QotD: “Man celebrates death of Women’s Studies Programs”
Over time, academics – Judith Butler, for one – got sloppy drunk on Deconstructionism and started applying the technique to other fields, like sociology, psychology, anthropology. (Scientists, you’ll note, have not jumped on the Deconstruction train because their discipline is, thankfully, rooted in that which can be verified by logic and reason.)
Queer Theory, which has hijacked every Women’s Studies program (as far as I’m aware) in the U.S., is nothing but Deconstructionist Literary Theory applied to human beings – the “science” of “because I say so.”
The other day, California Magazine, published a piece by a gay male academic/Deconstructionist who took some time to, not surprisingly, celebrate the eradication of Women’s Studies programs in favor of those that center around male needs, and to chastise mean ladies who question the assertion that their bodies, their lived realities are interchangeable with male bodies, and males’ lived realities. This man, not unlike so many of his contemporaries, has firmly embraced the notion that woman is a theory, is a text, is whatever men say it is.
One of the first things he does is celebrate that gender discussions in the academy no longer prioritize yucky issues like “male hegemony”:
Today’s hot zone of gender talk has moved militantly past the male/female binarism and its critique of male hegemony. The T in LGBTQ has now taken center stage. Its aim, largely speaking, is to explode the notion that any of us is exclusively masculine or feminine—culturally, neurologically, or biologically. Rather, we are all of us complex, shifting blends of “masculine” and “feminine” traits—depending upon how those traits are viewed across the passage of time.
And I mean, thank god, really that Women’s Studies has gotten away from women and from examining male hegemonic dominance. I mean, we’ve totally solved the problem of women’s subjugation and it’s high time we talk about new topics – like WHAT ABOUT MALES WHO FEEL LIKE LADIES?! What about PRONOUNS?! What about YOU HURT MY FEELS WHEN YOU CALLED ME ‘SIR’?! Queer theory in the university has allowed males to wrest women-centered academic discourse away from women’s lives, and position male feelings/ideology front and center into the discourse. Such wonderful progress!
The author then harkens back to the bad old days:
In Women’s Studies circles, the focus has been largely on women’s subordination to men in public policy and the workplace, not to mention rape and household abuse, with less attention given to either gay or lesbian concerns.
Gee, whiz. That really was fucking awful when Women’s Studies concerned itself with women’s subordination to men in “public policy” and the “workplace.” I mean, what a drag that those programs had to subject their students to discussions of rape and household abuse because WHAT ABOUT GAYS?
Here’s the thing, I minored in Women’s Studies in the early/mid 1990s. I took all manner of classes to fulfill my minor, and very few of them centered on lesbians. Fewer still on identity politics. Most of the issues we dealt with concerned women who lived with men/were heterosexual and had more dealings with men than I did or cared to. Most courses rested on the (correct) notion that women’s suffering, women’s subjugation came as the result of living in societies designed by and for males. Even though I was a dyke, I could accept that I lived in that world, too.
Women’s Studies wasn’t about “my special unique human identity” – it was about women and girls.
Gender, too, was a part of the Women’s Studies curriculum. Gender, the courses (rightly) argued, was a scaffolding built by men in order to oppress women. It was simple. It was easy to see. And never once, in my father’s flannel shirts, with my buzz cut (I was THAT Women’s Studies student), did I wave my hand wildly and say, “Uh, why are we not talking about women like me? I don’t present in a way that is typically affiliated with female gender stereotypes? What about meeeee?!”
1) I did not do this because I am female, and I don’t expect all things to center around me; and 2) even as a young woman, I knew that it was my upper-middle class, white girl privilege that allowed me to haunt the halls of my expensive liberal arts college as some kind of “gender renegade.” Shit, I even understood that my ability to sit in those classes reading Marilyn Frye was a privilege few are ever afforded.
I was fine with my Women’s Studies coursework prioritizing women, straight women, poor women, women of color – I didn’t need to always have my individual experience taken into account. I understood that analysis required some degree of generalization. I didn’t expect everything I learned to validate, or even acknowledge, my inherent specialness. (This is a problem in all areas of education today – learning must always “feel good.” If you wonder why America is getting dumber by the day, there’s one reason.)
Naturally, it doesn’t take the author of the California Magazine piece long to bring up radical feminists. Here, he’s discussing how female colleagues – nice women who wouldn’t dare call themselves radical feminists — sometimes question trans/queer politics:
Indeed, the radical feminist rhetoric of the sort articulated by Cathy Brennan and the leaders of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival mimics the same sentiment: We—the real women—don’t know and can’t trust what and who they are.
First of all “of the sort articulated by Cathy Brennan and the leaders of Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival” – uh, do these males know that Cathy Brennan and the “leaders” of MichFest aren’t the only women who question bullshit trans/queer rhetoric? Do they know that the number of women who believe females are more than “a feeling in a man’s head” is quite large? Or is this part of the trans/queer delusion, pretending that only, like, five women hold these beliefs? Anyway . . .
What he’s getting at here, is that women should not be able to acknowledge a difference between themselves and males who “feel like women.” Women should not be able to have space away from males who “feel like women.” Nor should women be able to question the politics of “trans/queer.”
Note that this writer, and not a one who holds his opinion, ever argues that gay men need to embrace or “work harder” to validate their gay transman brothers. Or that straight men need to “work harder” to be inclusive of transmen. Where is the concern for transmen’s feelings? Huh?
Oh, right, the trans/queer movement only cares about transmen insofar as they (females) validate the mythologies created by transwomen (males). Got it. (In fact, in this entire article, transmen are only acknowledged ONCE.)
This next line was a personal favorite:
One selling point of queer theory was that it sought to bring sexuality into the conversation alongside race, gender, and class.
