Feminism

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    [post_content] => British Vogue's interview with the Pakistani Nobel Peace Prize laureate set off a storm of virulent criticism in her native Pakistan.

The July issue of British Vogue departs notably from the usual fare of supermodels, pop stars, and actresses. Wearing a traditional salwar kameez and matching head scarf, Malala Yousafzai—“survivor, activist, legend”—gazes serenely through honey-colored eyes. Her warm smile is slightly lopsided, a permanent reminder that she survived a gunman’s bullet to her head. She is a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and one of the world’s most admired activists for the education of girls and women; and yet, she conveys neither artifice nor arrogance.

The interview, conducted by London-based journalist Sirin Kale, reads like the transcript of a lighthearted conversation between two young women sitting in a café. Malala, now 23 and just graduated from the University of Oxford, happily answers questions about what she likes to eat, how she spends her time, and what her plans are for the future.







 





















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But when asked about her romantic life Malala became so visibly uncomfortable that her interviewer felt as though she were “torturing a kitten.” In the extremely conservative area of northern Pakistan called Swat, where Malala was born and raised, falling in love or having a boyfriend is considered shameful and dishonorable. But, later, she nonetheless offers some ambivalent comments about marriage.

“I still don’t understand why people have to get married. If you want to have a person in your life, why do you have to sign marriage papers, why can’t it just be a partnership?”

In Pakistan, these anodyne comments set off a firestorm of virulent criticism. Social media users called her a “prostitute” and “traitor”; and the hashtag #ShameonMalala trended for days. Z-list celebrities attempted to capitalize on the Malala hatred by issuing sanctimonious statements about marriage, while newspaper columns analyzing the interview made headlines for weeks. A so-called preacher in the conservative north of Pakistan declared that he would assassinate the young woman for violating the sanctity of Islam.

By now Malala is used to Pakistanis expressing outrage at what she does and says. But the magnitude of this backlash was particularly intense.

Upper middle-class women, who tend to be more educated and thus supposedly more worldly, were particularly critical of Malala for voicing reservations about marriage. In Pakistani Facebook groups, they wrote that Malala’s head injury had probably caused brain damage; or they mocked her appearance, commenting that of course she was against marriage—with her disfigured face, she would never find a husband.

How to explain this vicious torrent of outrage? Perhaps these well-heeled, well-educated urban women were lashing out because by questioning the value of marriage, Malala had implicitly criticized the institution from which most Pakistani women derive their identity, status, and privilege.

Pockets of liberalism do exist in Pakistan. A 23-year-old woman from a rich family in Lahore, Islamabad or Karachi might be allowed to choose her spouse—even to date or have a boyfriend. But saving face is essential; cultural and religious standards must be upheld. Those who rebel against society’s mores are expected to do so discreetly.

It’s a rare woman in Pakistan who remains single by choice. By questioning whether partnership and love should require religious and legal sanction, Malala unintentionally held up a mirror that reflected all the burdens and restrictions of marriage. That is why these women responded to the interview by having a complete meltdown: Their own internalized misogyny trumped whatever lip service they usually give to female solidarity and sisterhood. Their lambasting of Malala, the so-called “darling of the West,” was reminiscent of the ritual of “salvaging” in The Handmaid’s Tale, when the Handmaids gleefully pull on the rope that hangs the condemned woman to death.

Of course Malala does have many supporters in her home country, where she’s often called the “Pride of Pakistan.” They counter the haters by holding up examples of Malala’s positive influence in Pakistan and the rest of the world—like the Malala Fund, mentioned in the Vogue interview, which is rebuilding schools in her native Swat, in several African countries, and in Gaza. Few people know about this important work, or that the Fund supports the work of policy reformists who are overhauling Pakistan’s creaky education system. Those who love Malala are happy that she survived the assassination attempt and thrived; that Pakistan’s military defeated the Taliban; and that something excellent can come out of Pakistan, a place where life is difficult and often grim.

Pakistanis are under a lot of pressure these days. The country faces serious economic problems even as it tries to recover from decades of dictatorship and terrorism; matters are further complicated by the country’s continued involvement in geopolitical conflicts with India and Afghanistan. Salaries remain low even as inflation and taxes continue to rise. Quality education, health care, and job security are all in short supply. Working-and middle-class people feel the economic frustrations most acutely; for them, dignity and security are a mirage.

On popular television talk shows broadcast each night, upper-class Pakistanis argue about the causes of their country’s malaise—e.g., corruption, government incompetence, and the erosion of moral values. But instead of looking for ways to strengthen the country internally, they blame external bogeymen such as India, “the West,” and anyone who seems to be working against Pakistan’s interests.

Malala has become a lightning rod for these people. Every time she does something that makes the news, she’s accused of making the country look bad. The usual round of accusations and bizarre conspiracy theories are trotted out: Her shooting was a staged drama so she could obtain a foreign passport; she has been chosen by Western and Jewish overlords to become prime minister of Pakistan one day; her many prestigious awards are in fact compensation for the role she plays in a master plan to dismantle Pakistan altogether. They speculate that Malala is actively working against her own country.

On the Vogue cover, Malala is traditionally but elegantly attired: She wears a crimson dupatta draped gracefully over her head and shoulders and a matching crimson kameez; the backdrop is the same shade of crimson—the color of blood, the color of revolution, of love—and she holds one hand up to her face, right where her facial muscles droop because of her injuries. She’s careful to portray herself visually as respectful of her Pashtun heritage. But it’s getting harder to keep her intelligent mind and her ideas as carefully curated. This tension will only grow as she navigates through life: In Pakistan, every word she says will be parsed and every action criticized.

Having completed her formal education, Malala is now considering what she should do with the considerable money and influence she has accumulated over the last six years. Besides the Nobel Prize, there is the Malala Fund (Bill and Melinda Gates and Angelina Jolie are donors) as well as appearances at Davos and the United Nations. For some, this is too much power for a young woman from a valley in Swat, Pakistan. Her friends Greta Thunberg, the climate activist, and Emma (‘X’) Gonzalez, the Parkland shooting survivor and anti-gun activist, both of whom have also been targeted by vicious critics, can relate.

Malala’s detractors often ask why other young victims of terrorism, especially boys, don’t receive the same treatment as the young woman from Swat. But most people don’t know what happened to these victims, whom they believe are stranded in Pakistan, locked out of the privilege and influence that Malala wields. Waleed Khan is a university student who was shot in a 2014 Taliban terrorist attack on the Army Public School in Peshawar. Like Malala, Khan went to the UK for treatment and stayed on to pursue his education; Malala and her family supported him throughout his ordeal. In the wake of the controversy over the Vogue interview, Khan tweeted: “From a long time I have been seeing images of me and Malala circulating around. I would like to request everyone please stop this comparison. We can’t uplift one person by degrading the other. Malala is an inspiration for many young ppl like me and millions around the world.”



With so many programs for improving the lives of girls funded by Western NGOs and foreign missions, many complain that boys are left behind. Some of this is fair criticism; but some is sexist backlash in a society accustomed to conferring automatic privilege upon boys and men. Elevating Malala above male victims of similar violence sparks fears about another Western conspiracy to rend Pakistan’s social fabric and make women more powerful than men.

The degradation of others considered to have gained too much wealth or prominence is called Tall Poppy Syndrome, a term that originated in Australia. In Pakistan, Malala is the home-grown variety; both men and women want to cut her down because they think she’s gotten too big and gone too far. But not everyone reacts with so much jealousy or negativity to Malala. Many Pakistanis openly adore her; and the government of Pakistan gave her full support and security when she came to Pakistan on a secret trip in 2018. Hundreds of little girls study in the schools she has opened in the Swat Valley. Across the country, plenty of people recognize that those who shot Malala in the head are the real enemies of Pakistan.

Malala rarely comments on this negativity, although when she came to Pakistan in 2018, she told the BBC that she couldn’t understand it. But in the three years since that visit, Malala has grown and evolved from a girl into a woman. The biggest sign that she’s ready for the next phase in her life, and that the hatred doesn’t faze her, is a meme, popular among millennials, that she tweeted a few days after the Vogue cover was released online. It’s a GIF of Elmo, the Muppet character, standing with his arms raised in front of a backdrop of flames dancing behind him. For Malala, this is the equivalent of a mic drop.
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    [post_excerpt] => The 23 year-old Nobel laureate's cover photo and interview for British Vogue set off a storm of virulent criticism in her native Pakistan.
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Hating Malala is now ‘en vogue’ in Pakistan

by Bina Shah

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    [post_content] => An assertive new generation of Muslim feminists is disrupting the white feminist narrative of victimhood.

“Too many religions are patriarchal and imbued with misogyny. Because of this I am often asked how I can be a Muslim feminist. My response is that I am both of Muslim descent and a feminist, and the two identities are not connected. One does not depend on the other.” — Egyptian-American feminist and author Mona Eltahawy, in her recently published book of essays, The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls. 

The West has for too long related to Muslim women as though they needed to be saved, lumping them all into a single, victim focused narrative. In recent years, a vocal new generation of Muslim feminists, of whom Mona Eltahawy is perhaps the best known, seeks to challenge the victim narrative and assert their place in the feminist discourse on their own terms. 

Saving oneself, as opposed to being saved by others, whether by escaping physically, emotionally or creatively, is a key theme in the emerging Muslim feminist narrative. 

The plot of Yosra Samir Imran’s debut novel Hijab and Red Lipstick (Hashtag Press, 2020), appears at first to describe a familiar narrative of oppression.  Sara, a British Muslim adolescent in London, chafes against the restrictions set by her strict Egyptian father, who forbids her from indulging her passions for makeup, fashion magazines and pop music. His decision to move the family to Qatar, where Sara’s freedom is further restricted by patriarchal social norms and laws, sets father and daughter on a collision course. Imran insists that her story is strictly about an individual—and not a commentary on Muslim society as a whole. 

[caption id="attachment_2752" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Yousra Samir Imran with her book, "Hijab and Red Lipstick."[/caption]

“I even put an author’s note at the start of my book asking readers not to discredit one woman’s experience just because it’s not their own, and that this book tells only one type of experience,” Imran told The Conversationalist. Still, some Muslim readers complain that the novel perpetuates stereotypes. Their unwillingness to see the book as one woman’s journey reflects a pervasive awareness among Muslims of the lens through which they are perceived—one that they feel distorts their lived experiences.

Sabyn Javeri, a Karachi-born academic and novelist (Hijabistan and Nobody Killed Her) who is a professor of Literature and Creative Writing, told The Conversationalist that a major barrier to understanding the diversity of narratives within Muslim communities is the propogation of a single dominant narrative. “I always wonder what we mean by white feminist narrative,” she said, adding: “I believe in plurality, I believe there’s many facades to identity.”

She almost wrote Hijab and Red Lipstick as a memoir, said Imran, who now lives in West Yorkshire, but decided to fictionalize her story for reasons of personal safety. Nevertheless, the book is obviously based on  her own experiences in Qatar, where she lived from the age of 14 until she returned to the U.K. at 29. Sara, the protagonist, is a practicing Muslim who wears the hijab, but she is also a rebel who tests boundaries. Samir Imran believes that because she wears the hijab, her Muslim readers might have expected her “to present squeaky clean Muslim characters” instead of the complex and flawed characters in her novel.  

There are, to be sure, some widely reported incidents that seem to support the white feminist narrative about oppressed Muslim women who need to be saved. Princess Latifa of Dubai, for example, has for several years been her father’s hostage, kept in an isolated villa after an unsuccessful attempt to escape the Gulf territory in 2018. Dina Ali Lasloom, then 24, was forcibly returned to Saudi Arabia in 2017 when she was stopped in Manila on her way to seek asylum in Australia. 

Another highly publicized incident occurred in 2019, when Rahaf Mohammed, an 18 year-old Saudi woman who was granted asylum in Canada after she barricaded herself in a Bangkok Airport hotel room and tweeted that she was in danger of being deported and imprisoned for having renounced Islam (a crime in Saudi Arabia). Via amplification, she grew her Twitter following from fewer than 30 to several thousand within a few hours and gained the attention of the international media. Ms. Eltahawy, who played a critical role in amplifying the then-unknown Rahaf Mohammed’s tweets, writes in The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls that Ms. Mohammed “saved herself.”

“Saving oneself” can also mean asserting one’s right to choose how to dress—including whether or not to wear a traditional head scarf.

