A feminist generation gap (and four other stories)
Five reads on gender (in)equality and the backlash against feminism to end your week.
It’s been a busy week, so let’s dive straight into the reads…
1) The problem with Gen X feminists
In a beautifully written essay, my colleague Melissa Denes discusses the generation gap between Gen X and Millennial and Gen Z feminists. She writes about the anger some older feminists harbour towards younger women for apparently taking their hard-won rights for granted. She writes:
In the limbo between leaving one job and starting another, I found myself on Twitter more than was healthy. “Mum, what are you doing?” my 15-year-old daughter would ask from across the room, to which the answer was often, if I was honest, “I don’t know.” I was tracing an argument about the “right” kind of feminism back to its origins, bemused and compelled by the meanness, the bad faith, the battle lines of likes and retweets and sometimes the simple expressions of support, dim glimmers of hope in the combat soup.
Often they weren’t even arguments but something more one-sided. A columnist tweeted that she was bored of reading younger women’s epiphanies, as if they had discovered inequality for the first time – why couldn’t they just admit that they hadn’t cared about motherhood, marriage or the menopause when such things affected only “gross” older women?
And also:
The generation gap is real. I don’t deny that my daughters reject me in a hundred subtle ways every day, and that I sometimes smile inwardly to hear younger colleagues’ certainties about how the future will be. But not knowing something yet, not having fully lived it, is not the same as hating those who have. Characterising our differences as enmity turns the generation gap into an argument for division and bad faith.
Okay, just one more:
Despising women who don’t think like you is not the price of entry to your forties.
2) UN issues warning over gender-based violence in Sudan
This week, UN officials highlighted that reports of violence against women and girls in Sudan have been increasing since fighting broke out there 11 weeks ago. According to a press release:
Since this conflict began, the UN Human Rights Office in Sudan has received credible reports of 21 incidents of conflict-related sexual violence against at least 57 women and girls. The victims include at least 10 girls. In one case, as many as 20 women were reportedly raped in the same attack.
The Unit for Combatting Violence against Women under Sudan’s Ministry of Social Development also continues to receive reports of conflict-related sexual violence. It has documented at least 42 alleged cases in the capital, Khartoum, and 46 in the Darfur region.
3) The Austrian gender wars
by this week looks at how the gender wars are playing out in Austria. He reports that the far-right Freedom Party has managed to ban “gender-inclusive constructions” from government documents in the state of Lower Austria. “Together, on the side of the Austrian people, we are successfully taking a stand against the gender LGBTQ cult,” he cites the party as saying. For grammar nerds, the newsletter goes into enjoyable detail on how gender inclusive language works in German. P.S. From the ever-volatile gender wars in the US, The Guardian reports that a former Trump administration staffer and the legal director of a group called the Women’s Liberation Front “are now partners in a Wisconsin law firm exclusively focused on anti-transgender litigation”. As per the report:
The partnership and the cases it is currently pursuing reveal the close collaboration between far-right and “gender-critical” anti-trans activists in waging legal warfare on transgender rights – through legislation and litigation.
P.P.S. In her essential newsletter
, links to an op-ed responding to the astonishing story of volunteers who are flying people seeking abortion and gender-affirmative care to US states where they are still available.4) France falling short on feminist foreign policy
Last year, Sweden, a pioneer of feminist foreign policy, dropped the approach. France, which followed in Sweden’s footsteps in 2019, is still pursuing the policy – but according to a new report the French effort has not been an overwhelming success. According to AFP:
It has resulted in a rise in the number of French women ambassadors and consuls general, who now make up nearly a third of such posts compared to just 14 percent a decade ago.
But an evaluation of its progress published Monday by the High Council for Equality – an independent consultative body – found mixed results, with strides made at home outpacing "timid progress" abroad, council president Sylvie Pierre-Brossolette told AFP.
That was "regrettable in an international context of regression of women's rights, including in democracies like the United States, Poland and Hungary, which would... require French feminist diplomacy to be deployed as a matter of urgency," she said, referring in particular to the US Supreme Court's historic decision last year to erase abortion rights.
5) Girls are being sexually harassed in schools
Forgive me for ending on a depressing note. The UK Parliament’s Women and Equalities Committee has published a report (blandly entitled “attitudes towards women and girls in educational settings”) that details the extent of sexual harassment in schools in England and Wales. It says:
Jackie Doyle-Price, a Member of this Committee and the then Chair of our Sub-Committee, which led on this inquiry, told a Westminster Hall debate of her experience in speaking to 13 year old girls during a school visit. She asked the girls how many of them had been harassed:
The answer was every single one of them, and for most it had happened in school. That abuse is exactly what we are talking about. […] The girls told me that they are pressurised into sharing intimate pictures, which are then shared by phone. One girl said to me, “If you make a stand, you just attract more attention to yourself and end up getting more harassment, and if you comply you’re easy. What are we supposed to do in those circumstances?”
And also:
The evidence we heard was not revelatory or, sadly, a surprise. Seven years ago, our predecessor Committee noted in its 2016 report:
almost a third (29%) of 16–18 year old girls say they have experienced unwanted sexual touching at school;
nearly three-quarters (71%) of all 16–18 year old boys and girls say they hear terms such as “slut” or “slag” used towards girls at schools on a regular basis;
59% of girls and young women aged 13–21 said in 2014 that they had faced some form of sexual harassment at school or college in the past year.
Bonus: A new study shows that early women were hunting, just like men | This Dove campaign from a few years ago (shared by a colleague this week) on girls’ self-esteem is very affecting | a subscriber (you know who you are!) sent me a podcast on myths about motherhood | And another subscriber (who also knows who they are…) sent me this video on gender equality and sport, which is far more interesting than it sounds.
Thanks for reading, see you next week.