New Statesman: Just face it, being a parent will never be cool

My children call me various things. Mummy. Mum. Poo-Head. One thing they have never called me is Mama. This is only to be expected, for I am not cool.

Last year Elisa Strauss reported on the rise of white, middle-class mothers in the US using the term “mama” as “an identity marker, a phrase of distinction, and a way to label the self and designate the group.” Mamas aren’t like mummies or mums (or indeed poo-heads). They’re hip. They’re modern. They’re out there “widen[ing] the horizons of ‘mother,’ without giving up on a mother identity altogether.” And now it’s the turn of the dads.

According to the Daily Beast, the hipster fathers of Brooklyn are asking their children to refer to them as Papa. According to one of those interviewed, Justin Underwood, the word “dad” is simply too “bland and drab”:

“There’s no excitement to it, and I feel like the word papa nowadays has so many meanings. We live in an age when fathers are more in touch with their feminine sides and are all right with playing dress-up and putting on makeup with their daughters.”

Underwood describes “dad” as antiquated, whereas “papa” is an “open-minded, liberal term, like dad with a twist” (but evidently not a twist so far that one might consider putting on makeup with one’s sons).

Read the full post at the New Statesman.

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Mumsnet: We can’t compete with Trump’s hate – and we shouldn’t

I’m not sure how many Brexits today is supposed to be worth. I started to lose count at around 3am. Then again, the shock is not quite the same as that of the morning of June 24th. If anything, given 2016’s track record, it would have felt odd for the US election to go anything other than terribly wrong.

Perhaps I have no right to be upset. After all, I’m not even American and even if I was, every expression of dismay will be that of a member of the smug liberal elite (since that is now what anyone who is not virulently right-wing has become). Even so, the parallels between politics in the UK and US seem to me overwhelming. We are witnessing a thuggish take-over by far-right bullies who pose as anti-establishment heroes, men who pretend to smash up the system while their own dominance remains untouched.

Donald Trump – just like the UK’s Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage – is someone whose privilege has exempted him from having to follow the same rules as everyone else. He has been able to pose as a rule-breaker even though the normal rules of engagement never applied to him in the first place. Hillary Clinton’s femaleness meant she could never have behaved as Trump did and get away with it. Yet precisely because of this she was dismissed as a member of the elite propping up the establishment. But Donald Trump is the establishment and it is rotten to the core.

Read the full post at Mumsnet. 

Toxic best friend: Glossy magazines and me

I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with glossy magazines. The reason this blog is called Glosswatch is because I originally conceived of it as a place where I’d go to rant about the publications to which I was still, inexplicably, subscribing in 2012.

I knew how these magazines functioned. I could see the way in which, like a toxic best friend, they eroded your confidence by drip-feeding you advice on ways in which to improve yourself. I knew that the solutions they offered were to problems you hadn’t even realised you had. I knew they didn’t really want you to be happy with yourself, since a woman who is happy with herself does not spend vast amounts of money on trying to make herself look like someone else. But I bought them all the same. I’d been buying them for decades.

Twenty-five years ago I used to spend my lunch money on whatever was available in WH Smiths in Penrith. My selection criteria used to be based on how much content a magazine was running about food, weight and diets. If it had an article about eating disorders, ideally illustrated by photographs of anorexic women, I felt I’d struck gold. Day-in-the-life food diaries were also good. Otherwise I’d settle for anything with a special feature on how to make less of yourself. I never actually followed the diets – my own calorie limit tended to be way below the ones on offer – but I liked reading them anyhow. Continue reading

New Statesman: Tattooing your name on your partner’s forehead is an act of control, not devotion

“I do it because he’s paranoid and wants to have me branded.” These are the words of Kourtney Leigh, who has the name of her boyfriend, Ryan Wibberley, tattooed across her forehead.

According to Wibberley, she is not the first of his girlfriends to have his name inscribed on their bodies, although none of the others have gone for quite so obvious a location. “It’s a laugh,” he tells the Sun, “It’s not taking advantage because they want it done.”

Should we be judging Leigh for consenting to be, as Wibberley puts it, “branded like Heinz Beans”? Or is it an act of devotion, perhaps not all that dissimilar to Johnny Depp’s famous “Winona forever” – now “wino forever” – tattoo? There might be a gendered context to this, but isn’t getting your partner’s name tattooed on your forehead on the same continuum as changing your name to his? Or reassuring him that the children you bear are definitely his? It’s all about ownership, when all’s said and done.

