Feminism

'Seasoned feminist’ Jessica Valenti has written in the Guardian about catcalling and the detrimental effect it is having on her self-esteem as she grows older. Valenti mourns ‘the hellishness of my teen years’, ruined by unsolicited comments from strange men, and feels even more sorry for herself now, a slightly older mother who gets fewer catcalls and feels like she is becoming ‘invisible to men’. Feminists are never happy: whistle at them, and it's an act of abusive male entitlement; don't whistle at them, and you're ignoring women, treating them as invisible. What are men to do? Our relationship towards social interaction is changing.

Imagine if a Ukip politician wrote about being on an aeroplane that was 'heaving' with black people. Imagine if he described becoming suspicious of them, and assuming, on the basis of no evidence, just a hunch, that they must be flying overseas to get up to no good. Imagine if he complained to British police about this 'heaving' group of dark-skinned air travellers, and the police agreed to interrogate them upon their return to Britain. There would be outrage. We'd see this as racialised suspicion. In which case, why has there been no outrage, not so much as a raised eyebrow, over what the Lib Dem Baroness Jenny Tonge did at the end of last week? Baroness Tonge wrote about a flight she recently took from Heathrow to Addis Ababa.

Today the Prime Minister has set out to 'end the gender pay gap in a generation'. It would be an ambitious goal, if a wage gap actually existed. According to the latest ONS figures, women between the ages of 22 – 29 earn 1.1 per cent more on average than their male counterparts and women between the ages of 30-39 are also earning more. And it doesn’t stop there. There's evidence that when men and women follow the same career path in the UK, women tend to out-earn and out-perform men. There is growing evidence that if you control for similar backgrounds, women actually tend to get more aggressively promoted than men by their employers. This alleged gap that the Prime Minister refers to is actually indicative of personal lifestyle decisions, not employer discrimination.

Earlier this month, a review published by the Cochrane Library criticised the idea of ‘eating for two’ while pregnant, suggesting that doing so would affect foetal development and increase the likelihood of obesity in the child. At the weekend, the British Medical Association said it plans to revise all previous advice given to pregnant women, and will now inform them that the consumption of any alcohol while pregnant will have a negative effect on the child. Why doesn’t the BMA just come out and say that it doesn't want pregnant women to have any fun? The continual revision of medical advice to make it fit with our health-obsessed culture is impacting on all our lives, through smoking bans, drinking limits and calorie warnings on eclairs.

Over ten years ago, the satirical American magazine the Onion published an article under the headline: Women Now Empowered By Everything A Woman Does. If you’ve ever heard someone insist that pole dancing is empowering, the Onion predicted it. In a take-down of the lazy gluttony of ‘choice-feminism’, it told us: ‘Whereas early feminists campaigned tirelessly for improved health care and safe, legal access to abortion, often against a backdrop of public indifference or hostility, today's feminist asserts control over her biological destiny by wearing a baby-doll T-shirt with the word "Hoochie" spelled in glitter.

Forget the selfie or the belfie; the latest craze to hit the internet is the 'tampfie'. Twitter users are raiding their bathroom cupboards to show solidarity for the hashtag #JustATampon. It's in aid of the charity Plan UK, whose campaign hopes to start a conversation about periods. Arguing that ‘stigma and embarrassment attached to women’s periods contributes to gender inequality worldwide’, Plan UK aims to teach menstrual health and hygiene to young women in developing countries. This moral crusade has reinvigorated UK activists who failed to get tampons on to the political agenda earlier in the year, with a petition calling on the government to remove the tax on sanitary products. https://twitter.

Imagine if Education Secretary Nicky Morgan went into a mosque and told the praying blokes to put their shoes back on. Or if she bowled into a Catholic school and said: ‘The look of anguish on Christ’s face in that crucifix hanging on your wall could upset children. Please take it down.’ We would be outraged (I hope). We’d wonder what business it is of politicians to tell people how they may express their religious convictions. So why isn’t there more discomfort over Morgan’s launch of an investigation into a Jewish sect’s decree that women may not drive children to its schools? The Belz sect, which is ultra-Orthodox, runs two schools in Stamford Hill.

The Tube isn't an obvious political arena, but recently, it has become the backdrop for a number of flashy feminist statements. Last year, a blog which pictured women eating on the Tube provoked outrage among female activists, who held a picnic on the Circle line in protest. More recently, the infamous Protein World adverts, which supposedly encouraged body-shaming, were defaced before they were eventually banned. Yesterday, TFL announced that more than 100 police officers will be on patrol once London Underground's 24-hour service begins. Her Majesty's finest will be accompanied by extra Community Support Officers and the installation of a further 13,000 CCTV cameras. What call is there for such precautionary measures?

I get defensive when feminists are accused of being prudes. There’s nothing prudish in critiquing a monotonously promiscuous culture; in despairing of unrealistic body standards, or believing, as I’ve argued before, that porn is healthy, even necessary, when it’s privately stashed under the mattress, but doesn’t belong on the high street. Then a bunch of students does something so reactionary in the name of feminism that we may as well scatter séance candles about the university library and revive en masse the spirit of the Victorians.

It’s good to see that an actual anthropologist is studying the behaviour of some of America’s weirdest women. Wednesday Martin’s book The Primates of Park Avenue describes the exhausting lives of Manhattan’s most full-on wives: sci-fi beauty regimes, frenetic fund-raising, intensive mothering and military household management. In 1832 when a farmer in Lancaster offered up his young wife for sale, he advertised a similarly energetic range of skills.

Every morning on the way to work I pass a group of Polish builders waiting to start work on the new Design Museum. I know, it tells us a great deal about the availability of British youth for work in construction that every last one of them is Polish, so far as I can make out – and come to that, are the Irish nowadays too swanky to be navvies? -  but what’s interesting is how well behaved they are. They smoke heroically, but when women walk by they register their existence but don’t utter a peep. Possibly it’s because their English isn’t good enough for Wotcher, darling, but they don’t wolf whistle either, which I assume is a lingua franca. It’s not just me, I may say; it’s the same with teenage girls.