Reason (the libertarian website) agrees with the libertarian feminists, of course. Elizabeth Nolan Brown says the usual things:

In a recent interview with Time magazine, feminist icon Gloria Steinem—currently promoting a new travel memoir—says that the biggest threat to reproductive rights today is “patriarchy… the very definition (of which) is that men control women’s bodies in order to control reproduction.”

The way johns do, for instance. But Brown isn’t having any of that, thanks.

It’s a nice sentiment—but alas, Steinem’s concept of human rights and bodily integrity only applies to certain people. Steinem has been an outspoken proponent against sex workers’ right to bodily integrity.

Over the summer, Steinem was one of a group of Hollywood celebrities and high-profile feminists condemning the human-rights group Amnesty International for its support of completely decriminalizalizing prostitution.

Or rather, decriminalizing pimps, brothel owners and johns. They favor the decriminalization of prostitutes aka sex workers. So Steinem isn’t in fact “an outspoken proponent against” (i.e. an opponent of) sex workers’ right to bodily integrity.

In 2014, Steinem said it was wrong to use the term “sex work,” a preferred term of many women who willingly work in the sex trade, because prostitution is merely “commercial rape”—a “body invasion” that is “not like any other work.” Never mind that a lot of grown women choose to be sex workers and do not experience prostitution as commercialized rape; that’s how Steinem sees it, and so pity the poor sex worker who thinks she gets to define her own experience.

But by the same token a lot of grown women and underage girls do not choose to be sex workers; they are forced into it and/or trapped in it. Which group is more likely to have various kinds of privilege that should be checked? I say it’s the group that doesn’t choose. The more options you have (and privilege amounts to more options), the less likely you are to “choose” to be a chicken-processor or a coal miner or a prostitute. The more desperate you are, the more likely you are to do jobs that you wouldn’t touch if you could survive any other way. The fact that some women think prostitution is a fabulous way to get both sex and money is not all that relevant to the desperate ones.

In Pakistan too.

A gunman on a motorbike shot dead a Pakistani journalist in the country’s restive northwest on Tuesday and hours later the Taliban claimed the killing, bringing to 71 the number of journalists and media workers killed in Pakistan since 2002.

Zaman Mehsud, 38, was a journalist working for the Pakistani Urdu newspaper Daily Umet and SANA news agency, and also worked for the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan.

A journalist and a human rights worker. Of course they killed him.

Taliban commander Qari Saif Ullah Saif told Reuters: “We killed him because he was writing against us … we have some other journalists on our hit list in the region, soon we will target them.”

The journalist’s brother Muhammed Aslam wept as he collected the body. “He left five children and a widow,” he said.

…

At least 67 journalists and media workers were killed between January 2002 and 2014, according to press freedom group Reporters Without Borders. Including Mehsud, another four have been killed this year.

All but one were Pakistanis. The killers have been convicted in only two cases — that of American Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl and that of Geo reporter Wali Babar.

Shoot the messenger.

Katha Pollitt on Germaine Greer and the fatuous attempt to no-platform her and the absurd demand that a feminist be 100% perfect (in the sense of: agrees with me in all particulars) or be banished.

She starts with the fact that Greer has always been all over the place. There’s always plenty to disagree with in what she writes and says. Nobody could agree with everything she says.

Still, when I was invited to interview her a few years ago about Shakespeare’s Wife, her biography of Anne Hathaway, I was delighted. I did not start a petition to have her invitation canceled on the grounds that anyone who approves of cutting off little girls’ clitorises has no place on a podium talking about any subject, even Elizabethan England. I thought: Here’s a woman who has lived a big life and, at 70, has written a book that tries to rescue one of history’s most famous wives from oblivion and misogyny. That’s feminism.

Also, it’s interesting. Being interesting is a virtue. Greer is interesting. Few of her detractors are.

(Do I mean none of them are? Yes, probably. But I haven’t examined them all, so I can’t be sure. On the other hand I can be pretty sure that the kind of person who thinks Greer should be shunned is not interesting. People who are interesting don’t think that way. It’s a crude way to think, and that’s not compatible with interesting thought.)

Then Katha quotes from Rachael Melhuish’s petition.

