We recently reported the hilarious, if disturbing, remarks of Tory MP Tim Loughton:

“We need a message that actually it is not a very good idea to become a single mum at 14. [It is] against the law to get pregnant at 14. How many kids get prosecuted for having underage sex? Virtually none. Where are the consequences of breaking the law and having irresponsible underage sex? There aren’t any.”

So, The Guardian asked, should there be prosecutions?

“We need to be tougher. Without sounding horribly judgmental, it is not a good idea to be a mum at 14. You are too young, throwing away your childhood and prospects of developing a career.”

Without sounding horribly judgmental, anybody who thinks that there are no consequences to getting pregnant, and that a criminal record promotes a happy childhood and helps develop a healthy career, is a Platinum Imbecile.

Platinum Imbecility aside, there’s something to note about the bizarre universe Mr Loughton resides in: girls get pregnant by magic. continue reading… »

Guest post by pagar

The policy of multiculturalism is built on two theories.

Firstly, there is the idea that human beings need, at a very primal level, some sort of attachment to cultural heritage. Without such attachment, the argument goes, people are likely to be less fulfilled and lack personal foundation. Without our cultural reference points, we are but leaves blowing in the wind.

Secondly, multiculturalism demands that all cultures have equal value. Indeed, it says that the value of a culture cannot be empirically measured because there is no fair starting point. The person making the comparison and value judgment will necessarily do so from a position that is informed by their own culture.

When these two theories are put together, we are logically driven towards embracing diversity- where everyone is encouraged to celebrate and codify the differences between cultures. Divergence is seen as positive and homogeneity is outlawed. In this climate immigrants are not required to integrate into the host culture and it is considered wrong and regressive for anyone to ask or expect them to do so.

But for liberals, the multiculturalism agenda brings with it some difficulties. continue reading… »

Tomorrow, Amnesty International holds a panel discussion on the impact of religious fundamentalism on gay and women’s rights. The speakers are playwrights Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti and Jo Clifford, and artist Sarah Maple. I spoke briefly to Jo and Sarah about their experiences:

Keen churchgoer Jo Clifford knows exactly what it is to attract the ire of today’s irrelevant, but loud, Christian extremists.

Some 300 protestors turned out for the 2009 opening night of her play Jesus Queen of Heaven – a piece where Jesus Christ is presented as a transsexual, and in a skirt. The play, which was performed at the 2009 Glasgay arts festival, was part of an attempt by Clifford to appraise the hostility she faced in her own life as a transsexual. A committed and active Christian, she turned to the bible, and although she saw ‘no scriptural basis for prejudice against gays, or transsexuals there,’ she theorised that society may have taken its lead from ‘god’s suppression of the female aspects of his nature.’

Her cardinal sin seems to have putting Jesus Christ in a frock, and taking the public dime to do it. The Scottish Arts Council and Culture and Sport Glasgow were among the Glasgay sponsors: here’s The Telegraph’s Damian Thompson in small, gaseous, piece about the wrongs of funding transart and the BBC’s failure to give adequate airtime to homophobic rage. continue reading… »

Picture this. You open the newspaper one grey morning, and there in a bright pixel smear on the third page is a full-length photograph of a young man. The young man is almost naked; a flesh-coloured thong clings tightly to his hairless cock and balls; he looks over his shoulder at you, his jaw a perfect masculine square, his dark eyes smouldering. Everywhere, this young man is hard, smooth, impenetrable and yet submissive, wanting you to consume him. You turn the page.

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. continue reading… »

Something terrible is happening to young women. Despite the dazzling gains made for bourgeois white women by reformist feminism, we’re….well, we’re turning into sluts. Look around you: the streets are littered with half-naked young hussies vomiting their A-levels into spillovers with their skirts hoiked round their waists. At the merest flash of a web-camera, young ladies from nice homes will flash their tits for Nuts magazine.

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.
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I found myself in the unenviable position this week of actually agreeing with Nadine Dorries about something. But don’t worry, it was a short lived affair.

Now despite the fact that I appear to be one of the few lefties she hasn’t yet blocked on Twitter, I’m not renowned for holding Dorries in any high esteem (see here for example), so you can imagine my surprise when she tweeted this:

…and I found myself nodding along.

Yes she’s right, the political new media is dominated by men – in fact it’s something I’ve been intending to write about for a while now.
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The suspension of Gita Sahgal for allegedly briefing the Sunday Times against her employer, Amnesty International, follows the suspension a few months ago by a Human Rights Watch employee, Marc Garlasco, who was revealed to be a collector of Second World War memorabilia.

