after being caught sexually engaging with her boyfriend on school premises, she was suspended too. Not only did rape happen to some of us, if you were unlucky enough to be one of the ones it happened to, you faced punishment and moral judgement. God forbid you actually engaged in consensual sex – that was even worse.

This wasn’t the case for the boys, of course, who could shag around to their hearts’ content, and frequently did, without having any moral judgements attached to them. Their bodies and developing desires weren’t policed by their peers and their parents as ours were, their sexuality was not taboo. Biologically, of course, this is more than illogical: whilst many men do not experience sexual feelings until puberty, women and girls are in theory capable of sexual pleasure and orgasm from early infancy, not that they are old enough to understand what that means.

Whilst boys’ first experience of heterosexual sexuality tends, these days, to be visual – catching a peek of a dirty magazine or simply being assaulted by a naked female body on a billboard – many girls’ first experience of sexuality is of a parent telling them not to fiddle in their knickers without ever explaining why it’s dirty, bad and wrong.

Little girls are already sexual – but instead of teaching them about sex, we teach them to fear it, just as the rest of society fears female sexuality. We teach them to become objects for others’ enjoyment, rather than acknowledging that they themselves are capable of positive sexual agency.

These days, young girls learn that sexuality is simultaneously shameful, dangerous, and the only sure way of gaining attention and popularity. We culturally castrate young girls before they’re into training bras, and then the Polanski defenders, the critics of Little Lolitas, our parents, our teachers, our peers, tell us that little girls are all immoral because we’re so clearly begging for it.

The sexuality of young girls is not there for the enjoyment or artistic appreciation of men, it’s not an excuse to rape us and hurt us and shame us and punish us, it does not make us wicked, or manipulative, or slags. These days, I’m a feminist. I understand that I have sexual agency, I understand that my body is not shameful, I know that liking sex doesn’t mean I’m a slut or that I deserve to be treated like an object rather than a person.

I know that logically, but the damage has already been done, to me and to millions of others. I want us to stop talking about young girls as if they were not people. I want us to acknowledge a range of female experience. I want young girls to be allowed to be sexual without being taught victimhood, and taught that victimhood is all we deserve.

Addressing his article to the only members of the academic profession who really count – straight, male ones – Kealey advises his chums to have fun flirting, because everyone knows that ‘normal’ young women are more interested in men than in their education:

Normal girls – more interested in abs than in labs, more interested in pecs than specs, more interested in triceps than tripos – will abjure their lecturers for the company of their peers, but nonetheless, most male lecturers know that, most years, there will be a girl in class who flashes her admiration and who asks for advice on her essays. What to do?

“Enjoy her! She’s a perk.

Kealey has expressed his irritation that women have failed to ‘get’ the article, which was intended to be humorous, or semiotically playful, or both, or something:

Because transgressional sex is inappropriate, the piece uses inappropriate and transgressional language to underscore the point – a conventional literary device. At a couple of places, the piece confounds expectations, another conventional literary device, by employing the good ol’ boy language of middle aged male collusion.

Anyway, the T.H.E editor says the humourless feminists are to blame for denying Dr Kealey (with, Laura Woodhouse points out, his 45 peer-reviewed papers, 35 scientific articles and two books) his right to free speech.

Of course, feminists haven’t called for Kealey to have his tongue cut out of his fatuous head or, indeed, even asked for a retraction, they’ve merely called him out on his pathetic sexist jerkery,but even so:

If we cannot have freedom of speech and robust debate in the academy where can we have it?

…yep, that would be the same ‘academy’ which is still cutting funding from women’s studies courses all over the country. Clearly some speech is freer than others.

This pile of festering bollocks has not deterred feminists across the country from taking a stand, with Feminist Fightback offering to treat Dr Kealey to a seminar on respect for women in education and the NUS leading a campaign against misogyny in higher education, with Women’s Officer Olivia Bailey collecting stories of personal experience of sexism at university which will be published anonymously over the next few days (send yours to olivia.bailey[at]nus.org.uk).

But wait, there’s more! Today, another male academic has been enjoying having a great big media-sponsored male privilege soapbox to shout from exercising his free speech over the evils of contraception in the Torygraph.

David Lindsay of Durham university, who claims to be a liberal voice, here tiptoes merrily down misogyny lane into the steaming ditch of the completely sodding bonkers, but there it is, prominently placed in a national broadsheet. A woman’s pure untainted fertile reproductive system is not only the core of her personhood, it is sentient, yes, sentient of its own accord, able to independently process subjective perceptual experiences.