Where to begin? Violence against trans women is the fault of feminists? I doubt the brutal men who assault and murder trans women have even heard of Greer­­—or are likely to attend her proposed lecture on feminism in the 20th century (which, she says, will not touch on the subject of trans women at all). And if you believe that inviting someone to lecture on campus is an endorsement of their views—even on subjects they’re not lecturing about—it doesn’t sound as if you’re really all that keen on debate. It sounds more like you want the university to invite only people who think like yourself.

Which would be a disaster, because they would all be so unlikely to be interesting.

It’s both unfortunate and bizarre that at a moment when feminism is showing renewed signs of life, the first impulse is to narrow the conversation and throw rotten vegetables at everyone who isn’t singing 100 percent in unison. And did I mention ageism? That prejudice seems to be completely acceptable. A typical tweet: “Germaine Greer is an insane old woman. Just watched the interview, she should be in an old peoples home.”

Feminism doesn’t apply to women over 40. Once you’re past 40 you’re in the wrong wave, and you should be locked up.

In the UK, the National Union of Students has “no-platformed” (attempted to prevent from speaking anywhere) the lesbian feminist writer and activist Julie Bindel for “transphobia” stemming from a 2004 article in The Guardian in which she mocked the notion that having a sex change made someone a woman. (Although she’s apologized for the tone of that piece, it doesn’t matter: She questions the use of sex-reassignment surgery, especially for children, and that’s enough.) Transgender-rights activists argue that trans women are real women, irrespective of their physical attributes, and have always been so. But even if that view prevails, the movement has taken a wrong turn somewhere if Bindel—a decades-long campaigner for lesbian rights and against male violence toward women—is the misogynist, and the feminists include male “allies” screaming at her to shut up.

Tell me about it. All those male “allies” screaming at feminist women to shut up – screaming it in full, throbbing confidence that they’re on the Right Correct Pure side, the social justice side, the intersectional side, the fight privilege side, the listen to marginalized people side. I could compile a list of those fuckers.

Even abortion isn’t as divisive a subject as transgender rights: No one pickets a campus talk by Sister Helen Prejean because she belongs to a church that demands that raped 10-year-olds give birth. You don’t see anyone no-platforming conservatives who support cuts in government programs that devastate poor women and families, or foreign officials representing governments that deny women basic human rights. There’s a virtual standing army of prominent people—people with actual real-world power—who are more intimately connected with the subjection of women than Germaine Greer or Julie Bindel; to say nothing of the numerous people, like the classics scholar Mary Beard and the gay-rights campaigner Peter Tatchell, who have supported their campus appearances and found themselves in the same crosshairs.

Strange, isn’t it. Counter-productive. Embarrassing. Narcissism of small differences.

Guest post by Josh Spokes. An email from Consumers Union to members, and his reply.

Policy and Action from Consumer Reports

Journalism again treating violent unreasonable reactions to other people’s reasonable actions as “provoked” or “sparked” or “ignited” by the people who did nothing wrong. Charlie Hebdo “sparked” the violence that left nine of them dead; Lars Vilks “set off” outrage; Raif Badawi “triggered” his own ferocious punishment.

This one is the New York Times:

An actress from Iran has gone on the run after igniting a backlash by posting photos of herself on social media showing her not wearing a hijab…

Seriously: journalists need to be more careful with the way they write these stories. She didn’t “ignite” anything.

Sadaf Taherian began posting the controversial photos on Facebook and Instagram over the last two weeks and the response from Iranians was as swift as it was extreme. In an interview with Masih Alinejad, a journalist who runs a Facebook page called “My Stealthy Freedom,” which features photos and videos of Iranian women walking in public with their heads uncovered, Taherian reportedly said she was initially “nervous” about the reaction the images might trigger. Indeed, many Iranians lashed out at Taherian with insults and called her “immoral.”

That’s the way to say it. They lashed out at her; she didn’t do anything to them.

Then, the Iranian government piled on, officially denouncing Taherian as an “offender.” When another popular actress came to Taherian’s defense on social media, a spokesman for Iran’s ministry of culture and lslamic guidance said the two actresses would be barred from acting. “As far as this ministry is concerned, these two individuals are no longer considered to be artists any more and do not have any right to act,” said Hossein Noushabadi. The popular TV show starring Taherian was abruptly pulled from the state television network schedule.

Well, that’s “Islamic guidance” for you.

Suzanne Moore says remember who brung ya.

