Still not thinking about much else (and five other stories)

Five reads on gender (in)equality and the backlash against feminism. Another wartime edition.

It is one month today since the 7th October massacre, in which Hamas and Islamic Jihad killed 1,400 people in southern Israel, taking 242 hostage, including 30 children. It has been nearly one month since the start of the Israel-Gaza war, in which so many thousands have been killed, so many of them children. This evening, Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, said the army was in Gaza City, that they had Hamas’ leader in the Strip surrounded. I continue to be unable to think about much else, and the present still feels like it’s rhyming with the past.

When I speak to family or Jewish friends, when I ask them how they are, the answer is the same: okay but not really okay, and we know exactly what this means. It is hard to see an end to the war, but there are flickers of hope (though hardly optimism) in other people’s conviction that a better future is possible. Like Sharone Lifschitz, an Israeli whose parents, both in their 80s, were abducted that Saturday (her mother has since, thankfully been released). She said in an interview this week that she still believes Israelis and Palestinians can live in peace. Or Aziz Abu Sarah, a Palestinian from East Jerusalem, who told France 24 that “hating won’t make any of us safer”. Within the cacophony, the continued denials and heartlessness, the feeling that the walls of the world are closing in, at least there are these flickers of hope.

And now to the reads…

1) A macho and heroic culture that made women invisible

The inquiry into the UK’s response to Covid-19 and the impact of the pandemic continues to reveal shocking derelictions of duty. Last week, evidence given by an ex-senior civil servant, Helen MacNamara also revealed that this poor governance had gendered overtones. MacNamara described a “toxic environment” at Downing Street. Female civil servants felt they had “become invisible overnight”, and were spoken over or ignored while men dominated meetings — an experience I would wager many working women will be familiar with. As per the Guardian, MacNamara’s evidence stated:

“The dominant culture was macho and heroic. Neither are the preserve of men (women can be macho and heroic too) but the culture was problematic because it meant debate and discussion was limited, junior people were talked over and it felt that everything was contaminated by ego. It was positively unhelpful when the country needed thoughtful and reflective decision making.”

According to MacNamara this lack of gender at the policymaking table meant that issues that overwhelmingly affect women — domestic abuse, maternity services — were not deemed as important as, say, football:

In her evidence she wrote: “The exclusion of a female perspective led to significant negative consequences, including the lack of thought given to childcare in the context of school closures. There was a serious lack of thinking about domestic abuse and the vulnerable, about carers and informal networks for how people look after each other in families and communities. There was not enough thinking about the impact on single parents of some of the restrictions.

“There was a disproportionate amount of attention given to more male pursuits in terms of the impact of restrictions and then the lessening of the same (football, hunting, shooting and fishing). There was a lack of guidance for women who might be pregnant or were pregnant and what those who were key workers should do (this was particularly significant in education and the NHS given the demographics of their workforces). The restrictions around birth and pregnancy care seemed unnecessarily restrictive and were comparatively slow to adapt. I never understood this.”

I remember at the time finding it astonishing that restrictions on football were loosened before restrictions on maternity wards. Now we know why.

2) Gathering momentum on “gender apartheid”

Since Kabul fell to the Taliban in 2021, Afghanistan has become the only country in the world where girls cannot continue their education beyond primary school. In The Diplomat, Anushka Sisodia describes how Afghan women are resisting “the oppressive forces thrust upon them”, from learning online to underground schools. She writes:

It is hard to overstate, or even imagine, the despair of an entire generation of girls and women mourning their right to education and the futures they deserve. Sixteen-year-old Atefa, in a 2022 interview with Human Rights Watch researcher Sahar Fetrat, offered a glimpse into her grief: “For Afghan girls, the earth is unbearable, and the sky is unreachable.”

Sisodia notes the campaign for “gender apartheid” to be recognised as a crime under international law, in order to help fight it. This is gaining some steam. Karima Bennoune, former UN Special Rapporteur on Cultural Rights, has a thread on X from earlier this year tracking references to gender apartheid by officials and experts.

3) Latin America’s “green wave” feminists

Jill Filipovic

(who writes an excellent newsletter on here) has written for UnHerd about what the US can learn from countries across Latin America, where feminist activists have managed to shift restrictive abortion laws. She writes:

Years of organising precipitated the green wave. In 2006, Colombia loosened abortion restrictions; in 2007, Mexico City legalised the procedure. Those hard-fought successes gave the feminist movement the confidence to broaden its approach. Instead of focusing primarily on passing laws in legislatures, they took up a kind of kitchen-sink strategy: do it all, try everything, see what works. While some focused on using the justice system to effect change, others prioritised bringing young people into activism. Women spoke out about their own experiences in a push to destigmatise abortion — and feminist groups put pressure on politicians to highlight women’s rights. This combination accelerated the green wave.

4) South Korean man attacks woman he thought was a feminist

The backlash against feminism in South Korea is a much-reported-on trend (see past editions of this newsletter). This week in the south-eastern city of Jinju, a man in his twenties violently assaulted a shop worker who he thought was a feminist. According to the BBC’s report:

"Since you have short hair, you must be a feminist. I'm a male chauvinist, and I think feminists deserve to be assaulted," he told [the woman], according to the police.

He continued his assault until he was stopped by police who arrived on the scene. Authorities said he had been in a drunken state, and was previously diagnosed and treated for schizophrenia.

….Women with short, cropped hair have been the target of attacks before in South Korea - where many misogynistic commentators associate the hairstyle with feminism, a term that has been equated with being a man-hater. In 2021, a viral solidarity campaign saw women showing off their short hair styles in defence of an Olympic archer who won several gold medals at the Tokyo Games but received a torrent of abuse online for having short hair

5) On women’s anger and the social media age

Anna Holmes, who founded Jezebel, the feminist website, in 2007, has written a piece for the New Yorker reflecting on the ways in which outrage and anger drove traffic and engagement in the pre-social media age, with readers and comments an increasingly vital part of the ecosystem before Facebook, Twitter, et al were a thing. She concludes:

I see Jezebel not as the beginning of the end of the digital-media era but as a moment—a spark—within an ongoing discussion about gender politics. That conversation has led to new realities around sexual assault and harassment, pay inequity, and cultural depictions of women. It also makes some people uncomfortable—in part because it involves women expressing their anger in public and sustained ways. “Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger,” Audre Lorde wrote in 1981, which can act as a “powerful source of energy serving progress and change.”

If that’s part of Jezebel’s legacy, I’ll take it. It’s about everything I could have hoped for. 

Bonus: If you are in London, Women in Revolt!, an exhibition on art, activism and the women’s movement, from the 70s to the 90s, starts at Tate Britain on November 8th.

Thanks for reading. See you next week.