Read the full post at the New Statesman.

New Statesman: No, single men do not have a “right” to reproduce

Last year Katha Pollitt wrote an article for the Nation in which she asked why the left was simultaneously making progress with equal marriage while falling behind on abortion rights.  “The media ,” she wrote, “present marriage equality and reproductive rights as ‘culture war’ issues, as if they somehow went together. But perhaps they’re not as similar as we think.”

Pollitt went on to highlight the multiple ways in which the right can afford to cede ground on marriage equality while remaining unwilling to pay the price of granting females bodily autonomy. She is right to do so. While both reproductive choice and gay rights may be classed as gender issues, each has its own very specific relationship to patriarchy.

A woman’s desire to control her reproductive destiny will always be in direct opposition to patriarchy’s desire to exploit female bodies as a reproductive resource. The social institutions that develop to support the latter – such as marriage – may change, but the exploitation can remain in place.

This has, I think, caused great confusion for those of us who like to see ourselves as progressive. We know that the idealisation of the heterosexual nuclear family, couple with the demonisation of all relationships seen as “other,” has caused harm to countless individuals. We refuse to define marriage as solely for the purpose of procreation, or to insist that a family unit includes one parent of each sex.

Read the full post at the New Statesman.

New Statesman: How to explain Brexit to your kids

My parents never sat me down for “the politics talk”. I suspect they were too embarrassed. Like many children of my generation, I was left to develop my own ideas about what adults did in private.

We didn’t have the internet and our arms were too short to open most newspapers (scientists were still working on the tabloid-broadsheet hybrid). Hence we picked up news randomly, either by overhearing snippets on the radio while buying sweets in the newsagent’s or by accidentally watching the start of the six o’clock news following the end of Charles In Charge.

By the time I was nine, the same age my eldest child is now, I had unrealistic expectations of politicians and the democratic process. Due to the fact that I had no idea what anyone was talking about, I assumed everyone in the House of Commons was having serious, informed thoughts about the most important issues of the day. I now know that the real reason I couldn’t understand what anyone was saying was because what had sounded like roargh roargh [insult] <braying laughter> really had been roargh roargh [insult] <braying laughter> all along. I’d assumed it was a language I had yet to learn, one of the more specialised dialects of Adult-ese. I’d already wasted one vote by the time I realised that Prime Minister’s Questions was basically Jeremy Kyle with posher accents and minus the lie detector tests.

Read the full post at the New Statesman.

New Statesman: HBO’s Divorce is uncomfortable viewing for feminists

In Episode 2 of HBO’s Divorce, Thomas Haden Church’s Robert visits his friend Nick in hospital. Nick has had a heart attack following a violent row with his wife Diane.

“Seems like it’s open season on men around here,” notes Robert, before adding that it must be “hell” for Nick to be lying there, “can’t speak, clucking hens all around you.”  In case Robert’s anger at womankind has not yet been made clear enough, he then tells his wife Frances’ friend to “get the fuck away from me you old harpy.” As far as Robert is concerned, women are the enemy.

One could say he has good reason to be mistrustful. Not only was he almost shot by Diane, he recently found out Frances has been having an affair with a granola-making academic. Having changed the locks on their home, he asks Frances whether she ever slept with both her lover and him on the same day: “Because officially that would mean you were gang banged.” He tells Frances that he is going to make her miserable: “And more to the point I’m going to make our children hate you.”

Divorce is written by Sharon Horgan and executive produced by Sarah Jessica Parker, who also plays Frances. It would be difficult – and unfair – to argue that this is a dramedy in which female perspectives on relationships have been sidelined. Even so there’s something about Robert’s embrace of misogyny, almost as a form of liberation following years of repression, that I find deeply discomforting. It’s not unfamiliar territory in TV shows or films relating to the topic of separation, but still it leaves me, as a viewer, on edge.

Read the full post at the New Statesman.

Mental health medication: Stigma is not the only problem

Earlier this year someone very close to me became seriously ill, so much so he was in ICU and it was expected he would die. The cause of this was not unknown: it was a side-effect of anti-psychotic medication, which he’d been taking for the past 20 years in order to treat schizophrenia.

It was not an unexpected side-effect. Everyone treating him had always known about it but it was considered a risk worth taking for a “treatment resistant” case such as his.

