This seems useful and healthy – this Facebook group called Women Who Eat on Tubes*, which features sneak photos of just that.
Some women had a picnic on the tube last month to mock the whole disgusting thing.
Sarah Hardcastle, in a T-shirt reading “women who eat wherever the fuck they want”, produced a bottle of juice neatly relabelled “bloody feminist cocktail”.
“It’s very bitter,” she explained.
The gathering in a London underground train carriage was a response to a controversial Facebook group entitled Women Who Eat on Tubes, featuring surreptitious mobile phone photographs of just that.
Hardcastle, an advertising copywriter, was already wearing the T-shirt when she heard Lucy Brisbane McKay confront film-maker Tony Burke on the Radio 4 Today programme on Friday, and realised gratefully that she and her friends were not the only ones who found his Facebook and Tumblr pages creepily misogynist.
Oh, pshaw. It’s important to monitor the behavior of women in public so that they will be sure to either do the right thing (as determined by randos with camera phones) or stay home.
It was, Burke said, an art project, mere reportage – “an observational study”.
Julia Bohanna disagreed. “I write about art and that’s rubbish,” she said. “You only have to look at captions commenting on the size of a burger a woman is eating. It’s voyeuristic bullying, turned on a group which may include many vulnerable people. The mere idea that these photographs could be called high art is borderline hilarious.”
I think “contemptible” is the word, more than “hilarious.”
Hardcastle said: “Some people have asked us: ‘Why are you standing up about this? Why aren’t you tackling a real cause?’ But you can’t do everything – and when you can do something, it’s better than doing nothing.”
In other words, some people were all “Dear Muslima” – so fuck them.
* “Tubes” in the sense of the London Underground. “On Tubes is slightly odd, now I think about it; “on the Tube” would seem more normal to me, but “on Tubes” just means on different trains on the Tube.