Everyone now is bisexual, pansexual, agender (without a gender). It’s all so wild. Miley, Cara, various models. Young people are coming out of the closet into a hall of mirrors. For this “coming out” often says my insides feel different to my outsides. Hear me roar. Welcome to the world, friends, for who does not feel like that?

Exactly. This isn’t some hot new thing, it’s just how people are. Granted it is more talked about now, but that doesn’t mean it’s a new invention.

Now that there is a new set of identities for people to pick’n’mix, it would be gracious not to erase those who lived and died with more fixed identities. This is not melodrama, this is history as power. Laurie Penny recently came out as a genderqueer feminist but she differs from many of her genderqueer friends: “I still identify politically as a woman. My identity is more complex than female or male.” This I take for granted. So why does it need to be said? Penny is extremely smart and if she wants to present as a sexual outlaw that’s fine. Try being a “butch dyke” or is that not quite radical enough?

Nah. *yawn* That’s so last year.

The current preoccupation with being on the sexual edge and yes, call me a Terf or a Swerf or my own term Smurf (Some Made-Up Radical Feminist) if you like, but I don’t just check my privilege, I check our history. Because if sex is just something you do rather than something you are, then it is way easier to play with gender. Yet it has become so muddled that every identity must be proclaimed in a hierarchy of grievance. This fragmentation, which is not intersectionality, but rather an increasingly insular discussion about cis-ness, microaggressions and trigger warnings, runs in horrific parallel to images of women being raped and killed all over the world.

Once, queer meant that one could get outside of one’s own identity. My male gay friends came on abortion marches with me. I went to Aids vigils with them. Even now I see that the fight about reproductive rights for women continues and while places such as Ireland can accept gay marriage and the decriminalisation of drugs, they still won’t decriminalise women’s bodies.

But hey, we’re just cis women, we don’t own feminism.

I saw a very bizarre remark – by a woman – on Twitter today.

Sick and tired of cis & white feminists thinking they own feminism.

Leaving aside the “white” part, the remaining claim is pretty staggering. “How dare women think feminism is about women?!”

What other oppressed class is subject to this kind of bullshit? What other oppressed class gets shouted at for thinking its own liberation movement is not “owned” by someone else?

It’s only women who are willing – in fact eager – to erase themselves this way.

Maybe that’s enough to tell me I’m not a woman after all. I’m not a fucking political masochist.

Another woman stoned to death in Afghanistan.

The men surround the woman as she stands in a hole dug into the stony ground, only her head pokes above the surface. Then they begin to pick up rocks and hurl them at her again and again from close range.

Her agonized cries grow louder as the barrage of stones intensifies.

They like that. They like her agonized screams.

The 19-year-old woman, identified as Rokhshana, had been forced to marry against her will and recently fled with another man, said Seema Joyenda, the governor of Ghor province. The couple were caught after two days, and the Taliban leader of the village ordered that Rokhshana be stoned to death for adultery, Joyenda said.

Because men own women, and women don’t own themselves, and women who rebel in any way must be killed by torture.

Attacks on women and disregard for their rights have been widely documented by international organizations in Afghanistan.

“The prevalence of violence against women and harmful practices continues to be of serious concern,” said a report in April by the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan.

A report in the same month by Amnesty Internationalraised concerns about the persecution of women’s rights activists in the country, not only by the Taliban and tribal warlords, but also by government officials.

Women aren’t supposed to have rights. Women are property; property can’t have rights.

The Economist tells me something I didn’t know: Jeremy Corbyn is an advocate of justice for Dalits.

Specifically, Mr Corbyn wants British law to prohibit discrimination on grounds of caste, a step which the government seems reluctant to take, and one which some prominent British Hindus adamantly oppose. These opponents insist that the existence of caste discrimination in Britain is unproven, and that outlawing it would be an insult to the Indian community.

Except of course for the Dalit portion of “the Indian community.”

All this matters more than ever because a political battle over the Dalit question may soon come to a head in Britain after simmering for a long time.  Arguments over whether Britain should explicitly outlaw maltreatment on grounds of caste have been in progress since at least 2010 when an Equality Act made it illegal to discriminate (in the treatment of employees and customers, or the provision of state services) on a familiar list of criteria, including race, ethnicity, religion and gender.