On average people like him die 20 years prematurely. There is not one specific cause for this. It is not necessarily the illness itself – that is, suicide, a common assumption — but tends to be a combination of neglect, poverty and preventable physical illnesses. With regard to the medical profession there is a tendency to misdiagnose physical problems or simply disbelieve a patient when that patient is mentally ill. In addition, there is the physical toll of psychiatric medication. High-strength drugs such as clozaril, which might dull (but never quite silence) the voices, come at an incredibly high cost to those who take them.

It is of course a cost that psychiatrists have considered worth paying, and they will persuade patients and families to agree. I write this not in judgment – what other options are available? – but simply to state the facts. Schizophrenia is real, absolutely, but still grappled with and defined by other humans, the sane ones, in their own clumsy, imprecise, prejudiced way. Schizophrenia sufferers are people who are not considered “normal”, by which I do not mean the only real problem they face is stigma. They are normal people – whatever that might mean – but they suffer from delusions. How can these be treated? Right now, with drugs. With the pharmaceutical equivalent of being smashed over the head with a mallet (I do not exaggerate. That is what it is like. The medication does not hone in on the voices unheard, but bludgeons every human feeling in the hope of not missing the bad ones).

I am not a conspiracy theorist (or maybe I am? What is a feminist, if not that?). In any case, I do not spend inordinate amounts of time fretting over whether Big Pharma is one massive con trick, creating imaginary illnesses simply in order to get more cash (unless we’re talking about the beauty industry, in which case, yeah, it’s that). I am less convinced of the supposedly evil intentions of drug companies than I am of the human desire to ensure that everyone can “fit in”. I don’t think schizophrenia is some sinister invention. I do however think that the cost of treatment – and the cost of a schizophrenia sufferer’s life – is being set by people who have a fixed idea of “normal,” that is, by people who see mental illness solely in terms of an individual’s distress/inability to fit in as opposed to taking into account any broader social context. These are the people who, earlier this year, sat discussing with my parents whether my brother had a life worth living, due to his reaction to a drug regimen which had always assumed “well, quality of life, what’s that?”

Two years ago I would have said to anyone who raised questions about schizophrenia and drugs “you don’t understand. It doesn’t matter whether a particular drug gets an individual and their carers through the day. It matters that they survive.” And yet we are talking about drugs that kill people all the same. They kill them, slowly, yet to question this is considered ignorant.

I am increasingly uncomfortable with the drive to present mental illness as the same as physical illness when it comes to treatment, not least because treatment itself can be the cause of so much physical deterioration. This drive seems to me a moral, idealistic one which is not always taking into account the practicalities and the high costs.

The situation my family is dealing with is one in which an individual’s severe mental illness is now accompanied by physical disabilities resulting from side-effects – and the drug which caused the side-effects cannot even be taken any longer, so a less effective one is in use. We are in a much worse place than where we started. Would it have been better to take the less effective, but lower side-effect drug to begin with? I don’t know. What is clear to me is that the problem for us is not some universal stigma against taking any form of medication for mental health conditions. It is far more complicated than that and I think this needs to be more widely understood.

I don’t believe the outrage over Donald Trump

It’s that time again, when the liberal left pretends to be totally outraged by some heinous act of sexism which they’d ordinarily condone. Perhaps I should feel relieved. Perhaps I should think “well, at least one sexist out of the many millions is getting his comeuppance.” But instead I feel tremendously depressed. I don’t believe the outrage over Donald Trump. Yet again it’s feminism being used for anything but the purpose of liberating women.

So the GOP has chosen Trump’s “lewd” admissions of grabbing women “by the pussy,” caught on tape, as the excuse to distance themselves from him. Fair enough. They’ve known about the creepiness, the misogyny, the rape accusations, for long enough, but better late than never. They could of course have drawn the line over some other form of discrimination – one which, as many liberal commentators have helpfully suggested, affects actual people, such as men – but you can’t have everything. Hey, at least a trivial issue such as sexual assault is being used for the greater good.

I don’t believe anyone is actually outraged, though. Not women, nor men, either, and not merely because this is “what they’re all really like.” It’s just another of these increasingly false dawns, a cleansing ritual of sorts, whereby everyone gets to performatively express horror at one man’s sexism and by doing so absolve themselves of guilt. Take our sins upon you, oh tiny-handed one, that we may once again be pure (and not have to liberate women in any meaningful, practical way, which might cost us time, money and our precious ‘rights’).