Well, I for one can’t remember the last time I had a conversation with my uterus. It strikes me that David Lindsay, who is in his own special, Catholic way actually trying to speak on behalf of women, may have heard of the core feminist text ‘The Vagina Monologues’ and made some misplaced assumptions about the content.

Oh, and also, the contraceptive pill is a horrible poison that prevents women from doing ‘what comes naturally’, and the Pope should make it stop, because women don’t enjoy sex anyway, they only use contraceptives to satisfy male desire like the manipulative little SLUTS they are. Jesus saves!

This matters. It matters that high-profile academics and commentators, who hold the keys to learning, to advancement and to power, hold these views and see it as their god-given right to express them no matter who they hurt. It matters, because these words do hurt. They hurt more than these men, who clearly find it exceptionally difficult to understand that women are people just like them, can possibly understand.

It hurts, as a person who loves books and science and learning with a bone-crunchingly hard passion, to be told that my brain is merely incidental to my body, that what my teachers and superiors, most of whom are male, obviously, are interested in are my curves, my tits and my arse and my magical sentient uterus.

And they wonder why women fail to put themselves forward for top jobs after university. They wonder why only 30% of women science graduates, compared to 95% of men, go on to do research or get jobs in their field. They ask why so many women in higher education and beyond feel like frauds in academia, in business, in the arts, in science, why women lack confidence, why we fail to put ourselves forward for promotions and pay rises. This sort of thing is why. And you may like to think it’s all in good fun, but I’m not laughing. I’m not laughing at all.

This rumour, along with what Guido reminds us are “the stories of rages, flying Nokias, smashed laser printers, tables kicked over and crying Downing Street secretaries subjected to foul-mouthed tirades”, have led many in the national press to suggest or imply that Brown’s leadership is inherently undermined by his alleged mental health difficulties, as well as by the medication he supposedly takes for those difficulties.

We have no way of substantiating this rumor, but let’s for a moment run with the assumption that Brown is taking anti-depressants.

My response? Good. Great. If the Prime Minister of Britain is suffering from depression or some other mental health condition, which given the stresses of his current position seems highly likely, then I’m glad he’s getting treatment for it. I’m glad he’s man enough to admit that he might need help.

Anti-depressants are used by millions of people in this country, although the stigma attached means that many of us don’t talk about it, and in almost all cases barring those of people detained against their will in institutions, the process is both voluntary and helpful. It takes courage to go to the doctor and say that you have a problem, even if you’re not a leading political figure who’s constantly in the public eye.

I only wish more politicians would follow his example – after all, it’s not as if mental health difficulties in government are unheard of.

Some of the greatest leaders the Western world has ever seen had serious mental health difficulties. Winston Churchill was plagued by crippling depression, which he referred to as ‘black dog’ and treated with that much less effective anti-depressant, booze.

Lincoln was also chronically depressed and anxious. The Time To Change campaign has hilighted these examples, along with other famous figures who had mental health difficulties, such as Florence Nightingale and Charles Darwin.

Last year, a Mind investigation found that large numbers of politicians and staff were forced to hide mental health problems, with 19% of MPs, 17% of Peers and 45% of staff reporting personal experience of mental health difficulties. And in 2001, the Norwegian Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik outed himself as a person with depression, and was subsequently elected for a second term.

So is the ‘Prime Mentalist’, as he has become known, a person who has mental health problems? It certainly seems likely . Would that fact, by definition, make him unfit to lead the country? Absolutely not.

Not only have plenty of great statesmen and women had mental health problems, the experience of overcoming those problems and playing to one’s strengths may even be an advantage in politics – as it is for many people who, like myself, battle mental ill health.

You know that something’s rotten in the state of Labour when you read about a Tory welfare proposal – that’s a Tory welfare proposal, written by the Tories – and find yourself thinking, ‘that’s actually the first vaguely sensible idea I’ve heard for a long time. It might improve things.’

The plan in question involves decentralising the benefits system – giving individual councils a lump sum of money to spend on welfare howsoever they choose. Provided that safeguards were put in place ensuring a minimum amount of benefits and housing support were offered to the needy, this would actually be an improvement on the current system, which involves a great deal of overheads for very little positive return. JobCentrePlus, incorporating the new Pathways To Work scheme, currently spends £3.36 billion a year on administration costs alone which, when you consider that the total amount the state spends on Job Seeker’s Allowance handouts is £5 billion, is not an inconsiderable figure – especially as much of this money is currently spent on finding creative ways to deny people state support.

