Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Homemade wine

    From the Guardian:

    The children of a British man have called on David Cameron to intervene to save their father from being subjected to 350 lashes in Saudi Arabia. Karl Andree, 74, faces being publicly flogged as part of a punishment imposed after bottles of homemade wine were reportedly found last year in his car by Saudi police enforcing strict laws prohibiting alcohol.

    The family of the oil executive, who is being held at Jeddah’s Briman prison, say he is already weak as a result of cancer and fear that the flogging will kill him.

    Once again, words fail me. The guy is 74 years old and has cancer. He had some wine – and for that they want to hit him with a whip 350 times. What can possibly be the point? The motivation? The justification? Why does someone else’s consumption of wine matter so much that it’s worth whipping him to death?

    “He is 74 years of age, has had cancer three times and his wife is dying in a home in the UK. He now needs medical care for his cancer and asthma, and there is no doubt in our mind that 350 lashes will kill him. We implore David Cameron to personally intervene and help get our father home. The Saudi government will only listen to him.”

    The Foreign Office said: “Our embassy staff are continuing to assist Mr Andree, including regular visits to check on his welfare, and frequent contact with his lawyer and family. Ministers and senior officials have raised Mr Andree’s case with the Saudi government and we are actively seeking his release as soon as possible.”

    And yet Jack Straw said a few years ago that the UK and the KSA rejoiced in “shared values.”

     

  • The Serial Harasser’s Playbook

    A former graduate student of Geoff Marcy’s has more details.

    Based on the stories I’ve heard from women who don’t know each other, but share eerily similar experiences, I put together a Serial Harasser’s Playbook. Most of the stories I heard before writing that post were related to one specific colleague: my former adviser Geoff Marcy. Thus, the Serial Harasser’s Playbook I posted is seemingly Geoff’s playbook. To be clear, many harassers employ such a strategy. But Geoff is the person most commonly named by targets with whom I’ve spoken.

    After [I published] the Playbook post, most of the people who contacted me with additional stories named a single person. That person was the target of a six-month Title IX investigation at UC Berkeley. That investigation report, which I have seen, concluded that, “The evidence gathered supports the conclusion that the totality of [Marcy]’s behavior violated the relevant UC sexual harassment policies.” Violations of that university policy de facto are violations of the federal law on which the policy is based, as articulated by Title IX of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The Berkeley Astronomy faculty were unaware of the conclusions of the report because their former and current chair declined to inform them.

    …

     

    After multiple complainants testified about Geoff’s behavior, he was given a warning. Until he was recently asked to step down, he was on the scientific organizing committee of the upcoming Extreme Solar Systems III meeting. He was recently the featured lecturer at UC Santa Cruz’s “Evening with the Stars” program. Following the findings of UC Berkeley’s Title IX investigation, he was free to continue to exert his considerable power within the community.

    Geoff recently posted an open letter that is, in my view, as vague as it is calculated. But what it does do is remove any doubt about his actions and guilt. This should be surprising to very few researchers in the exoplanets community, particularly those of my generation or younger. Geoff’s inappropriate actions toward and around women in astronomy is one of the biggest “open secrets” at any exoplanets or AAS meeting. “Underground” networks of women pass information about Geoff to junior scientists in an attempt to keep them safe. Sometimes it works. Other times it hasn’t, and cognizant members of the community receive additional emails, phone calls and Facebook messages from new victims.

    It’s all so horribly familiar, isn’t it? The famous guy, the open secret, the networks of women warning each other. The long history of people in charge doing absolutely nothing about it.

    In 2013 I received tenure. Leading up to my tenure decision, I decided that I would use my position, voice and male privilege to finally do something about the open secret—Geoff’s long con of holding the community in fear to provide himself cover to continue harassing our junior female colleagues. Yes, I have greatly benefited from Geoff’s letters over the years. But his publication record shows that he has benefitted from my scientific productivity. In 2013 I figured we were square, and I effectively ended our 13-year collaboration.

    I’m ashamed that I didn’t speak out sooner. I hate that academia’s power structure, which allows a single phone call from a senior member to sink a person’s career, so often forces junior people into silence for fear of losing their jobs. For this reason I am in awe of the bravery of the women who spoke out all the more; they were far braver than I and other male astronomers have been over the years.

    With today’s news story, I hope Geoff’s long con of the astronomy community has finally come to an end.

    It certainly seems unlikely that it can continue as before, given all the discussion I’m seeing.

    That said, and if Geoff is finally brought to justice, it will only be a partial victory for our community. I sincerely hope that we recognize that Geoff wielded a highly effective weapon in his use of sexual harassment. His expertise in harassment, honed over the decades, ruined many promising careers; pushed women away from exoplanets in particular, and astronomy generally; and in so doing set progress in our subfield back in ways that we’ll still be grappling with in a decade hence. But it will be important to recognize that Geoff is just one of many serial harassers in our field of science, and that other fields are also widely infected (cf Clancy, Nelson, Rutherford & Hinde 2014). Plus, it’s not just the serial harassers. It’s also the “everyday” harassment that women face in their departmental hallways, astro-ph discussions, scientific conferences, and committee meetings. All of this is aided and abetted by a vacuum of leadership at universities like UC Berkeley, which is dealing with a class-action lawsuit as well as a civil lawsuit by many former students for mishandling their complaints.

    Sexual harassment is just one very powerful aspect of the systemic sexism that pervades our daily lives.

    It seems astonishing that any women at all go into the field.

  • Wondering about the criteria

    Reginald Harper wonders why the Manchester Students’ Union banned Julie Bindel and (later, after protest) Milo Yiannopoulos from a debate proposed by the Free Speech society, while allowing, indeed welcoming and promoting, Muslim Engagement and Development’s (MEND) exhibition on Islamophobia.

    Abu Eesa Niamatullah, MEND’s CEO, has come under fire for comments he made on Facebook regarding women, such as, “Don’t try to understand women. Women understand women and they hate each other.” When feminists responded with outrage, Niamatullah responded that feminism was antithetical to Islam, and that he relished women’s anger over his comments:

    For you, carry on burning in your rage. There is nothing that delights me more by God than making you mad. I hope you spend the rest of this entire week spending every second thinking about these comments and it freaking you out.

    He says a lot more than that, and it’s ugly stuff. Let’s read some more.

    I absolutely believe that feminists – with all the nuances of that title that I stated on my earlier comments today – are the enemies of Islamic orthodoxy and to refute them is a rewarded act. The reason for this can be seen in their corrupt and insincere approach with other people. My refutations and responses are done according to the level of their intellect. Thus, when you have an interlocutor who derives from the statement, “Don’t try to understand women. Women understand women and they hate each other”, that one is therefore legitimising or supporting or promoting the beating of women, or the rape of women, or the abuse of children, or FGM etc – as was stated by such a feminist – then one finds little other option but to descend into such stupidity and intellectual failure, and entertain them at their chosen level. To humiliate them. To expose their stupidity. To show how insincere and how irrelevant such feminists are when it comes to defending the rights of individuals who are oppressed and abused.

