Misogynation

by Laura Bates

  @CannibalKisses: ‘A woman’s place is in the kitchen’ you know what you’re right. Lemme grab a knife.

  @lolly_chops: guy makes orgasm noise at me as I walk past. Me: ‘That will probably be the only time you ever hear that noise in your life.’

  @KrezzyNL: a guy kept harassing me for my phone number so I gave him the number of another sexist, figured they’d have a lot in common.

  @butterworthamy: Someone bleeped at me from a car as I was striding down the road. I yelled ‘I AM A WOMAN NOT A TRAFFIC JAM.’

  @_sallypreston_: Man: ‘Nice tits.’ Me: ‘If you’re going to be a sexist pig at least be accurate. I have fantastic breasts.’ Silence . . .

  Some favoured actions over words.

  @NettyH: 5yo daughter got told by a 7yo boy at the park that ‘boys are best’. She promptly out performed him on monkey bars.

  Some whipped out their secret weapons.

  @eleanorhydenl: two French men on Tube discussing me in Fr: ‘She’s far too tall [6'+] for a woman’. Me: ‘Oui, elle parle français en plus’

  @CleoR7: Managed to stop white van full of men mid-catcall by shoving a big powdery donut into my mouth then smiling with mouth full.

  Others showcased wit and wordplay.

  @Kathkinson: Bloke: ‘You’re a bit too thin for me’. Me: ‘That’s lucky because you’re a bit too thick for me.’

  @butterworthamy: MAN: ‘Ive got the F, C and K, all I need is U’ ME: ‘I’ve got the B, Y and E, so I don’t need U.’

  @AineSays: Him: ‘Look darlin, I don’t mean to hassle you but . . .’ Me: ‘WELL THEN DON’T HASSLE ME.’ . . .Then he got aggressive #charmer

  @DemonicDragon: Guy on train after I asked him to move his bag off seat: ‘Why don’t you grab my cock?’ Me: ‘I didn’t bring any tweezers.’

  @Gareth_E_Slater: Dealing with a complaint, person didn’t like amount I offered. ‘I want to speak to your manager, and make sure it’s not some woman’, ‘My boss is a woman’, ‘What about her boss’ is the reply, ‘She is too’ I replied he stated ‘I’ll complain to the director if I have to’. ‘Erm, not sure what she’d have to say’. He hung up!

  @AlternateRowan: Male colleague: ‘Don’t mind her, she’s on her period.’ Me: ‘If I had to bleed to find you annoying, I’d be anaemic.’

  @_Vickycee: A friend heard a guy shout ‘Sit on my face!’ at a girl who replied ‘Why, is your nose bigger than your dick?’ AMAZING!

  @Karen_M_Evans: New job, 1st meeting, only woman, suit asks where’s the coffee? Reply Don’t know, but when you find it mine’s white no sugar.

  And some really turned the tables.

  @RachLittlewood: flashed at on a bus when I was 19. Snorted and said I’d seen more meat on a butcher’s apron. Flasher got off bus head low.

  @punk_manners: On train home guy rubs my bum. I grab hand, lift it in the air & say ‘has anyone lost a hand? I found this one on my arse!’

  @soapachu: ‘cor look at the tits on that!’ ‘Yes, well at least one of us has something worth shouting about.’

  @MistressLoz: Last time a man called me a bitch for ignoring his unwelcome advances, I barked at him loudly & repeatedly until he ran away.

  Some came from awesome male allies.

  @tauriqmoosa: Ran up excitedly to car filled with dudes after they hooted at my friends. They sped away.

  Another recent fave from a man: ‘Apparently the answer to “are you a legs man or a tits man” isn’t “sorry I’m not a sexist” ’

  And others came from men who had experienced sexism themselves.

  @philkemp1975: I’m 6'7 . . . drunk woman grabbed me and said ‘Is “everything” in proportion?’ I said ‘Sadly not. If it was I would be 7'7.’

  But my personal favourite was just sheer kick-ass comedy gold.

  @RosieBalls: A man once pointed out loudly that I have huge boobs. I looked down at them and screamed like I’d never noticed them before.