I understand, of course, that the Tories are about as likely to really have the best interests of the poor and unlucky at heart as I am to be a contestant on the next series of Strictly Come Dancing. The reason that this plan looks good is that it would be hard to envision a welfare system more punitive, more cruel and illogical, than the one we currently have, reworked under the expert supervision of former Work and Pensions Secretary, James Purnell MP for Stalybridge and Hyde.

One of the founding principles of the welfare state, laid out in the Beveridge report and part-quoted in a poor-bashing article by Michael Portillo in the Times this week, is that the state “should not stifle incentive, opportunity, responsibility; in establishing a national minimum, it should leave room and encouragement for voluntary action by each individual to provide more than that minimum for himself and his family”. The current system both forbids other work ‘to provide more than that minimum’ and stifles incentive – not, as the received wisdom runs, by providing benefit recipients with a cushy lifestyle that they don’t want to relinquish, but by making it so bloody hard to access benefits that by the time you’re luck enough to receive your £50.95 a week, you’re terrified of giving it up.

Having lived with and financially supervised young jobseekers for a year, £50.95 a week isn’t much – in London, it’s barely enough to cover a basic, unhealthy diet of frozen pizzas, travel costs and heating bills. Britain has the stingiest welfare system in Europe – if you’re on jobseeker’s allowance, you can’t afford to buy a newspaper or take the bus into town to meet your parents, and you certainly can’t save any of it. But it’s the difference between poverty and absolute destitution, and despite the weeks and weeks of beauraucratic faff it takes to access it, as soon as you get a job, the benefit stops. Not only do you have no money to live off until you get your first paycheck, but if you lose the job at the end of your trial period, you’ll have to wait another couple of months before you get any money from the state, and you risk being turfed out onto the streets.

Centralisation of services should, in theory, streamline and speed up the welfare system. Instead, deliberate lack of communication between the DWP, the Jobcentre and the National Health Service makes it as difficult and as taxing as possible for people to access the benefits they need, an operating principle which punishes the sick and the mentally ill disproportionately harshly. Consider the case this month of the terminally ill hospice resident who was ordered to attend the jobcentre before he would be allowed to receive any benefits, and died without receiving a penny of state support. Or the woman with mental health difficulties who was so badly bullied by JobCentre staff and agencies that she was tipped into a major health crisis. There is currently no way for doctors and healthcare workers to ensure that vulnerable people get the support they need – instead, as many barriers as possible are thrown in the way of claimants, ensuring that it is the most doggedly persistent, rather than the most needy, who get state support whether they deserve it or not.

After helping my partner go through the agonising and humiliating process of filling out a form for Disability Living Allowance, we waited over four months to hear back from the DWP – four months of watching my partner get thinner and thinner through stress, poverty and persistent lack of proper food, whilst he came to terms with having to abandon his dream job because he could not walk well enough to sustain it. Four months at the end of which we were both sure that he would be given at least some money to improve his circumstances, because his is a clear case of not being able to walk without agonising pain and the use of crutches. Instead, we’ve just received a letter informing us that the DWP does not consider my partner disabled, and that he is well enough to work in any job immediately without any adjustments.

The sublime hypocrisy of all this, of course, is that JobCentrePlus – which employs nearly 700,000 staff and spends billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money telling disabled people, in the words of shoutyporn victimblaming Channel 4 hatefest Benefit Busters, that they can “walk down the street and get a job tomorrow” - has a very poor record itself on employing people with mental or physical disabilities. Despite being one of the only companies currently hiring, just 1.26% of the thousands of people taken on by JobCentrePlus in 2007-2008 had any sort of physical or mental disability, compared with15% of working-age people.

This is not how the welfare state is supposed to work. It’s meant to help people, not punish people. It’s meant to listen to people and work with them, rather than shunt them between departments and use any excuse to reject their claims. It’s meant, in short, to be a welfare state, not a special circle of hell for anyone unlucky enough to lose their job.

