Free Speech Nation the Podcast: Episode 11 Julie Bindel

welcome to free speech nation the podcast i'm thrilled to welcome my guest julie bindle who is a journalist a writer and has been campaigning against male violence against women since she was 17 years old she's the author of the pimping of prostitution straight expectations and this book feminism for women the real route to liberation julie thank you so much for joining me it's a pleasure um we will get onto the book in a minute because there's a lot to cover in this but i wanted to ask you first about how you got involved in this because seventeen strokes is a very young age to become an activist it doesn't seem like something that most young people would innately just choose what happened well it was a combination of luck uh and circumstance i grew up in a very working class community in the northeast of england and trust me when i tell you that being outed as a lesbian when i was still at school and it was a sink school was not the best fun i've ever had i can imagine so and there was no work um the thatchery destroyed all of the the mining community and much of the um the industry so mass unemployment it was 1978 when i was 16 i decided to leave home and move to a city or a town where i might be able to get work and as it happened my aunt lived in a little blue rinse town as we called it called harrogate near leeds yes i've been right so there happened to be a gay bar in hurricane i have no idea why probably because people were so bored the straights were going to it yeah anyway i i met someone who was visiting um another lesbian of my age and we moved to leeds together and when i got to leeds of course the first thing i did um was look for the feminists because i realized at that time lesbianism and feminism were pretty indivisible so where you found one you found the other and i had no interest in going to the working class gay bars because i'd escaped that culture and for the young lesbians who were in those bars there was a lot of damage there was some violence there was a lot of fun but also some kind of unhappiness that was a bit too close to the bone from what i'd kind of almost run away from so i found the feminists and they were actually almost all middle class yeah and i had no education and they all did and so they they were older than me and they mentored me into the women's movement and of course it was at the time when peter sutcliffe was killing women in and around you know that city and so therefore anger about male violence and the police response to it was at its height so therefore i was in in the deep end straight away yeah i heard you talking about this in the documentary about about peter circliff and about how men would come up and offer you a sort of passageway or to guide you home and of course your anger i suppose is about the fact that we live in a society where that even would be considered i mean i think their gesture was probably well intentioned right but it's more about societal issues oh totally i have no issue with chivalry in good manners none whatsoever i do think some of it's borne out of a sexist assumption of women's weakness in relation to men but quite frankly we were scared at that time very scared about this man who was killing with impunity but we also knew that the home was the most dangerous place for women and girls because of domestic violence child sexual abuse and the like and that's where most women are killed in domestic violence situations and we also knew that the streets were populated not just by one man whose intent was to harm women but by several yeah so of course if a man approached me or any of my friends to say can i walk you home why on earth would we think we were safe yeah it's a good point i mean that's what someone would do if they were even going to perpetuate violence wouldn't they that's what they might do well absolutely and the the problem is when when feminists like me talk about male violence and especially when i've just said to you i wouldn't have felt safe walking home with a man who may or may not be chivalrous or he may or may not be a rapist it can come across as though what we're saying is all men are rapists are all men are potential rapists we're not what we know is there are enough men perfectly sane nice looking well presented um going about their businessmen who do commit acts of violence against women for us to have to be wary of all men in those circumstances not necessarily the men we know but that can happen but um you know we have to be on our guard and i don't think that women really recognize that we go around the world you know our jobs our home life our relationships our social life feeling that little bit aware that bit stressed and tense and having to be on guard it's a self it's a it's an unconscious feeling but that if we really sit and think about it how outrageous is that that we have to do that yeah yeah absolutely so do you did you decide that the best way to get into to address these issues i mean you've got the activism on the one side but then you went into journalism now how did that happen or was that just a natural thing that came about i mean it came about way further down the line when i first became a feminist and when i was living in leeds between 79 and 87 you know we we were doing activism almost constantly and none of it was paid and quite frankly i got involved in the grey economy to keep me afloat um you need a bit of kiting and shoplifting here and there only from chains no one's gonna judge you here julie only from chain stores okay so for the big corporations indeed yeah um and so you know that was quite a nice sideline i signed on of course and then eventually i met my partner who was a respectable person so i was semi-feral at the time that we met you know i was 25 and she was just a couple of years older but she was from an upper middle class background and understood the value of education and also was able to support me getting onto an access course and going to university as a mature student which i did and then that led me into academic research on violence against women still doing the activism and it wasn't until i was 40. so in the very early 2000s i started to think do you know what i'm writing all these comment pieces for the guardian mainly to get the word out about our campaigns i can do this and i could probably do more than i'm doing now so i walked out of research and went full time into journalism and it's interesting now you've produced this book which which feels very much uh like a not quite a call to arm so much as a kind of reinstatement of what lies at the core of feminism and and and and and almost as though there is a need now to to restate the case for it was that the sort of motivation behind this book definitely i wanted to write it for young women and i do not assume that young women want to hear what i have to say if they do that's fantastic if it can be a piece of armory if it can be useful for them then that's great even if it's useful for them to learn how to argue against the ideas that feminists like i have but what i wanted to do is actually define feminism at a root and branch level because we can do this with the black civil rights movement with anti-anti-racist movements you know what anti-racism is and what it isn't if you are in that active field yes there's disagreement around tactics and strategies but yes it's a bit like the kind of labor movement the the working-class work the workers movement you have a set of aims and principles and you know that what you want to overthrow what you want to challenge with feminism that's different it's as if women and girls don't have the right to our own movement despite being half the planet so we're told well feminism is about choice feminism's about being able to lap dance and feel proud of it feminism is for beyonce for margaret thatcher feminism is whatever you want it to be or as emma watson said feminism is about equality for everyone no it's not feminism is for women and feminism in recent years has been subverted and misconstrued to something that more benefits men than it does women so this is really interesting because um you see i i'm not sure i agree that phrases like anti-racism racism you'd like to think we all know what that means but actually these days actually different people have different definitions of what these things mean and similarly with feminism i mean you've said in your the subtitle route to liberation and it does seem like what you were saying is we need to clarify what feminism actually means and i've just taken a couple of notes from the book you say that feminism is about the quest for liberation from patriarchy and you talk about feminism as a theoretical framework based on the material reality of women's oppression as a sex class that's really clear and but the thing is so many young female not young but women that i speak to don't see feminism in the way that you see feminism so is that a sort of difficulty of course it's difficult but i think it's an ideological