    Also:

    As for the feminists who were offended then I hope that your offence burns in your heart and causes you to wither and wiggle in rage. *Your* contention is not about personal opinion or taste. Or not liking a joke or not or thinking it went over the top or not. Your problem is far deeper. Look at the people who are picking up these comments: Islamophobes and journalists and all and sundry. Why? Ask yourself that question. Who are allies to who? You promoters of feminism and complainants thereafter are nearly always associated with secular humanist thought and tendencies. A brief perusal of your work will expose who makes Allah’s law their standard, and who makes their own intellect their standard. You are the people who are desperate to remove from our tradition any statement or mention of that which your ideological masters disagree with whether that be female circumcision, or the defining of the age of puberty for girls for marriage, or the institution of polygamy, or the parameters of hijab and jilbab, and so on from a thousand issues concerning female fiqh and indeed anything else you don’t like.

    That’s what led up to the “burn in your rage” remark. That theocratic anti-humanist authoritarian garbage is what Abu Eesa Niamatullah stands for and promotes, yet the Manchester SU promotes him while banning Julie Bindel.

    Wtf is wrong with everyone?

    Reginald Harper continues:

    MEND continues to promote views that are unequivocally antisemitic and anti-women. Azad Ali, Mend’s director of engagement, is an extremist who has given support to the killing of British troops. Yasir Qadhi, MEND’s speaker for their “Islam in Britain” events this year, is already controversial for claiming that the Holocaust was a hoax. In addition, he has also gone on record as saying that women should be entirely barred from the workplace:

    Women should not be in the workplace whatsoever. Full stop. I simply can’t imagine how we will safeguard our Islamic identity in the future and build strong Muslim communities in the West with women wanting to go out and becoming employed in the hell that it is out there.

    Qadhi thinks half of humanity should be denied fundamental human rights, yet he is welcome while Julie Bindel is called names and banned.

    Why?

  • The numbers rise

    Middle East Eye says it has evidence that the death toll from the Hajj disaster is much higher than the Saudis have said.

    We have seen evidence suggesting that at least 2,432 people were killed on 24 September when pilgrims were crushed to death at a crossroads in Mina, inside Mecca and not far from the holy city.

    Photos displayed at the Muaism Medical Emergency Centre in Mina, where people are being permitted to search for missing relatives until 30 October, appear to reveal a numbering system of those killed.

    A Saudi source travelled to Mina on 30 September and spent four days visiting the centre, where he covertly took photos of what he found and sent them to Middle East Eye, requesting anonymity for fear of being arrested.

    The bodies are numbered.

    Photographs seen by Middle East Eye show a row of bodies laid out in the morgue, each of which has been attributed an ascending serial number.

    The source sent Middle East Eye more than 50 photos of the dead, demonstrating the sequential numbers rising.

    And there are more from hospitals who haven’t been counted yet.

    This would bring the death toll to at least a potential 2,432 people, which would make it easily the worst disaster ever to hit the annual pilgrimage, surpassing a stampede in 1990 that saw 1,426 pilgrims killed.

    The source said that they believed the toll to be significantly more than the potential 2,534, claiming that a large number of people had been transferred to hospitals in the city of Taif, where a list of the dead has not yet been released.

     

    It’s horrific.

    And it’s the usual problem with “revealed” religions. The hajj was workable at the time it was started, when people couldn’t travel far and there weren’t huge numbers of people anyway. Now we live in a world of 7.5 billion people, perhaps a billion or more of them Muslims, and the technological ability to go to Mecca. The hajj is a “requirement” for people able to go. Result? Far too many people in one place, and they crush one another. Not very merciful.

  • Reverse Missionaries: Are African Churches Exporting Homophobia to the West?

    In recent years, the issue of gay rights in Africa has generated intense debate and discussions. Some countries have tried to tighten the laws against homosexuality and prohibit same sex marriage. They claim homosexuality is an evil, corrupt and immoral lifestyle which western societies are trying to impose on African nations.

    Concerned individuals, state and non-state actors have been campaigning and lobbying to beat back the tide of homophobia that is threatening to engulf the region. It is frustrating to know that as is often the case when dealing with Africa-related issues, many people have tried to infantilize African agency in the raging homophobia by looking for some western or colonial scapegoats, and they have found one in the activities of the American evangelists who supported the Uganda “Kill the Gays” bill.

    It is quite in order to condemn the activities of these evangelists of gay hate and persecution, but I think there has been much more focus on the role of American evangelists than on their African counterparts. In fact the situation has been presented as if Africans are not contributing to the problem of homophobia in Africa and beyond. The role of African migrant churches that are championing a reverse missionary project and spreading and exporting the gospel of gay hate and intolerance to western countries has been ignored.

    Many African Initiated Churches are establishing branches in western countries where they propagate what they call “Africanized Christianity,” that is, Christianity with an African flavor in terms of ritual, worship and interpretation of the Bible. The notion is that American and European Christianities have drifted from preaching the true word of God by espousing teachings and practices that are incompatible with what many African church leaders define as “true Christianity”. However this is only a ploy to create a gospel niche which they could use to teach doctrines that are literally against the laws and human rights provisions in these countries such as the human rights of homosexuals.

    One of such churches is the Redeemed Christian Church of God. Not too long ago, the General Overseer, Rev Enoch Adeboye came out strongly in support of Nigeria’s anti-same sex marriage bill which was later passed into law. The pastor said that the practice of homosexuality would lead to the extinction of humanity.

    He said:

    Same-sex marriage is an anathema to the will of God for human beings to be fruitful, replenish and multiply on earth. Anything contrary to that is evil … How can a man who marries a fellow man produce a child and how can a woman who marries a fellow woman produce a child?

    According to Adeboye:

    If this evil is allowed to stay, there will not be newborns again in the world. As the older generation dies, will there be a new generations to succeed it? Even plants and animals have new generations to succeed them.

    He called on people practizing same-sex marriage to desist and flee from the wrath of God, warning that God frowns on same-sex marriage.

    The Redeemed Christian Church of God has branches in western countries and across the world, including those where same sex marriage is legal or at least not treated as a criminal offense. These churches look up to Rev Adeboye for spiritual guidance.

