by Lucy Ellmann
There was a young fellow named Prost
Who tried to make love to a ghost.
At the height of its spasm,
The poor ectoplasm
Cried ‘Ah, now I feel it – almost!’
7 Disasters caused by men, but borne by women. Men run the banks and building societies after all, the property market, the stock market, industries, Parliament, Congress, the internet, monopolies and corporations and all the other enterprises that keep economic downturns happening. Not only do men create these financial collapses, but they unfairly tend to withstand them better too. Because they have all the dough! We are all being crushed beneath their insane belief in growth and progress and maniacal lust for despoiling things. Since the Romans, patriarchy has proved to be the guarantee of a society doomed to implode. (But at least the Romans, before Christianity spoiled everything, had a lot of wine and sex. And chariots. It wasn’t all bad.)
8 The accusation of institutional sexism must be added to the British police force’s proven institutional racism. Only eight out of forty-three police forces in England and Wales respond adequately to instances of domestic violence, according to the 2014 estimate of their own body, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary. Police behaviour towards purported victims ranges from unforthcoming to shameful. West Midlands police officers called one female victim a ‘fucking slag’. ‘He threatened to cut my womb out with a pizza cutter. When I spoke to the police, they just laughed,’ recalled another abuse victim (Progress Report on the Police Response to Domestic Abuse, HMICFRS, November 2017). Predictably, domestic abuse committed by cops is widely covered up by their colleagues, and the victims and witnesses are arrested instead and intimidated. With domestic abuse now on the rise, due to Covid lockdowns, Greater Manchester Police have admitted that they ignored or erased seventy per cent of reports of domestic abuse reported during 2020. Not very nice of them. (NB. The police did nothing for years about reports of Jimmy Savile’s crimes either. Wherever women are ill-treated, children will be too.)
9 When Phil Spector died in prison in January 2021, the death was largely reported as that of a big important gifted and famous music producer whose life happened to end in ‘tragedy’. The tragedy was of his own making. He abused women all his life; he waved guns at people, particularly women who rejected him. He bullied his ex-wife, on pain of death, into accepting an old car and minimal alimony as part of the divorce settlement. And, finally, he shot an actress in the head, whom he’d just met, and then claimed she’d committed suicide in his house. Yet Rolling Stone treated this recurrent behaviour as incidental, tweeting about ‘Phil Spector, the famed “Wall of Sound” producer… whose legacy was marred by a murder conviction’ (January 17, 2021). Some legacy.
10 Nitpicking about rape definitions is so wearying, especially when you need all your strength for fleeing rapists. Whoopi Goldberg added to the confusion in 2009 by declaring that Roman Polanski isn’t guilty of ‘rape-rape’. What, just ‘rape’ then? Trump seems even more oblivious to all the rape allegations against him, an invincibility that must give new vigour to millions of fellow rapists. In England and Wales, few sexual molestation victims expect any solution from the criminal justice system: rape prosecutions are at an all-time low. Recent figures suggest that only 1.5% of rape claims result in any charge at all (see Julie Bindel, The Guardian, January 24, 2021). That’s a lot of consequence-free violation going on.
11 Intolerance toward immigrants and foreigners closely resembles the negative male treatment of women and animals and other groups that are left out of calculations except as objects of blame. According to Teresa Hayter, all border controls are counterproductive and unjust: ‘Their object… is to exclude poor people, and especially black people. The denial of free movement across frontiers gives rise to some of the worst and most vicious abuses of human rights, and provides perhaps the most fertile terrain for the agitation of the far right.’ From Open Borders: The Case Against Immigration Controls (Pluto, 2004).
12 The UN’s Special Rapporteur Rashida Manjoo’s statement on sexism in the UK (April 15, 2014) dropped like cool rain on a desert, and even managed to affront the Mail (or was it the male?). Amongst many acute observations about Britain’s noncompliance with the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (to which, incidentally, the British government had already signed up), Manjoo raised concerns about the machinations of the family court system. She said it ignores ‘children and women’s safety when hearing applications for contact with estranged parents. … Lawyers and magistrates have limited understanding of the dynamics of domestic abuse and force children and their mothers to enter into unsafe and inappropriate contact arrangements, which are mostly unsupervised. Shared parenting is increasingly seen as an appropriate, default position without the adequate consideration of the best interests of the child principle and ignoring the history of family abuse…’ The best interests of children rarely seem much of a priority in Britain.
