Welcome. Hello, everyone.
Welcome everyone in the room to our UnHerd debate about the
future of feminism. I'm Sally Chatterton, I'm the editor of
UnHerd. Thank you for being here. We have Mary Harrington
here, who is one of our much-loved columnists and soon
to be published author. Not very soon, soon-ish. Soon. It's a work in progress.
We have Julie Bindel, campaigner, author, and another
beloved contributor to UnHerd. Hadley Freeman, award winning
columnist. And I keep on asking her to write for us and maybe
one day, she will. Well, we're here to talk about the future of
feminism. It feels like it's a really interesting fracture
point at the moment, in the lifespan of the movement, which
has been quite turbulent, I think we could agree. And sort
of discussing going forward, what it means to be a woman in
the world today, really. A great deal of the feminist debate at
the moment, obviously, is freighted with the trans issue.
And it's interesting that the women that we have here are all
from different points on the socio-political spectrum, but
who are all united, really, on that issue. But we're not really
here to talk about that - talk about the subtext - that
alignment, and what that alignment – we want to explore
that alignment and the single point of agreement, what that
means for feminism going forward. And also, on a more
practical point, I suppose, I've got a 12 year-old daughter -
whether feminism will be relevant to her in her future as
well, because she knows that she could be what she wants now, but
she can also be who she wants, which I think is an interesting
idea. But without further ado, I think we should probably start -
I don't know, with you Mary, I'm not going to try and
summarise what that means to me, possibly? except that it's meant a lot of
different things over the course of my life. From the point where
I thought it was unfair that my mum had to do all the dishes
when I was about 12, and my brothers would just leave the
table. And read Simone de Beauvoir, and then got really
angry, and stayed really angry for a long time. To more
recently, when I re-evaluated a lot of things, especially in the
light of having a daughter myself, she's now five. In the
course of which, I became radicalised by Mumsnet. Nobody
actually admits to that, but Mumsnet introduced me to a world
of discussion. The coruscating realities of being a woman and a
mother in the contemporary world, including some of the
more live political issues, which we've agreed that we're
not going to discuss directly today. Which brought me a full
180 degrees from being- eventually, in over a long
period of time - from being a vociferous quoter, an
enthusiastic quoter of Judith Butler, all the way to my views,
which are in the public domain now, which are some distance
from there. Where do I think we go from here? I think, for me,
there are two parts to that. One part of that is that I think,
where we are, with the question of 'what does the women's
movement mean' is - in my view, AI and biotech changes
everything about what feminism is for, and what it actually
means in policy terms. And that's an enormous proposition,
which I'll argue in a really untidy way, because it's the
subject of a book which I'm in the middle of writing. And
secondly, that, in my view, the whole question of women's
liberation and women's rights is to a huge extent determined by
the material context that women happen to find ourselves in. A
huge amount of women's rights as such emerges out of changes in
the way past households were organised under the Industrial
Revolution. So as we move out of the Industrial Revolution into
the digital age, I think a lot of those questions are thrown
right up in the air again. And in gloomier moments, I think
what the future of feminism will look like for my daughter,
Sally, or yours, probably depends on what kind of
apocalypse we're going to get. Whether it's going to be an
ecological one where we all live in mud huts again, or whether
it's going to be the techno-dystopian one where we
all end up being slaves to the machine, or hopefully it's not
going to be either of those! But in either of those cases, in
either of those nightmare scenarios, the implications for
women will be very different. Hopefully we won't get both of
them at once, because then we're just screwed. So without further
ado, I'm going to pass on to someone more upbeat than me. Julie, Left-wing socialist -
quite a different political stable from Mary, nor a mother.
And so what does feminism mean? Well, feminism first and
foremost means that we have to have a movement that benefits
all women. And we have to start at the very bottom, and not at
the elite, and not have it played out within elite
institutions. And refuse to have an agenda set by overprivileged,
super educated women and men who will decide whatever their
individual needs and identities are, and work towards benefits
for them. So if feminism isn't touching working class women,
for example, then it's not effective. And the reason why I
mention class without adding the usual kind of trotted out
demographics that you usually then hear after that, is because
I do actually think that for black, of colour, and white
women, class is an essential issue right now that feminism
has lost its grip on. And the reason why - and I need to think
about language, because - I'm sick of calling the liberal
feminists, 'feminists'. So I need to actually find a way to
describe these women, and the men that identify as feminists,
without calling them feminists. Because it gives them an
authority. And it means that they can decide what our
movement is and what feminism is, without actually being a
part of it, and working against it, actively against it. But the
good news is that feminism is vibrant, and it is moving
forward. Because women have had enough, we've always had enough.
But we've particularly had enough now. And the only reason
for me that the whole issue about transgender ideology is
even on my radar, is because it threatens women's autonomous
organising, and the creation of - and I hate to use this term,
but it's been bastardised - 'safe spaces', that we actually
built from nothing through the 60s and 70s, as a response to
male violence. The only reason I care about this, is because of
the threat to our sex-based rights because of male violence.
If we had no male violence, I would not care at all, seeing a
bit of gristle hanging down between a person's legs in a
changing room. Sorry, I haven't seen one for a very, very, very
long time, but I assume that they remain the same
aesthetically, right? Feminism is not an essentialist movement,
we are not biologically determined, we are the opposite
of that. While men are still raping and killing us, we have
to have a movement that, first and foremost, directly
challenges men's violence. To do that we have to see men as a sex
class. Not that every single man is a baddie, and not that every
single woman is a victim. But there is a sex class, and there
is a sex class of women. And if we don't recognise that, we will
continue to arse around with individual identities, and
highly privileged women setting the agenda, and that can't be
allowed to continue. Hadley, where are you coming
from?. Well, I was lucky enough to grow
up in very easy circumstances where I didn't really have to
think about my rights, at all. And it wasn't until university I
thought about feminism at all, when a very surprisingly
forward-thinking tutor suggested I read people like Andrea
Dworkin, and Shulamith Firestone, Audrey Lorde. So I
thought of it always as a collective movement, that it was
about the collective, improving the lives of women in general.
Then we get to about the 2000s, 2010. And it was that era of
individual empowerment, and suddenly there was this idea
that feminism was about whatever made individual women feel good.
So waxing your legs was a feminist thing, because it made
you feel confident. Shopping for shoes was a feminist statement.