Allow me, if you will, to engage in a little Deconstruction of my own with this brief moment in the author’s text:
“Selling point” – this is telling, and true. Queer theory is “sexy,” it’s a great academic commodity – much more so than icky, boring, snooze-inducing talk about women’s subjugation. I mean who wants to talk about misogyny and abuse and the glass ceiling when we could talk about sex! Who wants to sit in a lecture hall listening to some bitch drone on about “the objectification of women” when we could talk about porn and deliberate to what degree the penis is actually a male sex organ.
Also, what’s awesome about Queer Theory, is that it makes everything relative and challenges ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about – to quote the writer –“male hegemony.” Everyone’s happy! No one’s feelings are hurt! Men can participate without ever feeling left out! Awe-some! And by “awesome” I mean TOTALLY FUCKING DEPRESSING AND USELESS.
To build on this, the author mentions Billy Curtis, a transman who made sure that Gender Studies programs did not in any way suggest that women were most harmed by gender:
Billy Curtis was part of the effort to bring T front and center to campus awareness, largely following student demand. “Gender still meant women,” he told me.
Listen, gender never “meant women.” If anything, gender “means men.”
Even in the early 90s, before Women’s Studies was hijacked by dudes, we acknowledged that gender was a construct that impacted both males and females, but that males, unlike females, were the beneficiaries of the construct as gender existed to keep females subordinate to men. It’s not rocket science.
Part of acknowledging that gender is a construct is that you can then, if you’re in a privileged enough position, fuck with it. Men can wear lipstick. Women can cut their hair short. Who fucking cares, it’s all a ruse! Do what you like, and like what you do!
Gender is malleable, because it is a pretense. It doesn’t really exist, but as a social construct that is DESIGNED TO OPPRESS WOMEN. And not all women have the luxury of sitting in a classroom debating the classification of genitals or wondering what pronoun they would prefer. Not all women can sit around naval gazing about all their special gender preferences or sexual preferences because they’re busy, um, surviving. And yet, even when they don’t have the kind of privilege afforded to me, or to this writer, or to Judith Butler, women still suffer because of gender and the bullshit belief systems promoted by gender.
Gender is only “fun” to those of us fiscally stable enough, white enough, or male enough to sit around and fucking think about it.
For the vast majority of the world’s female population, gender is a pernicious, toxic, life-threatening construct that benefits men.
And, call me old fashioned, or naïve, but I always thought theory and praxis belonged together. Women’s Studies programs, while theory driven, I thought, were ultimately about providing women (and men, I guess) the intellectual tools needed to challenge oppressive constructs – like gender – in order to affect real change, in order better the lives of women and girls.
In what way does “Gender Studies”/”Queer Theory” improve the lives of women? This is, after all, the discipline that has come to replace Women’s Studies, but how does it attempt to improve the lives of women? How is it anything more than a useless intellectual endeavor that makes delusional males feel better about themselves, and convinces females that their lived reality is utterly theoretical, that their lives, their bodies, their experience is just another text to be annotated, dissected, and redefined by males?
And statements like this, from the author, only serve to solidify my conviction that trans/queer theory is useless for women:
Trans in all these forms is at once a way of being and a performance. Increasingly, however, trans aims to suggest that all of us, if we are able to acknowledge it, are to some degree trans*. We all are traveling through lives that are less and less defined by language, style, presentation, or physical and hormonal capacities.
“We are all of us traveling through lives that are less and less defined by language . . .” – the “we” in this assertion is “males.” Males who “feel like” women, have (owing to their male privilege) been with break-neck speed, changing language, and gaining access to medical products and procedures (say nothing of gaining access to women’s spaces) that will validate their special identities.
Women, actually, are still defined by language, style, presentation, physical and hormonal capacities.
I mean, it’s super awesome that we’ve arrived at a time in history when men can do whatever they want . . . oh, wait. Men have ALWAYS been able to do whatever they want. What I meant to say was it’s super awesome that women have made such amazing strides that we no longer get raped, trafficked, paid less than our male counterparts, harassed on the street, threatened for having perspectives that run counter to the perspectives of men, or called bigots for not wanting to sleep with males. It’s super awesome that women don’t have to fight for reproductive rights, and that we are so well represented in the political sphere, and that males no longer control language. Phew. So glad all that’s over and that we shut those stupid Women’s Studies programs DOWN.
And speaking of how women are no longer threatened for expressing ideas that aren’t lockstep in line with the male zeitgeist (oh, by the bye, just because a lot of women have bought this bullshit, it doesn’t mean it isn’t male-focused):
Indeed, one of the dark sides of the new social media is how it has allowed bigots of all sorts to express their angry resentment against anyone who threatens established convention—be they racial minorities, feminists, or gender dissenters.
Since the author spent a good deal of time wagging his finger at radical feminists, I’m guessing here he’s inferring that MEAN LADIES are resentful of those who threaten “established conventions.” The thing is, it doesn’t take too close of an examination to see that trans/queer theory is anything but against “established conventions.” Trans/queer theory is simply a way of getting women to shut the fuck up and move over for the boys. (It’s no coincidence that in the academy trans/queer theory doesn’t merely exist alongside women’s studies, it’s REPLACED that discipline.) Trans/queer theory offers reparative therapy for gay and lesbian youth (this has had a devastating effect particularly in lesbian communities). Trans/queer theory promotes the ancient notion that woman is whatever a man defines it as. (Hey, if this guy says penis is female, then it is! Case closed.) Trans/queer theory argues that women don’t “have it so bad” because men who feel like ladies get misgendered. Trans/queer theory equates males hurt feelings with rape and murder (“Radical feminists have blood on their hands” – because they hurt males feelings). Trans/queer theory worries over whether or not males are being considered ENOUGH. (We can’t have Women’s Studies, or women only colleges or festivals, because those things don’t take into account males who say they’re women.)
Ill-spirited as Cathy Brennan and her sister-feminists may be toward a group of people who have manifestly suffered nastier slings and arrows than they have, there exists nonetheless a legitimate question: Once you have struggled for transgender recognition as its own way of being, is it reasonable to claim simultaneous identity as a woman? Is it possible to be both?
