Feminism

Much like supporting Millwall or contracting Parkinson’s Disease, red hair has traditionally been seen by the prejudiced as an affliction worth avoiding. The biographies of Mary Magdalene, Van Gogh and Sylvia Plath will confirm this. Rod Liddle sticks it to the gingers in his column this week: ‘I took my youngest son to a football match on Easter Monday. It used to be something I wryly called a ‘treat’ when the kids were younger, but we usually lost in such depressing circumstances each time that I would then feel the need to give them another treat immediately afterwards, to alleviate the misery. Bowling or pizza or something. Not any more.

Writing in the Spectator Diary some time ago, the evergreen Peregrine Worsthorne, observed that one of the things about getting on was that you ended up forgetting the reason why you believed things and ended up having to think things out all over again. I know what he means. A little while ago I was invited to be interviewed on Sky about my opposition to women having close combat roles in the Army. And you know how it is; you’re busy beforehand, you don’t have the chance to do research, you don’t have time to look up your original thoughts on the subject. And it dawned on me en route to Milbank that I couldn’t for the life of me remember why I was opposed to women fighting.

The head of the British Army has given the clearest sign yet that women will soon be given the right to fight on the front line in a combat role. General Sir Peter Wall, chief of the general staff has said that lifting the ban on women serving in combat units was ‘something we need to be considering seriously’. It is. Women can already serve on the front line with the artillery and as medics, engineers, intelligence officers and fighter pilots. So let’s open up all areas to women – but only if they can pass the tests to prove they are up to it. No quotas; no easier trials. There will be women who pass, and women who don't. The ones who pass of course deserve to fight in frontline combat units . The ones who don't may well be suited to other areas of the military.

How to protest these days? You can’t rely on our music industry to kick out a good protest song, and the film industry does a pretty feeble job. So once again, it’s down to the people. In the past few years, we’ve seen a couple of examples of how Generation Y protest: Case Study 1: The 2011 riots. Case Study 2: The 2010 tuition fees protest. Quite old school in style, and not hugely effective, but both at least showed there was still some fire in the belly of Britain’s yoof. There’s a new case study to add to the Generation Y protest list. 3: The Selfie Protest. It’s simple, and perhaps therein lies its supposed ‘brilliance’. You can protest, without even getting out of bed. Very John Lennon.

Tomorrow is International Women’s Day, and no doubt it will be marked by plenty of discussions about internet misogyny, everyday sexism, the war on women and all the other things that get people worked up. So I’d like readers to have a look at this blogpost from Australian forensic psychologist Claire Lehmann, on the subject of feminism, which begins: ‘“Pop-feminism,” as a movement, valorises feelings above reason, cynicism above hope. It has regressed to a point where anything at all, no matter how irrational or how narcissistic, can be celebrated as ‘feminist’.

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_20_February_2014_v4.mp3" title="From this week's View from 22 podcast, Burchill and Paris Lees debate intersectionality" startat=86 fullwidth="yes"] Julie Burchill vs Paris Lees [/audioplayer]In the early 1970s, my dad was a singular sort of feminist. As well as working all night in a factory, he had banned my mother from the kitchen for as long as I could remember because, and I quote, ‘Women gets hysterical and you needs to be calm in a kitchen.’ He also adored tough broads: ‘There’s a lady!’ he would yell appreciatively at Mrs Desai when the Grunwick strike came on TV, the Indian women wearing English winter coats over their hard-core saris. ‘Thass a lady too!

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_13_February_2014_v4.mp3" title="Cosmo Landesman and Mary Wakefield discuss what defines a 'dirty old man'" startat=683] Listen [/audioplayer] The other day I casually remarked to my ex-wife that our son’s new teacher is ‘really hot’. She gave me a look of disgust, shook her head and said, ‘You dirty old man!’ It’s not the first time I’ve been called that, and usually I just keep smiling and stay silent. But this time I bridled. Recently, in two separate courtrooms, both Dave Lee Travis and Bill Roache had been denounced as ’dirty old men’. OK, I confess: maybe I did emit a ‘phwhoar!

There has been a lot of comment about a recent Michelle Goldberg piece in the Nation on feminism in social media and how incredibly unpleasant feminists are to each other. That is not entirely surprising, in one sense. All political ideologies are wracked by internal struggle, especially those that reach an impasse in their goals. And Twitter is full of angry, self-righteous eejits. But there is also something uniquely intolerant about feminism in the online age. Partly it seems to be because it is much more dominated by one-upmanship over victimhood; the ground war of the sexes was won a long time ago, but what has followed is a deluge of un-winnable everyday injustices, things that no amount of legislation will ever solve because they are a part of human relationships.

The Universities and Colleges Admission Service (UCAS) has released its latest admission statistics, and they aren’t pretty. Of the 580,000 people that applied for places at British institutions, 333,700 of them were women. Only 246,300 men applied, a difference of 87,000. The figures show that the gender gap is particularly wide among poorer households. Perhaps this is some small victory for the women’s movement – after all, more women in tertiary education means more women with decent career prospects. But what about the men? If feminist ideology defends equal political, social and economic rights for women, then by that token, they should want equal political, social and economic rights for men. Equality can’t be lopsided.

Boy oh boy do I feel sorry for Laurie Penny. I hope that's not a sexist thing to say. There she is, doing what she does, churning out perfectly harmless po-mo guff for the New Statesman about 'why the patriarchy fears scissors' because 'short hair is a political statement' — and people seem to hate her for it, as if she were saying  something dangerously wrong. 'If you've a ladyboner for sexist schmuckweasels,' says Penny, 'short hair isn't going to help, although they might let you administer a disappointing hand-job.' Top drawer prose, that — witty, rude, could be a quote from Lena Dunham's Girls, everything a good New Statesman or Guardian article should be.

Jon Snow’s interview in the Standard today makes for perfect post-lunch reading: 'Sex comes into every evaluation of a woman, there’s no doubt about it. It’s there. Once you’ve established a friendship or a working relationship with a woman, it’s parked. But it’s an interesting barrier. When you’ve gone through it and arrived at the other side, it’s never a problem again. Well I’m not saying it is a problem at all, it’s rather a delicious thing really, ‘what might have been?’ or ‘what could be’. It’s a natural animal element of sustaining life.' Mr S has to wonder what Snow’s colleagues and female guests will make of this ‘delicious thing’.