And this felt very divorced from how I thought of it. It just
seemed quite self-serving. But what did I know, I was just a
20-something working on the fashion desk, of all places, at
The Guardian. So it wasn't like I was about to storm the
barricades about it. And then, in 2014 there was an article in
The New Yorker by Michelle Goldberg, about the cancellation
of the Michigan Women's Fest because there was a trans woman
at the festival who wanted to attend a group for rape
survivors. And some of the women at the festival objected to
this. And the article- you look back at it now, and it's so
moderate and balanced. The article sparked a lot of angry
commentary as you can imagine, on Twitter, this was really
before gender ideology was taking off. But I read that
article, and it just made no sense to me. I couldn't even
understand this. And that's when I really began thinking more
about women's rights and women's ability to define themselves.
Soon after that I had my first two children, my twins, and like
a lot of women - particularly women on Mumsnet - that is when
a lot of women begin to think about the biological oppression
in their lives, reproductive oppression, how their lives are
dictated by their biology, and how for, I think, most women,
their concept of what being a woman is, is based entirely on
their biology. You menstruate, you either do or don't have
children, you do or don't have an abortion, you go through
menopause at some point, and how that affects your life. And I
was also increasingly thinking about gender roles, because when
I grew up, I was a very feminine little girl. This actually
worked against me in a lot of ways, I've written in the paper
a bit about how I had an eating disorder for a long time, as a
teenager, I was in lots of different psychiatric hospitals.
And so much of eating disorders - there's reason eating
disorders largely affect girls, 90% of anorexics at least, are
girls or women - is because of gender oppression, is because of
femininity, this idea that you're supposed to be small,
this idea that you're supposed to be good. And this idea that
becoming a woman means being sexualised. So that's why
anorexia mainly affects adolescents, it always comes on
in adolescence, it's a fear of becoming women. And so I was
thinking more about those two things, the gender oppression on
women, and the biological oppression on women, and
suddenly, gender ideology took off. And I understood, and I
still understand, why there are a lot of young people- first of
all I just want to say, I understand why, people don't
want to know about 'the trans debate', as they call it. I
don't think of it as a 'trans debate', I don't have any
concerns whatsoever how trans people live their lives. I think
of it as a gender debate, which is about how women define
themselves. And this is why women get so angry about this.
Because what gender ideology is saying is that 'if you're
feminine, you're a woman, if you're masculine, you're a boy'.
And I understand why young people latched onto this and
why- I know lots of young people who say "I don't feel like a
woman, therefore I'm now a boy called Ethan", or whatever. But
to me, this is just looking at it the wrong way around, this is
saying that your body is your personality, which is what
eating disorders is saying as well, 'my body is me'. Your body
is just your biological casing, you are not supposed to be
defined by it, you're not supposed to be restrained by it.
And you're not supposed to be living your life by what other
people tell you a man and or woman is supposed to look like,
or be. A woman is just your biology, you can be and look
anything within that. And that's why I find gender ideology so
maddening. Because to me it is regressive. It is encouraging
eating disorders, I think in a lot of ways, because it's
telling people 'your body is you, your body is your
personality', rather than 'your body is just your body', as a
woman you can be- that's an umbrella term, you can do and
look as anything the way you like. Look at the four of us, we
all look very differently, and we behave very differently. You
are not locked into a certain life just because you're a
woman. This is not the 19th century. And this viewpoint made
me increasingly isolated among my colleagues, among my, what I
thought were my political bedfellows, and in some cases,
my friends. And that, in turn, made me angrier, because I just
couldn't understand what seemsed so obvious to me. That you
cannot change sex. You can identify however you want, but
sex is a lived reality. And for women, their sex defines a lot
of their lives. And as Julie said, as long as men are raping
and killing us, and for women the biggest threat is violence
from a man, then we cannot identify out of that. And it's a
lie to be telling girls, 'you can identify out of FGM, you can
identify out of these gender roles that you're put into'. By
ascribing to gender ideology, you're validating them. And I
find that very sad. But how do you change that?
Given that our daughters are swimming in these waters in
which they are allowed to choose who they want to be? Well, yes. It's very hard and I
do try to talk to young people, my children are younger than
yours Sally. And I've got six year-old twin boys and a two
year-old girl. And my boys always say things to me, like
"mummy, I want to wear a dress, but it's for girls", and I
always say to them, "wear a dress, who cares? You're a boy."
That is the thing. When we read articles from parents, when I
read articles from parents, who say that their seven year-old is
trans, their six year-old is trans, they always include
statements like 'well, so my child when they were about three
they wanted to play with boy toys, they wanted boys toys'.
And I really believe that a large reason why this gender
ideology has taken off is because there's been such a
hardening in the toy market, of the way things are marketed.
When you look at 70s toy adverts there is not this gendered
marketing 'this is for boys, this is for girls'. Cleaning
sets were marketed to boys, cars are marketed to girls. Suddenly
in the 80s and 90s you look on the Disney website, it's 'this
is for girls, and this is for boys'. And that is not from some
nefarious gender plot. That's just capitalism. That's just
trying to make more money. 'Here's the girls aisle, here's
the boys aisle. If you have a girl baby, you have to buy a
pink onesie, if you have a boy baby you then have to buy a blue
onesie'. And I think these gender roles are more strict
now, and girls are growing up with this idea that 'if you're a
girl, you have to like princesses. If you're a boy, you
have to like soldiers'. And I don't think that was as true for
kids growing up in the 70s and 80s. I think we could probably bring
you in here Mary, couldn't we, because you were telling me
about what happened this Christmas at your house with
your daughter and the Disney princess. How do you feel about
it? I'm a lot more horizontal than I
ever expected to be in my strident feminist years, about
Disney princesses. In the grand scheme of things they're fairly
innocuous. A few thoughts on the sex roles and capitalism front
though, which is something I've rummaged around in a bit in my
writing and which I find really interesting. I was looking into
studies of gender stereotypes, and egalitarianism, and stumbled
on the counterintuitive fact that the more egalitarian things
become in a material sense, in a society, the more pronounced
people's desire to identify in a gendered way, becomes. So in a
sense, in countries where it's materially less equal between
men and women, you get more women going into engineering and
science, for example. Which is not really the way around you'd
expect it to be. But people are much more committed to the
imaginary sense of themselves as either either a man or a woman,
in situations where actually it doesn't matter very much. And if
that holds, if that's accurate, then what it would suggest is,
the more materially egalitarian our society gets, the more we're
going to end up sliding around in this business of identity. It's a decadent belief. Right, because it's a decadent
belief. So in a sense, you start with sex roles being obligatory
in a pre-modern society. Then you get to a point where there's
a bit more flexibility, and people start saying, "I don't
have to do just this, because I'm a man or just this because
I'm a woman." And then you get right out to this hyper-modern
scenario that we're in at the moment, where in fact,
materially, if you work in the knowledge economy, it doesn't
really matter, it completely doesn't matter what sex you are.