The hijab is a hot topic—and not only in the west. Tunisia, for example, bans women from wearing the niqab, or face covering, in government offices. France and Quebec ban the niqab completely, while the Canadian province recently passed a law that restricts public servants from wearing religious symbols at work, in a move that is widely regarded as singling out Muslim women. But the debate about face and head coverings is taking place without the participation of Muslim women. How do they feel about the issue?

“Hijab has been a tool of military and political intervention since colonial days,” said Sabybn Javeri. “People don't want to focus on things which really are oppressive—like violence or assault. It’s easier to target women’s clothing because that’s easier to control. Violence and control takes more work, you need to challenge the system, demand a larger shift,” she pointed out. 

The characters in Hijabistan, Javeri’s collection of short stories about hijabi culture set in the U.K. and Pakistan, include a kleptomaniac who exploits the anonymity of her burqa to shoplift, and who enjoys flashing the fruit vendor across the street. They include women who feel the hijab liberates them and others who feel it constricts them. The stories highlight the intersectionality and plurality that comes with identities, which are often overshadowed by the debate about the meaning of a scarf on a woman’s head rather than the thoughts inside it. 

“We have long been defined by what’s between our legs and what’s on our heads,” said Mona Eltahawy. She told The Conversationalist that the title of her first book, Headscarves and Hymens, was inspired by her desire to challenge the binary view of what defines a Muslim woman. Nevertheless, Eltahawy feels now that there is too much talk about the Muslim head scarf. “Whether I should wear the hijab, or whether anyone should wear the hijab, is a difficult conversation about choice. At the end of the day that conversation of wearing and not wearing is limited to women of Muslim descent and no one else,” she said.

Our Women On The Ground is a collection of first-person essays by female Arab journalists in the Middle East that reflects the unique challenges Muslim women face when reporting. “I wondered about the fearless Arab women journalists, whose work I’d been following for years,” editor Zahra Hankir told The Conversationalist. “What if we read about their experiences, and about how their lives have been affected by the tumult in the region, in a similar space? The stakes are, without a doubt, so much higher for them. Being a local journalist in the region, particularly a woman journalist, carries with it immense risks and challenges.” 

Choosing a job that means being in the public eye can be seen as an act of defiance for a woman in Muslim society. Foreign journalists have the privilege of leaving when things get bad, or of turning to their government for help when they are in trouble. Local journalists, particularly in countries where laws or customs restrict a woman’s presence in the public domain, do not have those privileges and are easier for the state to control. Non-Muslim female journalists also face many gender-related challenges when working in the field, although of a different sort; by acknowledging that oppressive systems affect all but in different ways, we see how their identities affect their experiences. For Muslim women, their religion is just one part of that lived experience. 

The bottom line for most Muslim feminists is that they are more concerned with advancing their own cause than with countering the white feminist point of view. “A lot of my work goes towards complicating the narrative for women of Muslim descent, who are not white, who are from the global south,” said Eltahawy. This is the disruption we need in order to change existing systems. 
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Muslim feminists are not interested in the white woman’s gaze

by Anmol Irfan

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    [post_content] => Is Melinda Gates trying to get ahead of uncomfortable revelations about her husband's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein?

When I read the news last week that Bill and Melinda Gates were divorcing after 27 years of marriage, my first reaction was empathy. The pandemic has been hard on all couples, I thought, even the ones who happened to have been quarantining in a 66,000-square-foot compound with 18.75 bathrooms called Xanadu 2.0. Melinda told The New York Times in October 2020 that being stuck working from home with her husband, after years of frenetic traveling, “was a piece that I think we hadn’t really individually prepared for quite as much.” This was somewhat relatable. No matter the size of your home, there is such a thing as too much togetherness. 

But then there were questions. Foremost among them: Why now? After all, thanks in part to the efforts of the Gates Foundation, which has donated more than $1.75 billion to Covid-19 research, 130 million people in the U.S. have received at least one dose of the vaccine. As we approach herd immunity, we are slowly emerging from our pandemic hidey holes. Businesses are reopening. People are talking about wearing jeans again. Couldn’t the world’s biggest philanthropists just carry on living separate lives, united by their passion for giving back? We already know that Melinda is pretty laissez faire when it comes to her marriage, allowing Bill to vacation every year with his ex-girlfriend. The couple owns a far-flung real estate portfolio with at least seven properties totaling $170 million. Melinda could take up residence at Xanadu 2.0 while Bill could stay in their $12.5 million home in Palm Desert, California, from whence he signed the divorce papers. Or they could resume traveling around the world, perhaps staying at the Four Seasons, which they own a large stake in through Bill’s firm Cascade Investment LLC. 

A few days after the divorce announcement, we started to get a possible answer to the timing question. The Daily Beast broke the news that Melinda was reportedly “furious” after her husband took her to meet with Jeffrey Epstein at his Upper East Side mansion back in September 2013. The anger is understandable given that one of Melinda’s top priorities at the Gates Foundation is to invest in gender equality and women’s empowerment—and Jeffrey Epstein at the time was a registered sex offender. The Wall Street Journal followed up this week, reporting that Melinda met with divorce lawyers in 2019 after the New York Times published a story detailing the extent of her husband’s relationship with Epstein. The Times reported that Gates sent an effusive email to his colleagues upon meeting Epstein, describing his lifestyle as “very different and kind of intriguing although it would not work for me.” The Gates PR machine then went into full-on spin mode, telling the Times that Gates “was referring only to the unique décor of the Epstein residence.” Ah, yes, the unique décor! 

I remember reading that Times article in 2019 and shaking my head. Did I think it was creepy that Bill Gates was hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein? Yes. Did I think that Bill Gates was raping girls who Epstein had trafficked? No, I did not. 

Given his wealth, power and involvement in scientific pursuits, Bill Gates has been a magnet for truly wacko conspiracy theories, such as the idea that he wants to use vaccine shots as a vehicle to insert trackable microchips into people’s bodies. Believers in QAnon, the umbrella conspiracy theory that holds that there exists a secret child trafficking ring run by Satan-worshipping Democrats—including President Biden, Hillary Clinton and George Soros–have been having a field day with the divorce announcement, speculating in chat forums that Bill Gates is either about to be arrested or that the breakup is intended to somehow cover up for the fact that both Gateses are dead (don’t ask). I can now see how these types of bonkers narratives had the unusual effect of pushing my mind toward the exact opposite explanation, which is that Bill Gates is a brilliant but oblivious man who, like so many others, unwittingly got swept up in Epstein’s net. 

But now I’m not so sure. Is it possible that Bill Gates’s involvement with Jeffrey Epstein went beyond fundraising for philanthropic projects? It is. And the thing that makes me think it is possible is the extent to which Gates downplayed his links to Epstein, both to the press and, apparently, to his wife. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal tied to a Netflix documentary about Gates, he denied having any sort of relationship with the pedophile financier, saying “I met him. I didn’t have any business relationship or friendship with him. I didn’t go to New Mexico or Florida or Palm Beach or any of that.” This turned out to be a big lie: Not only had the two men met many times over the years, but the Times report revealed that Gates flew on Epstein’s Gulfstream plane, known as “the Lolita Express” from Teterboro Airport in New Jersey to Palm Beach in 2013. The New Yorker also reported that Gates made a $2 million donation to the MIT Media Lab in 2014, a donation that was said to be directed by Epstein. 

At the heart of any good conspiracy theory is a twisted kernel of truth. Could it be that there is, in fact, an elite illuminati-like pedophile ring running the world–except that, instead of being controlled by prominent Democrats, the cabal transcends any particular political ideology? If that turns out to be the case, then is it even remotely possible that Bill Gates, in collaboration perhaps with two other powerful Bills—Barr and Clinton—may have conspired to have Jeffrey Epstein murdered in jail, so that their involvement is kept secret? When my brain goes down these (admittedly speculative) rabbit holes, I start to feel like I’m getting swallowed up in the Matrix, until I remember that it’s one thing to be running around spouting nonsense about Pizzagate and frazzledrip, and quite another to see evidence of an actual conspiracy unfolding before your eyes. Because something here really does not make sense. 

We need answers as to why Bill Gates, the fourth-richest man on earth who runs the biggest charitable organization in history, needed Epstein’s “help” with philanthropy, even after his wife expressed serious reservations about interacting with him. We need to understand why the Gates Foundation’s former science adviser, a man named Boris Nikolic, was named executor of Epstein’s estate before he died. We need to know how Melanie Walker, a longtime adviser to Epstein, came to be part of Gates’s inner circle. Then there’s the question of Nathan Myhrvold, former Microsoft Chief Technology Officer, who, according to Vanity Fair, palled around with Epstein in Palm Beach and Manhattan and was accused by Alan Dershowitz of having sex with one of Epstein’s underage victims. We need to understand why Bill Gates brushed off all these intersections between his orbit and Epstein’s, not to mention why he suddenly stepped down from the boards of Microsoft and Berkshire Hathaway last year. 

And before we let Melinda Gates off the hook, we need to understand what she knew and when she knew it. Any evidence of complicity should disqualify her from being an advocate for women and girls. 

Hopefully soon, we will get some answers. Last summer, Epstein co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested at a 156-acre property in New Hampshire and on Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Alison Nathan announced that the trial will begin after Thanksgiving. It was originally slated to commence in July, but her lawyers argued that they needed more time to prepare after a new sex-trafficking charge was filed this year that alone carries a maximum sentence of 40 years. If anyone knows where the bodies are buried, it is Ghislaine Maxwell. Indeed, she may already be cooperating with investigators in exchange for leniency. 

Suddenly, the carefully coordinated Gates divorce announcement makes more sense as a calculated PR move on the part of Melinda to get ahead of the Epstein narrative and distance herself from its stench. If you are trying to run a foundation that advocates for women and girls around the world, being tied to a global child sex-trafficking ring is not exactly great for the brand. 

There’s no question that the $50 billion Gates Foundation, in its 21 years of existence, has done a lot of good work. Because of their work, the incidence of polio around the world has declined by 99 percent. They have prevented 1.5 billion cases of malaria and donated billions to fighting HIV and AIDS. And of course, the coronavirus. But we cannot ignore the fact that the Foundation has also helped launder Bill Gates’s reputation, transforming him from a ruthless Robber Baron 2.0 who built his success by crushing the competition (and foisting a sub-optimal product on consumers), into a champion of public health, an expert on climate change, a thought leader for the Davos set. As Anand Giridharadas put it in his book “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World,” the only thing better than being a fox is being a fox asked to watch over hens.

We as a society need to question whether relying on the voluntary largesse of an ascendant billionaire class is the best way to solve the world’s problems. Why should the takers, the hoarders of the world’s wealth, be presumed to be experts on giving? The Gates divorce reminds us that it might be more effective, more conducive to a thriving democracy, to simply raise their taxes. 
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What did Melinda Gates know—and when did she know it?

by Rachel Dodes

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    [post_content] => A powerful argument that fat people should be accorded the same dignity that social movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter demand.

Aubrey Gordon’s What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat is a book about being trapped. It is rooted in trauma and designed, at turns, to break your heart and open your eyes to the humanity of a scorned and maligned demographic. It is also another volume in the generally shouty, scolding, so-called “woke” rhetoric that has shot through the public discourse like a never-ending Reddit thread. 

The path to inclusion, apparently, is balling out strangers on the internet and hosting a podcast. Gordon excels at both. She first came to fame as the author of Your Fat Friend, which she wrote anonymously and subtitled “Essays on life as a very fat person.” As the title of her undertaking implies, Gordon has set herself apart from a default confrontational stance. Her tone is direct, earnest, informative—uninterested in trauma porn. The same cannot be said of her voice on Twitter, but such is life when expressed in a maximum of 280 characters. 

I first became acquainted with Gordon through a hilarious, often brilliant limited episode podcast about the dieting industry, which she co-hosts with Huffington Post journalist Michael Hobbes. Called Maintenance Phase, its tagline is “wellness & weight loss, debunked & decoded.” Much like Your Fat Friend, the tone of the podcast conveys to the listener that she is implicitly on the same team as the co-hosts: away we go, together, to laugh at the sick standards and twisted marketing schemes that warp our view of the world and threaten our psychic wellbeing! The duo’s takedown of Moon Juice (“What the fuck is an adaptogen?”) is one of the funniest things I listened to in the past year; the episode on the Twinkie Defense, exploring the moral panic behind the legal defense that exculpated Harvey Milk’s killer, is moving and especially well researched. 

What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat is not a memoir but rather “a mix of memoir, research, and cultural criticism all focused on unearthing our social and cultural attitudes toward fat people.” The aim is to accord fat people the same dignity and steps toward harm reduction that other social justice movements, like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, demand. 