“Ill-spirited” – C’mon, broads. Lighten up! Get with the program! Stop being so ILL-SPIRITED. But what really gets me here is “people who have manifestly suffered nastier slings and arrows” – um, excuse me? This is the product of Trans/Queer Theory thinking. I’m not going to play Oppression Olympics, I’m not going to throw out stats about women’s suffering, but I’m going to hazard that the centuries of inequity, injustice, and abuse women and girls have (and still do) suffer at the hands of males trumps the hurt feelings of some dude who really wanted the Starbucks barrista to call him “ma’am” instead of “sir.”
Sorry. I know that makes me ill-spirited. But this is what trans/queer theory has gotten us – men who feel like women suffer so much more than females. This is a way of shutting down discourse around women’s oppression. Who benefits when parameters are placed around how women may discuss their realities? Who benefits when women cannot discuss their experience in honest terms? (Hint: men.)
This way of thinking, championed by males, has succeeded in erasing Women’s Studies programs, to say nothing of women’s spaces, in order to coddle and cater to the egos of males who are drunk on gender and want us to believe we are all the same – not as some attempt toward equity between the sexes, or to liberate women from oppressive gender roles, but rather, like everything else from football to pornography, to make males feel good. If science doesn’t make males feel good, then that science is wrong. If a line of questioning makes males experience discomfort, then that line of questioning is “ill-spirited.” If a woman argues she is not a theory, not a text, but an actual human being, and if this inconveniences males, then her argument is “bigoted” and “hateful.”
Males identities are super precious and important; their feelings around those identities are sacrosanct. Women’s feelings about their identities – say, as lesbian – women’s lived realities, once examined in the dark ages of Women’s Studies programs, are meaningless.
So of course Women’s Studies programs had to go. And for anyone who thinks academia isn’t a pit of dick-driven rhetoric and mansplaining, you are wrong. Academia, just like every other corner of the world, is just as chauvinist and male-centric as they come. Academia fucking invented the lesbophobic, woman-hating, porn-celebrating “queer culture” we’ve come to know and love – and not because academics are “smart” or “progressive” but because academia is, by and large, just a place where males congratulate each other and beat off to the sound of their own “genius.”
QotD: “Universities ‘should update sex crime guidelines'”
Universities should overhaul guidelines on dealing with allegations of sexual assaults and harassment, according to a taskforce set up by the government.
Current guidelines were written in 1994 and should be updated to reflect legal changes and the effect of social media, the Universities UK taskforce said.
Key areas to be considered include better reporting systems and creating a “zero-tolerance culture”, it said.
The National Union of Students (NUS) and the government welcomed the review.
Though not legally binding, universities often rely on the so-called Zellick guidelines when dealing with allegations of sexual violence or harassment between students. They have been criticised for causing universities to leave investigation of complaints to the police rather than investigating them themselves.
Supporting studentsThe guidelines’ author, Prof Graham Zellick, has said they are still valid, but that they only cover discipline, and not other requirements such as a system of recording sexual assaults.
But BBC education editor Branwen Jeffreys said there had been increasing pressure for action from campaigners who accuse universities of being “more concerned with reputation than supporting students”.
The Universities UK taskforce said “significant elements” the Zellick guidelines were still useful to universities.
But it said developments including the Equality Act 2010 and “changes in the wider social environment, including the significant impact of social media” meant guidelines should be reviewed and updated.
The taskforce will produce a final report on violence, harassment and hate crime later this year.
NUS women’s officer Susuana Amoah said: “We hope this review will lead to the creation of a new set of guidelines centring around the welfare of survivors rather than institutional reputation.”
Sarah Green, of the End Violence Against Women Coalition, welcomed the recognition that “it is time for universities to change the way they respond to allegations of rape and other abuse and harassment”.
The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills welcomed the “progress” the taskforce had made and said it looked forward to seeing the final report.
QotD: “Criminalise the sex buyers, not the prostitutes”
Any young British woman considering a career in prostitution should give careful thought to location. The same applies, our prostitution law being the mess it is, to any pimp or trafficker aiming to maximise profits without fines, arrests and other loss-making interruptions.
In Leeds, for instance, the Holbeck area is now a pimp’s paradise, the police and council having decided not to apply the laws on soliciting and kerb crawling between the hours of 7pm and 7am. Councillor Mark Dobson has explained that, since prostitution will never stop being an “industry as old as time”, “it’s incumbent on us to make it as safe as possible”. In December, one of the women benefiting from this scheme, a 21-year-old Pole, Daria Pionko, was murdered, her body discovered on an industrial estate.
In Suffolk, however, police prefer to believe, like the Swedish government, that prostitution is not part of the natural order. After five young women were murdered by a regular sex buyer in 2006, Suffolk Constabulary’s then Det Supt Alan Caton responded with a Nordic-style plan. Although the legality of off-street prostitution ruled out a full “end demand” strategy, as pioneered in Sweden, Suffolk’s zero tolerance of kerb crawling, with multi-agency support for women, rather than criminalisation, virtually eliminated street prostitution.
Nottingham, too, differs from Leeds, with its own project to end street prostitution by targeting sex buyers and by helping, instead of persecuting, women who want to exit. Since 2004, almost 900 sex buyers have attended a deterrent one-day course, of whom only 27 are known to have reoffended. Sgt Neil Radford, of Nottinghamshire police, says the number of women in street prostitution has fallen over 10 years, from 300 to around 50. If Britain followed Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Northern Ireland, Canada – and potentially, France – in adopting a sex-buyer law, the trade could also be reduced off-street, where prostitution remains dangerous and exploitative or, as an all-party parliamentary group on prostitution put it in 2014, a “form of violence against women and girls”.
The group deplored a “near pandemic” of violence that goes unreported because women are criminalised. Under current law, women and girls who are already damaged by prostitution, whether by actual physical violence or psychological trauma, are further punished with fines for having put themselves in harm’s way. In 2013-14, there were more charges for loitering and soliciting than for the crimes of pimping, brothel keeping, kerb crawling and advertising prostitution combined. Buyers, as Sgt Radford has often observed, just walk away.