There are few people who genuinely believe a man’s wealth should not grant him access to the bodies of vulnerable women whenever he wants it. Fewer still who would dare to say that the ‘male’ in ‘male sexual entitlement’ has any actual hierarchical or political meaning. Those who do believe and say these things are roundly vilified, by men of both left and right, and by mainstream feminism. Feminism these days is nothing if not pussy-grab inclusive. Anything less would be sex negative, exclusionary and wrong.

I am bored to death of the consciousness-raising rituals whereby we women all share our experiences of sexual assault. “Isn’t it awful, what men do to women!” we all say, “isn’t it common! Why, it’s happened to all of us!” But who are these men assaulting these women? What is ‘man’? What is ‘woman’? Oh, best not to police those boundaries. If the person who’s assaulting you says they’re a woman, you must accept that narrative, regardless of your own experience within the social hierarchy that is gender. Hence the whole performance becomes meaningless. We have robbed ourselves of the tools of analysis. Why would one group of people want access to the bodies of another group? Are there any differences between those bodies? You’re simply not allowed to ask.

According to Lindy West, “if you have derided and stigmatized identity politics in an effort to keep the marginalized from organizing” you are no better than Donald Trump. Because “doing feminism” is all much of a muchness to Lindy. You read from the script, which changes from hour to hour. Feminism must allow women boundaries and self-definition; feminism must allow women neither boundaries nor self-definition. Feminism says women are not objects for sale; feminism says women are objects for sale. Whatever. As long as you have a specific baddie somewhere – Donald Trump, meanie men on the internet, “exclusionary” feminists – you can reassure men as a class that their rights to female subjectivity and flesh will remain intact.

“You can do anything,” says Trump in the recording. Power, fame, money, male privilege, all of these things allow you to exploit the bodies of women. Why get squeamish about this now? Isn’t that what the left wants with their current approach to pornography and sex work? Surely it’s only the pearl-clutching prudes who have issues with such an exchange and wish to stigmatise those involved in it. How do you know they’re not consenting? Aren’t you just concern trolling now?

The truth is, men can still pretty much do what they like, unless other men see a broader class benefit to placing limits on this. To write what I have just written – about sex work, gender, identity – would, I am sure, be far more damaging to any presidential candidate than literally admitting on tape to sexual assault. Good job Hillary’s not a TERF.

Theresa May isn’t a feminist, but I’m sick of everyone reminding me of this

News just in: Theresa May isn’t a feminist, despite the fact that she once wore a Fawcett Society t-shirt claiming that she was! This will no doubt come as a shock to the many amongst us who take t-shirt slogans to be gospel truth (indeed, I now find myself worrying in case I am not in fact brilliant and everyone else is an arse).

I have to admit, though, I’ve suspected for a while that May’s feminism wasn’t all that it seemed. It’s that whole being leader of the Conservative Party thing. That whole “holding views which are not just not particularly feminist, but which are in direct opposition to very principles of feminism” stuff. It’s always made her look – how shall I put it? – more of an anti-feminist. Not exactly a men’s rights activist (I’m not sure the Tories are keen on most men having rights, either) but certainly someone who isn’t trying, to use Andrea Dworkin’s words, “to destroy a sex hierarchy, a race hierarchy, an economic hierarchy, in which women are hurt, are disempowered, and in which society celebrates cruelty over us and refuses us the integrity of our own bodies and the dignity of our own lives.” I really don’t think Theresa May is into all that.   Continue reading

Mumsnet: The unmasking of Elena Ferrante shows women writers can’t win

How much of yourself should you reveal when you are writing? The answer, of course, depends on whether you are male or female.

If you are male, it doesn’t really matter. You are the default human being and all experiences about which you write – regardless of whether or not you have actually had them – will be universal.

If you are female it is more complicated. Reveal too much about yourself and you are not a real writer at all, just an over-sharer, wallowing in the petty specifics of a non-male life. Don’t reveal enough and you are suspect, manipulative, a tease. Either way you can’t win.

See the full post at Mumsnet

The Science Museum: Forthcoming exhibitions*

Following on from the brilliant Who am I? exhibition, what’s next for The Science Museum in teaching us who we are today?*

No-tails – our closest relative?

