Guardian article by Nina Power 8 March 2011

When young women feel they are no longer held back by their gender, one outcome is an increase in political confidence Nina Power The Guardian, Tuesday 8 March 2011

Britain may still have appalling representation of women in parliament (as of the general election there were 144 female MPs to more than 500 male MPs), but the streets tell a different story. In the four major education protests before Christmas, women were frequently at the forefront: organising, talking to the media, standing up against increasingly aggressive police tactics, and articulating how and why the cuts would affect students. In the European student protests of May 1968, the student leaders we remember were male (Rudi Dutschke, Daniel Cohn-Bendit); in 2011 many of the people responsible for heading meetings and co-ordinating occupations are women. The rise of women to senior positions in major trade unions – too long bastions of male dominance – must also be seen as a major victory for progressive politics. Of course, it would be a mistake to think that protest comes about because of the leadership of a few charismatic figures: which is why the participation of all taking part in occupations and protests should be celebrated – without imagining that these things simply emerge from nowhere or, as a recent argument has it, because social networking has suddenly allowed protest to be organised at lightning speed. In the buildup to what looks likely to be the biggest trade union demonstration in recent history, on 26 March, the role of women in organising and participating in protest will continue to be central. Nevertheless, for the usual suspects the participation of so many young women – in the education protests in particular – has given rise to a certain moral panic. See, for example, the hilarious Daily Mail cover: "Rage of the Girl Rioters". The attempted pillorying of these young women – accused of "lacking respect" – by the Mail is the latest in a long line of attacks on women who campaign directly against the state: the suffragettes; women involved in the 1926 general strike; the miners' protests in the mid-80s; those who fought for reproductive rights and against domestic violence. Just as with the attack on "ladettes" in the 1990s, what looks to be a moral criticism frequently masks a deeper political and economic fear – what shall we do when young women are academically successful, economically independent, socially confident and not afraid to enjoy themselves? Could there be anything more terrifying? It would be a mistake to imagine that the strong participation of women in recent political protests is something new; nevertheless, the flip side of this female visibility is the way in which women, particularly working-class women, are already far more likely to be negatively affected by the cuts. Combined with the disparity in pay between men and women, and the fact that it is women who still do most domestic work and childcare – even if they are doing two or three other jobs outside the home – it seems obvious why more women would be taking to the streets. The past few years have similarly seen an eruption of interest in feminism across the country, with meetings and book launches spilling over with women and men of all ages. Whatever the 1990s tried to tell us was over – from inequality to political commitment – has most definitely not gone away; and the idea that one would simply have a passive, ironic or otherwise disinterested stance towards the brutal and brutalising policies of a government hell-bent on removing any vestige of a social bond now looks historically outmoded. While there were many women tirelessly campaigning throughout the 1990s and 2000s on a variety of issues – both those that directly concerned women and as part of broader political campaigns – it was with the anti-war marches from 2003 onwards that the kind of street politics we see today came back on the agenda in a more visible way. Many of the schoolkids who played truant to attend anti-war protests have grown into articulate and politically passionate adults, rightly incensed that education is being transformed into something insanely expensive, increasingly exclusive and socially divisive. The explosive mix of single-issue campaigns (such as UK Uncut), broader anti-cuts struggles and a growing worldwide recognition that the corruption and complicity of governments are no longer tolerable means that everywhere men and women are realising that what unites them is far greater than what divides them. When young women feel they are no longer held back by their gender, that they can take on any job, that they are more likely to do well in education than their male peers, that they don't have to think of themselves as wives and mothers first, one outcome is an increase in political confidence. If you tell women they can be and can do anything they want, and then let them down – by taking away their education maintenance allowance, by making university prohibitively expensive, by forcing them to stay in poverty – they, along with their male peers, will make you pay for your lies and hypocrisies. While the Mail presumably thought that "girl rioters" would terrify its middle England readership, this should only serve to encourage us to recognise that female emancipation – and political emancipation more generally – will start with those most angry about its incompletion.

