Thanks but no thanks (and four other reads)
Five things on gender (in)equality and the backlash against feminism
Dear readers old and new,
I am writing this from Sozopol, a small town on the coast of Bulgaria, where I am on holiday with my little family. It’s hot here and the sea is beautiful. The Backlash-relevant thing I have to report is that the average Sozopol tourist is either a hyper-feminine woman (lip filler everywhere!) or a hyper-masculine man (so many muscles!). This has made me think a lot about the limiting costumes of our gender and the point of feminism.
Meanwhile, since I last wrote, the death toll in Gaza has gone beyond 60,000, and the number of Palestinians in Gaza who have starved to death in this war has reached 227. Israel’s cabinet voted on a plan, opposed by the army, to take over Gaza City, and to aim for “security control” of the Gaza Strip. Being an Israeli and a Jew, I watch not only with horror but with feelings of guilt, complicity and shame and long for this to end.
And I feel a duty to do something to help people trapped in this nightmare. I like to think that this is also what feminism is about: a striving for solidarity across lines of hatred and division. In recent weeks, I have come into contact with a woman who lives in Gaza City. Samaa Sabra is 37 and a mother of five children. She has been practising her excellent English with me via Whatsapp voice notes, telling me what things are like where she is. Her day to day, against the soundtrack of bombings and helicopters hovering overhead, involves cooking food for her family over fire lit with cardboard and paper in the blazing heat (it’s very hot in that part of the world in the summer). She is an optimistic person with an incredibly generous spirit who just wants to be able to live her life.
Like many other Palestinians in Gaza, Samaa is trying to raise money via international donations because the economy of the Strip has collapsed. Her husband was a teacher before the war. Since it broke out they opened a small shop, but struggle to fill it with goods. In order to help her have a more sustainable income, I am trying to organise a network of supporters who can help Samaa and her family with a monthly donation. So far we are 13 people. If you would like to join us, please let me know by replying to this email. Or, if you would like to make a one-off donation to Samaa and her family, here is a link to her Go Fund Me page.
And now for the reads…
1) Thanks but no thanks
The cover of the Mail on Sunday tabloid over the weekend was an interview with the pretender to the Conservative throne, Robert Jenrick, in which he used his daughters, or rather his supposed fear that they might be attacked by a migrant, to stoke hatred and division over immigration. This is becoming an increasingly common trend on the British right (alongside extreme commentary about race, as
has explained on here). Reform leader Nigel Farage has also been linking sexual offences and immigration. When launching his “Britain is lawless campaign”, he said that “an Afghan male has a 22 times more likely chance of being convicted of rape than somebody born in this country” and that “40% of sexual assaults in London over the course of the last five years have been committed by those born overseas". Sky News helpfully fact-checked his statements. (It’s worth noting here that former victims’ commissioner Vera Baird warned in 2020 that rape in England and Wales had effectively been decriminalised because of a collapse in prosecutions).2) The problem with “care feminism”
has an interesting essay on “care feminism”, the idea that feminists should “build and create a ‘matricentric society’ that will elevate the social and political power of women while still allowing them to remain the primary caregivers for children in traditional motherly roles”. As in, rather than women taking up space in a world forged by men to push for equality, they should reshape the world, elevating the feminised roles (caregiver, parent) that are so diminished in our society. Here’s a bit more:… in order for women to gain that political power, women must compete with men for positions of authority in the public sphere as it currently exists, thus necessitating the success of the “girlboss” feminism that care feminism aims to replace. In other words, for any “care feminist revolution” to realistically take place, care feminist women must already have equal or greater political power than men, but this power is only realistically possible if women succeed in the male dominated public sphere on men’s terms in the first place
And also:
…the goals of care feminism necessarily limit the relative output of women in the public sphere relative to that of men. Because care feminists generally argue that biology drives to a large degree women’s preferences to remain in the private rather than public sphere, and because early child care and practices like breastfeeding necessarily consume large portions of women’s “prime of life” in her 20s and 30s, it seems inevitable that if care feminism succeeds mothers will necessarily be marginalized relative to men and childless women in any politically, socially, or culturally important domain.