difference not a generational one yeah but it's played out across the generations because i do think although young women know their mind and are extremely strong and assertive in general there are many young women that have a real lack of confidence when it comes to speaking out in male-dominated settings such as universities so it's middle-class women or working-class women who are told that feminism is you know what's the point of it because you know you've got to get your kids fed and you've got to get decent housing and that's all that matters and so the personal relationships are put on the back shelf but feminism is for all women feminism benefits all women but not all women are feminists yeah and there are hundreds of ways to be a feminist but many of them are counterproductive so the whole kind of you know feminism is just for feminism is about choice well of course it is but what does choice mean in a world where women do not actually have a right to exercise full choice so can you explain that idea of this idea of women as an oppressed sex class what exactly you mean by that just in case people aren't familiar with the argument okay so when you say to somebody women are oppressed which is a crude way of putting it they'll say how ridiculous look at that um chief executive of a bank who's on a million pounds a year and look at that homeless man on the street are you honestly telling me he's oppressing her well of course i'm not yeah the point is it's like for like so that homeless woman on the street next to that homeless man on the street is in danger of course of being raped is in danger of being harassed by homeless men on the street the woman at the top of her uh career who i have to say i'm not interested in the glass ceiling at all i'm interested in the basement the women in the basement but the woman at the top of her career will absolutely be uh vulnerable to being sacked if she's pregnant not being promoted earning less than the man being sexually harassed at the water cooler right yeah like i say i care less about that scenario not because i don't care about women being sexually harassed but because i think that we have a lot to do before we even think about the women at the top of the tree so women women as a sex clash share something in common and i would say it's only one thing and everything else divides us and is fragmented but the one thing that we do share is extremely central to our lives from birth to death and that is the fear and reality of male violence yes which of course doesn't go away irrespective of how rich you are absolutely not so that's where i think we need to galvanize our feminism not to pretend that women are united on all fronts we're not most things divide us but to say okay let's let's forge solidarity between women on this issue and everywhere around the world we will find women together who are countering the kind of abuse that is in their daily lives yeah i mean you emphasize continually in the book this need for feminism to be a collective movement um and do you are you optimistic that that can ultimately be achieved while there's all these disagreements going on and i'm thinking that you know the different branches of feminism now how do you how can you forge an effective collector i mean you point out that feminism has to be revolutionary not egalitarian so but how can that possibly be achieved while everyone does if everyone disagrees on what it is and that's the problem because if you don't have a working definition of feminism which we don't only have a right to have as active feminists we have a responsibility to put forward if we can't agree on a baseline of feminism then it really is for just everybody except women and that's how it's gone now you're right of course about you know not agreeing on what an anti-racist activist is yes so whether critical race theory is helpful and useful in the liberation of people of colour of black people because my feeling is it's the opposite that actually makes things worse but i know that's arguable well it's arguable but it's a point and it's a good point but the the problem with not having a definition of feminism that is real and based on material you know reality of women's lives is that it means it's up for grabs from everyone now who are the ones that want to own feminism and colonize it and change it to suit them men of course because to put it crudely if men aren't threatened in any way by your feminism then we're doing something wrong well that's interesting because you you we're talking in your book when you're talking about whether men can be feminist which you resolutely say they cannot be feminists and you actually say that um how do you put it you put it it's almost like a serious some game you say why would we want men in a movement with the primary aim of taking away their patriarchal power so you do see it in those terms that actually it is a zero-sum game for you i do but i really want men to be feminist allies right and which you may clear in the book as well yes and do you know what i hate the word ally but i couldn't actually think of another word there probably isn't one is that no i mean ally has been it's become such a oh awful word allyship yeah it's cringeworthy isn't it well it really is but what i mean by that is um the men that are doing work to end violence against women and i know them i've almost got a man in every port right so where i travel around the world so in africa in south america across europe um in north america i have friends who are doing this work and they're brilliant and they work with other men and they don't want cookies they don't want praise they don't want to be um adorned with a kind of superhero costume and put on the podium as the keynote speaker yeah but having said that we all do things for our own reasons none of us are selfless so there has to be a reward and the reward is i think for these men that are fighting alongside women to end male violence is that they actually know that they will be better human beings and happier for it if they have good relationships with women and that they're not porn soaked kind of individuals feeling rage and hatred towards women because of socialization because no man is inherently bad and no baby boy is born bad in the same way as girls aren't born victims so i absolutely want that that kind of relationship with men doing this work to be fruitful for both sides and not to do that whole you man go off and stop someone from raping tonight and then we'll talk because i think a lot of people would interpret or do interpret feminism as being an anti-male thing i mean would you like it for men more men to read your book for instance i'd love men to read my book i would and i think they might get a surprise because first of all it might show them what active feminism is so as opposed to the kind of keyboard warrior blue fringe tweeting that goes on that passes for feminism that achieves nothing but i'd also really like men younger generation and and you know maybe men of my generation to understand what has changed and how change in this area is not necessarily or never organic yeah so for example when i was talking to young women interviewing young women for the book most of them had no idea that before 1992 raping marriage was not a criminal offence and that it was feminists after a long campaign that changed that and it seems incredible doesn't it relatively recently totally and there are still countries around the world where raping marriage is perfectly legal and of course domestic violence but what they fail to recognize and it's not because older feminists are asking for praise or thanks but is we have a history here feminism has a history and we have changed things and these are the laws and these are the societal norms that we have successfully changed and therefore if you actually campaign alongside women from different generations and if you pick up your own campaigns as issues relating to young women today because so much of the abuse is online you can also bring about change such as the campaign group that i interviewed um we can't consent to this about the rough sex defense where men are saying that she asked for literally asked to be murdered during sex or the upskirting law you know taking photographs or filming up a woman's skirt was not a criminal offense young women campaigning have changed that there's been all kinds of brilliant changes from when i first joined the movement in 79 up to today but we need young men in particular to understand why we dinosaurs go on so much about our sex-based rights because we had to fight tooth and nail to introduce them because otherwise their own mothers and their aunts would be fleeing with nowhere to go no refuges no rape crisis centers yeah i think it is just often that you you don't think outside your own experience you know i mean i i had an experience recently where a friend of mine has she's recently moved to a very rural area and said for the first time i feel it's quite liberating i just walk out at night