Fun feminism
Julie Bindel agrees that the UK and US are not Afghanistan, but disagrees that that means feminism has finished its work and can go away now.
For example, of the tiny minority of rapes that are actually reported to police, only 1.4 per cent are charged by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). In 2018/2019, charges, prosecutions and convictions for rape in cases brought by the CPS fell to their lowest levels in more than a decade.
That’s a really astounding statistic. I keep seeing it and keep clutching my head and wondering how the fuck. Rape is in effect legal.
The past decade has seen a shift towards what I call “feminism for men” or “fun feminism”. Currently, what passes for feminism in universities and other elite settings is anything but. Prostitution and pornography have been rebranded as “choice” and “empowerment”, and harmful and degrading sexual practices have been rebranded as “kink” and liberating for women.
I think of it as Greta Christina feminism, aka not feminism at all.
I decided to write my latest book, Feminism for Women, in order to explore how and why things seem to be going backwards for women, and make suggestions to get back on the road to liberation in the context of a vicious, misogynistic backlash against our hard-won rights.
I love the title.
What does this mean? “Charged by the Crown Prosecution Service” = brought to court for a trial?
Again: Google is good for basic information of this kind.
Yeah, Greta is a terrible feminist (she banned me from her blog five years ago).
Yep. The Benson Affair converted me from a Greta Reader to a new Ophelia reader, pretty much entirely because she forgot what a woman is.
I had switched from Christina to Benson some time before, but I was never a dedicated Greta Christina reader. I thought her thinking was rather shallow and sort of self-centered. I began to realize it was extremely self-centered, and stopped reading even sporadically.
It also reminds me of the sad commentary of western anti-feminists: “Well really, what are western women complaning about with the odd pinch at the office? I mean, really, they should be grateful they aren’t in Saudi Arabia! That’s real oppression!”