13 We think we treat women okay? Then why do they feel they have to wear six-inch heels to work? And that their only purpose in life is to sculpt their eyebrows, give good head, and learn to lap-dance? Why does Melania Trump have to organise those ‘fucking’ Christmas decorations? Why do some women feel they need plastic surgery in order to look like a Barbie doll? This form of self-mutilation is becoming the norm, and is now being sought at an earlier and earlier age (if you can afford it, that is; and, if you can’t, you may well be fired, demoted, dumped, snubbed, harassed, or shunned). Discrimination on the basis of how you look has long been an effective repressive weapon against women. Every cosmetic procedure performed puts pressure on other women to submit to body enhancements. When the fact is, even if you miraculously manage to be whatever’s considered beautiful in your era (the ideal is always changing), you’ll still be stuck in a sexist society that hates you! Women’s self-esteem is in tatters, smothered under a deluge of photoshopped celebs, the grotesqueries of the designer fashion parade, the realities of poverty, and a gushing river of porn and big-eyed, big-breasted superwoman types in films and cartoon animation, all geared to prioritise male pleasure and artificial styles of female body. As a result of all this, there are girls on anorexic websites who congratulate each other for dying. Why is female life held so cheap? The young opera star Tara Erraught was described in the Independent as ‘dumpy’, by The Times as ‘unbelievable, unsightly and unappealing’, and by the Financial Times as a ‘chubby bundle of puppy fat’. Ever considered focusing on the woman’s singing ability? (See Susannah Clapp’s great retort to these insults – Observer, May 25, 2014.) Why does female fat worry people so? Because it implies a freedom from constraint, a vice, a failure, a lack of decorum. But what heaven does slimness win you? As the novelist Elfriede Jelinek wrote, ‘The slim ones, who have worked hard for their figure… climb up the mountains every day or climb the walls at home…’ (Greed, 2006.) One defect of Susie Orbach’s book Fat is a Feminist Issue, by the way, is that it offers diet advice: this seriously undermines the radicalism of its empowerment message. It’s fattism that is the real feminist issue. Meanwhile, in ‘The Obesity Era’ (Aeon magazine, June 19, 2013), David Berreby suggests that being overweight may actually be caused by global pollution rather than shameful lapses in self-control. This places guilt back where it belongs, in patriarchy’s lap, as the instrument of all this environmental destruction.
14 No one has so far questioned my use of the term ‘terrorism’ to describe all the really lousy stuff men do to women en masse as a gender – perhaps because the word is so self-evidently spot on. But it all depends on who’s doing the defining. Men, the current controllers of language, seem reluctant to admit that all men in a patriarchal society are terrorists. Instead, they trip all over themselves trying to keep the definition of terrorism fuzzy. White American males rarely commit it, apparently. The police and media hesitate to name their barbaric acts ‘terrorism’. Nobody even bothered to keep an eye on Anthony Quinn
Warner, though his girlfriend warned police a year before his 2020 suicide bombing in Nashville that he was making bombs and plotting some destructive act. Instead, CNN reported after the incident, ‘The man who detonated an RV bomb in downtown Nashville early Christmas morning was a loner with no significant criminal record and as yet no signs of a political ideology’ (Eric Levenson, CNN, December 30, 2020). Here’s what his ideology was: patriarchy. The US Department of Defense’s dictionary of military terms defines terrorism thus: ‘The calculated use of unlawful violence to inculcate fear; intended to coerce or to intimidate governments or societies in pursuit of goals that are generally political, religious, or ideological.’ According to FBI special agent Doug Korneski, terrorism is ‘the use of force or violence in the furtherance of a political or social ideology’ (Levi Ismail, News Channel 5, Nashville, December 28, 2020). What is male oppression if not a coercive campaign that depends on propaganda, blackmail, and the calculated use of unlawful violence to further its ideology? Through violence, or the threat of it, patriarchal terrorists indoctrinate, malign, silence, subdue, guilt-trip, and murder. Misogyny can be lethal. Just because this particular terror agenda has been in play for thousands of years doesn’t absolve it of criminality. ALL VIOLENCE IS A TERRORIST ACT. Unless committed in self-defence or to protect life. All violence aids patriarchy. And all violence is a hate crime against women, since women gave birth to the people being murdered or mutilated, and women are usually the ones left to tend the wounded and mourn the dead. Family annihilation, that euphemistic term for massacring the people closest to you whenever you feel like it, is a good example. Killing your family out of pique is not just an unfortunate offshoot of domestic disharmony, as in ‘it takes two to tango’ and other victim-blaming guff. It is an intimidating display of male power, a misogynistically motivated hate crime, an act of patriarchal terror. The truth will out. The New York Times has now introduced the clumsy term ‘male supremacy terrorism’ (March 17, 2021) and even Wikipedia has a page on ‘misogynistic terrorism’.
15 In The Kreutzer Sonata (1889), Tolstoy’s narrator Pozdnyshev complains bitterly that the whole world is pro-woman – essentially because women are big shoppers. There are all these products, he says, aimed at women: they may be hopeless at making money, but they sure can spend it. This picture of male victimhood is neatly contradicted later on though, when it emerges that Pozdnyshev has murdered his own wife in a jealous rage. Mrs Pozdnyshev has had her last spree.
