Julie Bindel

Watching the BBC drama Mrs America about the 1970s fight for the Equal Rights Amendment is a reminder that progress is rarely permanent and that feminist battles for women's liberation always attract backlash, as well as open hatred and disdain. In the show, the right-wing Republican and anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly does battle with second-wave feminists such as Gloria Steinem, Shirley Chisholm and Betty Friedan. Whatever your views on feminism, I would implore you to watch it. It is incredible television. But something occurred to me right in the middle of the first episode. The Schlafly character reminded me of some of the so-called feminists of today.

OnlyFans.com (OF) is the latest kid on the block to be billed as a safe, consequence-free way of selling sex and home-grown porn that empowers women. The social media site is similar to Instagram, but users pay to subscribe to creators’ feeds. The top earners on OF are women whose subscribers are male. These men pay between £5 to £20 a month to view images considered too pornographic for Instagram. Subscribers can also direct message women and pay tips to get personalised videos or photos, ‘depending on his individual sexual tastes.’ OF is a huge money machine and is doing extremely well during the Covid-19 lockdown. It now has around 17.

Reading the back cover of the soon to be released Me Not You: The trouble with mainstream feminism, I assumed Titania McGrath had churned out a new book. But on further inspection I realised it is in fact the latest from Alison Phipps, Professor of Gender Studies at Sussex University – a disciple of the ‘sex work is work’ and ‘trans women are women’ faux-feminism cult. This book has clearly been written for the hard-of-thinking. ‘Privileged white women use their traumatic experiences to create media outrage,’ reads the blurb, ‘and rely on state power and bureaucracy to purge “bad men” from elite institutions with little concern for where they might appear next.

Scotland is planning to change the way in which people can legally change sex, and is currently holding a consultation (which closes next week) on whether trans people should be able to ‘self identify’ as their preferred sex. But some trans people fear that the move toward ‘self-ID’ might be a mistake. Claudia is a proud Glaswegian living in London, and a trans-woman in her early 60s who underwent sex change surgery in the 1980s. She has serious concerns about the campaign to introduce self-ID for those wishing to legally identify as the opposite sex without going through a more thorough and longer medical process.

In my 40 years as a feminist activist campaigning to end male violence, I have never felt so engulfed in a culture of woman hating. I first met feminists in Leeds, West Yorkshire, in 1979, shortly before Peter Sutcliffe, the so-called Yorkshire Ripper, was finally arrested, weeks after he murdered and mutilated his 13th victim, Jacqueline Hill. During the five years that Sutcliffe was killing, the climate of fear and hostility towards women kept many of us indoors. We were terrified to walk the streets at night, but also galvanising others into protesting at the bungled police operation and the disgraceful misogynistic newspaper coverage of the murders. According to police and the press, there were ‘good’ and ‘bad’ victims.

Imagine you are regularly invited to visit universities to speak with students (unpaid) on your specialist subject, but in order to be allowed to enter the campus, you are required to fill out a form to confirm that you are neither a bigot nor likely to cause offence or distress to the students. Unfortunately, I do not have to imagine such a scenario. Last year, I received an email from the president of the Durham University Union, reciting my CV back at me, schmoozing me up in the hope I would agree to take the three hour train journey from London to take part in a debate about prostitution laws. The date was fixed as 31 January 2020. I put it in my diary. Then came silence.

Are women inherently dishonest? We must be, particularly when accusing men of rape. This is one of the most pervasive of all rape myths: that women love nothing better than maliciously and falsely accusing decent, law-abiding men of sexual violation. Some of the coverage of the poor young woman in Cyprus would lead you to believe that men are walking targets for female fantasists hellbent on destroying their lives. Having met the young woman convicted of making false allegations of rape against 12 men, I am very clear that she's not lying. Why is it then that we are so keen to believe that young women in particular lie about rape? Let's look at the recent figures from the UK.

I decided to go booze free this Christmas. I had a lot of people staying, which means work, stress, and potential vicious, drink-fuelled arguments. With a post-Christmas holiday planned in Cuba, an island drowning in rum, I wanted to give my liver a break in preparation. I prepared well: I got the latest alcohol free ‘spirits’ and beers, bought in some quality mixers, and looked forward to a festive period free of hangovers, broken glass and fighting. I wish I could say it worked. First of all, we forget how boring other people are when drunk and we are sober. To sit and listen to repetition, petty disagreements, and the giggles that come out of nowhere for days on end makes me want to kill.

I am at a conference on domestic violence today, entitled Stand up to Domestic Abuse, listening to story after story of violent men murdering women they had professed to love. Men who slayed their victims because they had the audacity to attempt to leave them. I hear the dreadful tale told by Luke Hart, whose mother Claire and sister Charlotte were shot dead by his controlling, narcissistic father. The conference room was deathly silent when a 15-year-old girl spoke about her mother being murdered by her violent husband. The woman that organised this conference, the redoubtable Rachel Williams, was shot by her ex-husband after enduring 18 years of abuse at his hands. Later that day he took his own life.

Lesbian tourism has long been a thing — women who once kissed a girl trying to appear more interesting while living a heterosexual life. Anne Heche, Madonna, Britney Spears and Ariana Grande have used lesbian/bisexual hints to titillate fans and sell more records. But nothing riles me like the Miley Cyrus approach which is to be heterosexual, married to a man, but claiming to be ‘queer’ and edgy. In a recent interview about her marriage to Liam Hemsworth, she said: ‘We’re redefining, to be fucking frank, what it looks like for someone that’s a queer person like myself to be in a hetero relationship.’ What a load of pretentious baloney. Cyrus is as heterosexual as the next woman.

Lesbian tourism has long been a thing — women who once kissed a girl trying to appear more interesting while living a heterosexual life. Anne Heche, Madonna, Britney Spears and Ariana Grande have used lesbian/bisexual hints to titillate fans and sell more records. But nothing riles me like the Miley Cyrus approach which is to be heterosexual, married to a man, but claiming to be ‘queer’ and edgy. In a recent interview about her marriage to Liam Hemsworth, she said: ‘We’re redefining, to be fucking frank, what it looks like for someone that’s a queer person like myself to be in a hetero relationship.’ What a load of pretentious baloney. Cyrus is as heterosexual as the next woman.