    Another of Nigeria’s mega-Pentecostal churches – the Mountain of Fire and Miracle Ministries (MFM) – preaches against the practice of homosexuality as well. The church has ‘‘Deliverance Prayers Against Homosexuality and Sexual Perversion’‘. MFM regards homosexuals as sexual perverts in need of salvation and redemption. One of the prayer points of the Los Angeles branch of MFM urges those who are caught in the sexual bondage of homosexuality, lesbianism and other forms of sexual immorality to understand that their bondage can be broken ‘through the power of the blood of Jesus’. The branch of MFM is in New Jersey, an affiliate in Houston has the same prayer programs which partly reads:

    Romans 6:14

    Sexual sins open the doors for all kinds of evil spirits to enter, This prayer program is for those:

    ● Who would like to be delivered from the spiritual contamination resulting from past sexual sins.
    ● Who would like to be delivered from their present sexual lusts, enticement, and other sexual sins.
    ● Who would like to expel sexual satanic deposits acquired by sleeping with demonised people.
    ● Who had been a commercial sex worker in the past.
    ● Who frequently dream of having sex.

    Don’t despair if the enemy has subjected you to such a depth of immoral degradation. You would be lifted up to the height of purity, which God has purposed for you as you call upon him to help you.

    ● Rom. 1:22: “Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.”
    ● Please, open your Bible and slowly, meditatively read Rom. 1:18- 32 and Leviticus 18:1-30

    Are you surprised at the things you’ve just read? Indeed there is nothing new under the sun! (Ecclesiastes 1:9) Basically the laws of God concerning sexual perversion as stated in Leviticus 18 can be divided into 5 groups. They are laws against:

    – -incest (I.e having sex with close relatives, brothers, in law’s uncles etc., there are 20 categories of close relatives stated between verses 6 & 19)
    – adultery (vs 20)- idolatry I.e. Offering child sacrifices (vs21)
    – – homosexuality, lesbianism, masturbation, prostitution etc (VS 22)
    – – bestiality (having sex with animals (vs 23)

    Are you caught in the bondage of any of these? Indeed the chains of habit (perversion) are two weak to be felt till they are too strong to be broken. All kinds of sexual bondage can be broken through the power of the blood of Jesus. There is hope for you, the Bible says, “Sin shall not have dominion over you” (Rom. 6:14) because, “ The law of Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death” (Rom 8:2)

    Another branch of the church in Houston in a typical Mugabean style compared homosexuals and lesbians to dogs. It says on its web site:

    The Bible refers to homosexuals and lesbians as dogs. Anyone who has ever engaged in these kinds of things would need to receive deliverance from the spirit of the dog, which has entered into him or her. Generally, in the spirit world, dogs symbolize sexual perversion. So, if you see yourself being pursued in the spirit by a dog, check your sexual life. It means that something must be wrong somewhere, whether in your heart or your activities. Psalm 22:16 says, “For dogs have compassed me: the assembly of the wicked have in closed me: they pierced my hands and my feet.”

    Another transnational Nigerian church that openly propagates anti-gay gospel is the the Deeper Life Bible Church (DLBC). The General Superintendent of Deeper Life Bible Church (DLBC), Pastor Williams Kumuyi, recently stated the church’s opposition to gay marriage and homosexuality:

    We are in the forefront of those fighting what they call homosexuality, whether here in Nigeria or outside…The marriage between members of the same sex is anti-Bible, satanic and anti-God. DLBC can never support homosexuality. We are against it.

    While Pastor Faith Oyedepo, the wife of the General Overseer of the Winners Chapel, David Oyedepo, has urged church members against homosexual practices:

    “The dictionary defines a homosexual as one who is sexually attracted only to people of the same sex as oneself. God defines it as an abomination. The Word of God says: “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination” (Leviticus 18:22 ).Yet the world is teeming with homosexuals; some churches even conduct marriages for homosexuals! They are fighting for the right to be regarded as a nuclear family. They are everywhere: in government, on the streets, in institutions of learning.”

    Watching CBN’S 700 club one day, I saw a Christian woman who had been ensnared by the spirit of homosexuality (it’s a spirit you know) and who required help to break the habit. She had suffered in secret for many years and now needed deliverance.

    In secondary schools, youngsters are drawn into homosexual practices by cruel seniors, and their own lust. But for whatever reason, homosexuality is of the devil. The Word of God says, “Because they do this, God has given them over to shameful passions, Even the women pervert the natural use of their sex by unnatural acts ( Romans 1:26-27).(Good News Bible) In the same way the men give up natural sexual relations with women and burn with passion for each other. Men do shameful things with each other, and as a result they bring upon themselves the punishment they deserve for their wrongdoing.

    She urged members to be ‘born again’, to ‘receive new mind’ and pray in order to be freed from these “deadly diseases of homosexuality and sexual perversions.’’

    The human rights community should call these African churches and their affiliates to order. Their homophobic prayers should not be seen as innocuous intercessions and supplications to God or an exercise in freedom of religion and worship. They are not. These prayer programs are actually teachings that shape the minds and attitudes of the people.

    However, it is not all African churches and pastors that are exporting anti gay gospel to the West. Rev Jide Macaulay is a Nigerian pastor who promotes a counter gospel narrative. But his ministry has a marginal influence on African migrants when compared with those of the MFM, Redeemed, DLBC and the Winners Chapel.

    Just as the world came out and roundly condemned American evangelists who sponsored or supported the Kill the Gay Bill in Uganda, we should also condemn expressly African pastors and churches that are propagating hatred and persecution of gay people here in African migrant churches. Individuals and organizations should try and petition these African churches praying against homosexuality. Non-Africans should not refrain from criticizing these churches because they could be accused of racism. Condemning homophobic churches is not an act of racism but a clear mark of respect for universal human rights, common humanity, racial equality and justice.

    We cannot work and campaign for the respect and recognition of gay rights in Uganda, Nigeria and in other parts of Africa and at the same time stand by and allow African pentecostal churches to erode the gains we have made in Europe or America. We need to send a strong message to MFM, Deeper Life Bible Church, Redeemed Christian Church of God, and their affiliates in the Europe and the US that their reverse mission of spreading homophobic gospel is not welcomed in the western world.

  • How to know what is “whorephobic”

    Edinburgh University Student Association is holding an election. The EU Feminist Society interviewed the candidates for the Women’s Liberation Group Convenors.

    We also sent this email to the candidates for Women’s Liberation Group Convenor to ask them some questions. Before you read their replies below, we’d like to remind everyone that FemSoc passed a policy stating we support sex workers’ rights, which means we back the decriminalisation of sex work and condemn all forms of whorephobia.

    Two candidates have answered so far. The first to answer gets a trigger warning at the top.

    Magdalen Berns

    TW: whorephobia

    “Whorephobia”? Really? She expresses hatred of prostitutes in her reply? No, of course  not.