In its report, Shifting the Burden , the all-party group recommended the introduction, instead, of a sex-buyer offence, of following the Nordic model. It then asked End Demand , a campaign to end commercial sexual exploitation, to find out how this could be implemented. The resulting report, produced by a commission on the sex buyer law, is to be launched in parliament this week. This concludes – on the basis of evidence from Nottingham and Suffolk, as well as countries such as Sweden, which criminalise buyers – that a similar law is overdue here, to reduce both the human and economic cost of prostitution.
Having participated in that commission, along with, among others, Alan Caton and Diane Martin, a survivor of the sex trade who has helped others to exit, I find it harder than ever to understand how any politician, local or otherwise, would want to perpetuate, by legalising it, a trade so staggeringly unequal and so dependent on the trafficked and marginalised. In Germany, which did precisely that in 2002, the resulting brothels are warehouses of migrant women, pimped for bargain basement prices. Legalisation has failed, it turns out, both to inspire more gallantry in clients and to convince many German women that supplying oral and anal sex on demand could make a nice change from waitressing.
“I find it awful, this is not work, you don’t set out to be in prostitution”, says a Swedish psychologist Lisen Lindström, whom the commission met in Stockholm. She treats women in and exiting prostitution for the city’s social services. Post-traumatic stress is common. What of the women who protest they’re happy in prostitution? “So let them,” she says. “We don’t bother them. We let them be. The majority have had very bad experiences, so let the focus be on them.” And if it’s the career prostitutes’ right to work, unhindered by a sex buyer law? “What kind of union would fight for the right to be raped? If being a psychologist meant that I should be beaten up or raped sometimes, what would my union say about that?”
To legalise prostitution, as Sweden’s chancellor of justice, Anna Skarhed, also pointed out, is to normalise sexual discrimination and violence against women. The reaction to a young woman’s murder in England’s legalised “managed zone” in Leeds was certainly muted, for a country that gets exercised about domestic violence, forced marriages, child rape. Many women in prostitution were underage, visibly so, when they were first exploited. For them, the rules are different. One UK campaigner argued recently for the legalisation of co-working for women in prostitution, “as this is the main way in which they believe their safety will be enhanced”. That the inessential business of prostitution should be as synonymous with serious physical danger as it is with organised crime barely registers as anomalous. If there were consistency in health and safety alone, Leeds police would be insisting on hi-vis jackets and lanyards in their night-time “managed zone”.
The converse, says Skarhed, has been a steady normalising, in Sweden, of the principles underlying the sex buyer law. As enforcement, with exit services, has depleted the number of prostitutes in Sweden, so attitudes have shifted : 70% want to keep the law.
But as in Britain, a forceful lobby maintains that the sex buyer law represents a “whorephobic” attack on women’s self-determination, moreover one infinitely more threatening to their wellbeing, you gather, than the kindly traffickers – who make an annual £130m in the UK. On the contrary, says Patrik Cederlöf, Sweden’s national co-ordinator against prostitution and human trafficking; when they are not criminalised, women are more willing to report attacks. Incidentally, with decreased supply, prices for sex have risen: witness a neat ledger shown to the commission by a Swedish state prosecutor, Lars Ågren, documenting the massive profits enjoyed, prior to discovery, by a Polish outfit running 23 prostitutes. “They could charge double in Sweden than in Poland.” He adds: “The girls aren’t making money.”
It’s quite true, though, that sex buyer laws are lousy for pimps. That’s another reason why one should, I think, be introduced in Britain, in the way now backed by the all-party group and proposed to the new home affairs select committee prostitution inquiry. As with any big, ethically blighted industry, PRs for prostitution will respond with renewed attacks on its opponents, to add to despairing assurances, as in Leeds, of futility: the trade is “as old as time”. So, of course, was slavery.
QotD: “What has changed in the four decades since Fat is a Feminist Issue was first published?”
Obsessive dieting and self-hate, compulsive eating and body dysmorphobia – all the handcuffs women placed on themselves and assumed, Houdini-like, they had to escape on their own. We weren’t just weak-minded, greedy, ill-disciplined; there were specific realities to the conditions of both fat and thin that we were all chasing or escaping through our eating. Being fat was a protection against sexual attention, but also against being marketed to, having one’s body appropriated as a commercial space. Fat was a statement of solidity in the face of motherhood. It was a defence against competition, a way to dance around the painful establishment of hierarchy within your own gender. Fat meant so much more than calories in and calories out. As did thin, which carried its own freight: that you would be seen as superior and cold; that you would be overcome by your own promiscuity; that you would be perceived as selfish; that there would be no buffer between you and the world.
[…]
This is a truly tragic thing: those vast insights – which ranged from the most profound drivers of problem-eating to the most achievable, real-time routes out of it – changed nothing. Public health still talks about obesity as a lifestyle or ignorance issue, an information deficit – people who don’t know about calories accidentally eating too many of them. The standards to which women are held are more extreme and more distant than ever. Bodies communicate more about status than they ever have and, as that conduit, are the site of more anxiety.
“People used to know they had problems with their bodies and their eating, and they would come for help,” Orbach says, her pessimism always belied by the magnetic atmosphere of reassurance, optimism and challenge she creates when she talks to you. “Now it’s just taken for granted. This is just part of how I have to live – feeling shit about my body, scared of food, either managing it this way or managing it that way. [People who come to see me are] not familiar with feminist ideas, they’re not familiar with anti-dieting ideas, they’re not familiar with the idea that you could actually have a personal solution to your body that doesn’t involve being obsessed by it. When I first started, not every woman had an eating issue; not everybody had a body dysmorphic problem. Now everybody does, but they don’t bother to talk about it. It’s beyond depressing. It’s hateful, really, what the culture has done.”
