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… »

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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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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London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) was established in 1916 as the School of Oriental Studies, with the specific remit of training future colonial administrators in the language and culture of the people they were destined to rule.

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. continue reading… »

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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Its been yet another one of those in weeks in which the use of ‘offensive’ language has been making headlines in both the press and with at least one prominent blogger.

The story that captured the media’s attention was, of course, Pierre Lellouche’s description of the Conservative Party’s attitude towards the European Union:

“They have one line and they just repeat one line. It is a very bizarre sense of autism,”

Curiously that comment failed to generate any real sense of outrage in the one place you might have expected it to – the Daily Mail seems to have been far too preoccupied with laying into Cameron for backing away from a referendum on Europe to indulge in the usual round of sneering at the ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’ leaving the field open, for once, to someone with a genuine reason for taking offence, Charlotte Moore, to frame the debate in terms of whether its acceptable to use the term ‘autism’ as a casual insult.

Elsewhere, the Press Complaints Commission decided that its okay to refer Iain Dale as an ‘overtly gay Tory blogger’ in a ruling that leaves me wondering whether Iain’s mistake might have been to complain under clause 12 of the PCC’ Code (discrimination) rather than under clause 1 (accuracy). While Iain makes no secret of his sexual orientation I wouldn’t have said that he was ‘overtly gay’, not in the commonly understood sense of the term, which implies that someone is camping it up to the point that their sexual orientation is blatantly obvious. ‘Honestly’ is, strictly speaking, a synonym of ‘overtly’ but colloquially the two words carry very different connotations in the same way that acknowledging that homosexuality is part of the normal spectrum of human sexual behaviour is a very different thing to promoting homosexuality, despite some people having a marked propensity for conflating the two.

Iain also points the way to another interesting article on language, offence and disability, by Ian Birrell, in which the bone of contention is the use of ‘retard’ and ‘retarded’ as casual insults. That article is, again, written from the perspective of the parent of a child/children with a disability and carries all the more weight for it. continue reading… »

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.

291 women and 4559 men have been elected to the House of Commons since women were enfranchised in 1918. So those shouting “not in my name” and “meritocracy” to argue against the possible means of all women shortlists do have a prima facie case to answer.

David Cameron’s claims that his party gets it enough to continue if he fell under a bus is rather challenged by the ferocity of the response from the Tory netroots. Aspiring candidate Iain Dale declares not in my name while the Isaby/Montgomerie co-premiership at ConservativeHome seems to think the sky might fall in. (Tory ppc Joanne Cash has offered a rare pro-leadership view).

By definition, meritocrats must share the goal of “fair chances and no unfair barriers”.

The simple question: what is the cause of the scale of under-representation? And what is the solution to deliver fair chances and equal representation?

2001 was the last General Election in which no party used an all women shortlist measure. How did we do on gender equity? Most noticed a small drop from 120 to 118 women in the Commons. The real story was missed. Just 9 out of 92 MPs elected in mainland Britain were women. Not quite 10%. The Conservative class of 2001 – 38 white men and 1 women (2.5%)- was well below the post-1918 historic Commons average.

So whose meritocracy is it anyway?
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Abusive husbands were left furious today after a “controversial” new drive to reduce domestic violence against troublesome women was unveiled by chief feminazi Harriet Harman.

Under the contentious scheme, children as young as five will be taught that time-honoured traditions of men beating their wives when they take too long doing the dishes or refuse sex because they ‘have a headache’, are no longer acceptable in today’s politically correct, ultra-feminised society.

Shockingly, boys will be indoctrinated that their female friends are ‘people’ with “human rights” too, and just because girls are weak and over-sensitive doesn’t mean it’s acceptable to punish them for disobedience.

But imaginary critics warned that ministers are cramming the already over-stuffed National Curriculum with silly lessons that should be taught in the home, and schools should teach proper subjects like maths and fox-hunting instead of focusing on the supposed rights of nagging women.
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YET ANOTHER EXPENSES RESIGNATION

Kitty Ussher leaves the Government, as TheTelegraph’s Augean project continues…

NATIONAL
Governor seeks more powers for Bank of England
Belfast Romanians rehoused after race attacks
Terror law used to stop thousands ‘just to balance racial statistics’

INTERNATIONAL
Mousavi urges more demonstrations for Thursday
New financial rules in the USA too…
Cricket attacker arrested in Pakistan
British ambassador attacked for supporting gay march in Bulgaria

A friend told me recently about an evening she’d just spent visiting an elderly uncle who was staying with her parents. Now this uncle, let’s call him Bob, is in his seventies, and is fond of telling stories about his past. This particular evening was no exception, and as my friend, her partner, and various other relatives (including his wife) settled down to chill out after a big family meal, Bob started off on one of his tales.