    3. EUSA and Femsoc both passed policies supporting sex-workers. What is your opinion on this?

    I think we all agree that those who sell sex for money should be decriminalised and safe from harm, which is the most important thing. With that said, I have not yet seen any credible evidence produced by Scot-PEP (or their associates and the mainstream media narrative), a self described campaigning and lobbying group established with the express purpose of campaigning for full decriminalisation of all aspects of the sex trade, which remotely suggests that decriminalisation of pimps and buyers of sex would in any way make women and children impacted by the sex trade safe from sexual violence. Since evidence does suggest that the main perpetrators of sexual violence towards prostituted people are actually the demographic of men which Scot-PEP have been lobbying to fully decriminalise, it deeply concerns me to find that so far female students have not seen fit to scrutinise the motives, background, associations or the unrepresentative sex demographic of the leadership of this organisation, before assuming good-will and deciding to collaborate with them.

    The facts speak for themselves: women in prostitution have been more comfortable in reporting sexual crimes committed against them in Nordic countries and they are not being murdered there; in stark contrast to full decriminalisation regions, where prostituted women are still being killed and reports of indigenous victims being trafficked into sexual slavery are still not being taken seriously by the authorities.[2,3]

    As women, we are not stakeholders in the systemic sexual commodification of the female sex which is the very core of the rape culture we all of us experience in our lives. Feminists who oppose the gendered exploitation of the sex trade do so because:
    * We recognise there is nothing inevitable about prostitution or its associated male sexual violence
    * We understand that the worth of a woman should no longer be measured by patriarchal standards
    * We see that women must no longer be defined by patriarchy
    * We value sexual consent such that we see it as too priceless to be taken away via social, economic, psychological, chemical or physically coercive methods.

    Buying or selling access to a woman’s body is not a right: it’s male privilege. I do not stand for the role of Women’s Liberation Convenor to pander male entitlement, I stand for women’s human rights.

    How does any of that qualify as “whorephobic”?

    It’s explained on the EU Feminist Society Facebook page.

    [Person 1] Where was Magdalen Berns being whorephobic??

    [Person 2] I think it was the fact that she doesn’t support the prostitution industry, which like… I don’t think that’s ‘whorephobic’ at all? Like, let’s face it most women in the sex trade don’t /want/ to be prostituted. They do it because they don’t have a choice.

    IDK how it’s “””whorephobic””” to ensure that exploited women don’t get in trouble for their circumstances, while making sure that the men who are taking advantage of their situation /do/ face consequences.

    [Person 3] “Buying or selling access to a woman’s body is not a right: it’s male privilege.” This part is, I think, and another quote slightly above which says something similar, because this sentence takes all the agency from sex workers and puts it into the hands of their clients? It is the SW’s body, and it is her who is choosing to use her body how she wants, and this is really framed as if the SW is a piece of meat on a table and men come and take a part when they want.

    She’s choosing it. She’s choosing it, just as she might choose to be beaten, or raped, or imprisoned in her house. She’s choosing it just as she might choose to stay married to and obey a man who told her she could not get a job outside the house, could not get further education, could not meet her friends for coffee, could not travel without him, could not talk on the phone without his supervision.

    By the same token, workers choose to work in poultry plants, in mines, in seasonal fruit-picking; workers choose to work in dangerous conditions, for long hours, for bad pay.

    They all have agency, and if you say those choices are not wholly free, you are framing them as pieces of meat, and you are a dangerous Phobe.

    Person 1 disputed what Person 3 said, and the EUFS stepped in.

    Edinburgh University Feminist Society Our members who are sex workers are entitled to a safe space, so they have the right to be warned about statements that deny their bodily autonomy

    Person 3 amplified.

    As not-a-sex-worker, you don’t have the right to decide if something is not sex worker phobic.

    It’s not clear how Person 3 knows that Person 1 is not-a-sex-worker, but who knows, maybe they know each other. Then again it’s also not clear that Person 3 is herself a sex worker, and if she’s not, how does she have the right to decide if something is sex worker phobic? How does anyone? Is whoever put the trigger warning at the top of Magdalen Berns’s reply a sex worker? Do we know that? Is the EU Feminist Society a sex worker? How does the EU FS get to decide if something is or is not whorephobic if it’s not a sex worker? The epistemology of all this is very confusing.

  • Does the university not realize?

    Michael Eisen is pissed off at Berkeley, his university.

    On Friday, Azeen Ghorayshi posted a story about Geoffrey Marcy, a high-profile professor in UC Berkeley’s astronomy department. It reported on a a complaint filed by four women to Berkeley’s Office for the Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination (OPHD) that alleged that Marcy “repeatedly engaged in inappropriate physical behavior with students, including unwanted massages, kisses, and groping.”

    Unusually for this type of investigation, the results of which are usually kept secret, Ghorayshi’s reporting revealed that OPHD found Marcy guilty of these charges, leading to his issuing a public apology in which he, in all too typical PR driven apology speak, acknowledges doing things that “unintentionally” was “a source of distress for any of my women colleagues”.

    There’s not much to say about his actions except to say that they are despicable, predatory, destructive and all too typical. It defies even the most extreme sense of credulity to believe that he thought what he was doing was appropriate.

    Welllll, except that people are so good at thinking what they are doing is appropriate even when no one else in the universe would think the same.

    But, unlike so many other cases of alleged harassment that go unreported, or end in a haze of accusations and denials, the system worked in this case. An investigation was carried out, the charges were substantiated, the bravery of the women who came forward was vindicated, and Marcy was removed from the position of authority he had been abusing.

    WAIT WHAT? He got a firm talking to and promised never to do it again????? THAT’S IT???

    It won’t do, Eisen points out. Not even a little bit.

    It is simply incomprehensible that Marcy was not sanctioned in any way and that, were it not for Ghorayshi’s work we wouldn’t even know anything about this. How on Earth can this be true? Does the university not realize they are giving other people in a position of power a license to engage in harassment and abusive behavior? Do they think that the threat of having to say “oops, I won’t do that again” is going to stop anyone? Do they think anyone is going to file complaints about sexual harassment or abuse and go through what everyone described as an awful, awful process, so that their abuser will get a faint slap on the wrist? Do they care at all?

    He concludes that they don’t.

    Then he talks about a state-mandated online course on sexual harassment he’d just taken and how bad it is, with an example. The example is about…a male professor whose female graduate student just won’t stop asking him out.

    What’s his name? Dr Randy Risktaker.

    I swear, I’m not making it up. Look for yourself.

  • Learn to spot the facetious

    So there are people who actually think it’s a serious mark against Julie Bindel that she said in an interview last month:

    I mean, I would actually put [men] all in some kind of camp where they can all drive around in quad bikes, or bicycles, or white vans.

    Oh come on. Really? That’s obviously not a serious statement.