According to Amanda Platell of the Mail and Melanie McDonagh of The Telegraph, what this means is that middle class, “Anglo-Saxon” women now have a duty to have more babies in their twenties. I have a spare set of sewing scissors around if anyone cares to unpick the various strands of racism, misogyny and class prejudice going on in those assumptions – let’s just say that it’s all intersectionally fucked.

I’m going to work on the assumption that by “Anglo-Saxon…women”, McDonagh means to say is that ‘white women should be having more babies.’ And despite my Mediterranean-Slavic heritage, I’m fairly sure I’m one of the nice young lilywhite gels McDonagh wants to see breeding like paranoid supremacist bunnies.

To which my response is: fuck. Right. Off. I’m not going to be told when and how and with whom I may breed, by anyone, thanks.

My body is mine: it’s not a tool of your crumbling kyriarchy, it’s not a self-replicating node in your future white race, and it’s not a mute block to shore up a class structure contorting in the face of global migration. Fuck off with your misogynist frothings: I’m not anyone’s baby-making machine. I don’t care when I ‘should’ get pregnant. I’ll carry a child when I want, or not at all.

The sublime irony of all this is that if women’s concerns had been taken on board back when we first started pressing for reproductive freedom; if we hadn’t had to spend the past decade fighting campaigns to defend the few precious rights we have to control our own lives and bodies; if we had a system to facilitate free, safe, legal abortion as early as possible and as late as necessary; if we had the morning after pill free and on demand and available in our own homes; if we had a decent childcare system and real, comprehensive sex education in schools instead of the piss-poor, prudish information we dribble out to our children,leaving them to get their education from pornography and television; if we had any or all of that then the right wouldn’t be finding themselves blindsided by sudden demographic change.

Because what happens when one is miserly about reproductive freedom is that only certain women are able to exercise it, and those women are almost inevitably the richer ones.

It’s insulting to blame women for exercising the limited choices they have rather than accepting the real consequences of keeping those choices limited.

Personally, I’m more than happy for the generation that comes after me to be – gasp! – over a quarter of immigrant heritage. But just for kicks, let’s go with the notion that a ‘middle class baby boom’ is actually something desirable. If this government and the next wants a greater proportion of babies born to middle-class mothers, it can start by making part-time working a real, highly paid option for men and women everywhere.

Give everyone, not just parents, the right to request flexible working and home working, and end the throwback 9-to-5 working culture that’s destroying our mental health as a nation, not to mention our childcare arrangements. End discrimination against mothers and potential mothers in the workplace, and make combining motherhood and paid work a viable choice.

Introduce comprehensive, compulsory sex education at every level of schooling from year 5 up – and make sure our children know more about sex and contraception than we did before we started having it.

Rather than attempting to pressure and cajole middle-class women into reproducing, the right would do better to encourage education, childcare and reproductive emancipation across the board– not to prevent working-class, immigrant babies being born, but because education and reproductive freedom are every woman’s right, whatever her income, background or country of origin.

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A longer version is at Penny Red

‘Oh my GOD, Laurie, it was awful,’ she moaned. ‘Climate Camp was full of hippies!’

The fact that Polly might have expected something different is key to the essential weirdness of Climate Camp. The idea is – well, It’s a protest, you see, a four-day sit-in protest about…something. The environment. Capitalism, also. And associated…badnesses. And we swoop, you see, we all gather in various parts of the city and swoop, not walk, swoop, on text-command from our remote superiors towards a target which we don’t know what it is yet but we’ll definitely be told about on the day. Possibly we’ll go to the Bank of England, and everyone will see, because it’ll be in London. I’m certainly planning to take lots and lots of photographs. How about you?

Being a young cool lefty kind of person, I’m aware of many people who are at Climate Camp – and every single one of them has gone with the express or primary intention of taking photographs.

Photographs of the protesters; photographs of the police, in particular, as public rage over not being allowed to turn the gaze of surveillance back on our beetle-backed overpigs is still simmering merrily away. Hundreds of amateur photographers – and that’s not counting the thousands of press cameras, which reports from the frontline assure me practically outnumbered those who were officially there to protest. Every single one of them just waiting for something to kick off between the coppers and the crusties like it did at G20.

The question begs itself: if you have a protest where most people have gone along to take photographs of a protest happening, is that still a protest? If so, what about? In the case of Climate Camp, any original intentions seem to have been lost in a flurry of press taking pictures of the protesters taking pictures of the police taking pictures of us. Political voyeurism: marvellous, and utterly mad.

