by Laura Bates
Words such as ‘groping’ and ‘fondling’ are incapable of carrying the weight of the experiences they are stretched to encompass: an elderly woman pinned roughly against a wall in her home by a friend of her late husband; an 11-year-old girl too afraid to report the male classmate stroking the inside of her thigh under the desk during a geography lesson; a university student out running when a passer-by grabbed her suddenly and firmly by the breasts; a video store cashier whose boss would smack her bottom each time she went up the ladder to the storeroom. All stories that have been relayed to me personally, some through tears. A litany of sexual assaults, reduced to something flimsy and dismissible. Moments that profoundly affect women’s lives, diminished and whitewashed.
Language has such power. When we deny victims the words to describe and define their own experiences, we actively disempower them and distance them from justice. We owe it to all survivors to start describing ‘groping’ and ‘fondling’ by their real name: sexual assault.
Originally published 13 January 2017
WHY WOMEN NEED TO SHOUT ABOUT SEXUAL PLEASURE
Over 50 per cent of women would like to be having more sex, according to a recent survey of users of the fertility app Kindara. Contrary to popular stereotypes about men having higher sex drives than women, 75 per cent of the 500 women polled would like to be having sex more than three times a week, and 13 per cent would prefer six times per week.
The survey comes hot on the heels of a new Tumblr called How to Make Me Come, which has been making waves by sharing women’s intimate accounts of sex and orgasm, in their own words.
‘Kissing me will make me feel like I am more than a vagina (which I am),’ begins one essay.
Another says: ‘Giving the direction “fingers inside me with clitoral stimulation” seemed to cause as much confusion as telling him to look behind something to find the milk.’
It might seem like the idea of women enjoying, demanding and taking the lead in sex is hardly a revolutionary concept these days, but it could be argued that the advent of online pornography has turned back the clock on the sexual revolution, at least from a feminist perspective. I speak to girls at school who have seen porn on boys’ mobile phones and think that sex is something at best aggressive, at worst violent; something that will be done to them when they ‘give in’; something that men initiate and perform for their own pleasure while women submit. I have spoken to boys who have seen it and are confused and bewildered by the role they feel will be expected of them. One young woman who wrote to me had been having sex with her boyfriend for the first time when, with no warning, he started trying to throttle her. Shocked and scared, she managed to push him away. But it was he who broke down in relief, asking her: ‘Wasn’t that what you were expecting?’
Sexual empowerment and feminism remain closely linked in a world in which women are expected to perform sexually but not necessarily to make their own demands. The idea of the personal space as political remains deeply relevant while we still battle to extend the popular understanding of rape beyond the mythical shadowy stranger in a dark alleyway.
As we debate consent at university and contend with the deliberately obtuse who suggest it is unfair to expect a man to explain how he knew a woman consented, the notion of consensual, empowered female pleasure is one we need to shout about.
The reclamation of sexual control is complex, particularly in light of the centuries-old exotification and colonization of the bodies of women of colour, the erasure of sexual orientations and gender identities that fall outside the heteronormative, gender essentialist mainstream, and the prejudice and violence faced by sex workers and trans women.
What feels like sexual empowerment to one woman doesn’t necessarily look the same to another. For example, the idea of a woman instructing a partner in the specifics of how to turn her on might feel different for women who are already battling sexual stereotypes associated with their race, profession, sexuality or gender identity. But it is exciting and important that spaces are opening up for women to speak out in their own words, publicly (and sometimes anonymously), about what was once considered stigmatized and taboo.
How to Make Me Come isn’t the only platform offering women a space to speak openly about their sexual experiences – the sharing of personal stories is also an integral part of Pavan Amara’s My Body Back Project, which supports survivors of sexual violence to reclaim their bodies. For some women, taking back the narrative of sex is a crucial part of regaining control. Alongside its Café V workshops and health clinics, My Body Back also offers free poetry and creative-writing workshops, which aim to help women reclaim their physicality through their own words. Amara says: ‘After any sort of sexual violence, the way you think about sex and your body changes, so you think it’s not under your control or you have to go with somebody else’s likes and dislikes and you lose that connection to yourself. We looked at taking that back.’
We live in a world in which the ubiquity of the male gaze constantly packages women for sexualized consumption, yet the notion of women enjoying their own sexuality remains startling to some.
The fact that so many women disclosed their sexual desires to an app doesn’t necessarily mean that they feel similarly confident relaying them to their sexual partners – in fact, their reported dissatisfaction might suggest otherwise.
In the age of online porn, which shows women going from zero to panting with next to no foreplay and having suspiciously regular screaming simultaneous orgasms with very little apparent effort from their partners, for women to share their stories about sex and climax isn’t just powerful. It’s a public service.
Originally published 24 September 2015
SCHOOL DRESS CODES REINFORCE THE MESSAGE THAT WOMEN’S BODIES ARE DANGEROUS
As pupils go back to school this month, one institution has hit the headlines for sending up to 150 girls home for wearing skirts that were deemed ‘too short’. Pupils at Tring School in Hertfordshire were either placed in seclusion or had to be picked up by their parents, reported ITV news.