  Originally published 6 December 2013

  SHOUTING BACK: HOW WOMEN ARE FIGHTING STREET HARASSMENT

  Nobody should be surprised at official statistics showing that one in five women over sixteen in England and Wales has been the victim of a sexual offence. Just before last week’s report was launched and in response to a flurry of post-New Year accounts of harassment, the Everyday Sexism Project invited women to share their experiences of harassment on Twitter using the hashtag #ShoutingBack. Some 3,500 did so within the first five days.

  The frequency of incidents reported is alarming: ‘Every day since I was fourteen . . .’ ‘I’ve lost count of the number of times . . .’ ‘Called a bitch, whore, slut, slag on the street too many times to mention’ were just a few of them. One woman said: ‘On street, bent to tie my shoe, man walks pass, sticks hand inside my top, into my bra & squeezes breast.’ Another described being ‘force-kissed by a stranger in the street in broad daylight’. One woman, a cancer patient, told how a man openly elbowed his friend as she passed and said: ‘You missed it. Totally bald. Proper dyke.’

  Many incidents happened on public transport, from ‘a man . . . putting his hand up my skirt and stroking my legs’ on a packed Tube, to a woman who tried to get off the train only to have a man grab her breasts and tell her ‘This isn’t your stop, love’. Another victim said a man ‘asked me to get off and f*** him . . . then tried to force my head into his lap’.

  The theme of harassers becoming aggressive upon rejection was also repeated again and again. One woman said shouts of ‘Hey . . . come here’ switched to ‘You whore, I’ll beat you so hard’ when she refused. Another described being ‘followed by a car of teenage boys who then tried to reverse into me when I wouldn’t talk to them’. In one case, ‘harassment started on the street, asking if I was married, ended with sexual assault on my doorstep at 3pm’.

  Threats of violence and sexual assault, such as ‘If I knew where you lived, I’d follow you home and rape you’, were frequently reported, as were actual physical assaults. One woman was ‘chased to my door at 11.30pm by two lads who “didn’t want to hurt me”. I ran faster.’

  Nat Guest, a 26-year-old digital marketer from London, was walking home from a party on the morning of New Year’s Day, when a man came up behind her, making ‘sexual overtures’. When she didn’t respond, he told her he had a knife and forced her to face a wall before masturbating into the back of her dress.

  Although the police were supportive, the male officer said: ‘Usually I’d tell you to avoid walking around on your own late at night, but, you know – New Year’s. You have to get home somehow.’ As a young woman in London, Guest experiences sexual harassment so frequently (‘most days’) that when she reflects on the incident, she says: ‘Theoretically, I feel angry about it but emotionally I don’t feel much at all apart from resigned. But the fact that I feel resigned to this type of thing makes me feel angry.’

  Most worrying of all was the number of accounts that described the sexual harassment and assault of young girls. One said: ‘While walking home last year, a man inside a parked car ask[ed] me for a blowjob. I was fifteen and in school uniform.’ One recounted ‘being told by my parents not to stand up for myself because that will get me raped’.

  Holly Kearl, founder of the US-based organization Stop Street Harassment, says: ‘Street harassment is often an invisible problem or one that is portrayed as a joke, compliment or the fault of the harassed person. In reality, it’s a human rights violation.’

  As one of the male supporters of #ShoutingBack tweeted: ‘We have the power to stop street harassment. Don’t do it. Don’t let other men do it.’

  Until they stop, we will keep shouting back.

  Originally published 15 January 2013

  DARTH VADER IS FOR GIRLS, TOO: THE YOUNG FAN WHO FORCED DISNEY TO CHANGE TOY LABELS

  Star Wars fan Izzy Cornthwaite wanted a Darth Vader costume and lightsabre for her eighth birthday. But, upon exploring the UK Disney Store’s website with her mum, Rebecca, she was devastated to see that the o
utfit was listed as a ‘boy’s costume’. ‘Her face fell,’ says Rebecca. Her eyes ‘filled with tears and she said “I can’t have it, it says they’re only for boys.’ ” But Izzy decided not to take it lying down and, following a quick chat with her mother about gender stereotypes, she wrote to Disney to explain her sadness about how the costume was labelled.