So in practice, you kind of could- if you're a Zoom class
person anyway, it doesn't matter. You can identify as an
attack helicopter, and it really doesn't affect your ability to
do your job. But, as Julie rightly and regularly points
out, that doesn’t hold all the way down the economic food
chain. And the further down the social class ladder you go, the
more brutally sexed your life still remains. Totally. You know, and if you're right at
the top of the food chain, you really can identify as an attack
helicopter down at the bottom in prisons, or in rape shelters, or
in any or in the home yet, or in homeless shelters, then it's a
completely different ballgame. So an idea an ideology, which
percolates down from the top, you know, fairly sort of, you
know, by people who probably just lack the imagination to
just took a tour, consider what life is like in somebody else's
circumstances, is ending up having these utterly pernicious
effects on people who are just in a different economic
situation, the material situation, the And the assumptions that working
class, uneducated, past schoolpeople, are somehow
ignorant about feminist issues, because they might not consume
feminist theory is a travesty. Because of course, the women's
movement was built on activism. And that meant grassroots
activism where you are visible. And this is where I think we
need to go next. We need to be seen, rather than theorising.
Theory's great. Theory’s really important. But we’ve got to get
back to the traditions of being loud and visible. And not just
online, online's really important and it’s enabled so
many women, young women in particular, to get together and
talk to each other without being screamed at by the bearded heads
of feminist societies. But if you look back at how working
class women, where I'm from, in the North East of England,
working class women, of all stripes, are actually very, very
well aware of multiple oppressions that face other
women. Because they rub shoulders on the factory floor,
in the workplace, where everyone's seen as subservient
by the bosses and by other women, university and above
educated women. So, it's actually in your face if you're
a white working class woman, what's happening to the black
women in that work space You might not do anything about it,
you might still be racist, you might not care enough. But trust
me when I tell you there is that knowledge about it. And
similarly, when we look at who traditionally from the 1970s
when I was growing up, onwards, where inter-relationships,
multiracial relationships, where mixed race children are being
raised and being where born. That wasn't with the upper
middle classes. The white upper middle classes, trust me. No,
no, no, they marry each other. And so this absolute
bastardisation, by the upper middle classes, of the term
'intersectionality' makes me so very angry. Because they've
taken every single bit of politics out of it, and made it
about involving very wealthy, trans-identified men, and women
who are heterosexual and call themselves they/them, and I'm
trying to think of... But you know what I mean. And so, like
both Mary and Hadley have said, you have to base women's
oppression, and the fight against that oppression, on what
we know about material reality. And it is, of course, our
biology. But it's also about the circumstances in which we find
ourselves when we are in fear of male violence. And when we
experience male violence. And it's always worse for the women
at the bottom of the social ladder, without question, but it
doesn't mean that women with the highest status in society are
excluded from this. That is the thing about male violence, and
the fear of it. It's a great leveller. And that's where my
feminism is situated. Because it is the one thing that unites
women and girls on the planet. And it is the only thing! And
you know, we say these things like, yes, vast numbers of
women, 68% of women have had some sort of sexual assault. 90%
of women have been catcalled, one in six children - this is
something I heard on LBC the other day - have experienced
some sorts of unwanted sexual contact. Sorry, everyone. Way
too low, those figures. We're talking about the vast majority
of females, and I'm afraid we all know it in this room. So
that's where the fight has to be, in my view. Where do you think the fight
fits in, Hadley? Well, I think there's two
problems at the moment. First is that feminism has become such an
individualist movement as opposed to a collective
movement. It's about what makes people feel good, and not
wanting to give things up and this idea of not being for the
greater good. And the other issue is that feminism has
always had- it's got a very teenage attitude towards
rebelling against its mother. So every wave of feminism is
rejecting the one before. And also, particularly at the
moment, this kind of revulsion of older women. There's so much
ageism that I see now, among younger women, which I find
quite shocking, and also incredibly Freudian. The disdain
that I see expressed about for example, Mumsnet. I think,
largely because it's got the word 'mum' in it. And this
disgust that I see from young women when women talk about
things like breastfeeding, and pregnancy, childbirth, this is
the boring stuff that your mum talks about. Women who are
older, and I'm not saying this as someone who is now older, but
women who are older will have experience lots of different
things. Twenty-somethings don't invent sex. And this is a
problem, I think this also lies behind the rejection- this
embrace of gender ideology. I think a lot of us here who are
perhaps older than 35, 40, you know younger women, can see that
in a way this evangelism that some of them have about gender
ideology is a way of dividing between the young ones and the
old ones. People go on about 'it's a generational divide' as
though that means that the young people are so much more
forward-thinking. It's not that. I understand it. Young people
want to have a civil rights fight of their own. Their
mothers had gay rights fight, their grandmothers had the civil
rights fight, they want to have a fight. And of course for the
younger people now, the fight really is about the environment.
But fighting for plants is not quite as fun, it's not for
people, so then you bring in the people, and it's a great way of
telling your mum off. "God mum, you're so bigoted. God mum,
you're committing wrongthink." And in the end, it's not helpful
for girls to grow up thinking that being a girl means you have
to behave a certain way, and that you can identify out of
your biology, because neither of those things is true. You're
stuck with your biology, but you can behave however you want. And
I think those are really big things that feminism needs to
address, and I struggle to think how. I've written a book that's
coming out next year. And I'm already fighting with editors
and stuff about how strong I can go in on this. So it's a fear.
The other one is this fear that corporations have of addressing
this, this fear that corporations have alienating
20-somethings on Twitter. I find this incredibly frustrating.
When I was 20-something nobody listened to me. And now
suddenly, I'm supposed to be in thrall to them, like, where's my
time? I missed it somehow, now I'm just a passé, middle-aged
person. I thought being 40 was when people listened to me. It's interesting what you say
about mothering being central to your feminism, because it's the
same with you Mary, isn't it, you've written about it several
times. I wonder what happens then if that, then, is erased. If mothering gets written out of
feminism. I'm probably about to get burned at the stake, because
I'm going to throw out a hypothesis which I've been
playing with for a little while. I need to do the research on
this to see whether the data actually stacks because it's
just a hunch at the moment. But one of the possibilities I've
been playing with- I really ought to just pitch this to you,
Sally in private, rather than doing it in a room full of
people. You've got witnesses, go! But anyway, anyway, here goes.