A statement from Tring School’s headteacher, Sue Collings, said: ‘We believe that students looking smart and professional is an important element of being a successful school. We also believe that, if students are consistently dressed in the correct uniform, it enables us to focus on teaching and learning. As such, we have a school uniform policy that has been in place for some time that is adhered to by the large majority of the students. The most contentious issue, though, is the style and length of the skirt worn by the girls.’ It also stressed that parents and pupils had been warned in advance that uniform regulations would be tightened after a decision by school leadership in the summer.
But parents commenting below the statement on the school’s Facebook page expressed frustration at their struggle to find skirts that would fit their daughters’ waists while fulfilling the length requirement. Some said their daughters’ heights or body shapes simply made the skirt sit higher. One parent commented: ‘My daughter wore “regular”, not skinny, trousers from a school uniform shop, they had no external pockets as per guidance and [she] was told they showed every bone in her body and was put in internal for four lessons today.’ On another post, a parent said her daughter had been forced to wear a skirt several sizes too big safety-pinned round her waist in order to obey the length requirement.
Tring wasn’t the only school to take such measures – other reports have described children being sent home from various schools in the past week for wearing the wrong footwear, or even the wrong kind of socks. But while boys have been punished for some dress code violations too, it is clear that the majority of cases involve girls’ appearance being policed.
A number of pupils at South Shields Community College were made to change because their trousers were deemed ‘too tight’. And these cases follow hot on the heels of two schools that have banned female pupils from wearing skirts altogether. In May, Bridlington School in East Yorkshire reportedly banned skirts after a male staff mem
ber was made to feel ‘uncomfortable’ when implementing rules over their length. And in July it was reported that Trentham High School in Stoke-on-Trent was banning skirts, with the head teacher saying: ‘It’s not pleasant for male members of staff and students either, the girls have to walk up stairs and sit down and it’s a complete distraction.’ This week, the same school is reported to have sent home ten girls whose trousers were deemed too tight because they would prove a ‘distraction’ to male teachers.
The media images of the Tring schoolgirls in their ‘inappropriate’ skirts, worn over thick black tights, powerfully remind me of another recent case, in which a US teenager was sent home from school for wearing an outfit that revealed her collarbones. What is so shocking, or offensive, about the bottom inch of a teenage girl’s thigh, or the bones below her neck?
In fact, that case was just the latest in a recent string of high-profile dress code battles in the US and Canada, where students have been protesting for some time about dress codes that unfairly target girls, using the hashtag #IAmMoreThanADistraction and turning up at school with placards asking: ‘Are my pants lowering your test scores?’
While the principle of asking students to attend school smartly dressed sounds reasonable, the problem comes when wider sexist attitudes towards women and their bodies are projected on to young women by schools in their attempt to define what constitutes smartness. It’s no coincidence that many school dress codes contain far more rules pertaining to girls’ clothing than to boys’, as we live in a world where women’s bodies are policed and fought over to a far greater extent than men’s. When girls are denied time in the classroom because their knees, shoulders or upper arms are considered inappropriate and in need of covering up, it privileges the societal sexualization of their adolescent bodies over their own right to learn. We don’t have the same qualms about seeing those parts of their male peers’ anatomy.
Meanwhile, the repeated use of the word ‘distracting’ centres the needs of men and boys above those of the girls, and suggests that girls’ bodies are powerful and dangerous, impacting on boys and teachers, whose behaviour is implicitly excused as inevitable. It is girls’ responsibility to cover up, not men and boys’ responsibility to restrain themselves. If male teachers are ‘distracted’ by pupils’ legs then I would suggest that the girls’ trousers are not the main thing we need to be worried about.
Then there is the potentially negative impact of draconian dress codes on trans or gender non-conforming pupils, many of whom have reported being blocked from their school yearbooks because of clothing choices.
Another common refrain is that it is important to prepare pupils for the ‘world of work’ – this was the explanation given by the headmaster of Ryde Academy on the Isle of Wight last year when more than 250 girls were taken out of lessons because their skirts were too short. But if schools pull girls out of lessons and publicly shame them for exposing too much of their bodies, they are only preparing them for a sexist and unfair working world in which women are constantly judged and berated on their appearance. Men, by comparison, get a free pass. Look at the endless articles about whether women ‘should’ or ‘shouldn’t’ wear make-up to be taken seriously at work, or cringeworthy instructions from firms on how female staff should dress.
Wouldn’t it be refreshing to see a school taking a stand against the idea that girls’ bodies are irresistibly dangerous and sexualized, instead of reinforcing it?
Originally published 10 September 2015
#NOTALLMEN
Poor, beleaguered men. They’re not all bad, you know. Well of course you know. Not a single feminist I have ever met actually needs this pointed out to them. In fact, the only people who actually seem to buy into the idea that there’s some ideological war on all men are the ones writing articles with titles like ‘American men are being institutionally oppressed’ and ‘ “White Men”: the most dehumanizing insult of our times’. Feminists, who spend their lives fighting against the notion that an entire group of people are the same simply because of their sex, are unsurprisingly not trying to smear all men as sexist pigs. They are, however, interested in tackling many issues, from sexual violence to street harassment to stalking, which undeniably involve a disproportionate number of male perpetrators and female victims.