  About a week later, she received a reply: ‘The description for this costume has now been amended as we understand that all our little Jedis enjoy Star Wars.’ Izzy went online to check for herself, and was delighted to find that it wasn’t only the description of the Darth Vader costume that had been changed – the wording on everything from costumes to toys, Disney princess tutus to Hulk outfits was now labelled ‘for kids’, instead of being divided by gender.

  Izzy is not alone in liking toys such as cars and fire engines, as well as dolls, from a very young age. Yet all stores clearly define their products by gender – ‘If you visited a toy shop, you would actually see boys and girls going to their respectively gendered aisle,’ says Rebecca. ‘Some might argue, “What does this matter?” ’ But Rebecca believes the impact of this early delineation doesn’t end in the toy aisle: ‘We know that women are under-represented in many work roles and I feel very strongly that I don’t want Izzy to avoid a career later in her life because it is a “boy’s job”, when I know she is capable of doing anything she sets her heart on.’

  We can take hope from this and the string of other incidents where companies have listened to young people’s concerns about gender stereotyping. Earlier this year, Clarks announced plans to bring out a wider range of unisex children’s shoes after 8-year-old Sophie Trow wrote to complain that she wasn’t allowed the dinosaur shoes she wanted as they were ‘only for boys’. In a message shared by her mum on Twitter, Sophie wrote: ‘Why can’t girls have dinosaur shoes? I don’t like how girls have flowery shoes. I like dinosaurs and fossils, so I think that other girls might as well.’

  And last month, 8-year-old Els wrote to children’s book publisher Scholastic to complain that it had labelled an exciting pirate book ‘for boys’. After she started a petition and collected signatures from eighty friends and teachers at Bounds Green School, Scholastic agreed to end the gendered labelling of its books and removed gendered categories from its website. Els told The Independent: ‘Girls may not like things that are labelled “for girls”, they might want a monster book labelled “for boys”. Books should be for everyone and we all like different things.’

  It’s a positive sign of what change might lie ahead, as more and more young people are speaking out against gender stereotypes – and companies are beginning to listen. These might sound like small victories, but together they are part of a real shift in the way big businesses are approaching the marketing of children’s toys and clothes. This change has the capacity to have a major impact on young people’s ideas about the world and their place in it. ‘I want other children to be able to go into a shop and choose whichever toy they like,’ says Izzy. ‘I don’t want them to feel embarrassed because they are a girl buying a “boy’s toy” or a boy buying a “girl’s toy”. I like Lego and Star Wars, but I have to go to the boys’ section to look at them. I think this should change.’

  It’s exciting to see a new generation of girls who already feel able, aged as young as eight, to stand up for themselves and declare their right to step outside the rigid pink and blue boundaries of gender stereotypes. May the force be with them.

  Originally published 3 June 2015

  SO FEMINISTS SHOULDN’T USE HUMOUR TO COUNTER SEXISM? YOU’RE HAVING A LAUGH

  This week, a Twitter account called @talkSPORTdrive_ (not to be confused with the account of the popular radio show, @talkSPORTdrive) tweeted the following charming request:

  It’s #TitsoutTuesday girls give me some entertainment before the game starts!!

  Almost immediately, two obliging women responded. The first wrote: ‘Here’s a lovely pair’ . . . but the picture of two pretty garden birds might not have been exactly what the folk behind the request had in mind. The second was equally forthcoming, offering up ‘a nice pair of jugs’ in beautiful ceramic shades.

  After I retweeted the request to the Everyday Sexism Project’s Twitter followers, more responses flooded in thick and fast. Over the course of the next forty minutes, those lucky chaps at the @talkSPORTdrive_ Twitter account received a veritable visual feast of all things tit-related. They saw some lovely (floured) baps . . .

  A pair of (large-beaked) boobies . . .

  A massive (dishwasher) rack . . .

  A couple of shapely pairs of (table) legs . . .

  A lovely (fur) muff . . .

  Some big (weaponized) bazookas . . .

  A couple of huge (sports) hooters . . .

  And even a cute little ass (donkey) . . .

  I could go on, but you get the picture. And would you believe it, within the hour the account that had issued the original request was mysteriously closed down. It was almost as if they didn’t want to see any tits (or boobies, or knockers, or bazookas) after all.