    Let’s look at it in context. The interview is with radfem collective, so she’s talking to fellow radical feminists – not “radical feminists”as in the hostile stereotype, but radical feminists as in feminists who think we need to get to the root of things. They asked her:

    will heterosexuality survive women’s liberation?

    And she replied:

    It won’t, not unless men get their act together, have their power taken from them and behave themselves. I mean, I would actually put them all in some kind of camp where they can all drive around in quad bikes, or bicycles, or white vans. I would give them a choice of vehicles to drive around with, give them no porn, they wouldn’t be able to fight – we would have wardens, of course! Women who want to see their sons or male loved ones would be able to go and visit, or take them out like a library book, and then bring them back.

    Does anyone really need to be told she’s not talking literally there?

    Yes, anyone does, because people are including that in the list of Reasons Bindel Must Be Shunned From Everything Forever. A commenter here took it seriously.

    And far-right hate-mongers take it seriously. Google came up with an all-far-right list for me. Eagle Rising for instance:

    Julie Bindel is an English writer, feminist and co-founder of the group Justice for Women, Her primary areas of interest are lesbian rights, opposition to the sex industry, modern anti-trafficking campaigns and defending female victims of domestic violence. . . . As a lesbian, she has shared her views and been quoted regarding sexual identity and sexual orientation issues and refers to herself as a political lesbian feminist.

    Bindel is anti-men and anti-heterosexuality. While the war on women is a myth concocted by liberals to get women to vote for Democrats, there is a real ideological war against men, and Bindel is a perfect example of one of its militant soldiers.

    In an interview with the website radfem collective, “Bindel says that she would ‘put … all [men] in some kind of camp where they can all drive around in quad bikes, or bicycles, or white vans’…

     

    It’s appropriate, in a way, that the No Platformers are aligned with the far right. They think they’re progressive as fuck, but alas, they’re not.

  • Islamist voices

    So Ariana Huffington and the Huffington Post empire are promoting Islamism via their new website, from what the Independent says:

    The refusal of Western news organisations to involve Islamist voices in the debate on the future of the Middle East is acting as a recruitment driver for Isis and al-Qaeda, one of the region’s leading media figures has claimed. The accusation that global news groups are “pushing people to become extremists” was made last week to The IoS by Wadah Khanfar, the former managing director of the Al Jazeera network.

    Mr Khanfar is Arianna Huffington’s partner in the new Huffpost Arabi website, which has been embroiled in controversy since it launched eight weeks ago. Critics have denounced the site for giving a platform to extremists and allowing them to voice comments criticising gays, atheists, and the practice of taking selfies.

    If that’s true, what on earth is Ariana Huffington playing at? Aren’t there enough sites giving platforms to theocrats who hate atheists and gays and by the way women?

    Khanfar says Huffpost Arabi isn’t just more pesky secular liberal thought translated into Arabic. It’s better than that.

    He accused Western news media of failing to understand the complexities of Islamism. “Political Islam is a phenomenon that is about 100 years old – it started after the First World War. The phenomenon evolved and transformed in many ways,” he said. “It became part of the politics of the region and is not outside the politics of the region. You need to deal with all the components of the region and isolating one segment means imbalance in the solution you are introducing.”

    Oh? So by the same token the Independent and the Guardian should be publishing opinion pieces by fascists, sex traffickers, doctors who practice FGM?

    No. News organizations are allowed to choose among voices.

  • Stepford students

    Julie Bindel in the Sunday Times:

    I have been “no platformed” on and off by the various factions of the National Union of Students (NUS) since 2009. My crime? In 2004 I wrote a column in a national newspaper about the case of Kimberley Nixon, a male-to-female transsexual who had sued Vancouver Rape Relief, a feminist support service, after it declined to take her on as a counsellor for rape victims. In the article I made facetious comments about Nixon, and immediately came under fire for my alleged “transphobia”.

    I have since apologised for the tone of my article. But no matter, the piece from 2004 has followed me around ever since, with a small cabal picketing and disrupting my presentations on rape, trafficking and prostitution, child sexual abuse and domestic violence.

    Because that’s what most needs to happen – powerful feminist voices need to be silenced because we perceive them as wrong on one particular issue. We have so many powerful feminist voices that we can afford to silence them that readily and that persistently.

    In 2008 I was shortlisted for a journalist of the year award by Stonewall, the gay rights charity. I was harassed by a baying mob of trans people and their supporters on my arrival at the event. In 2009, the NUS lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender committee voted to “no-platform” me, an honour usually reserved for fascists and former dictators. The motion, which listed a number of phobias I am accused of possessing, such as Islamophobia (I believe the full-face veil to be a symbol of oppression) and transphobia, ended with the statement: “Julie Bindle [sic] is vile.”

    It’s all or nothing. (It’s yes or no.) If you don’t recite all the correct platitudes in the right order with the approved spellings, you become an enemy of the people and Vile.

    I have been physically attacked while on stage talking about sexual violence towards women; and was forced to withdraw from a debate at Manchester University two years ago after death and rape threats. I am called a bigot, a fascist, regularly compared (unfavourably) to Hitler, and am told I am responsible for the deaths of hundreds of trans women.

    A few months ago I might have thought that last item was hyperbole, but now I know very well it’s not, because I’ve seen the same claim made about me.

    This latest Stepford Student saga can look, to the uninitiated, as if feminists are banning other feminists from debating contentious issues. But increasingly women’s officers in universities have little to do with feminism.

    As a result of the witch-hunt against me I have received emails from students, transgender folk and others who feel silenced and disgusted at the McCarthyite tactics being increasingly used in place of rational debate.

    Last year I was invited to Essex University to debate with a former pornography producer. This man had given awards to pornographers responsible for some sick material based on men’s rape fantasies. But I was the one picketed and shouted at by a group of students, demanding I be removed from the premises for my “dangerous transphobia”, while the porn producer was left alone.

    This arrangement has got to change.

  • Missing the point of Rosie the Riveter

  • Ratchet warning

    One National Review – 4chan laughingstock of the week is a “language awareness campaign” at Western University in London, Ontario. It’s a Facebook campaign, the kind with people posing next to sound bites, which frankly makes the whole idea look sillier than it has to. Not all its points are obviously absurd, but they look solemn and self-important in that format, so it’s no wonder that National Review and 4chan are pointing and laughing.

    Some of its points are silly though.

    Like this one:

    I don’t say “White washed” because it presumes “Whiteness” as tied to a certain set of behaviors.

    No, it doesn’t, any more than washing white shirts to get them clean does.

    Or this one:

    I don’t call people “gingers” because a unique hair colour does not make one inferior.