I've been wondering for a long time about the sheer volume and
bitterness of mother hatred. And it's not just mother hate. What
you talk about is very palpable to me, the disgust about
breastfeeding, the disgust about the embodied, really visceral,
nature of mothering and gestation and birth and all of
that. But also it's not just that, there's an anti-natalism
that's associated with that. I hear particularly from
20-something friends who say that all the women they know
just don't want to have kids, they're just revolted by the
idea. That somehow, it's as though a collective decision has
been taken by at least some of the generation or so younger
than me, 'let's just draw a line under this, we're not going to
do this any more'. A sort of collective, human death wish or
something. I've been thinking, where does that come from? Where
is that anger coming from? Where's that and fury and
loathing coming from that seems particularly directed against
mothers, and this real vengeful desire to just annihilate
mothers and motherhood and mothering? The venom that gets
directed at Mumsnet, the venom that gets directed at quote,
unquote, Karens. Middle aged mummy types. I think, why do
people hate mums so much? And this is why I get burned at the
stake, I'm thinking, the generation that's now old enough
to be making their voices heard in this way, it's probably also
the first generation that were sent en mass to nurseries from a
pre-one year-old. And is it possible that having just
collectively brought a generation up in an
institutional setting, that they're just really fucking
angry with their mothers, in such a preverbal sense - excuse
my languag, I'm sorry. But at such an inarticulate level, that
it's coming out in this drive to just annihilate mothering. I
don't know. I have an alternative theory.
Which is that this set of- So do I, just for the record. Okay, okay. I regret that. Come
forth with your flaming torches! It's not angry. I just think the
20-somethings now are the generation who don't have any
money to buy their own place. And they're actually stuck at
home. And they are so fucked off with their parents, with their
situation, and I don't blame them. I honestly don't. And
girls rebel against their mothers. They do, they do. And
that is the women that we're hearing from, that's the young
women, and they are grossed out by it. And when I hear young
women talking about, "ergh, leaky boobs, the school run
mums", and that kind of thing. But what I'm hearing them say is
how pissed off they are with their own mothers. And what
they're also saying is like in Gone Girl, they're not going to
be like a normal woman. They're a cool woman. They're not like
the boring mum, they're the cool ones. And you know what, there
will come a point when suddenly they get pregnant and they
realise what their mums went through and it's a whole
different story. But that's what it just seems to me, it's just
an arrested development of How do you feel about that
Julie? teenage rebellion. Yeah, I agree with Hadley. I
disagree with Mary, I think that there's a- because Mary it's in
your argument, because obviously there is a hatred towards
mothers. And I've seen it, I don't know if you saw the
lovely, very nice bedtime reading piece I did for UnHerd
on the breast milk trade recently. And so you find an
awful lot of hatred through that. And I really, tonight at
some stage, want to talk about commercial surrogacy and
prostitution as well. But I think Mary's right, there is a
hatred towards mothers, I think that's misogyny. And it comes in
different forms. As a 59 year-old middle class living -
not origin, you'll note - North Londoner, who's been an out
lesbian since I was in my teens, I feel more stigmatised by my
peers for choosing happily not to have children than I do being
a lesbian. There's something in that, that we need to look at. I
am the first, and probably last, person that was banned from
Starbucks in Crouch End. It was a very early no platforming
experience in my life. And it was actually two weeks before I
wrote the article that was published in 2004 that got me
into all that trouble. So it wasn't about that. But I think
for feminists, motherhood has always been a tension because I
would argue it's not our hatred of mothers - and obviously,
Mary, you weren't talking about feminists hatred of mothers -
but there is a massive row, always, it's been constant,
about the kind of brattish behaviour that some extremely
privileged parents encourage their children. In Crouch End, Is this why you were banned from
Starbucks? Well... yes, because I wrote a
column saying all this with my byline in, in Guardian Weekend,
and when I walked in they said "are you that woman that wrote
that column?" So I said all of this in the Guardian. And
obviously, the letters editor and the readers editor were
very, very busy that week. You do find it's difficult as a
feminist because - and I'm really sorry, I'm now going to
be burned at the stake - those of us that chose not to have
children, and I'm talking about through the movement, the 80s,
and 90s in particular. We did a lot, a lot, lot, lot of child
care, and a lot of work. And we were very happy to do that. But
we were very well aware that the extremely middle class women in
the movement, had made an active choice to have their children,
that then would talk about it as though it was something imposed
upon them. And we were saying, "but you chose to have children.
