After Harriet Harman's remarks about men and power, Janice Turner has an article in today's Times, on "Why we need feminism more than ever" (that, at least, is the hardcopy title).
It is Friday evening at Liverpool Street station, London, and while browsing commuters kill time in WH Smith before their trains, a dozen young women attack a stand of lads’ magazines. Over the covers of Nuts, Zoo, GQ and Loaded — “50 Boobiest Blondes”, “Summer’s real breast fest” — they slip brown paper bags adorned with handwritten slogans: “Don’t be Nuts — get this sexism out of my face”, “Stop mainstreaming porn”, “FHM: For Horrible Misogyny”.
Soon the mags in bags cover a whole shop wall and the women, activists from the feminist group Object, pause exhilarated yet apprehensive, awaiting a response. Mostly people are puzzled. A few men sidle out of the shop. But when Object asks women to sign its petition, to have lads’ mags reclassified as porn and displayed on top shelves, no one refuses. “I never feel comfortable when they’re on the counter in a newsagent’s,” says one woman, clutching a copy of Grazia. Finally the store manager comes over and actually apologises. “I don’t like selling them,” he shrugs, “but it’s company policy.”
The trial of Lubna Hussein, the Sudanese journalist sentenced to 40 lashes for wearing trousers in public, was postponed yesterday, a tribute to her gamble in choosing worldwide publicity rather than accepting the sentence, as most do. The Khartoum police promptly found others to beat — the women who had come to protest.
This story resonates all the more in the month of the Afghan presidential elections. It’s worth making the case for why we should spend money and effort and yes, sometimes, military lives, in defence of women’s rights, in places that barely recognise the concept.
At a tense time in the Afghan mission, it’s an unfashionable point to make. On Monday, Bill Rammell, the Armed Forces Minister, defined the purpose of the British deployment more tightly than ever. “Our troops are in Afghanistan to keep our country safe from the threat of terrorism,” he said. “To prevent al-Qaeda having a secure base from which to threaten us directly.” […]
But in all the fervent new realism, I must say, I find it hard to give up the belief that one valuable aim is to improve women’s lives in a country where to be born female is to be dealt a horrendously difficult card. Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist, said two weeks ago: “I find it hard to come to Afghanistan and not ask, ‘Why are we here? Who cares about the Taleban? Al-Qaeda is gone . . .” But after watching a new girls’ school opening in the mountains, and “after witnessing the delight in the faces of those little Afghan girls crowded three to a desk waiting to learn, I found it very hard to write, ‘Let's just get out of here’.”
Mick Hartley 
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