Mick Hartley

Sonia Sodha reflects on the Brighton violence:

Those of us attending Europe’s largest feminist conference at the weekend in Brighton had more than logistics to contend with. A rabble of angry men greeted us at the venue by screaming “shame on you!” and brandishing placards telling us to get out of their city. The previous night a violent group, “Trans Bash Back”, smashed multiple windows and graffitied the venue, then went on social media to declare “paint washes off, blood never does”.

A veiled threat – and not very veiled. These men are vile. The silence from most politicians – Wes Streeting was a noble exception – was deafening. Sian Barry’s victim-blaming – the meeting was a provocation – was a disgrace…..a female MP condemning a meeting of women as it offended a few deranged men.

I took away three reflections. The first is just how widespread the rollback of women’s rights is. There are the most distressingly obvious cases where religious fundamentalists in Afghanistan and Iran have dismantled women’s basic freedoms. But there are plenty of others: in Argentina, the US and Hungary, authoritarians are eroding women’s access to safe abortion. Ireland and Germany have legislated to allow men to self-identify into women’s spaces in the name of progress. Australia’s (female) sex discrimination commissioner appears unable to define something as basic as what makes someone male or female. In an increasingly polarised world, women are being squeezed by misogynistic forces from both right and left.

Second, technology has made it much harder to fight female exploitation. Gone are the days when lobbying newspaper editors to drop Page 3 could be chalked up as a hard-won success. Today corporations make billions out of hosting criminally violent yet ubiquitous porn. The forces that oppress women have become more distant and shadowy.

And finally, I don’t think feminism has yet fully confronted the implications that ageing societies have for women’s rights. Unless taxes on those of working age rise in the next few decades, societies will be unable to afford healthcare and social care for older citizens, and it will of course be women who end up shouldering the burden as the state recedes, to the detriment of their health, employment and general wellbeing.

Back to the movement that sees nothing wrong with men screaming at female rape survivors; that thinks lining up bottles of male urine outside a public building is effective protest; that believes male demands for validation should be elevated in a way that trashes women’s legal protections. It’s both extraordinary and embarrassing that so many so-called progressive grown-ups have been duped into thinking this childish and parochial campaign is some sort of brave liberation struggle rather than an insistence we concede any notion of the rights and responsibilities we owe each other. But they have, and it’s consequently no less of a threat to women than the old-school misogyny of the right. So it is that feminists are forced to hold the line across multiple fronts.