and i'm not constantly looking over my back and of course i never think about things like that so just even hearing that kind of story wakes you up a little bit i suppose i hope so and you know i've i learned from feminists that were about 15 years older than me the group that i met all those years back in leeds um and and my eyes were you know ablaze with fascination about it all because i of course had no idea about the history um prior to that wave of feminism i knew very little about the suffragists or the suffragettes um and and i just thought look if young women understand that change only comes through agitation and campaigning then they're just going to sit back and think everything's bad that's happening to them right now can't be helped and instead what they've got to do is capitulate to it maybe it's helpful to outline what what exactly we mean by the various waves of feminism because you've just mentioned the suffragettes which is what is classified as first wave feminism and then you're often called a second wave feminist which would be the sort of i suppose 1960s type of feminist um the jermaine grier kind of women's lib movement i think you'll find that jermaine grier and i are very different feminist i know but i'm just saying this is the way that the second wave is described is that unfair of me not at all no it's just that it's so kind of pointless and also confusing yes to have these so-called i thought i wanted to yeah no it's a good question i mean obviously you know the suffragists and the suffragettes were you know the the first active feminists that brought about legal change i mean there's always been a women's movement there's always been resistance to patriarchy to male violence and that was you know definitely before those those movements and then of course there was a resurgence in the 60s and 70s in the us and the uk and other countries as well in the global south um i suppose during the time that people were protesting uh you know it was post-war um protests to you know change the world for the better but feminism came very much out of the sexist left in in the us and the uk so obviously those women um were working with men to i mean that they probably started for example protesting the vietnam war and then you know they were sort of involved in regular socialist campaigns and realized that the men on the left just like the men on the right didn't want them to become liberated from their own control because that meant them losing their privilege so the women went off and formed their own movement which was the women's liberation movement now i won't use terms like waves because if you think about what happened with that vibrant feminism that i entered towards the end of the height it did peter out and we it was replaced with something called femocracy so women who were going into paid jobs wearing suits to go to work working in town halls signing off equality and diversity policies instead of fighting for liberation yeah they were they started to fight for equality which was a pathetic you know kind of way to fizzle out that energetic movement but then of course there was still you know there were always campaigns to end male violence and you know when i uh when we set up justice for women in 1991 it was probably at the lowest point of active feminism but it then became revived not just because of us but because of loads of active feminists that had decided enough was enough and we need to get back on the streets and protest outside the courts again yes so at the heart of your brand of feminism what distinguishes it i suppose is this emphasis on violence on the risk of violence and you even worked with police you mentioned in your book that you worked in 1994 with police no can you tell us a bit about that because i didn't know this and it seemed quite surprising that was fun so so i came out to university needed a job and a colleague of mine said oh we're just starting this um civilian project in a north london police station where we go out with the police officers to offer the support and the advice to the women while they go after the perpetrators so in other words doing policing work and policing of domestic violence at that time it was the early 90s it was pretty chronic yes there was still a lot of prejudice around was kept in the family very much wasn't it it was just awful the way that they talked about the women was just a disgrace so we were in the domestic violence unit and uh oh yes there was one of the coppers who we called six of one because he used to say come in every day well i went to that dv call out six or one half a dozen of the other it's not helpful he would talk about how much she was drinking how there were you know dirty dishes in the sink that kind of thing perpetrators were never really brought in then there was a hilarious story which actually shouldn't really make me laugh but it still does where a turkish woman who spoke no english at all had called in a very serious domestic violence incident we went to the house she was in an awful state brought her back to the station and we used to use something called language line where you would ring it was all phone based and you would say i need a turkish interpreter but there was not one available yeah so the copper who was about to do the interview with this victim and she was in a real state nipped over the road to the kippah shop and went to get the turkish bloke that was carving up donna kebabs i mean so you know in a way things have got better haven't they you know in terms of the way that the police handle these things and yeah because we made them because we made them and at one stage i decided when i was working at that project i don't care actually if these men respect the women give a damn about domestic violence think it's wrong of a man to hit a woman i just want him to arrest the perpetrator and do right by the victim i don't give a damn what's going on in his head anywhere near as much as what i care about in terms of his action and so we pushed and pushed and pushed until policies were put in place nationwide so that that kebab shop show could not happen again but he would be disciplined you must be quite uh gratified that actually all these years of activism and the feminist movement it has made such a revolutionary difference already hasn't it i mean this must be and yet in your new book you're also saying there's much much more to be done well the problem is we're in the face of a horrific backlash right now so what used to be understood across the board and still is in a lot of hearts and minds but they get terribly bullied for saying it what used to be understood was that things like prostitution um violent degrading pornography and the like was actually not going to bring about women's liberation in fact it was just a tool of our oppression and now of course it's been turned on its head very cleverly by the post-modernists at the universities who will have it that if you speak out against the sex trade of course the sex trade itself the abusers the punters the pimps not the women who should never be arrested feminists say and should always be supported listen to speak for themselves but if you actually speak out about the sex trade that awful capitalist industry yeah much worse than the tobacco industry but leftists seem to support it then you are homophobic which is one of the words du jour yeah it's relatively new to me this one horror phobic but it's used a lot and it's a real i mean your last book as well the pimping of prostitution this is a something that you're very keen to emphasize but it's also one of the main sources of division i think within feminism isn't at the moment and um last time i spoke to you uh on another podcast i had messages from feminists saying how angry they were the things you'd said about prostitution and how prostitution should be legal would you like to clarify what your position on prostitution is and why you think it is at the heart of feminism or the opposition of prostitution is at the heart of feminism well if there was true equality and liberation of women there wouldn't be a sex trade because one set of human beings wouldn't actually dehumanize another set of human beings in order to have one-sided sexual pleasure and to rent the inside of a person's orifice um it just wouldn't happen but then i suppose the counter-argument is always going to be about choice isn't it and then and one of the messages i kept going is getting is about choices that women have the right to choose what they do with their lives absolutely women absolutely have the right although we don't but theoretically yes women absolutely should have the right to choose what to do with our own bodies and this argument of course is not about their right it's about men's right it's about the right of men to buy them and it's about listening to an unrepresented unrepresentative yes minority of women such as brooke magnante who inspired the bel de jour tv series starring billy piper other phd candidates who fund some of their