3) Billionaire to invest in women’s health
Okay, apologies for the snarky headline. This is actually good news (though the fact that billionaires hold so much power in our world depresses me). The Gates Foundation has announced that it will spend $2.5bn on R&D in women’s health by 2030, with a focus on “maternal care and sexual health”, as well as “deeply under-researched” critical issues such as “preeclampsia, gestational diabetes, heavy menstrual bleeding, endometriosis, and menopause”, Health Policy Watch reports. Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft and chair of the foundation, said that “women’s health continues to be ignored, underfunded, and sidelined.” Here’s more:
This comes amid a massive defunding of global health led by the United States, which is threatening progress in key areas such as maternal health, sexual and reproductive health and HIV.
The foundation has selected five priority areas: obstetric care and maternal immunisation; making pregnancy and delivery safer; maternal health and nutrition; gynaecological and menstrual health; and contraceptive innovation and sexually transmitted infections (STIs).
And also:
A 2021 McKinsey analysis found that just 1% of healthcare research and innovation is invested in female-specific conditions beyond oncology.
Meanwhile, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) allocated 13.5% for research related to women’s health in 2005, whereas this year, that figure has declined to around 10%, according to Guttmacher.
4) “Western feminism has, in many respects, lost its way”
Remember
’s “moment of feminist exhaustion”? For the , Faye Curran reflects on various recent online disputes ostensibly about feminism or feminism-adjacent issues (Pamela Anderson wearing no make-up to a film premier; that Sydney Sweeney ad), and argues that, while feminism once concerned itself with important matters like suffrage or reproductive rights…Western feminism has, in many respects, lost its way. The shift from communal, public debate to an almost exclusively online form of activism has driven feminists down sharply divergent paths. Where feminists once happily identified simply as such, the online world has fractured the movement into categories such as intersectional feminists, tradfems, radfems, ecofeminists and postmodern feminists. These factions burrow into their own convictions and subcultures, bringing them a sense of identity and shared goals. But in the process, many of feminism’s founding principles have been diluted, and former comrades find themselves battling one another. All the while, the patriarchy rearms.
5) How do you solve a problem like Bonnie Blue?
Relatedly, since her Channel 4 documentary aired—the premise of which is to ask whether, in supposedly sleeping “with 1057 men in 12 hours” the “adult content creator” was “dangerously pandering to male fantasies or being an empowered sex-positive entrepreneur”—pundits have been trying to work out what to make of Bonnie Blue, whose real name is Tia Billinger. Here are two interesting takes, both in The Times.
argues that the responses to her extreme stunts expose a gap in secular, liberal morality. He writes:Throughout history, liberals have cheered their liberation from puritans, scolds and humourless morality campaigners. Rightly so. Our freedoms are hard won and valuable. But an emerging paradox of liberalism is that it seems to be a self-undermining ideology. What sounds noble in the abstract (Liberty! Freedom!) can look grotesque when pushed to its practical extremes.
I increasingly believe the attraction of illiberal ideologies of the left and right to young people is at least partly driven by how grotesque and meaningless modern liberal societies sometimes look up close. The chaos of obscenity and depravity that characterises the internet is the result of unlimited freedom. Few find it particularly attractive. It may turn out that liberalism needed some restraints to survive.
And Caitlin Moran writes that what Billinger is doing is explained by the fact that she makes porn. The more interesting question, Moran says, is what the men who take part in such stunts are doing. Here is a snippet:
It seems counterintuitive to say this, when we all know we live in a male-dominated society, but I am continuingly astonished by how little we seem to notice men. To see what they’re doing. To ask questions about it. No — let me correct that. I am continuingly astonished by how little men notice what other men are doing, and ask questions about it.
Men! A total of 1,057 of your team just took part in the world’s most famous gangbang — and you’re asking women what we think of the one woman in the room? Bonnie Blue isn’t a question for feminism. She’s a question for men.
Bonus: Italian Senates approves femicide bill | “people really hate placentas”
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Thank you so much for reading. See you next time.
“A 2021 McKinsey analysis found that just 1% of healthcare research and innovation is invested in female-specific conditions beyond oncology.” 😵💫 shocking! Really loved this read Alona!