I don't understand, this is a lifestyle choice." "What do you
mean, a lifestyle choice?? What else could it be? So- It's perpetuating the human
race, Julie! But you don't do it for that
reason, and you know it. Nobody ever thinks 'I better get
pregnant because honestly, fertility rates are really
dropping'. No one ever gets pregnant for that reason! Ever! But the idea of mothers has been
turned on its head slightly, hasn't it, by what you were
talking earlier, about surrogacy. And I think there is
a point of agreement between you and Mary on that, I would have
thought. Definitely. There are many
points of agreement between me and Julie, I would just like to
underline that. Many, many points of agreement. Absolutely. But one of the central ones is
the huge admiration that I have for you and your campaigning
work on commercial surrogacy, you opened my eyes to a lot of
the absolutely monstrous practices that take place
overseas. And have done a lot to really underline the arbitrage
of freedom that goes on between different countries. Where some
people get to be freer in terms of their reproductive choices in
one country, by making women elsewhere less free. And
exploited in a really, profoundly intimate and in my
view completely disgusting way. I felt so angry a few months ago
- on Twitter, you'll be amazed to know - when Julie's friend,
the editor of Pink News... He's all of our best friends! Did I mention I sued Pink News? I thought we were going to get
all the way through without mentioning it. Without mentioning Benjamin
Cohen. Who had been railing against all of us as 'terfs',
and 'trans women are women', etc, etc, and then announced
that he and his husband are on 'a surrogacy journey'. And I
just thought, 'now you know what biological sex is'. You don't
get to opt in and out of it. And guess what, neither do women. If
you want a baby, you have to opt into it and that's what women's
lives are like. It's astonishing how quickly
people remember what a woman is when you need to rent a womb. works. Exactly. It is. It is interesting what Mary said
about capitalism, because I think surrogacy more than
anything except for prostitution and they're very similar, is
that interface between capitalism and patriarchy in its
rawest, ugliest form. And that is why I think that women's
bodies, poorer women's bodies, women at the bottom of the
social ladder, their bodies are just seen as objects for rich
people to mine for their own convenience. Mainly men, but not
all men, because, of course, with surrogacy, I've seen some
really ugly exchanges between women about surrogacy and about
who owns the womb that the baby is growing in. And the baby is
commodified and commercialised. And what's particularly
distressing, I think about about surrogacy, because I do include
altruistic surrogacy in this because it's unfortunately, it's
a bit like the happy hooker. She's very rare, and she also
gets damaged through that. And we have yet to hear from the
children who come of age through this process. But I've seen the
ugliest exchanges where there will be an ownership, just this
assumption of ownership of a child, which I think is always
wrong. And then the way that the woman's body is seen as just a
womb. I mean, her womb is literally trafficked. She's a
vessel. And the disturbing thing for me in campaigning against
this, is how much harder it is to convince well meaning, good
liberal people, that it is an abhorrence. With prostitution
and the sex trade, yes, it's a huge bone of contention. It's
massively contested with the liberals thinking,
'legalisation, it's just a service like any other'. And of
course, the feminists ,or some very conservative people
thinking, 'it's wrong for various reasons'. But we know
what prostitution is, it's a man seeking an orgasm with a person
who is not consenting, who does not want sex with him. So it's
one-sided sexual pleasure. And all of this, if we allow
ourselves to think about that, is unpleasant. Once you get to
the end of surrogacy - a baby! And people can't help
themselves. Look at Ottolenghi, the Guardian columnist. Handome
gay man, wealthy gay man. The women who wrote to the Guardian
when he was profiled as having been through the surrogacy
'journey' with his partner, they were fawning all over him
writing letters to the Guardian, saying 'I'll have his next baby.
Oh, isn't he lovely?' And just refusing to look beyond. And
then from that, of course, it gets framed as gay rights. Which
means those of us that speak out against it, because gay men are
used as a smokescreen, are mainly heterosexual people and
increasingly, single heterosexual men that are using
surrogacy services. Think about that one. But we are told that
we are homophobic if we speak out about it, and it's the same
with prostitution. And if you look at the trans ideology, the
trans rights activists, most of whom are not even transgender -
all of them to a person will support these three things. Sex
work. Big Pharma, and the hormone and surgery stuff. And
surrogacy. Now, what do they all have in common, I wonder? Money.
And women's bodies that just don't matter. How was it wherever you are in
The Guardian, with regards to all of this work, Hadley. So how's work, Hadley? I'd like to throw that question
to my colleagues in the Guardian who are hiding over there, the
secret railroad down there. Three of them over the least, if
not more. Well, I haven't been in the
Guardian for a few years. And I'm just interviewing
celebrities. So you can't paint a picture of
what it's like to be an apostate amongst them? Well, I think you can tell from
the newspaper. It's a very fractious issue. That I am not
part of. So you're an outsider. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I am not
contributing to that debate in the Guardian pages. I'm looking forward to seeing
your interview with JK Rowling soon. Why hasn't it been in? It's interesting that you do
have these of similarities, and I think we need to draw it to a
close slightly, but I wonder if we could think about whether
there is a new coalition growing here, under the umbrella of this
one single issue, and whether it will hold together, or whether
you think that it will implode. You first, and then maybe Mary. I think it has created more
female solidarity. I know that certainly for me, over the past
few years. I now have so many more groups of all-female
friends. And Julie included, we've become much closer doing
all this. I think that's been really wonderful. I think it has
been- other people call it radicalisation, I think it's
just awakening a consciousness. And a reminder of what feminism
always was, and the female friendships that have been
formed. Will we agree on every single issue? No, but that's
fine. I think it has brought feminism back to its grassroots
for a lot of us. And that is really important. I absolutely think there's so
much more scope to cooperation. Feminism, the women's movement,
since it started with Mary Wollstonecraft has always been
fractious, there have always been disagreements within it,
because people are coming from different places. And I'm not
sure that there is such a thing as a universally feminist set of
policies, because so much of it depends on your context. And we
can just roll with that, and come together on the things that
really matter. And for so many of us right now, the issues that
really matter, I think, are the ones that Julie's already named.
The turn on the commercialisation particularly
of women's bodies, but really the monetisation of bodies. And
the the reordering of our humanity at the most fundamental
cellular level, to the world of big business. Because
fundamentally that's what this is about, it's a wedge issue, in
my view, towards a kind of transhumanist attitude that just
says "we're within our rights to remodel our bodies as we see
fit, we're entitled to treat all of what a human is, as plastic
resources to be strip mined, or to be monetised, or to be
reconfigured however we like. And that in fact, what we need
to do is deregulate the idea of what people are, and let's start
with what women are. Then we'll deregulate that first, and if we
can get people to agree to that we'll just deregulate what
people are. And then it'll be just like the big banks were
when they deregulated finance in the 80s, except it'll be our
bodies. So I'm really not up for that. And I think it's well
beyond just liberal feminists, or radical feminists, or
whatever the hell kind of feminist I am. Plus, a whole
load of other constituencies are quite not keen on that
programme. And to me, that's something we really can unite
around. Feminism needs to get to the
women that think they don't need it. That's the really urgent
task. Yes, coalitions are great. And we couldn't have done the
work that we've done over the years without it. I recall back
in the 1980s, when the anarchists and the hard Leftists
would not join with us in protesting pornography because
