The future is frightening (and four other stories)
Five reads on gender (in)equality and the backlash against feminism
Last week, my part of London, as far out north and peripheral as can be, was in the news for an entire day. Three women, a mother and her two daughters, Carol Hunt, Hannah Hunt and Louise Hunt, had been murdered in their home in another part of peripheral north London. The suspect, Kyle Clifford, was on the run, hiding from police in the park at the end of my road. He was found wounded in a graveyard nearby. Schools in our area were on lockdown because Clifford was believed to be armed with a crossbow.
Many people (particularly women, I would wager) knew what it meant when they first saw the story: Clifford was a boyfriend, or ex-boyfriend, probably. And so it was. The man who had tied up and killed a 61-year-old woman and her two daughters, both in their twenties, was the reportedly “controlling” ex-boyfriend of one of the daughters, Louise.
That day, and in the day or so that followed, I saw so many people, again mostly women, posting about the violence and fear that women live with. It’s such an old story that it is hardly news, and so the news cycle moves on, as does everyone else.
The national conversation went quickly to whether crossbows should be subject to greater restrictions. There was not much stopping to consider our brutal mundane. Periodically, politicians announce strategies against such violence, or they declare that “violence against women and girls” is an emergency. During the Covid-19 pandemic, a trend repeated around the world was the spike in reports of domestic violence, the chief victims of which are women and children. Last year, when I interviewed Louise Casey, who led the review into London’s Met Police after an officer kidnapped, raped and murdered Sarah Everard in 2021, Casey said how frustrated she was to hear that phrase. She said she would “call it male violence against women and children”. The fact that “we can’t name the major reason… irritates the hell out of me”. When will we speak clearly about such violence? And when will the action to truly end it be commensurate with the scale of the task? It is as if we accept these murders of women as part of life. It is as if we are resigned to them.
And now to the reads….
1) The future is frightening
If you needed proof of the extremes to which the American right has travelled, I have a 900-page policy paper with your name on it. Produced by Project 2025, a Conservative leadership initiative at the Heritage Foundation think tank, and headed by at least two former Trump staffers, the document has not exactly been endorsed by the former president (his comment: “I know nothing about Project 2025”). The think tank proudly explains on its website, however, that last time around the Trump administration adopted much of its “Mandate for Leadership” platform. It even has this handy tracker.
This new document ahead of the 2024 election presents a libertarian, Christian nationalist agenda, that includes the concentration of power in the hands of the American president. The platform is anti-abortion and pro-heteronormative family as the basis of society. Married fathers, apparently, are the main thing protecting children from violence and abuse. It is also anti-pornography, proposing a very strict ban. The definition of pornography it presents is broad, however, including “the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology”. Arwa Mahdawi in the Guardian explains why this anti-porn policy has little to do with women’s rights. Dip into the document—it has to be read to be believed.
2) Alice Munro and the patriarchy
Much ink has been spilled (or whatever the internet equivalent of that might be) since the revelations that Nobel laureate Alice Munro stood by her second husband after finding out he had sexually abused her daughter (his step-daughter) from when she was nine. If you haven’t read them yet, here is the link to the essay by Munro’s daughter, Andrea Skinner, about what she went through, and here is the link to the Toronto Star’s report on what happened (trigger warnings for both of these). Munro, who died this year, was close to a literary feminist icon, writing stories with complex female characters, even though she didn’t describe herself as a feminist writer. The disappointment in her over what looks like complicity or even indifference to her daughter’s abuse has been profound.
On The Conversation, Rebecca Sullivan writes about Munro’s style of women’s gothic, “replete with psychologically complex women characters”. For Prospect, Caspar Salmon points out that this story says much about how cycles of violence and abuse against women and children persist:
Amid the recriminations and the reappraisals of Munro, the matter of prime importance following Skinner’s article about her experiences is to think seriously about her story—before attending to the matter of Munro’s reputation and body of work. What Skinner says about systems of abuse, patriarchal power, and the way that both fame and the family unit can crush individuals in their midst is gravely serious. Here in the UK, the CSA Centre reports that the family environment accounted for almost half of all child sexual abuse offences reported to the police in England and Wales in 2023; these statistics are reflected worldwide. Fathers and stepfathers are the relatives most commonly convicted of intra-familial child sexual abuse.
3) Undercover on the incel forum
Lest we underestimate the extent of the women-hatred on the average incel forum, OpenDemocracy has published an extract of
’ book on the far-right attack on reproductive rights, which describes how misogyny in these spaces plays out. She writes:Women’s freedom terrifies the far right because it means society can be changed, people can be changed in response to social progress, and white male supremacy is not a fixed, natural state. In other words, women’s liberation takes a wrecking ball to the entire worldview of the far right – so women must be stopped.
It’s important to understand how much hatred against women exists in these spaces.
Posters write about sending women to the slaughterhouse, keeping vaginas on leashes, and shoving grenades up women’s anuses. Women are described as “rape fuel”, as “scum” who should “rot in jail.” Men share videos of women being beaten, cheering on the violence, and they spread fantasies about child rape. When the Taliban recaptured Afghanistan in August 2021, the incels celebrated the “Talichad” and approvingly shared images of women being flogged. One post on abortion reads, “I care about abortion, women have to suffer and if they don’t wanna suffer, we make them suffer.”
4) Some girls watch sports alone
This weekend was one of major sporting events, with the Wimbledon final and the heartbreaking (for England) end to the Euros both taking place. According to a survey by the charity Plan International UK, more than 30 per cent of girls and young women aged 14-21 will have avoided watching these in company because they feel “unwelcome and out of place”. As Huffpost reports:
Poppy, aged 14, from South Wales, said in the survey data that even in school, she finds it uncomfortable to watch sports. She explained that when Wales entered the World Cup, her school put on a football match to celebrate. Sadly, it was an intimidating experience for her. She said: “Throughout the match there were numerous violent and sexist comments made predominantly by the male students in my year.
And also:
…data from the National Centre For Domestic Violence [reveals] that reported incidents of domestic violence increased by 26% if England plays, 38% if England loses and 11% the next day, win or lose.
5) Carceral feminism
Can policing and state security end violence against women and girls? Would harsher sentencing make women safer? The writer Leah Cowan has a new book exploring these questions, and arguing that this is neoliberal policy which ultimately won’t achieve feminism’s aims. Dazed has an interview with Cowan in which she discusses “carceral feminism”, an approach she argues is “virulent” among some British feminists:
Carceral feminism was coined by an academic called Elizabeth Bernstein in 2007. She wrote an article in a journal that mainly focused on the way that evangelical Christian groups, some NGO groups and some secular feminists coalesce together around this anti-sex work position. That’s the starting point of her research. She uses the term ‘carceral feminism’ to talk about a specifically neoliberal approach to feminism that seeks to redress harm through criminal legal interventions that involve locating harm within ‘deviant individuals’ in society rather than looking at institutions, social norms, attitudes and patterns of activity.
Bonus: Codifying Gender Apartheid might not help | Katy Perry’s defence | Posy Simmonds
Thank you for reading. See you next time.