“Women’s Equality party leader seeks backing for a clear run to beat ‘misogynist’ MP”
She is the leader of the Women’s Equality party (WEP), a new political force committed to furthering the cause of gender equality, but which has yet to make inroads electorally.
He is a Tory MP who tried to derail a bill to protect women against violence, and told a conference hosted by an anti-feminism party that “feminist zealots really do want women to have their cake and eat it”.
Now, in what is likely to be one of the most fascinating clashes of the general election, Sophie Walker and Philip Davies are to face off on the campaign trail as other opposition parties consider giving her a free run in her attempt to unseat the Shipley Conservative MP.
The developments in the West Yorkshire constituency come as attempts to engineer a broader “progressive alliance” gather steam. On Monday the leftwing pressure group Compass will launch a website to help maximise the anti-Conservative vote in constituencies around the country, and bring together activists from the three main opposition parties in a new political movement.
Walker, a journalist who became the WEP’s inaugural leader in 2015 and has been at the forefront of its campaigns for equal representation and pay in working life, said: “Philip Davies basically is a sexist misogynist who puts his own ego ahead of his constituents. His anti-equality agenda in Westminster threatens the rights and freedoms not just of women but also people with disabilities, BAME (black, Asian, and minority ethnic) and LGBT+ communities. I think that Shipley deserves an MP who will prioritise representing them and the issues that are important to their constituency, rather than using parliament as a stage to play out attention-seeking performances.”
[…]
The Green party approached the WEP with the offer to stand aside, according to local Green activists in Shipley, who have yet to rubberstamp the idea but are supportive of it in theory. The idea has not so far been floated widely among local Liberal Democrats, who meet on Thursday, but there is strong support already among some officials.
However, while the idea of Walker’s candidature has been discussed by WEP and Labour members of Shipley Feminist Zealots, a local group, some Labour members are eager to field a candidate. Local chairman Joe Wheatley said that Labour had shown itself as the “most effective” opposition to Davies, who racked up a 9,624-vote majority over his Labour runner-up in 2015.
The Brexit-supporting MP will be boosted in a constituency that mirrored the referendum’s national result. Walker, a Remain supporter, wants an “equality impact assessment” of any final Brexit deal, and the chance for MPs to vote it down if necessary.
From the Shipley Feminist Zealot’s ‘about us’ page:
We are a grassroots group of women and men in Shipley, West Yorkshire, working for gender equality.
We started with a cake stall in August 2016, when our local MP Philip Davies notoriously said “Feminist zealots want to have their cake and eat it” and also complained of “politically correct males who pander to this nonsense”. He is also a well known supporter of Trump and opponent/filibuster of equalities legislation – despite currently sitting on the parliamentary committee for women and equalities.
We run cake stalls raising money for Bradford Women’s Aid and CALM (a charity working to prevent male suicide) and we organised the Shipley Sister March on 21st January.
QotD: “Today’s feminists are bland, shallow and lazy”
The book is called Why I Am Not a Feminist, which is, of course, a lie as well as a provocation, for its author’s feminism runs through her veins like blood. Crispin’s principles, however, have their roots, radical and angry, in the second wave of feminism, not the third: she, for one, is not about to renounce the likes of Andrea Dworkin and Shulamith Firestone, whose uncompromising books she has, incidentally, actually read.
What she disdains, then, is what she deems lifestyle feminism: a bland, ultra-inclusive marketing exercise that demands absolutely nothing from those who buy into it save for to ask that they use the word “feminist” as frequently as possible, preferably while looking utterly adorable. “Dior has this $600 T-shirt that says on it: ‘We Should All Be Feminists’,” she tells me, when she talks to me on Skype from New York (where she is ill and rundown, her pink kimono almost matching the colour of her feverish cheeks). “But what does that say about the person wearing it other than: ‘I can afford a $600 T-shirt’? Feminism has been entirely co-opted by consumerism.”
The new feminism, which is not really feminism at all, is by Crispin’s telling as shallow as a martini, and a good deal less good for you: “This is a T-shirt you can wear in order to cloak your bad behaviour, to let you think of yourself as some kind of political hero or rebel without you actually having to do anything.”
What, she wonders, is the end result of so many younger women choosing to call themselves feminists? “It’s about individualism, and self-achievement. It’s about pop stars and television and narcissism. It’s not about subsidised childcare, or institutional and structural social change. It’s meaningless.” This self-obsession and ideological laziness extends, she thinks, even to their reading matter. “Roxane Gay [the US feminist writer] is on the record as saying that she hasn’t read Andrea Dworkin [the anti-pornographer campaigner], and that we don’t have to, either. Really? Isn’t there work and sacrifice in being a political person?”
[…]
Crispin looks out at the world and sees a hyper-masculinised realm in which women must mimic men if they’re to survive, let alone to rise in an upwards direction. “I realise that using words like ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ in this way can get you into trouble these days,” she says. “But where are the [feminine] values of community, care and empathy in our modern world? Their absence doesn’t seem to bother a lot of people.”
[…]
“Good intentions are nothing against the system,” she writes sombrely. And then, more terrifyingly: “The system is older than you. It has absorbed more venom that you can ever hope to emit. You will not even slow it down.” She would also like it to be known that not getting what you want is not, by any stretch of the imagination, oppression.
[…]
The Women’s Marches which followed his inauguration seemed to her to lack focus. “This is a repeated problem with the American left: the lack of clear goals. Those marches were celebratory. They were good for the heart. But we’ve had [municipal] elections in the US since then where the turnout was, like 15 to 20%. During the Women’s Strike [on 8 March], I saw a journalist ask a woman what she was going to do instead of working. She said: ‘Oh, I’m just going to do something empowering like watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer!’ I mean, come on! Let’s do something, here.”
[…]
Well, now I’m going to have be a little tough myself. If our marches are pointless and our workplace aspirations without worth, what should we do instead? She can’t be allowed to get away with writing a feminist manifesto with no plausible suggestion for the society of the future.
“You can start by all divorcing your husbands!” she says. For a moment, I wonder if she’s joking. But, no. “There does have to be a process of understanding the way you participate in these systems of oppression. Marriage’s history is about treating women as property, and by being married you’re legitimising that history.” Another good start would be to remove your money from the big banks and put it in a small, local credit union instead, “even if you only have $80”. Above all, maybe women should start listening to one another again.
Anti-Porn Feminists 
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