First things first: I was almost giddy to read a book published in 2021 that tells public health experts—and pretty much everyone else—that they are dead wrong and can fuck off. After this pandemic year of public health obsession, shaming (e.g., for wearing or not wearing a mask), and broadly asking to speak to the manager, it is refreshing to see a woman stand her ground and explain fat shaming and the diet industry to me.

 
Gordon trashes BMI (Body Mass Index) as a racist, meaningless marker; she deftly explains how blaming fat people for being fat allows us to avoid taking collective responsibility for a widespread problem, to indulge our biases, and isolate fat people from equal pay, housing, and medical care. Her arguments bear the hard won credibility of a woman who has been mocked, menaced, and bullied online and off throughout her life and presently wears a size 26. Biography is Gordon’s chief credential, and her stories of discrimination and humiliation at the hands of anyone from landlords to flight attendants will make you shake with rage. On her podcast, she speaks of “the shitty economy of trauma” and how she needs to be “vivisected” for anyone to buy into her arguments. 

What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat is very much a book written by a woman. To be sure, we are all trapped in these flesh suits. To be alive as a woman, in particular, is to experience being judged on your looks before all else. Describing viral videos that shame fat people, Gordon writes, “It was surreal to watch it all unfold, this litigation of my body, a voiceless inconvenience, an inanimate obstacle.” As a woman in America, I must confess it was surreal to read that sentence. I understand my role is to be a reader, and not to place myself in Gordon’s lived and often excruciating narrative, but at several points in this book I felt lectured to about my own lived experiences as a woman in a way that baffled me. 

For instance: Gordon is at pains to define a difference between fatcalling and catcalling: “Catcallers do not consider themselves to be wooing me, concocting faux romances in their minds. I do not face the inconveniences of chivalry...Instead, I face...unsolicited disclosures of men’s rape fantasies.” As I read that paragraph, I couldn’t help but think, #MeToo, Aubrey! That’s exactly what it’s like! And, even if details differ, why spend pages denigrating the trauma of catcalling in favor of the paramount trauma of fatcalling? Why must we rank trauma? Why is it all a contest? Both things suck. 

Gordon indulges in moments of intersectionality, but male aggression on an empty street is also familiar in the forms of gay bashing or bigotry—as well as straight-up catcalling. We can (and should) create room for fat women in feminism without invalidating someone else’s narrative. And, while we are at it, I’d like to point out that dating apps are humiliating for everyone. 

No one wants to be pathologized; this is something the gay rights community has been teaching us for decades. Knowing Gordon is a fierce advocate both in the queer space and for reproductive freedoms, the following sentiment left me gobsmacked: 

“The world of straight-size people is a reliable one. In their world, services are procured. Healthcare offered is accessed. Conflict arises primarily from active decisions to provoke and is rarely—if ever—prompted by the simple sight of a stranger’s body. The biggest challenges with anyone’s individual body are their attitude toward their own skin, not issues of security, dignity, or safety from bodily harm.” 

This simply isn’t true. Americans are denied access to healthcare for a plethora of reasons that include race, income, sexuality, gender identification, and immigration status.  

Gordon is at her strongest writing about how cultural conditioning yields a cruel smugness: 

“Media messages about revenge bodies and baby weight and beach bodies abound, conditioning our feelings about our own bodies the ways that we treat those who are fatter than us," she writes. She references a damning Wharton study about how “obesity serves as a proxy for low competence,” and compellingly links this attitude to legalized weight discrimination in many states. 

“Anti-fatness,” Gordon asserts, “is a way for thinner people to remind themselves of their perceived virtue. Seeing a fatter person allows them to remind themselves that at least I’m not fat. They believe that they have chosen their body, so seeing a fat person eat something they deem unhealthy reminds them of their stronger willpower, greater tenacity, and superior character.” 

This line of thought is redolent of the Calvinist doctrine of predestination and Weber’s Protestant Work Ethic—it’s as American as it gets. In this vein, I am troubled by an underlying assumption that crops up again and again in this book: that we are empowered and enabled to participate in public discourse once we are consumers. Surely our humanity is not tied to our ability to participate in capitalism. Personally, I think people should aspire to a lot more than earning more money and being able to buy clothes in their size. I would like to see us dream bigger than a shopping spree. What else are we gunning for here? More invidiously, what industry will co-opt these upper tiers of obesity? Each June, the Gay Pride Parade boasts multiple floats from big banks and corporations: does fat acceptance look like a TD Bank ad? Can someone chart a course out of this capitalist trap?  

The book also contains the seeds of some serious fatalism, and, as it goes, a serious paradox.  

On the one hand, Gordon argues passionately against BMI as a valid metric and size as an indicator of health. At one point, she even lauds a few anti-diet dieticians. She writes of studies that point to vile and widespread medical bias against fat people, even in medical schools. Yet, she also insists that the prevalence of fat Americans is a consequence of substandard nutrition, processed food and poor education—deficits she traces back to New Deal agricultural policy and the Reagan Era’s war on obesity. 

So, we hold both of these truths to be self-evident: being fat is okay and not a threat to one’s health, but having a fat society is a problem we must collectively solve. 

Gordon also claims that 97 million Americans diet and it’s a $66 billion-industry. But, she says 98 percent of dieters fail. This made me wonder: what constitutes a failure? What constitutes a diet? Success metrics are strange, and their definition is often slippery to the point of slime. When my own father was dying of cancer, I learned that “success” at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center is defined as living for another five years. If it doesn’t look like you’ll make it that long, they don’t treat you for fear of sullying their numbers. 

So: who is in these diet studies? What did they want to achieve? Where did they start? When I dove into the footnotes to learn the rationale behind the numbers, I was led to a Psychology Today author promo listicle: “6 Reasons Smart People Don’t Diet.” The statistical improbability of “success” pinned to these numbers allows for an ugly tendency to flay any follower engaged in weight loss. On her podcast, Aubrey says she believes it was a fair boundary to block anyone with an Instagram bio that states an aspirational weight—although she herself doesn’t do so. 

Isn’t it possible to both understand that the diet industry is largely shambolic and also leave room for people to try and change their bodies a little if they want to? A before-and-after photo is not inherently toxic. Perhaps social media is the bigger issue, with all of its attendant lies around displays of wealth and heteronormative couplehood—while we are on the topic. 

Somewhere between being resigned to genetic predisposition and indulging in the freak show that is The Biggest Loser, I’ve got to believe there is a middle ground where we have a bit more acceptance and agency. Call me an optimist. How can a writer as smart as Gordon so sharply point out the sly complicity in Heinz buying Weight Watchers, but come down so hard on Michelle Obama for her “Let’s Move” campaign and any poor schmuck trying to lose a little weight? In hanging readers out to dry at various points, Gordon lowballs the universality of her message. Movingly, she writes, “The war on childhood obesity had given up on me, and over time, I learned to give up on myself...At eleven, I clung desperately to the idea that my body could and would change—that, somehow, I would become thin. Then, and only then, could my real life begin.” Who didn’t feel that way in some capacity as a middle schooler? 

We need to treat fat people—and everyone—with more kindness and consideration. But there is nothing wrong with trying to grant those same people a sense of autonomy and agency to decide on their own definition of defeat or victory. For Gordon, it’s having the space to be the woman she is right now; for others, it might mean shedding 20 pounds put on during a stressful, sedentary pandemic. There must be room for someone trying to figure out what works for their own highly personal wants and needs. 

It breaks my heart that the end of this book must focus on harm reduction. In her final chapter, Gordon writes, “We deserve a personhood that does not make size or health a prerequisite for dignity and respect.” We do. And if we don’t find one that we all can fit in together as a nation and as a culture, it’s not so much that we will be trapped but, rather, that we’ll know for certain that it’s been a trap all along.
    [post_title] => Dreaming big: the politics of preaching body acceptance in a fat phobic society
    [post_excerpt] => Aubrey Gordon’s 'What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat' is a book about being trapped. It is rooted in trauma and designed, at turns, to break your heart and open your eyes to the humanity of a scorned and maligned demographic. 
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Dreaming big: the politics of preaching body acceptance in a fat phobic society

by Cara Marsh Sheffler

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    [post_date] => 2021-04-16 03:57:25
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    [post_content] => Activists and civil society groups are outraged at the prime minister's victim blaming. 

In Pakistan, the first thing a woman thinks of when she steps outside her home is rape. In a country that routinely ranks as one of the most dangerous in the world for women, rape is everywhere. Women live in constant fear of predators, who routinely go unpunished not because the law protects them (it does not), but because attitudes in this deeply conservative culture manifest in a lack of will to enforce them. Recently Imran Khan, the prime minister of Pakistan, reinforced this entrenched misogyny when he claimed that vulgarity, temptation and willpower were among the causes of rape.

Before he became a politician, Imran Khan was an international cricket champion and a national hero. Oxford educated, handsome, fair skinned and an eloquent speaker, he embodies the quintessential colonial concept of the “white man” coming to save the damsel in distress Pakistan was made out to be. When he was elected prime minister, the media dubbed him the leader of “naya Pakistan” (new Pakistan).

But this, I knew, was a lie. Imran Khan has a well-documented history of misogyny.

In 2006, he rejected the Protection of Women’s Rights Bill, which amended the 1979 Hudood Ordinances that put the entire onus of proving a rape accusation on the woman. The 2006 Bill did pass a parliamentary vote, no thanks to Khan; but prior to this legislation, a rape victim could be prosecuted and imprisoned for adultery if she failed to produce an adult male witness to her assault.

Ayesha Gulalai, a human rights activist who in 2013 became the first female member of the National Assembly, accused Khan of sexual harassment; according to Gulalai, the prime minister sent lewd messages to her and other women in the progressive Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party. For having made this accusation, Gulalai received death threats.

In 2018, Khan said that feminism was “degenerating” to motherhood and called it a “western concept.”

In 2020, he said that the Aurat (women’s) March was culturally divisive.

This year, Khan presented a Pride of Performance award to Ali Zafar, a prominent singer-songwriter who has been credibly accused of sexual harassment by several leading female artists. The prime minister did not even acknowledge an open letter from feminist activists who asked him to refrain from conferring the award, given that one of Zafar’s accusers, singer-actress Meesha Shafi (who plays the protagonist’s sister in the 2013 film The Reluctant Fundamentalist)  was pursuing legal action against him.

In a Q&A session with the public that was televised live in early April, a journalist asked Prime Minister Khan what steps he would take to tackle rape and child abuse. Instead of answering the question, he said: “In any society where vulgarity is prevalent, there are consequences.”

Vulgarity is a broad term. What’s vulgar for one person, might not be for the other. But in this case, Khan was using the word to blame the victims. Over the past three years, Pakistan has seen a spike in widely publicized, extremely violent rapes. One of the victims was 6 year-old Zainab Ansari, whose body was found in a rubbish dump in 2018; she had been raped and strangled. In another notorious case that made international headlines last April, a woman was gang-raped in front of her children after she stopped at the side of a highway just outside of Lahore because her car had run out of fuel.

During the same televised Q&A session, Khan held women responsible for the behavior of men, saying they should remove “temptation” because “not everyone has willpower.” He claimed the high rape statistics were a consequence of “increasing obscenity.” Bollywood films and an infatuation with Western lifestyle were to blame, said the prime minister.

With those words, Khan diminished every person who has stood up against rape, every victim who came out with their story; and every woman, trans and non-binary individual that marched against rape. By saying that women should take “purdah” (cover themselves from head to toe), he reiterated the notion that the onus is upon women to protect themselves. There will be no safety in Pakistan, no justice. There will simply be women constantly berated for taking up space.

In 2020, 11 rape cases were reported every single day in Pakistan. But only 77, or 0.3 percent, of the accused have been convicted. According to government statistics, fewer than half the women who report having been raped end up pressing charges; police estimate that the actual number of rapes could be closer to 60,000 annually. Women are instantly labeled liars when they press charges against their rapists. Sometimes the consequence is more fatal, as seen in cases of so-called “honor killings,” whereby the male relatives of an unmarried rape victim take her life because she is no longer a virgin. Women are sometimes forced to marry their rapist to save their family from scandal. In other cases, families choose revenge rape as a “solution.”

In a conference organized by the Women’s Action Forum on rape, Nazish Brohi, a social sector consultant said that, “There is the expense of the lawyer, going to court, the cost of living in a big city, and then there is the impact on the family, so, the cost of reporting rape is high. But the cost of not reporting rape is also high.”

