I thought of Hogan when I first read about Lindsay Clancy, who leapt from a second-floor window of her Massachusetts home in January 2023. Clancy was not holding her three children; they lay dead or dying in the basement, after their mother had strangled them with exercise bands. Although there are clear similarities between the two cases, my current feelings toward Clancy are very different from those I had toward Hogan. Like many feminists at the time, I struggled to sympathize with him. The “earthquake of insanity” line, in the context of a domestic dispute and a wife who wishes to leave, did not seem to indicate sustained mental illness, but a version of the old provocation defense overwhelmingly relied on by abusive men. By contrast, I find myself feeling enormous pity for Clancy, despite the horror she inflicted on five-year-old Cora, three-year-old Dawson and eight-month-old baby Callan. Her defense claims she was suffering from postpartum psychosis, left undiagnosed in the months leading up to the killings, during which she repeatedly sought help. While this does not lessen the horror of her actions, it suggests a different loss of control — not anger or hatred, but something far more desperate.

I am not alone in feeling this way. Clancy has attracted outpourings of sympathy from mothers ever since the killings took place. By early February 2023, following the announcement that state prosecutors would be pursuing murder charges, many were sharing their own postpartum struggles, some even suggesting that “it could be any one of us”. One open letter signed by more than 80 women declared that “as mothers, we know Lindsay was not in a healthy space to carry out the acts she is accused of and we will stand by her in her darkest hour as we wish any other mother would do for us if we found ourselves struggling too”. Now that the trial is taking place, supporters have gathered outside the courtroom, wearing pink clothing as a show of solidarity and displaying slogans such as “Believe” and “She Needed Help”. A GoFundMe on behalf of Clancy’s parents, to help with their travel and living costs, has now raised more than one million dollars. It is hard to think of a comparable example in which a father has killed his own children and received so much support. Few men would want to say, “I could have been John Hogan, too”.

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While the trial is nominally about the distinction between madness and badness, Clancy’s identity as a mother has shaped the public debate around it. In a 2024 interview with the New Yorker, her ex-husband Patrick described her as someone who loved her children but whose mental state deteriorated dramatically toward the end of 2022. Clancy consulted multiple therapists over her anxiety and insomnia, was prescribed an increasing number of medications, and had a brief stay in a psychiatric hospital at the beginning of 2023. She disclosed her thoughts of harming her children to her family because they so terrified her. At no point was any severe mental illness diagnosed. For many, this timeline offers a ready-made feminist narrative. It is what happens when mothers are ignored, when maternal health is trivialized, and when research into female psychiatric disorders is neglected. It is “fundamentally a story”, writes The New Yorker‘s Jessica Winter, “of who is listened to, who is believed and taken seriously, and who isn’t”. The case of a woman killing her own children has become an argument for greater compassion toward women — rather than serving as a reminder that women can be just as violent as men.

One does not have to doubt Clancy’s account to feel a little uneasy about this conclusion. Postnatal mental health is indeed neglected, and postpartum psychosis is yet to gain formal classification as a distinct disorder. Yet the fact remains that Clancy committed a horrendous act. Is her trial really the place for pink t-shirts and #BelieveHer sloganeering? And is Clancy really the representative that this cause needs? Female support for Clancy has been a gift to anyone wishing to define feminism as hypocritical or present feminists as willing to defend the most evil acts just because a woman has committed them. I myself worry about my own fixation on Clancy’s suffering over that of her children. Could it be that we are all reluctant to acknowledge the extremity of female violence because it is so politically inconvenient? 

Still, I do not feel my pity is entirely misplaced. Many of the recommendations being made by Clancy’s supporters are uncontroversial: more understanding and better treatment of postnatal mental health crises, less pressure on mothers to hide their struggles, more joined-up prescribing of psychiatric medication. Nonetheless, it is not clear whether any of this would have stopped Clancy from killing her children. Her treatment was flawed but, as Patrick Clancy later pointed out, she seemed to be going through a positive phase immediately before the killings, making it impossible for him and others to know when to intervene. This does not seem to be an instance in which one can simply blame the patriarchy. Indeed, to do so risks sanitizing the maternal experience. I think there are other, darker reasons why many mothers feel sympathy for Clancy.

When mothers claim they “could have been Lindsay Clancy”, it is more than just an expression of solidarity. Clancy has become a vessel for a kind of collective maternal fear. Many of us have tried to imagine what it would be like to end up in her situation. In the midst of all the sleeplessness and isolation of early motherhood, the physical power we have over our children feels horrendous and threatening. We care about Lindsay Clancy because she is our very worst nightmare. We pictured ourselves in her shoes before she even committed her terrible act.

Postpartum psychosis is rare, and postpartum psychosis leading to the murder of one’s own children is rarer still. There are countless mentally ill mothers out there who do not kill their children. However, intrusive thoughts of harming one’s baby are common. More than half of new mothers experience them and they are not related to any greater incidence of actual harm. When my own sons were tiny, I lived in terror of “mad moments” in which I might throw them down the stairs or drop them out of a window. The feeling was akin to the thoughts you might have standing on a high ledge, terrified that you might suddenly decide to step off, even though that is the last thing you want to do. The comforting explanation for these thoughts is that they are linked to a desire not to harm but to protect your child. We run through a film reel of the most terrible things that could happen to our children: harm coming through our own hands being the most terrible of all. When we look at Lindsay Clancy, we see the most horrific malfunction of maternal love and feel immense relief that this never happened to us. That is why we feel sorry for her.

Of course, an intrusive thought is not the same as a “command hallucination” or hearing a voice telling you, as Clancy later put it, that “she had to kill her children and herself”. One of the most chilling elements of Clancy’s account of her actions is the sense of time pressure. She felt that she had to act in that moment or “neither she nor her children would be safe”. It is hard not to ask “what if that moment had never come?” She must, surely, think of this constantly.

Clancy’s act is not excusable, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t worthy of our compassion. In the end, however, there are no slogans that can remedy this tragedy and there is no one else to blame. The mind can do terrible, twisted things out of love as well as hate.

A lot of the most vocal feminists of recent years are obsessed with helping men. In her 2018 book, self-styled Guilty Feminist Deborah Frances-White declares that feminism “must fight for men who are being pushed into lonely desolation by the patriarchal pressures”. And in her recently published On Our Best Behaviour, Elise Loehnen tells women to spare a thought for the boys: girls might have to suppress our feelings “to function in what otherwise might be dysfunctional relationships or a dysfunctional society”, but “at least we’re allowed to cry”.

For years, it is implied, feminists have focused on women and failed to acknowledge that patriarchy hurts men, too. And men cannot be expected to sort this out for themselves because, well, they’re just men. Rather like remembering birthdays, making doctor’s appointments or caring for elderly relatives, sorting out the patriarchy is something that women must do because women have always done it, therefore making us better at it. In her book, What About Men? — in which she argues that “we’ve neglected our boys” — Caitlin Moran writes: “The advantage women have is that we talk about the patriarchy, and we know how it disadvantages us”, whereas “men haven’t yet started the conversation.”

One could be forgiven for thinking that no one has made these particular observations before — that feminism has thus far ignored men’s inner lives. Of course, one could also argue — with some legitimacy, I’d say — that women ought to be allowed one solitary political movement just for them. But the point would be moot, because the reality is: there have always been feminists expressing concern for men’s emotional lives. The fact that this gains so little acknowledgement is symptomatic of neglect, not of men, but of female intellectual legacies.

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There is an entire PhD thesis to be written on “feminist takes on why men aren’t allowed to cry”, with a special section devoted to “why we keep forgetting this issue has already been noted”. In 1983, for instance, Andrea Dworkin made a speech at an American convention that was entitled, the National Organisation for Changing Men. There she acknowledged the shame and impotence felt by many of the ‘good’ men around her: “Everything makes men feel so bad: what you do, what you don’t do, what you want to don’t want to do but are going to anyway.”

It is a measure of the defeatism that dominates this particular strand of feminism that its early adherents were already offering a critique of its limitations. Granting men more space in which to emote might provide them with more healthy ways in which to interact, but it is not the same as transforming power relations between the sexes. As Adrienne Rich wrote in 1976, “men are increasingly aware that their disorders have something to do with patriarchy. But few of them wish to resign from it.” Her suspicion that “the majority of ‘concerned’ or ‘profeminist’ men secretly hope that ‘liberation’ will give them the right to shed tears while exercising their old prerogatives” does not seem particularly off-target. Half a century on, many men might wish to cry about what unfettered access to porn has done to them; far fewer are keen to take on the industry itself.