But this story turned out to be a bit different from the normal, everyday reminiscences the family was used to hearing: this one was about the time Bob was out in Libya doing his National Service, more specifically about the time he witnessed 6 or more of his colleagues line up and rape a young woman.

Apparently the soldiers had been given a night off and so had gone out to a small town close to where they were billeted. There, they’d come upon a local couple, and after a brief discussion among themselves about how they hadn’t seen a woman in ages, one of the group went over to the man and asked him how much he’d be prepared to take to let them have sex with his wife The two men negotiated, and eventually the husband settled on a price.
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Jessica Valenti, editor of the popular blog Feministing, in an effort to make us all feel like we should get up earlier, has not one but two new books out. Both were released in the UK this week on May 7th.

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

But we know Valenti better than to expect anything so simple. Inside, chopped into sassy bite-sized chunks Valenti presents an overwhelmingly compelling case for the existence of a double standard for women in every branch of society.
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In recent weeks, I’ve faced a lot of accusations of misandry for daring to point out that some bad things that happen are perpetrated almost exclusively by men, and for having the temerity to suggest that in some situations women get a raw deal simply because of their biological sex. I thought I’d respond to the critics with a few reasons why feminism and misandry are not synonymous, and why male and female feminists need to work together to break tired economic models of gender.

As feminists, the liberation of the y-chromosomed half of the human race has never been high on our list of priorities – historically speaking, we’ve had enough to worry about. However, it’s high time that we started a serious recruitment drive. Although the feminist movement has faced many obstacles and lost many battles, women have now won themselves enough social and economic capital that we can finally start to address the other half of the equation: the emancipation of men from capitalist patriarchy.
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From his Daily Mail column today, erm, last year:

Women who get drunk are more likely to be raped than women who do not get drunk. No, this does not excuse rape. Men who take advantage of women by raping them, drunk or sober, should be severely punished for this wicked, treacherous action, however stupid the victim may have been.

But it does mean that a rape victim who was drunk deserves less sympathy. Simple, isn’t it? You can hate rape and want it punished, while still recognising that a woman who, say, goes back to a man’s home after several Bacardi Breezers was being a bit dim.

via Chickyog on Twitter

The Home Office yesterday published results of a poll on violence against women.
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I’ve been thinking a lot, over the past few days, with all the shilly-shallying around International Women’s Day and this whole issue of violence against women and whether or not it’s important. I’ve been thinking about what it means to be a feminist writing online, and whether I can hack the amount of abuse I’ve been getting recently. Whether it just depresses me too much to carry on. People have been telling me to shut up and get a real job for a while now. Perhaps I should listen to them.

On the internet, identity is fluid – and so choosing to adopt and pursue a female identity, or indeed any identity which deviates from white heteronormativity, is a statement with which makes a lot of people uncomfortable on a very basic level. Choosing to be proud of an identity that consciously others itself from the white, male consensus with which the internet, like so many other fiefdoms, emerged, is problematic. It can and does draw an horrific quantity of abuse, including on the pages of mainstream debate sites such as Comment Is Free, Lablist and even – sometimes – this site.
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Some commenters recently raised concerns about Amnesty UK’s statistic: ‘Each year, around 1 in ten women in Britain will experience rape and or other violence‘. So, Rachel North emailed them and got this response:
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A few hours ago now Paul Dacre, editor of the Daily Mail poured a Molotov Cocktail and sat back, ready to watch the PC brigade scream. Monday’s Daily Mail frontpage has one of those frontpage stories that’ll make you tut and say “typical Mail“. But it’s so typical in fact, that I think it’s worth digging a little deeper into it.

It screams “ANOTHER BLOW TO FATHERHOOD” in that way only the Mail can do. No – it’s not a sympathetic piece supporting say, Fathers 4 Justice and their campaign for father’s rights – the Mail branded those “morons” long ago. It’s in fact some thinly-veiled homophobia, of course. “Now IVF mothers can name ANYONE as ‘father’ on birth certificate – and it doesn’t even have to be a man”, the paper tells us.
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Pamela Izevbekhai and her two daughters are under threat of deportation by the Irish government. They fled Nigeria after another daughter died following female genital mutilation and Pamela’s husband’s family planned to forcibly mutilate her remaining two girls. The husband remains in Nigeria but supports his wife and does not want his daughters cut.

Check out ‘Let them stay‘ for how you can support this family .

Below is a you tube telling the families story. Pamela explains the process of FGM and how she tried to get help for her daughter who bled to death after being butchered, all in the name of controlling women’s sexuality.
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