Feminism for women
It is more than forty years since seventeen-year-old Julie Bindel came out as a lesbian and signed up as a feminist, the two threads that have run sort of a double helix through her particular and professional lives. Since the late 1970s, she has been a researcher, reporter and advocate for women around the world, with a specific specialise in those that are the victims of manly violence. Bindel may be a stager of the eighties feminist juggernauts against pornography, co-founder of Justice for women, which works for women condemned of boggling their violent mates, and an advocate for women and girls around the world who have been raped, trafficked and prostituted.
The use of the word “ harlotry” then’s pivotal to Bindel, who bridles at the way that the term has been superseded by “ coitus work”. Although it sounds less hypercritical, she argues that this verbal whitewashing serves to erase the material conditions the poverty, racism, the habitual health inequality that forces women into renting their bodies infrequently dangerous and demeaning circumstances. It is, in short, to apply a neoliberal gloss, with its charming language of “ choice”, to a situation that is all about compulsion.
For Bindel, this repackaging may be a symptom of the way that liberation feminism (alternate-surge feminism, the type on which she cut her teeth within the early 80s) has been eroded since the 90s by equivalency feminism. Equality feminism is request-driven, exorbitantly concerned with what chance women are on the boards of FTSE companies and complacent about the risks that women still face at the hands of men.
One of her most annoying examples concerns the normalisation of sexual violence quite a third of the united kingdom women under forty have experienced unwanted choking, slapping and gagging during consensual sex. Hardly a coincidence then, that there has been a marked increase within the “ rough sex” defence employed by men to urge away with murder. All too often, Bindel argues, equality feminism may be a cloak for the desires and interests of men.
Bindel is not a chic writer, on the other hand, these are not elegant matters. She uses statistics, interviews and her own experience to produce an account of how she believes that advances made in women’s lives over the once forty times are being rolled back. What use, she asks, is “ commission” in a Britain where such a low chance of reported rapes affect a conviction? And how is it anything away from deeply damaging, literally shaming, that young teenagers study sex through pornography on their phones?
There is, of course, something different, something further. Over the once many times Bindel has become a controversial figure, often-platformed, wrangle at both on social media and within the road. The wrathfulness may be a response substantially to her asseveration that there’s a cloth base to the sexual difference that can not be cancelled. Or, to put it another way, she doesn’t believe that what she calls a “ feeling” can allow a man to come to a woman. How asks Bindel, are we to stop such a person causing discomfort and indeed danger in female-only spaces, including harbourages’ and prisons as well as sports halls and changing rooms? Trans people and their supporters in turn say her arguments are scaremongering, especially when set against the violence they experience every day.
Bindel is not entirely innocent of baiting the opposition, a minimum of on the evidence of this book. Calling trans activists the “ Queer Isis” as she does at one point seems like a deliberate provocation, no matter how badly she has been hurt. Yet behind this, you do sense that Bindel’s predominant feeling is that of overwhelming regret that it has come to this, with the progressive left falling out viciously rather than coming together to tackle escalating sex-based social injustice. “ Let us make a feminist movement grounded in solidarity,” she writes, “ as opposed to conflict and sectarianism.” On this, it is hard to disagree.
SOURCE
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/oct/06/feminism-for-women-by-julie-bindel-review-equality-is-not-enough
The use of the word “ harlotry” then’s pivotal to Bindel, who bridles at the way that the term has been superseded by “ coitus work”. Although it sounds less hypercritical, she argues that this verbal whitewashing serves to erase the material conditions the poverty, racism, the habitual health inequality that forces women into renting their bodies infrequently dangerous and demeaning circumstances. It is, in short, to apply a neoliberal gloss, with its charming language of “ choice”, to a situation that is all about compulsion.
For Bindel, this repackaging may be a symptom of the way that liberation feminism (alternate-surge feminism, the type on which she cut her teeth within the early 80s) has been eroded since the 90s by equivalency feminism. Equality feminism is request-driven, exorbitantly concerned with what chance women are on the boards of FTSE companies and complacent about the risks that women still face at the hands of men.
One of her most annoying examples concerns the normalisation of sexual violence quite a third of the united kingdom women under forty have experienced unwanted choking, slapping and gagging during consensual sex. Hardly a coincidence then, that there has been a marked increase within the “ rough sex” defence employed by men to urge away with murder. All too often, Bindel argues, equality feminism may be a cloak for the desires and interests of men.
Bindel is not a chic writer, on the other hand, these are not elegant matters. She uses statistics, interviews and her own experience to produce an account of how she believes that advances made in women’s lives over the once forty times are being rolled back. What use, she asks, is “ commission” in a Britain where such a low chance of reported rapes affect a conviction? And how is it anything away from deeply damaging, literally shaming, that young teenagers study sex through pornography on their phones?
There is, of course, something different, something further. Over the once many times Bindel has become a controversial figure, often-platformed, wrangle at both on social media and within the road. The wrathfulness may be a response substantially to her asseveration that there’s a cloth base to the sexual difference that can not be cancelled. Or, to put it another way, she doesn’t believe that what she calls a “ feeling” can allow a man to come to a woman. How asks Bindel, are we to stop such a person causing discomfort and indeed danger in female-only spaces, including harbourages’ and prisons as well as sports halls and changing rooms? Trans people and their supporters in turn say her arguments are scaremongering, especially when set against the violence they experience every day.
Bindel is not entirely innocent of baiting the opposition, a minimum of on the evidence of this book. Calling trans activists the “ Queer Isis” as she does at one point seems like a deliberate provocation, no matter how badly she has been hurt. Yet behind this, you do sense that Bindel’s predominant feeling is that of overwhelming regret that it has come to this, with the progressive left falling out viciously rather than coming together to tackle escalating sex-based social injustice. “ Let us make a feminist movement grounded in solidarity,” she writes, “ as opposed to conflict and sectarianism.” On this, it is hard to disagree.
SOURCE
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/oct/06/feminism-for-women-by-julie-bindel-review-equality-is-not-enough