Fighting in Sudan puts pregnant women at risk (and four other stories)
Five reads on gender (in)equality and the backlash against feminism.
Often, when it’s late and I’m tired and I want some entertainment, the only thing I have bandwidth for is trash. This week, it was Idiocracy, an American film from 2006 in which Joe, a man of average intelligence, wakes up in a future where humanity has become stupider, and he is the cleverest man in the world. So far, so diverting. This future stupid humanity has a puerile sense of humour. Part of the joke is that men express sexual urges in an overt and dumb way and women are dumb and sexual. The men are very clearly subjects in this scenario, and the women objects. It is a grotesque mirroring of reality, an exaggeration. Alongside jokes about “utilising women”, this is the film’s punchline. It made me think about how often women are the butt of the joke, and how very uncomfortable that can be to watch. Take, for example, the video doing the rounds this week of Canadian lawmakers dancing in hot pink heels, ostensibly as part of a campaign against domestic violence, but effectively mocking and humiliating women. By the way, Idiocracy ends with (spoiler alert!) Joe becoming president of America. Meanwhile, the only other intelligent person on earth, (I won’t bore you with the details), a woman who happens to also be a prostitute, becomes the first lady. That’s right, the other most intelligent person on earth doesn’t govern the country, she marries the average Joe. And on that note, here are this week’s reads….
1) Pregnant women not accessing healthcare in Sudan
In times of crisis, whether war or pandemic, maternity services are often severely limited, putting pregnant women at great risk. Amid the outbreak of fighting in Sudan, the UN has warned that pregnant women can not access medical care. According to The Telegraph:
Hospitals have become targets of attacks from warring factions, and medical supplies looted.
The United Nations has warned it has become extremely difficult for pregnant women to leave their homes and seek essential antenatal care, safe delivery services, or postnatal care. It added that 219,00 pregnant women are at risk in the capital, and 24,000 women expected to give birth in the coming weeks.
At the time of writing, the warring factions had agreed a ceasefire. Let’s hope it holds.
2) Iran cracks down on hijab removal
After the death of Mahsa Amini in morality police custody in September last year, Iranians have demonstrated across the country, with women and girls removing their hijabs in protest. Now, in a bid to regain control of the general mood of unrest, the government is reportedly cracking down on removal of headscarves, and has said that people who promote “unveiling” will be prosecuted. In response, a group of UN special rapporteurs spoke out against the crackdown and Iran’s compulsory veiling laws (which are “enshrined in Iran’s penal code and other laws and regulations, which allow security and administrative authorities to subject women to arbitrary arrests and detentions, and deny them access to public institutions, including hospitals, schools, government offices and airports, if they do not cover their hair”):
It is deeply worrying that after months of nationwide protests, including against restrictive hijab laws, and following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in the custody of the morality police, Iranian women are increasingly facing harsh and coercive measures by State authorities….
These additional repressive measures would further exacerbate the negative impact of the compulsory hijab laws. Criminalising refusal to wear the hijab is a violation of the right to freedom of expression of women and girls and opens the door to a range of other possible violations of political, civil, cultural and economic rights.
The UN press release on this also says the following:
The experts recalled that under the current version of Iran's Islamic Penal Code, any act deemed “offensive” to public decency is punishable by 10 days to two months in prison or 74 lashes. Women seen in public without a veil could be sentenced to between 10 days and two months in prison or a fine. The law applies to girls as young as nine, which is the minimum age of criminal responsibility for girls in Iran. In practice, the authorities have imposed compulsory veiling on girls from the age of seven at the start of elementary school.
3) The poet Maggie Smith on when a marriage ends
In this interview with The 19th, the poet Maggie Smith talks about her recently published memoir, which explores the breakdown of her marriage and the role that gender definitions played in that. She says:
I think women are having very quiet one-on-one conversations with each other all the time, texting a friend asking, “Why if we are both working from home am I the one doing all of the homework help?” or, “Why is it my office door that is knocked on when someone needs a slice of apple?”
