Feminism

The Daily Mail has got itself into a bit of a lather over a “young mum” who was asked not to breast feed her baby at a swimming pool in Ashford, Kent. The story is here. As you can see, she apparently got her fecund baps out in the pool itself, before being censured by the pool manager. I think I’m sort of with the pool authorities on this, which perhaps just underlines my lack of modernity and general reactionary nature. Truth be told, I’m not terribly happy about seeing an infant breastfed in a café either. But I suppose the women are right when they reply well, we don’t give a toss how uncomfortable it makes you feel.

As Edmund Burke wrote: ‘Manners are of more importance than laws. Upon them, in a great measure, the laws depend.’ Testify, brother – and if our lawmakers have no manners, then we are really up a creek. As Spectator columnist James Forsyth noticed yesterday: ‘Quite remarkable that no MP has offered Jo Swinson, who is seven months pregnant, a seat. Really shocking manners and decency.’ Swinson didn’t help matters when, according to the Mail, she said it would have been ‘quite sexist’ to suggest she was not capable of standing. I wonder how damaging that sort of attitude is to feminism in general?

The Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer, yesterday declared that it was right not to prosecute doctors who authorised abortions which, according to a Telegraph investigation, were requested because of the gender of the foetus. It seems that the women mentioned more than one reason for the abortions so it wasn’t possible to isolate the gender selection element from the other factors. ‘The only basis for a prosecution would be that although we could not prove these doctors authorised a gender-specific abortion, they did not carry out a sufficiently robust assessment of the risks,’ he said. And just what might a ‘robust’ assessment of risk amount to?

A few years back I did one of those online debates on the Times website, the subject being why feminism had fallen out of favour. Within about 60 seconds four people had used the phrase ‘gender is a social construct’ and, well, I sort of switched off at that point. It’s strange that the F-word is now so unpopular that even David Cameron, a man with a desperately keen ear for metro-liberal opinion, refused to identify as such last week. When asked by Red magazine, he said: ‘I don’t know what I’d call myself... it’s up to others to attach labels. But I believe men and women should be treated equally.

Labour is the only party for women; that was the message of its conference launch last weekend. Every step towards equality had been made by the red team, it was claimed. Of course there was no mention of Maggie, the first (and only) female PM. Indeed, the party had to overlook the fact that it has never even elected a female leader. Harriet Harman and Margaret Beckett have both been leader by default, before being replaced by the newly elected male leader. Speaking of which, Ed Miliband recently had Messrs Rawnsley and Helm of the Observer round to his house in Dartmouth Park for a natter. Katherine Rose, a freelance photographer (pictured, above), was with them. Ed offered the blokes a cuppa, but ignored Ms. Rose. Bit of a boob, you might say.

Was Jane Austen really the best idea the women could come up with? Furious campaigning from feminists has resulted in the rather mimsy authoress being chosen to adorn the back of our new ten quid notes. There’s another woman, of course, on the other side – the Queen. But as she’s an inbred fascist agent of imperialism, she doesn’t really count as a proper woman, apparently. My own suggestion – Mary Seacole, the partly black lady who helped out a bit in the Crimean War – fell on deaf ears. But it’s not too late to change. And if not Mary, how about someone who represents modern British womanhood in the 21st century – Kerry Katona, say, or Victoria Beckham? Or the wonderful Claire Balding?

‘I embrace Barbie because I’m not threatened by her,’ says my friend Pippa, an early 40-ish antiques dealer from London who lives in Berlin. We are standing inside the ‘Barbie Dreamhouse Experience’, a 2,500-square metre Barbie museum; a pink monstrosity erected last month in a parking lot near Alexanderplatz. Inside, one can bake imaginary cupcakes, saunter down a fashion runway and gawk at the contents of Barbie’s hall of shoes. It’s a little out of place in the midst of the communist-era Plattenbau (pre-fabricated, council-style) apartment blocks that surround it. In 1989, East German activists gathered not far from this spot to welcome the downfall of socialist dictatorship.

A female friend asked me to a burlesque night she had organised. She honestly thought I would enjoy it. ‘Come and see naked women who aren’t being exploited,’ she said. My friend said this because I sometimes hide from the world in the dark caves of Hackney, where ladies collect pounds in a pint glass and then turn around a pole with all the joie de vivre of a rusty weathervane in a light gale. On a wet weekday afternoon there are typically six or seven punters in these stews, who half-watch the show while drinking lager, munching crisps and thumbing through Loot or watching the cricket on the screen in the corner. I like these places. Flesh, alcohol, crisps, cricket, literature — the five pillars of civilised manhood, all accessible from one bar stool.

This week, I bring you a dispatch from the frontline of pseudo-intellectual, metropolitan navel-gazing. This is, after all, what you pay me for. So right now the big thing for people who consider themselves warriors against nasty isms and phobias (of the sexism and homophobia varieties, not the Blairism and arachnophobia varieties) is to undermine each other constantly via accusations of intrinsic privilege. ‘I am a feminist!’ declares somebody, via a book or blog or Tumblr or tweet. ‘Aha!’ retort others, ever vigilant for this sort of thing. ‘But have you canvassed the views of Somalian refugees who are weekending female impersonators in Anglesea?’ ‘Um, no?’ replies our proto-feminist. ‘Check your privilege!

Mr Steerpike has checked his privilege, and he’s a radical feminist. Middle class, self-loathing and instinctively liberal, how could he not be? A devotee of feminist blogs, I was intrigued to read MadamJ-Mo saying that she felt ‘cheated’ by Laurie Penny’s Meat Market, a pamphlet published in 2011. And MadamJ-Mo has a point. Compare this passage from page 62 of Penny’s pamphlet: ‘Judith Ramirez, co-ordinator of the Toronto-based International Coalition to End Domestics’ Exploitation (INTERCEDE) insists that there is no simple solution to what she calls “a modern day variation on the slave trade” – hiring a nanny or a housekeeper is really a question of women trying to fend for themselves.