The worst of it is, it’s not even a surprise. Julian Assange and his defenders have shown a remarkable – and prolonged – ability to smear, attack, or simply ignore, the weight of the charges levelled against him in Sweden.
Yes, it’s wildly fantastical to suggest that Assange has any more chance of being extradited to the United States from a Swedish court than a British street corner, but from the moment Assange was first accused, the women involved have been smeared as everything from liars to CIA employees.
Yes, it’s indescribably awful that Representative Todd Akin – a Republican congressman and in all probability the next senator for Missouri – claimed that abortion was unnecessary, because in the case of ‘legitimate rape’ a pregnancy could not arise. But the Republican party – and the anti-abortion movement both in the US and across the world – has shown a shocking ease with untruth and pseudo-science.
And yes, it’s horrific that George Galloway apparently believes that sexual consent, once given, becomes an issue of social nicety, not morality – in his words ‘Not everybody needs to be asked prior to each insertion’ – but some of Galloway’s political allies have not been noted for their support for women’s rights.
No, the worst thing about this trio and their defenders is that they reveal what we already knew in our hearts, but didn’t want to give voice to: that the battle for gender equality is going backwards; that feminist revolution has given way to patriarchal counter-revolution.
Since the coalition came to power, the number of unemployed men has remained roughly static; the number of unemployed women has increased by twenty per cent. The number of women claiming jobseeker’s allowance is at its highest for almost two decades. That’s in part because the public sector employs large numbers of women, but the more troubling statistic is the large numbers of women who have been forced to give up their jobs voluntarily. The cost of childcare is now so high that a couple on an average household income is better off with one member of the household looking after the children full-time. There is the very real danger that the long-term consequence of the government’s failed deficit reduction programme will be the permanent transfer of thousands of women out of work and back into the home. The failure to address the growing boil of adult social care will also place severe limitations on the career lifespans and prospects of countless people, predominantly women. Hidden by the sound and fury over playing fields is the reality that the movement back to an examination-dominated system instead of continuous assessment has seen girls slip behind boys for the first time in decades.
A surfeit of orthodoxy is toxic in politics, but a movement without shibboleths ceases to have any power or relevance. When Harriet Harman said it was impossible to be a feminist and a Conservative MP, she was right; you’re not a feminist if you impoverish single mothers, gut adult social care and force women out of the workplace and back into the home. But she was met with little more than embarrassed silence from her own side. We’ve allowed the right to take feminism from us twice: first by defining it as a creed of the crazed, and again, through appropriating it for their own. The problem with disparate and divided movements is they can’t take revenge; they can’t fundraise to expel George Galloway from the Commons, to keep Senator Claire McCaskill in Washington, or form the most effective advocacy organisations against an asylum decision. The moral arc of the universe is long, and it has be compelled to bend towards justice. That requires political definitions that demand verbs as well as nouns.
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Stephen Bush writes a weekly column for Progress, the Tuesday review, and tweets @stephenkb
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I don’t disagree that some of the under-current of Galloway and his crew is very disturbing and the Tories historically have been luke-warm on feminism but jumping to sweeping generalisations that a Tory MP cannot support equality is slightly over the top as well. Sometimes things move too far in the opposite direction such as Labour enforcing 50-50 quotas on Council election seats in areas where there no/few women candidates, driving out good local candidates and even superceding other minorities groups who have no representation at all. Balance and sensible application of policy should always be at the centre of this question – no good replace one inequality with another.
I wonder if, as a Commonwealth citizen, Julian Assange might be eligible to contest the parliamentary seat that is being vacated by Louise Mensch? And, as an EU citizen, would Anna Ardin be eligible to stand against him? Probably not, but that would only ever have been a bonus. Bring it on.
If rape, as such, has to be a ground for legal abortion, then does that mean that there has to have been a prior conviction for that very specific offence before the abortion can be carried out? If not, then are we supposed to accept, and to enact into law, the principle that any heterosexual act is rape, either by definition, or at the very least if the woman happens to say that it was? It has to be one or the other. Which is it, and why?