studies by becoming what i call tourists you hear about this a lot don't you yeah nipping in and out yeah yeah um thinking it's really cool you know when i was in nevada doing some research on the legal brothels there which is way worse for the women than than even prohibition i mean the women should never be arrested but the point is that you know um you don't have to arrest the women you can just actually deter the men but not have the wild west which is what you've got in nevada where one woman described these brothels to me as penitentiaries and their women are locked in they have to ask permission to go out into the town they're in the middle of nowhere in the desert these brothels but one woman who was doing some research in these brothels at the time all owned by dennis hoff who thankfully is now dead she was telling this conference that i saw right years later that her phd studies was based on this question what age group is more likely to have an orgasm during sex work than others she was actually talking about women in nevada brothels being by john's that they did not want to be by and by john's you mean the punt the people who are paying for sex that's right and what possibility what opportunity was there for these women to get sexual pleasure well quite frankly what craziness is this these women do not have sexual pleasure because you've i mean you've traveled the world talking to prostitutes around the world about this and so you have a very a good overview of and you would say that because i think there's a misunderstanding about this because when we see on tv often middle-class women standing up saying but i it's empowering to me but of course you you would say that's a very minority it looks like it isn't the minority but it is isn't it oh it really is because if you think about it how many middle class male students do you know that are flogging their asses at the moment down in some kings cross cd hotel yeah through desperate no not how many men are in prostitution well there are some um there are some gay identified men in prostitution usually the trajectory that gets them there is pretty similar to those women but that everywhere i ever went and i interviewed huge numbers of women in prostitution those that have been trafficked those on street those in brothels those under legalization those under decriminalization prohibition etc and they all tell me the same story once they've got out of prostitution yeah which was it was hell and that they they had to keep themselves together during that time yeah to do that now i went to a university with a great friend and colleague of mine sabrina valise who is a sex trade survivor who was prostituted since the age of 15 um in legal decriminalized and illegal brothels and she campaigned for the change in the law in new zealand that came about in 2000 to decriminalize the brothels so just complete gung-ho and she now talks about what an absolute disaster it was because of course the brothel owners become managers yeah and what we would normally go if we were employed and we had to go to a employment tribunal against our manager it would be something like constructive dismissal with the women in the brothels it's literally sexual assault that becomes an issue for an employment tribunal rather than a criminal court so everything's normalized to the point of where it's supposed to be work but the women know it's not work anyway when i was in this university debate with against the english collective of prostitutes on the one hand the ecp that believed that sex workers work and sabrina and i at the beginning there's a show of hands at these debates isn't there and vast majority of the students all think prostitution should be legalized it it would it would completely remove all the harm by the end we had turned that around completely almost i was going to ask about because that seems available holland nevada to name but some all far higher murder rates than countries that have decriminalized it for the women yeah that deter the the pontiff by threatening to arrest yeah but during this debate sabrina veliz asked a student who had said you know one of the the kind of privileged blokes hey well you know i did a shift in mcdonald's in the summer holidays and i got burned by hot cooking fat and the bus was horrible to me and it was awful why is prostitution a worse job than that and sabrina just looked at him and said okay take your pants down bend over and take his up your ass now it's quite a direct approach isn't it well but i mean you'll get the right answer but it's because that's what that's what you do in prostitution he said or what did he say to them uh well he sort of went green but then she continued because sabrina's not one to let anyone off the hook yeah she then said see that bloat there you don't know when he last had a shower take his dick in your mouth now you see that's what people and he went no i'd rather work at mcdonald's well that's because people are thinking of prostitution in the abstract probably they don't think about the sex right okay they don't think about the way that the women's bodies respond to eight ten johns a day because even when somebody's madly in love and lost you don't want to eight ten times a day yeah our bodies aren't made for that so the women have awful effects um on their bodies and on their mental health and psychology the other interesting thing around this that you raise in the book in particular is how much this relates to class actually and and i think that that is a conversation that extends beyond the question of prostitution but more to feminism more more generally and you you do criticize emma watson at one point percent because she she thinks that women can just choose to be empowered and they're magically empowered but of course some people are from circumstances well that's not going to happen is it class is a major issue and it's a major issue in feminism and it should be because it's never really been high on the agenda we've never really had a moment where because look we've had problems in feminism in the women's movement with identity politics so i lived through the 80s when it was all speaking as a jewish disabled lesbian mother yeah um and you know by the time you got round the room there was no conference to be had because you'd run out of time you couldn't start a conversation exactly there was even a conference once a fat liberation conference where one woman was turned away at the door she wasn't seen to be fat enough go away and gain some weight and then come back i mean no joke the identity politics got ridiculous what we've got today of course is identity politics with no politics and just individual identities that relate to nothing at all you know at least though some of those identity politics i mean it went berserk in the end some of them began in looking at structural oppression and they were rooted to politics actually that you know they were i mean it got silly in any way it was it it got really silly it really did yeah um and i've completely forgotten what you're asking me about when i was asking about class and the importance of playing class has never really had its moment in feminism and i'm rabid about class because i see classes a huge issue where these women are talking about horror phobia or transphobia or issues that actually do not relate to women's lives when they are struggling to exist in a world that does them no favors and the only moment that really dealt with class in in the early days of the women's movement which didn't really deal with it was some working-class women who got very angry who started demanding checkbooks and money off of middle-class women right um and and it got nasty there were a few bricks through windows in those early days i think okay and some women who even though they dropped out of oxford were still saying they were working class and and that happened in the states i remember um kate millet who one of the most amazing second wave feminists going around to andrea dawkins ditto brownstone in in um in brooklyn yeah and going absolutely mad about the amount of privilege andrea had when she'd actually all she had was a house and she worked you know 24 hours a day in the women's movement yeah but class should be something that is way more on the agenda than whether somebody um is sapiosexual or demisexual or genderfluid and i suppose because um the entry into prostitution is often through poverty right and that's absolutely the heart of it why do you think it is though uh that so many feminists um would prioritize the kind of multiple sexual identities you're talking about rather than class which has a kind of material impact on your life and how you can live your life because if you just talk about who's say piosexual as opposed to who's being abused into prostitution you have to do nothing at all except for tweet how brave and stunning which probably clarify what say pyosexual is it's when you're attracted to someone's mind is it someone who's braining yeah i believe i've got that right i