Misogynist merch (and four other stories)
Five reads on gender (in)equality and the backlash against feminism to end your week.
Summer has finally (fleetingly!) arrived in London. Some days have been the kind of hot that really means it. I’ve been quite distracted by the high temperatures, but one story that particularly pulled me out of the haze was a nightmarish report from Paris, where a 12-year-old girl was raped and racially abused by two boys about her age (a third boy also had a role in the attack).
For women and girls from ethnic minority backgrounds, racist abuse often comes with gender-based violence, or the threat of it. In 2018, a study of anti-Semitic abuse against British politicians found that Jewish women were 15 per cent more likely to be targets compared to men, and that this abuse tended to be tinged with misogyny. As the former Labour MP Margaret Hodge tweeted when that study came out:
"You're a bought and paid for Zionist whore" - just one of the many messages I've received from hard-right and hard-left
There is yet another aspect to the horror in Paris. The attackers were so young, as was their victim. Their acts evidence the persistence of certain thinking about women (not to mention Jews) that is not going anywhere, not dying out with a new generation growing up in a culture that knows better. A few months ago, a piece in the FT highlighting
’ work on the growing differences between young men and women—the former are more conservative, more sexist, the latter more progressive and liberal—went fairly viral. What happened in Paris is surely the darkest dimension of this gap.P.s In the Donald Trump and Joe Biden debate this week, Biden accused Trump of having “the morals of an alleycat”. It bothered me that Biden included the former president “sleeping with a porn star” in his criticism, as if the porn star was the problem, rather than Trump having broken the law to pay hush money to a woman with whom he had been intimate, then lying about it and insulting her in public. The exchange utterly dehumanised Stormy Daniels.
P.p.s. There are only a few days to go until the election here in the UK. All the major parties have policy related to the very divisive so-called debate on sex, gender and trans rights, and the BBC has a useful summary of their positions. It’s quite something that this is the main women’s rights-related topic of the election, before violence against women and girls, say, or the dire state of Britain’s maternity services. The state of the discourse on this is so broken here that the UK could perhaps take a leaf out of Ireland’s book and use a citizens assembly to get people finding some common humanity on the issue, rather than throwing it into election manifestos.
has a video asking whether citizens assemblies could be the answer to the West’s culture wars. To their credit the Women’s Equality Party did a similar exercise on this very issue in 2020.And now to the reads……
1) No Afghan women at UN Afghanistan meeting
Starting today, Qatar is hosting a two-day UN-led meeting on the future of Afghanistan, which the Taliban will attend alongside envoys from 22 countries. Despite the horrendous violations of the rights of Afghan women and girls since the extremists took power again in 2021, no women from the country will be included in the main talks—and rights violations won’t be on the agenda. The exclusion of women has attracted much criticism. In the New York Times, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in the country writes:
After discussions with the Taliban, the meeting’s agenda will focus on fighting narcotics and helping the private sector — and does not include human rights or women’s issues, and neither women nor Afghan civil society representatives will be included.
If these exclusions are the price of the Taliban’s presence in Doha, the cost is too high.
And also:
Denial of education is just one of many Taliban decrees against women. Female civil servants were instructed not to report to work when the Taliban retook power. Women are now barred from working at nongovernmental organizations and humanitarian agencies, including the United Nations. Some female-owned businesses, like beauty salons, have been shuttered. Women and girls need to be accompanied by a male relative to travel.
The net result is that today, women and girls have been virtually erased from public life, deprived of their most basic rights. Afghan women began describing the Taliban’s policies as gender apartheid in the 1990s, and they and many others, including me, want such policies to be criminalized under international law.
Yesterday, a Taliban spokesperson said ahead of the talks that women’s rights are an internal matter. As per AFP:
The Taliban authorities "acknowledge the issues about women", government spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told a news conference in Kabul on the eve of the latest talks.
"But these issues are Afghanistan's issues," said Mujahid, who will lead the delegation.
P.s. For Prospect, Arezo Rahimi, an Afghan journalist based in, Dublin recently wrote a devastating report on what life is like for women living under Taliban rule.