Climate Camp is, at root, a protest about having a protest. A glance at the extensive and exciting-sounding programme of workshops shows more sessions about activism for students, community organising, resisting police pressure and the legacies of the Brixton riots than sessions about the actual environment. M’ladies from Feminist Fightback, never previously the vegan police, have gone down to lead a workshop about the targeting of women in protest zones, tying it all together with Greenham Common. A glance at the shiny shiny website turns up ‘Photos from the Camp’, ‘Media Circus Twitter Feed’ and ‘Our Open Letter to the Police’ and precisely zero aims and objectives.

This is a virtual protest, conducted on Twitter and Flicker and in the newsfeeds of all the major paper sites, all waiting for something to happen, for the violence behind the screens to transfer to ephemeral meatspace reality. We’ve set the bar for the ultimate 21st-century direct action: a protest where nobody apart from press, photographers and twitterhounds turns up at all and they all have to take pictures of each other taking pictures of each other in an infinitely recursive loop of pseudo-political voyeurism until we are all drained entirely or someone behind a camera screen somewhere stumbles across the face of justice.

This has been a hard, weird summer. People are in pain, and they are angry, young people in particular: but the response to that anger has been confused. A significant proportion of this summer’s protestors have not been politically active before; hopelessness, worklessness or a dawning comprehension that they’re all a bunch of bastards who want to screw us and then take pictures of it has driven a lot of young people into political activism, many of whom lacked an initial understanding of the issues involved. That’s not necessarily a bad thing: but it changes the terms of this summer’s political unrest to something more directionless, more systemic, more fundamentally frightening and exuberant.

All of those lost kids pulling on their flak-jackets and soft-shoeing it down to the police line, all of them have cameras in their pockets. Cameras are the contemporary semiotic equivalent of the concealed bottle, the brick in a sock, the pocketknife: they are understood as power in the hands of the people, gaze and evidence and connectivity and protection, keener than any blade.

Which is just as well, really, because if the majority of this summer’s protestors hadn’t though it was more effective to bring a camera to a demo than a big fuckoff stick, it might all have got a lot more bloody. There is anger, now, on the streets, in our living rooms, seething. The young are fed up and chancing for a fight. The Met police are on record saying they’re ‘up for it’; the people on the other side of the cordons want to kick something off; the press and hundreds of amateur photographers want to be there behind a screen taking notes when that thing, whatever it is, kicks off.

The irony is of course, that is IS kicking off – in Birmingham and Codnor and in a score of other places away from the glare of the cameras, neo-nazis are trading blows with anti-fascists, feminists are marching, socialists are organising. Combine it all with media attention and central planning and there is potential here for something truly extraordinary to happen. But outside London, the press aren’t interested; instead, we’re drawn to the pretend protest, the virtual protest. Instead, we’re all standing on the police line behind little flashing screens, watching them watching us watching them.

*Activist Polly wishes it to be clear that she does not agree with the content of this article and that any comments about fucking hippies were made strictly in jest.

In her rather confused verdict on the Caster Semenya controversy, Greer comes up with the following gem today:

Nowadays we are all likely to meet people who think they are women, have women’s names, and feminine clothes and lots of eyeshadow, who seem to us to be some kind of ghastly parody, though it isn’t polite to say so. We pretend that all the people passing for female really are. Other delusions may be challenged, but not a man’s delusion that he is female.

Greer hardly does any better in the grand game of unthinking prejudice bingo than the disgusting commentators who have decided that just because Semenya, a phenomenally high-achieving athlete, is big, butch and brilliant at sports, she can’t be a girl.

Greer believes that my ‘womanhood’ is defined by my tits, my bleeding cunt and my XX chromosome. Well, then, it clearly sucks to be one of the significant proportion of women who are none of these things, excluding the trans population for a moment: the women all over the world who lack breasts after mastectomy or a quirk of biology; women who are born without vaginas, or who are victims of FGM; women who are androgynously skinny, naturally or because of illness; women who are infertile or post-menopausal; or the 0.1% of women who are intersex.

Who’s to say that these people are not women too, if womanhood is the gender identity that they prefer?

She also believes that ‘woman’ should be my primary identity: before I think of myself as a writer, a journalist, a sister, a daughter, a lover, a friend, a consumer of trashy vampire novels, I should consider myself “a woman, first”. In other words: my cunt and tits are what make me, me. Well, gonads to that.