The system usually works against survivors. In the case of the woman who was gang raped on the highway, Capital City Police Officer Umar Sheikh blamed the victim, asking reporters rhetorically why she was traveling with her children late at night.

Mehnaz Akber Aziz, a member of Pakistan’s National Assembly and a children’s rights advocate said: “You are signalling to these people, the rapists, that ‘It’s OK, you can continue doing what you’re doing and there will be a way out, even if you’re arrested.” Pakistan’s police and judiciary generally fail to apply the law robustly in rape cases where there are no witnesses.

But there are organizations and activists working to force law enforcement officers and the judiciary into implementing the laws that are supposed to protect women.

Sahil provides free legal aid for children and women who have been victims of abuse. War Against Rape (WAR) provides rehabilitation for survivors of sexual assault and works with them to deal with their medical, legal and social issues. Earlier this year, The Lahore High Court declared the “two finger test”—used to determine whether a sexual assault survivor was a virgin—as illegal.

The Zainab Alert Response and Recovery Act, 2020 was passed under the Children's Protection Bill to criminalize abduction and kidnapping. Anti-Rape Ordinance 2020 was approved to ensure that sexual assault trials are completed within four months and that victims’ identities will be protected.

Each of these organizations is committed to tackling Pakistan’s rape problem. And yet, Prime Minister Khan did not mention any of them. Instead, he left Pakistan’s women in a more vulnerable and precarious state than ever before. The country does have laws that, if enforced, would help combat sexual violence. What it does not have, however, is a leader who sets an example by working with existing organizations to change the entrenched patriarchal attitudes that prevent women from feeling safe in public. Nor does it have a leader who is committed to public education.  If the prime minister of a country where the literacy rate has fallen below 60 percent says that men aren’t able to control their instincts and that women must be covered from head to toe if they want to remain safe, the masses will believe it.

Sheraz Ahmed, the program officer at WAR, noted that Khan’s remarks demonstrated “a clear pattern that reveals his regressive views of rape and sexual violence.” Asked why rape cases in Pakistan are so high, and what measures need to be taken to make women safer, Ahmed said, “Rapists know they will get off the hook and that’s why cases are rising.” The lack of medical and psychological care available for rape survivors places even more stress on the woman, which often factors into a decision to refrain from pressing charges.

Several organizations—including Women’s Action Forums of Pakistan, War Against Rape, Aurat March Lahore, The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, and The Women’s Lawyer Association—have demanded an apology from Imran Khan. In a statement of condemnation that has, as of this writing, been signed by 438 people, they describe the prime minister’s comments as “factually incorrect, insensitive and dangerous,” adding that they “actively fostered and promoted rape culture.”

The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan said in a statement that they were “appalled” by the prime minister’s remarks, describing them as “unacceptable behavior on the part of a public leader” and demanding that he apologize.



Jemima Khan, the prime minister's former wife (and mother of his two children), tweeted: “The Imran I knew used to say, "Put a veil on the man's eyes not on the woman."”

The response on Pakistani Twitter, meanwhile, has been scathing.

This time, the anger does not seem likely to abate; it will continue to fester until there is systemic change and a decisive shift in the conservative narrative regarding rape in Pakistan. Over the past two years Pakistan has seen a rising feminist movement; now, with the growing Aurat Marches and the opening up of the #MeinBhi (MeToo) movement, something has shifted. The women of Pakistan will no longer be dismissed when it comes to sharing their truths.

In many South Asian countries there is widespread scepticism about the #MeToo movement. Why, people ask, does it even exist? Why don’t women who are molested immediately speak out and share their stories? The answer, or part of it, can be found in Khan’s remarks. Whether he believes them or not is irrelevant; he has exacerbated the dangers women face by reinforcing the primitive idea that men are driven by animalistic instincts and are physically incapable of controlling themselves in the presence of a woman.

Imran Khan has a bit of a nefarious past, with his playboy reputation and his hypocrisy towards women. But it is his actions and words today that demonstrate yet again how men in power use their privilege to reinforce only one truth—their own.
    [post_title] => 'Vulgarity has consequences': Pakistan's prime minister blames rising number of rape cases on women's dress choices
    [post_excerpt] => Before he became a politician, Imran Khan was an international cricket champion and a national hero. Oxford educated, handsome, fair skinned and an eloquent speaker, he campaigned for prime minister as a reformer who believed in meritocracy. But he had a well-documented history of misogyny.
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‘Vulgarity has consequences’: Pakistan’s prime minister blames rising number of rape cases on women’s dress choices

by Maheen Humayun

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    [post_date] => 2021-03-26 04:20:38
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    [post_content] => The recent proliferation of high end chai dhabas inspired a national conversation about freedom of movement for women.

It’s a truth widely accepted in Pakistan that drinking chai is what makes you a true native. And not just any chai, but the sweet, milky, caramel-colored brew that is served at dhabas (outdoor tea stands) and slurped noisily while sitting on a small plastic chair, waiting for the dhabay wala to bring you another cup because one is never enough.

But while street dhabas play a major role in Pakistani society, they are traditionally a male-dominated space.

Granaz Baloch, a teaching fellow at the University of Turbat in Balochistan, is a feminist academic and writer whose research focuses on the gender challenges rural women face in finding potable water. She said that while dhabas in Turbat provide “information, opportunities and networking” for men in the city, women are not welcome. But this is not a Turbat-specific issue. Until recently, it was very unusual to see a woman enjoying the simple pleasure of a leisurely cup of chai at a roadside stand anywhere in Pakistan. Now attitudes are beginning to change, partly on the back of social media driven influencer culture. 

[caption id="attachment_2404" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Granaz Baloch[/caption]

Chai Wala is a hip Karachi café (tagline: "reinventing the chai experience") that serves upscale versions of traditional dhaba snack foods and beverages. Established five years ago, it attracts young men and women who are drawn to its trendy decor and menu, which includes Nutella chai, "artisanal" teas, and “dips” like hummus. It also sells branded merchandise. Places like Chai Wala have taken the concept of the traditional working class outdoor tea stand and reinterpreted it to attract a bourgeois clientele. 

[caption id="attachment_2406" align="aligncenter" width="640"] The scene at Chai Wala.[/caption]

Shaheera Anwar, a 29 year old journalist who moved from Saudi Arabia to Karachi in 2017, got engaged at a traditional outdoor dhaba. “I was dating my now-husband and we often hung out at dhabas after work—and I am someone who hates grand, public gestures, so I got proposed to at a dhaba,” she said. Shaheera is aware that dhaba culture has since become trendy, and she is not sure this is a good thing. She sees places like Chai Wala as gathering places for the rich that erase the egalitarian culture of the traditional dhabas.

[caption id="attachment_2405" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Shaheera Anwar getting engaged at a traditional dhaba in Karachi.[/caption]

Among middle class Pakistanis there is a widely-held perception that high end dhabas are safer for women because they attract a “better crowd.” This raises the question of the role class plays in Pakistani society, and how it affects the way women are treated in the public domain. 

The emergence of high end dhabas occurred right around the time that a feminist collective founded an organization called Girls at Dhabas,  which addresses the absence of women in public spaces and strives to reclaim them. The media gave significant coverage to the group when it first launched, but while press attention has since dwindled the movement has only grown stronger and more vocal in addressing the structural problems that prevent Pakistani women from moving about freely in the public square.

“It took living in other countries to learn that I had been conforming to a clever scam my whole life, thinking the city belonged only to men,” said movement founder Sadia Khatri. Sadia speaks in poetic language about the joy that comes with finally breaking free of the restraints placed on women’s freedom of movement. “The city’s breath rising to meet mine with each step, the pleasure of placing one foot before another, unthinking, meditative. The trust that so long as I kept going, Karachi would keep expanding, opening up before me.”

Many Pakistani women are making similar discoveries about the joy found in moving about in public. Maliha, who re-entered the corporate world after a career break, said that working in an office brought a kind of freedom she had all but forgotten. By extension, sitting at dhabas no longer seemed as daunting. “You gain enough confidence that when someone tries to harass or catcall you, you don’t shy away from hitting back,” she said.  Maliha found herself easing into the spaces she wanted to be. “The more you become accustomed to an environment, the more you learn about an environment, the more confident you become in dealing with that environment,” she said. 

Shoaib is the owner of a successful traditional dhaba in Lahore that specializes in Amritsari hareesa, which the women in his family make according to an old family recipe. He cheerfully  acknowledges that his clientele, once predominantly male and working class, has expanded to include families and women; and he has noticed the increased presence of women on the streets. But while Shoaib expressed no objection to other women claiming public spaces as their own, he said he would not want the women of his own family to be seen on the street or eating a meal at a restaurant. For Shoaib the women he saw eating at his dhaba represented a different lived reality—one that was simply not his. 

Shoaib’s perception of the class divide seems accurate. Upper-class women at posh dhabas are granted the right to be there because they come with the entitlement associated with their socioeconomic class. They are accustomed to being addressed as “ma’am,” and the staff treat them accordingly. Working class women, however, do not see these cafés as their place.

But Sanam, a supervisor at Shahi Bawarchi Khana, a fashionable restaurant in Old Lahore,  banished her insecurities and discomfort about being out in public. “I no longer feel uncomfortable in public spaces, because I know I can handle myself,” she said of working in a restaurant, adding that “girls need to keep moving forward and face the world.” Unlike the women who founded the feminist collective Girls at Dhabas, Sanam is not from the educated upper class. But with her unapologetic confidence she is exactly the kind that needs to be normalized within this debate about public spaces. 

Aqib, the manager at a trendy chai dhaba style restaurant in Old Lahore, articulated his perception of how class drives the lived reality for women in Pakistan. “Women come here more than men now, especially young TikTokers who like creating a big fuss,” he said of the changing demographics among his customers. Like Shoaib, the proprietor of the traditional dhaba that specializes in Amritsari hareesa, Aqib thought that the increased presence of women in the public domain should occur within cultural limitations. 

But what Pakistani men think about gender roles is slowly becoming irrelevant to the women who are paving a path forward. In Karachi’s impoverished Lyari district, notorious for its gun battles between criminal gangs, Shazia Jameel, the manager at Lyari Girls’ Café provides a space in this very male dominated area where women can gather. At the café they can take English language classes, learn boxing, study hair styling and makeup techniques, and chat in a relaxed atmosphere without fear of molestation. Shazia leads a group of women from the café who go cycling on Sundays, stopping on the way back from their ride for breakfast at a male dominated dhaba. At first the women were uncomfortable there, but that feeling has since disappeared. Now they are regulars.

The truth is, it’s not the piercing gazes or the opinions that have really changed, especially not among the working class. What has begun to change is women’s responses to traditional mindsets. The posh dhabas are not remotely inclusive places, nor would anyone argue otherwise. But the noise around them has led women to question why they accepted the limitations placed on their freedom of movement in their own country. They now regard strolling the streets and sitting in cafés as their right. Shazia Jameel puts the onus for protecting women's safety on the authorities, calling upon them to instal CCTV cameras. She also advocates legislation to eradicate religious extremism, which she blames for the perpetration of restrictive attitudes toward women. 

Shazia is right. It’s well past time that the right of women to move about in public without fear of molestation be protected. Nor should they be held responsible for the way men behave toward them. Despite what the old guard may think, change is coming from every direction, one cup of chai at a time. 
    [post_title] => Pakistani women are claiming their right to be in public spaces—one cup of chai at a time
    [post_excerpt] => What Pakistani men think about gender roles is slowly becoming irrelevant to the women who are paving a path forward.
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Pakistani women are claiming their right to be in public spaces—one cup of chai at a time

by Anmol Irfan

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    [post_date] => 2021-03-19 14:54:55
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    [post_content] => Over the past decade, women in the music industry have seen no notable improvement in visibility.

At Sunday night’s Grammy Awards, women won big. For the first time in Grammys’ history, the top four prizes went to four separate solo women: Megan Thee Stallion won Best New Artist, Taylor Swift took home Album of the Year, Billie Eilish snagged Record of the Year, and H.E.R. won for Song of the Year. Beyoncé in turn claimed four awards, which brought her lifetime total to 28—more than any other female artist, ever.

But the recognition of women at the Grammys, while welcome, is not an accurate reflection of their standing in the music industry. A study released earlier this month by the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative at the University of Southern California found that women's place in pop music is dismal—that they are vastly underrepresented. The study showed in no uncertain terms that since 2012 no progress has been made.

