Feminism

Nell Minow, an American film critic, recently described how in 2010 she had interviewed the Friends actor David Schwimmer. When the noise in the restaurant grew too loud, he asked her whether she might like to move to a room upstairs with him, and if so, would she like a chaperone present. She praised him for this behaviour. ‘He understood what it is like to have to be constantly on the alert and he wanted to make sure I understood I was safe.’ When I read Minow’s story, my reaction was to think what a patronising arse Schwimmer must be. A woman journalist shouldn’t need a chaperone when she is doing her job. But, in the fallout from the Harvey Weinstein allegations, it has become clear that, for many women, safety is starting to trump liberty.

If someone had told you 10 years ago that it would soon become tantamount to a speechcrime to say ‘Men cannot get pregnant’, you would have thought them mad. That would be like punishing someone for saying, ‘Humans need oxygen to survive’. And yet here we are, in 2017, where PC has spun so violently out of control, and the cult of gender-neutrality has become so unwieldy, that one of the most controversial things you can say these days is: ‘Only women can get pregnant.’ Apparently that’s offensive to transmen (women who identify as men). ‘Men can get pregnant, too’, trans activists cry. Which strikes me as a real-life version of ‘2 + 2 = 5’.

Very good piece from Giles Coren (as usual) on the intrusive and aggressive act of putting 'xx' at the end of emails. I had been thinking pretty much the same thing. I suppose one could quote Derrida and the structuralists and insist that there is no one-to-one relationship between the signifier (the 'xx') and the thing signified (putting your tongue halfway down some babe’s throat). There certainly isn’t when I do it. But there’s the fear. What if the recipient isn’t a structuralist? Incidentally, if you want to see where we are right now with this issue, just read the comments from Caroline Kirkpatrick.

Following a weekend crammed with ever more salacious revelations about Harvey Weinstein, hundreds of thousands of women have now taken to social media to share their own experiences of sexual harassment. This is called the ‘#MeToo’ movement, and it’s gone viral, in the way that these things do. According to Twitter, this reveals ‘the magnitude of sexual assault’. In reality, it does nothing of the sort. #MeToo tells us far more about the desire of some women to reach for victimhood status. The accusations against Weinstein include charges of rape; as such, they deserve to be taken seriously and tried in courts of law rather than by public opinion.

Almost two and a half years ago, feminists called on Transport for London to remove adverts of a scantily-clad Australian from the tube. Protests against the infamous 'beach body ready' adverts claimed that showcasing a woman in a bikini to peddle weight-loss pills was offensive to women. Apparently the sight of a skinny woman was upsetting to all of us non-skinny women. And, after pressure from London Mayor Sadiq Khan in 2016, TfL promised to ban all adverts which didn't adhere to the notion of 'body positivity'. Not all women were happy about the ban. Back then, I, and other commentators, warned that giving TfL the power to decide which images of a woman were ‘damaging’ and which were acceptable was pretty dangerous.

It would be wildly generous to bill Hugh Hefner as some kind of grandfather of feminism – I’m not sure his interest in women extended beyond getting his rocks off – but it’s equally outrageous to depict him as a gang-master abuser running a harem of sex-slaves. As it seems some feminists have. The women who worked for him were adults making choices and, brace yourself, some of them enjoyed themselves! Still, watching the bile rise for Hef after his death, I've been shocked to see the insults aimed at the women who worked for him, and how quickly their experiences have been written off. In his later years, padding around his decaying mansion in a slithery dressing gown and silk pajamas, Hefner cut a seedy figure: A horny old perv chasing nubile flesh.

However stressful and bad things get for a parent of young children, there is always one thought that puts it all in perspective - just wait until they're teenagers and they're calling you up at 3am asking for a lift from a nightclub in New Cross. So reports like this one, showing that one in four adolescent girls suffer from depression, are bound to add to that gnawing feeling of dread. Firstly the caveats - any statistic that claims '1 in such and such' suffers from this, or is a victim of this, should be treated with scepticism. Depression is also an ill-understood term, a medical diagnosis widely applied by non-medical experts. But it's safe to say that a lot of people are unhappy, and in particular a lot of young women.

There was much fanfare last week when Holly Willoughby's apparent 'huge £200k pay rise' meant she'd finally be earning the same as her This Morning co-host, Phillip Schofield. The closing of this pay gap was hailed by some as a victory for womankind, but it seemed a travesty to me. After all, why had there been such a mighty imbalance to begin with? What's worse, though, was that the whole saga highlighted a bigger problem with feminism: its obsession with equality. The reality is that Willoughby isn’t equal to Schofield. She's better than him – in a commercial sense – and therefore deserves to earn more. If you doubt me, just take a look at the numbers on their respective social media accounts.

There has been an unprecedented development this year in the Islamists' war on the West. For the first time their foot soldiers are singling out women to kill. Women have been the victims of terrorism before, murdered by paramilitary organisations such as ETA, the Ulster Volunteer Force and the IRA, because of their uniform or their beliefs, or simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, but never solely because of their sex. In the era when Islamic terror groups hijacked aircraft it was rare that women were harmed. When a Trans World Airlines jet was hijacked in 1985, for example, the terrorists released all the women and children, including the Americans.

Despite Taylor Swift’s aspiration that her sexual assault trial last week should stand as an example for all women, what’s been notable outside the courtroom is how little support from the sisterhood Swift’s had. When Swift’s pop contemporary Kesha faced her own sexual assault case last year – against music producer Dr Luke – female celebrities clamoured to express their support. An MTV line-up of Divas tweeted their wishes: Lady Gaga, Ariana Grande, Kelly Clarkson, Lily Allen and Lorde made #freekesha trend. Even Adele used the headline-grabbing moment she collected her BRIT for Best Female Solo Artist to holler her encouragement for Kesha. By contrast, Swift’s case was met with deafening silence from prominent women.

I never dreamed I’d see the day when I agreed with Miriam González Durántez - such a snob that she believes people can be socially snubbed by being given Hellman’s mayonnaise, such a Euro-bore that she found Brexit ‘devastating’ and so short-sighted that she sees sex with Nick Clegg as a reasonable proposition. But with this recent Twitter rant, I quite warmed to her: ‘When you have a 2.30 hours delay in a British Airways flight (what is happening to this airline!?) open the inflight shop magazine and want to scream: STOP-CALLING-GIRLS-LITTLE-PRINCESSES!!

The hen party was seated at an outside restaurant table under the plane trees when I arrived. They sat with straight backs conversing normally, looked cool and lovely, and everything appeared seemly. Yet it was now ten o’clock on their first night on tour. They seemed unusually glad to see their chauffeur; apart from this, there was nothing to suggest that they were even slightly drunk. Appearances might have been deceptive, however, for they were all of them privately and expensively educated young women. I was bidden to be seated and offered a glass of wine, which I accepted. I sat and sipped and listened to their chatter. That something or somebody was ‘cute’ or ‘insane’ appeared to be the highest possible accolade. Men and maleness were beyond a joke.