In fact, ‘womanhood’ is not a holy, immutable quality. ‘Womanhood’ encompasses a complex spectrum of biological facts just as ‘femininity’ encompasses a huge range of social and cultural factors. ‘Woman’ is not a binary fact, set irretrievably and forever against ‘Man’. The reason that radical feminists and social conservatives alike find transpeople so terribly threatening is that they know this better than anyone else.

Transpeople know that however much it happens to mean to you, femininity is, in fact, something that can be bought from a shop*. They know that identity is fluid and that womanhood itself is not a fixed biological quantity. They know that the state of being a woman or being a man is something imposed from without, something that can be altered, and they are living, breathing proof of that radical truth. And that’s horribly threatening to recalcitrants everywhere.

Let’s come back to Caster Semenya, whose physicality is rather more of an issue for her career and identity than it might be for the rest of us. I for one am disgusted by the popular reasoning that any physically high-acheiving woman who is not stereotypically ‘feminine’ is an aberration, and therefore must actually be a man.

Caster Semenya is a woman; she has lived her whole life as a woman; her genetics have nothing to do with it. The insistence by the IAAF that she ‘prove’ she is a woman – as if there were any concrete way of doing such a thing – is sexist on every level.

For the sake of argument, though, let’s suppose just for one minute that Semenya does turn out to be XXY or XXX-type intersex, or a person with Androgen Insensitivity syndrome. Suppose that this incredible athlete, who feels that she is a woman, who has spent her entire career competing against women and expresses her triumph as a triumph in the sphere of women’s sports, a female and feminine physical feat, happens to be amongst the 0.1% of women without an XX genotype.

Why on earth is that a problem? And why should that disqualify her from women’s sports? What, are they going to create a special intersex olympics just for her and a handful of others? Or will she be ostracised from the world of sport altogether because her body does not support the binary ideology of the IAAF?

The sporting world is a cultural throwback, as paranoid over the maintenance of strict gender binaries as, well, as your average Greerite radical feminist.

But if we truly want to progress as a species – if we want to celebrate sporting acheivement, if we want to strive collectively and individually to run faster and swim stronger and jump higher and think more clearly, our frantic cultural drive to uphold gender as a holy and immutable binary is the first thing we need to abandon.

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*For more on this and the capitalist connotations of femininity, I heartily recommend the excellent essay Mama Cash: Buying and Selling Genders by Charles Anders, available in several essay collections, although unfortunately I can’t find it online!

She explains her objection to “a men only team of leadership” by suggesting that “men cannot be left to run things on their own”. Which is, of course, entirely untrue, not to mention lazily misandrist.

Men can be left to run things on their own – indeed, they managed to run central government all by themselves for a number of centuries without setting the Commons on fire or leaving the Civil Service strewn with empty kegs, takeaway pizza-boxes and porn.

What Harman totally fails to do is to make a case for why we should not be satisfied with having men in sole charge of government, even if they’re competent.

We want an equal government because only an equal government can truly comprehend the interests of the people it serves. Of course, the past thirty years is littered with examples of brave male politicians who have worked tirelessly to advance women’s rights – John McDonnell and Dr Evan Harris – and female politicians like Thatcher, Dorries and Widdecombe who have done anything but.

But even male MPs working for women’s rights have always done so in a context of solidarity with female ministers and women of power, advancing the female agenda as only they know how – consider, for example, Dr Harris’ partnership with Dr Wendy Savage in countering last year’s HFE bill to clamp down on abortion rights.

Her idiotic comments will, of course, be taken gleefully out of context by rightist pundits over the next few days, and there have already been charges that Harman is anti-meritocratic, with Prescott himself weighing in to say ”why take away from the party the right to choose its leaders on the basis of ability? You can’t dictate equality.”

Well, of course you can’t, John. Since Harriet seems pathologically unable to properly explain herself right now, let me: if we were a truly meritocratic society, this wouldn’t be a problem at all. If we had a truly meritocratic system that picked its leaders on the basis of ability and competence, one of the two top jobs would usually* go to a woman – if not both. To claim otherwise is to admit to a belief that women are somehow innately inferior.

Later in the same interview Harman goes on to suggest, more sensibly, that “in a country where women regard themselves as equal, they are not prepared to see men running the show themselves.” As Yvonne Roberts put it today:

The idea that the individuals running an organisation ought to reflect the market that the organisation is trying to serve is increasingly common practice (ie it generates profits) in the commercial world – so why is it deemed such a revolutionary concept in politics?