The study, called “Inclusion in the Recording Studio,” is one that researcher Stacy L. Smith has been leading annually for the last four years. Smith and her team had previously conducted similar work analyzing film and television, before expanding their focus to include the music industry as well. When her first report was released in 2018, it caused a stir. The study showed that with respect to the top 600 songs since 2012, only 16.8 percent were performed by female artists; analyzing the same pool of songs, only 12.3 percent of the songwriters credited were female and 2 percent of producers. When it came to Grammy nominees, between 2013 and 2018, 90.7 percent  of the nominees were male.

Neil Portnow, the then-president and CEO of the Recording Academy, which determines the Grammys, argued that if women wanted to be recognized they needed to “step up,” effectively blaming women—rather than the system—for their lack of visibility, opportunity, and recognition. The ensuing backlash included calls for Portnow’s resignation, and the rise of the popular #GrammysSoMale hashtag. A scathing open letter written by female executives from many sectors of the music world lambasted Portnow and demanded his resignation. “The statement you made this week about women in music needing to ‘step up’ was spectacularly wrong and insulting and, at its core, oblivious to the vast body of work created by and with women,” they wrote. “We do not have to sing louder, jump higher or be nicer to prove ourselves.” They added: “We step up every single day and have been doing so for a long time. The fact that you don’t realize this means it’s time for you to step down.” Portnow, it should be noted, did resign from his position in 2019 which many took as a way to gracefully remove himself from the controversy.

But the following year, even after all that noise, there was almost no change. The latest numbers released in early March, which analyze credit information from the Hot 100 songs on the Billboard year-end charts for each year from 2012-2020, actually show that women’s place in the industry is a little bit worse than it was before. Last year, women made up 20.2 percent of artists whereas the year before that the number was higher, at 22.5 percent. While women like Beyoncé and Taylor Swift take center stage, behind the scenes women are even more outnumbered. When it comes to producers, the ratio of men to women is 38 to 1, while songwriters women only make up 12.6 percent. Further on the subject of songwriters, from 2012-2020 Max Martin was the top male songwriter, with 44 credits on the songs analyzed; the top female songwriter was Nikki Minaj with only 19 credits.

The reports’ central takeaway is that over the past decade, women in the music industry have seen no notable improvement in visibility. This is true even as a number of initiatives have sprung up in recent years to try and address the industry’s systemic problems, like She Is the Music, co-founded by Alicia Keys to empower female creators.

“The advocacy around women in music has continued, but women represented less than one-third of artists, clocked in at 12.6 percent of songwriters, and were fewer than 3 percent of all producers on the popular charts between 2012 and 2020,” the authors of the Annenberg report wrote in the study’s conclusion. “The music industry must examine how its decision-making, practices, and beliefs perpetuate the underrepresentation of women artists, songwriters, and producers.”

“To fully examine this problem, we have to look at schools where females are more likely to be encouraged as vocalists than instrumentalists. While things are changing, there still exists a bias toward female ‘musicians.’ And this bias extends to any opportunities given to students to learn technology as well. Once out of school, women in the music industry aren’t taken as seriously as producers or front women of their own bands. Some genres in particular have excluded women from radio play,” explains Susan Cattaneo, a musician and associate professor of songwriting at Berklee College of Music. “The fact that women aren’t considered ‘bankable’ means they’re not given the same radio air time as their male counterparts. For every seven male artists on a country playlist, there is only one woman played.”

Cattaneo adds, “Unfortunately, the music business is still a man’s world so there is this perspective that women can’t do the job that men can do. This applies to female producers, engineers, performing artists, and songwriters. It’s a pervasive problem in all genres of music.”

“It has been wonderful to see a number of musical superstars who have taken full control over

their careers including their branding, their image and their business,” Cattaneo said. “Unfortunately, we’ve also seen that no matter who the artist is (Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus or Britney Spears), they have had to pay for that control with various kinds of backlash from the industry and their fan base.”

The Annenberg study did show a positive trend for women in terms of Grammy nominations, calling 2021, “a high point for women in nearly every category considered.” Even so, there were 198 female nominees and 655 male nominees. That said, this was the first year the Recording Academy publicly reported those numbers which is a step in the right direction.

Another glimmer of hope on the horizon is that the Recording Academy earlier this month announced they’d be partnering with Berklee College of Music and Arizona State University to conduct a study on women’s representation in the music industry. “The data collected from the study will be utilized to develop and empower the next generation of women music creators by generating actionable items and solutions to help inform the Academy’s diversity, equity, and inclusion objectives amongst its membership and the greater music industry,” the Recording Academy said in a statement.

Still it should be said that in 2019 the Recording Academy made promises to move equity forward through the establishment of an inclusion initiative called “Women in the Mix.” The goal was to increase women’s presence as producers and engineers by asking for all involved to commit to considering at least two female candidates when making hiring decisions. The announcement cited the 2018 USC Annenberg study which said only 2 percent of pop producers were women and 3 percent of sound engineers. Now in 2020 those numbers are relatively unchanged.

As Smith, who runs the Annenberg study wrote in this year’s report, “Solutions like the Women in the Mix pledge require pledge-takers who are intentional and accountable, and an industry that is committed to making change — something that clearly has not happened in this case.”

Perhaps, though, the sweep of wins for women at this year’s Grammys will be a harbinger for change. And for pop music to become equitable, change it must. “There has been no meaningful and sustained increase in the percentage of artists in nearly a decade,” Smith wrote in this year’s study. We have to do better than that.
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Despite big wins at the Grammys, women are vastly underrepresented in pop music

by Elena Sheppard

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    [post_content] => Gender equality in Belarus looks good on paper, but comes with many caveats. 

Less than five minutes into a recent television appearance, the interviewer asked Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya about her last time in a kitchen. Tsikhanouskaya is generally believed to have won the August presidential election in Belarus, beating the long-term authoritarian ruler, Alyaksandr Lukashenka. During the election campaign, Tsikhanouskaya referenced her role as a housewife in what turned out to be a politically savvy move. Diverse groups within Belarus — reformists, conservatives, feminists — could all see a reflection of their ideals in Tsikhanouskaya. Conservatives could see a loving housewife and mother; reformists, an opportunity for change; and feminists saw a viable female candidate for the presidency. But the housewife trope was also used to undermine her. President Alyaksandr Lukashenka claimed that while he was sure Tsikhanouskaya could cook a good cutlet, how could he debate with her? The President sought to diminish his female opponent by comparing her knowledge of the kitchen to her lack of political experience.

During the election campaign and the now three month-old protest movement against Lukashenka’s blatant attempt to rig the results, the media spotlight has deservedly focused on Belarusian women for the outsized role they have played leading the struggle for fair elections, an end to egregious police violence, and peaceful regime change. Maria Kalesnikava, a political activist who was abducted by security forces on September 7 and then jailed, and Nina Bahinskaya, the 73 year old woman who is an iconic protest figure, have become household names for their roles in the protest movement.

However, the long-term impact on women’s role and position in society is more difficult to gauge. While a reporter for The New York Times wrote that the movement has “already shattered deeply entrenched gender stereotypes built up over generations,” and Belarusian media TUT.BY labelled it a “feminist revolution,” this view is not shared by everyone. Women have certainly played a pivotal role, but there is a great deal of work to do in mobilizing this newfound empowerment to dismantle Belarus’s deeply entrenched patriarchal system.

Barriers facing Belarusian women

On paper, Belarus is a leader in gender equality. In The Global Gender Gap Index 2020, it is ranked 29th out of 153 countries for women’s economic participation, educational attainment, health, and political empowerment. It has signed and ratified international legal frameworks on gender equality. At 69 percent, the share of women in the Belarusian judiciary is high. The Women’s Power Index shows that women have 35 percent representation in parliament, exceeding many European countries and giving Belarus a world ranking of 39th.

On closer inspection, however, gender equality in Belarus comes with caveats. In the Cabinet, where more decision-making power lies, women’s representation falls to 3 percent. In 2004, Lukashenka declared that the presence of women in Parliament, makes it “stable and calm,” and that it will ensure that “the male Members of Parliament work properly,” thus reducing a woman's role to one of a caretaker or matron. True, there were a handful of high profile women in Belarusian politics before the August election—such as Lukashenka's press secretary Natalya Eismont, Senate Speaker Natalya Kochanova, and the Head of Central Election Committee, Lidziya Yarmoshyna—but their prominence does not reflect the reality for most Belarusian women.

The 2019 UN Gender Equality Brief highlighted entrenched systematic gender norms and stereotypes as the biggest challenge to gender equality in Belarus, where a woman’s role is defined primarily as wife and mother. The majority of men and women in Belarus believe that being a housewife is as fulfilling as working for pay, with more women agreeing with this statement than men. Maternity leave is up to three years. This might sound ideal to women in the United States, where there is no legally mandated maternity leave, but because employers in Belarus are legally required to hold a woman’s job open for her while she is on leave, women of child-bearing age can see their careers suffer. A General Director of a medium-sized factory in Minsk once told me that it is common practice to weed out newly-married women when hiring to avoid taking on an employee who is likely to seek maternity leave. This is contributing to the wage gap that is currently around 25 percent and growing. A 2019 UN report found that almost every second woman in Belarus has faced partner violence; yet in October 2018, Lukashenka dismissed a new law on the prevention of domestic violence, decrying it as “nonsense” borrowed “from the West.”

The three graces

After the government prevented the three most popular male candidates from running as opponents of Lukashenka in the August election, women stepped up to form the main opposition. Tsikhanouskaya ran in place of her imprisoned husband, Siarhei Tsikhanouski; she was joined by Veranika Tsapkala representing her husband Valery Tsapkala, who had been forced to flee; and Maria Kalesnikava, who was the campaign manager for imprisoned opposition candidate Viktar Babaryka. It took just 15 minutes for the three women to agree to unite campaigns, something previous opposition had never managed to achieve. Over the course of the campaign, they emerged as a powerful triumvirate; it is because of their work, many believe, that Tsikhanouskaya won the election.

Hundreds of thousands attended Tsikhanouskaya’s campaign rallies across Belarus, amassing huge support. But for Galina Dzesiatava, project manager at the NGO Gender Perspectives, there was also disappointment. Dzesiatava attended the rally in Homel, in southeastern Belarus, where Tsikhanouskaya expressed her desire to be “back in the kitchen frying cutlets.” Another moment that stung for Dzesiatava was when Tsikhanouskaya said “I do not have a program for changing Belarus,” adding “the men…have it.” deferring to the excluded male candidates. Dzesiatava said she “was devastated” upon hearing this. 

Irina Solomatina, the founder of the project Gender Route and the Head of the Council of the Belarusian Organisation of Working Women, noted the lack of a feminist agenda in the campaign. Solomatina said they “mentioned social problems exclusively in terms of care” (for husbands, children..). In their rhetoric, “there was no place for either feminist or gender agendas.” Women rights’ issues, such as domestic violence and labour discrimination, were not mentioned during the campaign.

The women’s protests

Katya* created the initial Telegram group ‘Girl Power’ on the evening of  August 11, following two nights of protests against the fraudulent election results, which police broke up with brutal violence. She could never have foreseen the impact of a group chat she said she originally made “for close friends and friends of their friends.” The initial plan was for a flashmob of women to meet at Komarovka market in Minsk the next day wearing white and holding flowers. Katya said “the goal [of the flashmob] was to transform the violent energy of protest into something safe and inspiring.” The chat, which began inviting people that evening, had more than 8,600 members by morning, “I couldn’t believe my eyes,” Katya said. By the afternoon, thousands of women were joining hands and lining the streets all over the country. Katya and her friends had to learn fast, “it was our first chat on Telegram. Me and my friends at first had no clue how to handle it, how to pin messages, change settings etc. We had to learn on the go.” Still in awe of the power behind the protests, Katya reveals that it began as “kind of a bet” saying “I promised my friend and sister that I [would] think of a safer way for us to protest.”

Katya also noted that at the time she encountered a backlash from some women who saw this form of protest — of wearing white and carrying flowers —as “revealing our weakness.” She received comments like “flowers? Don’t forget about candies for the torturers too.” Solomatina echoed this perspective, arguing that these female protests perpetuated patriarchal values and stereotypes, appealing to beauty and softness. But Solomatina also highlighted the argument that it would have been a sin “not to take advantage of the patriarchal way of life.” The idea to play on gender stereotypes and roles was central to the performance of a Belarusian lullaby as part of the protests, where women stood barefoot dressed in white holding flowers. They altered the lyrics of the lullaby, calling upon those near them to open their eyes—instead of closing them. Dzesiatava said that in these protests, the women were successfully “playing the patriarchal system against the patriarchal system.”

