Labour has fallen in with the wrong kind of feminist

The novelist Doris Lessing has been called a ‘feminist icon’ but had some withering words for modern-day feminists before she died last year.

At the Edinburgh Book Festival in 2001, she said: “What I really can't stand about the feminist revolution is that it produced some of the smuggest, most unselfcritical people the world has ever seen. They are horrible."

She added: "It is time we began to ask who are these women who continually rubbish men. The most stupid, ill-educated and nasty woman can rubbish the nicest, kindest and most intelligent man and no one protests.

"Men seem to be so cowed that they can't fight back, and it is time they did."

I have had my fair share of shouty abuse from feminist mobs online and can certainly sympathise with what Lessing says, even though I would pull away from calling all of these people ‘awful’; indeed they are often perfectly pleasant when separated from this side of their politics. It is often better to judge words and actions alone without getting on to the whole person.

Nevertheless, they can certainly test you with those words. Probably the most harrowing moment I have had was when one girl from a particularly angry ‘pile-in’ mob on Twitter said she wanted to throw a knife in my face for saying I thought the feminist ideology of ‘patriarchy’ was “nonsense”. When I told her how I felt about this she apologised and we got on decently enough after that; it also turned out she was only a teenager, at school. But it was indicative of the sort of angry hostility that is common from certain feminist types who you might expect to find only on the margins of our politics.

So imagine my surprise a few weeks ago when I read that my wannabe knife-throwing assailant, Lili Evans, founder of the Twitter Feminist Youth Army and now sixteen years old, had been given a platform by Labour’s shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper to speak at a conference on improving the criminal justice system to help women.

Actually, I was not in the least surprised.

Ever since I re-joined Labour after the 2010 election, the party’s approach to gender politics has concerned me. For a start Labour generally uses the word ‘equality’ in an Orwellian sense, not to describe equality but rather with securing exclusive, preferred rights for women, while giving free reign to some pretty aggressive anti-male rhetoric. But the culture of barely allowing any criticism or critique of this approach is if anything more disturbing, reflecting the authoritarian instincts of many of these activists and a weakness of values in the party.

Another speaker at Yvette Cooper’s Women’s Safety Conference was Caroline Criado-Perez, who came to prominence with her successful campaign to put a woman’s face on a banknote and suffered some nasty online abuse for it. This draws our sympathy and admiration, but Criado-Perez’s politics should make us extremely wary. Along with Lili Evans and many others in and around the higher echelons of the Labour Party, she is in to the idea of universal female oppression in a big way, and I mean big.

Check out for example this (apologies for being rather long) passage, which is typical of her views and those of her fellow travellers (from a post entitled ‘It’s My Job To Educate You’):

As a woman, I am oppressed on the basis of my gender. I am paid less than men for the same work. My emotions and body are deemed problematic. I am expected to conform to behaviours that I don’t want to – but blamed for being weak when I do. I am expected to spend reams of time and money to fit into an oppressive and completely unachievable standard of beauty, do serious damage to myself with unwearable shoes and clothes – and mocked and belittled if I do. I face the daily reality of sexual harassment, the threat of rape, being disbelieved when I talk about my trauma, when I talk about sexual violence committed against me, and of course, when I talk about my oppression.

Now we shouldn’t belittle or doubt any personal oppression that Criado-Perez has experienced in her own life, but the casual universalization of these things and the contempt for factual evidence takes the breath away. She has also built up a track record of being appallingly rude to people who honestly disagree with her bizarre theories. I find myself questioning the judgement of Yvette Cooper and the wider Labour movement that these are people they (or, I guess I should say, we) are looking to take advice from.

Now the headline policy that has arisen from Cooper’s consultations is a proposal to ban community resolutions in cases of domestic violence against women [Correction: should read 'domestic abuse']. She went on to Radio 4’s Today Programme to explain it and, as Cathy Newman, an admirer of Cooper’s, said, “swiftly came unstuck”.

On the programme, Garry Shewan, Assistant Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police, pointed out that community resolutions are only used in less than 1 per cent out of a staggering one million annual domestic abuse cases, are generally used only in cases not involving violence, and when the victim wishes not to prosecute. He used the example of a broken wing-mirror as an example. Cooper’s outrage that these resolutions had seen a threefold increase in two to three years (to 6,861 in 2012/2013) looked rather silly.

Later on she made a decent little political speech, saying: 

“This is about the Government, which has actually turned its back on violence against women. Prosecutions and convictions for rape and domestic violence and child sex offences have gone down substantially in the last three years at a time when the number of offences being reported to the police has increased.”

This deserves attention and investigation, but it sounded rather hollow after her grasp of basic numbers and police practice had been found so wanting.

To me, this seems to show a couple of things. Firstly, that Labour’s old instinct to micro-manage and control from the centre rather than devolve powers (as it has been talking about recently) remains very much alive. And secondly, that this is most apparent when it comes to pleasing the base. Within Labour’s base of committed activists, the feminist tendency now stands alongside (and indeed within) the unions in terms of clout and influence. It needs some 'red meat' to chew on.

But there is more. In her earlier article, Cooper said she thinks all boys should grow up as ‘confident feminists’ (something I wouldn’t have had a problem with a few years ago, but do now - now that I know what I do about contemporary feminism). In amongst all the noise that the campaigners generate she doesn’t seem to realise what a minority pursuit feminism is, even among women – let alone men. 

She and the Labour mainstream don’t want to face up to the fact that this ‘movement’ is not particularly admired beyond the political activist community of the left. In a survey by Netmums, only one in seven women in Britain were happy to describe themselves as feminist. As it concluded, “The study starkly shows modern women feel traditional Feminism is no longer a label they feel proud to wear - it is seen as aggressive, divisive and doesn't take into account their personal circumstances.” 

The recent appearance of the popular ‘meme’ #WomenAgainstFeminism hasn’t come out of nowhere.

Better kinds of feminist are out there of course, but they are not nearly as well plugged in to the sprawling network of institutions, campaign groups and interest groups that make up the wider political architecture of the left. They are rather marginalised, but this probably also reflects a relative lack of motivation. There are certainly battles left for feminism to fight, and the culture of domestic violence is one of them, but the big battles of feminism are now largely won.

The worst of feminist politics as espoused by the ideologues privileges group rights while denying even a voice to the ‘other’ group – on account of ‘male privilege’. This is simple authoritarian behaviour, based on an idea of exclusive authority. It is not a politics any of us should be indulging or embracing. Unfortunately however, that is precisely what Labour is doing: the extreme has become mainstream.


For more on this and similar topics, see Identity politics and the left page.