To acknowledge this is not to implicate all men in criminal or sexist behaviour, nor to deny the devastating experiences of male survivors of sexual violence. It is to recognize a system of oppression that is rooted in gender inequality and whose structural nature must be named in order for it to be tackled effectively.
It is not counter-intuitive to fight for a feminism grounded in an awareness of the systemic and institutional nature of female oppression, and at the same time to recognize the ways in which gender inequality impacts negatively on some individual men. It is possible to acknowledge the fantastic contributions made by some men in the battle against sexism and at the same time to realize that the majority of perpetrators of sexism and sexual abuse are men, raised in a system that grooms them for patriarchal privilege just as it prepares girls for objectification and subjugation.
EDUCATION IS ESSENTIAL FOR CHANGING MALE ATTITUDES TOWARDS SEXUAL VIOLENCE
‘My name is Nicola, I am thirteen and I am so scared to have sex it makes me cry nearly every day.’
So starts an entry to the Everyday Sexism Project from a schoolgirl who has seen videos of ‘sex’ (she doesn’t use the word porn) on her peers’ mobile phones at school. She continues: ‘It looks so horrible and like it hurts . . . I feel like it’s unfair that girls have to have horrible things done to them but boys can just laugh and watch the videos and they don’t realize how scary it is . . . the real-life sex that we see is so scary and painful and the woman is crying and getting hurt’ [sic].
Another girl’s entry reads: ‘Yesterday at school I was sat at a desk working, and didn’t notice a male friend of mine take a picture of my breasts. The only reason I found out is because he snap-chatted the picture to various other guys from my school, having edited it so that my breasts were circled.’
One entry comes from a girl who describes being sexually assaulted at school at the age of twelve. She writes: ‘I can’t type too much because I’m starting to cry, but suffice to say he put his hands in places that I did not want him to.’
Another is written by a teacher and form tutor in a secondary school. It says: ‘I witness on a daily basis the girls in my classes being called “whore”, “bitch”, “slag”, “slut” as a matter of course, heckled if they dare to speak in class, their shirts being forcibly undone and their skirts being lifted and held by groups of boys (I WANT TO EMPHASIZE THAT THIS IS MORE OFTEN THAN NOT A DAILY EVENT, AND OFTEN BORDERS ON ASSAULT). On a daily basis, I am forced to confiscate mobile phones as boys are watching hardcore pornography videos in lessons and I have noticed, sadly, that as time has gone on the girls in my classes have become more and more reserved and reluctant to draw attention to themselves.’
From online porn to page 3, Facebook memes to Game of Thrones, young people in the UK are growing up facing a barrage of ideas and information about sex and gender, what it means to be a man or a woman, and how they will be judged and valued as adults. Data from a 2010 YouGov survey for the End Violence Against Women coalition found that 71 per cent of 16–18-year-olds have heard sexual name-calling to girls at school at least a few times a week. Among the same age group, almost one in three girls had experienced unwanted sexual touching at school. According to a 2009 NSPCC report, one in three girls aged 13–17 reported sexual partner violence, a quarter reported physical partner violence and nearly three-quarters reported emotional partner violence.
We know young people are facing all this and more, yet we don’t give them the basic tools to help them analyse and make sense of the material with which they are confronted. The government recently rejected proposals to make age-appropriate sex education on issues such as sexual relationships, violence and consent compulsory on th
e school curriculum. For boys and girls, an alternate narrative is desperately needed in the classroom, so that received ideas from misogynistic videos and websites aren’t accepted as the facts of what ‘real-life sex’ and relationships must look like. We know that a woman in the UK has a one in four chance of experiencing domestic violence, yet we don’t teach our children about healthy relationships. We know that 85,000 women are raped every year but consent isn’t on the curriculum.
This week, I’ll travel to Kosovo to observe the work of the Young Men initiative, a project supported by the charity Care International. The idea behind the initiative is simple: by educating young men on issues such as gender equality, violence and sex, they become part of the solution rather than part of the problem. In the wake of its success so far, governments in Croatia, Serbia and Kosovo have added compulsory teaching of these issues to the curriculum. Now, Care International is calling on governments around the world to follow suit. Ahead of June’s global summit to end sexual violence in conflict, the charity has launched a petition asking the summit’s co-chairs, William Hague and Angelina Jolie, to urge ministers from the 140 countries attending the summit to ensure these vital issues are covered in the classroom.
Alice Allan, head of advocacy at Care International UK, said: ‘We’ll never end sexual violence – whether it’s happening in war zones or behind closed doors here in the UK – without tackling the root causes. The attitudes that lead to abuse and sickening attacks on women and girls are ingrained in society, globally. Care’s work has shown that working with men and boys really can break the cycle of violence. In parts of the Balkans, where teaching boys and young men about respect, consent and non-violence in relationships is already on the curriculum, 73 per cent now say it is wrong to use violence against an unfaithful partner, compared with 48 per cent before. This is just the start but it’s clear that educating young men and boys to change male attitudes is a crucial step to ending violence against women in the next generation.’