Leandra Bias, a Gender and Peacebuilding Advisor at Swisspeace, said that foreign feminists observing from the outside sometimes “think they know which female tropes and roles are the most emancipating” but that actually “we know nothing about the lived reality of Belarusian women.” Bias added that “when it comes to women protesting, they are the ones who know best how to navigate their daily lives, they know what is going to be effective.” 

The Fem Group

One aspect of the movement with a clear feminist agenda is the Fem Group, a working group of the Coordination Council for the Transfer of Power, founded by Tsikhanouskaya. The Fem Group was created to ensure that women are involved in all the transformation processes that would follow regime change. Their work includes increasing the visibility of women’s political participation, documenting state violence against women and raising awareness of state violence against men. The group are currently conducting an anonymous study on the needs of Belarusian women and the tools required to support them.

While Lukashenka labelled Tsikhanouskaya a “poor thing” during the election campaign, he now appears to have woken up to the political force women possess. The women’s marches, initially left alone by the regime, were soon subject to a cruel crackdown. Russia put out an arrest warrant for Tsikhanouskaya, who is now in exile in neighboring Lithuania, while Kalesnikava is in prison after tearing up her passport at the border to prevent police from expelling her from the country. Prominent Belarusian feminists Olga Shparaga, Yulia Mitskevich and Svetlana Gatalskaya have all recently spent time in prison. While under arrest Shparaga conducted tutorials on feminism for fellow prisoners from her prison cell.

Belarusian feminism

“Feminism” is still largely a taboo word in Belarus. Few women openly identify as a feminist, and there are many women currently marching each weekend who would balk at the label. A survey carried out back in 2012 which analysed attitudes towards feminism found that just four percent of women considered themselves feminists and more than half of the men surveyed said that they would treat such women with disgust. In 2016, fewer than one percent of Belarusian NGOs advanced women’s rights, and fewer still identified themselves as feminist. 

Yuliya* is an activist from Minsk who has been organizing peaceful evening gatherings; when asked how she perceives feminism she replied: “I can’t say I’m fully aware of what ‘feminism’ really means.” Katya*, the founder of Girl Power, said she identifies as a “humanist more than a feminist.”

This may change. One of the potential impacts of the current women-led protest movement is an acceptance of the term ‘feminist’ in Belarus. Kalesnikava, who openly identifies as a feminist, says that Lukashenka “accidentally did more for the development of feminism in Belarus than anyone else,” adding that “feminism will stop being a dirty word.” 

Nonetheless, feminism is advancing in Belarus. In 2019 there were more than 470 educational activities associated with women’s rights—workshops, lectures, and roundtables—and more than 2,500 consultations in legal, psychological and business support. Events in the gender sphere attracted over 5,000 participants. Some of the female-led initiatives in Belarus include: March on Baby, which aims to introduce a domestic violence law; Wen-do, which conducts self-defense training for women; and Her Rights, which strengthens women’s awareness of their rights. Gender Digest stresses however, that this work that promotes gender equality is often invisible to a wider audience.

Long-term impact

Renewed awareness of domestic violence is another source of hope. The widely publicized violence of OMON, the paramilitary security forces, repulsed many, but Dzesiatava explained that “OMON are actually the fabric of Belarusian society — this level of violence has always been visible for feminists and it is now visible to everyone.” The overt violence seen today was being committed before, but behind closed doors. Now that the violence is out in the open it will be harder to ignore; the hope is that this will inspire a national conversation about domestic violence. Dzesiatava draws parallels between an abusive domestic relationship and that of the regime and the Belarusian people. Bias noted the same thing, adding that “the most dangerous moment for someone in an abusive relationship is when they decide to leave”—just as Belarusians want to leave Lukashenka. 

The August election and subsequent protests have seen both classic femininity and feminism being used and inverted. Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya has become a feminist icon around the world, but she never intended for that to be. Belarusian feminism still faces many barriers, including the use of patriarchal tropes by both women and men. Yet Belarusian women are defining a feminism of their own, one that fits their lived reality, and it may well be that regime change will enable a redefining of the women’s agenda, offering up space for new opportunities. The recent women-led uprising may not necessarily be called ‘feminist’ but, as Galina Dzesiatava makes clear, they have been dubbed the ‘Revolution of Dignity,’ and dignity is a basic tenet of feminism.
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    [post_excerpt] => One of the potential impacts of the current women-led protest movement is an acceptance of the term ‘feminist’ in Belarus.
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The Belarusian protests: feminized, but feminist?

by Alexandra St John Murphy

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    [post_content] => Women are seeing their basic rights rolled back in the era of rising authoritarianism exacerbated by the global pandemic.

For the past several decades, the world maintained a shallow consensus, propped up by international human rights law, that women and girl's rights matter, that it was important to educate them, protect them from violence, and give them the means and opportunities to make a living outside the home.

Although global mainstream discourse and rhetoric around women was nominally positive, even liberatory, women and girl's material realities still suffered. Among the 1.5 billion people living on one dollar or less a day, the majority are women and children, a phenomenon the sociologist Diana Pierce calls the feminization of poverty. Women and girls make up 70 percent of trafficking victims, according to a 2016 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime report. As the #MeToo movement has shown, even in allegedly egalitarian countries, women and girls still commonly experience sexual assault and discrimination. Just this morning, Amy Dorris accused Donald Trump of sexually assaulting her, making her the 26th woman to level allegations against him.

Women and girls are perpetually gaslit about the glaring disconnect between the dignity they are told they possess from birth, and its continuous violation. Far too many women and girls aren't afforded basic rights to begin with. Is it any wonder that a new wave of grassroots, intersectional feminism is growing all over the world, particularly among younger generations of women who broadcast and amplify their activism on social media. The Chilean protest song, Un Violador en tu Camino, A Rapist in Your Path, became a viral feminist anthem against rape culture and personal, state, and institutional complicity.  

Now amidst the global COVID-19 pandemic, women are bearing the brunt of the impact. They are losing their jobs at a rate disproportionate to that of men; globally, domestic violence has risen to crisis levels, even as women are forced to shoulder the burden and stress of caregiving and child rearing. Now, with so many school districts having opted to go online, women have had to take on homeschooling as well. 

Many states have overtly regressed on women's rights.  This week major U.S. media outlets published shocking allegations of mass hysterectomies having been performed without informed consent on detained migrant women in a privately run ICE concentration camp in Georgia. The allegations emerged after Dawn Wooten, a nurse at the camp, filed a whistleblower complaint. As one detainee said, "I thought this was like an experimental concentration camp. It was like they’re experimenting with our bodies." Reports of women being raped in the camps are widespread and ongoing. In a federal lawsuit filed in May 2020, a Mexican woman said she was sexually assaulted and impregnated at an immigrant detention facility in Houston hours before she was deported to Mexico.

Last year, the Department of Justice's Office on Violence Against Women narrowed its definition of domestic violence to felonies or misdemeanors, in a move similar to Russia's decriminalization of most non-lethal forms of domestic violence in 2017. In recent months Turkey and Poland have been threatening to leave the Istanbul Convention, an international treaty on domestic violence. 

We're in an era of chest-thumping authoritarians, (Trump, Duterte, Modi, Xi, Putin, Erdogan, Bolsonaro, Netanyahu, MBS, Kim Jong-Un) who, despite their diverse religions, ideologies, and geopolitical backgrounds, are universally patriarchal. Women's subordination is a given, and deviations are punishable with cruelty. Fundamentalist religions, men's rights movements, and incels have fueled misogynist terror and aggrieved men's reactionary backlash against women's empowerment. Their growing political success is costing women their lives. 

Misogyny is key to understanding the male entitlement powering the global trend away from feminine-coded social democracy and toward toxic masculine authoritarianism. 

I use the definitions of feminist philosopher Kate Manne, who, in her books Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny and Entitled, makes an important distinction between sexism and misogyny. Sexism, she writes, is the "theoretical and ideological branch of patriarchy: the beliefs, ideas, and assumptions that serve to rationalize and naturalize patriarchal norms and expectations—including a gendered division of labor, and men’s dominance over women in areas of traditionally male power and authority." 

Misogyny, she says, "should not be understood as a monolithic, deep-seated psychological hatred of girls and women. Instead, it’s best conceptualized as the “law enforcement” branch of patriarchy—a system that functions to police and enforce gendered norms and expectations, and involves girls and women facing disproportionately or distinctively hostile treatment because of their gender, among other factors."

The focus is thus flipped from perpetrator to victim. Rather than concern ourselves with men's intentions, which are easily denied and impossible to prove, misogyny is the hostile treatment women and girls experience when they step outside gender roles or are perceived to. 

Separating sexism from misogyny is necessary to understanding the current attacks on women's rights. As Manne noted in a recent  interview with Isaac Chotiner for The New Yorker, "There is this somewhat new phenomenon of men who believe women are perfectly competent and will take advantage of their talents, but who will smack them down if they try to assert their authority over a patriarchal figure." 

Misogynists who happily exploit women's talents while still maintaining patriarchal order are everywhere. Look at Trump and Ivanka, or Erdogan and his daughter, Sümeyye Erdoğan Bayraktar. Their idea of women's rights is a bouquet of flowers, a refrigerator, and a demand to have more babies, but only if you're of their preferred ethnic or religious group. 

At the same time, women, once empowered, never forget what power and respect look and feel like. Absent sexism, misogyny grates more harshly, and brutish patriarchal power plays become more transparent. Women are organizing locally and sharing their struggles online. They're speaking out like never before, whether it's the women who brought down Harvey Weinstein, or the Turkish feminists sharing black and white photos on Instagram. 

What exactly is being rolled back, and how do we fight it? 

For decades, women have been fighting for recognition and protections in international laws. 

The first major international treaty on women's rights, the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) was adopted in 1979. In 1995, Hillary Clinton famously said, "women's rights are human rights, and human rights are women's rights" to the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, China. In 2014, education activist Malala Yousafzai became the youngest person to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, after the Taliban shot her in the head as punishment for advocating the right to education for Pakistani girls.

In 2012, the Council of Europe passed a groundbreakingly progressive treaty on gender violence, the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence, commonly known as the Istanbul Convention. 

The Istanbul Convention was held in response to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) 2009 ruling in Opuz v Turkey, which found that Turkish authorities failed to protect Nahide Opuz from her ex-husband's years-long abuse, even after he stabbed her repeatedly and murdered her mother. Turkey hosted the convention, and became the first country to sign and ratify the treaty on March 12, 2012. Since then, 45 countries and the EU have signed. 

Two sections of the treaty stand out:

    
 	
  • Article 12.1 of the Istanbul Convention says, "Parties shall take the necessary measures to promote changes in the social and cultural patterns of behaviour of women and men with a view to eradicating prejudices, customs, traditions and all other practices which are based on the idea of the inferiority of women or on stereotyped roles for women and men." 

      
 	
    • This article commits parties to undoing patriarchy in their respective cultural traditions, social norms, and interpersonal behaviors, which the treaty identifies as the root cause of domestic violence. 
      • 

    

    • 
 	
  • Article 12.5 says, "Parties shall ensure that culture, custom, religion, tradition or so-called “honour” shall not be considered as justification for any acts of violence covered by the scope of this Convention."
    • 


Another direct shot at patriarchy and organized religion. At the root of toxic male entitlement is the idea that male honor is more valuable than a woman's life. Look at Trump directing Bill Barr's Department of Justice to take over the defamation case brought by columnist E. Jean Carroll, who alleges that the President sexually assaulted her and then called her a liar.  

It is these attacks on patriarchy that have triggered the misogynists. Turkish feminist Feride Eralp, who recently was interviewed for The Conversationalist about the anti-femicide protests in her country, calls this the anti-gender movement. 

Erdogan’s government, said Eralp, had established a pattern of announcing extremely controversial policies regarding women's freedoms and equality in order to “gauge public reaction.” If the reaction is overwhelmingly negative, the government postpones until public memory fades, only to re-introduce it. “It's an incredibly frustrating government tactic, because it [makes it] impossible to achieve lasting gains." 

In 2016, for example, the government tried to pass a law that would give amnesty to male sex offenders if they agreed to marry their underage female victims. Widespread public outrage led to the tabling of the legislation, but the government continues periodically to reintroduce it with slight changes. "It's the same with the Istanbul Convention," Eralp said. 