of its misogyny. And so we just said to them, "animals were
abused in it." And they went "right!" And there they were,
down at the porn shops, with us, and then we helped them glue up
the fur coat shop later on. We have to work across a broad
basis. I worry about some of the women in the US that are Right
wing, that seem to not like trans people because they also
don't like lesbians or gays. That are deeply conservative in
a really not acceptable way. That are Trump supporters. That
have this as a single issue, where they just shout about the
trans and they'll go to the Heritage Foundation, and take an
invitation from the worst kind of think tank, that also is
looking to find ways to re-criminalise abortion. That
worries me greatly, they're not my allies. So I won't join with
them because they don't like the trans, because I could not give
a damn about transgender people who should just be left alone to
live their lives. As I said at the beginning, it's about our
rights being erased. But I think that we can work across
differences without question. And one of the really good
things in the last few years since this issue has become
really mainstream, is making really good friends, with women
- and some men - who understand and have come out as decent
human beings, and with a lot to lose. Everybody that speaks up
about this has so much to lose. The treatment of Hadley and
other colleagues, feminist colleagues, in the media, has
been appalling. And you really do think to yourself, 'okay,
when we've won this battle, I want the women who've only
fought on the trans stuff to come and help us with the rape
and domestic murder and stuff. Because what else will they be
doing? But we'll be carrying on doing this because we understand
it's about women's liberation and not just a single issue'. At that point, I think we should
throw it open to the room. Hi. I wanted to ask Hadley - is
this on, is this working? I've been so disappointed with the
Guardian. You finally got a female editor, and she's just
terrified of the trans lobby, it seems to me. I used to love the
Guardian, read it several times a day. And now I can't even
click on the site. How do you manage to work there? Look what
happened to Suzanne Moore, how do you feel about that? Have you
supported her within the Guardian, and is everybody
against her or is it actually just a few loonies? Thanks for the question. I think
Suzanne might be here? She was, she couldn't come in. I don't think I'm revealing
anything when I say it's been very hard- we're not going to
make this into an evening about me and my work. I've been at the
Guardian for 22 years, and it has been very hard over the past
7 or so years to feel very out of step within the organisation
and the newspaper that was the only place I've ever worked. So
yeah, I would say it's been very hard. When what happened to
Suzanne happened, I did stand up for her in the office. I was
devastated when she left. I've been devastated by a lot of
people who've left. It was sad when Gary Younge left, too. It's
not an issue... let's put it this way, it's an issue I'm very
cognizant of. Can I ask the panel - what's
their opinion of the levels of feminism in the House of
Commons? Because I feel like there's a lot of women, but I
don't... I don't know, there's a few exceptions. Just interested. Well, Nadine Dorries likes a
drink, doesn't she. That's a hard one. I can't speak- with the
disclaimer that I'm not really a Westminster news junkie, my
sense of feminism in the Houses of Parliament is that there are
lots of reflexive liberal feminists who will think about
women's interests largely in terms of more free childcare.
And I'm not sure how many- I think the subset which are
thinking perhaps slightly more broadly about what constitutes
women's interests, is perhaps smaller. But they're not
non-existent. And certainly, it's very clear that there are
women and also men who are who are thinking very concretely
about the gender identity activism, which is now rife.
Some of them are just reflexively going for the idea
that we can all just be whatever we want, because it worked fine
in my university years, so it should be fine for everyone
else, including in prisons. But not all of them. It could be
better, bluntly. We were talking about Stella
Creasey weren't we, earlier. If you think about who was the
most famous woman in modern parliament, it was Margaret
Thatcher. Margaret Thatcher was not a feminist obviously, she
was entirely self-serving. And it seems to me that a lot of the
women in parliament are similar, in a way. I do think Twitter is
the worst thing that could have happened to politics. I think
there are too many MPs who care too much about Twitter. What
gets them likes on Twitter, are they famous on Twitter, blah,
blah, blah. There's been a lot of publicity around Stella
Creasey's campaign, which I find distinctly unimpressive. I can't
imagine the thinking that goes through your head after you've
had a baby to think, 'I know what I'm going to do. I'm going
to campaign for better childcare provision for probably the most
privileged, tiny group of women in the country - women MPs who
get full pay for six months, and subsidised nursery care in the
fricking office place!' I mean, that is a lot more than I ever
got. While apparently being unable to
define what a woman is. While refusing to still define
what a woman is, on Mumsnet today I saw, but still
complaining about how her own biology is stifling her life. So
I find it frustrating, I'm frustrated with lot of the
Labour women for not stepping up about the gender movement. I've
been frustrated with people like Jess Phillips, who I respect on
lots of other things, particularly rape shelters. I'm
surprised that she doesn't speak up more about this stuff.
Obviously, horrified at Keir Starmer who apparently has no
concept of female biology. It's not as bad as the Democrats, I
say this as an American. Joe Biden signing away women's sport
without even a second glance. Or California, just totally doing
over female prisoners. But the Left in America and Britain has
got to get itself together on this gender issue, basically Do you agree, Julie? I do agree. And Rosie Duffield
is a feminist, she's a principled feminist. Yeah. And she's held up as a warning
to other women in parliament. Yeah, exactly. And unfortunately, there's not
enough courage by a long chalk. They're supposed to serve us,
and in fact they're serving themselves. They're serving a tiny minority
of people on Twitter. I just wish all journalists and
politicians would remember, Twitter is not representative of
real life! It's like really not representative of real life.
Twitter thought Corbyn would win, it thought Bernie Sanders
would win, well look how that turned out. And this catering to
the views of this tiny view on Twitter is, I think, what's
really escalated the gender issue. Obviously, America has
massively contributed to that. And that's because American
healthcare has so jumped onto it because they've realised how
much money there is in this, particularly in regards to
children. But the way MPs are so scared of upsetting Left-wing
people with massive followings on Twitter is just totally
tilting and distorting the politics of this country. 'Why is most of mainstream media
fawning over or celebrating gender ideology, and how can we
change this?' I think there is a great fear in
the media, and I don't just mean in the UK, you see it a lot in
the US too, of going against what the youth are saying. It's
this idea that the youth are on the, quote unquote, 'right side
of history'. And also there's more young people working in
media organisations from the tech side, who aren't
necessarily journalists, who work in the digital department,
who come from the tech world. And have a much more libertarian
view of gender and sex roles, I guess- this isn't the best way
to put it, I don't mean they're polyamorous or whatever, but
they may well be. They have a very different view of these
kinds of things. And they are also dictating, in some cases,
the media lines. We hear about that kind of thing as the New
York Times and all those kinds of organisations. And also,
newspapers are now very dependent on online revenue. And
it's young people who are online. They don't care anymore
about paper subscriptions. And it's older people who have paper
subscriptions, which is why you have this weird divide of the
Left-wing press going much more for the gender ideology, because
they are more for young people and they're online. The
Right-wing press can be a bit more cautious, because their
readers are older and they tend to have subscriptions. So
therefore, we have this situation where the Right-wing
press acknowledges science, and that biology exists. And the
Left-wing press is bound up in ideology. And that's it. This question from Tilly is,
'I'm confused about the arguments not to criminalise
misogyny, it seems to me obviously the right thing to do.