Locker-room Legacies - Julian Barnes (copyright probably The Observer, probably late 1970s)

A WIDELY cultivated, politically liberal and largely honest acquaintance of mine remarked the other day, during a conversation about sexual equality, ‘I’m all in favour of women’s liberation: it puts a lot more pussy on the market.’ If he’d said, ‘I’m all in favour of blacks breeding faster than whites: it means we won’t run short of bus drivers,’ those present might have been shocked, or at least thought him striving for a jauntily subversive effect. As it was, there was a burst of complicit male laughter, and that hiss of relief at the voicing of a generally unspoken group truth. The women’s movement in this country, which ought to have produced the most far-reaching post-war social revolution, has so far failed with many classes and types of women: with working-class women, upper-class women, and middle-class conservatives; with those daunted by their own freedom, those already awed and tamed by men, with gold-diggers and outflanked hausfraus. It has been disgracefully trivialised by the Press, paid token homage to by broadcasting, betrayed by agitators for the ‘return of the feminine woman,’ and unhelpfully falsified by its more extreme package-thinker members. But it’s failed nowhere more spectacularly than with men — and in particular with educated, liberal-progressive men whom one might have expected to acknowledge its self-evident truths. Can you, for a start, name a single significant male contributor to the debate on women’s rights. Parliament has removed most of the legal and economic hobbles from women. A bit more tidying up, and they will finally have achieved theoretical equality: that is to say, they will have obtained the sort of official protection from discrimination that Catholics achieved after the Catholic Emancipation Act, or that blacks have obtained from the past decade or so of legislation. But no one can seriously claim that blacks are significantly better treated by whites in our society; and there’s little evidence either that men now treat women with significantly more fairness, kindness or understanding. Locker-room chat isn’t confined to locker-rooms; and it’s a more depressingly reliable indicator of what men really think about women than is their pillow- or table-talk. Its current tenor is also a sign that it will take more than a 10- or 15-year burst of polemic to establish in the averagely sapient man a gut feeling of sexual equality. It can’t, indeed, take less than a whole generation: gut feelings can’t be transplanted any more easily than guts, and sexual prejudices are dismayingly tenacious. So the generation of men whom one might expect to be flexible and sympathetic to the women’s movement — those, say, under 50 — are still, for all their libertarian reading, encumbered by the sexual attitudes implanted in their youth. The underground — and often the official — lore of their sex stated that men were dominant, aggressive, predatory, and promiscuous; and they reflexly take as universal facts the circumscribed values of their own adolescence. The sad truth is that, while for most women bed means love and sex, for most men it means love, sex and power. Women tend to philander from lack of love; men philander from a near-military sense of responsibility to their sex’s concept of itself, and as a constant, nervy testing of their own sexual power. And when it comes to power, and the renunciation of power, there is one sure rule: those with it don’t give it up unless and until it is forcibly taken away from them. The parallel with political power is direct. Who — except a freakish intellectual - has ever been argued into giving up political power when he doesn’t have to; and give it up, moreover, for the sake of an abstraction, a principle? The idea is ludicrous. So with sexual power: who would give it up unless he had to? Power is nice, thrilling per se; it brings privileges and the heady pleasure of dispensing largesse in one’s turn; it makes one bigger, better, wiser, stronger — doesn’t it? And then, on a cynical level, there is this subversive argument: since I won’t get any credit from most other men for behaving well and yielding up my power, why shouldn’t I continue to behave as I do now? In “The Female Eunuch” Germaine Greer remarked that women failed to understand how much men hated them. If hate sounds too polemically strong to be true, then try these words for what men do to women in their daily encounters with them: patronise, trivialise, colonise. In the old, traditional lexicon of sexual commerce, language reflected the power structure: there were no feminine equivalents for words like cuckold. In the sexual vocabulary of the seventies, there are no feminine equivalents for words like: ballbreaker, slag, cockteaser, score, nymphomaniac. Getting it right isn’t a matter of waiting for women to produce an answering vocabulary of contempt; it means waiting for the scorn, condescension and sporadic hate which generate that male vocabulary to wither away. It isn’t going to happen quickly.