16 Women have to be kept on their toes, worrying and consuming, to keep late capitalism afloat. So-called fashion is a way of corralling women’s psyches into acquiescence, even to the point of personal financial ruin. There is continual pressure on women to throw out one set of clothes in favour of another, at great cost to the environment, or risk humiliation. Marks and Spencer released a self-satisfied ad campaign in 2014 called ‘Leading Ladies’, which involved well-known, middle-aged women like Emma Thompson, Annie Lennox and others, swanning about distractedly in M & S gear (S & M gear would have been more appropriate, given the slavish predicament of the fashion-conscious). Somehow, these celebs all seemed a lot more celebratable before they were roped into modelling those dopey black-and-white duds. Again, a vague ‘advance’ made by women (in this case, excelling as actors, artists, movers and shakers) is somehow twisted into its opposite, in the service of commerce. So, instead of offering middle-aged women reason to feel somewhat proud of themselves for what they’ve accomplished through talent and hard work, M & S’s ‘Leading Ladies’ adverts implied that whatever lofty things these high-flyers may once have had on their minds, what they really care about is towing the line in very conventional clothing. For marketers, respected public figures become just more gals on which to hang products. The hidden purpose of it all is to reduce any supposed independence in women to signs of compliance – in this case, compliance with the dictates of fashion. These ‘Leading Ladies’ weren’t leading the way anywhere but the fitting room.
17 Gallantry is dead. In 2013, the BBC sports reporter John Inverdale felt his negative estimation of tennis star Marion Bartoli’s feminine allure was required by the nation the day she won Wimbledon. Not very sporting of him. Here is Inverdale on the champion, in her moment of glory: ‘I just wonder if her dad did say to her when she was twelve, thirteen, fourteen maybe, “Listen, you are never going to be, you know, a looker. You are never going to be somebody like a Sharapova, you’re never going to be five foot eleven, you’re never going to be somebody with long legs, so you have to compensate for that. You are going to have to be the most dogged, determined fighter that anyone has ever seen on the tennis court if you are going to make it,” and she kind of is.’ The message was clear: get back to your mirrors, girls. Because, however good you may be at something else, your only real function in life is to be found attractive by jerks like Inverdale. The BBC received seven hundred complaints about Inverdale’s comments (and even a reprimand from Maria Miller, the Tory Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport – though what induced compassion in a Tory, I do not know). Inverdale apologised later for his obnoxiousness, and the BBC issued this grudging statement: ‘We accept that this remark was insensitive and for that we apologise.’ But what good was that? The damage was already done to the psyches of women and girls across the country! The last resort of the cornered misogynist is often hypochondria. Behind every male fist, every declaration of male displeasure, there is always the threat of self-pity. Inverdale claimed illness had interfered with his judgement. Harvey Weinstein succumbed to back trouble (after all his lively antics in hotel rooms too!), travelling to his 2020 trial in a wheelchair. And in June 2014, Michael Fabricant used novocaine confusion (he’d just been to the dentist) as his excuse for his threatening tweet about Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: ‘I could never appear on a discussion prog with [her.] I would either end up with a brain haemorrhage or by punching her in the throat.’
18 While American women got there a little earlier, British women were only fully entitled to vote, at age 21, in 1928 – just ten years before the publication of Woolf ’s Three Guineas. (Women couldn’t vote in Switzerland and Bangladesh until 1971, and in Iraq had to wait until 1980.)
19 Although the only FGM conviction to succeed in Britain so far occurred in 2019; three other cases ended in acquittal. Meanwhile, a form of virtual FGM goes on at Evangelical ‘Purity balls’ (now spreading to Europe from America). At these cheery gatherings, the sacrificial victim, a teenage girl, dressed all in white, pledges her virginity to her father (eeeugh!), in his capacity as ‘High Priest in the home’. I am not kidding. Proffering her virginity to her dad for safekeeping, the girl effectively neuters herself (temporarily) for the sake, she’s led to believe, of another bloke: her future husband. Not even kissing is allowed in this community before marriage. Weirdly borrowing abortion lingo, the doting fathers, or ‘High Priests’, claim to be protecting their daughters’ ‘choice’. What a tangle of hypocrisy, when in fact any worship of virginity is a denial of female sexuality and bad news for women.
20 The Equal Pay Act was passed in Britain in 1970, yet it is still unlikely that any woman now working in the UK will see pay equality in her lifetime. The pay gap for British women is currently twenty per cent below men.
21 The modest requirements of the Bechdel test: (1) A movie has to have at least two women in it, (2) who talk to each other, about (3) something besides a man (bechdeltest.com).
22 Despite seven women successfully suing the New York Times in 1974 for sex discrimination in hiring, pay, and promotion, the paper has never outgrown its male bias. In 2014 the paper fired its first female executive editor, Jill Abramson. Curiously enough, Le Monde fired its first female editor Natalie Nougayrède the same week. What unanimity! Female CEOs are more likely to be fired, and fired sooner, than their male counterparts (Edward Helmore, Observer, May 17, 2014): male bosses are given more time to settle in, while employers, colleagues, and junior staff are swift to grow impatient with female bosses.
Female politicians are treated with greater scorn too. The murderous venom directed at Hillary Clinton, Theresa May, Nicola Sturgeon, Angela Merkel, Diane Abbott, Caroline Lucas, Jill Stein, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Kshama Sawant and Alexandra OcasioCortez are examples of this intolerant attitude towards women who wield some power in the public sphere. But the harshest treatment of all has been reserved for Greta Thunberg, a child who dared to tell it like it is. The fact that she speaks out infuriates a lot of men. One attack came in the form of a cartoon depicting her being raped. Thunberg’s unflinching response was: ‘This shows we’re winning.’ (If only.)