Do men actually want to save themselves from patriarchy? Dworkin, at the National Organisation for Changing Men, talked of meeting men who would tell her, “what you’re saying about me isn’t true. It isn’t true of me. I don’t feel that way. I’m opposed to all of this.” It’s the Eighties equivalent of #NotAllMen, a phrase now so widely mocked that it feels incorrect to write it without a hashtag. Yet Dworkin’s response was not just to laugh or shame. “I say: don’t tell me. Tell the pornographers. Tell the pimps. Tell the warmakers. Tell the rape apologists and the rape celebrationists and the pro-rape ideologues.” She asks men to take responsibility — to challenge one another — rather than simply offering up their apologies to women.

Today’s popular feminists see men more as victims than agents. Moran blames the ascendance of Andrew Tate on teenage boys hearing phrases such as “‘Typical men!’ or, ‘Ugh, toxic patriarchy!’”. Amia Srinivasan, in 2021’s The Right to Sex, concludes that “a feminism worth having must, not for the first time, expect women to be better — not just fairer, but more imaginative — than men have been”. Here, the helplessness of the Lost Boy merges with a presumption of over-sensitivity and moral inferiority. I wonder if, when Moran and Srinivasan write these things, they really grasp that men can read them too. If men react badly to suggestions that they are useless as a sex, what benefit lies in finding other, albeit more benevolent, ways to say it? Men are granted no dignity, no capacity to change on their own terms. They are portrayed as weak and petty, so why should they even try?

There is also something deeply and depressingly gender-normative in the expectation that women be better than men. Again, this is something that feminists seem to have forgotten — even if their predecessors analysed its implications. Rich already pointed out in Of Woman Born that, “the women’s movement is still seen in terms of the mother-child relationship”; feminism is seen “either as punishment and abandonment of men for past bad behaviour, or as a potential healing of men’s pain by women”. Either way, it “will ease men into a more humane and sensitive life. In short … women will go on doing for men what men cannot or will not do for each other or themselves.”

Rich wanted this infantilising dynamic to change. But half a century later, Moran is insisting that men can’t be expected to act independently because, “it’s so much easier for women and girls to show love and support for each other”. We are, apparently, just better at this sort of thing, so it’s on us to help men be more human. If this is irritating for women, it is profoundly insulting to men.

Indeed, one of the great ironies of a position that dismisses earlier feminists as insufficiently sympathetic to men is that there are far more parallels between today’s fix-men feminism and genuine misandry. “To be male,” wrote Valerie Solanas in The SCUM Manifesto, perhaps the one (known) work of the Second Wave that might genuinely be said to be man-hating, “is to be deficient, emotionally limited; maleness is a deficiency disease and males are emotional cripples”. Solanas wrote off men as beyond help; fix-men feminism takes a similarly disparaging view of half the human race, while patronisingly offering to save them. The hostile response of many men to Moran’s book shows that pity is counter-productive; men are not so emotionally illiterate that they can’t understand they are being belittled.

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This rhetoric is dangerous to women, as well as irritating. Fix-men feminism validates the excuses abusive men have used for their mistreatment of female partners — how can he be in touch with her feelings when he’s not even in touch with his own? — while providing good men with a reason to feel victimised. The reason why “I Can Fix Him” has become such a popular parody meme is because we know it isn’t true. The woman who imagines herself “fixing” the Joker is funny; the one who imagines fixing a real-life Tate acolyte is less so. It is not safe for women in toxic relationships to feel they are responsible for men’s responses, nor is it safe for men to be told that yes, if they hate women, perhaps it is because feminists have driven them to misogyny by neglecting their needs. Many men who hurt women really do feel powerless, but placing their redemption in the hands of women is hardly likely to inspire them to change.

Moran has said that her book is written in part as a response to the anxieties of mothers of sons. (She has two daughters.) I have sons, two of whom are teenagers, and the challenges they face offer a constant reminder of the way in which the myth of masculine invulnerability sells both men and women short. Men are not forced into a state of heroic independence, but there is shame, and often rage, when they are forced to acknowledge their reliance on women. I do not see how telling them they are needier than they already are can resolve this. In her 1979 essay Man Child, Audre Lorde described the importance of “teaching my son that I do not exist to do his feeling for him”. “Men who are afraid to feel,” she wrote, “must keep women around to do their feeling for them while dismissing us for the same supposedly ‘inferior’ capacity to feel deeply.” We can hardly eradicate this toxic maternal dynamic by replicating it.

The problem, then, is not that feminists do not care enough. If we respect men — if we do not see them as helpless, stupid children, dumb Ken dolls, or “a bit like dogs” — we ought to consider them up to the challenge of a feminism that does more than oscillate between mocking and pandering to them. Fix-men feminism views itself as realistic, “muggins here” taking charge because men can’t be better. In truth, it lowers expectations, restricting opportunities for growth. “He can’t change unless he wants to” might be a cliché, but it’s one that today’s feminists would do well to take on board. It may be that the best thing we can do for men is not to make our movement all about them.

I think of her often, mainly because I — along with others in our anorexia treatment group — was mean to her. The severity of her illness both irritated and frightened us. It felt as though she was parodying us, representing sickness with all of the person taken out. The only fierceness she exhibited was with regard to food rituals: scraping out bread rolls, then rolling crumbs between her fingers, making Slim-a-Soup, then tossing three slops down the sink before taking one sip of the rest.

L’s diagnosis was the same as ours, and in some cases, her body weight was not dramatically different. Nonetheless, she seemed to inhabit a different space entirely. Like us, she might have been afraid of gaining weight, but she was beyond fearing recovery, that half-resisted, half-desired transformation of self. For L, the very idea seemed ridiculous. Everything had been burned away, every remaining muscle, every trace of her identity, to the point where one would have had to build an entirely new person in her place.

I am sure that today L would have met the criteria for a diagnosis of terminal anorexia nervosa. In 2022, US eating disorders clinician Jennifer Gaudiani, along with Joel Yager and Alyssa Bogetz, published a paper recommending palliative care and assistance in dying for anorexia sufferers who “simply cannot continue to fight”. (Bogetz, a sufferer herself, died before the paper’s publication.) Here in the UK, new NHS guidance has been issued for patients with severe and enduring eating disorders (SEED). The “SEED pathway” includes taking the focus away from “full recovery or weight gain” and offering “palliative care interventions focused on pain and symptom management”.

Many have reacted to this news with horror. I am horrified too, yet when I think of L, it gives me pause. The final weeks of her life were appalling. She had no peace, surrounded by people who could not accept her as she had become. Three days before she died, she was still going through the pantomime of “group lunch”, when we would sit round a table and act as if we could eat like “normal people”, in preparation for “afterwards”. Rather than prioritise her comfort, we challenged her over the breadcrumbs she’d flick across the table. We each told tales if we saw her hiding food, nominally concerned at her “lying to the group”, but also resentful about how her rule-breaking might reflect badly on us. Her last days on Earth were torment; she was forced to pretend — for our sake, not hers — that she had a chance.

I am against normalising the concept of terminal, incurable anorexia. At the same time, I know, both rationally and from experience, that some long-term sufferers do become unreachable. I am sure that offering them palliative care would lead to a better, more humane death. But it’s a position that makes me feel callous and compromised. If we start to redefine particular anorexia cases — especially if we start talking about them as “terminal” — we need to consider our long history of bad attitudes towards the illness.

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There have been significant changes in public and medical interpretations of anorexia over the past 40 years. Many of them have been positive. When I was first diagnosed in the mid-Eighties, three things were generally known about the “slimmer’s disease”: Lena Zavaroni had it; Karen Carpenter died of it; non-famous sufferers were selfish, vain and attention-seeking. This was the environment in which women such as L and I first received treatment. In 1986’s Hunger Strike, Susie Orbach described Eighties treatment programmes as “predicated on conflict with the patient and her very difficult set of behaviours rather than on engagement with her and her feelings”.

My first hospitalisation was in 1987. I was force-fed and, until I gained weight, denied “privileges” — getting out of bed, going to the toilet alone, receiving books and letters, having conversations, even having the light on. I was, it was made clear to me, a bad person whose “performance” of illness was inconveniencing everyone else. I was 12 at the time. Looking back, I tend to think of what happened as formative, turning what might have been a relatively short illness into a state of long-term alienation from the body. Similar things, I suspect, may have happened to L. We were shrews in need of taming.