Why is it questioned?' Oh, we must not make misogyny a
hate crime! In fact, let's get rid of all the hate crime
legislation. It's outrageous. No. There are several reasons,
and there's a really brilliant lawyer in the room, Harriet
Wistrich. And by the way, I'm always
cleaning up her muesli. Imagine if we actually made misogyny a
hate crime. Imagine how many more prisons we'd have to build.
Imagine how many arrests there would have to be. Who would
define misogyny? Who would be seen as the correct person?
Would it be a trans woman, having me arrested for misogyny
because I asked about their inclusion in a women-only space?
How would we define it? Because I don't think the vast majority
of people even know what misogyny actually is. The police
would never respond to this. And if you look at other hate crime
legislation, which has been a disaster - so for example, you
have hate crime, racist hate crime, where white people use it
against black people. Where we're told that if a black
person experiences something as racist, we have to take that
word. What on earth does that even mean in the law? We need to
rigorously apply the law as it stands. There are so many crimes
that police are not even arresting for, before we even
start thinking about misogyny as a hate crime. So here's one
example. At the moment, we know that the majority of rapes and
sexual assaults aren't reported to police. Of those that are
reported, those that end in a conviction is under 1%. Now, do
you think 99% of women are lying? Or do you think that
we've got a huge problem with our criminal justice system,
actually implementing these laws? It must not be a quick fix
solution to those in parliament that think it sounds good, and
it'll look good on their sheet, and it's reminding me of your
woman who first decided when she was Minister for Women, that the
first thing she would do is bring in self-ID. Maria Miller.
It's one of those things that costs nothing, they think, and
will instantly have the women saying, "aren't you clever". But
the police won't arrest anyone, there'll to be no
investigations, and there'll be no training. Oh, yeah. And
misandry. So I would be arrested three times tonight! Sally, you started off by asking
everyone on the panel what feminism meant to them
individually. And I'd like to ask what, going on from that,
you think that feminism can mean more broadly. And the reason why
I'm asking this is because when I first became active in women's
policy, it was very clear in a way, what it stood for. There
were clear demands of the Women's Liberation Movement,
that collectively we thought would bring people together. And
I just wonder now, if one of the problems is that we have quite
an atomised view of politics based on what we individually
find to be offensive and a problem. So for example, for me,
my big thing is women's inability to be able to control
their fertility. And attacks that the government are making
that prevent women from just making decisions about their own
pregnancy. On the other hand, Julie's very concerned about the
surrogacy issue. I'm not very concerned about men. I'm much
more concerned about the absence of childcare. There's a whole
load of various different things, and how do we bring
those together and make it something that is a social
movement? I think it's interesting that we
live in an age when people are so concerned about their
identity, and so desperately want an identity, and are
desperately looking around for something to tell them what they
are and who they should be. And feminism has become suddenly
unfashionable. Well, feminism can give you your identity. That
doesn't mean that you tick every box in it. It means that we all
have- there's a common denominator of various
experiences. And we can all branch off from that. That's
what I have found, certainly over the past six or seven years
since I have felt more ostracised from the groups that
I thought I belonged to. And having groups of female friends,
some of them straight, some of them not, some with children,
some not, some this, some that, all sorts of different
experiences. But we have a shared experience, which is
being women. And understanding what each other's fears are,
understanding what each other's needs are, supporting each other
in that, for it not to be a competition. And I wish more
people would take their identity from that, because that is
something you don't get to identify out of, which is your
female experience. One final question from our zoom
audience. From Alex Hamilton. 'Is it possible that the root of
many young women's disgust of motherhood is a profound fear of
the responsibility of motherhood, especially the
asymmetry in the early years in bringing up a child and that
fear materialise itself in denigration or dismissal of
motherhood, in an unconscious manner?' Yes, possibly, I think it's also
that we really can't underestimate Young Women's fear
of their own bodies and their disgust by their own bodies. And
this idea that their body is just going to become a thing
that, you know, spews forth this baby out of their vagina, and
their breasts will no longer be something that's pretty or is,
you know, sexy, that's there to be looked at, their body becomes
something that's set off of, you know, all these kinds of things,
women are told to be pretty to be looked at, to be quiet to be,
you know, amenable, and childbirth kind of takes all
that away, and also takes away your autonomy, you're just there
to feed this baby. I mean, there's nothing sexy about it.
There's nothing cool about it. It's completely unladylike.
Women have always had a disgust by their own bodies. And you
know, that's why there's so much cutting. That's why there's so
many eating disorders. That's why girls in the Middle Ages
used to starve themselves. And I think this is another form of
for some of disgust with their own bodies. As a 59 year-old bloke, who has
daughters and a wife, it's been my impression over the years
that feminism, as a movement, has not really celebrated and
admired and been hugely supportive of womanhood, in
terms of having children. Of actually creating families, and
caring for them. It's tended to focus on - quite rightly -
economic independence, and power and strength, and all that. But
this is just my observation, as an ordinary guy. It hasn't
really celebrated the thing that is uniquely female, of having
children. And I just wonder if the future of feminism should be
to acknowledge, and to really support the idea of women having
children and bringing them up? I think Julie might say, "yes,
except in Crouch End, perhaps." But more seriously, yes and no.