A fascinating look at the lives of those primates who many say are our closest relatives: the no-tails. Born into human communities, but without penises,  the no-tails possess an incredible ability to emulate human behaviour, even acquiring language and, some claim, having thoughts. Most of us are familiar with the ways in which no-tails help us in our daily lives: washing underpants, making sandwiches, even gestating and bearing human children with real, human penises. But what else can no-tails teach us about ourselves? What is it that makes us, so close in so many ways, so much more special than them? And how could this help us to get even more out of human-no-tail relations in years to come? Join us for an amazing exploration of the lives of what some scientists have affectionately called “the lesser humans.”

Where do I come from?

An entertaining, informative response to age-old question: “how are babies made?” While scientists, philosophers and clerics have always known that men make babies, theories as to how they do it have varied. From Aristotle’s idea of menstrual blood as the “matter” which develops the male life principle, right through to today’s more detailed understanding of conception and gestation, men have always been the universe’s experts on the origins of human life. Today we find them pushing the very boundaries of medical science in order to find new ways of planting mini-humans in the potting soil that was once referred to as the “female” body. What could the future hold? Will it always be necessary to gestate new beings in the primitive boundaries of a womb, or can mankind find more sterile, civilised environments? Is a global surrogacy market in which “female” bodies are strictly controlled and force-fed medication from birth the answer? Explore all this and more in this fascinating look at the miracle of life.

Community voices: Pro-ana

Bodies come in all shapes and sizes and perhaps none are so fascinating as the bodies of chronic anorexics. In this, an exhibition set up with the co-operation of the pro-ana and pro-mia communities, we explore what it means to be anorexic or bulimic, the complex interactions of body, mind and community that go to shape what we call “the anorexic experience” and listen to the story of Mary, a young woman who discovered her true identity by starving herself down to five stone and dying of heart failure. Our display includes objects selected by members of the community: laxatives, scales, an actual toothbrush used for self-induced vomiting, carrier bags of actual bulimic vomit, Mary’s daily diet (two Polo mints) and some age seven jeans worn by Mary shortly before her death. A fun way for young people to explore issues of identity and self!

Isaac Baker Brown, medical pioneer

A retrospective on the work of Isaac Baker Brown, 19th century English gynaecologist, surgeon and pioneer in the performance of clitoridectomies on women who didn’t behave like women. While disgraced in his own lifetime, we now recognise him as a forerunner of today’s doctors performing mastectomies on teenage non-binary folk and prescribing testosterone to non-feminine womb-owners. A true Galileo of the medical community, Baker Brown is a fascinating figure, tragically misunderstood as an abuser of “females” in his own unenlightened times.

(*These aren’t real exhibitions. I just think, on past evidence, they really, really could be)

New Statesman: Action against sexual harassment in schools is more about protecting the male orgasm than girls

How much pain and suffering is the male orgasm worth? Is there ever a time when a man’s right to access hardcore pornography is outweighed by the rights of young women to feel safe?

I am wondering this in light of today’s Women and Equalities Committee Report into sexual harassment and sexual violence in schools. The way in which young men see their female peers is tainted, poisoned by broader cultural narratives about what female bodies are for. Boys are not born with a need to hurt and humiliate for pleasure, but they are acquiring it, and fast.

The findings of the report are dismaying, if not altogether surprising. It states: “A number of large scale surveys find girls and young women consistently reporting high levels of sexual harassment and sexual violence in school.”

Data published in September 2015 found that over 5,500 sexual offences were recorded in UK schools over the course of three years, including 600 rapes. Almost a third of 16-18 year old girls say they have experienced unwanted sexual touching in school, while 41 per cent of girls aged 14 to 17 in intimate relationships reported experiencing sexual violence from their partner. Sexual harassment starts in primary school, with lifting up skirts and pulling down pants, driving some girls to wearing shorts under their school skirts.

Read the full article at the New Statesman

New Statesman: Allowing boys to be boys won’t bridge the GCSE gender gap

According to Tory MP Karl McCartney, UK schools need to spend more time celebrating the traditional masculine roles that men were “born to do.” As a mother of school-age boys, I’m obviously very concerned about this. Does my sons’ school offer lessons in manliness? If not, how can I be sure they won’t mistakenly end up doing things women are “born to do,” such as hoovering, ironing and remembering to send birthday cards?

Not only that, but how can I be sure that girls – any girls, I don’t care which – won’t get better exam results than my brilliant boys? This stuff keeps me awake at night (this, and fuming over white male MPs standing up in parliament to complain about the “shrill equal pay brigade,” but best not to dwell on that now).