Perhaps predictably, some of the people who were most vociferous in calling for Garlasco’s suspension have been equally forthright in calling Sahgal’s reinstatement.

I do not know either Sahgal or Garlasco and I do not know all the circumstances surrounding their suspensions, but I do have some experience of operating disciplinary procedures in a human rights organisation.

I worked as a middle level manager in Amnesty International UK Section’s Campaign Department 10 years ago and a large part of my job involved personnel issues. I have absolutely no doubt that if a member of my staff had behaved as Sahgal is alleged to have done I would have had to take disciplinary action against her and this applies not just to Amnesty International, but to every management job in every organisation I have done before or since.

As even her friend and supporter, Rahila Gupta, admits here Sahgal was not a whistle-blower because she was not revealing activities that anyone was trying to conceal. She went to the media because she disagreed with a decision that Amnesty had taken to give a platform Moazzam Begg and to work with his organization Cageprisoners on behalf of people detained in Guantánamo Bay.

She must have done it knowing this would be used by journalists like Nick Cohen who is on record as supporting the torture of detainees in certain circumstances, as part of his ongoing campaign to denigrate the organization.

At a professional level I have more sympathy with Garlasco whose hobby, while slightly weird, had no bearing on his professional activities. However, I think that, on balance, Human Rights Watch were right to suspend him and both cases should provide a wake-up call to human rights organizations.

As Frances Crook notes, Amnesty used to operate a very strict ‘joint-platform’ policy in which it was reluctant ever to mount joint campaigns with other organizations. I remember that part of my recruitment process was an in-tray exercise that included telling Campaign Against the Arms Trade why we would not be signing a hypothetical letter to the Guardian with them condemning the sale of arms to Turkey.

I also remember the first report I wrote (with Keir Starmer) coming back full of paragraphs with red lines scored through them because, in by boss’s opinion, they had broken the ‘work on own country’ rule.

These procedures were awful for those of us who had to operate them. Getting out public statements was slow and cumbersome and we often appeared stand-offish and aloof to other organizations. Staff were also expected to observe considerable discretion in their personal lives; a friend of mine who worked as an Indonesia Researcher resigned her job because she fell in love with a resistance leader in East Timor.

It is on that basis that I think Human Rights Watch was right to suspend Garlasco but why I also think that Sahgal’s – on the face of it appalling – behaviour should not detract from her political argument. Her basic criticism of Amnesty is that it has allowed itself to be seen as too close to someone who has strong views on the position of women in society, which many people (myself included) find repugnant.

Begg has every right to hold whatever political views he wants and – as he points out – nearly everyone familiar with the situation in Afghanistan has concluded that ‘engagement and dialogue’ with the Taliban may be the only route to peace in the country.

But, as Southall Black Sisters have noted, ‘We know from experience around the world, including post war Iraq that women’s rights are the first to be traded in such political settlements’. Indeed Amnesty itself has warned of the danger of such a development in Afghanistan.

Some argue that Begg’s actions, for example, in developing dialogue with his former prison guards, could be used as a model for peace-building and that Amnesty should encourage this process. However, I think that misunderstands the basis of how human rights organisations should work in conflict and post-conflict situations.

Despite its name, Amnesty has played a leading role in opposing those who argue that human rights violators should be forgiven in the name of ‘peace and reconciliation’.

I think that the position that it has taken on the ‘justice and peace’ trade-off has sometimes been too dogmatic in places such as Northern Uganda. However, part of the reason why Amnesty International is so important is that it has been so uncompromising in defence of human rights above all other political considerations.

In its statement justifying the suspension of Sahgal, Amnesty made clear that it welcomed a ‘vigorous internal debate’ and my memories of the organisation are that those debates were very vigorous indeed. But one thing that has always held Amnesty together is a realisation that the organisation’s core purpose is bigger and more important than any of our factional considerations or ideological disagreements.

Amnesty is listened to and taken seriously at the highest and lowest levels because of its reputation as a neutral, impartial and independent organisation. It is capable of generating a deluge of letters, faxes, phone calls and emails that may save a life or stop someone from being tortured.

Those who seek to undermine that reputation – for whatever reason – had better be clear that their own ‘higher purpose’ justifies the suffering that will go unchallenged as a result.

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

The pope is right and ­Harriet Harman is wrong. I 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.

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In responding to John Denham’s speech last week on class, Chris Dillow said this on his blog:

…how could anyone have ever thought that class wasn’t important, or that race and disadvantage were the same?
To cut a long and tragi-comic story short, I fear the answer originates in the Left’s reaction against orthodox Marxism in the 1980s. Inspired in part by Hobsbawm’s essay, the Forward March of Labour Halted? (pdf), many on the Left gave up on the idea of the working class as a revolutionary force, and looked instead to what they called “new social movements”: women, blacks and gays (yes – to many the three were somehow homogenous!)