I would never wish to see the return of such attitudes. Coercion traumatised us and for the most part, it did not work. Old-style force-feeding usually targeted sufferers who had reached a stage of severe physical decline, little attention having been paid to earlier, psychological symptoms. Today, there is greater focus on early intervention, which has far better outcomes. There are evidence-based treatment models, such as Maudsley Anorexia Nervosa Treatment for Adults (Mantra), which provides structure and long-term support. Anorexia diagnoses have increased significantly over the past 50 years, as have hospital admissions and the length of hospital stays — in contrast with decreases for other severe mental illnesses.

However, the mortality rate for anorexia remains the highest for any mental illness, at around 5.1 deaths per 1,000 person-years. Treatments are better informed and less likely to cause trauma, but have not necessarily improved for those furthest down the line. It’s here, I think, that the much-needed backlash against viewing sufferers as “wilful” may have had an unintended consequence.

There is far more compassion for anorexia sufferers now. We tend not to call them spoilt brats in need of a slap and a sandwich. But when I read works such as Hunger Strike, I cannot help feeling that the way in which we have resolved what Orbach called “the conflict” has not been through engagement so much as through retreat.

In recent years, I have noticed a drive to emphasise the (slight) genetic component to anorexia. The Guardian columnist Gaby Hinsliff has been explicit about the exculpatory potential of this, portraying it as liberation from “the idea that sickness must be someone’s fault, or that they could get well if only they chose to snap out of it”. In tandem, I have seen an increase in the portrayal of anorexia via metaphors such as that of the “Evil Friend Ana” who takes control of an innocent individual. The Beat website, for instance, includes a post on “Ana” versus “the real me” in which the sufferer describes herself as “a girl possessed”. But anorexia is not like schizophrenia; the voice you hear is your own.

I don’t think for a minute that anyone can “snap out of” anorexia. However, I feel that it is profoundly unhelpful to depict sufferers are having no agency, and to downplay the cultural, familial and political aspects. To insist, as I do, that anorexia is political is not to reduce it, but to recognise that eating, gender and the body cannot be understood outside of their social and historical context. Hatred of one’s own body, and of the act of putting food inside it, does not “just happen”, even if it seems like a bizarre invasion. I only really began to understand the factors that led to my own madness when I was in my forties, years older than L ever became.

The concept of terminal anorexia legitimises this idea of invasion, as though some bodies are simply infected with uninhabitability. But it has arisen at a time when many of the triggers of bodily alienation are more obvious than ever before. Sexual abuse; pornography; the diet and cosmetic surgery industries; the idealisation of underweight bodies; the objectification of pubescent girls; the belief that sexualised bodies represent inner identities. None of these is trivial. They might not be the things you are actually thinking about when you have anorexia, but I simply do not believe that anyone is born pre-programmed to reject their own body. It is a learned thought pattern.

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To be clear, I am not proposing that anorexia, for all its symbolic potential, constitutes some well-thought-out rebellion against an oppressive society. As anyone who has had anorexia knows, it is not intellectually interesting as an experience; it is, for the most part, boring. You might appear unlike your growing, developing peers, but when you enter group therapy, you find that your symptoms match those of everyone else. You are in no way original.

I used to think there would be more dignity and less shame in viewing my own anorexia as mysterious and inexplicable. Thinking this way made recovery even more difficult: how can you recover, if none of it is really in your hands? “Terminal anorexia” seems to me the logical end point of denying the moral, political, and relational aspects of the disorder. It might make it easier to forgive the dying patient — to not hate and punish them — but it also denies society’s complicity. And once we say that anorexia has a terminal manifestation, can we ever unsay it? Once it becomes embedded in our understanding of what anorexia is, don’t we risk accepting that women such as L were never for this world?

And yet, in refusing to accept a terminal diagnosis, what do I ask of sufferers such as her? For them to hang on in there and try not to have a seizure in the occupational therapy room until the entire world gets fixed? In rejecting both the treatments of the past and the proposals of the present, I might seem to be wanting the worst of both worlds: neither forcing sufferers to live nor helping them to die. I know that a third option, helping them to live, is not always possible.

Nonetheless, I think we can distinguish between treatment programmes that focus on maintaining comfort rather than promoting weight gain, and ones that actually use words such as “terminal” and “palliative”. This might seem a subtle difference, but it matters. There has to be a middle ground, whereby showing compassion does not require us to abandon the principle that no one should be dying of anorexia at all. When L was dying, we treated her badly. To us, she was all illness, no person. I wish we had been better, but acceptance of the dying person should not come with acceptance of anorexia as a terminal disorder. It isn’t — or, if it is, it is only because we have made it so.

What Martin achieved in such a short space of time is remarkable. Like the criminalisation of marital rape, it is a change that forces us to reconsider social norms. When it comes to the body — particularly the female body — what is and is not illegal matters. It shapes how we understand both ourselves and how we expect to be treated by others. Following the law change, guidance on upskirting was added to the Department of Education’s Keeping Children Safe in Education booklet. This has not led to the imprisonment of multiple snap-happy teenage boys; its punitive impact is minimal. But as my partner, a teacher, tells me, there’s now an awareness in schools that it is unacceptable to dismiss upskirting on the basis that “boys will be boys”.

So, Martin deserves to feel proud of her activism. Yet in both her recent Guardian piece and her new book, No Offence, But, one gets the impression that she now feels torn. Partly, this is because she is now defined as “the upskirting girl”, her activism reduced to what was, for her, an experience of violation. But Martin also seems to be subtly distancing herself from what she actually achieved. “I’m proud that my political activism has had a lasting positive impact,” she writes, “but I also have a complex relationship with it.”

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This complex relationship is very obvious throughout No Offence, But. Billed as a progressive handbook offering “a space to explore the problematic, distracting or lazy comments we so often encounter”, its chapters each focus on a particular phrase: “Not all men”, “I see no colour”, “I don’t do politics”. Some are written by Martin, others by guest contributors. The tone is one of preaching to the converted. In her own sections, Martin is keen to emphasise her growth, but she also seems unduly embarrassed by her former self. Both her furious feminist awakening and the visible, measurable achievements that ensued are suddenly positioned as somewhat immature, unsophisticated and, worst of all, privileged.

There’s a certain strand of social justice activism that is not always kind to feminists who get their hands dirty. Ten years ago, when Caroline Criado Perez fought a successful battle to have Jane Austen appear on the new £10 note, her detractors were keen to denounce hers as “banknote feminism”. Criado Perez’s campaign had stressed the importance of female visibility and heritage; her critics zeroed in on the fact that Austen’s image would be appearing on money, something that marginalised women sorely lacked. A straightforward achievement was belittled because it was associated with the Bank of England.

In a similar fashion, feminists who work with, or to change, the criminal justice system can find themselves denounced as “carceral feminists”. “The thrust of the accusation,” writes Julie Bindel in Feminism For Women, “is that those of us that want consequences for men who rape and otherwise abuse women are unconcerned with the fact that the prison system is a problem in general.” The accusers tend to ignore the fact that many feminist organisations, such as Bindel’s own Justice for Women, state that they would prefer it if prisons were not necessary, accepting them only as a last resort, given that no one has come up with anything more effective. As Bindel argues: “It should be possible to challenge the race and class hierarchies upheld by the criminal justice system” without putting women at risk by junking it completely.

Indeed, it is possible. But if one does not wish to bear the taint of complicity, it is uncomfortable. Unfortunately for Martin, she seems to have realised this only after she succeeded in making the world a safer place for women.

Alison Phipps, a sociologist at Newcastle University, has made herself a leading voice against so-called carceral feminists. In her 2021 book Me, Not You, she includes Martin’s upskirting law in a list of things that should be opposed on the basis that they “move us away from our ultimate goals”. (She comments, disdainfully, that the new law was announced “to loud applause from mainstream feminists”, because if there’s one thing worse than being practical, it’s being practical and mainstream.) There’s a perfect world out there, and by making it illegal for a man to stick a camera between your legs and take a photo of your crotch, Martin has apparently made it that much harder for us to find it.

