"You have changed the world" (and four other reads)

Five things on gender (in)equality and the backlash against feminism

Dear readers old and new,

It’s been a while since I sent this newsletter. This has been due to a combination of personal and work projects and a general feeling of anxiety about world events chipping away at the snatched moments in which I usually write The Backlash. This week, the living nightmare that is Israel’s new war with Iran, alongside the daily mass killings of Palestinians at aid hubs in Gaza, have monopolised my mind. It’s difficult to think (or care!) about much else. It’s hard to forget loved ones under fire. Overnight, the US got involved more fully, striking three Iranian nuclear sites. As throughout the week, Israeli news studios are filled with virtually all-male panels, whose participants hardly question the premise for this war, which is gambling with so much.

Just before Benjamin Netanyahu launched his wet dream of a military operation, pressure had been building, at very long last, against Israel over Gaza. Then, 13th June happened, and that pressure has dissipated, with support for Israel’s actions evident across European leadership. In the meantime, there are virtually daily reports of Palestinians being shot en masse trying to access aid in Gaza, and civilians are losing their lives in Iran and Israel. In Tamra, a Palestinian town in northern Israel, a man lost his wife and two daughters, aged 13 and 20, and another relative, when a missile hit their home. In Bat Yam, central Israel, five members of a Ukrainian family in the country to get medical treatment for a 7-year-old child with blood cancer were killed by an Iranian missile.

On Thursday, Netanyahu visited the site of a hospital in Beer Sheva that had been damaged by a missile from Iran. He told reporters about the personal price every Israeli citizen is paying for this war, including the prime minister himself. "It is the second time,” he said, “that my son Avner... cancels his wedding".

And now to the reads….

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1) Netanyahu wants to save Iranian women?

After Israel’s operation against Iran (codename Rising Lion) was launched, Netanyahu released a video message in English aimed at Iranians. Among other things, he said: “As we achieve our objective, we are also clearing the path for you to achieve your freedom. This is your opportunity to stand up and let your voices be heard. Woman, life, freedom – zan, zendegi, azadi.”

Aside from the fact that the Israeli prime minister’s professed concern for Iran’s women is disingenuous at best, in the Guardian,

Mona Eltahawy

makes the point that such faux concern can put women fighting for their rights in Iran at risk. She writes:

They did not need Netanyahu to fight for their freedom then, nor do they need him now. On the contrary, his attempt to co-opt the courageous uprising is the quickest way to discredit feminism itself – often dismissed as “western” and alien. Wars and invasions harm, not strengthen, revolutions. As an Egyptian, I know all too well that the Egyptian regime tried its hardest to claim our 25 January revolution in 2011 was being masterminded from abroad.

Eltahawy also makes the point that, when the US invaded Afghanistan in 2001, after 9/11, the US claimed that the invasion “was to ‘liberate’ women from the Taliban’s misogyny. Twenty years after that reckless invasion, an increasingly disastrous war and occupation, and a criminally chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Taliban once again rule.”

2) “Grooming gangs” and ubiquitous misogyny

A major political event in the UK this week was the publication of a national audit on “group-based sexual exploitation and abuse” (often referred to with the terrible euphemism “grooming gangs”), and the government’s subsequent announcement of a national inquiry. The idea that the scourge of sexual exploitation and abuse of vulnerable girls by networks of grown men had been ignored or hushed up because of a fear of racism had become a major pet cause on the right. (Remember Elon Musk weighing in himself in January?) Had the authorities been too scared of being accused of racism to acknowledge the ethnicity of perpetrators who were of South Asian or Pakistani heritage? Was it true, as many not on the right argued back, that really most perpetrators of child exploitation and abuse are white? On the News Agents podcast, Louise Casey explains how much ethnicity data was missing in such cases. She makes the important point that if good people don’t talk about difficult issues, bad people will make hay with them. And in the meantime the countless victims don’t see justice.

Amid the national focus on these unthinkable crimes, the underlying misogyny, dehumanisation, and sexualisation of teenage girls has been less discussed. For

The Lead

,

Zoe Grunewald

has written a great piece about this, reflecting on her own experiences as a teenager:

Being a woman can be lonely and frightening. Being a teenage girl can be terrifying. You exist somewhere between childhood and adulthood, where your growing autonomy evokes contempt and your naivety invites blame.

“We need to see children as children,” Casey writes. But when it comes to teenage girls, especially those from poorer backgrounds, that simple principle too often falls away. Misogyny, compounded by racism or class prejudice, overrides our ability to see girls as vulnerable. Instead, their abuse is treated like something they opted into and a reputation they earned.

PS The Guardian has interviewed Natalie Fleet MP, who was groomed by an older man as a teenager and had a baby aged 15, on her personal experience and her work standing up for survivors of rape.

3) Abortion decriminalised in England and Wales

Also in Britain this week, MPs voted to decriminalise abortion in England and Wales. Before Tuesday’s vote, women who terminated pregnancies beyond the legal limit here of 24 weeks were at risk of prosecution. The BBC described this as “the biggest change to abortion laws in England and Wales for nearly 60 years”.