And also
I think a lot about what template we are offering our children.
Studies have shown that kids see more than we think they do. They are also taking in everything, so even if they’re not having the same discussion we are having about gender roles, they’re taking it all in and absorbing it. That’s something I think about all the time in how I parent them. What am I modeling about gender as a parent?
The outlet also has a write-up of a new study by Pew Research Centre, based on data on the US from the past five years, which found that:
Even as wives in heterosexual relationships have started outearning their spouses, they are still doing more of the care and the housework while their husbands have more leisure time.
4) Judy Blume and a key difference between the UK and US
The mere mention of the name Judy Blume is enough to trigger a tidal wave of nostalgia among anyone who read her books as a child. For me, the fundamental text will always be “Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret”. It’s iconic line — “I must, I must, I must increase my bust” — is etched on my brain. But I digress. Film and TV adaptations of Blume’s oeuvre are afoot, and Hadley Freeman of The Times interviewed her. In the piece, Freeman quoted Blume as saying that she stands behind JK Rowling in reference to “the abuse Rowling has received for speaking up in defense of women’s sex-based rights”, but Blume clarified later that her remarks had been taken out of context. She said:
“I wholly support the trans community. My point, which was taken out of context, is that I can empathize with a writer — or person — who has been harassed online…I stand with the trans community and vehemently disagree with anyone who does not fully support equality and acceptance for LGBTQIA+ people. Anything to the contrary is total bullshit.”
This is noteworthy for people who didn’t read Blume’s books as children, too, because it highlights a key difference between the US and UK in the discourse on trans rights. Early subscribers to this newsletter might remember that Freeman, whose move from the Guardian to the Times last year caused quite the stir, is very much on the gender-critical, sex-based rights side of the trans/feminism argument. In the US, there is a much clearer left-right split on this issue. It is Republicans who are pushing for bans of trans healthcare. Blume, who is 85, made this clarification in that context. In the UK, meanwhile, those lines are far more blurred.
In relation to this, do UK readers remember PM Rishi Sunak standing up for sex-based rights during his campaign to lead the Conservative Party? Jessica Elgot at the Guardian has written about how Sunak is the most socially conservative PM of his generation, including on such issues. (And also, UnHerd, which published a lot of gender-critical columns, has this piece linking gender critical activists in different countries as a global trend).
5) On patriarchy and Hindu nationalism
The ever-excellent New Lines magazine has a fascinating feature by Sanya Dhingra on the women taking a leading role in Hindu nationalism, a right-wing political movement that very much centres reproduction and motherhood as patriotic duties. As Dhingra reports:
Pooja Shakun Pandey, a leader of the far-right All India Hindu Mahasabha party from Aligarh in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh (UP), is a case in point…..
“I see no contradiction between the ideas I stand for and women’s empowerment,” she later told New Lines. “Violence is a woman’s friend. Women are not supposed to be docile; that is not what Hindu dharma teaches us. … But this does not mean that they do not fulfill their natural duty, which is to have children — it is also a national duty for Hindu women to have children.” If Hindu women do not have children, the Hindu population will be taken over by Muslims, she warns, echoing the common Hindu nationalist trope of Muslims taking over the country through what they call “population jihad.” She herself took to celibacy because she had already produced two sons in the service of the nation, she adds.
The above poses problems for Indian feminists more broadly:
“What they stand for cannot be seen as feminism,” argues the feminist activist Kavita Krishnan. “Merely organizing and mobilizing women does not qualify as feminism — the goal towards which they are organizing is equally important,” she says. “They mobilize for what are obviously regressive, Islamophobic goals. … At most, one can concede that the right wing appeals to certain feminist impulses (like the quest for political participation) that young women may have, but then channelizes them for exclusionary, Islamophobic goals, including against Muslim women.”
Bonus: Re: the Canadian lawmakers, on LinkedIn, Alexandra Sufit (a subscriber to this newsletter!), explains the problem with the pink stiletto stunt.