by Laura Bates
Despite this, the site was a success, and over the next five years, hundreds of thousands of testimonies flooded in. Almost every woman or girl I met told me their story, too. A 9-year-old who had received a ‘dick pic’. An elderly lady who had been assaulted by her late husband’s best friend. A young black woman refused entry to a nightclub while her white girlfriends were waved through. A woman in a wheelchair who was told she would be lucky to be raped. My assumptions about the type of person who suffers particular forms of abuse and the separation between different kinds of prejudice quickly shattered.
The sadness of the stories was a heavy thing to bear, as was the continued abuse I received. An interviewer asked me live on air whether it was difficult having no friends because I was so humourless. An American commentator wrote a blog publicly warning my husband he would one day come home to find I had burned down our house, murdered our children and joined a ‘coven of lesbian witches’. Somewhere around the time I received a death threat alongside the claim I was a dripping poison that should be eradicated from the world, I started seeing a counsellor. And at times I seriously considered the coven.
But there were pleasant surprises, too. I hadn’t anticipated the practical and emotional help offered by other women – solidarity from those of my own age and staunch support from older feminists who had seen it all before. And nothing could outweigh the privilege of being entrusted with so many people’s stories, often never told before. I felt a great sense of responsibility to make sure women’s voices were heard.
Another joy was being part of a burgeoning wave of feminism, standing alongside others tackling everything from media sexism to female genital mutilation. Perhaps the most important lesson I learned was how closely connected the different forms of inequality are. It is vital to resist those who mock and criticize us for tackling ‘minor’ manifestations of prejudice because these are the things that normalize and ingrain the treatment of women as second-class citizens, opening the door for everything else, from workplace discrimination to sexual violence.
To be a feminist, I have learned, is to be accused of oversensitivity, hysteria and crying wolf. But in the face of the abuse the project uncovered, the sheer strength, ingenuity and humour of women shone like a beacon. The dancer who performed for hours on the Tube to reclaim the space where she was assaulted. The woman who waited five years to present her contract and a salt cellar to the careers adviser who had told her he would eat her paperwork if she ever became an engineer. The pedestrian who calmly removed the ladder of a catcalling builder, leaving him stranded on a roof.
That’s why I can honestly say that the experiences and lessons of the past five years have left me more hopeful than despairing. I can’t celebrate this milestone, exactly, representing as it does a collective outpouring of grief, anger and trauma. But I think of the resilience, the solidarity, the resistance, and I can’t mourn it either. In five years, I have learned that the problem is immense, but the will to fight it is greater still.
Originally published 17 April 2017
AFTERWORD
In 2014, UN special rapporteur on violence against women Rashida Manjoo described the UK as one of the most sexist countries she had recently visited. Describing a ‘boys’ club sexist culture’, she said there was ‘a more visible presence of sexist portrayals of women and girls’ and a ‘marketisation of women’s and girls’ bodies’ in the UK, which was more pervasive than elsewhere. ‘Have I seen this level of sexist cultures in other countries?’ she asked: ‘It hasn’t been so in-your-face.’
If Manjoo’s assessment succinctly summed up the UK’s misogyny problem, our response only confirmed it. A male Telegraph writer dismissed her conclusions as ‘pure nonsense’. Another male columnist wrote that she ‘could hardly be more wrong’. Daytime radio and television programmes went into overdrive, scrambling indignantly to quote rape statistics from different countries around the world (ignoring the fact that Manjoo had not specifically referenced rape), as if they could magically erase the number of women assaulted and murdered in the UK on a weekly basis. One radio programme invited me on to discuss the statement, opening the interview by demanding that I confirm their belief that the UK was, in reality, far less sexist than other countries. Slowly, I replied that it was difficult for me to answer the question with scientific accuracy, given that my work had begun only relatively recently, and that my project was qualitative rather than quantitative. If only, I mused aloud, there was some expert we could ask instead: somebody, perhaps, with over three decades of international human rights experience, who had been charged by a body like the United Nations with the explicit job of visiting different countries to assess their treatment of women . . .
In the five years spanned by these columns, there have been some slow changes, both big and small. John Lewis has ended the gender segregation of its children’s clothes. The UK government, after intense pressure from campaigners, finally voted to ratify the Istanbul Convention and to make sex and relationships education a compulsory part of school education. The Supreme Court made the landmark ruling that employment tribunal fees are unlawful and must be abolished.
Other battles drag on. Free childcare and flexible working remain inadequate to prevent women’s careers from suffering negative repercussions after having children. New shared parental leave allowance doesn’t go far enough to begin to level the caring playing field. Sexual violence services and refuges continue to battle and compete for meagre funds. The gender pay gap persists. Recommendations by the Women and Equalities Committee for schools to tackle sexual violence have been rejected en masse by the government, despite new figures showing a wave of rapes and sexual assaults reported in schools. Opinion polls repeatedly reveal that a large percentage of the British public blame victims of rape for their own assault. Survivors of sexual violence remain detained in Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre despite having committed no crime. And, as I write, the government has revealed plans to remove supported housing from the welfare budget, a move that charity Woman’s Aid says would force over a third of refuges to close their doors for good.