think you have yeah but who knows because there's so many sexual and yeah i can't even there's so many yeah but act but of course the the reality of not having any money is you know and particularly for women in certain circumstances that's of course if you've got upper middle class kids sat on twitter and they're talking about being oppressed because they're asexual but that they're only asexual i saw something on on tick tock which was hilarious they're only asexual half of the time and the rest of the time they're aromantic but that might mean that they're aromantic but they're not asexual at that time and why can't everybody understand yeah and all you have to do to actually bleat on about that oppression is to sit there on tick tock for 30 seconds and say it but if you actually deal with a woman who lives on a high-rise with three kids under the age of five who's been beaten by a husband and who's been sexually assaulted by the landlord you've got to actually do some work you've got to actually really try to make a difference and get to the nitty-gritty of her situation instead of sitting on twitter and whinging about something that is never going to oppress you in a million years there's a weird sub genre now of tick tock videos from people who are they're very um they lecture you they're very angry and they're talking to you about their uh asexuality or something and they're they're pointing their finger at you and it's but it does reek of entitlement because they're all clearly quite middle-class have you seen the one with the this teacher the female school teacher who says that she misgendered a student i have seen this one yes i i had to watch that again and again because i thought tell me this is a parody she was beating herself up over that if you go into any school i did a talk just before lockdown in a girls school in hornsey a comprehensive school near where i live for international women's day where i went around talking to these girls about their experiences of being sent dick pics being sexually harassed and assaulted in the school yard things that those girls could not wait to talk about because it affected their everyday life imagine that you just had to worry about your teacher misgendering you because that day you're they them and in fact i went to a table to talk to the group that was doing you know when you do all these bits on kind of um you've got your exercise and you can all report back so that's why i was going around all these tables talking to four or five girls at a time and i got to one table and the belligerence was fabulous it was like the faces were silky like whatever and i said hi girls what have you um done you know what are you talking about and one of them said we're not girls and i said oh he said yeah we're non-binary so i said okay i said in that case why are you in this room because this is a girl only session right but you know that was the deal what did they say to that well we are girls but we just they them yes i hear that when people say they're non-binary lesbians that seems incoherent to me to be honest but they assume they were soon girls but i wonder like with that video with that teacher and she was talking about how she'd accidentally that people had said well i was she her and now i'm they them and she and then the teacher called her her right but you know if i was a kid at school and i wanted to cause trouble that's what i'd do i'd change my pronouns every other day and i'd make the teacher try and get it yeah i mean you know when i was at school i wanted to have a day off or go to the sick bay i used to pretend i'd eaten mercury from the clock that's a good one yeah i mean it worked so there are other things we want to get on to because um you were instrumental with the uh breaking the story of the grooming gangs back in 2007 and i remember we spoke about this before because you'd continually tried to get this story out there and you'd face resistance from the from the press can you can you talk us through what happened there so um in the late 1990s i come across a group um called coalition for the removal of pimping that was set up by a woman called irene iverson who sadly died in the early 2000s whose daughter was abused into prostitution um i mean i hate the word grooming but you have to use it so people understand what you're talking about it's the most common it's the most commonly understood but basically targeted um and abused into prostitution and she was 14 was fiona she was very vulnerable and she was being bullied at school and this man just toned in and social services and police didn't want to know and when she was 17 she was um murdered in a car park in doncaster by a punter and so that was the life trajectory of fiona iverson and her mother started to campaign because the police did not give a damn it was well she's consenting to seeing this man how old was she she was 14 when he started abusing her and he fed the line fiona was white and and the abuser was black and he was saying your family are racists and that's where they don't want you to see me but how does consent come in if she's below the age of consent well of course it didn't but the police didn't care um he he pulled every trick in the book and the police just kind of went along with it and i mean this was this was a very liberal family a very kind of i mean irene was a was a peace campaigner you know they weren't telling her not to see this man because he was black they were telling her that she was too young and that he was a creep which he was um and so irene set up this organization and it was based in leeds and straight away lots of different parents of girls that had been targeted by these men came forward and in these small kind of former mill towns where the demographic there's in some of the towns that came forward there were large numbers of men of pakistani muslim origin and of course some of these men were criminal they weren't doing it because they were pakistani they were doing it because they were criminals and they were non sing and abusing these girls because there was a profit to be made yes but of course the parents some of whom were racist saw it in different ways yeah so for some of them they were saying um i told you didn't i about immigration this is what we've got now abusing our girls well of course child abuse we grow our own yeah plenty plenty around and nothing to do so they were using ethnicity as a justification for their own prejudices absolutely but some of the families met in fact most of the families many of whom i talked to weren't in the slightest bit racist they were concerned about these men these grown men abusing their girls and putting them on the game so the police weren't interested and in many ways the police said that they weren't interested because they didn't want trouble now the police don't care about being called races the police have been called racist plenty many of the police are racist not all but plenty are yeah it wasn't because they were going to be hurt by being called racists they didn't want the ag they didn't want the hassle hadn't it come down from the top though as well people saying don't investigate this totally totally but by the time we got to 2004 when it really hit yes the news unfortunately um the british national party racist party had kind of controlled the narrative to an extent because the parents couldn't get any joy from the police social services and so of course the bnp were targeting these vulnerable parents at the time and said you can talk to us we'll listen to you and the parents didn't really know what they were they were doing in some in some respects but then uh the i think it was the chief constable of west yorkshire police put out a directive um on the eve of a documentary yeah being um screened which channel 4 which showed how these grooming gangs were operating and poured scored on the police for their inaction and the chief constable said we do not want to race riot i think the oldham riots had just happened and so there was lots of unrest and therefore the girls with the collateral damage the program was pulled yeah anyway so i decided that i would look into this and it was a couple of years later that i approached a liberal newspaper and that's going to be difficult to work out which one i'm i've got a good idea of what you're talking about and i was investigating the um disappearance and a body was never found but certainly murder of a girl called charlene downes who was from a bad family in blackpool and uh about whom nobody cared um and definitely there was sexual abuse within her family and the like and you really don't have to worry about legals on this one by the way we are fine and um i talked to the police about what they were doing to investigate this in blackpool yes and thought this is a fascinating story because we can then unearth all of the other stories that i've been hearing and the liberal newspaper said no because it might be seen as racist and i said i'm a left-wing anti-racist feminist journalist and i would