Women earn 23% less then men. The conviction rate for rape is only 6.5%. 1.5 million people have an eating disorder, and 90% of them are female. During the 1990s the number of men paying for sex acts has doubled. One in four women will experience violence at the hands of a current or former partner. And that’s all not in the third world, but the UK.
Ever since feminism existed, in whatever shape or form, there’s been arguments that its mission is done and hence the movement outdated. Virginia Woolf (!) in 1938’s Three Guineas claims that ‘since the only [women’s] right, the right to earn a living has been won, the word [feminism] no longer has a meaning.’ The illusion that equality has been achieved persists: nowadays, when a widely read liberal paper runs a story on feminism, the comments underneath are shockingly aggressive and sexist, the mildest insinuating that whoever wrote the article was transported back to 1969 in some homemade time machine. Oxford University Press’ Short Introduction to Feminism stops around the turn of the millennium. Women got the vote, women can work, they’ve got the pill - what else could they possibly want?
I’m sorry to break it to you - feminism is not finished. Actually, I’m not sorry at all; but whoever wants to believe that the world they inhabit is fair and free will have to reevaluate their standards, and that is never a pleasant thing to do. Some people claim that women in allegedly developed and great first world countries should stop ‘moaning’ and instead focus on the enslavement of women in Islam. What? Do you think that’s a valid response to the fact that Harvard President Lawrence Summers believes that there are fewer female scientists because of the ‘innate’ differences between the sexes, or to the UK government’s recent emergency budget, where 72% of cuts will be met form women’s income, as opposed to 28% from men’s? Yeah. If you think for more than 30 seconds, you should agree that feminism is not just another piece of 60s/70s/80s/90s nostalgia. It’s a real necessity in 2010. And it’s not just for women either: according to Kat Banyard, recently profiled in the Guardian as one of the UK’s most influential feminists, if you believe in the inherent dignity of people, in justice and human rights, then feminism is for you.
Banyard is the author of The Equality Illusion: The Truth About Women and Men Today, a carefully researched study that takes an interesting shape of an ordinary day in a life of British women. Issues begin as early as 06:56 am with Waking Up To Body Image, continue through the morning with A Gendered Education and Sexism and the City, turn to Coming Home to Violence and A Night Out in the Sex Industry, to culminate with Bedroom Politics at night. Banyard’s focus is incredibly broad, which makes her work even more impressive. It only took her 9 months to write the book, and apart from researching academic journals, she conducted case studies, finding individual women who agreed to speak to her about their experiences. She is not a theorist: everything she writes about is deeply rooted in reality. And exceptionally, it reaches much further than the bookshop. Banyard believes that academia and activism have to go hand in hand, and so she used the advance on setting up UK Feminista, an organization that brings together feminist activists, campaigns, and organizations. It only started in March, and with no external funding, already in August UK Feminista ran a free feminist activism Summer School, an amazing training and networking opportunity with panels, workshops, and talks for experienced activists as well as complete beginners in fighting gender inequality. It generated a huge buzz online, and proved that the book+organization initiative is symptomatic of a wider upsurge in feminist activity. As Kat Banyard told me when I briefly interviewed her, despite the huge amount of stigma that has grown around feminism in the last decade(s), change is happening. There’s been a steady growth in activism at a grassroots level: more groups, more blogs, more websites, more marches, more conferences. More feminist publications came out in the last twelve months than in the last twelve years (Catherine Redfern’s and Kristin Aune’s Reclaiming the F Word: New Feminist Movement, Ellie Levenson's The Noughtie Girl's Guide to Feminism, Nina Power's One Dimensional Woman, Natasha Walter's Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism, Sheila Rowbotham's Dreamers of a New Day, or the recent and hotly debated Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference by Cornelia Fine). It all shifts feminism back into the center of the political debate so policymakers, the media, and all sections of society have to pay attention.
Local London initiatives abound, from big organizations like London Feminist Network (its huge annual conference Feminism in London happened on Saturday 23 October; review here), London Third Wave, Equality Now, OBJECT or two London branches of the Fawcett Society, to specific campaigns like LASH (London Anti Street Harassment) or Hollaback London/ Hollaback UK, a dozen of local groups and Women’s Institutes like Shoreditch Sisterhood, Feminists of Hackney, East End W.I. or Feminist Societies based around universities at Goldsmiths, UCL or LSE; and even groups for men: London Pro-Feminist Men’s Group, White Ribbon Campaign, or the newly launched Anti Porn Men Project, ran by young male activists who oppose the aggression and sexism in pornography. Launched in mid-September, this initiative ties in perfectly with what Banyard believes is a crucial condition for feminism to advance: the involvement of men. ‘The future of feminism depends on focusing on the role of men and masculinity. We need to change what it means to be a man’, she said when I asked about feminists who have inspired her most, and she listed academics Robert Jensen and Michael Flood alongside famous US PhD Rebecca Whisnant. Hopefully the rise of the new feminist movement means that the stereotypes around man hating and marginality will disappear, and we will all accept that women’s issues are everyone’s issues, and sexism harms all genders. And that doing something about it is awesome, and as valid as it ever was.
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In other, more recent news, this Saturday is Reclaim the Night, an annual national march in London to say no to rape and all forms of male violence against women.
"A recent survey by the young women’s magazine More in 2005 found that 95% of women don’t feel safe on the streets at night, and 65% don’t even feel safe during the day. 73% worry about being raped and almost half say they sometimes don’t want to go out because they fear for their own safety.
In every sphere of life we negotiate the ...threat or reality of rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment. We cannot claim equal citizenship while this threat restricts our lives as it does. We demand the right to use public space without fear. We demand this right as a civil liberty, we demand this as a human right.
According to the British Crime Survey (2001) there are an estimated 47,000 rapes every year, around 40,000 attempted rapes and over 300,000 sexual assaults. Yet our conviction rate is the lowest it has ever been, one of the lowest in Europe, at only 5.3%. This means that more rapists were convicted in the 1970s when Reclaim The Night marches first started than they are now. Did you know that the maximum sentence possible for rape is life imprisonment? Probably not, because rarely are rapists even reported or convicted, let alone with a realistic sentence. This situation has to change.
We march to demand justice for rape survivors."
Reclaim The Night
Saturday 27th November 2010
Assemble 6pm, Whitehall Place (near Embankment tube) for women-only march followed by mixed rally and party at the Camden Centre, Euston till late. All welcome.
Men can support the Reclaim The Night march by joining the London Pro-Feminist Men’s Group solidarity demonstration. Meet by the Edith Cavell statue, opposite the National Portrait Gallery at 6pm on Saturday 27th November to make your protest against violence against women.
http://www.reclaimthenight.org/
http://www.facebook.com/?sk=events#!/event.php?eid=156359841057661
I will be visiting Nadine in Glasgow this weekend so sadly neither of us can come, but we will no doubt stage our own mini march in solidarity.
womenfire.dangerousthings