[…]
Of the cultural surprises delivered by the past four decades, few have been pleasant for Orbach. “I wouldn’t have predicted the international dimension. I wouldn’t have thought that you’d be going to China and seeing billboards of western women projecting that fey, fuck-me look, selling back to the Chinese the clothes that were made in their factories. It’s a form of imperialism, isn’t it? We’re exporting body hatred all around the world. That’s something I did not expect. And I suppose I hadn’t really anticipated the explosion of non-food foods – the chemicals, the sugars that don’t get metabolised by the body.”
It is fascinating to consider the new context for Fat is a Feminist Issue to be reissued: one in which feminism has been through the trough of the apolitical 90s but, if not peaked, certainly resurfaced. That’s positive, of course; it’s less thrilling to find that debates that, in the 70s, were fairly sophisticated are having to start from scratch.
“Feminism,” Orbach recalls, “was a very broad church. There were the women who were going after changing the law and fighting so you could get a mortgage, then there were the women who wanted to get into the banks. Then there were the revolutionary feminists, the radical feminists, the lesbian separatist feminists. Within the grouping that wanted equality in the workplace, we would have been arguing that it would be hard to achieve that on the terms that the workplace is structured. Most women don’t want to be working from seven in the morning until 11 at night. There was a feminist critique of that model. But neoliberalism took hold, and solidarity with other women got turned into a thing called ‘networking’, and that turned into the glass ceiling. It wasn’t meant to be that. It was about: ‘How do we change the workplace?’”
Orbach is often reluctant to make large generalisations of gender, while at the same time irresistibly drawn to the density of pressures and signals that make up its social construction. And yet, she persists. Last week, she broadcast In Therapy on Radio Four, five short programmes in which a different actor each day arrived on the couch for an unscripted conversation. Orbach is immovable in her faith in the mind. “A couple of Fridays ago, I was giving a talk at the Wellcome Collection. I arrived and there were 5,000 people queueing. They weren’t queueing for me, let me be clear. They just wanted to be exposed to sophisticated ideas. They are rejecting oversimplification – they want more texture in their lives.”
Susie Orbach: ‘Not all women used to have eating issues. Now everybody does’
QotD: “Paid surrogacy makes disadvantaged women into walking wombs – an unacceptable solution to infertility”
ast week, a national newspaper ran a piece on the shortage of people in the UK willing or able to sell a kidney.
“It’s terrible,” said one interviewee, a stockbroker forced to buy his kidney from an organ farm in Mumbai. “UK regulations need to change so we can have this service closer to home.”
Another customer agreed.
“It’s very distressing to know that if someone over here sells you their kidney, they can change their mind. The ownership documents aren’t worth the paper they’re written on as long as your kidney’s still busy filtering waste products in the body that grew it.”
A lawyer specialising in cases such as these confirmed that this was a problem:
“The UK has a long way to go in catching up with other nations, some of which have even built dedicated hostels to prevent donors – or living incubators, as we call them – from departing in possession of body parts which are reserved for those with more money.”
Of course, no such piece was actually written.
Wealthy people in this country are not permitted to harvest the bodies of poor people elsewhere. While a shortage of organ donors is a recognised problem, it is widely understood that the exploitation of extreme wealth inequalities is not the solution.
We cannot allow ourselves to reach a point where certain people, born at the wrong time, in the wrong place, have the same status as the clones in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.
Unless we are talking about international surrogacy. While no one may be publicly complaining of the difficulties of purchasing organs from abroad, the Guardian recently published a highly sympathetic piece on “childless UK couples forced abroad to find surrogates”.
The piece focused on two barriers to finding surrogates: the cost (“attempts to keep costs down have seen the creation of ‘hybrids’, where an egg is fertilised in one country, often where the commissioning parents reside, and then implanted in a woman in a developing country”) and the risk of a surrogate changing her mind (celebrity chef Yotam Ottolenghi, whose own child was born to a surrogate in the US, claims it is “definitely time the laws were adjusted to allow people to sign legally binding contracts here”).
Throughout the piece, the difficulties are portrayed almost entirely from the perspective of those wanting easier access to rentable wombs. That surrogates are people too, not property on an unstable market, would be an easy thing to miss.
We shouldn’t miss it, though. There is something horrendously dystopian about the growing acceptability of trans-national surrogacy, involving an industry which places poor women of colour in closely monitored residences and treats them as potting soil for the planting and growing of children for wealthier, usually white clients.
While radical feminists have long been critical of the practice, mainstream liberal feminism, which claims to be more aware of intersections of race, class and gender, has remained surprisingly silent on the topic. This is the most literal example we have of women being treated as walking wombs, yet it appears that it would be bad manners to point it out.
Perhaps part of the problem is that we are dealing with competing social justice narratives. While one can feel sympathy for someone needing an organ transplant, there is nothing politically sexy about being restored to health in this way.
Finding alternative ways of understanding and creating family units is, on the other hand, exciting. It feels – and often is – a way of challenging traditional, repressive beliefs about how people should be allowed to live, love and raise their children. Feminism should support such objectives.
For too long, the idea that families are created when women submit to their husbands and give them children has been used to dehumanise anyone who is not a fertile heterosexual adult male.
However, discomforting though it is to see a different side to this story, we need to ask whether all alternatives are better alternatives. In particular, we need to examine the cost of maintaining a belief in continuing one’s genetic line, even as all other beliefs in what makes a family are dismissed as outdated and harmful to others.
If you want a baby to be genetically “yours”, the alternative to being a person who bears it yourself is not going to be finding it under a gooseberry bush. Someone has to gestate that baby. In ways that we may neither wish nor be able to define, that baby is theirs, too.
The status of the surrogate as an actual human being rather spoils the neat, non-patriarchal narrative we may be trying to construct. You may not live with her. She may not have promised to honour and obey you. She may support you in railing against the petty squeamishness that leads people to oppose IVF and other positive developments in reproductive technology.