actually be writing about the disgrace of the way it's been co-opted by the right wing yes and that because we haven't dealt with it it will be misconstrued as a story about race and ethnicity which it is not yeah there's a way to write about these things isn't it to make it clear where you're coming from and guess what i did manage to write about it in that way because i took it to the sunday times magazine yeah and we did a piece in there in 2006 2007. and then of course the the guardian did take a piece from me after that um on it and we did manage to do it in not just a non-racist way but an anti-racist way where we we brought in the issues about how liberal white racism can actually mean that these criminals just go unchecked yeah and the girls are left and and and nobody um helps them but i think people see was it sarah champion who was kicked out of the cabinet for raising the issue uh or the shadow cabinet yeah i think because she wrote in the sun about it and the sun doesn't have a great track record in looking at this from the point of view of this is about child abuse as opposed to this is about muslim grooming but she wasn't coming from a racist perspective she wasn't at all i mean the the phrase muslim grooming gangs is a really i think it's a really racist term right this is not about muslims this is about grooming gangs and you have to look at the demographic because of course the the the pakistani men that were knee-deep in this in the in the old mill towns back when i first started looking at it had been dealing in heroin right because like i said they were criminals um and of course heroin became too hot to handle so their merchandise became girls and it's in the same ways we can look at the history of different groups of of criminals be there white maltese jamaican taking up particular crimes because that's the road that is open to them at the time well it's about applying the law to everyone of course it's as simple as that really but but i suppose when when it becomes embroiled in race politics then it it is harder to to at least not have your work exploited by the kinds of people that actually that you oppose you know totally and the thing is that what we needed to do was run a piece in this liberal newspaper really early on so that it didn't become a story about muslim or asian grooming gangs because we would never have used that that uh language you know we would never have laid out the story like that and we didn't in the pieces that i did but then of course the times took over the story with some great investigation and it did become a little bit along that kind of narrative um and and some of its coverage was criticized i think some of it was criticized unfairly and some of it was bang to rights but what should have happened is that the liberal press should have taken this up immediately i think you raised a really important point here is that again and again i think uh the the left-wing press or the press that consider themselves left-wing often leave things alone and it gets owned by some quite nefarious people and and then it becomes impossible to even talk about these issues without being branded as such and that isn't how it should be completely because you know if you actually want to um expose um an atrocity and of course journalists should run towards the news not run away from it so when i was looking at the issues of convicted sex offenders who identify as transgender in prisons you know i wanted to expose that because we have a problem with sexual violation and abuse of our most vulnerable women which is you know women in prison and of course it would have been brilliant had um the guardian or observer run the piece that i ended up doing yes for the mail yeah but they didn't now this was a story about rape and sexual abuse this was a story about convicted sex offenders being given carte blanche to to to abuse with impunity yes it wasn't about anything else of course but of course you know there's there are certain um you know there's a level of cowardice in the liberal press at the moment that means that you do actually end up either deciding well i won't write anything about an issue that i've campaigned for all my life or i'll take it to a particular publication whose values i don't necessarily share yeah i mean i you know i have i have been accused of these things when i talk to a right-wing person on a certain platform people say you're the same as that person i'm just over all of that and i don't even think you know there are some people i won't talk to when they go too far but you know i think you you did a very interesting tweet the other day about how you know stop asking me why i write for the mail start asking why the guardian won't publish what i need to write and i think this is now becoming suzanne moore now is published in more right-leaning publications of course and then you you bring a left-wing feminist view to that paper which i think is all for the good there are some publications i wouldn't touch with a barge poll because you literally are just buying into their editorial but most now mainstream media what does having an editorial mean anymore i mean if i read an article in the mail i will read what the person is saying in that article and i don't get clouded by this idea that you know they must be paid for by some person on a high who's pulling the strings and there are good journalists across writing across the board and there are some extremely bad journalists writing across the board as well yes so but i mean do you ever i mean you raise it in the book actually is that there's often accusations against uh your brand of feminism because you end up on certain issues allying with say the christian right on anti-pornography stance that kind of thing and you raise that issue is that a very unfair accusation that people well okay so there's two things here first of all i have a line in the sand and i will not sit on a platform with um those that wish to um criminalize abortion um and think that me being in the same sex relationship is akin to marrying your vacuum cleaner yeah right yeah so that's going to say because the christian right would not approve of your life so i will not work with those people to give them any more grist to the mill because i'm passionately opposed to what they are trying to do legislatively and across the board uh in terms of of social norms and politics and the like so i will never ally myself myself with those that wish to for example outlaw porn because it shows that women are slots and they should be married before anyone gets naked i mean we do not share the same aims and objectives and i think that those people will do harm um to women and girls as opposed to help liberate us sure so i don't want to work with censors um in any way i don't think that's the way to go but there are some women and i will not call them feminists who are women's rights activists who are mainly in the us and they've allied themselves with for example the heritage foundation and they work on assisting particular bits of legislation that might be for example anti-transgender yeah for the simple reason that these people are also anti-lesbian and anti-gay so of course they're going to be anti-transgender now i want nothing at all to do with that and i do not know any feminists that would ever decide that this is a single issue campaign it's immoral and it's unethical to think i don't want single sex bathrooms or trans women in women's prisons so therefore i will go to bigots and help them push forward legislation that will also affect other people i don't want bigots working on this issue it's a very simplistic understanding of it i mean it's the equivalent to uh if some nasty racist talks about the importance of free speech because they want to be able to say what their racist things i support free speech under all circumstances but that doesn't mean that i approve of anything that he's got to say do you see what i mean so that that's always bundled together well yeah i mean i you know i i sometimes get um accused of of um allying with homophobic bigots because i refuse to accept that there is a gay gene yeah now i speak about this from a wholly feminist perspective and from a left-wing perspective yes immutability has never helped black people for example yeah or jews it it doesn't actually help to say i can't help it i was born this way right right nobody protected jews or black people in those circumstances i am not going to ask to be tolerated and i'm not going to be talk i refuse to use the conservative argument that i was born that way in order to stop the bigots legislating against me or kicking my head in the street well let's talk a little bit about that because i'm really interested in this idea because i think the question of whether there's a gay gene or not is a question of fact it either is or or it isn't and they haven't found it yet and they haven't found it yet it's interesting because you're talking about it almost in strategic terms and i've spoken to many gay people and i find