A (more than usually) bad time to be a woman
So, I haven't been writing terribly much recently.
The quick explanation is that I've kind of lost the will to live. The long explanation involves the EHRC, cervical cancer, Barack Obama, South African football players and the Fritzl case.
Hot on the heels of the discovery that lots of people think rape should be legal (as if it wasn't as good as that already), last week the Equalities and Human Rights Commission recommended that the upcoming updated Equalities Bill excludes mandatory pay equality audits for private employers. A recession, apparently, is not the right time to tackle discrimination. You see, income parity was such a big priority during the hay day of City extravagance and football team buyouts by offshore millionaires that there's just no point trying to close the gap further now. Plus of course, all women are really good for is bringing children up for free, and children can't vote anyway - so why spoil our wonderful relationship with those nice people in the business world by asking them to not push more of them into poverty?
Then there was the trial of the murderers of Eudy Simelane (the link is to the Guardian, but note that it's a comment piece and not reportage - the only UK news outlet to carry a report on the trial was, bizarrely, the Daily Mail). She was an openly gay South African footballer who was gang raped and murdered in April last year by a group f men who believe in the doctrine of "corrective rape" - the idea that raping a woman will "cure" her of lesbianism. If you ask me, it's more likely to achieve the opposite aim, but of course that doesn't really matter of you stab her 25 times and leave her in a ditch to die. Corrective, indeed.[0]
Oi, EHRC: in Africa, they don't really think much about equality for women, either. They cut off their labia and clitorises with rusty razorblades, stuff their vaginas with herbs to dry them out and make sex deliberately painful, mass rape them as a form of genocide, pretend they can cure AIDS by raping young girls, prevent them from gaining an education, and all kinds of funky stuff like that. Africa is also the most war-riven, economically depressed, under-developed, epidemic riddled, and poorest continent in the world[1]. Coincidence? You decide.
Apparently Barack Obama has created a Council for Women and Girls, which is getting all sorts of people's knickers in a twist. What about the men and boys, they cry? Surely if you close the gap between women and men any further, then that will just be, well, I mean, it's just not right, is it? Stands to reason! Anyway, the Council is going to be staffed entirely with people who already have full time jobs doing other shit, and has no budget or powers as far as I can tell. It's a fucking gesture - but even a gesture is enough to maybe give women the dangerous idea that they are worth the government's bothering with, and that will never do. What next, protection from abuse? Preposterous. Mr. President, you should take a cue from the UK body in charge of human rights and equality. They know the natural limits of what women deserve.
Yea verily, who needs feminism any more. Let's all be post-feminists!
All that has been playing out on a very disturbing visual background that I've been more than usually sensitive to. The shop here at work has two news stands - a magazine rack on the left as you enter the shop, and a newspaper stand on the right. For the past week or more, every time I wanted a bottle of Diet Coke[2] or a chocolate bar, I had to walk through a display of crying, abused, dying or dead women (Jade Goodie, Natasha Richardson, Elizabeth Fritzl) on the one side, and an equally overwhelming razzmatazz of distended breasts, pertly proferred buttocks, coyly twanged thong strings, pouting mouths and hairless, barely-concealed vaginas on the other. Yep, the shop carries the full range of soft core porn mags from Loaded to Maxim.
So, at a time when women are braced to absorb the impact of economic collapse as they struggle to carry the burden of increasingly more solitary and thankless parenting, the message of support they are given by the printies is unambiguous: you can be fucked, or you can be fuckable. Or you can fuck off.
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[0] From the article: "A statement released by South Africa's national prosecuting authority said: 'While hate crimes - especially of a sexual nature - are rife, it is not something that the South African government has prioritised as a specific project.'"
[1] My sincere apologies if this sounds like a racist generalisation. I do of course realise that not all places in Africa are the same, and that human rights records differ among the many and varied states therein. But sub-Saharan Africa does have something of a unified identity, and many of the problems I cite are very widely shared. So my generalisation is stretching the truth only a little. I wish I could counteract this woeful catalogue of misery with some wonderful story about what a great place for women Africa is; but I don't know of any. We just don't get told. So in the unlikely event that I have acquired some African readers, please can they enlighten us all by telling us something about empowered, positive, future-looking women doing something great for their community?
[2] I know, I'm a pathetic slave to the patriarchy. What can I say, they got me young.