There’s a long history of boys underperforming, by which we mean “not doing as well as girls.” The assumption is that boys should naturally be doing as well as their female contemporaries. This is not an idea of equality we apply to all areas of achievement. We do not, for instance, talk about women “underperforming” at sports. We do not insist that men have no innate physical advantage (something that would be quite obvious were the Olympic 100m sprint to be replaced with competitive menstrual bleeding or breastmilk squirting). Yet we refuse to accept that girls could just be better at certain academic subjects. Of course not. There must be something wrong with the way these subjects are being taught.

Read the full post at The New Statesman

New Statesman: A new German law wants to force mothers to reveal their child’s biological father

The German press call them “Kuckuckskinder”, which translates literally as “cuckoo children” – parasite offspring being raised by an unsuspecting innocent, alien creatures growing fat at the expense of the host species’ own kind. The British press have opted for the more Benny Hill-esque “milkmen’s kids”, prompting images of bored seventies housewives answering the door in negligées before inviting Robin Asquith lookalikes up to their suburban boudoirs. Nine months later their henpecked husbands are presented with bawling brats and the poor sods remain none the wiser.

Neither image is particularly flattering to the children involved, but then who cares about them? This is a story about men, women and the redressing of a legal – or is it biological? – injustice. The children are incidental.

This week German Justice Minister Heiko Maas introduced a proposal aimed at to providing greater legal protection for “Scheinväter“ – men who are duped into raising children whom they falsely believe to be biologically theirs. This is in response to a 2015 case in which Germany’s highest court ruled that a woman who had told her ex-husband that her child may have been conceived with another man could not be compelled to name the latter. This would, the court decided, be an infringement of the woman’s right to privacy. Nonetheless, the decision was seen to highlight the need for further legislation to clarify and strengthen the position of the Scheinvater.

Read the full post at the New Statesman.

Why I wear the iron maiden: One woman on dressing modestly in everyday life

We live in a very shallow society, where far too many women are obsessed with moving, speaking and not being dead. Wearing an upright metal coffin, with sharp spikes going through my internal organs, gives me the freedom not to worry about all that. I wear it because it’s my choice.

I grew up in a culture where wearing the iron maiden was not the norm. Women and girls would wear clothes which allowed them to walk about, breathe and not release torrents of blood from gaping open wounds. Like so many before me, I was to witness first-hand the consequences of female clothes-wearing.  Men and boys would cat-call, grope, call names, commit rape, even murder. It amazed me that so many women continued to put themselves and their daughters at risk.

One of the best things about the iron maiden is it liberates me from the male gaze. I don’t get ogled or harassed when there’s several inches of moulded iron between me and the outside world. It’s a way of dressing that gives me safety and security. I don’t judge other women for choosing to be fresh meat, available to all and sundry, but they need to respect my choices in return.

I know many women choose to be outspoken in public and experience death and rape threats as a result. Being already dead, I am liberated from this but even if I wasn’t, having a spike going into my mouth and piercing the back of my throat offers me further protection. I know some women who only go so far as wearing the scold’s bridle and that’s their decision. As long as no man is forcing them to do this, I’m happy to support them in undertaking their own empowered harassment avoidance strategies.

Some women may take the opposite route and wear no clothing whatsoever, or have several rounds of surgery in order to become numbed, emotionless Barbie doll sexbots. I am as accepting of them as I am of women who buy their own ducking stools, put themselves in the stocks once a fortnight or cut off their legs at the knee in order not to be spotted by gangs of marauding males. We’re all just non-people, after all, making our own choices about which kind of non-people we want to be. It’s not as though we can challenge the way people, that is, men, respond to us in the first place.

There are downsides to wearing the iron maiden. There are men with their “dead chicks with spikes in them” fetishes. There are the gangs of drunk youths who yell “oi, metal tits!” whenever they spot me. There are the men who insist any woman in an iron maiden that isn’t locked up in a vault at a top secret location is just asking for it. But I think, as a woman, these are just things that you have to accept. As long as you’re happy with your own choices, that’s all that matters.

New Statesman: Anorexia, breast-binding and the legitimisation of body hatred

In 1987 I underwent the first of three hospitalisations for anorexia. I was force-fed via a nasogastric tube. This led me to gain a significant amount of weight, which I hated. Furthermore, it made my overall psychological state not better, but worse.