    But “ginger” isn’t always a pejorative. It’s one of those liminal words – it can be used as a taunt but it can also be just a nickname or a colloquialism.

    And some are just…wut?

    I don’t say “ratchet” because it is racist, classist, and sexist.

    And then…come on.

    I don’t say “that is so ‘depressing’” because depression is a legitimate mental illness that should not be taken lightly.

    Well yes, so you also can’t say “that is so sad,” because sadness is sad; you can’t say “that is infuriating” because fury is a legitimate emotion that should not be taken lightly; you can’t say anything emotive at all, because it’s all so desperately serious – oh wait I take back “desperately” and “serious”…

  • Lifelong learning

    A post at A Mighty Girl on Facebook:

    At Leaders Vision Preparatory School in Ndalat, Kenya, one student stands out from the rest — 90-year-old Priscilla Sitienei! The nonagenarian, who attends school alongside six of her great-great-grandchildren, is believed to be the oldest primary school student in the world. Although she never had an opportunity to learn to read and write as a child, Sitienei now hopes that her example will inspire the children of her community to understand just how valuable education is.

    Affectionately known as Gogo, which means “grandmother” in the local Kalenjin language, Sitienei has been a midwife for 65 years and she even delivered several of her 10 to 14-year-old classmates. When she first applied to the school, they refused her admission until they realized how committed she was to getting an education. Five years after she began studying, Headmaster David Kinyanjui says “I’m very proud of her. Gogo has been a blessing to this school, she has been a motivator to all the pupils. She is loved by every pupil, they all want to learn and play with her.”

    Now a class prefect, Sitienei participates in all of the classes, including math, English, PE, dance, drama, and singing. And, she also teaches her fellow students about local customs and traditions. Expectant mothers still seek her out and she assists with deliveries when needed. Part of her motivation for reading and writing is to pass on her midwife expertise and her knowledge of herbal medicine to further generations.

    Earlier this year, Sitienei told BBC News that she will confront children she sees who have left school and ask why. “Too many older children are not in school… I see children who are lost, children who are without fathers, just going round and round, hopeless. I want to inspire them to go to school.” she explained. “They tell me they are too old. I tell them, ‘Well I am at school and so should you.’” She hopes that her example will also inspire children around the world: “I want to say to the children of the world, especially girls, that education will be your wealth, don’t look back and run to your father. With education you can be whatever you want.”

  • Joyfully waving a Confederate flag

    Obama went to Roseburg, Oregon yesterday to meet with some of the people mourning the victims of the shooting there.

    President Obama, visiting a city Friday where emotions are still raw from last week’s shooting massacre, was alternately berated by hundreds of demonstrators and warmly embraced by many survivors of the victims.

    The president met privately for about an hour with about 40 people, including survivors of at least three of the nine dead, and made only a short public statement afterward. Many in the community have said they were angered by his pro-gun-control remarks hours after the shooting at Umpqua Community College.

    Imagine the students and teacher killed at Umpqua Community College had been blown up by a bomb instead of shot with guns. I wonder if many in the community would have said they were angered by his remarks condemning terrorist bombing hours later.

    The shooter at Umpqua Community College was able to do what he did because it’s so easy to get guns and ammunition here. Why be angry at Obama for saying so?

    “I’ve got some very strong feelings about this, because when you talk to these families, you’re reminded that this could be happening to your child, or your mom, or your dad, or your relative or your friend,” Obama somberly told reporters after meeting with survivors at Roseburg High School. “And so we’re going to have to come together as a country to see how we can prevent these issues from taking place. “

    Remember Charleston? Remember the extraordinary people who were killed there? By another guy who had been able to get a lot of guns and ammunition with no trouble? That was just a few weeks ago.

    One woman, leaving the high school after meeting the president, refused to stop for an interview. But she said emphatically, “It wasn’t a discussion, it was a hug.”

    She was likely referring to the noisy discussion taking place at the airport – where he helicoptered in from Eugene – and outside the high school, where most of the demonstrators made it clear that they didn’t welcome him to Roseburg.

    “Just by being here, he politicizes” the shooting deaths, said Chuck Cooper, a retired homebuilder from Oakland, Oregon, arguing that the president’s goal was not to console victims but to build support for new restrictions on guns.

    See that’s just completely inane. It presents the goal of restricting guns as somehow starkly unrelated to the agony of the victims. It presents Obama’s desire to make guns less easy to get as a sinister, “political,” self-serving goal that’s opposed to his purported goal of consoling people who need consoling because their loved ones were murdered by means of easy to get guns. There’s no opposition here, no lack of relation – the two are the same issue. Easy access to guns makes it way too easy to murder people. There’s nothing else like them for that. Knives are much more up close and personal, and risky to the would-be murderer. Poison is no use for those times you want to murder a whole roomful of people in a hurry. With a gun, you can stand at a safe distance and kill people before they can grab your arm or knock your legs out from under you. Easy access to guns is not a social good, because a high rate of murder is not a social good. This isn’t some sinister random “politicizing” move, it’s the reality.

    A large banner, “Obama Go Home,” was hung at the entrance to the airport, and signs berated his stands on guns while others praised the local sheriff, John Hanlin, for his past insistence that he wouldn’t enforce gun restrictions he regarded as unconstitutional.

    At one point, a truck raced past the airport crowd as a young man leaned out the window joyfully waving a Confederate flag.

    A fan of Dylann Roof, no doubt.

  • He has been given clear expectations

    Why does this sound so familiar…?

    Azeen Ghorayshi at BuzzFeed reports:

    One of the world’s leading astronomers has become embroiled in an increasingly public controversy over sexual harassment.

    After a six-month investigation, Geoff Marcy — a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who has been mentioned as a potential Nobel laureate — was found to have violated campus sexual harassment policies between 2001 and 2010. Four women alleged that Marcy repeatedly engaged in inappropriate physical behavior with students, including unwanted massages, kisses, and groping.

    As a result of the findings, the women were informed, Marcy has been given “clear expectations concerning his future interactions with students,” which he must follow or risk “sanctions that could include suspension or dismissal.”

    As word has spread that Marcy was not more severely disciplined, some fellow astronomers have begun speaking out about his behavior, asking for stronger sanctions and even telling him that he is not welcome at his field’s biggest annual gathering. On Wednesday evening, Marcy posted an apology letter on his faculty page.

    A very inadequate apology.

    David Charbonneau, a professor of astronomy at Harvard University, said the matter has broad implications.

    “Geoff Marcy is undeniably the most prominent exoplanet researcher in the U.S.,” he said, referring to the study of planets beyond our solar system. “The stakes here couldn’t be higher. We are working so hard to have gender parity in this field, and when the most prominent person is a routine harasser, it threatens a major objective nationally.”