In its initial version, the Act said that the government “may” add caste to the catalogue of protected characteristics if the need were to become obvious. Then in April 2013, after some lively debate in both Houses of Parliament, the government reluctantly agreed to a new forms of words, spelling out that it “must” add caste to the list.

But they’re still talking about it, and dragging out the process. Mustn’t rush into these things.

Meena Varma of the Dalit Solidarity Network says she believes that Hindu lobbyists are pressing the government “at the highest level” to drop the idea of legislating against caste discrimination. On the other other hand, the list of people and bodies who still think that Britain should outlaw caste discrimination is also quite impressive; not only Mr Corbyn but Anglican bishops, some respected Liberal Democratic and Conservative peers, the National Secular Society, the Equality and Human Rights Commission and Navi Pillay, who till recently was UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

So the Labour leader is not alone in his concern for the Dalits, whether in India or Britain. But as he may soon discover, people who speak out for the wretched of the earth can get themselves called all manner of unpleasant things, from neo-colonialist to Orientalist.

Because only a neo-colonialist Orientalist would insult the Indian community by advocating the outlawing of caste discrimination. So Dalits are neo-colonialist Orientalists, so they can safely be forgotten.

Julie Bindel and Rachel Jolley were on BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking tonight talking about no-platforming and radical feminism – “not the fun kind that men love, pole dancing your way to liberation,” Julie said.

Their segment starts at 30 minutes.

Via Riasat Ahsan on Facebook:

Reporters sans frontières / Reporters Without Borders / RSF renamed the road of the Bangladeshi embassy in Paris to “RUE AVIJIT ROY” today, in honour of Avijit Roy, the first to be slain as part of a series of fatal attacks on outspoken secularists in Bangladesh this year, which still continues today.

Congratulations you “soldiers of Allah”, members of Ansarullah Bangla Team! Thanks to you, whenever people think of Bangladesh, they’ll be reminded of a brave people, voices of dissent who were so powerful, the only thing you could do to stop people from listening was to silence them forever. But alas, they speak on! They live on. Thanks to you, their voices are more powerful than ever, their books, “The Virus of Faith”, “The Philosophy of Disbelief” recognized worldwide. We are no longer in the 7th century Arab dessert my friends. Striking our necks will no longer serve to silence us. Didn’t the Quran tell you that? Just like your beliefs, your actions will be relegated to the afterlife. This, the dunya, is our world. People will remeber the names of Avijit Roy, Humayun Azad, Washiqur Rahman, Ananta Das, Niloy Neel, and all the other people you’ve killed in order to protect your flimsy beliefs from criticism, as long as they remember Bangladesh. By their names and their writings, Bangladesh will be known. Not as an Islamic State. Bangladesh will never be an Islamic State. It will NEVER be governed by Islamic Sharia’. Nor will Pakistan. And your names and your beliefs will die in the shadows of great men and women.

I hate to use the Daily Mail as a source, but every now and then I do. This story on Saturday reports that an organization called Gendered Intelligence runs workshops in a few primary schools in the UK. Very few – the Mail says “up to 20” schools a year get the workshops. Well 20 is a tiny number. Minuscule. The issue I have isn’t with the quantity but with the content.

In one class, Year Six boys at Hotspur Primary in Newcastle are asked to describe the ‘girlish’ things they like to do, while the girls say what ‘boyish’ pursuits they enjoy.

Gendered Intelligence’s founder Jay Stewart, who is giving the class, asks the pupils if they think ‘life will be hard at school if you’re a boy at school who likes doing “girlish things”?’

See that’s what’s fucked up about this – all this god damn sorting. All this artificial monopolization. Girls don’t have a monopoly on dolls, and boys don’t have a monopoly on adventure games.

Margaret Morrissey, of pressure group Parents Outloud, said four and five-year-olds were ‘far, far too young’ to receive the lessons. She added: ‘We’re in danger of frightening children and making them feel they ought to feel like this.’

Mr Stewart said: ‘It’s so important to be teaching children in schools that they can be anything that they want regardless of the gender that they have been given at birth.

‘Gendered Intelligence delivers age-appropriate workshops and assemblies by working closely with the senior leadership teams of each of the schools we work with. We are proud of this work and feedback is always incredibly positive.’

But does it? Does it teach them they can be anything that they want regardless of their sex? Or does it teach them they have to switch to a different sex if they like the “wrong” things for their own sex?

The title – Gendered Intelligence – is not very encouraging.