Upon discharge I lost the weight again and in the years that followed I tried to play a game of keeping myself just thin enough to manage my anxiety, not so thin as to be coerced into further treatment. I was not always successful. I used to fantasise about the peace I would experience if only people were to leave me alone. The expectations they had for my life, my body, were not my own.

Decades later I have not come round to other people’s point of view. I still think force-feeding was violent, traumatising, if not downright abusive. I still reject the idea that one might somehow, by sheer force of will, learn to accept a body in which one does not feel at home. The portrayal of anorexia as some invading enemy, or a sly, toxic friend, is one I find wholly ridiculous. There was no battle between the “real” me and a manipulative, alien “Ana”. Every thought I thought, every feeling I felt, was mine.

Should this sound like the start of The Pro-Ana Manifesto, I would like to stress that anorexia robbed me of a great deal. It almost killed me. Perhaps, if I had been “left in peace”, I would not be around to write this today. Yet there was no simple cure, no demon to kill. There was, in the end, no Ana, no skinny mean-girl shadow stalking me, whispering in my ear. There was only me. There was only ever me and a world for which I desperately wanted – and still want – to be the right shape.

Read the full post at the New Statesman

New Statesman: Gender pay gap – women do not choose to be paid less than men

Is it just me, or does Mansplain The Pay Gap Day get earlier every year? It’s not even November and already men up and down the land are hard at work responding to the latest so-called “research” suggesting that women suffer discrimination when it comes to promotions and pay.

Poor men. It must be a thankless task, having to do this year in, year out, while women continue to feel hard done to on the basis of entirely misleading statistics. Yes, women may earn an average of 18% less than men. Yes, male managers may be 40% more likely than female managers to be promoted. Yes, the difference in earnings between men and women may balloon once children are born. But let’s be honest, this isn’t about discrimination. It’s all about choice.

Listen, for instance, to Mark Littlewood, director general of the Institute of Economic Affairs:

When people make the decision to go part time, either for familial reasons or to gain a better work-life balance, this can impact further career opportunities but it is a choice made by the individual – men and women alike.

Women can hardly expect to be earning the same as men if we’re not putting in the same number of hours, can we? As Tory MP Philip Davies has said, “feminist zealots really do want women to have their cake and eat it.” Since we’re are far more likely than men to work part-time and/or to take time off to care for others, it makes perfect sense for us to be earning less.

Read the full post at the New Statesman

New Statesman: “I did not want her to become a decrepit old hag.” Why elderly men kill their wives

“I did not want her to become a decrepit old hag. I loved her too much for that.” Those are the words of 89-year-old Philip Williamson, who last week received a suspended two-year prison sentence for the manslaughter of his 83-year-old wife Josephine.

A retired teacher, Josephine was suffering from dementia and becoming increasingly dependent on her husband, who had terminal cancer. Philip claims to have been following his wife downstairs when “something took over me and I pushed her”. Once she had reached the bottom, he also strangled her. The judge presiding over the case, Joanna Cutts QC, accepted that in killing Josephine Philip “felt this was the only way to limit or prevent her suffering”.

Philip Williamson is not the first husband to make such a decision on behalf of an elderly wife suffering from dementia. In December last year Ronald King, 87, shot dead his wife Rita, 81, at the care home where she lived. King told staff that his wife “had suffered enough”. He was found guilty of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility, in what the investigating police officer described as “a particularly sad and tragic case”. Other cases, such as that of Angus Mayer and his late wife Margaret, who had Alzheimer’s, have yet to come to court.

Read the full post at the New Statesman

The weird sexism of thinking female journalists invent children to back up their political opinions

Yesterday my eight-year-old son announced that he was going to make us all some chocolate cake. He promptly went into the kitchen and emptied a puddle of vegetable oil all over the floor. His seven-year-old brother looked at him despairingly.

“You’re just like Jeremy Corbyn,” he said.

Their baby brother, recognising the aptness of the comparison, suggestive as it was of someone who promises much that is good and right but delivers a total mess, nodded his head and cried.

It is at this point in the story that I should tell you this was all made up. Ha! I was cleverly parodying all of those ridiculous members of the commentariat who “use their children to back up their political opinions.” As Sam Kriss so astutely observes in Vice, “when the time comes for them to really make their defences of an increasingly unpopular status quo, they seem to be constantly delegating responsibility to their children.” Continue reading