Still, she will be going through a pregnancy that places her autonomy on the line, compromises her health and changes her mind and body forever. Still, you will be attempting to assume ownership of something that cannot really be sold: her relationship with, and feelings for, the baby she is going to bear.
Liberal feminism has painted itself into a corner from which it is very hard to launch a coherent critique of surrogacy. Two effective but dangerously simplistic slogans, “work is work” and “my body, my choice”, make it almost impossible to claim that what is happening is wrong.
A woman can, it is suggested, rent out any part of herself. To question this would be a denial of her agency. The logical conclusion of such a line of thought is that nothing that is mutually agreed and paid for can be deemed abusive or exploitative, regardless of the gendered, class-based and/or racial conditions under which the agreement is made (which seems to me the antithesis of an intersectional approach).
Even worse, we seem to have reached a situation whereby the more physically or sexually intrusive gendered work is, the more it is seen as anti-establishment and therefore beyond criticism. Thus one woman employing another to clean her house is seen as more abusive than a man employing a woman to gestate, bear and relinquish a child. I can see how we got here but it does not look much like feminism to me.
There is nothing wrong with wanting a family of one’s own. Those who mutter about selfishness and over-population should, but rarely do, have as much censure for people like me, for whom reproduction was straightforward, as they do for those for whom the route is more difficult. But paid surrogacy, involving the exploitation of those disadvantaged by sex, race, class and global inequalities, is not an acceptable solution to infertility, regardless of whether the cause can be connected to other forms of structural oppression.
I’d like to think the problem is not that our restructuring of the family is too radical, but not yet radical enough. If you can convince yourself that a woman’s ties to the baby she bears can be contractually relinquished, why is it so hard to convince yourself that the child you raise need not have any of your genetic matter? Why is the body so important as an idea, but not when it involves actual flesh, blood and pain?
What it comes down to is always the same thing: some people are seen to count more than others. And fine, we can outsource the not-counting to other people, other bodies, other countries. But is this really as far as we want to go?
QotD: “Commercial surrogacy is a rigged market in wombs for rent”
Since the disgraceful Baby Gammy case last year, in which an Australian couple left a twin boy with his birth mother when it was discovered he had Down’s syndrome, Thailand has banned foreigners and same-sex couples from accessing surrogacy services. Now only married heterosexuals are allowed to use surrogates, with at least one of the couple required to be Thai. No one is allowed to gain financially from the transaction.
But will this shift in legislation put an end to the inherent abuse in what can be described as womb trafficking? I doubt it. In order to put a stop to this increasingly normalised practice, we need to understand the reality of what surrogacy entails.
Commercial surrogacy breeds exploitation, abuse and misery. Although the poster girl of surrogates is typically a white, blonde, smiling women who is carrying a baby in order to make a childless couple happy, the truth is far less palatable.
Women in the global south are often pimped by husbands and criminal gangs into renting their wombs to rich western couples. For women in India for example, this is a particular problem. I have interviewed rich, white British gay couples who told me they chose India for surrogacy services because it was considerably cheaper than the US (where the surrogacy business is booming), with one couple admitting it was reassuring that the women are required to live in a clinic for the duration of the pregnancy so they can be monitored by the “brokers” throughout.
Gestational surrogates are required to take Lupron, oestrogen and progesterone medication to help achieve the pregnancy, all of which treatments can have serious side effects.
Class and racial divisions between surrogates, egg donors and the intended parents are often stark. Surrogates tend to be working class and to have already had their own children, whereas the egg donor will likely be a college graduate from an upper-class background who is considered bright and attractive. They generally earn significantly more than the surrogates.
While the gestational surrogates tend to be poor women disadvantaged in many ways, egg donors are often chosen (from catalogues) for their “strong genes” and lack of mental and physical ill health in their lineage. The process is not that far removed from eugenics.
Many agree that it is unethical to buy and sell pregnancy but support what is known as altruistic surrogacy. This is where a friend, relative or kind stranger bears a child for an infertile woman or couple simply out of the goodness of her heart.
The argument goes that if we do not accept altruistic surrogacy and put measures in place to regulate it, we will drive commercial surrogacy underground. But the opposite is true. The legal sanctioning and social acceptance of this practice, even where no money changes hands, will further perpetuate the notion that the wombs of poor women can be used as a service.
As in Thailand, the law has been changed in India, another popular spot for British couples seeking commercial surrogacy. Now it is required that prospective parents looking to engage a surrogate must be a “man and woman [who] are duly married and the marriage should be sustained at least two years”.
Alongside many feminist and human rights campaigners, I wish to see an end to commercial surrogacy and a serious, honest discussion about the ethics of all forms of outsourcing pregnancy, particularly in a world awash with unwanted and neglected babies and children.
We also need to pose a challenge to the increasing numbers of gay men who think it perfectly acceptable to use the womb of a desperate woman in order to reproduce. Indeed, this method of making babies is fast becoming the number-one option for gay men, which means the practice will become more normalised, and be seen even as a “right” for those who cannot conceive in the traditional manner.
However, the Thai and Indian ban on same-sex couples from accessing surrogacy is nothing short of discrimination and anti-gay bigotry. An end to this harmful practice in all but private, one-to-one circumstances would be what true equality looks like.
QotD: “All surrogacy is exploitation – the world should follow Sweden’s ban”
hat something is not quite right about surrogacy has been evident for some time. Ever since the commercial surrogacy industry kicked off in the late 1970s, it has been awash with scandals, exploitation and abuse. From the infamous “Baby M” case – in which the mother changed her mind and was forced, in tears, to hand over her baby – to the Japanese billionaire who ordered 16 children from different Thai clinics. There has been a total commodification of human life: click; choose race and eye colour; pay, then have your child delivered.
Then there’s the recent case of the American surrogate mother who died; or the intended parents who refused to accept a disabled child and tried to get their surrogate to abort; not to mention the baby factories in Asia.