    Exactly. This is why Tim Hunt’s “jokes” were such a bad idea: because things like that turn women away, so there goes your hard work for gender parity.

    “After all of this effort and trying to go through the proper channels, Berkeley has ultimately come up with no response,” said Joan Schmelz, who until recently led the American Astronomical Society’s Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy. (Schmelz was not a complainant in Berkeley’s investigation.) “I’ve seen sexual harassers get slaps on the wrist before. This isn’t even a slap on the wrist.”

    Famous guys don’t get their wrists slapped.

    Harvard astronomy professor John Asher Johnson was a graduate student in Marcy’s lab from 2000 to 2007. During his first few years in the lab, Johnson told BuzzFeed News, he directly witnessed Marcy giving an undergraduate a back massage, with his hand underneath her shirt, alone and after hours in the lab.

    Marcy, through his lawyer, denied this incident.

    “What’s really infuriating about this is that anybody of my generation in the field of exoplanets knows that Geoff does this,” Johnson said. “Everybody is so afraid of doing anything about it that they are afraid of speaking out, but everybody knows it.”

    Read the whole piece: it has a lot of detail.

    It’s such a thing. Everybody knew about Cosby. Everybody knew about Shermer. Everybody knew about this guy. They were all too big to tackle.

  • Guest post: The world is broader than just your nation

    Originally a comment by Holms on “White Feminism”

    I’m noticing a trend here. Apparently, it’s bad when activists campaigning against [X] social ill to fail to consider the intersection of [X] with [being black in America], i.e. it’s bad for a [feminist] to fail to consider [black feminism in America]. The fact that [X] is being fought in another nation doesn’t seem to change this; it all needs to consider the social climate in America.

    I first noticed this years ago when an Australian KFC ad was running. As you may or may not know, Australia is a major cricketing nation, and as Americans probably don’t know, cricket is very international. The teams that have what is called ‘test status’ (basically meaning the best of the national teams) are:

    Australia

    England

    New Zealand

    Pakistan

    India

    Bangladesh

    Sri Lanka

    West Indies (a bunch of Caribbean nations grouped together to field a single combined team)

    South Africa

    Zimbabwe

    Notice that most of the teams come from nations that are not white? In fact the predominantly white teams are outnumbered by African / south asian. This means more often than not, an international cricket match will have at least one non-white team participating.

    So, on to the ad I mentioned:

    This ad is entirely reasonable. One of the teams involved is Australia of course, because it ran in Australia; the other team is the West Indies because there was an Australia / West Indies match coming soon; and as mentioned, most matches will involve at least one non-white team anyway. A lone Australian fan is surrounded by Windies fans, that’s a bit awkward, let’s fix that awkwardness by sharing food. The Australian fan is white because Australia is predominantly white, the Windies fans are black equivalently, and the food being shared is fried chicken because the company that made the ad is KFC.

    Nothing out of the ordinary there aside from contrived acting, but apparently ads running anywhere in the world need to have American social issues in mind at all times (including racist stereotypes that don’t exist outside of America).

    American activists, you may be doing good work on American issues, but please pull your fucking head out of your arse, the world is broader than just your nation.

  • Not the worst wave ever

    Penny White has a shout-out to those pesky second-wave feminists everyone hates so much.

    Second wave feminists fought to make marital rape a crime and won. They fought for tougher domestic violence laws and for state funding for shelters where women could go to escape violent partners. They fought for the passing of rape shield laws, which protect rape victims from the cruelest form of slut-shaming: being cross-examined on the witness stand about their sexual histories. They fought to define and enforce sexual harassment laws, which gave women the tools to fight harassment at work and in school. Title IX, a federal law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in any federally funded education program; Title X, a federal grant program dedicated to providing low income women with family planning services; and Roe v Wade all came to pass under their watch.

    …

    The activists of feminism’s second wave transformed our culture into a bigger, safer, and freer space for women than I had ever dreamed possible.

    As one of millions of survivors who were saved by this movement, I am stunned and heartbroken when young women who have reaped so many benefits from the second wave dismiss key components of their elders’ hard work as “carceral” and/or “sex-negative.”

    They don’t understand about the benefits because they don’t grasp what it was like without them. They take the benefits for granted, while taking the perceived shortcomings as conclusive signs of systemic badness.

    These individuals stand in opposition to “carceral feminists” such as U.S. Representative Gwen Moore, who bravely stood before her colleagues in Congress and told her devastating story of living through child molestation, rape, and battering. She revealed these horrors, publicly, in order to support the passage of the “carceral” Violence Against Women Act. The bill was opposed not only by anti-carceral feminists, but by conservative groups such as the Family Research Council, the Eagle Forum, the US Council of Bishops, and Concerned Women For America — all of whom claimed that VAWA was a feminist attack on family values.

    Despite apparent political commonalities, those opposed to so-called “carceral feminism,” because of their pro-sex work stance, actually have more in common with libertarians than they do with traditional conservative Republicans. Libertarians, like “sex-positive” feminists, view prostitution as the voluntary sale of goods, with women being the “goods” in question. Since you cannot sell or rent anything you do not own, when a woman rents out her bodily orifices, she is “claiming ownership” of her body.

    Is that a real argument? I’m not familiar with it. If it is…I’m gobsmacked.

    A few months ago I watched an anti-carceral/pro-sex work feminist on MSNBC defend the inherent harmlessness of prostitution. This woman has a doctorate in Hollywood romcoms (I’m not kidding) but seems to have mistook Pretty Woman for a documentary. She opposed the Nordic model, which decriminalizes prostituted women but criminalizes their exploitation by pimps and johns. Feminists like her oppose the Nordic model even though it has led to a 50 per cent decrease of sex trafficking in Sweden. And in Norway, where the Nordic Model was also adopted, rape and physical violence against prostituted women has been cut by half, and emergency room visits by the prostituted has been cut by 70 per cent.  (This is based on research done by ProSentret, a Norwegian pro-legalization group). And as always happens with the Nordic model, sex trafficking in Norway has rapidly declined. By contrast, the decriminalization of pimps and johns, has led to an explosion of sex trafficking in countries like Germany, Finland, and the Netherlands, with no corresponding reduction of violence against prostituted women. Tragically, pro-sex industry/anti-carceral feminists refuse to allow concern for trafficking victims to get in the way of their enthusiasm for “sex work.” Depressing statistics and the shared experiences of trafficking victims are spoiling the fun for those who benefit from the industry.

    Just as the fossil fuel industry attacks those who speak out on climate change, the multi-billion dollar sex industry attacks those who speak out against sex trafficking. Author and activist, Rachel Moran, recently made public her horrific experiences as a prostitution survivor, only to be “defamed, slandered, threatened, physically confronted and screamed at” by the pro-legalization lobby. As Moran stated, “I’ve had my home address, bank details and personal email circulated amongst some of the most seemingly unhinged people, who have tweeted me portions of my home address in a clear we-know-where-to-find-you style threat.” The silencing tactics used by pro-sex industry activists are strikingly similar to those used by MRAs (who also support decriminalizing pimps and johns).