Meanwhile, the failure to acknowledge our society’s endemic sexual violence or to recognize the connections between these different human rights violations stubbornly persists.
On Friday 29 September 2017, police found a woman’s body, later identified as police officer Leanne McKie, in a lake in Cheshire. Police described the case as an ‘isolated incident’. Underneath the story on the Guardian website, an algorithm automatically listed ‘related stories’. The highlighted headlines included:
‘WOMAN’S BODY FOUND IN LAKE AT UNIVERSITY OF EAST ANGLIA’
‘WOMAN’S BODY FOUND ON NORFOLK BEACH’
‘WOMAN’S BODY FOUND IN WEST SUSSEX WOODS’
‘WOMAN’S BODY FOUND AFTER CANTERBURY SUPERMARKET SHOOTING’
‘WOMAN’S BODY FOUND IN SNOWDONIA’
‘WOMAN’S BODY FOUND IN SUITCASE’
‘WOMAN’S BODY FOUND ON ESTATE’
Isolated incident indeed.
Of course, the police intended to reassure the public that this wasn’t the work of a serial killer, but this wording, intentionally or not, erases and obscures the reality of the national picture of ongoing violence against women.
We can tackle each of these events individually, working to catch individual perpetrators and achieve justice for individual victims. But until we as a society acknowledge the devastating and far-reaching impact of daily misogyny and sexualized violence, we will never stem the tide. No single example of sexism automatically gives rise to a specific incident of misogynistic violence, the picture is far more complex than that. But when you step back and join the dots between each of the different examples outlined in this book, it is very hard to deny that the bigger picture reveals systemic and widespread inequality which goes to the very heart of our society.
We could draw, if not a straight line, then a meandering, dotted one, between the childhood messaging that
girls are bad at STEM subjects, the hopeless publicity campaigns that compound the problem, the dearth of women in engineering and science and the creation of medicines and crash test dummies that endanger women’s very lives.
Between the largely male front-page bylines, the sexist portrayal of female politicians, the explosion in online abuse of political women and the dramatic under-representation of women in our government.
Between the deliberately titillating portrayal of sexual violence in the papers, the rampant victim-blaming in our society, the low rates of reporting by victims and the paucity of convictions for rape.
Between the ubiquity of online pornography, the failure of schools, universities and government to tackle sexual harassment in education, the lack of sex and relationships education and the shockingly high rates of sexual assault on campus.
Within such a context, the repeated rape, murder, harassment and abuse of women is not a coincidence, or a series of one-off occurrences, but an inevitable, deadly conclusion. Every week that we fail to see the pattern, to acknowledge the invisible problem, and to take meaningful action, two more women pay with their lives.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am enormously grateful to Jane Martinson, without whom this book, these columns and quite possibly my entire journalistic career would not have existed at all. To Bim Adewunmi, Nosheen Iqbal, Malik Meer, Kira Cochrane, Leah Harper, Pamela Hutchinson and Suzie Worroll, who I have been lucky enough to work with as editors, colleagues and friends at The Guardian, and who have guided, supported and championed me. To Patrick Kingsley and Lauren Wolfe, who supported me at the very beginning of my career and answered all manner of stupid questions.
I would like to thank the article subjects and interviewees who have been so generous with their time and expertise and the schools, universities and organizations that have allowed me to gather research and experience. I am, as always, deeply indebted to the thousands of inspiring, strong, clever, funny women who have shared their Everyday Sexism experiences with the project website and Twitter account. A big thank you to the members of Women in Journalism, who provided inspiration, encouragement and community. And to the members of the coven, for solidarity and support.
I am also deeply indebted to my wonderful agent Georgia Garrett, to Madeleine Dunnigan and everybody at Rogers, Coleridge and White. And to Nicola Crossley, my fantastic, supportive and flexible editor, Jess Barrett, Melissa Bond, Claudia Connal, Amy Fulwood, Judith Long, Helen Upton and everybody at Simon & Schuster. It is always a joy to work with you all. Thanks also to my excellent and eagle-eyed copyeditor Jo Whitford for her tirelessly thorough and precise work, and to Pip Watkins for her gorgeous cover design.
Finally, to my family, friends and my husband, Nick, who provided staunch and stubborn support as these columns racked up some of the highest numbers of misogynistic, abusive and violent comments on the Guardian website. (It is tempting to remark with relief that there is no comments section in a published book, but try telling that to the men who responded to my first book by inserting handwritten notes in bookshops saying: ‘Say no to feminism’ and ‘Women lie about rape’.) Thank you for keeping me going.
Also by Laura Bates
Everyday Sexism
Girl Up
First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2018
A CBS COMPANY
Essays first published in the Guardian newspaper between 2013 and 2017
Copyright © Laura Bates, 2018
The right of Laura Bates to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
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