This week, Sweden took a firm stand against surrogacy. The governmental inquiry on surrogacy published its conclusions, which the parliament is expected to approve later this year. These include banning all surrogacy, commercial as well as altruistic, and taking steps to prevent citizens from going to clinics abroad.
This is a ground-breaking decision, a true step forward for the women’s movement. Initially divided on the issue women came together and placed the issue higher up on the agenda. Earlier in February, feminist and human-rights activists from all over the world met in Paris to sign the charter against surrogacy, and the European Parliament has also called on states to ban it.
The major objections to the Swedish report have come from intended fathers, saying that if a woman wants to be a surrogate, surely it is wrong to prevent her from doing so. It is telling that few women cry over this missed opportunity. It is, after all, demand that fuels this industry.
Surrogacy may have been surrounded by an aura of Elton John-ish happiness, cute newborns and notions of the modern family, but behind that is an industry that buys and sells human life. Where babies are tailor-made to fit the desires of the world’s rich. Where a mother is nothing, deprived even of the right to be called “mum”, and the customer is everything. The west has started outsourcing reproduction to poorer nations, just as we outsourced industrial production previously. It is shocking to see how quickly the UN convention on the rights of the child can be completely ignored. No country allows the sale of human beings – yet, who cares, so long as we are served cute images of famous people and their newborns?
To save surrogacy from accusations like this, some resort to talking of so-called “altruistic” surrogacy. If the mother is not being paid, there is no exploitation going on. Maybe she is doing it out of generosity, for a friend, a daughter or a sister.
The Swedish inquiry refutes this argument. There is no proof, says the inquiry, that legalising “altruistic” surrogacy would do away with the commercial industry. International experience shows the opposite – citizens of countries such as the US or Britain, where the practice of surrogacy is widespread, tend to dominate among foreign buyers in India and Nepal. The inquiry also says that there is evidence that surrogates still get paid under the table, which is the case in Britain. One cannot, says the inquiry, expect a woman to sign away her rights to a baby she has not even seen nor got to know yet – this in itself denotes undue pressure.
In any case, the notion of “altruistic” surrogacy – apart from being a red herring, since it barely happens in reality – has a very strange ideological underpinning. As if exploitation only consisted in giving the woman money. In that case, the less she is paid, the less she is exploited.
In reality, “altruistic” surrogacy means that a woman goes through exactly the same thing as in commercial surrogacy, but gets nothing in return. It demands of the woman to carry a child for nine months and then give it away. She has to change her behaviour and risk infertility, a number of pregnancy-related problems, and even death. She is still used as a vessel, even if told she is an angel. The only thing she gets is the halo of altruism, which is a very low price for the effort and can only be attractive in a society where women are valued for how much they sacrifice, not what they achieve.
India and Thailand do not want their female citizens to become the baby factories of the world. Now it is time for Europe to take responsibility. We are the buyers, we need to show solidarity and stop this industry while we can.
“Rotherham child sexual abuse victims to take police to court”
Victims of child sexual abuse in Rotherham are set to take South Yorkshire police to court to force them to hand over confidential records on how they handled decades of abuse in the town.
A Sheffield lawyer, acting for 65 victims, has said he has no other choice as the force is refusing to disclose data, call logs and other documentation that could establish if allegations that officers turned a blind eye to grooming in the town were true.
David Greenwood believes if he can prove this is so, the girls, now women in their 30s and 40s, will have a case under Article 3 of the Human Rights Act, which protects against torture but also “inhuman or degrading treatment”.
But he says the police “are putting up stiff resistance” and he plans to go to court to seek an order from a judge forcing them to hand over all their files.
His action comes as four men and two women face sentencing on Friday for a catalogue of crimes including rape, indecent assault, forced prostitution and forced imprisonment over 16 years.
Brothers Arshid, Basharat and Bannaras Hussain, who together were guilty of 48 offences, are expected to get lengthy jail sentences. Also being sentenced in Sheffield are their uncle Qurban Ali and associates Karen MacGregor and Shelley Davies.
The Hussains carried out their brutal crimes with impunity, with one victim telling the jury she felt they were invincible because they “owned” Rotherham.
Several of the 12 women who gave evidence at the trial said they reported their abuse to police in the 1990s and the 2000s but no action was taken.
Now that justice in the courts has been done, they are hoping for compensation to help fund counselling and other support they may need in years to come.
Greenwood said police were refusing to hand over the files on the grounds that if the victims saw the records, their witness accounts in potential future criminal trials could be contaminated.
Initially he met with the same resistance from Rotherham metropolitan borough council, which the victims are also planning to sue over alleged negligence.
The council has now conceded that it is safe to make the disclosures after Greenwood gave a legal undertaking that the documents would not be shared with the victims, but used to establish if there was evidence for civil proceedings.
“The police are putting up stiff resistance,” said Greenwood. “The police and the CPS don’t like it. I have offered them the same undertaking as the council and they are still saying ‘no’.”
He plans to make an application for pre-action disclosure in the next two weeks.
Detailed information about suspected child abusers in Rotherham was passed to police more than a decade ago – but never acted on, a whistleblower has claimed.
Adele Gladman last year described how her evidence was ignored by Rotherham council and South Yorkshire police after she provided them with information about suspected abusers.
In evidence to the home affairs select committee, originally given anonymously, she said she had raised concerns with police as far back as 2001 that children were “actively being placed at risk by social care and the police because of a lack of action against suspected abusers and a lack of support and understanding of the issues for the children concerned”.
She said her concerns were repeatedly dismissed by police as anecdotal and when she submitted her report to South Yorkshire police, the feedback she got was that it was unhelpful.
Recognising their past trauma, Greenwood has urged victims of historic abuse not to rush forward to join action for compensation.
“The difficulty for the girls is trusting anyone in authority. Getting details from them is off-the-scale difficult. They could be entitled to compensation but if it’s too distressing for them, I would urge women to be careful and not to come forward until they are ready and they have support.”