  No, of course it wasn’t the most important feminist victory of all time, but it left me smiling. Quickly, however, I started receiving messages from people (mainly men) suggesting that to use humour as a means of communicating feminist ideas was to belittle the severity and importance of the cause. The tone of my response, it seemed, was not angry or serious enough for them. And this is a common charge levelled at feminists – that they are being TOO FUN and should put on a frown and get on with the proper business of being the shrieking harpies they’ve so often been painted as.

  Every feminist should have the right to convey their message through whatever medium they choose, whether it be academic articles, performance art, short films or gut-wrenchingly funny jokes. I’ve never understood the stern Dworkin quote that has been adopted in so many social media bios: ‘Feminist: not the fun kind’. Surely each method, from feminist literature to feminist stand-up, is likely to resonate with and engage a different audience (with some overlap, of course), and don’t we need all the support we can get? What about reserving the right to be (justifiably) very angry one day, and use humour as a weapon the next?

  The strongest argument in favour of feminist humour, though, is the enormous effect to which it can be used. Laughing at a problem doesn’t just mean avoiding or belittling it – it can be one of the most powerful and effective ways to expose and tackle it. Since I started the Everyday Sexism Project, I’ve seen hundreds of women and men perfectly demonstrate humour’s ability to debunk sexism. Here are a few of my favourites . . .

  ‘Once had a guy ask: “Would you mind telling me your bra size?” I replied: “No, but tell me first how big your cock is!” Amazingly he was shocked and found MY comment highly inappropriate.’

  ‘I was walking to college when a group of thirtysomething men approached me. One of them asked me: “Is it true you can get an orgasm from riding a bike?” (I wasn’t even riding one.) I replied: “I’m more likely to get an orgasm from a bike than you.” His friends all laughed at him as I walked away.’

  ‘Guy at work used to think it was okay to only ever address me as “big boobs”. “Morning, big boobs” etc. I started addressing him as “small penis” – he soon realized that maybe saying “Morning, Kate” would be a better way to address me.’ ‘Guy on bus: “Do you know where the Playboy club is?” Me: “Sure, it’s the next stop.” That 25-minute walk’ll learn him. #haHA’

  ‘Dear guy I caught jacking off in your car while staring at me on the sidewalk, please enjoy the giant dent in your door.’

  Originally published 22 November 2013

  WHAT I HAVE LEARNED FROM FIVE YEARS OF EVERYDAY SEXISM

  In spring 2012, a week after setting up a website to catalogue experiences of gender inequality, I asked Lady Gaga for her support via Twitter. Keen to raise awareness of my newly created Everyday Sexism Project, I hoped she might spread the word among her millions of f
ollowers.

  The next morning, I sleepily reached for my phone and saw more than 200 new notifications. I clicked eagerly on the first message and stopped cold. It wasn’t, as I had hoped, the first of many new entries from women who had suffered harassment or assault. It was a brutally graphic rape threat – and the moment I became aware of the sheer force of hatred that greets women who speak out about sexism.

  The threats continued to flood in. The sheer tenacity was startling. Who were these men, who could spend days, weeks – years, even – bombarding a woman they had never met with detailed descriptions of how they would torture her?

  Over time, things became clearer. I met men who opposed feminism in different settings, and began to recognize their varied tactics. In some ways, the online abusers – who hurled hatred from behind a screen – were the least threatening. The repetition in their arguments (if you can call ‘get off your high horse and change your tampon’ an argument) made it clear that their fury was regurgitated: rooted in a fear of that man-hating, society-destroying ‘feminazi’ of online forum fantasy.

  More sinister were the slick, intelligent naysayers who hid in plain sight. Men who scoffed at social events, confidently assuring those around us that sexism in the UK was a thing of the past and I should look to other countries to find ‘real problems’. Men who asked my husband, in commiserating tones, how he coped with being married to me. Politicians who told me I was ‘unnecessarily negative’ and that girls these days didn’t know how lucky they were. The newspaper picture editor who overlooked the content of my interview when he announced his priority was to make me look ‘as sexy as possible’. People with the power to change things and the will to keep them exactly the same.