Sian Norris

has a very good piece explaining why this change was needed. She writes:

Campaigners estimate that more than 100 women have been prosecuted in England and Wales following an unexplained pregnancy loss in the past decade. Between 1967 and 2022, there were three court cases where women faced abortion charges; since 2022, there have been six.

A 15-year-old girl who was arrested in 2021 following a miscarriage, having previously looked at abortion information online, was among those investigated in the past ten years. The stress of the police investigation led to her self-harming, and the case against her was eventually dropped after a coroner concluded natural causes ended the pregnancy.

On the day of the vote itself (NB: there were two other abortion-related amendments up for debate), it was quite something to see a series of male MPs getting up to intervene, with some expressing their fears that decriminalising abortion would enable women to abort full-term pregnancies with impunity. For example:

Since the vote, this idea has shown up in various places. Two examples: On Unherd, Kathleen Stock described the move as “another stunning PR victory for that ever-darkening project popularly known as feminism”; in a stunningly unhinged piece on the demise of Britain in the Telegraph, David Frost lists the decriminalisation of abortion in a list of dark developments in this country. Thirty years ago, he writes, who could have predicted, that “parliament would allow women to kill their unborn baby at any point without committing any crime”.

4) “The feminist case for boosting the birth rate”

Falling birth rates are a long-discussed obsession on the right, but the NYT’s Amanda Taub has written an interesting piece asking whether there is a feminist or non-nationalist argument for tackling population decline. Here’s a snippet:

The work of Nancy Folbre, a feminist economist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, suggests that the problem may be that existing programs are simply too small to make a difference to the real issue: that as countries get richer, it becomes much more expensive to be a parent. That’s not just because out-of-pocket costs rise, though they do. Rather, the bigger issue is the cost of the time parenting requires, which, while unpaid, is not free, and in fact becomes vastly more expensive as economies develop.

“There’s a point at which, if you just keep ratcheting up the price of doing something that’s socially valuable, if you just keep ratcheting up the private costs, eventually people give up,” Dr. Folbre said. Today’s plummeting fertility rates suggest that potential parents are doing just that.

She also (of course) addresses the question of why more control over their own reproduction might mean that women want to have fewer, or even no, babies. Even in the Nordic countries, which famously have great parental leave provision and affordable, high-quality childcare, birth rates are falling:

“That’s how patriarchal societies function. They create really significant incentives for high fertility, in part, by really disempowering women,” Dr. Folbre said. (Those coercive methods are not gone — and some governments, including those of the United States and Poland, have curtailed reproductive freedoms in recent years.)

5) “We have won an astonishing amount”

Last month, I went to see Rebecca Solnit speak about her new book, in an event with

Carole Cadwalladr

. Solnit famously coined the term “mansplaining” through her 2008 essay “Men explain things to me” (the story of which she, rather satisfyingly, recounted at the event I attended). She is probably best known for her writing on climate and feminism, though in recent years she has also become one of the most recognisable voices calling out the US turn to authoritarianism. She is a searing critic of how establishment media such as the New York Times have let down voters in their coverage of Trump and the MAGA right.

With The Backlash in mind, I noted down a few things Solnit said about feminism. The first is that despite the current backsliding on, e.g. abortion rights, in places like the US and elsewhere, and despite the misogyny we see all over the internet (and IRL!), “we have won an astonishing amount”. Solnit spoke about taking a long, historical view on change. “We are just in the middle of a process,” she said of the changes feminists long fought for. She also said that the right-wing obsession with (fear of ??) progressives, environmentalists, feminists is really a back-handed compliment. It’s an acknowledgment that “you have changed the world”.

One final thing I noted was her answer to a question about trans rights and feminism in Britain. After caveating her answer with the fact that she hasn’t been following developments here, and isn’t really qualified to talk about it, she said the following:

“What's interesting is how fabricated this is. A lot of places were advancing trans rights 10 years ago, and then the right decided this. And it's funny with the US, right? They're really like Golden Retrievers [who] will chase anything. It's like this week, you're going to hate Muslims more than anything, but next week, it's just going to be immigrants in general. The week after that, it's going to be trans women, and then we'll go back to feminazis or whatever.

And the one thing I can really say is I've lived in San Francisco for my entire adult life, which was the great queer city, back in the day when it was a real refuge and a lot of people were fearful to be out in other parts of the world. It has a huge trans population compared to other places…. the anti-trans rhetoric is like, “Oh, if we let when large trans people exist and we let them have rights, then terrible things will happen.” I just always say, I've been in a city where they've existed and had rights, and I'm sure I've shared—I can't believe we have to fucking talk about bathrooms—endless public restrooms with them, as have all my friends. Lots of my friends’ kids have gone to school with kids who are non-binary or trans or whatever, and like you know, nothing to report.

And it's weird what a kind of Hobgoblin imaginary problem… that it's created… it's treated as if [if] one trans woman does a bad thing, then all trans women are bad, which is exactly the same as saying one Jewish person or black person or straight white man.

Bonus: First woman MI6 chief | Pregnant in Palestine | YouTube still profits from Tate | K-dramas and the birth rate |

Thank you so much for reading. See you next time.