Why indeed? There are plenty of reasons to wish for a balanced government; productivity and efficiency is certainly one, which is the point that I suspect Harman was blunderingly trying to make in the first place.

Genuine democracy – a government of the people, for the people, 51% of whom are women – is another. But we need to start being brave enough to make those arguments upfront, without apologising.

If we don’t, we’ll risk doing what Harman has just done, and making a very reasonable suggestion sound callously anti-meritocratic and misandrist.

*I previously used the word ‘invariably’ here, thinking that ‘usually’ and ‘invariably’ were synonymous. My bad!

Purnell believes that left ideology necessitates ‘choice in public services’, which is a tad rich coming from the man who single-handedly purged the welfare state of its last remaining shreds of compassion earlier this year with his intricate schemes for lie detector tests, workfare-style sickpay deals and a punitive scheme for addicts and alcoholics.

Will Hutton, fashionably late as always, talked a great deal about the language of fairness and ‘just deserts’. The tone of the debate was consistently philosophical, which is absolutely fine when debate is also inclusive – but the elephant in the room was its narrow field of vision.

Purnell opened his talk by declaring that he had been refreshed, since leaving the cabinet, by the expansive vision and energy in the wide, wide political world of….thinktanks! I listened for the sniggers, but there weren’t any. And looking around I saw why: in a roomful of 100 people meant to be talking about the future of the left, there were precisely no activists and nobody who looked like they’d ever spent time on state benefits. There were, however, plenty of Guardian journalists, a lot of folks from Demos and the Fabian Society and five – five! – people I personally knew from Oxford university. So where were the have-nots in the debate? Surely it was their conversation to have as much as anyone else?

I stood up to explain that I was living in a household of young people with the bad luck to be unemployed and suffering from chronic health problems, and that whilst the panel was equivocating over the real meaning of fairness most of us were lucky if we could afford one meal a day. I asked the room why we were not talking with and about the people suffering most in society today. I asked the room how many people there present had been unemployed for long periods, or had ever worked for the minimum wage, or had not been to a top university. By this point I was so angry that I properly started shaking. People came up to me afterwards to congratulate me rather patronisingly on my ‘passion’. Why? Had they spent so long in think-tank land that they’d forgotten what an actual angry person looks like?

This, surely, is at the heart of the dilemma. Labour was established in 1900 as a party to represent the interests of the working class, but the urban and industrial working class as it was between 1790 and 1980 no longer exists. The large swathe of people working low-paid jobs in industry who gave the Labour party its name and its purpose no longer exist as a block with a unified purpose of reasserting control of the means and rewards of production. But there are still many millions of people in Britain who are poor, disadvantaged and subject to what Purnell called “arbitrary authority”. If Labour isn’t the party for those people, then what on earth is it?

John Cruddas pointed out that the Labour Party “has lost because we’ve embraced a neoliberalism which is brutal and individualist”. The notion of collective good has been lost. Collective good is at the heart of what it means to be of the Left, and central to its instigation is, in Cruddas’ words, “a notion of socialism, which is important to retain, whereby we preserve and nurture forms of interdependence and solidarity.” In layman’s terms: being of the Left is more even than the utopianism, the statism and the egalitarianism that Purnell lays out in his LabourList article today. Being of the left is about materially supporting, practically helping and politically including those less advantaged than ourselves, because we share a common humanity.

The labouring classes of today don’t work in mines anymore. They work in callcentres, care homes, shops and hospitals; they are women as well as men, black and asian as well as white; they are single parents, the mentally ill, the sick and the unemployed, scrambling for a living in hard times; and they need a party that represents their interests just as badly as the factory workers and miners of the 1900s did. If it wants to survive at all, Labour needs to step outside the think tank bubble and ask not how the disadvantaged fit its agenda, but how it can best serve them.

Because if someone doesn’t start coming up with answers soon, as Cruddas, Will Hutton and neophyte Lewis Imu pointed out, then extremist groups like the BNP will step in to fill that gap. In the last elections 900,000 people voted for the BNP, most of them from poor and disadvantaged communities, because no other party in Britain today is even bothering to consider what people on low incomes or no incomes, people living in the teeth of the downturn, really care about. Unless Labour can relearn that language, then the party is finished. And if the Left doesn’t rediscover its social conscience double sharpish, we may as well all go home.