    And some other kinds of “activists” I can think of.

    It’s all pretty unhealthy, if you ask me.

  • When she tried to escape

    If Allah is merciful…why are foreign servants treated so horribly in Saudi Arabia? Why doesn’t Allah’s mercy make all Saudis kind and compassionate?

    An Indian servant was trying to leave her employer’s house, so the employer allegedly cut off her arm.

    India’s foreign ministry has complained to the Saudi Arabian authorities following an alleged “brutal” attack on a 58-year-old Indian woman in Riyadh.

    Kasturi Munirathinam’s right arm was chopped off, allegedly by her employer, when she tried to escape from their house last week, reports say.

    Ms Munirathinam was working as a domestic help. She is recovering in hospital.

    She’s not recovering her arm though. That’s gone.

    The family of Ms Munirathinam in the southern Indian city of Chennai said that her employers had been “angered” after she complained about the “harassment” she was facing at her employer’s home, where she had begun working three months ago.

    …

    “Ever since she went to work with this family in July, things were not alright. My mother was not even allowed to speak to us over the phone, she was not given proper food and was forced to work long hours,” her son S Kumar told BBC Hindi.

    “When she tried to escape the harassment and torture, her right arm was chopped off by the woman employer. Now my sister can’t even sit and do simple things on her own, as her spinal cord has also been injured,” her sister S Vijayakumari added.

    Ms Vijayakumari said her sister had been hospitalised in Riyadh and was “in a serious condition”, adding that although they were relieved she was getting proper medical attention, they were unable to afford the expenses.

    Maybe she burned the potatoes.

     

  • Another impossibly high bar

    Rosamund Urwin in The Evening Standard:

    On Wednesday night, Suffragette opened the BFI London Film Festival. Along with the film’s stars, Carey Mulligan, Helena Bonham Carter and Meryl Streep, Sisters Uncut campaigners had their moment on the red carpet. They let off green-and-purple smoke bombs and staged a lie-in, protesting about government cuts to domestic violence services.

    …

    But while the feminist fire is burning bright, the flames are sometimes scorching other feminists. The Suffragette cast was understandably supportive of Sisters Uncut (“Marvellous” was Bonham Carter’s verdict: “That is exactly what the suffragettes were about”) but the protesters were less enamoured about the film. Writing for Independent Voices yesterday, Sarah Kwei, a member of Sisters Uncut, said she felt women of colour had been shut out of the story: “Where was Sophia Duleep Singh and her Indian sisters, who led the Black Friday deputation to the Houses of Parliament in 1910?”

    Singh was an Indian Princess as well as Queen Victoria’s god-daughter who risked everything campaigning for female suffrage. “She was royalty yet one step away from being destitute,” says BBC presenter Anita Anand, who wrote a biography, Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary. Anand notes that Singh has been “made invisible by time” in that common way female experience is scrubbed out of history.

    So when someone does make a movie about women’s history, let’s tear it to shreds for not covering everything, rather than saying great and now let’s have movies about this and this and this.

    However, the makers of Suffragette had deliberately chosen to focus on working-class women because their stories have also been under-told. That’s why Streep’s Emmeline Pankhurst is only a cameo  part and Mulligan’s laundrywoman Maud is the star. When I interviewed Mulligan for this month’s Elle, she was only too aware that feminism’s foot-soldiers had been historically side-lined and these were women who suffered disproportionately: “The sacrifice was greater for women who had far less.”

    If the movie had focused on Sophia Duleep Singh, no doubt the critics would have been asking where the hell are the working class women.

    Understanding of intersectionality is vital for feminism, as is debate and criticism. But there’s a pattern emerging where women who do something feminist get written off for being imperfectly feminist. But feminism is supposed to empower women, not tell them they’re failing to reach another impossibly high bar.

    Spoken like a true White Feminist.

  • We are labelled prudes and “pearl clutchers”

    Julie Bindel points out the undeniable: that the endless campaign to no-platform mouthy women is an anti-feminist move.

    Lies and smears against radical feminists and allies who name male violence as the key way in which we are oppressed are nothing new. We are labelled prudes and “pearl clutchers”, slurs previously bandied about by men defending their right to rape.

    At a talk I did earlier this year on feminism, several students turned up to hear me, with one telling me a heartbreaking story about being cast out by her feminist group because she was a “terf” (trans exclusionary radical feminist) and a “swerf” (sex worker exclusionary radical feminist). Her crime had been to circulate an article I had written about the disgracefully low conviction rate for rape in the UK.

    No pretext is too small.

    Another emailed me recently explaining how she had been at the meeting at a London university that decided to “no platform” me from a debate on whether or not prostitution is harmful to women.

    When several of the female students said they wanted to hear the debate, the white, male leader of that society started shouting that they were all “transphobes” and “whorephobes” for supporting me, so everyone shut up. I don’t blame them. I have had 11 years of this hostility because of one article I wrote, and they do not want the same treatment.

    Been there. Alex Gabriel, Jason Thibeault, HJ Hornbeck, James Billingham – some of the white males who led the campaign to ostracize me. This is a pattern.

    Another student told me she was banned from her feminist society because the flyers she distributed outlining the threat to women’s reproductive rights referred to “women” rather than ‘“womb bearers”, which was deemed transphobic.

    Someone commented on a Facebook post of Julie’s to tell that story or a very similar one, and gave me permission to quote it here:

    My crime was distributing flyers at my campus for a pro choice action rally against anti abortion nutters harassing women at the abortion clinic (”trans exclusionary”) to add insult to injury, I didn’t put a penis symbol on the feminist emblem, and the flyers referred to reproductive rights as applying to ‘women’ rather than ‘womb bearers’. I’ve since been blacklisted as a ”terf” and apparently I am responsible for all the hate crimes committed against transwomen in the whole world, because of these flyers.

    It’s “trans exclusionary” to talk about issues that affect women as issues that affect women. That’s a problem.

    Any feminism that names men and men’s violence as the problem is being shut down. The liberal, queer-identifying feminists that celebrate SlutWalk, pornography and “sex work” do not get no platformed. They are simply not a threat to men, and therefore the increasing numbers of men who are leading the troops into no platforming hell are appeased by them.

    Saying No Platform to Julie Bindel but not (until later, under pressure) to Milo Yiannopoulos is the clincher.

    Here is proof that this is an anti-feminist crusade, and nothing at all about so called safe spaces.

    We have always been at war with feminism.