The feminism since the 1960s, I would say, definitely skews in
the direction you describe. But if you go back to the 19th
century, actually you can see all the way back through the
19th century in discussions on women's rights and women's
situation, there's this real tension between people who are
arguing from a defence of care and the family, and people who
are arguing from women's interests lying more in freedom
and autonomy. And that tension is there really for the first
150 years of arguments about women's rights under industrial
capitalism, and it's only really from the 1960s onwards, that
it's turned decisively away from taking an interest in
interdependence and relationality, and more towards
individual empowerment. We can go into the whys and the
wherefores of that, but I would just say the history of it is
much richer than you might imagine. And in my own work, I'm
very interested in recovering some of those older
conversations to see whether there's something we can learn
from them in terms of where we are now. Except in Crouch End,
obviously. But in terms of where we go next - potentially yes,
but I think that's going to be a difficult conversation to open
in the context of where we are now. Yes, and it will be
difficult. It's a nice idea, isn't it? It has to be part of it. That is
the experience of so many women's lives, the majority of
women's lives. And you're right, I think motherhood has been
ignored. You look at America, which thinks of itself as the
bastion of feminism, Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan. And yet,
where's the federally mandated paid maternity leave? It's just
completely disgraceful. And I am an American, and when I see
American feminists hectoring British ones on Twitter, and
calling them 'TERF island', you just think, 'can you perhaps
sort out your maternity leave before you start lecturing
Britain?' And your abortion laws. And your abortion laws. And yes,
it is a problem, obviously, because so much of feminism has
been bound up with abortion, and this is going to be another
problem with the overturning of Roe versus Wade, and then the
celebration of motherhood then looks like it's against
abortion. I've always hated the whole 'choice feminism' thing,
but feminism, of course, should be about that choice, those who
choose to have children, those who choose not to have children,
and to encompass both of them. Because those are both uniquely
female experiences. It's women who get to do that. And women have babies, lots more
women have babies than women that don't. And I think that
there is a massive stigmatisation of women that
choose not to have children. There's still huge amounts of
pressure on women to have children. And that to me is a
really important issue. Yes, maternity leave at every level,
not just for those women in highly paid, tenured jobs. Yes,
childcare available for all women. But absolutely, no, I
don't think we need any more celebration of motherhood. I
think what we need is a liberation of mothers from
domestic drudgery and from being trapped within that situation if
they don't want to be. Julie, you made a throwaway
comment earlier about 'you need a new name for liberal
feminists', I'd go with fake feminists, by the way. And we
all know the countless debates about redefining women, and
'chestfeeders' and all this bullshit, quite frankly. I'm
wondering how important you all think, though, these little
forest fires over language, whether they're a distraction
from the real issues, the coalface stuff, or whether if we
lose the language, then we're going to lose the bigger
battles. Language is really important.
It's crucial. And feminists have always said this. There was a
piece in the Observer this weekend, that thankfully, one of
the feminists at the observer pointed out, where the term '13
year-old sex workers' was used. Now - that is because there's
been an editorial decision that has been- this fight has been
raging since I wrote about the Ipswich murders back in 2006,
about the use of the term 'sex work', for example, and I'm
taking it away from the trans thing because I think we've
spoken quite a lot about that. But when I was doing a report on
the Ipswich murders, those were five prostituted women, an email
from the readers editor came around to all of us that had
written features, comments, investigations, whatever. And
said, 'look, we need to get this unified, because some of you
were talking about 'sex workers', some of you - me - are
talking about 'prostituted women', where it was relevant.
Some have used this term, some use 'prostitute', what should we
do?' And I just replied and said, 'how about we just say
women? Because clearly, what they were angling for, was to
introduce this, what they thought was a dignified term for
prostituted women, which gives a total and utter false picture of
what happens to the vast majority of women, men,
children, in the sex trade. And again, to argue that you can't
apply the term sex worker only because the child is underage,
is to suggest that it's fine when she reaches 18, that we use
the term 'sex work'. Similarly when we use 'clients' for
'punters', where we use 'brothel owners' for 'pimps'. And that
applies across- what was I hearing? Where people say 'real
rape', 'yeah, but it's not real rape, is it'. Or they talk about
'grooming gangs' when they mean 'children being raped and
prostituted'. Language is totally crucial, what I think we
shouldn't do is fight a battle only on the language front. If
you're fighting about language, it has to be because it's
describing something that you are concerned about, and that
you're doing something about. I think the language is
interesting, because it does reveal the misogyny that
underlies a lot of the gender ideology. So, women are 'uterus
havers' and 'pregnant people', but it's still, 'men, go get
your prostates checked'. That is really erasure of women. And I
think talking about 'pregnant people' and 'chestfeeding' is
also erasure of women, it's taking the mums out of the
picture. I don't think it's the most important thing, but I
think it gives a real insight into what's going on with a lot
of the gender ideology. Mary, how do you feel about the
use of language? I agree with Julie and Hadley. I
think it's not the thing itself, but - most of us live in a
disembodied, discursive world a lot of the time. And that is the
terrain that a lot of this stuff is, to a very significant
extent, being fought on. And when you talk about 'uterus
havers', or 'chestfeeders' or 'birthing bodies', in effect
what it does cumulatively is turn people into parts. Which
again, tills the ground for the deregulation of bodies, the
deregulation of humans, and the commercialisation of what we are
as people. It's all grist to the same transhumanist mill, it's
all grist to the same overall belief that people can be
disassembled, turned into parts and reorganised, according to
the whims of mad scientists, or teenagers who spend too much
time online, or whatever it is. We have to fight that battle. We
have to defend the human in language, as well as in reality. It's also - like what Julie was
saying about how theory is fine to a certain point - it also
keeps this argument very much in theory. Because the more the
language contracts, the fewer the people can get involved in
this discussion. Because it's only the chosen few who know
what this week's code words are. And if you've fallen behind, and
you say the wrong word, then you're cast out. And there's a class element to
that. Absolutely. And it's made by
Very Online Leftists. It's like knowing which fork to
use, it's literally the 21st Century version of knowing which
fork to use. It is, and what was fine today,
it's fine this week, but now it's not fine next week. And I
think it is a way of really restricting who is talking about
this, and who is legislating about it. And it's a great way of making
sure that working class women are never included in the
conversation, or working class men. Because all you have to do
is slip up once and that's it. And then you're out. Well,
working class women. Men can generally get by. I think that final comment
proved the point of the whole debate, didn't it. There are
points of commonality, and we can take feminism forward. And
we can continue the conversation I think in the bar possibly, but
I'd like to thank these three very courageous women.
Imagine you have it so good that you have to sit back and wonder what you can bitch about next.
Submission Statement: Mary Harrington, Julie Bindel, Hadley Freeman and Sally Chatterton discuss the future of feminism (at least this brand of women-centred feminism), surrogacy, trans issues, and more. Some interesting points for discussion if you can suffer past the "woe is me" undertow of the conversation. Food for thought.
I think men pretending to be women should be something that feminists take issue with, particularly in sports competition.
I wish I died as a happy old man in like 1998 before all of this.
Didn't have time to watch it all, but right the way Julie defined feminism as a movement aimed at benefiting women. Long gone are the days when feminism meant fighting for equality.
Away.
The kitchen?
Feminism in the Western world went straight through equality to demanding and gaining extra-judicial rights and privileges, all the while systematically demonizing men and boys, incentivizing kicking them out of households and father-ship roles, and influencing multiple generations of impressionable young women into thinking being sexually promiscuous is empowering, and killing their baby is either a. society's fault if they're born; or b. healthcare if they're unborn.
Where does feminism go next? To the grave, never to darken our doorsteps again.
“How can we make life even more difficult and annoying?”