Me, Not You is a difficult book to read, because it is so staggeringly misogynistic. Women who seek legal solutions to sexual violence are routinely compared to racists and fascists, their desire for justice dismissed as an unhealthy reaction to trauma. “Being raped,” writes Phipps, “often involves a visceral fear of death, whether the rape is physically violent or not — it is what makes us freeze, instead of fighting back… And if we freeze, perhaps we need our ‘kill’ after the experience is over. Unlike Arya Stark, we do not do our own killing. Instead, we ask the ‘Angry Dad’ or ‘White Knight’ of the state or institution to do it for us.”

I won’t quote the rest of that paragraph, but suffice it to say that Phipps uses the fact that accusations of rape by white women have been used to justify violence against black men to argue that “allegations of sexual violence” — by which she means real ones, as well as false — are “tools of oppression”.

Rape victims have long been demonised, the narrative being that their violation has left them damaged, vengeful and morally suspect. Think, for instance, of Medusa, known not for what was done to her, but for the literal monster it made of her. Centuries later, these myths are still with us. In Down Girl, Kate Manne describes how the rape victim who goes to court “is envisaged not as playing her difficult part in a criminal proceeding, but rather as seeking personal vengeance and moral retribution”. Contrary to Phipps’s claims, imputing vengeful urges to rape victims is not intersectional feminism — or any form of feminism — but the same old patriarchy.

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Then again, in the non-carceral world that Phipps envisages, there would be no rape anyway: “There would be no national borders. There would be no prisons. There would be accountability, but not vengeance. … There would not be powerful groups dominating more marginalised ones through violence.”

One has to admire the chutzpah of a middle-class white woman writing a book that dismisses feminists who engage with the criminal justice system as “bourgeois white women” before offering up John Lennon’s Imagine as a radical solution to injustice. Then again, what is a feminism that retreats from engagement with tainted institutions left with, other than imagination?

In her chapter critiquing the phrase “the police are here to protect us”, Martin indulges in a similar form of straw-manning, only using her younger self, rather than other feminists, as the target: “I believed the police force to be a heroic institution that worked tirelessly to make society safer. They found the murderers and locked them up, they stopped violence before it got out of hand.” Did Martin really have such an idealised vision of the world? Or is it just necessary for her to pretend she did, in order to justify her earlier work? Has she heard the other feminists whispering behind her back, and decided to redeem herself, by rejecting carceral complicity?

I find it hard to believe that someone who went on to achieve so much was ever as naïve as she now implies. And I find it hard to read her undermining her activism. “It wasn’t until I was in my mid-twenties that I started to be more of a critical thinker,” she writes — meaning “someone who recognises cultural, social and geographical contexts and applies theories”, as opposed to someone whose analysis is “determined mostly by their automatic emotional response, their personal context and existing opinions”. Of course, Martin’s anger at being upskirted was an “automatic emotional response”; her highly successful legal campaign was rooted in her “personal context and existing opinions”. But now, it seems, she knows better than to let her feelings get the better of her.

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How is this anything other than a step backwards? Society has long taught women to consider our emotional responses unreliable, to view ourselves as less rational than men, less capable of seeing things objectively. The feminist claim that “the personal is political” is turned against us, as though somehow, anything that is too informed by what has happened in our own lives cannot be truly relevant to anyone else.

In this feminism designed for utopia, theory is always more attractive than flesh-and-blood human beings, especially the female body, which is too messy, too unsophisticated, too implicated. It is not a coincidence, I think, that anti-carceral feminism finds common cause with trans activism, both movements raging against the inconvenient women who continue to assert the boundaries of their bodies and the validity of their trauma.

This version of feminism is, in the end, not a turn away from complicity with power, but a turn away from women. It tells us to stay quiet in the aftermath of violation, for the greater good; it tells us to bear the costs of doing nothing, so that we may be pure enough for an imagined utopia. It tells us to behave as if we don’t have bodies, as if we can exist somewhere beyond the world as it is. Imagine there’s no upskirting. Imagine there’s no rape. Imagine there are no women. It isn’t hard to do, for some.

As a beneficiary of this new-found openness, I do not wish to appear ungrateful. Even so, there’s something about it that unsettles me. When Lisa Snowdon calls her show Midweek Menopause Madness, or the writer Kate Muir describes her “deranged perimenopausal mood swings”, or the actress Martine McCutcheon compares the approach of menopause with “losing your damn mind”, I am desperate to empathise. But I worry about the renewed embrace of the language of craziness to describe being an older woman.

“Thinking about menopause,” wrote Germaine Greer in The Change, “is like thinking about the menstrual cycle: there are two schools of thought”: “One holds that nothing of any significance is taking place, and the other that the stress and strain of what is taking place are so acute that sensible behaviour is not to be expected. Both kinds of arguments conceal crude misogyny. The ‘nothing happening’ school reserves the right to despise women who are encountering difficulties, and the ‘Sturm und Drang’ school allows itself to treat femaleness as a pathological condition.”

In talking about menopause, it seems that we are still in thrall to these two extremes. I fear that in its desire to reject the “nothing happening” state of affairs, which makes women who struggle with menopause feel wimpish and inferior, today’s menopause activism risks going all-out for “Sturm und Drang”. But what about those of us who do not want to be co-opted into this narrative, either?

The legacy of medical misogyny means there is pressure on women to emphasise the severity of symptoms in order to be taken seriously; we have so often been told our pain is “all in our heads”. Yet there is a simultaneous, overlapping history of female emotions — things which are indeed “all in our heads” — being pathologised. Women’s feelings have long been stripped of any social and political context, and therefore treated as purely biological, which makes it easier to apply the label of madness.

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Given the ways in which women’s expressions of anger and anxiety are so often used to discredit us, I question just how liberating some of today’s “menopause madness” rhetoric is. “Some of our negative feelings about menopause,” wrote Greer, “are definitely the result of our intolerance for the expression of female anger.” For many of us, middle age is the first time we feel confident enough to acknowledge the validity of certain emotions. In her 2019 memoir Flash Count Diary, Darcy Steinke describes herself feeling “angry more often, a menopausal condition that doctors classify as hormonal irritability but that I’m starting to see as a gateway to authenticity”. If we see a woman’s expression of anger purely as an unpleasant biological symptom, rather than an acceptance of feelings that she might once have suppressed, we are in danger of undermining her. When I was younger, I was often told that my resistance to male authority was not “normal”, and I believed it. Is it pathological not to believe it anymore?

It is no small thing to tell the world that women your age are going insane, regardless of whether or not you blame this on hormonal depletion. As Elinor Cleghorn writes in Unwell Women, the discovery of oestrogen a century ago did not lead to a straightforward replacement of “old ideas about women being ‘naturally’ defective and deficient”: “Where female nature had, in the past, been blanketed as ‘hysterical’ and ‘neurotic’, now it was hormonal.” Personal accounts in a book produced by campaign group Menopause Mandate, entitled It’s Beyond a Joke, position the benefits of Hormone Replace Therapy as proof that women are not going “properly” mad, yet the distinction seems to me very fine. In the age of Karen, we have not evolved to a stage at which accounts of menopausal derangement can be treated as politically neutral. The shouty middle-aged woman is not taken seriously, regardless of whether she is categorised as mad, bad or simply medication deprived.

I am conscious that, in writing this, I may be accused both of being anti-scientific (because I find the biological realities politically inconvenient) and unsympathetic (because I am having a less extreme menopause than other women). In a piece for The Guardian, Kate Muir claims that “while some lucky women joyously ‘sail through’ the menopause with little more than red clover tea, the reality is that 80% have symptoms — from brain fog to anxiety, depression, sleeplessness, exhaustion, vaginal dryness and stiff joints”. I worry about being perceived as one of these “lucky” red clover tea women — a traitor to the menopausal cause, oblivious to the suffering of her peers.

I do not find this life stage easy. The reason I cringe every time a woman my age seeks to bond over our shared “craziness” is due to my own particular sensitivities. I have spent time as a patient in psychiatric hospitals; the credibility that comes with being perceived as “sane” is not something I treat lightly. I am not prepared to let go of it, in order to feel I am part of the “menopausal club”.

Besides, I am not the only person who finds the evidence base for “menopausal madness” shaky, and not all of us are feminists. Just how many women are having severe menopause symptoms is not a settled matter. Recent research puts those experiencing measurable changes in brain function during menopause at 23%. While this is not insignificant, it does not seem to justify the way in which all women are now primed to suffer from “menopause brain”.

It is also unclear why symptoms differ so much. A 2022 article in the BMJ argued that “social and cultural attitudes contribute to the varied experience of menopause”, and that over-medicalisation risks “collapsing the wide range of experience at the average age associated with this natural process into a narrowly defined disease requiring treatment”. The authors estimated the prevalence of moderate to severe symptoms to be 16-40%, based on a 2021 survey of 11,771 women. They also suggested that women’s expectations and experiences of menopause were strongly influenced by “personal, family, and sociocultural factors”, and by “social values around reproduction and ageing”.

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The article was controversial. Some read in it a puritanical insistence that women should “keep calm and carry on”, despite there being treatments available to alleviate their suffering. To these readers, the authors’ resistance to medicalisation sounded like a return to the “nothing happening” school of thought described by Greer. The debate captured much about the push-pull nature of women’s relationship to medical authority. Are we validated by being labelled, or does validation come when we resist? And what might be the relationship between validation and truth?

My own view is that it is not in the least invalidating to acknowledge that how we feel about our bodies and minds is influenced by how we are told we should feel. Indeed, this is something with which women struggle at all stages of our lives. When teenage girls are described as prone to social contagion, some see in this a claim that their feelings are less real or painful. What I see is that women and girls are always presented with a limited range of acceptable things to express. Right now, “menopausal craziness” is socially and politically forgivable in a way that middle-aged women’s activism regarding other issues is not. This is not to say that hormones or bodily changes are irrelevant, but that the “mad” middle-aged woman is being constructed and discussed using only fragments of an experiential whole.

To be clear, this is not a call to be silent about menopause, or a dismissal of medical intervention when it is part of a holistic view of potential symptoms. Much good has been done in recent years by organisations such as The Menopause Charity and Menopause Mandate. I know women who say Hormone Replacement Therapy has changed their lives, and fully support attempts to make it more accessible and affordable for those who need it. Nonetheless, I resist the tendency to identify as menopausal crazy women. There are enough people in the world who will do this for us; we don’t need to do it to ourselves.

“My previous births have been fast,” I said, when I went into labour with my third, “so I’d like to come in now.” I was speaking to the woman at the midwife-led unit that is the only option where I live. (If you need a caesarean section, you have to be transferred to next town.) “Third babies are notoriously difficult,” was her response.

What an odd thing to say to a woman already in labour. The “notoriously” suggested it wasn’t based on any actual evidence, but rather a kind of folk wisdom. It felt as though I was being warned not to tempt fate, not to assume that this baby would just pop out. I saw myself being categorised as one of those arrogant women who presumes to know her own body, only to be taught a harsh yet much-deserved lesson. “Third babies are notoriously difficult” sounded not unlike “third-time mothers shouldn’t get above themselves”.

In fact, I have never been particularly cocky about childbirth. When I was pregnant with my first child, back in the days when the Right-wing press were still obsessed with famous women being “too posh to push”, I wondered if I might be able to get an elective caesarean myself. I did not particularly care about childbirth being a wonderful experience, or about “doing it well”. I didn’t care if the Daily Mail thought I was a joke.

What I cared about was not having a child who would face the same difficulties as my brother, who was starved of oxygen at birth. This has had serious consequences for him, and for the rest of my family. Just how serious is hard to gauge. He was born traumatised; there has never been a before to compare the after with. What there has been instead is the hazy outline of an alternative life, one that runs parallel to the one he has now. It’s a life that began with the problem being identified sooner, with him being delivered quickly, perhaps by emergency caesarean. The difference between this and his actual life comes down to something small: mere moments, mere breaths.

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I was born three years after my brother, in a larger hospital, where my mother was induced and monitored carefully. There is something very strange about being the sibling who had the safe birth. It feels as though I stole it. There is a constant sense of guilt, as if my life — my independence, my choices — constitutes a form of gloating. “This is what you could have had.” Everything I do feels like something owed to my brother (do it, because he can’t) but also something taken from him (you shouldn’t have done that, because he should have done it first).

Still, my family were fortunate, insofar as my brother didn’t die. Current reports on the Nottingham maternity scandal reference 1,700 cases, with an estimated 201 mothers and babies who might have survived had they received better care. What strikes me, reading them, is the enormous gulf between the cost of a disastrous birth and the trivial, opportunistic way in which childbirth is so often politicised — with mothers themselves viewed as morally, if not practically, to blame if anything goes wrong.

As a feminist who concerns herself with how the female body is demonised, my interest in debates about birthing choices is more than personal. I have read books railing against the over-medicalisation of childbirth, aligning it with a patriarchal need to appropriate female reproductive power. I have also read books protesting the fetishisation of “natural” birth, suggesting that it infantilises women, that it implies women deserve pain. To be honest, I find both arguments persuasive and dismaying. Both are right about the way in which misogyny and professional arrogance can shift the focus away from meeting the needs of women and babies. I feel a kind of rage that we are told to pick a side.

Representations of the labouring woman are so often negative: the naïve idealist, the “birthzilla“, the birth-plan obsessive, the woman who is “too posh to push”. This latter stereotype has gone hand-in-hand with a veneration of vaginal births, and stigmatisation of caesareans, that has had sometimes disastrous consequences. Midwives at the centre of the Furness General Hospital scandal were reported to have “pursued natural birth ‘at any cost’”, referring to one another as “the musketeers”; at least 11 babies and one mother died. But their approach was sanctioned by their employer: the 2006 NHS document “Pathways to Success: a self-improvement toolkit” explicitly suggested that “maternity units applying best practice to the management of pregnancy, labour and birth will achieve a [caesarean section] rate consistently below 20% and will have aspirations to reduce that rate to 15%”. Proposed benefits to this included “a sense of pride in units”.

Responses to maternity scandals now express horror that such an anti-intervention culture ever arose — responses in the same press that denigrated women such as Victoria Beckham and Kate Winslet for not giving birth vaginally. Instead, newspapers now stoke outrage over “natural” treatments during NHS births, such as burning herbs. Women have been shamed for having caesareans, but they have also been shamed for wanting births with minimum intervention — as though they are selfish and spoilt for seeking control over such an extreme situation.

In his memoir This Is Going To Hurt, former doctor Adam Kay writes disparagingly of women who arrive at the delivery suite with birth plans:

“‘Having a birth plan’ always strikes me as akin to having a ‘what I want the weather to be’ plan or a ‘winning the lottery’ plan. Two centuries of obstetricians have found no way of predicting the course of a labour, but a certain denomination of floaty-dressed mother seems to think she can manage it easily.”

Wanting to have some control over your experience of labour — which will hurt you and could kill you or your baby — is not akin to some messianic aspiration to control the weather. And in his mockery of the woman who wants whale song and aromatherapy oils, ironically, Kay deploys the same silencing techniques that might intimidate a woman out of seeking the very interventions he so prizes. What he and others do not seem to grasp is that their arrogance is a problem, regardless of which course of action they champion. It makes women feel they can’t speak, for fear of inviting hostility at their most vulnerable moments. It’s true that none of us knows our body well enough to know how we will give birth. But, looking back, I find it utterly insane, not least given my own family history, that one of my biggest worries during labour was “please don’t let anyone get cross with me”. Then again, I don’t think that fear is unrelated to the desire to remain safe.

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Birth is not a joke. It is not a place for professional dick-swinging or political one-upmanship. I cannot describe — and, as I am not my mother, cannot fully understand — the shame of feeling that you “let down” your child before they drew their first breath, that they will forever suffer because of it. You watch an entire life unfolding and that feeling is there, every single day. This is the fear of the women in labour who are characterised as either idiots mesmerised by fantasy homebirths or cold-hearted posh ladies who can’t take the pain. If things go wrong, they are the ones who will bear the consequences, reflecting every day on what might have been, if they’d only done more.

When people discuss their siblings, my mind does wander to the one I don’t have, the one who was born safely. Perhaps he would have a job he loved, or one he hated, but in any case a job. Perhaps he would have a partner. Perhaps he would have children, and I would be their aunt. Perhaps we wouldn’t get on, wouldn’t even speak, but he’d have a life of his own. I know he thinks about this too. I wonder if the professionals who presided over his birth have thought about him since.

My third labour was not, by the way, “notoriously difficult”. My third son arrived into the world safe and well. No one can say why him or me, and not my brother. Mothers may long for control over birth, for which we are mocked; but we do not have it, for which we are blamed. Politics still takes precedence over our needs, and the needs of our babies.

The new Serial podcast, The Retrievals, tells the story of patients attending a Yale fertility clinic. All of them experience extreme pain during an egg retrieval procedure, and all of them see their pain trivialised and dismissed. It later transpires that a nurse at the clinic has been replacing the Fentanyl that should have been used for the procedure with saline. What comes through most powerfully in the first episode, which tells the patients’ stories, is these women’s impulse to blame themselves. Having been told they received the maximum dose of pain relief, they reach for stories to explain their responses: “I’m immune to Fentanyl. It’s my fault. It’s supposed to be painful”. “There’s nothing like feeling shame,” says one patient, describing her distress at hearing women who’d experienced egg retrieval at other clinics refer to their experiences as relatively painless. “I started shutting down after hearing those stories, like this was on me. Something wasn’t right with my tolerance and my ability to handle this.”

There has been a flurry of recent books, including Elinor Cleghorn’s Unwell Women and Pragya Agarwal’s Hysterical, which explore the way in which female experiences of pain are minimised and dismissed. This is true in general terms; as podcast presenter Sarah Burton comments, “there’s a balance you have to strike as a woman patient. You have to complain just the right amount to be taken seriously, but not so much that you seem shrill. Still, your pain is more likely to be underestimated than men’s.” In this instance, however, there’s an additional level of judgement. The women attending the Yale clinic compare themselves, but not to men, and not just, as in the example above, to other women undergoing fertility treatment. They compare themselves to women who do not need to access the treatment at all.

One patient, Leah, is described as having “internalised the narrative that her body was to blame. Her body was inadequate, deficient. Her body had had miscarriages. Her body didn’t make enough eggs. Her body couldn’t cooperate long enough to get through a critical procedure”: “Oh God, my body was like, here it goes again. Not only can I not have a baby, I also can’t even just lay still with the right amount of Fentanyl.” This is not just about gendered perceptions of pain tolerance. It’s about the censure that surrounds the whole issue of female fertility: which women can get pregnant, which can’t, which women can stay pregnant, which can’t.

Much of the time, infertility and recurrent miscarriage are unexplained, but like the women who cannot understand why their maximum dose of opiates is not working, we invent reasons for then, and whatever reasons we invent tend to make women themselves the culprit. A toxic combination of ignorance and misplaced guilt then makes it easier for the fertility industry to mistreat women. Patients arrive in an already weakened state, weighed down by the fear that they have “let down” both themselves and those around them: their partners, potential grandparents, any future babies, maybe even feminism itself.

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Like cosmetics, fertility is a multi-billion pound industry that capitalises on female shame. It can be an intense, multi-levelled shame — particularly for the kind of liberated, professional woman who visit clinics such as that at Yale. On the one hand, you have failed to do what is, according to the traditionalist, a woman’s main purpose; on the other, you have failed to prove the traditionalist wrong by having a baby on your own terms, in your own time. In an era that prizes freedom and choice, you are subject to the restriction and unpredictability of your own body. Your “failure” is shameful, but so, too, is your desire, a desire that is so strong that you will throw yourself at the mercy of an industry whose success rates are shockingly low.

According to the NHS website, the percentage of IVF treatments that result in a live birth is 32% for women under 35. However, this goes down to 11% for women over 40, and 5% for those over 43. Statistics for egg freezing — now increasingly promoted as a workplace perk — are even more depressing. Data from 2016 puts the pregnancy rate from thawed eggs at a mere 1.8%. Women suffer a great deal of physical and emotional pain for outcomes that are in no way assured. In the Yale case, the patients do this repeatedly, even before the Fentanyl issue has been exposed, enduring the agony of retrieval multiple times. “The women gear up for second, third retrievals,” we are told. “They change their diets. They cut chemicals out of their home… Despite these efforts, some of the women miscarry… It’s the cycle of hope and loss. It just clobbers you, and the longer you stay in it, the more that drugs mess with your head.”

What happened at Yale was a scandal because of the specifics: a drug-addicted staff member, victims gaslighted and disbelieved. But it also describes, in heightened form, the patriarchal attitudes that underpin the medicalisation of the female reproductive system. “A man’s life proceeds in smooth continuity,” wrote the gynaecologist Robert Wilson in the Sixties pro-HRT manual Feminine Forever. “How different is the fate of woman. Though modern diets, cosmetics, and fashions make her outwardly look even younger than her husband, her body ultimately betrays her. It destroys her womanhood during her prime.” The alleviation of specifically female pain becomes indistinguishable from the drive to “correct” women who are not fulfilling their designated role. “For centuries”, writes Cleghorn, “many medical ‘cures’ for women’s apparent deviancy and defiance had been punishments masquerading as therapies.” Fertility treatment is not a punishment, but it sometimes mis-sells hope. It sometimes downplays costs.

In criticising any aspect of the process, I feel unpleasantly unsisterly and finger-wagging. After all, it’s easy for me to say: I already have children. My experience of the pain of being denied is very limited. My first pregnancy ended in miscarriage, which prompted panic that any subsequent pregnancies would end this way, plus a kind of bewilderment. I’d “followed the rules” — I was under 35! My career wasn’t high-powered! I’d even given up coffee! — yet still lost out. I pored over miscarriage statistics and compared myself constantly to women who’d “managed” to stay pregnant. At times, I experienced the fact that every single person who has ever lived is the result of a successful pregnancy as a personal insult. Beneath my anger, though, was guilt. I must have done something, otherwise it made no sense. Like the Yale patients, I knew this was irrational. It didn’t alter my need for a story.

Since then, I have had three healthy babies, my last being born when I was 40. There is no moral, just a randomness to it. It’s one of two things those of us who obsess over making the world fairer for women — the feminists, the progressives — do not like: limitation and chance. It feels politically uncomfortable, and also regressive.

This is particularly the case at a time when a feminist politics rooted in the realities of the female body is being pitted against claims that sex is as socially constructed as gender. The latter position, which insists we interpret our own bodies regardless of the sex they have been “assigned”, implies endless possibility – you are whoever you say you are! – while also insinuating that those who continue to politicise the female body create the very limits it imposes. As Catherine McKinnon recently wrote, “women are not, in fact, subordinated or oppressed by our bodies”: “It is core male-dominant ideology that attributes the source of women’s inequality to our nature, our biological sex, which for male dominance makes it inevitable, immutable, unchangeable, on us.”

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This is true in regard to socially constructed inequality — what men choose to do to women — but not in regard to what our bodies are in relation to us. They do not always do what we want them to do. It is cruel to make us feel we can think ourselves beyond our own flesh. Some things are unchangeable. Yet a feminist politics that points this out — that explores both the possibilities and the boundaries, to the point of admitting that not everyone can get pregnant — will inevitably sound mean. By contrast, the false promises of the fertility industry, like those of the cosmetic surgery industry, will sound kind.

Patriarchal narratives which situate fertility in relation to virtue and women’s “natural” role are set in opposition to social justice narratives which prize the right to be and do whatever you want, with neither side accommodating the reality of women’s bodies. Sex difference has so often been presented as the justification for restrictions that are cruel and arbitrary — and the threat of infertility so often used as a stick with which to beat women who might otherwise become too liberated — that it has become very difficult to speak the truth.

We forget that the morality tales we impose on our reproductive lives are just that. Overwriting supposedly conservative narratives with apparently progressive ones is meaningless when the supposedly guilty party is at all times the female body. The betrayal of the Yale patients is symptomatic of a culture that profits from women’s self-blame at the expense of allowing them the space to grieve. A compassionate, honest fertility industry would tell the truth, and spare women further pain.

Babies who were breastfed “get better GCSE marks” apparently. Get in! I did this for all three of mine! To be fair, it’s not why I did it, which is just as well, since the science upon which this is based turns out to be shaky. Moreover, one of the key outcomes of this sort of reporting doesn’t make breastfeeding any easier, it makes women who have bottle-fed feel bad.

If it looks as though mothers are being shamed, that’s because they are. At a time when feminists fight to articulate why femaleness matters, stories such as this back up the idea that any appreciation for female bodies will be used against us.

I didn’t choose to breastfeed out of some desire to meet standards of feminine compliance — if anything, that was something I feared. I believe that the feeding relationship is unique, and that it matters, like pregnancy and birth, in relation to women’s social and political status. I know this might sound contradictory if one is simultaneously asserting that women should be free to choose not to do it. How can you value something only a woman’s body can do without suggesting this is what all women should do? But this is a trap into which so many of us fall, and which “breastfeed for GCSE grades!”-style reporting only makes worse. It doesn’t represent the truth of what breastfeeding is and means.

When we strip it away from narratives of duty, breastfeeding is not at all feminine. Nothing to do with femaleness — actual femaleness — really is. To be honest, I often found it comical. There was the time my middle son turned his head at an inopportune moment, making me projectile squirt milk across Costa Coffee; the time I was so feverish and exhausted, I became convinced my electric breast pump was playing the theme to Byker Grove; those months when my youngest son favoured one breast, leaving me shrivelled on one side, engorged and enormous on the other (it felt like a metaphor for something, though I could never decide what).

I don’t miss feeling my body was not my own, those moments when — usually pumping, not feeding — I feared I had become the patriarchal non-person: woman as animal, the very image of femaleness so often dreaded by adolescent girls (is that all you want to be, some beast of the field?). I do miss the connection, the utter bizarreness of my body’s responses, that sudden awareness that no, this did not make me a lesser human. How could I ever have feared that? Just because I was experiencing something men didn’t? Women are terrorised out of appreciating the magic of our own bodies — we’re terrorised out of using words such as “magic” — by the constant threat of dehumanisation.

“The ancient, continuing envy, awe and dread of the male for the female capacity to create life,” wrote Adrienne Rich, “has repeatedly taken the form of hatred for every other female aspect of creativity.” Now, more than ever, women and girls are told that if they wish to be considered full human beings, with complex inner lives, they must set aside any politics focused on the female body. A million misreadings of de Beauvoir’s “one is not born, but rather becomes a woman” — or of the phrase “biology is not destiny” — are deployed to suggest that the way to liberate women is to liberate the concept itself from any association with the bodies of menstruators, gestators, lactators. That sort of “inclusive” language reduces one half of the human race to pure function and leakage.

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Like pregnancy and birth, breastfeeding cannot be compared to anything else. It is extraordinary, yet because only female people do it, it is often ridiculed, treated with disgust or aligned with women’s subordinate status (unless male people can contrive a way to simulate it, whereupon it becomes a miracle worthy of a victory statue). “Breasts,” wrote Mary O’Brien in The Politics of Reproduction, “have been sometimes flaunted, sometimes flattened, understood as sensual tit-bits rather than as purposeful instruments of nurture. All the while, men have fashioned their world with a multiplicity of phallic symbols which even Freud could not catalogue exhaustively.”

When I breastfed my children, I still bore the scars of a complex relationship with food, flesh and femaleness. With my first two babies, part of me was still obsessed with the idea of not getting “captured” by maternity. I feared getting sucked into what Naomi Wolf described as “a primordial soup of femaleness … the unbounded, unidentified matrix out of which new life comes creeping”. “But I’m an individual!” I’d protest. “A proper, unique person in my own right!” It took me until the birth of my third child, when I was already in my forties, to understand the way in which uniquely female bonds are disrupted by this terror of being forced to hand back one’s “human” card. We would rather deny the specificity of our embodied relationship with our own children than risk being written off as some mindless blob of reproductive matter.

Yet the men who would write us off, won’t change their minds. Look at the treatment of any woman who pushes back, even in the mildest way, against the idea that femaleness is socially and politically irrelevant. How quickly her status crumbles; how soon she’ll be told she’s a biological essentialist who thinks all women are baby making machines. Denying what our bodies can do will not save us. Recognising it might.

The pride women take in their female bodies ought to be a collective one. It should not be reliant on individual experience — my child might do slightly better on WJEC English Literature Paper 1 because I was getting my tits out in Costa Coffee in 2007 — but on an understanding of ourselves as the sex class with the capacity to create life.

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It pains me to know I will now get the “oh, so you think all female people are fertile?” or “what about women who don’t want children?” or “my mum’s had a mastectomy, are you saying she’s not a woman?” treatment. But this is where we are: intelligent people feigning stupidity rather than countenance that female people should ever be bonded by collective pride at that power to gestate and birth. On the other hand, no one has a problem with shaming us because we can’t breastfeed.

Rich wrote of her belief “that female biology — the diffuse, intense sensuality radiating out from clitoris, breasts, uterus, vagina; the lunar cycles of menstruation; the gestation and fruition of life which can take place in the female body — has far more radical implications than we have yet come to appreciate”: “Patriarchal thought has limited female biology to its own narrow specifications. The feminist vision has recoiled from female biology for these reasons; it will, I believe, come to view our physicality as a resource, rather than a destiny.”

This is feminism, not flight from the body, nor fear that our own bodies do not measure up. We’re the reason men had to pretend they were gods. It’s about so much more than GCSEs.

Despite being marginalised crones on the fringes of society, witches are having a moment. For several years, we’ve been hearing of their resurgence as “a symbol of feminist empowerment”. From young women casting spells against Donald Trump to British Vogue producing a “Guide to Being a Modern Witch”, now is the time for us to wield our wands against the patriarchy — or, failing that, a beleaguered female author will do. And 2023, we are told, is set to be the Year of “Witch Lit”, with novels such as Emilia Hart’s Weyward and Margaret Meyer’s The Witching Tide hitting the shelves.

In many ways, I am in favour of this. Not only am I a huge fan of dark stories about powerful women, but my own forthcoming non-fiction book, exploring the demonisation of middle-aged women, bears the title Hags. The witch has long been an important figure for feminists, capturing the relationship between women’s vilification, our otherness, and our strength. In the words of Kristen J. Sollée, author of Witches, Sluts, Feminists, she’s “a martyr mascot for the women’s movement”.

And yet, I’m not convinced by some of the qualities — moral purity, stylised rebellion — that seem most important to some of those who champion her today. Real witches don’t win the applause of Bafta audiences. Women who are truly hated, truly marginalised, might be role models in the sense that they teach us what it means to be an outsider, but they are not aspirational. In Women & Power, Mary Beard argues that fetishising the female monster is a poor substitute for challenging the forces that keep her in place: “despite the well-known feminist attempts over the last 50 years or more to reclaim Medusa for female power (‘laughing with Medusa’, as the title of one recent collection of essays put it) — not to mention the use of her as the Versace logo — it has not made a blind bit of difference to the way she has been used in attacks on female politicians”.

In my own writing, I am more interested in looking at the dynamics of misogyny, witch-hunting and demonisation than in “reclaiming” witch as an identity open to all. I just don’t think it works that way. What worries me about treating the witch as “one of us” — someone on our side, representative of our values, proof of our anti-establishment credentials — is that it prizes the external trappings of “witchiness” over a meaningful analysis of what might make a woman a witch today. At its extreme, the former becomes a substitute for the latter.

Through the witch — in fiction and fashion — you can engage in a kind of fantasy feminism, role-playing standing up to the mob. In this sense, “Witch Lit” corresponds to a psychological need that cannot be met in the real world, where fear of rejection and ostracism tempers rebellious urges. By making it fashionable to immerse yourself in stories where women go against social norms, becoming ugly, aggressive and dangerous, you create a paradox: a woman can use the witch not as provocation, but to signal her conformity. It’s a way of ticking off feminism’s “bad woman” objective without inconveniencing others, the literary woman’s equivalent of wearing a Girls Just Want To Have Fun(damental Rights) t-shirt.

It’s not that I don’t think fiction writers are producing some wonderful, highly intelligent work on the topic of witches and witch hunts. My issue is with where it sits in the context of feminism and publishing at this particular point in time. For instance, Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s The Mercies is a brilliant study of the way in which a self-sufficient, female-centred community is rendered sinister under patriarchy’s gaze, with members eventually turning on its most outspoken member as a way to save themselves. It’s based on events on the Norwegian island of Vardø in the early 1600s. Nonetheless, the Guardian describes it as “a witch-hunt tale for our times”.

Suggested reading

Witchcraft isn't subversive

By Esmé Partridge

One of the most striking scenes involves the main protagonist, Maren, feeling compelled to participate in the condemnation of a woman who has been her friend: “Maren watches as the word [witch] ripples around the assembled women like a current… She watches, betrayal thumping its drum in her chest as Kirsten is bound at the wrists and led in the direction of Vardøhus.” Reading it, one feels dismay at Maren’s betrayal, but also senses that, in her place, we’d have done the same. It’s testimony to Hargrave’s skill and empathy as a writer that she doesn’t go down the easy route of focusing on heroic victimhood. She makes you understand the compromises. It is, absolutely, relevant to our times, if perhaps in more ways than the Guardian may have considered.

There are many behaviours I notice, in both feminism and publishing, which replicate the dynamics of the witch hunt. Accuse a woman — older, outspoken, perhaps too independent for your liking — of a ludicrous crime, such as causing crops to fail, bewitching your cattle, wanting to commit genocide or denying your right to exist. Vilify women who congregate without the presence of male guardians. Subject these women to punishments which rely on spectacle, then trust that the punishment itself will convince others of the validity of the original accusation. Create a climate of fear, so that other women will be afraid to assert themselves, perhaps even encouraged to point the finger at others to deflect attention from themselves.

In 2020, the year The Mercies was published, Hargrave refused to sit on a judging panel for Mslexia until the older novelist Amanda Craig stepped down. This was because Craig had signed an open letter in support of J.K. Rowling, who was receiving a torrent of death and rape threats — punishment as spectacle — for having had the temerity to express her own views on sex and gender. Rowling was being accused, ludicrously, of wanting others dead, and Craig, for standing by her, was tainted, too. Having read her novel, I was shocked by Hargrave’s behaviour: it seemed like such a crass replication of the very finger-pointing she’d depicted so well. The younger woman directs the mob towards the older one, like Abigail Williams in Salem, like Jennet Device in Pendle. Like, eventually, Emma Watson in front of the Bafta crowd.

Suggested reading

Why are women becoming witches?

By Suzannah Lipscomb

It was as though because Hargrave had “done” the politics of the witch hunt in fiction, she didn’t need to engage with it in real life. I’m not suggesting that every author has to better the choices made by their own creations, or that they should share the beliefs of J.K. Rowling. But if part of a book’s marketing relies on its moral import and relevance to modern-day feminism, then I think we need to question how far novels which deal with witchcraft and/or female persecution represent an extension of feminist activism — or merely a substitute for it. I’ve nothing against people immersing themselves in stories of “marginalised women with hidden powers, the kind of female traditionally hunted down or isolated”. It should not, however, become a kind of wish fulfilment, a way of easing the conscience, or not having to face it at all.

The witch is not a cool figure. No one gets burned at the stake for being too cool. Once you start claiming you’re here for “all of the witches”, the truth is, you’re here for the mob.

Judging by the stream of recent headlines, petitions and open letters, parents of 12 to 15-year-olds could soon be heading for a showdown over the “right to be vaccinated against Covid”. The UK’s Chief Medical Officers this week announced a plan to offer them jabs — despite the Government’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation’s advice that the direct benefits for healthy children were too marginal.

And while parents will be required to give their consent for their child to be vaccinated, a child will be able to override their parents’ refusal providing he or she is deemed to have “enough intelligence, competence and understanding to fully appreciate what’s involved in their treatment” (otherwise known as being Gillick competent).

Covid-19 has always been a crisis in search of a culture war, and the response to this announcement has been no exception. When such luminaries as Gillian McKeith and Laurence Fox, and groups with titles such as Family Defence League and Lawyers for Liberty, start advising parental resistance, you know it’s about more than the scientific specifics of just one jab. Suddenly it is about personal freedom, the rejection of state interference in family life and the principle that a parent should decide what is right for their child. It is about where you stand politically and how you want to be perceived.

I’ll be honest: I do not want to be standing alongside Laurence Fox. I know which “side” of this debate I am meant to be on — which one suits both my political persuasions and my parenting style. And it is that, more than any in-depth medical knowledge, which tempts me to declare myself fine with my own children overriding my consent (were it not for the fact that this in itself constitutes a form of giving consent — the eternal paradox of liberal parenting).

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How not to talk to a science denier

By Tom Chivers

I find the idea of a child ending up in mediation with their own parents over the right to be vaccinated not just unlikely, but bizarre (the idea of slammed doors, mealtime sulks, plaintive cries of “but EVERYONE else has had one!”). Yet for others, the anxiety is real, with schools being inundated with letters from parents fearful that vaccinations will take place behind their backs.

Perhaps I’m unusual, but ever since I was allowed — just allowed! — to take my firstborn home from the hospital, I’ve been sceptical about the idea that parents know best.

Parental decisions are informed not just by love, but politics. We know this, though we tend to tell ourselves it is those other parents — those of the opposing political tribe — who are getting it wrong. This inconsistency is particularly glaring in current debates on the treatment of young people with gender dysphoria. There are parents who support social transition, the prescription of puberty blockers and/or the use of binders, and parents who don’t — with both sides insisting they are motivated by an understanding of their child inaccessible to anyone else. In accounts of raising trans children, or opposing a child’s desire to transition, “I know what’s best for my child” merges with “any loving parent in my position would make the same choice” (or, at the sharp end, “any parent who would not make the same choice obviously wants their child dead”).

It is uncomfortable to admit that your love, and what is in the “best interests of the child”, is tainted by your own background, self-image, friendship groups and even personal traumas. Yet I know mine is, even when I think I’m right. Indeed, it is by watching the Covid vaccination debate play out that I’ve felt, more than ever, how much more attractive it is to cling to our slogans rather than admit how little we know.

I have my own self-defeating list of things that I, as a parent, should and should not be allowed to do. Not allowed: smacking children; restricting access to contraception and abortion (providing safeguarding checks are made); vetoing access to good sex education (I decide what “good” is). Allowed: vetoing access to dodgy sex education (I decide what “dodgy” is); intervening where a treatment constitutes self-harm (I decide what “self-harm” is).

I know this is provisional and shaky, riven with qualifications, making the bodies of my children (and yours) a testing ground for my politics. I do think there are areas — such as the administration of physical punishment, or the use of breast binders — where it is possible to make a more objective case for harm being done, but the template of “parents’ rights” is unhelpful. With the proposed Covid vaccinations, the situation is different still; the play-off is not between potential losses and gains for one’s own child, but potential gains for other people, perhaps even yourself.

Suggested reading

America's divisions will never be masked

By Douglas Murray

Here we have an example where the primary beneficiaries of a treatment may not be — indeed, most probably are not — those receiving it. As a result, the simplistic concept of individuals, or their parents, knowing what’s best for them falls apart. Writing in The Independent, Victoria Richards argues in favour of “competent” children making the final decision on vaccination using the principle of “knowing best”:

“Some children under the age of 15 will be deemed “Gilick competent”, some won’t… Parents or carers know their children best — so chances are, you know which camp your child would likely fall into. If you’re a parent who’s vaccine-hesitant, I can understand why you might feel upset – even angry — about such a scenario. But what I really feel is that we should trust our kids; many of whom are mature, intelligent and information-savvy well before the age of 12.”

I think my children are mature, intelligent and information-savvy; the trouble is, I don’t think the debate over having a Covid jab is a test of these qualities. This is a complex situation, hijacked by narratives about state control, science and freedom. It is also one in which moral pressure is being exerted on children, one that might come from schools, but which could also come from parents who want their children to be vaccinated. Coercing children — however subtly — to do something with their bodies which isn’t primarily for their benefit is questionable. But so, too, is making that body the site for spurious, abstract arguments about liberty and parental infallibility. Neither side is coming off well.

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Britain's absurd quarantine failures

By Stuart Ritchie

Richards goes on to invoke the principle of “my body, my choice”: “We can’t very well teach our children that they have the right to say “no” to unwanted physical contact one minute, and then demand they kiss an aged aunt the next… And if we are teaching our kids that their bodies (rightly) belong to them, then that should go for whatever it is they decide about the vaccine, too.”

But this is a reversal of our usual message regarding consent, because the focus is on the right to say “yes”, not “no”. There’s something telling in the way that liberal leanings push us towards making the dominant message “you have the right to override your parents if they say no”, rather than “you have the right to override them if they say yes”. It smacks — just a little — of an uncomfortable political division on consent, whereby some of us only want to focus on the giving rather than the withholding. For all the accusations of illiberal moral panic one might throw at those raising alarm about the vaccine, “my body, my choice” is a slogan that would seem to me to apply better to the children saying no for themselves. Suddenly, unexpectedly, I find myself veering, ever so slightly, Laurence Fox-wards.

I am not going to fight with my children over the vaccine; they want to have one and I will not stop them. But there are bigger questions to ask, not just about what influence parents should have, but what we are using our children for. Children have been asked to make significant, necessary sacrifices for adults; it is not necessary to use them to fight our own culture wars.