and i don't know why this is but i find that the vast majority of gay men do believe that they were born that way for whatever reason it's only from lesbians that i've spoken to who will absolutely reject that and say they don't go suffice to say it's a choice but they often say this is it's a social construct why do you think there's that distinction or is that just my experience well i think that there is um i mean gay men are less politically active and were less politically active during the um the gay liberation movement and also wanted more of a quiet life right in order to stop being targeted and harassed by police in the early days yes pre-aids of course which then brought on a whole new wave of bigotry um itself didn't it but but gay men have often actually used that very leave us alone tolerators argument whereas what lesbians have said is look although the bigotry towards us is hellish we actually benefit from not being in heterosexual relationships right were you described as political lesbian well i mean it's a it's a very misunderstood term so it just means being political about your lesbianism it doesn't mean thinking i'll tell you what i'll stop fancying men i'll start fancying women yes so that men don't get any sex and i can brand myself a lesbian for the sake of it it's women who of course are attracted to women and and do not wish to be heterosexual because they're not attracted to men but who actually refuse to go down the line of being born that way because you're not born fancying the midwife are you i mean you're not born mincing and waving a pride flag well maybe some are about not many i know you don't have a sexuality you don't have a sexual identity when you're born well i'm interested in that though because i do for instance i i to be honest i don't care whether it comes from chemicals in the womb which some people have now suggested or whether it is to do with uh socialization or whatever i also know that i did not choose to be exclusively attracted to my own sex right so i don't so i suppose what i bulk is the idea that we've chosen to be gay because i don't think that's true i understand that and i don't and i think that the word choice which i have used before and wish i hadn't is the wrong word but unfortunately there's no other word that can substitute because it's either that you're born that way or you're not and if you're not then what it has to be is a very complex mix of circumstance of opportunity yeah of socialization of very early experiences and of course our sexual desire our sexual sexuality is extremely hardwired but if you think about um those we call them has been women who never heard that well women who are women who are lesbians and who then you know uh fall in love with some bloke and oh i see okay yeah forever happily hedge sexual and we call them yesterday uh right yesterday yeah and of course that that often happens with your people too but then there's there are many many many women who are quite happily heterosexual quite enjoying the odd romp with her husband i can't believe i've just said the word romp it's great and and then yeah exactly and then and then meet a woman with whom they fall madly in love lost or a combination of the two and that's it they're lesbians well how do we explain them well somebody might say well they're obviously bisexual but they would never look at a man again yeah well sexuality is complicated i i guess is the main thing but but most of the gay men i know though are sort of predominantly maybe there is something different about male and female sexuality a lot of the studies about uh the chemicals in the womb and i'm not an expert or tend to be focused on men which is why men tend to be gay men tend to be the younger brother for instance which which is a fascinating thing i think but i don't know the answer there's a there's a really lovely um scientist um who i actually quote in the book um kazu rahman who has been looking at this issue yeah he's been looking for the gay gene or looking at ways in which we kind of reach you know our kind of sexual orientation yes for a long time and we disagree profoundly on this but he comes out with some really interesting stuff and i mean he wrote a book uh he co-wrote a book called born gay yes that's the book i'm referring to right you read it and there's no facts in it i mean there's no no disrespect to kazi who i really like and his work's exemplary he does lots of great work on mental health issues facing young lesbians and gays but i think the reason why people are so desperate to find um a causal link is because then young people who are being bullied by anti-gay bigots can say i'm gay because my mum took x drug when i was in the womb and that's why so stop bullying me but it doesn't work like that unless we're proud and say do you know what it doesn't matter at them why we are lesbian or gay yeah we just are stop looking for it why are you looking for a cause why do we need to do this yeah and so like i said there's either a gay gina there isn't and trust me they've been looking for it for a very long time yeah but that's the point to make is actually that it doesn't matter and i think the nervousness around it is that if it is perceived to be a choice then that validates say the extreme christian right who say well you're just sinning then aren't you yes so the thing that we say to the extreme christian right is do you know what i know you don't care whether i was born gay or not i know you don't care whether or not i am choosing this you just want me to stop doing it and the reason i know is because i went to gay conversion therapy yeah in colorado i mentioned this in the book i was fascinated by i didn't know this about you either so you went undercover i did spoke to a therapist for a week that's impressive you good actor yeah because i would have let it slip i think i would have laughed or something i would have i was deep in persona okay mary you were called i was called mary um and no i wasn't called mary i was called joe it was based on that based on someone i knew called mary and the only way that i could stop myself from actually crying in this pseudo-therapy when this so-called therapist was going on about my mother because they have to really destroy everything about oh they say it's to do a trauma right that's right and you know i'm very old-fashioned right working-class northeast no one this is my mother yeah even when you're in character exactly so i had to actually channel jeanette winterson's mother right in order to not care that she was really slagging off this character's mother but it was pretty hard hard-going and i'm a tough person but it really even though i've been an out and proud lesbian for more than four decades it shook me up like nothing on earth i mean these people are very nasty but they did not i'm telling you from experience they did not care how i'd come to be a lesbian they just wanted me to stop and that's why we can't play the biggest game we can't say we're born this way we can't help it just because they're saying that we could choose not to be because what they mean is we will force you to stop and in this small town in colorado that's what they were doing the therapy isn't to get you to be attracted to men yeah because that's not going to happen right right right and they know that do they know that the therapy is to actually convince you that if you don't live a good christian life in other words a heterosexual one yes you're going to hell yeah well that's sort of what is that what milo yiannopoulos is saying now these days he's saying he's become straight and that you can choose it i don't know it was incoherent what i saw him saying we shouldn't play the biggest game just because they say something doesn't mean we will for example the most extreme religious fundamentalists will say that pornography is bad for children they are talking about it from a completely opposite standpoint to me and that's why i'm not going to agree with them yeah so you can end up agreeing on the end point but you just don't agree on why you have those exactly yeah that's really interesting when you talk about those sort of christian fundamentalists and and you use the word nasty there do you think it is always nasty because sometimes i get the feeling that they do genuinely believe that they're on the side of the angels they do genuinely believe that it's for your own good and they're trying to help it's just it's just delusional i think the fundamentalists are nasty okay yeah i think that they are seriously they do not care about the damage the psychological and even physical harm that might meet um someone who is enmeshed within whether it's the pentecostal church or or other kind of religious fundamentalist um groupings yes which you know they're they're cults and and the the damage of course is most profound when we're talking about women and children i mean this outfit that i went to in colorado um you know that i i had to book into the christian hotel that was affiliated with this counseling