Turkish women have been protesting rising rates of femicide for well over a decade, demanding that the government  implement the Istanbul Convention—and that it enforce the law that specifically protects women from domestic violence. Recently, Polish and Turkish women protested in solidarity with one another against their respective governments, and the ultra-conservative Catholics and Islamists who are lobbying to preserve "traditional family structures," aka free labor, at the expense of women's lives. 

Eralp argues, however, that unlike grassroots women's movements, the Turkish men importing these new formulations aren't seeking solidarity with other men, but rather want to adopt effective tactics to keep women in their place. This is a cynical move by ultraconservative men who are taking advantage of Erdoğan's weakening political position to backtrack on women's rights, she argued. Turkish ultra-conservatives have adopted "pro-family" anti-LGBTQ tactics from their Catholic neighbors that Americans will be familiar with: white Evangelicals have long stoked moral panic among conservatives about feminists, single mothers, abortion, and gay and trans rights.

Gains for women in America are being erased in law, too. Decades of legal advocacy efforts brought about a series of legal breakthroughs in recognizing domestic violence as a basis for protection in asylum law in the United States, only to have them dashed in 2018 by Jeff Sessions. Betsy DeVos's Department of Education's new rule undoing protections for campus assault victims under Title IX went into effect last month, to the delight of men's rights groups. 

Abortion rights are perpetually under attack, as conservatives gain seats in federal courts, and acts of misogynist terror, whether its intimate partner violence or mass shootings, are increasingly common. Anti-semitic QANON supporters are obsessed with human trafficking conspiracies, while the President is trafficking thousands of children across the border in front of our eyes.

The picture is bleak, and the struggle will be hard. But as we have reported—and will continue to report, here at The Conversationalist—women everywhere are strengthening their own sense of entitlement - their right to life, to bodily autonomy, to political opinions -- to being a full human being independent of men. Women and their allies are motivated, organized, and pushing back in new, creative ways at the grassroots and institutional level. 
    [post_title] => Revenge of the patriarchs
    [post_excerpt] => "There is this somewhat new phenomenon of men who believe women are perfectly competent and will take advantage of their talents, but who will smack them down if they try to assert their authority over a patriarchal figure."  — Kate Manne
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Revenge of the patriarchs

by Anna Lind-Guzik

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    [post_content] => Even as femicide rates rise, conservatives in the ruling party want to roll back legislation designed to protect women.

For the last five years Turkish feminist movements have faced one backlash after another and are perpetually braced for the next one. “There is always this… feeling of insecurity, uncertainty, and inability to see the future,” activist Feride Eralp told The Conversationalist. “Your most basic rights are constantly under threat.”

Eralp has been advocating for women’s rights since she was 15; her mother was active in the founding women’s movements in the 1980’s. In recent weeks, thousands of women have been demonstrating on the streets of Istanbul, Ankara, and 35 additional cities across Turkey to demand their civil rights and to protest a shocking rise in rates of femicide.

The catalyst for this latest round of protests occurred in July, when police found the mutilated corpse of Pınar Gültekin, a 27 year-old student, in a rural area of southwestern Turkey. They arrested her ex-boyfriend, Cemal Metin Avci, who confessed to having beaten and strangled Gültekin, before burning her body and stuffing it into a barrel, which he buried in the woods. The horrific incident was heavily covered by Turkish media, eliciting widespread revulsion; the murder became a rallying cry for feminist groups, which had already been protesting for months the failure of government authorities to protect women from domestic violence and femicide.

The government’s obligation to protect women is enshrined in the Istanbul Convention, a groundbreaking human rights treaty against domestic violence that is aimed at preventing violence against women. It is formally called the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence. Turkey was the first country to ratify the treaty, signed on March 12, 2012. Since then, 45 countries and the EU have signed. No country has ever withdrawn from it.

Recently, President Erdoğan's Justice and Development Party (AKP) suggested they would withdraw Turkey from the treaty.

The impetus for the Istanbul Convention was the 2009 decision of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Opuz v Turkey, which found that Turkish authorities failed to protect Nahide Opuz from her violently abusive ex-husband, even after he stabbed her repeatedly and murdered her mother.

So far this year, 285 women have been murdered in Turkey. That’s more than one woman murdered per day, the majority at the hands of their estranged spouses.

Despite these numbers, lobbying groups for political Islamists, composed mostly of conservative men, have been pressuring the government to withdraw from the Convention on the basis that it undermines ‘family structure.’ In fact, the Istanbul Convention truly aims to protect the most vulnerable members of the family from domestic violence.

Preservation of the traditional family structure has long been a foundation of values instilled by the Turkish ruling party, explained Sinem Adar, an Associate at the Center for Applied Turkey Studies in the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. “I think the current government definitely has a very particular, rigid understanding of the family,” Adar told The Conversationalist.

Erdoğan has said numerous times throughout the years that women should have at least three children. The President has also referred to women who do not wish to have children as “unnatural” and “incomplete.” The deputy chair of AKP, Numan Kurtulmus, once described single women as “hedonistic,” and asserted that they put “dynamite in the foundations of the family.”

When Erdoğan, who was then prime minister rather than president, made his 2013 statement about woman having to bear three children, he played into this capitalistic driver of women’s oppression. As Eralp said, the family becomes a unit to keep women producing labor, inside and outside the home. Turkey does not have a strong social welfare system and it is on the brink of a financial crisis; under these circumstances, women become primary caregivers for children and the elderly. “With an economic crisis of this degree, you don’t want to lose free labor,” Eralp explained. As Erdoğan said in his speech: “One or two children mean bankruptcy. Three children mean we are not improving but not receding either. So, I repeat, at least three children are necessary in each family, because our population risks aging."

Turkish society invests the family with tremendous value and importance; the average Turkish citizen is inculcated from childhood with a strong sense of responsibility for relatives. But when the issue of gender is contextualized within the family, individual rights are undermined. “It’s almost like not seeing the woman as an individual but seeing them as part of a family,” Adar said. In other words, a woman’s safety, security and freedoms cannot be seen as intrinsic, but instead debatable within traditional family structures.

The government’s rhetoric and policy can be seen as systematic pressure to suppress individual liberties when it comes to family, sex, gender relations; they leave very little space for women to seek change. “It’s like making the voice of the women who need the help the most, less and less heard, because again everyone is packaged in the context of the family,” Adar said. “If they decide to abolish [the Istanbul Convention], it would definitely have an influence on individual liberties.”

Canan Güllüm, the president of the Federation of Women's Associations in Turkey, said during a phone interview that the Islamist lobbying groups have long advocated for the “protection of the holy family.” She agreed that this contributed to a culture that threatened women’s safety and freedom. “Family, where the violence is reproduced as it is happening now in the society, is not a safe place for women,” Güllü said.

The composition of the protests belies conservative claims that Turkish feminists are primarily secular. Practicing Muslim women wearing the traditional headscarf are as visible at demonstrations as their secular sisters; they are all willing to hold picket signs reading “We don’t want to die!”; the phrase recalls the last words of Emine Bulut, whose husband stabbed her to death last year in a café—in front of her 10-year-old daughter. Women who represent a broad swathe of political and religious views have come together in these protests to advocate for their right to life. As Güllü pointed out, they “do not feel comfortable in today's patriarchal and unequal family structure where their rights are not protected.”

Whether they are religious or secular, there is only one set of laws, and one path of recourse for all people in the country. “Women are aware of these rights and they’re not willing to give them up for any ideological or political reasons,” Eralp said. “I can’t imagine a woman who would push that away under her own free will.”

The debate around the Istanbul Convention in Turkey has also divided the ruling AKP’s base. Erdoğan’s own daughter, Sümeyye Erdoğan Bayraktar has come out in support of the Convention. Bayraktar is the deputy chair of the Women and Democracy Association (KADEM), which is conservative on issues such as LGBT rights; it advocates for ‘woman’s human dignity’ and is often engaged in lobbying the government.

There is something religiously conservative in the family value model the government is trying to “preserve,” but it isn’t predicated on a secular vs religious binary. A more accurate analysis would emphasize the ongoing inequality between men and women, and how the impunity and lack of justice demonstrated in Turkey promotes it. In recent years, a more moralistic, conservative discourse has become salient in the public realm. At the same time, there has been an increasing intensity of violence by the state and break down of the justice system in order to consolidate power.  As Adar put it; “it has to do with the institutional deterioration [and] the deterioration of the primary rule of law.” To a certain extent, the increase in violence now prominent in the public eye, reflects the socio economic situation of the country.

The rate of femicide has more than doubled in Turkey since the signing of the Istanbul Convention, which means that its legal and protective measures are not being implemented. Rarely is there justice for women who are murdered or abused, particularly if the perpetrators are well connected. For Turkish women, their rights, as Eralp observed, are transactional.

Güllü added that while the framework to protect women and promote equality is already in place, it hasn’t been prioritized. The government, she believes, has not upheld the values of civil and gender equality in the last 20 years.

The rhetoric employed by Erdogan’s conservative government further conveys to the public an implicit understanding that this type of discourse and behavior is acceptable; this acts as a legitimizing power. In general, there is an acceptance and understanding of men’s motives to commit violence towards women, which ends up being passed from one generation to the next. Amnesty International went so far as to say in an August statement on the rise of femicides that “even the discussion of a possible withdrawal [from the Convention] is having a huge adverse impact on the safety of women and girls.”

At the same time, women in Turkey are clearly going through a period of consciousness raising and are becoming much more politically assertive. But unless the value of gender equality is internalized throughout all levels of government and civil society, the task of protecting individual rights in Turkey will continue to be challenging. What’s needed is a widespread understanding that no one “deserves” to be subjected to violence.

Turkey’s feminist activists are hopeful, given the increasing numbers of women coming out to protest and stand up for their rights. “The women's movement in Turkey is very strong and consolidated, and we will not give up fighting,” Güllü said, emphatically.

 
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“We don’t want to die!” Turkish women demand government action to end femicide

by Tessa Fox

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    [post_content] => A secret language, Láadan, allows women to express feelings and experiences for which English, with its male-centric deficiency of words, phrases and grammar, does not possess.

In May of 2017, while many were still reeling from shock at the spectacle of Donald Trump as president of the United States, the New York Review of Books published an article by Masha Gessen called “The Autocrat’s Language.” Gessen, a non-binary person who uses gender-neutral pronouns, was rapidly taking their place as a Trump explainer, drawing upon years of covering the Putin presidency in their native Russia to position themself as an expert in contemporary authoritarianism. In their piece for the NYRB, Gessen explained that because autocrats distorted the meaning of words by using them to lie, journalists were forced to use an impoverished vocabulary in order to report the truth.  Suzette Haden Elgin, a linguist and novelist, uses a variation on this scenario to inform her 1984 science fiction novel, Native Tongue; it is set in a patriarchal future United States of 2205, a place where the nineteenth amendment was repealed in 1991, stripping women of their rights. To combat male dominance, a group of female linguists invent a language of their own. Today the question posed by Native Tongue seems especially relevant to Gessen’s warning about language manipulation: is it possible to restructure language to re-alter our reality?

A particularly prescient science fiction book can offer an eerie prediction of current events years before they happen. Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel A Handmaid’s Tale  describes a dystopia in which women’s civil rights had been rescinded; they could not vote or control their own procreation. Adapted for television in 2018, the steep erosion of rights didn’t seem so far-fetched in the Trump era. The dramatic series reflected the emerging reality that resulted from what Gessen describes as Trump’s ability to invert phrases and words dealing with power relationships into their exact opposite, thus doing “violence to language.”

This violence was strongly exemplified in Trump's July 3rd speech, given in the context of the recent protests demanding that Black lives matter as well as the Covid-19 crisis. In an attempt to discredit those calling for change, Trump spoke of a “new far-left fascism.” He argued that, “If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted and punished.” In twisting these words to speak of discrimination against those in power rather than those who are oppressed, terms such as “fascism,” “censor,” “banish,” “blacklist,” “persecution” and “punishment” are stripped of their original meaning and begin to become hollow.

Native Tongue, the first of a three-book series, envisions repairing this damage to language. In Elgin imagined United States of 2205, women effectively belong to men. They are not allowed to own their own property, or to work outside the home without permission from a male relative. Because interplanetary exchange and colonization are crucial for the United States, linguists play a central role in society as interpreters for extra-terrestrial negotiations. Due to the strong demand for translation, linguistic “lines,” or dynasties, have evolved; each child of the lines is trained in at least one alien language and in multiple human languages. Native Tongue follows a group of linguist women whose secret language, Láadan, allows them to express feelings and experiences for which English, with its male-centric deficiency of words, phrases and grammar, does not possess.