He then goes on to list three disastrous effects it’s had: a privileging of identity politics over class; the belief that government should get involved in everything; giving us a target-driven bureaucratized public sector which is plundered by “consultants”.

While I share concerns about the second and third issues, I want to discuss the first one. What frustrates me about Chris Dillow’s post is that while many on the Left instinctively support identity politics: they don’t seem to know why, or the thinking behind it.
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I disagreed with a whole heap of stuff in Ellie Levenson’s “The Noughtie Girl’s Guide to Feminism” when it came out last year (see my Mswoman comments under this CiF piece for specific examples).

But apart from her odious assertion that “we do women an injustice when we say that rape is the worst thing that can happen to a woman. It is, after all, just a penis.” top of the list was her claim, repeated in the Independent, that in some contexts so-called rape ‘jokes’ can not only be deemed to be acceptable, but they can also in fact be funny.

Because they’re not. Ever. They never have been and they never will be. They’re not funny when Ricky Gervais tells them, and they’re not funny when a Tory Councillor tells them either.
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Ever drunk more than one bottle of wine? Had a one night stand? Not if you’re a Labour politician standing for a seat in Pimloco you haven’t. Except Sally Bercow has, and she doesn’t seem afraid to admit it.

Anne McElvoy deserves full praise for an exceptional interview with Sally Bercow in yesterday’s London Evening Standard, where she gets the Sally Bercow to frankly discuss politics and past misdemeanours.

It’s not that she’s married to a Conservative speaker and willing to trash the party, we’ve all gotten used to that. It’s that she actually seems to be refreshingly human. Speaking as young person, it’s brilliant to hear politicians admit to making a mistake (lying on her CV) or just behaving a little big outrageously.
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Thinking of getting merry this Christmas? Think again, if you’re a girl. According to the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), women who don’t want to be raped have a responsibility not to get drunk.

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.
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Attention shoppers, and ladies that means you: now that marriage, mortgage and maternity are the new must-have items in today’s post-credit-crunch-pre-Torygeddon social control bonanza, there’s a new lifestyle drug on the market. It won’t help you dance all night, shunt you through a red-eyed work deadline or – heaven forbid – encourage you to go to bed with random strangers; it won’t even make you lose weight. It’s called Filibanserin, and it’s here to help you please your man.

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.” continue reading… »

This is a guest post by Sarah Brown

On Saturday, two events took place within a few hundred metres of each other in central London. The first was the London vigil for the International Transgender Day of Remembrance, where trans people come together to remember those who met their deaths simply because they were trans, or were perceived as trans. This was a quiet and emotional affair.

Emotional in perhaps a different way was the London Reclaim the Night march, a march ostensibly aimed at highlighting the fear and violence women face can face simply because we are women.

As a transsexual woman I attended the former event, but not the latter, ironically because of fear. After the vigil, myself and some friends bumped into the march on our way to get food, and it got me thinking.

I think “facing ones fear” is a cost-benefit thing; I’m scared to go on the RTN march, and I know lots of other trans women are. Ironically, I’m scared to go on it for a reason which may be very similar to the reason those women on the march did go on it…

When a woman walking home alone, in the darkness, she might encounter a man, or group of men walking along. These men probably intend the woman no harm at all, but quite a few men do intend harm, or at the very least, they intend to subject her to verbal and possibly physical harassment. Lots of women therefore treat all men as potentially suspect until proven otherwise out of simple self preservation. When hearing this, lots of men tend to protest – “But I’m not like that!”, they’ll say. Chances are they’re not, but we don’t know, and it pays to err on the side of caution, because erring the other way only has to go wrong once.

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I’d like to shout out for an unsung hero of improper, joyful, self-actualising women everywhere: Knickers Girl.

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.
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Julie Bindel is wrong again. She was wrong in 2004 when she said that “I don’t have a problem with men disposing of their genitals, but it does not make them women” and she’s shockingly wrong in a recent article for Standpoint mag that I can only describe as hideously transphobic.

There’s a lot in this article to take issue with. Other bloggers, such as cave of rationality have discussed it from a human rights perspective, specifically the human rights that she fails to apply to trans-gendered people.

I want to examine it through her discussion of biology as destiny, when she says:

transsexualism, by its nature, promotes the idea that it is “natural” for boys to play with guns and girls to play with Barbie dolls. The idea that gender roles are biologically determined rather than socially constructed is the antithesis of feminism.