center i was watched from every corner i had to actually put a disguise on to sneak over to chipotle to get a margarita because you know that the the hotel was dry of course yeah and you know trust me when i tell you that you need drink after a oh i bet a daily session like that but they they watch you and and they they send children to these um to these awful therapists and i met some of them that had been through this for real yeah and my god you know how they had survived i don't know these are incredibly courageous people but imagine pretending to be a loving father or mother and sending your child to be told that they are scum pervert weirdos worse than dirt under their feet and they can only be welcomed back into the family if they do something that's going to cause them daily distress i think that's pretty nasty yeah yeah did you have did you come out to them in the process or did you wait until you got away my plan was that at the very last session with kelly i would say actually i'm a journalist you can look me up and here's who i am because she loved me oh she loved me the therapist did you have any affection for her at all by the end no okay fine and did you do that did you open up to her at the end i was no i i felt too unsettled by the end i felt very very vulnerable and i actually went to the airport denver airport to get my overnight flight back and this really isn't like me but i told the cabin crew who was sitting waiting at the gate with us because there was some problem with the lose on board she asked if i'd been on holiday and i said no i'm a journalist and i've just been undercover and i've just been to gay conversion therapy i mean i've no idea where it came from i never talked to people at airports or well i mean maybe you have to get it out i was just i clearly wasn't well but she was she said what and she shouts declan declan come here and this little bloke minced over in his uniform and he went what she said tell him what i've just heard and i says well i've just been to gay come vote he went he said love where he is sitting and i says well unfortunately i'm on a row i got here too late for an aisle seat yeah trust me when i tell you declan looked after me on that flight there was the booze flowed and the the three-course meal was straight from first class but no it i didn't tell her but when i got back i sent an email and said here's who i am and she was absolutely horrified and terrified and so she should have been it wasn't that i felt uh vindictive towards retal i wanted you to never do that again yeah yeah yeah absolutely so um one final thing i want to ask you about which is something you you talk about in the book is you make a is your appearance is on various university campuses and you you're quite known now i think for getting invited and then having your invitation cancelled and you make a very important distinction i think uh between no platforming and d platforming uh do you wanna just talk us through that because it seems to affected you more than most people yeah thankfully now there's plenty of people that have you know taken up the mantle so yeah uh you know that they're busy no platforming and d platforming others yes okay so i was no platformed by the nus um and that was to clarify for people it means you get put on a list of fascists yeah yeah so in 2008 they decided that i was you know to be put on this list alongside fascist and terrorist groups and a couple of individuals like marie lopez i mean just someone uh with with extreme right-wing views and clearly as a feminist activist all my life with left-wing views this was quite incredible and then it went from the nus not being willing to share a platform with me which suited me fine to um being invited um being advertised all over campus getting a full house because i'm only ever going there to talk about violence against women yeah and how to counter it and actually students want to hear this stuff sure and then publicly disinvited publicly d-platformed told that i'm no longer welcome it going everywhere over social media the humiliation the disappointment for those that wanted to come along even if just to argue with me but it's not about the subject of your talk ever no it's me in fact i became i think it was the 2013 nus lgbt um conference the motion was uh julie bindley's vile that was the most she's incredible that was the motion julie bindley's vile and that was what went into the official and and of course you know the the d platforming is very different from no platforming yes no one has a right to be invited why would you i do all of this work as part of my activism so it's not paid work it's campaigning you're doing them a favor you would have thought wouldn't you i mean that but i think i agree with you entirely no one has a right to be on a platform absolutely not but i but i worry about the no platforming policies because it means that some people with just very mainstream views are never even considered so we don't actually know the extent of it because they're never invited in the first year you're right i mean of course it's a concern but but for me it it makes me very angry when those that are in favor of this sensorious and bullying behavior say oh julie bindle no platformed again is she and here she is writing about it in two national newspapers well one i'm a journalist it's a job that's what i do yeah and two actually myself and other women to whom this has happened who aren't journalists academics for example selena todd kathleen stark others um raquel rosario sanchez who lost her phd plays effectively because of the bullies i write about it and speak about it because i can yeah because there are so many other women who we've never heard of who are 20 years old or a bit older maybe who have been kept out of feminist events because they're told that they'll be transphobes horophobes if they even go i've been told by young students that just retweeting an article of mine or sending it around their feminist society where i've written about rape that they're told that they will be kicked out of the group if they do this again so they are being bullied and hectored censored and controlled because certain individuals myself included are seen as toxic and beyond redemption and so that's why i speak about it write about it and that doesn't mean i haven't been de-platformed and it doesn't mean that they haven't had a terrible and material effect on my life and work yes and and also it's in a sense it's not just about what happens to you it's the message it sends to those young women uh that you better not talk about the stuff that judy bindle talks about you know and that oh yes completely i mean there's a young a young student um who i knew through her parents we were great friends i loved talking to her whenever i visited the house you know intergenerational feminist politics and um she came to a couple of my launches and talks and she once retweeted me again about violence against women and she was piled on like nothing on earth and i had to beg her to block me on twitter because that would have been the end of her student um career that would have been it yeah um so so if i don't speak out and if i let them get away with it it means that all of those young women will think that they're done for but if they see others standing up against it then they know who to come to if they want just a little bit of advice and that's why i wrote the book because i actually want young women to know that we will have their backs that we will take a bullet for them that we will stand in front of them when the bullies come after them this is a movement you know yes it's scary and they don't have anywhere like the resources i've got you know i've got an established career i've got a home i've got a friendship circle they can't destroy me but they can destroy young feminists who are speaking out about the things that affect them on a daily basis prostitution pornography sexual objectification and violence and they need to be able to speak well i think that's a fantastic note to end on and this is the book feminism for women the real root to liberation so please check it out i thoroughly enjoyed it and thank you so much for coming on and talking to me thank you this has been free speech nation the podcast with me andrew doyle and judy bindle if you like the show please do like and subscribe and tell other people and join me next week for another fabulous guest goodbye

Channel: GBNews

Views: 7,663

Rating: 4.5991821 out of 5

Keywords: GB news, gbnews, Colin Brazier, Gloria De Piero, Michelle Dewberry, Andrew Doyle, Inaya Folarin Iman, Kirsty Gallacher, Liam Halligan, Tom Harwood, Rebecca Hutson, Darren McCaffrey, Simon McCoy, Nana Akua, Mercy Muroki, Andrew Neil, Neil Oliver, Alastair Stewart, Dan Wootton, Rosie Wright, Great Britain, United Kingdom, England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, Alex Phillips, news, breaking news, Mark Dolan

Id: 2iw91C5RYr0

Length: 71min 50sec (4310 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 29 2021