Newsnight interview

Well, that rules out my family for a start, and probably yours too. And yet Tory wallahs – not even in power yet but already slavering to sink their teeth into Labour’s social reforms – get all gooey over The Family. All you need to do is have a shyster mention ‘ordinary families’, as distinguished from the rest of us scum, and Tory spinsters start wetting their little knickers.

Every Family Matters wants to actively force men and women, who have been drifting gratefully away from the ball-and-chain-and-live-with-it moral mentality for generations, back into the heteronormative marriage model.

If Tory plans are initiated, they will institute a compulsory ‘cooling off’ period of three months before divorce proceedings, offer tax breaks and benefits bribes for married couples, and demolish Labour plans to offer the same recognition to unmarried couples and civil partners, as well as boring us all with a whole pile of ‘Pro-Family’ rhetoric.

I am going to remain calm about this. I’m not going to point a shaking finger at the fact that the Conservatives are coming out with more and more evilly recalcitrant, misery-inducing plans by the minute. I’m not going to squeal and whine over the coming Torygeddon. I’m not even going to point out just how much Every Family Matters is completely at odds with their plans to opt out of the European Social Charter and attack abortion rights. Instead, let’s pretend that this dribbling piece of under-researched excuse for loo roll is actually a balanced and sane piece of policy, and analyse it on its own merits.

Right. The main premise of Every Family Matters is the notion that, since kids whose parents are married do better, more marriage will fix ‘Broken Britain’. Which is balderdash. Married parents do not create happy kids. Stable, affluent families create happy kids, and stable, affluent couples are statistically more likely to get and stay married. Johann Hari explains the statistics so I don’t have to, but the short version is: marriage is a symptom, rather than a cause of social stability. Simply putting incentives in place to bribe quite unhappy people into staying together ‘for the sake of their children’ isn’t going to magically create social stability. That kind of logic is cargo-cultism, and it’s lazy, and it’s stupid, and it won’t work because it’s stupid.

In fact, most research points to the fact that whilst children whose parents are married do, on the whole, perform better than their peers due to aggregate economic and social factors, children whose parents are married but unhappy do worst of all. A recent study of 341 children whose parents had divorced showed that, contrary to expectations, fully 80% said they were as happy or happier now than they had been when their parents were married, and only 25% wanted their parents to get back together. Clearly, pressuring folks back into a model of mandatory heteronormative marriage won’t make kids fitter, happier and more productive. So what’s the Tory agenda?

Well, if they want to create straw men to shift our focus away from social redistribution, they have to start somewhere. The document states: “Poverty places enormous strain on relationships, as does poor housing and lack of meaningful employment.” So the Tory strategy would be to improve housing and increase the minimum wage and thus strengthen relationships, right? Right? Wrong. “Supporting adult relationships must be a key concern of family policy rather than a peripheral interest.” So rather than get to the route of the problem and pursue social justice, they’re going to make laws to sellotape unhappy couples together and ‘readjust people’s expectations’. Brilliant.

Marriage also saves the state money, which is more important than national happiness. Encouraging couples to stay together means that we need to build fewer houses; Duncan Smith practically came out and said it when he told the BBC that ‘the idea of compromise from day one, two living as cheaply as one, seems to have disappeared.’

But the basic agenda is far less subtle. Cameron and his cronies simply do not LIKE women who live independent lives, or single parents, or gay people, or people with alternative notions of what a free and happy family constitutes. Promoting heterosexual marriage above everything else explicitly others those people, singling us out as socially destructive. In Torygeddon, we’re simply freaks. And I’m sorry, but I don’t want to live in Mr Cameron’s world, particularly not when it’s raddled with hypocrisy.

Which brings us right back to this week’s ‘revelation’ about Tory plans to reduce the time limit on legal abortion without any commensurate easing of the sanctions on early-term abortion. This is a move that will not only significantly undermine women’s vital reproductive freedoms: it will bring unwanted children into the world.

It will leave us with more dysfunctional families, and put a great deal more children in the care system – exactly what Every Family Matters claims to stand against. David Cameron’s party has no real agenda for bringing about social change, it doesn’t really care about children, and its happy-clappy cuddly-wuddly mummies-and-daddies lets-fix-broken-Britain rhetoric has all the tenacity of soggy toilet paper. We need to get real about the basic hypocrisy of Tory family fetishism.