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.

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.

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.

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.

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”…

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A 2008 study also found the double standard about anger in women as opposed to men.

The abstract:

Three studies examined the relationships among anger, gender, and status conferral. As in prior research, men who expressed anger in a professional context were conferred higher status than men who expressed sadness. However, both male and female evaluators conferred lower status on angry female professionals than on angry male professionals. This was the case regardless of the actual occupational rank of the target, such that both a female trainee and a female CEO were given lower status if they expressed anger than if they did not. Whereas women’s emotional reactions were attributed to internal characteristics (e.g., “she is an angry person,” “she is out of control”), men’s emotional reactions were attributed to external circumstances. Providing an external attribution for the target person’s anger eliminated the gender bias. Theoretical implications and practical applications are discussed.

Fundamental attribution error all over again innit, but here in respect to women v men rather than self v other.

I wonder if this is part of the reason feminism is so generally hated, even by women, even by feminists. Mostly it’s because women are so generally hated, even by women, even by feminists, and that is obviously intimately connected to this double standard, as both cause and effect…but I wonder if it’s also a significant part of the hidden motivation for categories like “White Feminism” and “TERF.”

Because obviously feminism is all about women + anger. Feminism is women saying No, women refusing, women rebelling (yes rebelling), women fighting back, women resisting, women getting angry. If we all have a deep unconscious aversion to anger in women…

…well the problem is obvious.

A study confirms what everybody already knew: women can’t win.

Angry men are strong and forceful, while angry women are often dismissed as overly emotional. That double standard has been alleged for years now, with plenty of anecdotal evidence to back it up.

A newly published study featuring a mock jury not only supports that assertion: It takes it a step further, suggesting women’s anger may actually be counterproductive. It finds that, while men who express anger are more likely to influence their peers, the opposite is true for women.

Well that’s annoying.

Oh dear, I just made it worse.

“Our results lend scientific support to a frequent claim voiced by women, sometimes dismissed as paranoia,” conclude psychologists Jessica Salerno of Arizona State University and Liana Peter-Hagene of the University of Illinois–Chicago. They suggest the belief “that people would have listened to her impassioned argument, had she been a man” is, in many cases, valid.

They did a study via a mock-trial experiment on computer screens. There was one holdout on the jury, who spoke neutrally or with fear or with anger. The holdout could be male or female.

“Participants became more confident in their own opinion after learning they were in the majority,” the researchers report. “But (they) then started doubting their own opinion significantly after the male holdout expressed anger.”

In contrast, “when a female holdout expressed anger, participants became significantly more confident in their own opinion over the course of deliberation.”

This dynamic—which held true for both male and female participants—meant that “men were able to exert more social pressure by expressing anger,” whereas women actually lost influence when they did the same thing.

Huh. So I’ve been writing this often-irritated blog for more than 14 years now, losing influence all the time. Seems a bit futile, doesn’t it.

Katie Bamber of Liberty notes the relationship between universal human rights and women’s rights, via Suffragette.

It’s been said countless times, but it bears ceaseless repeating, that we owe so much to those brave women. Many of them, names long forgotten, were working-class foot soldiers – like Maud – who suffered social exclusion, destitution, lost their incomes and their families, for the cause. Others, most famously Emily Wilding Davison, paid the ultimate price.

Forget all that, the important thing is to attack them for not being 21st century anti-racism campaigners.

A century on, we’re still far from true parity. Gender injustice remains the most entrenched on our planet. Even here in the UK, it’s so embedded in our day-to-day existence that it becomes white noise and we stop seeing it.

Just this week we’ve heard that female MPs have been put on a rota to walk around the Conservative conference with the Prime Minister – perhaps to disguise the fact that a pitiful 68 of the party’s 330 MPs are women. That Suffragette’s selection for the London Film Festival’s gala screening made headlines because of the novelty of its all-female director-writer team shows how far we have to go.

Its all female director-writer team? Don’t you mean all cis female director-writer team? If it were an all trans female director-writer team then we could celebrate.

The progression of universal human rights law is our best hope for achieving true gender equality around the world. A dark irony, then, that the (still overwhelmingly male) Conservative leadership are on the brink of dismantling our Human Rights Act and, in the process, taking a monumental step backwards.

If we allow the powerful to erode the universality of human rights, the vulnerable will be hardest hit – and, as history shows, the most vulnerable are often women. Many human rights issues still disproportionately affect women: modern slavery, domestic and sexual violence, trafficking, pay inequality and lack of public representation.

But they have the immense privilege of being cis. Compared to that, everything else is insignificant.