2) East Asia’s backlash
The Economist has a feature on the growing rates of misogyny in East Asia, a topic that will be familiar to long-time readers of this newsletter. In South Korea, a majority of men in their 20s, as per a 2021 poll, think they are discriminated against by increased gender equality; in Japan, 43 per cent of 18-30-year-old men say they “hate feminism”. As per the piece:
…much of East Asia has tended to be rather patriarchal. Japan and South Korea are the worst performers in The Economist’s glass-ceiling index, a measure of how women-friendly the working environment is in 29 well-off countries. In the oecd, a club of mostly rich countries, South Korea has the biggest gender pay gap. Women earn 31% less than men. In Japan that gap is 21%. In a survey in 2023 by ipsos, a pollster, 72% of South Koreans agreed that “a man who stays home to look after his children is less of a man,” the highest rate in the 30 countries surveyed.
This growing gap is bad news for both countries, the Economist argues, as their birth rates are among the lowest in the world:
Can East Asian men and women find common ground? A survey by a dating app last year found that, among divorced singles, 37% of Korean women said that a “patriarchal” man would be their least favourite date. A similar share of men said they didn’t want to date feminists.
3) Misogynist merch
On NPR, Danielle Kurtzleben reports on the sexist merchandise she has spotted while reporting from Trump rallies. Here is a snippet:
….you can also see all this — the T-shirt slogans, the cuss words, Trump’s vulgarity — as a marker of a gap in American politics: a yawning partisan gap in attitudes about gender.
“Those differences in gender beliefs are going to make it more permissible or not to put forth these types of messages without some sort of a backlash or pushing down,” Dittmar of Rutgers University said.
Studies have found that Trump voters — including women — in 2016 were particularly likely to have beliefs that political scientists term “hostile sexism.” Furthermore, some found that these beliefs were prominent in a way they weren’t in 2012. Those “hostile sexist” beliefs include, for example, the idea that women are too easily offended.
4) The unpaid labour of collecting water
Across the world, for households with no running water, it is overwhelmingly women and girls who travel—often great distances, often on foot—to collect water for their families. In a new study, researchers at Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research estimate that by 2050 extreme heat could increase the time spent on this unpaid labour by 30 per cent. That would mean “more physical strain, psychological distress and lost time that could otherwise be spent on education, leisure or employment,” Daisy Clague reports for Climate Home:
“Even when people talk about gendered climate impacts, there is very little attention on time poverty and how that affects someone’s ability to improve their life,” Robert Carr [lead author of the study] told Climate Home.
In addition, the cost of lost working time for women affects economies, and is projected to reach tens to hundreds of millions of US dollars per country annually by 2050, the study said.
Climate change disproportionately affects women in multiple ways, as the report notes:
…female-headed rural households experience higher income losses due to extreme weather events like floods and droughts, through impacts on farming and other activities.
Rates of child marriage and violence against women and girls have been shown to increase during and after climate disasters. And studies have identified a positive correlation between drought-induced displacement and hysterectomies among female farm labourers in India.
5) A forgotten British feminist
In late 1800s Britain, the Contagious Diseases Acts “gave the police the power to carry out compulsory genital examinations of women they believed to be prostitutes – but not their male customers. If the women refused to be checked, they were sentenced to jail with hard labour. If found to have a venereal disease, they were forcibly detained in a ‘lock hospital,’” writes Susanna Rustin in the Guardian.
The Acts were intended to stop the spread of infections, but some people, noting that they were “illiberal, immoral and more likely to spread disease than inhibit it, since they did nothing to limit infected men’s sexual activity”, fought to repeal them. Rustin tells the fascinating story of Josephine Butler, an early advocate against this law. Here’s a snippet:
When the “first wave” of feminism is referred to, it is usually suffragettes that people have in mind. Less often remembered is that this was not the first time the British women’s movement rejected the reformers’ tactics of petitions, letters and lobbies in favour of a much more direct challenge.
In a single year, Butler addressed more than 100 public meetings and travelled nearly 4,000 miles. Millicent Fawcett, the non-militant suffragist, wrote in 1928 that “it is perhaps almost impossible for us to realise today how much courage and conviction was needed for a woman to challenge public opinion on this topic”. On one occasion, a gathering in a hay loft was attacked by arsonists. Butler’s physical bravery in the face of violent intimidation, as well as her philanthropic efforts on behalf of the young women she saw as victims of a cruel trade, deeply impressed her followers. But while prostitution, then as now, was a combustible subject, Butler’s arguments went far beyond the traditional Christian objection to sex outside marriage.
Bonus: Ursula K. Le Guin’s old blog | protonalism is eugenics | “the worst shape, perhaps, is strength”
Thank you for reading. See you next time.