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I was struck by this article, in which American journalist Penelope Trunk defends her decision, despite an unanticipated global barrage of hate mail, to post the following to her Twitter feed:

“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.
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You’ve got to feel a little sorry for Tory MP Nadine Dorries at times.

Not only does she seem rather confused by this whole business of the Tories mucking around with all-women shortlists, but the stress of it all seems to have brought on some differing views of the past.

Writing for ConservativeHome she said:

Three weeks before the 2005 general election I, a council estate Scouser, was selected as the Conservative candidate to represent a southern rural constituency. Because the vacancy occurred so quickly and so close to D-day, the party provided my association with a shortlist of seventeen candidates, of which, about five were women. Following a long day of interviews in hot sunny rooms, the list was whittled down to a shortlist of three.

The by-election procedure David Cameron spoke of yesterday existed then, however it was a little more generous to the association in terms of choice. At 9.10pm that evening, Sir Graham Bright invited me to walk back into a packed school hall where I had just delivered my final speech of the day. Met by a wall of applause and a standing ovation, with tears in my eyes, I was informed that I had been selected outright on the first ballot.

I have never, other than when looking into the eyes of my new born babies, felt as proud as I did on that night. That pride, that sense of achievement, the knowledge that I was selected on the basis of my performance and merit above all other candidates on that day is what enables me to hold my head up high in this place. It’s what humbles me every morning when I walk into Members’ Lobby. It gives me confidence to take on my male colleagues with not just a little bottle, because I got here by exactly the same process that they did. They are no better than me and I no lesser than they.

That is also not quite the account that you come across when you consult independent sources.
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I’ve already commented frequently about the fact of gender inequality in our society, but also of the fact most people just don’t see it.

But it’s always good to have up-to-date examples.

Take Amanda Platell, writing in the Daily Mail, for example:

“All the more so when Labour’s own experiment with female shortlists proved to be so disastrous. Has Cameron learned nothing from the catastrophe that was Blair’s Babes – the female intake of the 1997 election? Remember Ruth Kelly? Jacqui Smith? Caroline Flint? As with so many Labour ladies, they turned out to be stunningly incompetent or ill-suited for high office. It was a national embarrassment.”

As Sunder at Next Left points out (h/t owed for the above), neither Kelly, Smith nor Flint were actually selected via women-only shortlists. So Platell’s article commits a basic error of fact, if her argument is that all-women shortlists returned particular examples of bad MPs.

Imagine the logic, applied to men:

“All the more when the United Kingdom’s centuries-old practice of either only – or overwhelmingly (in recent years) – selecting men to be MPs has proved to be so disastrous. Has Cameron learned nothing from the catastrophe that was the last 400 years of Parliamentary supremacy? Remember Anthony Eden? Neil Hamilton? David Amess? As with so many Tory gentlemen, they turned out to be stunningly incompetent or ill-suited for high office. It was a national embarrassment.”

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The Information Commissioner’s ruling on Friday to release statistics on late term abortions carried out because of disability has alarming implications.

The figures were requested under FOI by the ProLife Alliance, and the case has already led to an op-ed in the Telegraph calling for “an open debate on the merits of late term abortion” once the numbers are out.

It’s clear that the potential for this information to be misused to promote an anti-choice agenda and to restrict women’s reproductive freedom is strong. The Telegraph state within their editorial that concerns over the identification of women and their doctors are “spurious”. They suggest that when the statistics were previously available, up until 2002, no one was harmed.

However, they fail to acknowledge the Jepson case, where a legal challenge was mounted against doctors who performed a late term abortion for a fetus with a cleft palate, and the area and hospital in which the doctors were working were identified by police and local papers.

The “deeply worrying” issue of identification of doctors who perform late term abortions as a result of the information being public was raised in a joint statement by Brook and the Family Planning Association.

There’s clearly a tension here between the public’s right to access information and the potential for statistics to be misused to promote a harmful agenda. If the Department of Health do not challenge the ruling in the High Court, and the information becomes public, there are clear ways to respond and mount a defence.

Instead of accepting a narrative of late-term abortions being carried out to “ensure that ‘designer babies’ are being born” (thank you, The Telegraph, for that excellent turn of phrase) we need to deconstruct these claims.

Rather than abortions being carried out for ‘cleft palates’ a facial disability which can be corrected by surgery, we can point out the huge number of disabilities and birth defects associated with clefting, which may only be part of the story.

We can also support medical professionals who perform abortions at late stages, and voice our support for women in the UK to have full access to reproductive freedom.