Humiliation as tactic (and four other stories)

Five reads on gender (in)equality and the backlash against feminism to end your week.

Happy Friday! It’s been a long week. Let’s get straight to the reads…

1) One year after Dobbs, humiliation as tactic

Saturday 24th June marked one year since the US Supreme Court overturned Roe V Wade, opening the floodgates to abortion access being rolled back across the country. Judith Levine reports for The Intercept on how the anti-abortion right has used humiliation as a tactic against doctors who have provided abortions and people seeking them over the past 12 months. She includes the story of Caitlin Bernard, the doctor prosecuted in Indiana after performing an abortion on a ten-year old rape victim from Ohio, where abortion is now banned. She writes:

As both the method and the goal of misogynists, racists, abusers, tyrants, torturers, and the systems that uphold their power, humiliation can be its own reward. But it is not merely a social tool, and it does not act alone. Humiliation, along with shame and fear, are produced by and in turn fortify the laws that intrude on intimate life, control bodies, and punish those who resist. Together, restrictive laws and destructive emotions create the disciplinary environment that the right’s culture warriors have prayed and labored toward for decades.

Laws abridging bodily autonomy — bathroom patrols and genital inspections of student athletes, compulsory sonograms and lectures intended to get abortion patients to change their minds — intentionally humiliate their subjects, and always have.

Also, Carole Joffe from the University of California has a fascinating piece on the Care Post Roe project, which is documenting how clinical care in the US has changed in the past 12 months. Joffe makes the point that after the Roe V Wade decision in 1973, doctors missed a chance to double down on abortion as healthcare:

If 50 years ago the field of OB-GYN had not been so skittish about abortion and this care had been firmly entrenched in medical institutions, it is quite possible that abortion would have come to be understood — by the medical profession and the general public — primarily as healthcare and not as the most divisive issue in American politics. Perhaps the newly emerging religious right of the 1970s would have found another signature issue, as nearly occurred, around which to grow their movement, and Roe would not have been overturned.

2) A link between extreme heat and domestic violence

During the Covid-19 pandemic, domestic abuse escalated around the world alongside measures to contain the virus. A study published this week in JAMA Psychiatry provides evidence that temperature increases also bring rises in domestic violence. The study (which followed 194,871 women and girls aged 15-49 in India, Pakistan, and Nepal between 2010 and 2018) “found a 1C increase in average annual temperature was connected to a rise of more than 6.3% in incidents of physical and sexual domestic violence”.

3) Dialogue with radical thought

The Swaddle has a series that sounds wonderful, if you like that kind of thing: dialogues with radical texts “to dream of a better world.” This week they looked at SCUM Manifesto, published in 1967 by Valerie Solanas, the woman who shot Andy Warhol. Here’s a snippet:

I. “Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.”

Life in this society is boring because gender imposition within all aspects of culture is endlessly repetitive and boring. Life, gender, femininity, as a cis woman in a neoliberal world, is devoid. From right under our noses, our agency to decide what femininity is and who can participate has been snatched by Sephora, Instagram, and corporations vying for attention. Then, having been willing and unwilling collaborators in this pyramid scheme, we’ve begun to tack feminism as an afterthought onto everything we do despite ourselves.

4) Israeli lawmaker stopped from addressing parliament for carrying her baby

This week, an Israeli politician, Sharren Haskel, was prevented from presenting a bill from the Knesset parliament podium because she was carrying her baby in a sling. The deputy speaker, Uriel Buso, told her that “according to regulations, only members of Knesset are permitted to stand at the podium….Haskel … explained to Buso that she tried to put her daughter in a stroller but the infant cried so she was forced to keep her in the sling,” the Times of Israel reports. The video from the incident (at this link, but in Hebrew) is an astonishing watch. Haskel later described the experience as “humiliating and terrible for me as a mother.”

This reminded me of what happened to British Labour MP Stella Creasy a few years ago. In 2021, when Creasy went to the House of Commons with her three-month-old in a sling, she was also told it was against the rules.

Both incidents, a couple of years and thousands of miles apart, are a reminder that our political systems were not built to be inclusive of women.

5) A feminist history of marriage

Rachael Lennon’s book Wedded Wife: A Feminist History of Marriage explores her motivation for joining this ancient and patriarchal institution, she explains in the Big Issue. Lennon married her wife in 2017, three years after same-sex marriage was legalised in England, Wales and Scotland (Northern Ireland followed suit in 2020). She writes:

More than half of all adults in the UK are married. Many more have been – or will be. While couples are marrying later and more people outlive their marriages, the vast majority of people around the world still choose to join the institution at some point in their lives. 

When feminist campaigner Gloria Steinem reflected on her decision to marry in 2000, aged 66, she remarked: “I didn’t change. Marriage changed.” In recent centuries, the history of marriage has been shaped by activists who have fought, generation after generation, to improve the lives of those who had been repressed, exploited or excluded by the structures set up around our most intimate of relationships. 

Bonus: Angela Saini has a new podcast with Science magazine looking at key texts on sex and gender. The latest episode is on Dorothy Robert’s 1997 book Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty.