It’s still common, though. Worldwide, more than 650 million women were married while still children. Nor is the practice normal only away from the “developed” West: most American states still allow marriage under 18, while California, Mississippi, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Washington have no lower age limit for marriage at all.

According to one campaign, between 2000 and 2018 in the United States, 222,430 under-18s were married, including 9,530 under-16s. Of those married under 18, 88% are girls. The age-gap in these marriages would often qualify the pairing as a sex crime, absent the legal formality.

Is there anything more paradigmatically “patriarchal” than thinking the solution to inappropriate sexual interest in an adolescent girl by a much older man is to marry her off to him, so he can molest her with the full support of the community? And there is often very little upside for the girl. International studies show, for example, that being married off under the age of 18 is associated with low education, poverty, partner violence, social isolation, and physical and mental health issues.

Given this litany of ills, we can hardly be surprised to see feminists calling for an end to the practice. And the smashing of this sort of patriarchy is going well: according to figures from Unchained At Last, the annual number of such marriages in America has fallen steadily over recent decades, from over 76,000 in 2000 to around 2,500 in 2018. (In Britain, marriage under the age of 18 was banned altogether in 2019.)

But what about the bit of “patriarchy” that involves the sexual molestation of young women by older men, sometimes with much more power? The smashing of that is not going nearly so well. Consider Epstein Island, or the accusations against Harvey Weinstein — some by women who were very young when they encountered him. Or, recently, allegations that comedian and social media star Russell Brand sexually assaulted four women between 2008 and 2013. One of them was just 16 at the time.

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If the allegations against Brand are true, then they fit into a much larger pattern of sexual interest by older men in sometimes very young girls. Not all men, obviously; but clearly at least some of them have this predilection. It’s a pattern shaped by an ugly convergence of public hypocrisy, power, and sex. And a glimpse at the modern history of efforts to grapple with this convergence reveals a grim conclusion: we are busy trying to address everything except the root of the problem.

For even as feminists rightly began agitating on behalf of young women being married off to older men for the purposes of sexual access, the same women’s movement has also promoted ideals that ended up opening the door for the age-old pattern to re-emerge — just without the marriage bit. Even as second-wave feminists began challenging the presumption of early, lifelong marriage for all women, in favour of access to the full range of possible occupations and roles, the arrival of legal and reliable birth control saw that joined to a much more radical programme for sexual emancipation. These calls converged, after legalisation of the Pill, in texts such as Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970): a rallying-cry for women to abandon the “castrated” condition of bourgeois domesticity, in favour of free, passionate, “deliberately promiscuous” self-discovery.

Many staid housewives were thrilled by the call of freedom. But some of the women “liberated” from bourgeois mores by this erotic libertarianism were very, very young: the same adolescent girls, in fact, who might in a previous era or different demographic have been the subject of a forced child marriage to their abuser. The Bafta-nominated 2021 Sky documentary Look Away records how this played out in the music industry, among the “baby groupies” of the Sixties and Seventies: girls who were groomed as young teenagers by some of the music industry’s biggest stars. Sable Starr, for example, was immortalised in Iggy Pop’s 1996 album Naughty Little Doggie, in which he sings about sleeping with Starr when she was just 13. And Aerosmith frontman Stephen Tyler notoriously persuaded the mentally ill mother of Julia Holcomb to sign over Julia’s custody to him in the mid-Seventies, when she was 16 and he was 25.

Still more modern “sex-positive” feminists might say: if the girls were consenting, so what? Some argue, in fact, that focusing on girls’ sexual “innocence” is itself further evidence of patriarchal efforts to control women’s sexuality. Why shouldn’t young girls explore their sexuality? Accordingly, contemporary “sex-positive” messaging aimed at young people vehemently de-emphasises the idea that lack of sexual experience should necessarily have any emotional or moral significance. “Virginity”, we’re told in one such book, “just doesn’t work any more in today’s world”, because there are too many different possible “first times” to fixate on “a person who hasn’t done a specific sexual act, traditionally a cisgender man or woman who hasn’t had penis-in-vagina sex”.

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This will doubtless be news to the millions of viewers of Pornhub’s “teen” content, a category that consistently makes the website’s annual top searches for men. On the contrary: for some of these at least, defiling this supposedly non-existent innocence is precisely the point. In his memoir, Stephen Tyler recalls his relationship with “Diana”, clearly a pseudonymous Holcomb, in terms that vividly suggest how he eroticised what he saw as Holcomb’s barely-legal cocktail of innocence and experience: “She was 16, she knew how to nasty, and there wasn’t a hair on it.”

Similarly, “Alice”, the woman who reports having had a sexual relationship with Brand age 16 when he was already in his thirties, says of the moment she told him she was a virgin: “He was like, ‘Oh my God, my baby, my baby’, and picked me up and cradled me in his arms like a child and was stroking my hair. He’s like, ‘You’re like my little dolly.’” After that, she says, Brand was “preoccupied” with her innocence and purity.

If this happened as Alice remembers, it suggests a similar cocktail of protectiveness and objectification to the one that emerges from Holcomb’s account. As Tyler’s ward, she was dependent on him; during the three years she spent as his “girlfriend”, Tyler impregnated her, then later pressured her into an abortion at five months’ gestation. Holcomb, now a mother of seven, only broke her silence when Tyler published his memoir (including the porn-adjacent description of her as “Diana”) in 2011. In a hard-hitting essay telling her version of the story, she alleges that as she wept her way through a “nightmare” late-term abortion, Tyler snorted cocaine off the bedside table every time the nurse left the room.

Since the alleged Brand incidents took place, we’ve had #MeToo, Epstein, and Weinstein; scandals that have, in their wake, brought greater emphasis on consent and attention to the risks posed in sexual encounters by power asymmetries, of the kind that Holcomb experienced. It is perhaps a testament to how the public conversation has changed that last December, some three decades after the fact, she launched a lawsuit against Tyler.

In Look Away, many music industry operatives acknowledged their complicity: carefully not seeing, hiding perpetrators, covering stories up. Whatever the truth of Brand’s behaviour, The Sunday Times report tells the same story. As with Epstein and Weinstein and many other such cases, it points to a grim inference: power and social status almost always counts for more than sex crimes, or young women’s suffering.

We should welcome such a shift in public willingness to ask difficult questions of sexually voracious high-status men. But we shouldn’t imagine a new focus on power has done anything to expunge the pattern itself, any more than ending child marriage did. Rather, the focus on power seems to have come with a corresponding reluctance to focus on those perceived as powerless.

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Accordingly, we find the pattern is still there, and still being given the benefit of the doubt — but this time among men perceived as “marginalised”. Whether due to race (as in the grooming gangs) or gender identity (as in sometimes flagrantly predatory behaviour, by men who claim to identify as women) actions that might prompt a witch-hunt against an out-of-favour celebrity are routinely met with stonewalling, silence, or excuse-making. And meanwhile nothing, to date, has stopped predators from predating. So how do we keep girls safe?

We’ve tried focusing on public hypocrisy, by campaigning to end efforts to make such abuse “respectable” via child marriage. This succeeded in clamping down on abusive marriages — only for the same dynamic to reappear in the “baby groupies”, and every other group of girls and young women whose exploitation has been whitewashed by narratives of “empowerment” or “liberation”. Then, with #MeToo, we tried focusing on the power aspect. That shone a salutary (if arguably selective and politicised) spotlight on the misdeeds of at least some powerful men — even as the powerless go on slipping through the net.

So perhaps it’s time to focus on the third and final dimension: sex. When men abuse very young girls, it may be about many things. It may be legitimised or concealed in many ways, and for many reasons. But it is, in part, simply a sex thing. That is: those men who molest very young girls do it because they can, and because they like it.

If this is so, it has immense implications for keeping girls safe. Effective measures would probably involve a realism about our sexed differences that would translate in practice to (for example) a presumption of suspicion toward adult men that would likely curb the operations of a serial womaniser but would also have far-reaching effects on our currently largely co-ed society. And this is before we get to the implications such realism would have for differential treatment of (and freedom accorded to) adolescent boys and girls.

And, thus, perhaps all of us — even feminists — have arrived at a tacit consensus is that it’s not worth it. That it’s better to blame power, or patriarchy, or whatever. That the overall liberal benefits of staying in denial about this distinctive form of male desire so far outweigh the risk it poses to a minority of young girls that we, too, look away as we sacrifice them in the name of everyone else’s freedom and pleasure.

The asker closes her eyes, and the girls in the circle raise a hand if they think the answer is yes. The raised hands are counted, then lowered; the asker opens her eyes and receives her rating, except it’s more like a life sentence, hot or not. She’ll never know who said she was beautiful, of course, but that’s not the point; the point is, how many people said so?

It’s a distinctly disempowering idea, that beautiful is something you cannot be until someone else bestows the word upon you. It’s also a recurring theme in the new horror novel in which this scene is set: Rouge, by Mona Awad. Exploring the terrible, pallid, preternaturally smooth underbelly of contemporary beauty culture, Rouge tells the story of a 30-something, skincare-obsessed woman named Belle, whose famously gorgeous mother has died suddenly and in deep debt to a mysterious seaside spa named La Maison de la Méduse.

In the novel’s third act, the protagonist gathers in a room with other women who are all nearing the end of what the spa’s proprietors refer to as their Beauty Journey. The room has no mirrors, and so the women have no choice but to ask each other how they look — but they’re also all suffering from memory loss, a known side effect of the spa’s coveted treatments, and struggling through brain fog. It’s hard to find the words, any words, to describe the beauty, the brightness, the glow. It’s like that game of “Honestly”, except worse: imagine having made unspeakable sacrifices to be, if not the fairest of them all, then certainly the fairest you ever have been or will be — and still, still, you cannot be sure of your beauty unless someone else confirms it.

This is also, of course, the paradox of beauty, especially in a post-feminist world. We’re supposed to be evolved enough that we simply don’t care whether or not other people think we’re beautiful — which has not in fact stopped us from caring, but has given rise to all kinds of intellectual acrobatics whereby we explain that the things we do to make ourselves prettier are actually a form of empowered self-indulgence. It’s the “I do it for me” trope (or, in parody form, “just for myself”), in which pandering to the gaze of some scrutinising — or sometimes lustful — other is presented as Extremely Feminist, Actually. The pervasive notion that all those creams and serums and peels and mists are actually a form of self-care is “I do it for me” in action, but it’s also among its least believable iterations. I mean, there it is, right in the name of the industry: “beauty”, that thing that is so famously in the eye of the beholder — who, it is understood, is not you. That would be just too vain.

One gets the sense that Awad has thought a lot about this paradox, what it means, and whether there’s a way around it. Belle is the rarest of beauty aficionados, a true believer who by all appearances actually is “doing it for me”. She is so isolated, so closed off, that she’s the only one around to do it for — and her skincare obsession only further distances her from the world. It is less about being seen than about concealing herself. Belle speaks of her regimen as if she’s putting on a suit of armour: it’s all shields and barriers and overcoats, a second and third and fourth skin on top of her skin. Awad plays expertly with the social aspects of beauty culture, the way that being pretty is a way of enticing people right up until you’re too pretty, and hence intimidating.

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The weirdest thing about Belle is that the results of her skin regimen are, to her, irrelevant; an early scene finds her spackling herself in the dark, relishing the burn of the products on a face she can’t even see. But when she does start to care what her skin looks like — a shift in mindset that coincides with her first visit to La Maison de la Méduse — she claims the role of both beholder and beholden, consulting mirrors for answers much like a certain fairytale queen.

As for what other people think, it is more of an afterthought. The envy of other women is nice to have, but the male gaze is always intrusive, ridiculous or vaguely threatening — never desired. It is a strange and self-contradictory idea, that a person could want to look beautiful but also want nobody to look at her, but it does in fact embody what the “I do it for me” beauty ethos would look like if someone actually lived by it — which is to say, deeply weird and incredibly vain.

But then, Belle is a fictional character. In real life, it’s not so easy to draw a bright line between ordinary pride and toxic vanity, or between self-care and self-adornment — or, for that matter, basic human hygiene. We all do some sort of work to look presentable, even if it’s just bathing regularly. But is it beauty culture to wash your face? What if you’re washing it three times a day with 17 different products? Does it matter what the products are?

It all puts me in mind of the intensive beauty routine, if you want to call it that, that I was forced to adopt after I unknowingly pulled out a clutch of poison ivy in my back garden before making the terrible mistake of touching my face. The resulting rash required two dermatologist appointments and the regular application of three prescription creams, and in the weeks it took to resolve, I was more preoccupied with the state of my skin than I have ever been in my life before or since. Is that vanity? Maybe. I was much more perturbed by the threat of scarring than the itching, all told. But wouldn’t you be?

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The truth is that what we call self-care is often more like self-preservation — not as in survival, but as in, well-preserved. What puts wrinkles on our faces? Frowning. Smiling. Feeling. Living. Real-life interventions such as Botox aim to prevent wrinkles by limiting facial movements. Awad goes further: in Rouge, the signature treatment at La Maison de Méduse deletes lines from a person’s face by deleting experiences, often traumatic, from her memory. It’s self-care as self-erasure; it’s The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Epidermis. It asks: might we be better off forgetting the things that keep us up at night, that hurt our feelings, and weather our skin? It seems the price of beauty is the loss of the ability to express yourself, one way or another.

It is this biting, satirical element in Rouge that feels most relevant to our present moment, when interrogating the moral valences of one’s beauty routine is increasingly as time-consuming and necessary as the routine itself. Sometimes it seems like a minor revolution is afoot, as beauty writers such as Jessica DeFino make careers not out of recommending products but dissecting our desire to use them, which is part of what DeFino calls “the money and soul-sucking cycle of beauty consumerism”. This beauty backlash can admittedly get a bit overwrought; but DeFino writes incisively about the inherent absurdity of the “I do it for me” ethos — in which beauty, like Sartre’s hell, is other people: “Beauty is a form of communication; by definition, an offering to or exchange with something or someone outside of ourselves.”

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Why, then, does the “I do it for me” line persist? Maybe it’s the shame associated with wanting to be beautiful: to admit this is to admit that you have succumbed to the pressures of patriarchy. Surely a truly empowered woman would stride barefaced through the world, zits and wrinkles and moustache and all. (As is so often the case, this apotheosis of female empowerment and autonomy would be just an average weekday for a man.) But I’m not entirely persuaded by this.

If beauty is an offering, the coin of the realm, then beauty standards are the market index that tells us what’s valuable and what isn’t — and a woman’s looks, which is to say youth, which is to say skin, are an asset in this world whether she likes it or not. To maintain that asset in the form of skincare may be inherently other-focused, but isn’t the ultimate beneficiary the owner of said asset herself? Consider the statistic that conventionally attractive people earn up to 15% more than those less aesthetically blessed. In this context, what’s a few hundred or thousand bucks per year on treatments that help you stay prettier for longer, if not a savvy investment? If there were no advantages to being beautiful apart from the occasional appreciative glance, the knowledge that you inspire envy in those more wrinkled than yourself, surely we wouldn’t be anywhere near as obsessed with it?

Perhaps the question, then, is not whether we should spend anything — time, effort, money — on making ourselves look better, but on how much is too much. And who decides? Despite the alleged influence of patriarchy, this industry is ultimately fuelled by individual women making individual choices: the wellness mogul selling a $500 jade face roller, the beauty editor scoffing at it (what a scam, when you can buy a perfectly good face roller using one of our affiliate links for a mere $300!), or the eager consumer without whom there would be no market for jade face rollers in the first place.

Awad answers this question of how much is too much by going to extremes: if your pursuit of beauty costs your life savings, or your life itself, then yes, you’ve overpaid. Outside the realm of fiction, however, the answer is just another question: what is it worth to you when you close your eyes and ask, “Am I beautiful?”, to be certain that everyone is raising their hand?

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.

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.

Outside Italy, meanwhile, the Romeo who told one biographer “Think of how many women there are out there who would like to go to bed with me, but don’t know it”, and reportedly called Angela Merkel “an unfuckable lard-arse”, is immortalised in Bunga-Bunga, a Covent Garden restaurant serving metre-long pizzas.

It is an achievement, I suppose, to have been the epicentre of a sex scandal so epoch-defining and internationally notorious as to have provided the name for a restaurant that isn’t even in your own country. The term “bunga bunga” was reportedly introduced to the world by Ruby Ruacori, real name Karima El Mahroug. Berlusconi was accused of paying El Mahroug for sex in 2010, when she was just 17; El Mahroug claimed it was a lap-dancing game, in which the winner got to have sex with Berlusconi.

The events mesmerised the press, nationally and internationally. The details were juicy, the settings opulent, the men powerful, and the girls pretty. The tabloids feasted. But could this larger-than-life figure reach such prominence today? Though Peak Bunga was barely more than a decade ago, the stories feel sepia-toned, as though they belong to a different age.

We’ve been through the looking-glass at least twice since then: first, the Great Populist Earthquake of 2016, then Covid, and all their respective derangement syndromes. Along the way, we seemingly abandoned the sinking ship of tolerance and shared values altogether, in a flotilla of quarrelsome social-media lifeboats.

Somewhere in there was #MeToo. There was Epstein. We swapped headlines for clickbait. Politics now comes pre-marinaded in competitive victimhood. An out-of-context video clip can trigger international social media meltdown. And in this dyspeptic climate, there probably is less political bandwidth for uncritically lionising the priapic, piratical, rule-bending alpha-male mafioso type than there was in the Age of Bunga.

Officially at least, modern politics runs on rules, procedures, and meticulous attention to everyone’s feelings. So is his death, as one internet mourner put it, “the end of an era”?

Well. Public mores have, perhaps, shifted somewhat. But have the underlying patterns that shape how sex, money, and power interact shifted too? While we may have declared, officially at least, that we are no longer at home to Mr Toxic Masculinity, it’s far from obvious that men have stopped wanting to be around attractive young women. Nor is there much evidence that male power and status are any less magnetic to women than they have been at any other point in the long history of hypergamy. And nor has the inevitable resulting confluence between high-status men and young, nubile women grown any less asymmetrical in terms of raw power. So whatever we may wish to tell ourselves about how #MeToo changed everything on this front, the reality is: #MeToo changed very little.

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It’s true that there is a Berlusconi type: men (they are always men) of prodigious energy and appetite, boundless and infuriating charisma, and a cheerful indifference to the rules. The type, perhaps mercifully for the rest of us, is relatively rare – but Berlusconi is far from unique. Back in 1998, there was Bill Clinton: wildly charismatic, ferociously on the make, awash in rumours of perjury and nepotism — and, famously, lying about sexual doings with intern Monica Lewinsky.

Britain’s foremost contemporary exemplar of the type is the also charismatic and priapic Boris Johnson, who survived his own sex scandal only to leave No. 10 over that of Chris Pincher. In a 2003 Spectator interview with Berlusconi, Johnson betrays the wide-eyed admiration of a senpai for his sensei: marvelling at the energy, hospitality and sheer opulent extra-ness of this “balding, beaming, bouncing multi-billionaire”, whom he describes as “the fizziest old dog you have ever seen”. Game, we might say, recognises game.

In turn, when such men become game themselves, their hunters usually lead with sexual wrong-doing. The accusations didn’t stick to Clinton, and only partially stuck to Johnson. But another of the same type, the epicentre of many post-Bunga political derangement syndromes, is now wrangling his own intensely politicised sex scandal: Donald Trump. In 2018, rumours emerged that Stephanie Clifford, real name Stormy Daniels, had been paid $130,000 to keep quiet about their affair. (There were also rumours of a “pee tape”, of which the less said the better.) The allegations have since cross-pollinated with a flurry of others, all of which add up to a miasmic impression of general dodginess and yet another indictment (or, to Trump supporters, banana-republic-style persecution of a feared political enemy).

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But as these big beasts age, we might be tempted to think their time is past. Berlusconi is on his way to his “fascistic” (according to Vanity Fair) mausoleum. The Orange Man is in the mire. Even Britain’s own pound-shop Alpha, Boris Johnson, has left Parliament. And the times really have changed: in 2018, Monica Lewinsky resurfaced, reframing her previous statements about a “consensual” affair in the #MeToo language of “authority, station, and privilege”.

But it doesn’t follow from this that young, pretty women are any safer today. It hardly seems likely that the corridors of power are any less stuffed with rich, entitled, horny men than they ever were, just because Harvey Weinstein got a punishment beating. Nor does it seem much more likely than before #MeToo that a woman will automatically get redress, should they find themselves in a sticky situation with such a man. Consider, for example, the recent fall from grace of Observer journalist Nick Cohen. Cohen is, to be clear, not a classic Berlusconi type; he was, however, the subject of numerous complaints, over a great many years, from female colleagues about sexually inappropriate behaviour.

Nothing was ever done – until campaigning barrister Jolyon Maugham identified Cohen as an enemy on Maugham’s pet issue of transgender rights, and set out to collate the rumours about Cohen. The paper apologised, following his departure, for ignoring the allegations so long.

The lesson is bleak. If a lower status woman accuses a higher status man of sexual impropriety, few will pay much attention – except that man’s political enemies. And the greater the power differential (as, for example, that of children trafficked to Epstein Island, seeking redress against billionaires and politicos), the more likely a horny plutocrat’s horniness will go unjudged and un-criticised.

Silvio Berlusconi left behind two ex-wives, five children, and a 33-year-old girlfriend. It seems implausible that such a rampantly oversexed man got all the way to his seventies before suddenly developing a taste for “bunga-bunga”. So why did his appetites take so long to cause a scandal? Well, Berlusconi was, by his own lights, someone whose modus operandi turned less on rules and procedures than on webs of friendship, loyalty, power-broking and obligation. He was upfront about this, saying of his convoluted business interests “If I, taking care of everyone’s interests, also take care of my own, you can’t talk about a conflict of interest.”

We can perhaps catch a glimpse of this network of interests, via the relationship between Berlusconi and the half-English, one-time showgirl Nicole Minetti, another central figure in Bunga-gate. After appearing on Berlusconi’s TV show ‘Scorie’ in 2007, Minetti trained as a dental assistant, later helping to repair two of Berlusconi’s teeth after someone threw a marble statuette of Milan cathedral at him in 2009. The following year, Minetti was picked, age 25, as a Lombardy candidate for Berlusconi’s People of Freedom Party, despite having no political experience, and was placed on Lombardy’s regional council a few months later. A couple of years after that, in 2013, Minetti was convicted of procuring minors for sex at Berlusconi’s notorious parties. During the trial, wire-tapped tapes appeared to show Berlusconi promising Minetti a seat in Parliament.

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The most likely explanation of Berlusconi’s evading the Bunga Police for so long, then, is that despite decades of efforts to catch him breaking rules against (among others) drug trafficking, tax fraud, mafia links, bribery, and abuse of office, his carefully-crafted network of interests preferred to keep him in situ. We can only speculate as to what changed circa 2010, to inspire his enemies to turn bunga-bunga against him, but one thing should be clear: the exploitation of a prostituted child was the least of anyone’s concerns.

Some cases don’t even get as far as the one against Berlusconi. Clinton emerged largely untouched from the Lewinsky scandal. And when, in 2019, seven women came forward to accuse Joe Biden of sexually inappropriate behaviour, precisely nothing happened – #MeToo notwithstanding – except that supporters went in to bat for him. We can of course make no inferences about the truth or otherwise of the allegations. But it should be clear enough that “Believe Women” has a great many qualifiers, of which the foremost is “when it’s politically expedient to do so”.

What is the lesson, then, for those women young and beautiful enough to find themselves courted by (or attracted to) charismatic and powerful men? It’s a bleak one: nobody cares if you get hurt. Even those women who avoid being treated as wholly disposable, but build careers and their own power-bases in the shadow of such men, may find themselves pitilessly exposed once inconvenient. Ghislaine Maxwell got 20 years. And while Berlusconi contested every allegation, receiving a final acquittal last February, Nicole Minetti was jailed for five years in 2013. No equivalent efforts were made to appeal her sentence.

And should you find yourself used and discarded by a man with more power than you, the only way you will find redress is in being used again, most likely by another man with more power than you. Only this time it’ll be as a weapon. And #MeToo counts for nothing, in this mix, unless you were groped by a Republican. I wish I had a more upbeat message, but the cold truth is this: if you attract the attention of men with big appetites and bigger bank balances, and you don’t want to be used either as a sex toy or political weapon, heed the medieval proverb. “She who sups with the devil should use a long spoon.”

One man who has done this countless times, to countless women, without their consent, is one Mr Deepfakes. As the founder of the most prominent deepfake porn website in existence, he has chosen to remain anonymous. He built the burgeoning community “from scratch” as a side hustle, after deepfake porn was banned from Reddit in 2018. It is, he claims, a place where “users affected by the ban could go”, to ensure the technology wasn’t unfairly “squashed”. MDF, as he styles himself, cites a commitment to free speech, and a desire to advance machine learning, as his sole motivations.

But in Deepfake Porn: Could you be next? MDF comes across as a man struggling with “the more moral aspect” of his work. On the one hand, he ardently claims to respect women (“100%”!) and insists this principle is reconcilable with his passion project. On the other, he has no plans to tell his wife — who would “probably be against” deepfake porn, “to put it bluntly” — about his work. “I’m afraid of how it would affect her, knowing I work on something like this.” He admits that “the content is actually in a grey area, and I think we’re on a fine line”.

Despite this ethical “indecision”, MDF’s website is thriving. It has amassed more than 20,000 deepfake videos of women loosely defined as “celebrities”, who are divided into 23 categories that include “Cosplay”, “Threesome” and “Asian Celeb”. Each day, an average of 25 new videos are added by a team of deepfake porn producers. There are 13 million original visitors who view this content every month, 10,000 of whom are online at any given moment.

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In these videos, the facial expressions, mannerisms, and idiosyncrasies of the deepfaked subject do not belong to the victim whose face we see. They are the creation of a male fantasy. It not only looks like the victim is performing porn, when they never have, but also that they are engaging in the producer’s favourite sexual acts. Their identity is hijacked. When a victim sees herself embodied in the form of a porn performer, she describes it to me as a feeling of extreme disassociation. That is her face, but that is not her body.

Mr Deepfakes rakes in a high four-figure profit per month, mostly from ad revenue. He’s probably earning upwards of $100,000 a year from the venture. This money goes mostly to “maintaining the servers”.

Most of his effort, meanwhile, goes to imposing strict ethics on his website. Or so he claims. MDF recites his boundaries to minimise harm like a script: no porn niches that are “defamatory”; only “celebrities” allowed; the age limit is absolute; and producers must “make sure people know that these are fake videos” by ensuring “every video is watermarked”. But ultimately, MDF’s defence always comes down to separating the videos’ potential consequences from their creators. “We’re not all bad people!”

MDF claims he is simply an advocate of technological progress. He is, he says, facilitating the improvement of AI, while “other communities like Reddit wouldn’t allow it”. It just so happens that the best way to do this is through the “porn niche”: a convenient assumption that MDF treats as an awkward but inevitable fact. The “community” forum, the section of the website where content creators discuss how to improve results, is therefore what he cares about most. It fails to generate any revenue, at least for now. But this is hardly a charitable venture. This “community” is working to develop a tool that’s being used as a weapon against women.

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And the ethical boundaries imposed by Mr Deepfakes fall apart on close inspection. There is no clear definition, for instance, of a “celebrity”. It includes women in the “mainstream media”, like those who appear in “Hollywood films”, but also “social media influencers”. And of course, “politicians are in the public domain”, so they can be targeted too. It is, in short, any woman with a public life. Many of these female “celebrities” already receive so much sexualised publicity in the media that MDF’s community think they are “fair game”. Or in the words of one user on the forum: “If you plaster your face everywhere and thirst trap me into seeking out your visage, then I’m just gonna deepfake you into porn.”

The majority of Mr Deepfakes community are “probably men”, he admits. Male users who are becoming radicalised by getting to “pick and choose aspects of different girls”, and digitally manipulate them into performing sexual acts.

Disturbingly, one regular poster on the site admits to deepfaking his co-workers. “Walking into work after having deepfaked these women, it did feel odd, but I just controlled my nerves. I can act like nothing is wrong, no one would suspect a thing.” The video is for his eyes only, he insists; it now exists on his hard drive, which he sees as merely an extension of his imagination. Asked if he would create a custom deepfake of an ordinary woman for someone else, he replied: “From a moral standpoint, yeah, I don’t think there’s anything that would stop me.” He went on to make a deepfake of someone after a Zoom call.

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The forums on MDF’s site seethe with misogyny, illustrating how utterly ineffective his ethical code is. “She didn’t let me smash her during highschool so cool. ima just deepfake u on porn and masturbate to it? CHECKMATE HOE,” one user writes. “It is never better when deepfake kicks in, and you get to make your dream celebrity be a mindless robot, and obey masters orders,” posted another.

Even those who have built a living on the porn industry are alarmed by the havoc deepfake technology could wreak on women’s lives. “The principal concern I have is how quickly the technology is evolving. It’s like a runaway freight train,” warns Viktor Zafirovski, a reviewer at the world’s largest porn directory website. Not only is it increasingly accessible, but they are getting easier to create.We will reach a point when “everyone will have to be paranoid about sharing their image,” says Viktor. And having made a small fortune developing this latest tool in the misogynist’s arsenal, even the man at the helm of the deepfake porn industry agrees. “It will be so convincing, that eventually you can’t identify what’s real and what’s fake,” MDF says. “You know, it’s scary to me as well.”

Underneath this cloak of concern for women, Mr Deepfakes must know that he empowers misogynists every day. “Porn runs the world right now. And it’s not something that I agree with with,” he says. Regardless, it’s something he leverages, even as he strives to distance himself from the culture he enables.

MDF doesn’t like to imagine how his wife would feel “if she found a video of herself on the internet — or maybe even a deepfake porn video of someone she knows”. But there are hundreds of women who, if they visited his site, might have the kind of horrifying realisation he wouldn’t want his loved ones to experience. The most frustrating thing is, he admits to feeling some discomfort. “I think I need to, you know, look deep down and see what I’m okay with,” he reflects. But his site remains live, and he keeps making money from it.

“It’s crisis upon crisis,” says Dr Shonagh Dillon, CEO of Aurora New Dawn, a charity that provides services for victims of domestic and sexual abuse in Hampshire and the Thames Valley. Organisations like hers have not yet fully recovered from having to deal with the increased demand caused by Covid, and now they are braced for a flood of new calls for help. Back in March 2020, government ministers were warned by MPs, charities and campaigners against domestic violence about the deadly impact lockdown was likely to have on vulnerable women and children. “Stay home” was a bitter message for women who suddenly found themselves shut up, 24 hours a day, with abusive partners. And lo and behold, calls to the national domestic violence helpline rose by 60%, some of them made by concerned neighbours who heard alarming noises from next door.

Dillon recalls the early days of lockdown, when staff trying to deal with a deluge of calls from desperate women had to wait weeks for the government even to designate them as key workers. I tell her about sitting in on remote meetings organised by City Hall in the spring of 2020, as charities and local authorities struggled to respond to the crisis: attempts to set up emergency accommodation to save women from injury and worse were being frustrated by government departments, each of whom — Home Office, Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government — claimed it was someone else’s responsibility. Perpetrators fully exploited the situation, telling police officers summoned by a 999 call that they couldn’t enter the family home because someone inside had Covid. They put trackers on phones and cars in case a woman managed to escape on the rare occasions she was allowed to leave the house, to go shopping or take the kids to the park. Social workers moving women to emergency accommodation had to learn how to check for such devices to prevent the victim being followed.

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Today it is not lockdown that is being exploited, but the high cost of living. Anxiety about making ends meet is creating ideal conditions for coercive control, a form of abuse that is not as widely understood as physical violence. Of course, the two often co-exist, with a history of financial abuse being revealed only when a victim is being treated for physical injuries. Money problems do not cause abuse but they make it worse, providing extra “leverage” for men who are already threatening and isolating their partners. “My abuser would check accounts when I had the debit card,” one survivor of financial abuse told Women’s Aid. “If I was food shopping, he would ask how much I’ve spent to see if I was truthful as he had already checked online. He would not top up the gas and electric meters so I had to spend all day with no gas or electric.”

Dillon is all too familiar with how coercive control operates. Survivors have told her about men who say: “You’re not feeding your kids. They’ve got holes in their shoes. I’m going to tell social services you’re a bad mother.” That is a terrifying threat to make to a woman who, through no fault of her own, is struggling to put food on the table or having to rely on charity shops to clothe their children. They already feel intense shame about their supposed shortcoming as mothers, something perpetrators understand very well and are eager to exploit. Women fear losing their children above all else — and abusive men can sound very plausible. How can a woman prove she’s not to blame — that money is being kept from her deliberately — when her partner sounds so reasonable to outsiders?

Shortage of money increases the pressures within relationships in other ways, as men who can’t afford to go to the pub or a football match spend more time at home. Researchers used to wonder why intimate partner abuse rises during big sporting occasions, such as the football World Cup, speculating that perpetrators were punishing women when their team lost. The answer turned out to be much simpler: domestic abuse increases whenever men spend more time at home, which is why the big rise during the Covid lockdowns came as no surprise to anyone. There were a spate of domestic homicides — 16 in three weeks — in the first month of lockdown.

Eventually, the government noticed. Covid “acted as an escalator and intensifier of existing abuse”, a joint report from the Home Office, National Police Chiefs’ Council and College of Policing belatedly admits. “It seems to have been weaponised by some abusers as both a new tool of control over victims and… as an excuse for domestic abuse and even homicide.” Two men, Anthony Williams and Hussein Egal, blamed stress caused by Covid when they were charged with killing their wives. Egal inflicted 70 injuries on his wife, Maryan Ismail, after (he claims) she had threatened to throw him out for having the virus. Williams strangled his wife to death, and then pleaded guilty to manslaughter, having told the police that lockdown restrictions had had a negative impact on his mental health. He received a reduced sentence of five years. It remains to be seen whether, in a few months times, men accused of murder will claim they were driven to it by anxiety about not being able to pay the mortgage.

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Homicides were not the only deaths linked to domestic abuse: there were also 38 suspected suicides of victims in the first year of the pandemic, a phenomenon so under-researched that we do not have previous years’ figures to compare it with. It attests to the desperate circumstances some women found themselves in, locked in with their abusers, as well as important questions about whether the women’s actions were voluntary.

Surely, surely, ministers would never make the same mistake again? But that appears to be exactly what is happening. “The suicide rate will definitely increase,” Dillon predicts. “It will happen if women can’t flee safely.” She asks herself every day how she can help victims, knowing that her organisation is struggling with its own costs, including soaring heating bills. Some of her employees are single mothers and survivors of abuse, and the cost of living is already hitting them hard. “I’m worried about my staff,” she says. Most earn between £24,000 and £26,000 a year, when they could get more than £30,000 in less stressful occupations. “We are going to lose staff hand over fist. We’re constantly fire-fighting,” Dillon says wearily.

Women’s Aid has addressed the looming crisis in an August report, offering a stark warning: “The cost of living is preventing women from fleeing domestic abuse.” Two-thirds of survivors told the organisation that abusers were using the cost of living increase as a tool for coercive control, “including to justify further restricting their access to money”. Almost three-quarters said that shortage of cash had prevented them from leaving. With private rents beyond the means of most victims, and mortgages prohibitively expensive, women feel trapped. “I feel like my only option to keep my kids is to go back to the marital home where he nearly killed me,” one survivor told the organisation.

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Two months ago, a group of charities said they were “disappointed” by the lack of government action on tackling the cost of living crisis. Women’s Aid is calling for mortgage payment holidays for victims, an emergency domestic abuse fund, and discounts on energy bills for organisations that provide services for women and children. Refuge has asked for the £20 universal credit uplift to be restored. The government says it is working across departments to ensure that victims, survivors and their families are fully supported, citing a £230m investment in its Tackling Domestic Abuse Plan.

What the government did not say, however, is just as important. The plan was announced in March, under a different administration, and some of the money is earmarked for long-term projects such as training to recognise abuse. The vast scale of the economic crisis has since become clear, yet one of Liz Truss’s first actions as prime minister was to abolish the role of women’s minister. The decision has been criticised by some Conservative MPs, including the chair of the women and equalities select committee, Caroline Nokes. Having a dedicated women’s minister gives us a voice — and also acts as a brake, forcing government departments to think twice about the impact of policies on women and girls.

If the government is planning a substantive response to a situation many women regard as an emergency, it is keeping very quiet about it. This time round, with so much evidence of the disastrous consequences of its predecessor’s tardy action in lockdown, it has no excuse. Another crisis is playing into abusers’ hands — and there is very little time left to save their victims.

Go on. You know the answer. We all know which way round this usually works.

This is a problem for our most assiduous egalitarians. Despite more than 50 years of efforts to abolish “gender stereotypes”, the difference between mothers and fathers is still such that it is almost always — as it was in this case, too — Mum who picks up the pieces when Dad takes off. But you can’t pursue “equality”, “progress” and “freedom” to their logical ends, without making men and women functionally interchangeable. And this means that every such pronounced asymmetry between men and women is not so much a natural feature of human nature, as a problem to be solved.

This is surely the most charitable explanation for an apparent ongoing campaign in the New York Times, to denaturalise motherhood. The most recent salvo was the claim last week, to widespread furore, that “maternal instinct is a myth that men created”.

This isn’t an isolated incident: in the past two years, motherhood has been a horror movie, an environmental catastrophe and a recipe for martyrdom. Women who reject it get admiring profiles. And when — unusually — it is Mum who abandons the kids, this isn’t shocking, it is a stimulating challenge to the ultimate taboo. But dig a little deeper, and this apparent effort to undermine the “naturalness” of motherhood reveals a deep progressive confusion as regards women, bodies, and babies. And this, in turn, raises questions about the unexpected implications of pursuing equality to its logical conclusion — questions that should give many feminists pause.

Despite what the Grey Lady may say about maternity being male-chauvinist propaganda, there’s no shortage of evidence across many species that there actually is something unique about the bond between mothers and their young. There are field birds who will let a tractor roll over them before they will leave their clutch of eggs. Mother bears are proverbially protective of their cubs. Anyone who’s seen footage of a mother elephant mourning a dead baby, or cows bellowing after their calves are taken away, can see that there’s something there.

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There is a straightforward evolutionary explanation for the maternal bond: it increases the chance that young animals will survive until they are able to take care of themselves. It would be strange if humans were the only animal species for whom this were not the case. But nor is this bond wholly universal, or wholly automatic. It can be interrupted. There are anomalies, such as mothers across many animal species who sometimes kill their babies. In the human world, some women don’t want babies at all, or feel nothing after they’re born.

This, in turn, points us toward feminism’s favourite hunting-ground: the boundary between nature and nurture. For the truth is that maternal behaviour is both natural and social. In her 2021 book on “the science of moms”, Mom Genes, science writer Abigail Tucker cites studies that show new mothers are more sensitive to babies’ cries. We’re better at distinguishing cries of distress. We think about our babies more. And a great deal of this is primed during pregnancy, as gestation transforms women’s brains in distinctive ways.

Dads, meanwhile, also bond with their offspring. But they do so later, and more slowly: paternal interest ramps up about a year after birth. And developing it is conditional on contact with a baby. Tucker quotes a Michigan State University maternal behaviour researcher who states flatly that while fatherhood also changes men’s brains: “The magnitude [of hormonal change] that you see in a mother is nothing like you see in any person at any other time.” And as Tucker puts it, while new moms are hormonally primed to seek out experience with infants, dads need the experience to get the hormone hit: “To become a father, the first thing a guy has to do is stick around.”

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In the NYT article that triggered all this fuss, Conaboy notes this hugely important and permanently transformative biological aspect of motherhood only in passing. While all parents experience brain changes, she says, “the biological mechanisms for change are quite different for gestational and non-gestational parents”. Her focus is on the nurture side: for as Tucker would agree, mothering isn’t purely “natural” or instinctive. It’s also a skill, learned in part from our own mums and from our wider social circle.

She’s not wrong to argue that “maternal instinct” greatly over-simplifies a complex sociobiological process. Nor is she wrong to point out how politicised it has become. For by treating it as wholly “natural”, this complex process can be generalised from a descriptive to a prescriptive norm: not a question of what usually happens, but one of what should happen.

And being told what you should be doing, based on the shape of your body, is anathema to a modern liberal. No wonder: for the story of the modern world is one of political and technological struggle against limits of every kind. And motherhood really does impose particular constraints on women, constraints which have, throughout history, shaped the work we do, the lives we lead and our social and political relation to men.

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Unsurprisingly, then, a central facet of the women’s movement, from the 19th century on, has concerned our relation to pregnancy and childrearing, whether individually or at scale: whether we can refuse pregnancy, how we deal with unwanted pregnancies, and which provisions are in place for raising children, to name but a few.

Today, our tech-enhanced pursuit of parity between the sexes is well advanced. Why, then, shouldn’t we pursue absolute equality, in the name of progress? From this perspective, evidence that the maternal bond has a learned component is manna from heaven. Perhaps, it suggests, this means we can stop noticing the far-reaching neurobiological effect gestation has on mothers, and in the process find a way to break free of yet another limit.

For while we still experience any constraints of any kind on doing exactly what we want — even biological constraints — someone is bound to be oppressed. And this includes absolute freedom to configure families any way we like: even the faintest suggestion that there’s something special about mothers oppresses not just those women who don’t want to be mothers, but also, as Conaboy puts it, “the rights and recognitions of same-sex couples and transgender and nonbinary parents”, whose “ability to care for their children is often questioned”.

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The solution is to lean hard into the nurture, while downplaying the nature, and imply that with a bit of diligence we can thus make parental bonding egalitarian across gestating and non-gestating “parents” alike. New research on “the parental brain” shows, Conaboy says, that “the idea of maternal instinct as something innate, automatic and distinctly female is a myth”. Instead, if only we Do The Work, “scientists now believe the outcomes may be similar for anyone — including fathers, adoptive parents and nonbinary parents — who truly invests time and attention in caregiving”. If parents other than gestational mothers can only be induced to try hard enough, then, the results “may”, she says, be “similar” to those experienced by gestating mothers.

Perhaps. But “similar” and “identical” are, well, similar rather than identical. “Truly” is also doing some heavy lifting here, as is “may”. Conaboy’s thesis, at least as filtered through the NYT’s relentlessly anti-maternal editorial lens, doesn’t have anything to say about those non-gestating parents who are disinclined to Do The Work. And I would venture to suggest that these are the cases where the enduring sexed asymmetry between mothers and fathers becomes visible — and gets entrenched in popular understanding, albeit in over-simplified form, via the term “maternal instinct”.

On the surface, Conaboy’s almost-blank-slatism is simply an argument for widening the scope of who may be considered important as parents — as though anyone disputes the obvious truth that there exist a great many devoted adoptive parents. But in effect, and seemingly unnoticed by the author, it’s an argument against granting any special meaning to maternity as an embodied experience or particular type of relationship.

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For confusingly, even as the thrust of her argument takes aim at the idea that motherhood should merit any particular distinction, Conaboy seems to suggest that this nonetheless adds up to a case for improving maternity provision. Barely two paragraphs after claiming that anyone can synthesise a mother-like bond if they try hard enough, she’s arguing that this means Americans should demand better perinatal services, and address America’s (frankly barbarous) lack of federally mandated maternity leave.

And while this is true, it also reveals the central, irreducible liberal mummy-issue. For, on the one hand, feminists may wish to empower mothers to flourish — which, you might think, would mean thinking about mothers’ specific needs and the policies that might meet them. But if, on the other hand, we want everyone to be equal, that means opening the maternal experience beyond mothers: that is, denaturalising those facets of maternal experience that are arbitrary, evolved, embodied and — yes — at least partly instinctive. And this militates against acknowledging mothers’ specific needs.

The result is a hopelessly muddled argument. It claims, based on historic variations in how men and women rationalise our sexed differences, that nothing underpins those differences except power. Then, almost in the same breath, it acknowledges that these differences exist and have a biological substrate, and that this has real policy implications.

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But we can’t simply throw up our hands and say this confusion is yet more evidence of a malign plot by men to psyop women into being docile housewives. We can’t have it all ways: we can’t both demand special provision for pregnancy and childbirth, and suggest that the absence of such provision is evidence of patriarchy. Not if we’re also going to suggest, as Conaboy does, that celebrating mothers’ embodied experience as unique and worthy of special protection is also evidence of women’s oppression, because the aim is to set women apart and constrain our social role.

In the bitter ongoing battle between gender-critical feminism and trans activism, it’s common for the former to accuse the latter of “erasing women” — that is, replacing any mention of women as a sex with the unfalsifiable category of women as inner identity. But it might be more accurate to say equality is erasing women. If you pursue the logic of absolute parity between the sexes all the way down, you hit a brick wall of evolved sociobiological differences, that has emerged over millennia in connection with historically distinct roles in raising kids.

Of course, contra what the cartoon-conservative position might claim, such instincts aren’t deterministic. How they play out varies immensely, depending on culture and material context. There is plenty of feminist scope for adding to that variation by questioning and modifying how we inhabit our embodied sex differences.

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But experience should have taught us by now that making something “inclusive”, that was previously ringfenced, is tantamount to abolishing it. And noticing that there’s a lot of wiggle room in our instincts isn’t the same as declaring that the instincts themselves don’t exist, or can be overridden if we only Do The Work. Once we make that claim, in effect we’re saying mothers as such don’t exist.

And this is not an argument for better perinatal provision. It’s an argument for making such provision available to everyone, whether or not you’re a mother — because there’s nothing distinctive or important about being the “gestational parent”. We should ask ourselves how feminist that actually is.

Detfri slave of Herennius Sattius
Signed with a footprint

Amica slave of Herennius
Signed when
We were placing the tile

The women’s footprints, and these inscriptions, are the only trace that they ever existed.

Amy Richlin includes this trace in her book, Arguments with Silence: Writing the History of Roman Women, because for most Roman women all we have is silence. And not just Roman women. Janina Ramirez’s new book Femina sets out to tell the history of the Middle Ages, “through”, as the subtitle puts it, “the women written out of it” — or never written in. The vast majority of people who have ever lived were illiterate and disenfranchised: they left no autographical sign of their existence and were simply not powerful or privileged enough to have their perspective represented in the documentary sources that survive. This is especially true of women.

The survivors who present themselves to a feminist historian are the exceptions. Ramirez tells the story of the thrilling post-Second World War mission to preserve the Reisencodex: the priceless manuscript that contains nearly all the collected writings of the extraordinary theologian, composer, and scientist Hildegard of Bingen; we have her surviving correspondence with three popes, King Henry II of England and Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine. And there’s Margery Kempe, whose book — only rediscovered in 1934 — tells her life as she narrated it to three scribes. (“Although not written down in her own hand,” says Ramirez, “this is the closest we can get to hearing a medieval woman speak to us from six centuries ago”.)

Those scribes were men, meaning even feminist histories must depend on male authorship. Almost everything we know about Eadburh, eighth-century queen of the West Saxons, comes from Bishop Asser’s biography of Alfred the Great, in which he casts her as the archetypal evil woman: tyrannical, murderous, both a cock-tease and a whore. Even Hildegard was edited by a man, Gebeno of Eberbach, whose decontextualised versions of her words were circulated far more widely than her own manuscripts.

For most women, though, what we know about them amounts to — at most — fragments. This creates problems for feminist historians. “Very few [historians] begin discussions of the Bayeux Tapestry thinking about the women who made it,” Ramirez observes, because we don’t know who they were or where they were.

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To find women, Ramirez suggests, we must move beyond texts. For the early Middle Ages especially, restoring women to history involves triangulating findings from archaeology, osteoarchaeology, material culture and DNA. This means the close examination of surviving stuff — the bed burials of early medieval noblewomen, the so-called Loftus Princess’s gold and cloisonné jewels, or Jadwiga of Poland’s fourteenth-century ivory casket. In the case of the Loftus Princess, buried in a seventh-century grave where bone, wood, and fabric have disintegrated, her jewels — including one large pendant set in gold, with a scallop-shaped garnet surrounded by rows of gemstones — indicate both her status and, probably, her gender.

Ramirez also tells the story of the two people buried in style on a ninth-century ship in Tønsburg, Norway with every conceivable item “from enameled buckets to dog collars”: what a joy to discover, through bone analysis, that these fêted individuals were an elderly and a middle-aged woman respectively. Why two women were buried with such honour remains a mystery. It turns ideas about the masculine machismo of Viking society on their head.

DNA analysis in 2017 also caused surprise by revealing the tenth-century Birka warrior — who was buried with an axe, two shields, a spear, and a sword — to be a woman. She was not the only female warrior: the most famous queen of the Saxons, Ætheflæd, Lady of Mercia, was a military leader. And, according to isotope analysis, by Dr Cat Jarman, of the remaining bones of 264 individuals from the so-called Great Heathen (Viking) army, some 20% of the Viking army were women too.

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Numismatics can also help the feminist historian: the eighth-century Queen of the Mercians, Cynethryth, wife of Offa, is depicted on coins, as is Irene, Emperor of Constantinople. Jadwiga was a female King of Poland, just as, three centuries later, Christina became a 17th-century King of Sweden; if you want to borrow men’s status, you sometimes have to borrow male terms.

Nevertheless, women who have enough burial stuff to be identified in death, were, like the women on coins, nearly always women of status. When it comes to writing the histories of these elite, well-known women, there is the further danger of hagiography — either because they have literally been canonised, like Hildegard and Jadwiga, or because, as in Jadwiga’s case, they have become secular saints hijacked for nationalist purposes. Ramirez is alive to the dangers of writing about exceptional individuals but doesn’t always go far enough to avoid them. One of her solutions is to offer brief parallels, for example, to show “that there was more than one twelfth-century woman challenging the status quo”.

And here another pitfall lies. The discovery by the University of Stockholm that the Birka warrior was a woman was immediately subject to scholarly scepticism and popular disbelief. This reaction says much about how we project onto the past — but all of us who search for people other than rich white men in history must refrain from an equally strong temptation to project: the temptation to romanticise. As Stephanie Smallwood puts it, we have to recognise our desire “for the subaltern [to be a] heroic actor whose agency triumphs over the forces of oppression”. Of course, we want women in the past to have defied the patriarchy and come up top — but most didn’t.

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Romanticisation shades into a desire to portray exceptional women as in some ways representative. Ramirez suggests that Kempe gives us a glimpse of “an ordinary married woman, mother to fourteen children”, but the weeping, wailing visionary is not very ordinary, and, as Ramirez points out, Kempe’s book says next to nothing about those children. This absence of insight into the historical experience of mothering is not unusual but — given that motherhood was a near-universal experience before the advent of reliable contraception — it is startling. The cradle-side experience was, in the view of Sarah Knott, either considered too mundane to be written down or went unrecorded because women whose hands were too full of children had neither the time nor the ability to pick up a quill.

Ramirez is strongest when on her home ground of the early Middle Ages. For the late medieval period, the pursuit of ordinary women requires the reading of manuscript evidence against the grain. Court records have produced rich results: analysis of the trial of Alice Kyteler in 1324, the first condemned witch in Ireland, or Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s account of the Inquisition’s interrogations of male and female Cathars in southern France in his Montaillou (1975). He examined the worldview of Pyrenean villagers between 1294 and 1324 through the testimonies that they gave to Bishop Jacques Fournier, producing chapters called “Body language and sex”, “Marriage and the condition of women”, “Concepts of time and space”, and “Fate, magic, and salvation”. Some of Ladurie’s handling of his material does not show the care and critical analysis with which later historians have treated depositions, but his findings still provide compelling insights into the lives of ordinary women and men.

There are women in the criminal records from the Court of the King’s Bench; they are also to be found in wills, petitions, household accounts, and medical texts — annotated, or sometimes even composed by, women. Monica Green edited and translated the Trotula, an amazing collection of medieval medical and cosmetic advice for women. Louise Wilkinson (whose Twitter handle is, incidentally, @MedievalFemina) drew on charters, chronicles, government records and early manorial court rolls to examine the experiences of noble- and gentlewomen, urban women, peasant women, and criminal women in thirteenth-century Lincolnshire. Rachel Delman used tapestries to examine ritual in the fifteenth-century household headed by Alice Chaucer, while Jessica Barker has written about the tomb effigies of the Middle Ages to explore gender, marriage, and emotion. And that’s just to scratch the surface.

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So the medieval women that Ramirez has reappraised are not exactly common or garden. She has, still, re-examined a handful of influential women in the easy-to-read, enthusiastic prose that is her hallmark. Femina is demotic in style: things “languish” in archives, villages are always “sleepy”, and Ramirez uses the present tense for drama, whether in 1077 or 1983. Troubadours are the “medieval equivalent of touring rock stars”, creatures in the margins of psalters are “lookalikes of… Yoda and Gandalf”. Perhaps most surprisingly, “medieval pilgrimage was like our modern-day package holidays”.

This is deliberate, for this is as much a book about our interactions with the past as it is about the past itself. It is in the nature of feminist history to have an agenda. Richlin acknowledged that, “in telling women’s stories, I am working toward a society that remembers women”. Saidiya Hartman explains that “every generation confronts the task of choosing its past… The past depends less on ‘what happened then’ than on the desires and discontents of the present”. Ramirez is upfront about the way her work is representative of our current age; still, it raises broader questions about the perils of letting the present weigh too heavily on the past.

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Is it helpful for modern doctors and psychiatrists to analyse Hildegard’s visions, nine centuries on, to see “whether they indicate underlying medical or mental health issues”? Ramirez concludes that “it was highly probable she was experiencing migraines”; later, this is a certainty: “her whole body was affected by the migraines”. Elsewhere, she explains Hildegard’s visions away by reference to the menopause. Margery Kempe, we’re told, might be diagnosed today as schizophrenic, epileptic or psychotic. Ramirez notes that some of Kempe’s contemporaries suggested epilepsy too — but these were her detractors, mocking her.

Being driven by the inequalities and injustices of our day to search for our ancestors in history is noble, but it isn’t easy. Men have been the powerful and the privileged for so long; to unbury the dead, feminist historians need to do some heavy lifting. But have we become so blinkered by the present that we cannot approach the past on its own terms? If the ideas in Hildegard’s visions were taken seriously by the powerful men who were her contemporaries but not by feminist historians — then who is writing whom out of history?

It was the same in many towns and cities. During the early days of second-wave feminism, in the late Sixties and throughout the Seventies, women’s libraries cropped up, usually housed in the corner of an alternative bookstore. The first one in North America, Minneapolis’s Amazon Bookstore, opened in 1970 on the porch of a commune. At one time, there were over 150 feminist libraries on the continent, mostly run by volunteers, providing resources key to the movement. Today, partly because of a different kind of Amazon, they have almost all closed down.

One feminist library that has survived and thrived is London’s. Founded in 1975, for decades it has been a valuable resource for historians, social scientists, journalists and, most importantly, young feminists who wish to learn their history. Countless women have benefitted from it. I myself have spent days there, digging up details of old campaigns for articles and research projects.

But now, it is threatened — by people who call themselves feminists but are in fact the opposite. Four years ago, the library trustees — all older feminists who had been involved for many years — decided to expand the collective and actively recruit young women to join. Unfortunately, many of those who came forward were hostile to the type of feminism that prioritises women, which was soon displaced by trans activism.

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An early sign that things were going wrong came in September 2019. The Feminist Library declined to offer a stall to FiLiA — a female-led, feminist organisation that hosts an annual international conference for women — at one of their events. FiLiA was told that the library’s new “Community Policy” would not allow FiLiA on their premises. It’s worth mentioning, here, that FiLiA has made it clear that women — and women-only spaces — come first in the feminist movement, and the organisation has been vocal in public and on its website about its rejection of extreme transgender ideology.

Then on the 28th January 2021, the Library published a statement on transphobia and accountability. Among a load of virtue-signalling waffle, the statement resolved “not to feature trans-exclusionary groups on our panels or other events at the Library or allow them to book the Library for their own events”. Despite the tradition of the library being women-only, this meant that those who believe in women-only spaces, and sex-based rights, were banned from accessing books and collections. Today, women have even been stopped from meeting on library premises if they don’t believe that “trans women are women”.

The library is now run by women hostile to feminists. Lola Olufemi, who was appointed Volunteer Coordinator at the end of 2019, was instrumental in de-platforming the historian Selina Todd at the 50th Anniversary of the first Women’s Liberation conference in February 2020 — an event that Todd helped organise. That same month, FiLiA attempted to open a dialogue with the Library, asking them for a meeting and voicing the concerns of their members. They felt the trustees should be ensuring the resource was available to those who need it; feminist librarians should not be excluding women.

“The biggest trick that patriarchy pulled is to put distance and barriers between women and to destroy the possibility of solidarity,” Lisa Marie Taylor, CEO of FiLiA, told me. “The new guard at the Feminist Library are doing this. They are blocking women from accessing our history and our language. They are literally stealing our words from us, and there’s no accountability. After 47 years, I’m sad to say that it is at existential risk.”

The library has responded to some of the many letters of complaint they have received from feminists, but very curtly. There has been no meaningful engagement with criticism. They have also issued a statement, saying that they are going to “review” their collections. What does this mean for the books, the textiles, the historic items in their care? Will anything that doesn’t conform to the ideas of trans activists be put under lock and key in the Restricted Section? Or worse, thrown away?

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London’s is not the only feminist library threatened by trans activists. In February 2017, the Vancouver Women’s Library opened its doors. The city has a vibrant feminist movement, which mainly focuses on campaigns to end male violence. At its opening event, women gathered to celebrate. They were met by very aggressive protesters who tried to block them from entering the building.

The crowd included several men identifying as trans women or “sex workers”, shouting things like, “Take SWERF and TERF books off the shelf”. Red wine was thrown over the feminist posters on the walls. The protesters began lighting cigarettes in the non-smoking building and accused women of “violence” for the crime of running a feminist library. Books were damaged, items were stolen, and the fire alarm pulled. The volunteers had to pay $500 to the owner of the building. Despite all the hostility, those who wrecked the Vancouver Women’s Library claimed to be progressives. They were, in fact, misogynists.

The row that broke out at Glasgow Women’s Library in 2020 was less dramatic. Trans rights activists held a training day, led by two men, at the publicly-funded venue. They then published a statement saying that they only accept bookings from organisations and individuals that “align with our values”. Those values, of course, allow men to invade women’s spaces: the Library subsequently refused access to a women’s group for the crime of thinking that men can’t become women.

Claire Heuchan, a feminist writer and Chair of the Labrys Lit lesbian book group, volunteered with the Glasgow library for five years. Her love for the institution was evident when we spoke. “Libraries foster campaigns outside of the library and it is a connection to past campaigns too, so women don’t need to reinvent the wheel in their activism. Reading women’s stories and theories freed me from the pale, male stale curriculum I learned about in school, and led me to celebrate women’s voices. And it was for free.”

But it would appear that a number of feminists that used to be regulars at the library no longer feel welcome. As Linda (I’ve changed her name) told me: “The library used to be a sanctuary, but I don’t feel comfortable going now since all the spaces advertised as women only are mixed-sex and many former friends have ostracised me for supporting single sex spaces for women.”

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Fortunately, there are a number of women resisting this hijacking of feminist values. Bec Wonders is a currently a feminist researcher at the Glasgow School of Art and co-founder of Vancouver Women’s Library. She is horrified at the way that women are being excluded from our own movement. “It is so anti-intellectual, and blatantly insulting to the ability of women to think for ourselves. It goes against the aim of empowering women to make up our own minds.”

Like me, Bec sees feminist libraries as not just a passive place where knowledge is stored and catalogued, but also a space where plans are made. Bec has lost all hope for the Feminist Library in London. She suggested that women should be storing things at home: emails, online conversations, pamphlets, publications — all the things that women in 50 years’ time will want to see. “We all need to be archivists,” she says.

What a tragedy, though, that we can no longer trust a collective to store these resources. Any movement whose goal is the destruction of women’s spaces, including feminist libraries, is not feminism; it undermines everything feminism has built. Gail Chester, who is one of the library’s founders and remains a trustee, appears to have been ostracised by the new guard for being committed to women-only spaces and the literature produced by early pioneers of the movement. She is the only person involved in the library willing to provide a comment for this article.

“As a founder of the feminist library,” says Chester, “what I want is an anti-sectarian library that is accessible to everybody, where debate and dialogue are welcome, and where no feminist publications are censored.” It doesn’t seem much to ask.

In all this, the fall of filmmaker and comedian Louis CK was a blockbuster moment. The comedian’s predilection for masturbating in front of his peers had been an open secret for ages. But now the tide seemed to be turning. A massive story in the New York Times alleged that he had harassed five women, most of them fellow comedians, in the early 2000s. The response was outrage, and more importantly, consequences: Louis CK confessed, apologised, and dutifully vanished from public life for nearly a year.

“These stories are true,” the comedian acknowledged in a statement. “At the time, I said to myself that what I did was okay because I never showed a woman my dick without asking first, which is also true. But what I learned later in life, too late, is that when you have power over another person, asking them to look at your dick isn’t a question.”

The damage was not just reputational. It was quantifiable. His new movie, I Love You, Daddy, was abruptly shelved, never to be released. His management company cut him loose; his contracts with FX and TBS were cancelled; his past work was pulled from streaming services. Forbes estimated that the comedian’s immediate losses counted in the tens of millions. And that was before you counted all the income he’d never make now that, as the writer boldly predicted, his career was permanent toast.

It was enough to make even the most coolheaded feminist start to imagine a time, surely not too far off, when the movement would rise to absolute power and the patriarchy would lie in ruins. But this week, Louis CK punched a Grammy-shaped hole right through that little fantasy, by winning the music industry’s biggest award for Best Comedy Album. “Sincerely Louis CK” was the comedian’s first release since 2017, when the story of his sexual misconduct broke.

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At the time of its release, the reaction to the new special was as much a microcosm for the divide between elite tastemakers and ordinary consumers as it was a response to the content itself. Critics mainly complained that Louis CK didn’t do enough to address and apologise for his inappropriate behaviour, while those who bought the album mainly laughed until they couldn’t breathe — a reaction for which they, too, were mercilessly indicted. (Slate’s review of the special scolded that these jokes might have been funny if told by a less repulsive entertainer to a less repulsive audience, before condemning both Louis CK and his fans in a single breath: “Everyone involved in that transaction deserves one another.”) At the time of writing, the show’s Rotten Tomatoes rating from viewers is a stellar 93%.

And yet, those same tastemakers still managed to be shocked, and to take it deeply personally, when the Grammy win was announced. “[Thanks] so much to our industry for once again telling us that survivors don’t matter,” tweeted writer and producer Sarah Ann Masse. To outraged critics, Louis CK’s comeback was like five years’ worth of progress undone.

But looking back, it’s hard to believe we were ever so confident in our ability to permanently separate a massively successful entertainer from an audience that still clamoured for his work. Even when Louis CK began popping up at comedy clubs in late 2018, the response from media folks and comedy scene critics was a chorus of “too soons” — as if their opinions mattered, when audiences at these events greeted him with wild applause.

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Meanwhile, not only did those who’d cancelled the comedian continue to act as if his redemption request was theirs to reject or approve, they also adamantly refused to sketch out a framework for how a #MeToo’d man might return to normal life. When pressed — if not now, when? if not like this, then how? — the answer was a shrug. Who knows? And more importantly, who cares? Eventually, this question would be turned back on the asker: how could you even ask about redemption for cancelled men when their victims were still reeling from the trauma? “How do you come back from having your mentor destroy your career? How to you come back from having your boss ask for sexual favours?” scolded an NPR interviewee. “Those are the questions I think we should be taking up, not how guys get to come back and have the next stage of their careers.”

In fact, in 2018 Louis CK was already showing signs that he’d reached the limit of his willingness to play this particular game of rhetorical Calvinball. He was done apologising when there was no forgiveness on offer, done asking permission to live from people who not only weren’t going to grant it, but were clearly getting off on rejecting his pleas for clemency. In one of his first appearances on stage after the scandal broke, he asked: “What, are you going to take away my birthday? My life is over, I don’t give a shit.”

This line was dismissed at the time as mere bitter raving from a washed-up nobody. Now, it feels like a pretty incisive indictment of the hubris that had taken hold amongst the movement’s most strident activists. After all, #MeToo had already managed to radically dilute the concept of sexual assault to include not just the Weinsteins of the world but also things like ghosting, cheating, or preferring that one’s partner wear a certain type of eye makeup during sexual activity.

Aziz Ansari was #MeToo’d for being too pushy while seeking consent during a hookup and failing to intuit that his date wasn’t enjoying herself. Al Franken was forced out of public life after what has since been widely acknowledged as a politically-motivated smear campaign by a Right-wing talk radio host. Ansel Elgort continues to be dogged by allegations of “grooming” based on a handful of years-old, flirtatious snapchat exchanges by the then 20 year-old with teenaged fans.

So you could be forgiven, as man after man was toppled for increasingly esoteric violations of the rapidly-evolving norms, for thinking that you could cancel pretty much anyone for anything.

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But in truth, the power of #MeToo to hold a cancelled man’s feet to the fire was already on the wane, diminishing with every renewed demand for more grovelling, more apologies, a few more slivers of flesh atop the pound that had already been collected. At the height of the movement’s influence, a choice was made: to be relentless, to rejoice in punishing those who not only transgressed but questioned the orthodoxy, and to scoff at the idea that these excesses might ever come back to haunt us. Had the movement gone too far? No! It hadn’t gone far enough!

It took a while to realise that we had created a toxic culture in which contrition was seen as pointless. And it was, ironically, the greatest gift the movement could give to its enemies: the courage that comes from having nothing to lose.

And now, we reap what we sowed. For all its influence over the discourse, and for all the scalps it’s collected from men who lacked the comeback capacity of someone like Louis CK, #MeToo cannot ultimately stop a popular entertainer from making money off his art — nor has it managed to persuade a plurality of people that the punishment for every weird sexual transgression should be permanent professional death.

One by one, the men we cancelled are coming back — if they ever left. Aziz Ansari is back on the comedy circuit. James Franco is still making movies. Christiano Ronaldo settled a lawsuit after a rape allegation and promptly returned to the soccer field. Ansel Elgort just starred in Spielberg’s West Side Story. The market, not the movement, still holds the power here.

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But more importantly, the refusal of #MeToo gatekeepers to even imagine that the men they toppled might not stay gone forever is exposing the movement itself as something far less groundbreaking than its most fervent adherents might have hoped. The promise of a better, fairer, more ethical framework for women’s workplace equality simply never came to pass — not least because we couldn’t bring ourselves to abandon the fantasy of throwing transgressors into the bin and letting them rot. And in our focus on punishment above all, we abandoned the principles that any real, working system of justice requires: of proportionate punishments that fit the crime. Of fairness and humility. Of a path back into grace for those who’ve transgressed but atoned.

Instead, the movement has been reduced to a revenge-seeking apparatus that takes grievances at one end and produces the instant gratification of an internet outrage cycle at the other. We were promised sweeping social change. What we got was a ritual spanking machine. And while some people might be sustained by this, riding the outrage rollercoaster from one cancellation to the next, it’s depressing to see it come to this — even as Louis CK and his Grammy award laugh all the way to the bank.

“You are always associated, in the public’s eyes, with your brother Augustus and with your lover, Auguste Rodin. I am always seen in light of my involvement with Lucian Freud,” Paul continues. “We are neither of us considered as artists standing alone. I hate the term ‘in her own right’ — as in ‘artist in her own right’ — because it suggests that we are still bound to our overshadowed lives, like freed slaves.”

They may have painted remarkable portraits themselves, but both women are primarily known as the muses of “great” male artists. And Paul’s new book takes the form of a series of letters to John, whose life was “stamped with a similar pattern” to her own.

“I hate the word ‘muse’, too, for the same limiting reason … What is it about us that keeps us tethered?” Paul undoubtedly knows the answer to this question already: she is forever seen first and foremost in terms of her association with a man, rather than judged by her own successes.

When the National Portrait Gallery, for instance, recently acquired a self-portrait by Paul (“Portrait, Eyes Lowered”), each of the news articles emphasised her “relationship with Lucian Freud, who painted her many times”. Similarly, Rachel Campbell-Johnston chose to open her Times article with the very same framing the artist despises: “Celia Paul was a model and muse for Lucian Freud. She is also an artist in her own right. There . . . I’ve said it. That’s how Paul does not like to be introduced.”

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This rhetoric is not unusual: there is a long history of women being identified as partners of men, rather than as individual agents. Constance Mary Lloyd was a children’s book writer and dedicated activist who campaigned for a woman’s right to serve in parliament. But, upon marrying Oscar Wilde, she was referred to as “Mrs. Oscar” in the press.

This is particularly galling when a woman has been instrumental to her partner’s success by, say, serving as a muse — a role whose influence has been repeatedly denied by male artists. Some have actually demanded that muses who were practising artists forget their careers to exclusively serve them. We know the famous faces of these women but often nothing of their own art. Jo Nivison Hopper, for instance, frequently features in her husband’s cinematic paintings, including the downtown diner scene, “Nighthawks” (1942). Most people recognise this painting; but how many could call to mind one of Nivison’s?

Nivison was initially the more successful artist. In 1924 she was invited to show six watercolours at the Brooklyn Museum, alongside Georgia O’Keeffe and John Singer Sargent. Meanwhile, Hopper hadn’t sold a painting in over a decade. Nivison, wanting to support Hopper, convinced the museum to include his work in the show; this was the exhibition which launched his career, and ended hers.

That same year, Jo Nivison married Hopper. From this moment on, her diary tells the story of his abuse, which was physical as well as psychological. Her husband discouraged her from painting: “If there can be room for only one of us, it must undoubtedly be he,” she writes, assuming the role of studio assistant, secretary and muse, and sacrificing her own success for Hopper’s.

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Paul intersperses her letters to Gwen John with reflective passages; they reveal that her fate contains distressing echoes of Nivison’s. Freud attempts to control and exploit Paul; he suggests that she should act like Gwen John, who gave up her own work while having an affair with Rodin:

“He often compared me unfavourably to Gwen John. He told me how beautiful he thought it was that she stopped painting when she was most deeply in love with Rodin because she wanted to give herself up entirely to the experience. She told Rodin, ‘I am not an artist, I’m your model, and I want to stay being your model for ever. Because I’m happy.’ This is how Lucian would have liked me to be. He would have loved Gwen.”

Freud’s desires reflect wider societal expectations that women should serve men’s needs above their own. Nevertheless, Paul — in contrast to John and Nivison — refused to acquiesce to Freud’s demands, living on her own and, following the birth of their son, passing childcare duties to her mother. She reveals that she always felt “resentful” about wanting to be with Freud, as it meant spending less time on her own work.

Perhaps Paul hates the term “muse” so much because she was forever attempting to evade the role — which is a demanding one. As she has said before, “the act of sitting is never passive”. She didn’t have the time, motivation or energy to be Freud’s full-time muse, if she was to become a successful artist on her own terms. “He wanted active participation”, and she wasn’t prepared to surrender. Which perhaps makes it all the more infuriating that being Freud’s muse is so often seen as the most important thing about her.

Still, for someone who is so enraged by the term, Paul can’t quite seem to (or doesn’t want to) completely let her identity as Freud’s muse go. In her letters she dwells on the decade in which she was “intensely involved with” the painter. And it’s not the first time that he has been her subject on the page. Her first book, Self-portrait, focused on her 10-year relationship with Freud, from meeting him while a student at the Slade (she was entranced by his “eerie glow”) to the first time she posed for him and cried. Throughout, she chronicles her struggle to love someone while dedicating herself to painting.

Having already told, and sold, her story as Freud’s muse, isn’t it about time that Paul moved on — especially if she wants everyone else to? Though professing to “hate” being seen always in relation to Freud, isn’t Paul also mining that association? In her letters to John, she is still reflecting on their “connection”, which she can’t seem to break. And in her paintings, Paul continues to orbit Freud. For her show at the Victoria Miro in 2019, she submitted an intimate self-portrait, “Lucian and Me”, in which the male painter tilts his head towards her, as if about to whisper a secret in her ear; she, too, leans in.

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Does Paul want it both ways? She is complaining about the plight of the muse, while attempting to profit from that status, effectively cashing in on her association with Freud. But then, why shouldn’t she? Paul, like so many other female artists, has been overlooked and exploited by the patriarchal art world. Why not take advantage of a situation she can’t escape, even when she tries?

“The world celebrates and rewards women who are chosen by powerful men,” the model Emily Ratajkowski pointed out last year in her memoir, My Body. No matter what she does, she will forever be known for her debut: dancing nearly naked in the music video of Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines”. It is practically impossible for women to escape the association, and influence, of the male gatekeepers who have “made” their careers; all they can do is try to reshape the narrative about their origins. Knowing that, why should we judge Ratajkowski because, to use her words, “I’ve capitalised on my body”?

Paul, too, has been placed in an impossible situation: no matter what she does, she will be seen as Freud’s muse first and an artist “in her own right” second. Paul may as well, then, leverage this association with Freud to further her career, and identify with other women like John who have also been framed in this light. It’s clear that she, like Ratajkowski, is using the very connection that binds her for her own means.

And yet, there is more than self-aggrandisement at stake. Paul is not simply feeding the reader’s fascination with the artist-muse relationship and name-dropping Freud; she is also turning the tables on art history.

In another self-portrait, “Painter and Model” (2012), Paul sits with tubes of paint at her feet, in a huge, stained overall. She is, unmistakably, the painter. But the title coyly alludes to the lasting impact Freud, though he’s not present in the painting, has had on her life. So much so that the viewer is left wondering: is Paul’s final project to invert their relationship? Here, she is the protagonist, while Freud has become a supporting character in her story: an invisible muse.

Ruth Millington’s book, Muse, is published this month.

Men are slipping, by just about every marker of measurement. Deaths of despair are on the rise, suicide and homicide rates are up, and more men are delaying marriage and the establishment of a family. Twice as many men have addiction disorders as women. As Missouri Senator Josh Hawley declared at the National Conservatism Conference last month: “American men are working less, getting married in fewer numbers; they’re fathering fewer children. They are suffering more anxiety and depression. They are engaging in more substance abuse.”

According to Hawley, bad things are happening to men because bad things have happened to masculinity. “Can we be surprised that after years of being told they are the problem, that their manhood is the problem, more and more men are withdrawing into the enclave of idleness, and pornography, and video games?” In his mind, it is not stagnant wages that cause men to feel demotivated at work. It’s not crippling student debt that convinces young men to drop out of university. It’s not the legacy of Purdue Pharma’s aggressive marketing of OxyContin fuelling their addictions. Taking his lead, perhaps, from popular masculinity influencers like Jordan Peterson and Stefan Molyneux, Hawley blames men’s problems on the fact that nobody respects manliness anymore. It’s the feminism, stupid.

Josh Hawley’s constituents in Missouri are among those hardest hit by these issues. The state has, for example, a raging meth problem that’s largely overlooked by the mainstream media. Hawley is responsible for many men like those I grew up with. He should be interested in their complex realities. But, like the self-help gurus he emulates, the senator mystifies. He might be able to accurately describe the state of affairs, but he misdirects men on both its roots — vaguely blaming “the liberal left” — and what to do about it. He wants a “a revival of strong and healthy manhood in America”, but isn’t clear about what that actually that means.

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Hawley’s tactics makes sense for the guru — after all, if they were able to solve your problems, you’d have less reason to buy their next book or listen to their next podcast. Some feminist grifters similarly tell women that their problems stem solely from “the patriarchy” or “misogyny” while also shrugging about what exactly to do about it. But this approach is particularly objectionable coming from a politician, especially a United States senator. Hawley is in the position to materially improve the lives of the men he is supposedly so concerned about, but he would rather obfuscate.

Hawley suggests, for example, that men are not marrying because, “The Left is telling America and its men, you’re evil.” But the real issue is class. In surveys of single people, the reasons given for delaying marriage (or partnership, for people whose goal is simply co-habitation) and childbearing are almost always economic. Marriage has become an elite institution, with highest rates among the people who are already best off — the white, the able-bodied, the most educated, the most financially prosperous.

In search of maximum support, Hawley always stays quiet about which “social issues” he’s blaming for the “deconstruction” of the traditional family. But reading between the lines, his finger is pointing at feminism and gay rights. Both criticise the concept of the nuclear family, for the way it makes the rights granted to couples and parents exclusive to those legally married. Hawley’s is a misdirection I recognise. He’s appealing to people like my uncle, who had difficulty finding stable work due to his lack of a formal education. His wife was a nurse, a traditionally underpaid, strenuous job. They blamed feminism for all social ills.

They played Rush Limbaugh almost continually; I remember first hearing the word “feminazi,” as a kid, in their house. They didn’t see feminism as a movement that fought for her rights as a working woman — which, given that by the Nineties the movement’s focus was more on lifestyle than class concerns, was as much feminism’s fault as their own. People in my town saw women and gays demanding the right to organise their own families in the ways they saw fit, and interpreted it as a threat to the integrity of their families.

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In the past that Hawley is harking back to, the man earned a living wage outside the home and the women raised children. You can see why he’s able to blame feminism for the end of an era. Women, the story goes, were radicalised by feminist thinkers who urged them to seek fulfilment through career and financial independence. This flood of new workers, competing with men for jobs, drove wages down — undermining the male breadwinner.

But the truth is, it was the inflation of the Seventies, and the danger of poverty it brought with it, that drove wages down and therefore women to work. Many mothers got jobs out of necessity, not choice, because their partners’ salaries were no longer enough to support a family. Perhaps the men who lost their breadwinner positions felt attacked, but the alternative was usually debt and destitution. And feminism was the result of this change, not its cause: entering the workforce, women found they had to advocate for fair pay and for the removal of obstacles to advancement.

Hawley ignores present-day economic conditions, too. The stresses that families have experienced during the pandemic — from the struggles of balancing working from home with parenting, to difficulties in getting adequate healthcare — don’t get a mention in his speeches. It’s the same tactic conservatives have often used: arguing for traditional family structures — and even incentivising them, through coercions like tax breaks and public condemnation — while refusing to listen to the practical reasons people are unable or unwilling to participate.

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The other institution that used to support masculinity until, according to Hawley, it was subject to “liberal attacks” is the military. In a 2019 speech, he condemned the progressive criticism of American military intervention, saying, “it also regarded America unilateral action as something to be avoided, even a danger,” as if this were a completely misguided belief.

It’s easier for the Right to romanticise the so-called manly virtues instilled by service — discipline, solidarity, and courage — than it is to admit that serving in wars has left thousands of men traumatised. And that many of those men have been abandoned by their governments to deal with that trauma on their own. More than one of my high school classmates has come out of the military only to find himself too damaged to work full time. Their patriotism and sense of duty — fine things, yes — have been manipulated so that they die not for their country, but for oil and capital.

Gays in the military, the feminist critique of male aggression, leftist anxieties about imperialism: all of these have been blamed for the marginalisation of military service as an integral part of the masculine identity. But the truth lies elsewhere. America’s failure to unflaggingly support the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq isn’t a comment on the terrible lack of patriotism in our nation. It’s not a sign that our armed forces are going “soft,” as figures like Representative Dan Crenshaw have suggested in their statements railing against a “woke” military. It’s happened because we’ve seen through propaganda, and have stopped believing that young men should die because the Republican party created illegitimate allegations of atrocity and invaded a nation under false pretences.

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Blaming progressivism for men’s problems, then, is an attempt by the Right to let itself off the hook. But it won’t do much good. Ideas about masculinity change because what helps a person thrive in one era is going to hurt him in another. If women hadn’t entered the workforce, men and their children would have starved; if soldiers continued to be seen as a masculine ideal, there would’ve been continued support for forever wars.

But masculinity influencers are fixated on the past, on “tradition”. While Hawley mostly just waffles on about the old, more sensible ways of doing something, his one proposed real-world solution to the crisis in masculinity was to bring back manufacturing jobs. Every politician since the Eighties has promised and failed to bring back well-paid manufacturing work. Hawley must know it isn’t going to work. Globalisation makes it impossible. The world has moved on. We can’t go backwards, but the political Right has failed to find a way forwards.

And so it fixates on the “manliness” of men, as many politicians have in times of crisis. Hawley speaks like a YouTube influencer, but he’s part of a long tradition that includes everyone from President Roosevelt to, well, Benito Mussolini. The trouble is that, because masculinity is something that is defined and measured by action, there’s always a sense that the men are simply not doing enough. You can always do one more rep at the gym, kill one more enemy on the battlefield, work one more hour before you end your day. No wonder men are feeling overwhelmed.

Men should be allowed to set aside the burden of ruling the world, for the sake of everyone. Instead of fixating on turning men back into some patriarchal stereotype, the Right should be helping them get jobs and quit drugs. When I think of the limited or derailed lives of the men I was raised with, I don’t just want them to regress into the structures and lifestyles that drove their fathers and grandfathers to drink, or hit their kids, or work so much they were never around. I want something better for them.

The concept of intersectionality — a shorthand for the ways that multiple minority statuses can overlap to create unique forms of oppression — is relatively easy to understand, which explains its sudden ubiquity in the sphere of extremely online activism. Twitter, after all, doesn’t generally allow for much complexity. But 10 years after its feminist incursion, the motto could use an update. “My feminism will be intersectional,” the new version might read, “and it will be the most ineffective flailing spectacle the world has ever seen.”

Turns out intersectionality is a concept that’s basic in theory but wildly divisive in application, especially when — as with feminism — you’re trying to get a coalition of activists with diverse identities to rally around a single shared goal. Whether it was getting the vote, reforming discriminatory laws, or even just pushing the so-called radical notion that women are people, feminism’s aim has always been to advocate for women because they are women. Once it was declared “bullshit” to focus on that commonality, the feminist cause fragmented with alarming swiftness. Since then, it’s had one crisis after another.

There were the toxic Twitter wars documented by Michelle Goldberg in 2014, as feminists eagerly trashed each other online over perceived political incorrectness. There was the implosion of the anti-Trump Women’s March over racial tensions, starting with complaints that the movement was too focused on pink-pussy-hatted white feminism, and ending with the diverse new leadership melting down amid allegations of anti-Semitism. There was Planned Parenthood’s astonishing apology this spring for focusing “too narrowly on women’s health,” closely followed by the schadenfreude-ridden girlboss downfalls in which powerful women, once feminist icons, were suddenly ousted from their own companies in the name of social justice.

Amid this ongoing feminist mission creep, those who attempted to bring the conversation back on the rails were accused of intersectional failure, centring white feelings, and inadequate attention (or even aggression) toward this or that marginalised group. The resulting chaos, apathy, and infighting caused the movement to basically stop moving — unless you count the numerous think pieces and half-dozen books devoted to the newfound scourge of “white feminism.”

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Against this stagnant backdrop, Julie Bindel’s new book, Feminism for Women, promises to breathe life back into the movement. “As feminists,” the veteran activist writes in her introduction, “we are sick of the differences between women being rammed down our throats and used to divide us.” Her book aims to save the cause by reviving the sisterhood and giving feminists permission to re-commit themselves to fighting for the rights of women full stop. “Feminism,” she writes, “has to refocus so that women are the centre of the movement.”

In a feminist culture dominated by online flame wars, Feminism for Women says that what we need are “tangible solutions that will help women move forward to achieve our goal.” Bindel takes aim at the rifts within the movement over trans rights, racism, sex work, pornography — and the incursion of men into positions of feminist influence — with a radical call for unity. If you felt pushed out of the movement during its intersectional moment, this book’s evident goal is to coax you back in.

At its best, Feminism for Women is a righteous expression of solidarity with women, by women, for women. Bindel writes with compelling fury about issues like intimate partner violence, corrupt police who make it fraught and difficult for women to report rape, the systems set up to privilege abusers over victims.

At its worst, though, all this coaxing becomes overwhelming, and this is never truer than when Bindel turns her focus to men, and the women who love them. This is not to say that Bindel’s identity as a lesbian precludes her from talking to and about heterosexual women. Indeed, the notion of identity as a be-all-end-all litmus test for determining who does and doesn’t get to speak on a given topic is just the sort of nonsense that this book rightly pushes back against.

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But having established herself as a person who finds the desirability of men incomprehensible, Bindel could perhaps approach the topic with a bit more humility — and to avoid, say, doubling down on insisting that women who enjoy kinky sex are suffering from false consciousness, or that a substantial number of straight women are simply deluded by patriarchy into imagining that they desire men. Feminism for Women delves at length into the concept of “compulsory sexuality,” with Bindel roundly asserting that if patriarchy were to be defeated, “there would be a significantly higher number of women who choose to be lesbians.”

I suspect that Bindel is probably wrong about this. Heteropessimism is already trendy among millennial-and-younger women. In 2019, Buzzfeed even suggested that straight relationships might be “a doomed project,” hopelessly passé. The new wave of feminists earnestly and publicly insist that they would choose to be lesbians — if only they could escape the siren song of their pesky, innate heterosexual orientation. But the choice, they lament, is not theirs.

The accuracy of Bindel’s hypothesis, though, is less interesting than her choice to assert it within the pages of a book that claims, in all caps, to be FOR WOMAN. In the name of solidarity, why lean so immediately and heavily into rhetoric that a substantial portion of your readership are bound to find alienating? Especially when, as the book itself notes, women are already fatigued by just this sort of identity-based shaming from the woke Left?

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The answer may be that Bindel’s book, despite its best efforts, is still a product of its time. The intersectional feminist literature of the moment instructs women that they’ve been hoodwinked into false consciousness by “whiteness”; Feminism for Women similarly condescends to its readership by replacing “whiteness” with “porn” and “patriarchy.” In both cases, the point is not to find common cause. It’s to fight against a common enemy.

This need to rally against a villainous antagonist is endemic to much contemporary activism, which tends to define itself by what it’s against rather than what it’s for. (Notice how the struggle for civil rights has lately rebranded itself as “anti-racism”; notice how much activist rhetoric focuses on dismantling and tearing-down without any mention of what might be built.) Of course, so many of these movements turn into circular firing squads, as some people invariably become more interested in ejecting apostates from within than advocating for change in the wider world. Consider how many more feminists want to defenestrate J. K. Rowling for her perceived transphobia than to set aside their differences in the name of advocating for shared policy goals.

Early on in Feminism for Women, Bindel asks: are we nearly there yet? Is the work of feminism almost done? The answer, of course, is no: globally, the subjugation of women remains a problem. And even in the western world, one can point to things like the recent Texas abortion statute as evidence that the battle for women’s bodily autonomy is hardly a thing of the past.

And yet feminism may be over anyway — not because there’s no work left to do, but because the necessary coalition-building has become impossible. Of course, Bindel wants this not to be the case. She writes of getting offline, taking to the streets: “It is crucial that we demand to be heard when we speak of what bonds and unites women, not only that which fragments us”. But women, and particularly those who call themselves feminists, no longer agree about what unites us. And the fractures in the movement run so deep that not even Julie Bindel can avoid tumbling between the cracks.

Julie Bindel‘s Feminism for Women is published by Little, Brown

After the burial-parties leave
And the baffled kites have fled;
The wise hyænas come out at eve
To take account of our dead.

How he died and why he died
Troubles them not a whit.
They snout the bushes and stones aside
And dig till they come to it.

They are only resolute they shall eat
That they and their mates may thrive,
And they know that the dead are safer meat
Than the weakest thing alive…              Rudyard Kipling. The Hyaenas

Jordan Peterson is not quite yet a cadaver to be clawed at by the Hyaenas of social media. Rumours of his death have, in Twain’s now sadly rather weary phrase, been much exaggerated. But he has had a tough 12 months.

His travails include, but are not limited to:

1. News that his wife has terminal cancer;
2. Addiction to, and a “paradoxical reaction” to, Benzodiazepines, initially prescribed to calm anxiety and depression but subsequently making the symptoms much worse;
3. A long period spent in Russia to avail himself of medical treatment that for some reason appears to have been unavailable in, say, Toronto, during which time he was put into a coma for his own safety;
4. The discovery that this has all led to “significant neurological damage” and that while Peterson is said to be recovering, he is not yet out of the woods.

And as reports of his brush with death emerged, the Hyaenas came a sniffing anyway.

Of course, not all of the curs openly point and laugh. Commentary — and the internet was awash with it — was in places couched more in sorrow than in scorn; in the familiar, “while I take no pleasure in the suffering and travails of [another human being] it has to be said that [said human being] arguably brought this on himself by [angering the gods of chaos with his stern warnings about dissolute behaviour] and thus [one must admit the natural symmetry and poetic justice of it all…]”

A brusque and brutal “Ha-Ha!” of the Nelson Muntz variety, which was the subtext, would at least have the virtue of brevity.

Anyway, if you had been waiting for a chance to sink a blade into Peterson —  as all the two-bit would-be Leftist Matadors were — the rumours of his helpless thrashings in the briars of pharmaceutical addiction was an opportunity just too delicious to decline.

“I’m sorry, you mean, the man who issued such stern warnings against the siren call of recreational drug abuse, of seeking refuge in their perfidious sanctuary, has himself become so weakened by recourse to prescription tranquilisers that he nearly forfeited his life? Oh, too, too sweet!” Who wouldn’t slaver at such news?

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The video message about this from his daughter — whose own notorious prescription that one should eat only beef in order to overcome various auto-immune issues — only enhanced the piquancy of the moment. This was as close to the old “Motel phone bill of the tele-evangelist reveals a fondness for rent boys” story of yore as we were likely to get, from one following as painfully self-enforced a moral code as Peterson’s.

Why, you might ask, is he so hated, that people so actively and nakedly revel in his distress?

Peterson’s core proposition, as laid out in his 1999 work Maps of Meaning, was that there are two kinds of knowledge of the world —  what it is and what we should do about it. His contention was that while science has proved an incomparable tool for expanding our understanding of the former, it was not equipped to satisfy our questions about the latter. These he suggested were perhaps better served by acquaintance with the world’s great mythical, religious and spiritual traditions. Some of these suggested answers were, inevitably, somewhat conservative in their remedies. This has been enough, in effect, to make him the Supreme Demon in the Pandemonium of Progress.

And, to be fair, anyone who has insisted on the value of ancient myth in understanding our superficially modern, hi-tech existence should not be surprised to find himself discussed in these terms, and the subsequent irony relished. Peterson had — to return to Kipling — set himself up as the Priest of the Gods of the Copybook Headings. That they should turn on him was high drama. And almost absurdly neat.

Peterson’s journey into Russia for medical treatment is further food for the mythically minded. Russia is for Peterson the cradle of Bolshevism, origin of the greatest tyranny to be visited upon Mankind in living memory. Plunging into this monster’s lair to seek his own redemption is pure Beowulf.

And surely Peterson rising from his induced coma is a little like the death and resurrection of the Hero, as described in Joseph Campbell’s mythological synthesis? Every hero, according to Campbell (a view endorsed by Peterson) has to die and be reborn before his quest is accomplished, his foe truly vanquished. The movies offer a thousand examples, from Lord of the Rings to Harry Potter, though my favourite has always been Baloo, briefly swiped into mortality by Shere Khan’s massive paw.

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Jordan’s story arc has thus far been inescapably Christ-like, even if the Peterson Pieta is diminished by his body being metaphorically cradled in his daughter’s somewhat compromised arms, rather than those of his Mother, Beverley Ann.

Or, alternatively, he is just a bloke who got rich telling young men to tidy their rooms, yet couldn’t even keep his own House in order, or indeed his mental integrity, in the teeth of an imminent spousal bereavement, an adverse reaction to benzodiazepine and grotesque levels of public scrutiny. Ha ha!

So, while it is a little disappointing that so many for whom compassion is, if not to be cultivated, at least to be signalled, found it just too tempting to get stuck in — it’s not a surprise. A degree of rancour is inevitable in the battle of ideas, and Peterson’s insistence in the right of the Right to be right stirred more than most. But the publication this month of a new feminist history does I think offer a way to reconsider and even reconcile a little.

In a neat twist, it’s by Helen Lewis, who has history with Jordan Peterson. She conducted a well-publicised interview with him for GQ in 2018. And she also wrote about him in the New Statesman, describing the man who had, if not destroyed, then at least carefully dismantled C4’s Cathy Newman, as a “Cargo Cult Intellectual”, ie an empty outer shell, with no working machinery

But with her new book, Difficult Women, she makes the very worthwhile point that much of the progress made over the last two hundred years in women’s rights was won by troubled, flawed, even monstrous individuals. The uncomfortable truth is, according to Lewis, that pretty much every one of those great pioneers of that long march have been women whose company it would be hard for a modern feminist even to tolerate for very long, or whose wider views they could endorse.

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The inescapable misogyny of modern life

By Tanya Gold

It’s an observation worth reflecting on, and not just when it comes to feminism. It can, I think, be extrapolated to describe all those who make useful waves. They are all too often deeply unreasonable people. As George Bernard Shaw said, it is only those who are so afflicted, who don’t just accept the world as it  is, and therefore change it.

And if it’s slack we accord our allies, it’s slack we must surely concede to our enemies, too.

Perhaps some of those who read Lewis’s book will conclude, reluctantly, that if you want to break the ice which is ever forming on the surface of society, you have to accept the kind of people who wield axes for what they are. Decide to wait, instead, for a man or woman without inconsistencies, without hypocrisies, without flaws, who is not human, and you will either wait for a very long time, or you endure sermons of a very thin gruel — a meal not even fit for Hyaenas.

On a similar note, a friend recently told me that my failure to recognise a vast malevolent patriarchy was as a result of “internalising your own oppression”. There seems to be a lot of internalised weirdness going on: gender victim battling it out with racist in my gut. I thought it was wind.

The publisher is pretty sure that the ranks of underpaid, bookish folk who work for them are also all white supremacists. It is distributing the tome to all the British employees of its parent company Hachette, and telling them to spend 28 days “reflecting on manifestations of white supremacy, including white privilege”.

The self-flagellation of all the white supremacists at Hachette is yet another example of how much the Woke borrow from the Church. Identity politics has become a secular religion, and “white privilege” is one of its shibboleths. Indeed Ms Saad makes the point clearly in her book, stating that “I strongly believe that anti-racism practice and social justice work are also spiritual work.”

To be woke demands faith in certain creeds, with the twins Equality and Diversity as unassailable deities. It demands a knowledge of the right language. You must believe in certain disprovable evils — like the existence of a malevolent patriarchy — and like many strict sects, it punishes its apostates most severely. The Twitter storms are fierce for those who express a non-woke view but should have known better than for those outside of the faith altogether.

Tom Holland, in his book Dominion, The making of the Western Mind, identifies the “trace elements” of Christianity in the woke world. The example he used was the intersectional feminists in the #MeToo movement offering white feminists the chance to “acknowledge their own entitlement, to confess their sins and to be granted absolution”.

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How racist are you?

By Tom Chivers

But the problem with identity politics as a secular religion is precisely its failure to allow for absolution. The faith that Saad  espouses is utterly bleak, even cloaked as it is in words of love. It utterly fails to allow for redemption, and its most direct  religious antecedent is found in Calvinist predestination.

Under this doctrine, God has predetermined whether you are damned or elect. From the second that the right sperm hit it lucky with the most fecund egg, your place in the woke hierarchy was decided. In the modern progressive world, informed by intersectional feminists, it does not matter what you say or do, the only defining factor in your state of grace is your skin, gender and sexuality.

This is a profoundly depressing outlook for three main reasons. The first is the essential nihilism in the creed. Your intent? Irrelevant. Your deeds? Likewise. The sum of your experience, desires, longings, beliefs? Your humanity itself? Nah, not relevant.

The second dispiriting message is that the problems its aims to address are insoluble. White people are racist by their nature, and inherently incapable of seeing their own racism or addressing it. Men are misogynists, by default, witting or unwitting bulwarks of the patriarchy. If they don’t believe they are individually at fault they are in denial. And if they try to say, actually, I’m not sure the patriarchy exists, they are mansplaining misogynist bastards. This is the politics of perpetual antagonism, of a  kind of bleak acceptance that all relationships between different categories of human are necessarily fractious.

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The toxic self-hatred of white Democrats

By Justin Webb

Most of us accept that racism, sexism, homophobia and other forms of discrimination exist. Most of us accept that it would be infinitely preferable if they did not. But as progressive politics grip, and the more the Pandora’s box of vile isms is talked about, the  fewer of us seem to believe that it is possible to eradicate them.

The third problem with Puritan wokeness is that it sinister echoes in the history of predestination. When the creed reached its zenith in the seventeenth century, the logical hole at its centre became insanely obvious. If it does not matter to God how you behave, because your salvation was pre-determined at birth, why not behave however the hell you want to?

The outpourings of radical thought in the English Civil Wars included sects who came to exactly this conclusion. The Ranters, at least by reputation, advocated a lifestyle of Dionysiac excess. If orgies and boozing, gluttony and blasphemy did not have any material impact on whether you were going to heaven or hell, then why not shag, indulge and curse the Lord as much as you want?

The extent of their membership is disputed and the fear of the Ranters was strong among the Puritans, partly, I suspect, because the logical fallacy of the original tenet is so glaringly obvious. Many of the theological arguments espoused by the men who were labelled Ranters were more textured and complicated than a license to loucheness. But the essential point remains: if you are already damned, your actions and intent are irrelevant.

The Puritan response was a horrified recoil. If God has made you one of the elect, you have a responsibility to Him to behave as if you are elect. A rare few came to believe they were not elect, and tortured themselves with it. If this sounds familiar, you have probably met an apologetic white male ally of the woke.

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Is conservatism normalising the alt-Right?

By Eric Kaufmann

This response to inescapable damnation matters. I have spent some time in the twilight reaches of the manosphere researching a new book, a world of depressing forums, full of hatred and despair, where young men gather to focus on the absence of sex in their lives. There are two broad categories: The Incels hate women because they won’t sleep with them. The Men Go Their Own Way (MGTOW) guys won’t sleep with women because they hate them.

These boys have their own vocabulary and belief systems. Pretty girls (Staceys) all sleep with the same few Alpha men (Chads). The Staceys ride the Cock Carousel, ie, have sex with the same few Chads. All this sluttish behaviour gives the Staceys something called A Thousand Cock Stare.

It is a grim world, in which women are evil and manipulative, and hated both for being sluts and for being virgins. It is a world in which pictures of pretty girls with their pet dogs are unbelievably sinister. These boys choose to live in this bleak world. They are culpable. But, if you tell all young, white boys that they are damned, why should they not behave as if they are damned?

A society which does not allow for people to atone, to be redeemed, and to be judged on their intent and actions is a miserable place. Most people interact with each other without antagonism most of the time. We should start being a bit more forgiving to each other, ditch the Puritanism and learn to cherish the well-meaning stumble towards decency. Even if, sometimes, we fall.

The last few years of politics have tested loyalties and fractured tribes; for many, it’s tempting to disengage altogether. We have asked contributors to remind us of why politics matters, by reflecting on their formative years. This series of political awakenings shows how family, feelings and unlikely accidents can shape a lifetime of politics…

One night in November 1980, I was followed on my way home from the pub. I was 18, newly arrived in Leeds and living in a YWCA hostel. At the time, the young women of northern England were living under a reign of terror; a serial killer operating in the region had already killed 12 women.

The man who followed me was of medium height with a dark, full beard, wiry hair and black, piercing eyes. I ran into another pub and managed to shake him off. Friends persuaded me to report it to the police and I completed a Photofit, but it was obvious that the officers weren’t taking me seriously.

The next day, the body of the serial killer’s final victim, Jacqueline Hill, was found less than half a mile from where I was followed. It was another two months before Peter Sutcliffe was arrested and confessed to her murder. When his photograph was published, it almost exactly matched my Photofit.

Sutcliffe, nicknamed ‘the Yorkshire Ripper’ by the tabloid press, turned out to be an ordinary, married man living in a suburb of Bradford. His crimes brought attitudes about women in general, and prostituted women in particular, out into the open — and it was in response to this shameful misogyny that I became a committed feminist.

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Our dangerous approach to misogyny

By Joan Smith

Sutcliffe’s first murder victim — 28-year-old sex worker Wilma McCann — had been discovered in 1975 and, right from the beginning, the West Yorkshire Police were guilty of dragging their feet and bungling the investigation. Complacent officers overlooked vital clues, and inadequate technology was used to collate interviews and intelligence reports. And all the while, Sutcliffe just kept killing — with hammers, screwdrivers and knives.

Partly to blame for their failure to track him down was their assumption that the Ripper was only interested in prostituted women — when, in fact, only a minority of his victims were involved in the sex trade. On 30 June, 1977, an open letter from the Yorkshire Evening Post to Sutcliffe said, “Your motive, it’s believed, is a dreadful hate for prostitutes — a hate that drives you to slash and bludgeon your victims,” Such women, in the eyes of many, were complicit in their own demise, or even deserved their fate — rape and murder being mere occupational hazards.

This mythology meant that police excluded a number of cases of women found murdered in England because they did not fit the profile. They failed, for instance, to listen to one of Sutcliffe’s surviving victims: Tracy Browne, 14 at the time, managed to get a good look at the man who chatted to her about the weather, before striking her about the head several times with a hammer. When she reported the attack, Tracy was shown the Photofits compiled by other survivors and told police she believed it to be the same man. But they dismissed her evidence because she was not engaged in prostitution.

As a result police were no closer to identifying Sutcliffe by the time they found his fifth murder victim — Jayne MacDonald, who also did not fit their profile — in June 1977. The killing was described by police and press as a “tragic mistake”: she was 16 and described as “respectable and innocent”. Victims were duly divided into deserving and undeserving women.

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The fall of the Wall powered up my politics

By Ruth Davidson

When MacDonald was murdered, I was 15 and already thinking about feminism. I had been outed as a lesbian at school, where girls were judged either slags or lesbians by the boys who were the ones doing the naming and shaming. Sexism within popular culture was neither subtle nor occasional in the 1970s, and I learned that sexual violence was endemic in reality and widely viewed as entertainment.

In 1979, I moved from the North East of England to Leeds, where I met a group of radical feminists who were campaigning against male violence towards women and girls. At that time, their main focus of the group was challenging the appalling attitude of the police and journalists towards the victims and potential victims — and all women were potential victims — of the Yorkshire Ripper.

During Sutcliffe’s reign, ordinary men in the north of England loved to make jokes about him. “There’s only one Yorkshire Ripper”, football fans would chant; “Ripper 12, police nil”, was one particular jibe during Leeds United football matches where the police were penalising unruly fans; “Give us a kiss, love, I’m not the Ripper” was a regular crack heard in nightclubs around the country. A group of anarchists even named themselves The Peter Sutcliffe Fan Club because they saw him as the ultimate rebel.

Men would refer to Sutcliffe’s victims as sluts, slags and whores; they had it coming, blokes would say. I heard it from men on buses and on the streets. In the Post’s open letter of 1977, Sutcliffe was asked how he felt knowing that he had killed an innocent victim rather than a prostitute. Surely he felt remorse about his mistaken killing of the “respectable” Jayne McDonald?

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There's nothing woke about the sex trade

By Julie Bindel

Sutcliffe’s killing spree and responses to it from the police, media and much of the general public opened my eyes to the toxic level of misogyny within our society. I learned that women’s lives are worthless in relation to men – especially when those women are, as the northern phrase goes, “No better than they ought to be”.

Misogyny is borne from boys who are raised to consider women as lesser beings — little more than a commodity to be used and abused. It is precisely because men are afforded power over women under patriarchy that sexual violence exists. Feminism, which is my core political belief, will ultimately liberate women from male supremacy.

Femicide — the slaying of women by men — is a pandemic worldwide. When feminism achieves its aims, there will be no more Sutcliffes, and no more raped and murdered women and girls stacked up in morgues. For this, and a million other reasons, every woman should be a feminist.