Artificial, or constructed and imaginary, languages (conlang) are spoken in popular television series like Star Trek (Klingon) and Game of Thrones (Dothraki and Valyrian). They are also seen in a wide array of speculative fiction by authors like Francis Godwin and Thomas More. Artificial languages have been used in fiction to explore imaginary voyages and worlds, but in a 2007 interview Hadan Elgin described Láadan as a “thought experiment” with directives for women’s change within society. Elgin, who had a PhD in linguistics, was a writer and poet best known for a series called The Gentle Art of Verbal Defense. She also subscribed to the controversial Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which she described in her book Language Imperative as the idea that languages “structure and constrain human perceptions of reality in significant and interesting ways”.

Accordingly, speakers of different languages see the world in very divergent ways: how one perceives the world is based both on linguistic structures in chosen words and their corresponding broader metaphors. For example, binaries such as male/female are often paired with other associations, such as strong/weak or active/passive. Elgin believed that English is dominated by male perception; that its lack of a vocabulary for women to discuss their feelings and experiences directly structures societal inequality. She argued that this configuration is upheld by societal metaphors, such as “women are objects,” reflected in cultural production ranging from fashion magazines to sitcoms. These structures, she posited, must be directly challenged by language itself. “By the technology of language– we insert new metaphors into our culture to replace the old ones, just as we have done in turning ‘war’ into ‘defense’. You don't use guns, or laws, to insert new metaphors into a culture. The only tool available for metaphor-insertion is LANGUAGE.”

Native Tongue provides a fictional blueprint for how these metaphors can change lived reality. While it takes several lifetimes and one more book in the Native Tongue trilogy, the linguist women eventually finish Láadan; they spread it secretly among themselves and then to some of the wider female population. Once enough linguist women have learned Láadan, the male linguists notice a startling change: their spouses, daughters and relatives have stopped complaining. Frustrated by the lack of nagging, which they realize had spurred them to respond, react and experience a sort of catharsis, the men eventually build separate houses for the linguist women. Left to their own devices, the women are freer to live, interact and express themselves, thus reveling in the real change produced by Láadan.

Láadan attempts to enable this freer expression through modifications to both the structure and intent of the language. Much of Native Tongue is occupied with “encodings”, new words for previously unexpressed experiences. The book includes part of a Láadan dictionary, available entirely online, which contains many words that feel very contemporary:

    
 	
  • ralorolo: non-thunder, much talk and commotion from one (or more) with no real knowledge of what they’re talking about or trying to do, something like “hot air” but more so
    • 
 	
  • rashida: non-game, a cruel “playing” that is a game only for the dominant “players” with the power to force others to participate
    • 
 	
  • rathom: non-gestalt, a collection of parts with no relationship other than coincidence, a perverse choice of items to call a set; especially when used as “evidence”
    • 


While these definitions do fit uncannily well with the present political climate, some of the concepts of Láadan and Native Tongue feel outdated. The stark divisions between gender, for example, fit more with 1980s second-wave feminism in which gender essentialism was a big discussion. There’s also the glaring idea that all women are dominated by all men, which fails to take into account configurations of race, class, ability and non-binary gender identities. The questions posed by Native Tongue feel more relevant to our contemporary situation when  “male domination” is replaced with “patriarchy,” which is defined as an unjust social, political and economic system harmful to all who do not hold power within it. In this line of thought, “women’s language” could be replaced with “intersectional feminist language”—i.e., a language that expresses the views of those who, for a variety of factors, experience discrimination and oppression.

Elgin wrote the Native Tongue trilogy with a ten-year timeline, aiming for Láadan to be adopted by 1994, but this never happened. While scholars such as Ruth Menzies point to the difficulty of learning a detailed new language, it is tempting to agree with Elgin, who argued that Láadan failed because women were reluctant to speak a language that forced them to parse their feelings so thoroughly. One additional detail about Láadan is that its structure makes the speaker state the emotion and intent behind everything they say. Necessary speech act morphemes, such as bíi (“I say to you, as a statement”), bóo (“I request”) and bée (“I say in warning”) are paired with suffixes, such as -li (“said in love”), -ya (“said in fear”) and -d (“said in anger”). Thus, in every sentence, the Láadan speaker must clarify their position with words such as:

    
 	
  • bíili: “in love, I say as a statement…” (bíi + li)
    • 
 	
  • bóoya: “in fear, I request…” (bóo + ya)
    • 
 	
  • béed: “in anger, I say in warning…” (bée + d)
    • 


The type of emotional involvement in constantly analyzing one’s position, intention and feelings seems completely at odds with how English is spoken by those given the most attention, time and money to speak it. Imagine a society in which every politician, but also every citizen, must state their feelings of love, fear or paranoia in every sentence and choose from numerous words for comfort, community and wrongdoing.

In her epigraph to chapter thirteen of Native Tongue, Elgin writes that, “For any language, there are perceptions which it cannot express because they would result in its indirect self-destruction.” Perhaps, as Gessen has warned, this implosion is in the not too distant future, in which the damage done by this era of American politics will leave us with few words that still hold meaning. Native Tongue provides a glimpse of how linguistic repair could be not just a tool to alter reality, but to mold it anew.
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In her 1984 science fiction novel ‘Native Tongue,’ linguist Suzette Haden Elgin created a feminist language from scratch

by Rachel Pafe

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Despite their liberal manifestos, the Labour Party and the Democrats continue to choose men as their leaders


It wasn’t meant to be like this. This time it would be different; Britain’s Labour party was going to elect its new leader, and this time it would be a woman. They didn’t really seem to have a choice: Labour turns 120 this year, but not once had a woman managed to poll higher than a man in a leadership contest.


On top of that, the original field of candidates looked promising. There were four women— and one solitary man. Two women dropped out early but that still left twice as many women as men in the running.


In the end, none of that mattered. The results of the Labour Party leadership election will be announced next week and, unless there is a major upset, Keir Starmer, the lone male candidate, will be elected leader by a landslide.


It wasn’t meant to be like this. The Democratic candidate was going to be Kamala Harris — or was it going to be Elizabeth Warren? No, it was going to be Bernie Sanders. One thing was certain: it was not going to be Joe Biden.


Biden was polling high but his campaign was poor and he was nowhere to be seen; he was more of the same when the consensus seemed to be that the Democrats needed anything but that. Still, he went on and slowly but surely, until everyone but Bernie dropped out. Now Biden is almost certainly going to be the candidate for president who will face off against incumbent Donald Trump in November.


It wasn’t meant to be like this. Both contests had already been going on for weeks — months! — and were starting to near fever pitch, but the pandemic hit. We know for certain that the Labour party’s leadership race will end with a whimper as everyone remains focused on the coronavirus.


The Democratic convention, meanwhile, feels like it belongs to a distant future: who even knows what our world will look like in July? But this doesn’t mean either race should go unrecorded; there are lessons that will need to be learnt, once we have the time (and mental space) to do so.


Let’s look at what happened in Britain, where the Labour party has now been headed by Jeremy Corbyn for four and a half tumultuous years. He seemed to emerge from nowhere in 2015; with politics well to the left of the party’s mainstream, the 70-year-old lawmaker had for decades been a backbencher with obscure pet issues.


With Corbyn as its leader, the Labour party was in near constant revolt. Factional infighting reached its peak in the summer of 2016, when an attempt to oust him failed.


While his fellow MPs had a famously acrimonious relationship with Corbyn, he saw his popularity with the Labour membership spike and grow exponentially in the first few years. Sadly for him, it didn’t translate into success in the polls; sadly for then-Prime Minister Theresa May, Corbyn’s apparent weakness pushed her to call an election in 2017, which turned into one of the worst campaigns in memory, and resulted in Labour making some unexpected gains.


Buoyed, the left wing of the Labour party claimed victory over its centrist counterparts — whose policies, they insisted, had lost the party the 2010 and 2015 elections — but the triumphalism was relatively short-lived.


After May came Boris, and when Johnson called an election last year, it ended with Labour’s worst electoral results since 1935. The shock came and went, and then came the gloating, this time from the moderates. After warning for four years that the hard left would bring disaster, they felt vindicated.


Corbyn’s faction, on the other hand, claimed that the election had been solely focussed on Brexit, and that the loss could be attributed to the Conservatives’ straightforward Leave message, as opposed to their own muddled position of a second referendum.


Then the leadership contest started, with Rebecca Long-Bailey, Lisa Nandy and Keir Starmer emerged as the three main candidates.


Most people believed that Long-Bailey would win; she always was a close ally of Jeremy Corbyn’s and the membership presumably still loved Corbyn, so it should have been a done deal.


[caption id="attachment_1688" align="alignnone" width="799"] Rebecca Long-Bailey at a Manchester Labour Party event on November 7. 2019.[/caption]


It wasn’t. Stuck in the former leader’s shadow, Long-Bailey struggled to make a case for herself. Yes, she was of the left, no, she wasn’t “continuity Corbyn: yes, she was asked to rate his leadership on television and gave him “10/10”; no, she couldn’t really explain what policies of hers would be a departure from the past few years.


She’s also, well, a bit middle of the road. Brought up in Manchester, she studied politics and sociology at university, and eventually became a solicitor in 2007. She joined the Labour party in 2010, was elected to a safe seat in 2015, and joined the frontbench after Corbyn’s victory, though never quite made waves.


As the party’s spokesperson for business, she pushed on establishing a Green New Deal, but the policy got a bit lost in the discourse; in fact, everything she did in those five years always failed to really land. That she was seen as the given pro-Corbyn candidate was telling.


Many observers have pointed to the similarities between Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, both socialists roughly the same age who tend to have acrimonious relationships with their fellow legislators. But while Sanders has loyalists like 30 year-0ld Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez poised to pick up his torch, Corbyn has left no such legacy. Under Corbynism, no successor was allowed to grow and bloom—and here we are.


Lisa Nandy had the opposite problem. Unlike Long-Bailey, she is not stuck with the Corbynite label. Nandy is a woman of no faction.


[caption id="attachment_1689" align="alignnone" width="799"] Lisa Nandy on September 23, 2018.[/caption]


The daughter of Indian Marxist academic Dipak Nandy and granddaughter of Liberal Party MP then peer Frank Byers, she has been in Parliament since 2010 — a term longer than her two opponents. Despite her pedigree, she has always been a bit of an outsider; often hovering near the frontbench but never fully a frontline politician.


There is a drum she has been banging, often alone, and it is: English towns that used to be safe Labour strongholds are leaving us in droves because we have stopped listening to them, and the party must reconnect with its northern working class base if it wants to survive.


She is absolutely right, of course, and did gain traction when she got to claim that she had been warning that the 2019 election results would be inevitable for a long time. When the party lost seats like Bolsover — held by socialist stalwart Dennis Skinner since 1970 — and Sedgefield, which was home for decades to a certain Tony Blair, people finally started to listen.


 Still, identifying a problem and finding a solution are two different things, and she never quite convinced her peers that she had succeeded with the latter.


Then there is our last candidate, who is simultaneously the most and least exciting figure in the race. On the one hand, he used to be the Director of Public Prosecutions and head of the Crown Prosecution Service, for which he was knighted, and is rumoured to be the man Helen Fielding based dreamy Mark Darcy in her 1996 novel Bridget Jones's Diary (later made into a hit film with Colin Firth in the role of Mark Darcy).


On the other, he is boring. Keir Starmer is not an exciting politician; he is a former barrister who measures his words, speaks with the cadence of an expert, and has always managed to keep out of his party’s factional warfare. His policy platform is a bit Corbynite but not entirely so; he appealed to the moderates in Labour but without appearing like one of them either.


In fact, he is currently all things to all people; he really could not be possibly accused of leaning into populism, and he is about to become the Labour party leader. Perhaps his very own brand of establishment dullness will be needed in five years’ time, when Britain’s voters have gone through a full term of Boris Johnson. Or perhaps desperate times call for desperate measures, and he simply is not up to the gargantuan task ahead of him.


In short: Labour is playing it safe. It could have taken a gamble by electing one of two 40-year-old women occupying northern seats, but is going instead with a 57-year-old man based down the road from the current leader’s inner London constituency. Starmer and Biden may be different, but the circumstances of their rise feel eerily similar.




Header image courtesy of Chris Boland.


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    [post_excerpt] => In their search for a leader who can beat the incumbent, both Labour in the UK and the Democrats in the USA chose white men who represent a status quo ante that already seems like ancient history.
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In the UK and the USA, the political left has rejected female leadership in 2020

by Marie Le Conte

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