His action comes as Prof Alexis Jay, the author of the devastating 2014 report into abuse in the town, said Rotherham authorities “disbelieved” the scale of criminality in the town.
“For many in a position to do something, the exploitation of these children and young people was simply not considered a priority,” she told the Guardian.
“The people in the council who managed these homes should have taken a far more direct role in assisting the residential staff to take action to deal with it, along with the police.”
Jay, who has been appointed a member of the panel in the Goddard inquiry into child sexual exploitation, said she was concerned that grooming had effectively gone underground because it was now perpetrated online.
“A worrying aspect of exploitation has been the more recent one of internet grooming, which was emerging latterly in Rotherham as it was elsewhere in the UK,” she said.
She has called for better education about exploitation in schools.
“The young people I spoke to in Rotherham were scathing about the sex education they received, which didn’t cover a range of concerns they had about their sexuality, and had mainly focussed on preventing teenage pregnancy.”
One of the victims of the Rotherham gang being sentenced on Friday has also urged David Cameron to introduce education about age-appropriate relationships into schools.
Jessica (not her real name), who was abused by the mastermind in the Rotherham gang, Arshid Hussain, is among those planning to sue the police and Rotherham council for compensation over a lost childhood.
It was revealed on Wednesday that the Independent Police Complaints Commission was investigating 54 named officers as part of a major inquiry into allegations about how South Yorkshire police dealt with child sexual exploitation in Rotherham.
Allegations made by 41 complainants range from a failure to act on reported child abuse to corruption.
“How a Rotherham gang with history of criminality abused vulnerable girls”
It seemed like a fairytale ending to a troubled childhood. After finding herself homeless at the age of 15, she was taken under the wing of a kind middle-aged woman who gave her bed and board in her nearby home in Rotherham.
Karen MacGregor fed and clothed her, was “a good listener” and made her feel welcome and loved, just like a second mother.
But days later, this vulnerable girl woke up in bed to find herself being sexually abused by a man after being plied with vodka.
What began as something “shiny and inviting soon turned horrible,” the girl, known as Girl A, told the police.
Girl B who also spent time as a guest in MacGregor’s house had a similar story of her descent into horrific abuse by several men connected to a taxi firm down the road, who used to hang around the house late at night. “(MacGregor) started telling us: ‘You need to earn your keep’. Karen wanted to pimp everybody out,” she told the court. “Looking back, it was like Hansel and Gretel living at Karen’s.”
Girl A and B are two of the 15 girls who were raped, trafficked, beaten up, and passed around like sex slaves for more than a decade by a gang of men, predominantly of Pakistani origin, who “owned” Rotherham.
The exploitation, which spanned 1987 to 2003, was orchestrated by Arshid Hussain, 40, two of his brothers Basharat and Bannaras along with their uncle Qurban Ali.
On Wednesday, Hussain, was found guilty of 23 counts of rape and indecent assault in addition to false imprisonment, abduction of a girl, and aiding and abetting rape.
Arshid Hussain’s brother Basharat was found guilty of 15 counts including of indecent assault, indecency with a child and threatening to kill a brother of one of his victims. A third Hussain brother, Bannaras, pleaded guilty to 10 offences before the three-month trial started. His pleas can be reported for the first time.
MacGregor, 58,was found guilty of conspiracy to rape, false imprisonment and procuring one of the women to become a common prostitute.Shelley Davies was found guilty of procuring one of the victims to become a common prostitute, and false imprisonment.
One girl was locked up in a room above a restaurant in Blackpool for weeks and forced to have sex with a succession of men to “pay her way”. A 12-year-old was forced to perform sex acts with a group of men in a car after she was picked up from a children’s home. The main victim in the trial was abused by Arshid Hussain almost on a daily basis in churchyards, garages, above a pub.
The grooming was typical. Many of the girls had unsettled home lives, had suffered previous ill treatment or abuse, and some were in local authority care. All were vulnerable to predatory behaviour.
They were offered “sweets and pop”, mobile phones, perfume, and, later, hard drugs. Many of the girls thought the abuse was normal behaviour and that their abusers loved them. “I was in a car on my own. I was a 12-year-old girl. I just thought it is what I had to do,” said one of the girls picked up by Basharat Hussain from a children’s home at 12 and forced to perform oral sex on three men after he treated her to a meal. Another thought it was happy ever after with Arshid Hussain, she didn’t know he was married, or that he was abusing a string of other girls. Some continued to see their abusers when in prison. Others were lured into their criminal activities handling guns and drugs.
Some of the girls suffered horrific violence, one had cigarettes stubbed out on her body, another was blindfolded and had petrol poured on her feet. When one of the victims tried to find a safe house to escape, her abuser threatened to kill her brother. He also told her he had a policeman on the inside so he would always know how to find her. Another girl, who had been abused since she was seven by various step-fathers was preyed on by Arshid and Basharat Hussain who would visit her at home and force her into sexual acts.
Five of the girls became pregnant, two at the age of 14. Two of them gave birth. One has a son by Arshid Hussain, whose brother warned the girl not to go ahead with the pregnancy as he already he had seven children by different English women around the country and didn’t even know their names.
The horrendous abuse mirrors cases elsewhere in the country and is part of a suspected wider pattern of abuse in the town whose reputation was shattered in August 2014 when Prof Alexis Jay concluded in a report that as many as 1,400 children were exploited in Rotherham over a 16-year period.
The Rotherham case highlights the collective failure of police, social services and the local council to act despite repeated complaints from the girls. The catalogue of missed opportunities scream loud and clear from 51 pages of “agreed facts” that supported the trial in Sheffield crown court.
They raise specific questions about Child Protection Services, Rotherham council, South Yorkshire Police and the probation services. For instance there are records of the discovery of three adult men at 12.45am in the bedroom of a girl in a care home. The men were not arrested.
The agreed facts show, at best, an alarming level of police indifference in relation to these vulnerable children, several of whom had drug and alcohol problems and who were from broken homes.
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