Editor’s note: The author discusses topics of sexual violence, and contains strong language reader discretion is advised.
I write these articles about the way women are treated and I hope that I can get men to think about it and think differently about their attitudes towards their wives, their girl children, their women employees and how they could want people to have different ways of treating each other.
We need to care about each other and try to change this horrible society that we are living in at this time.
Laura Bates, a feminist writer, receives death and rape threats on line and the police have said these threats are credible. Before she got married, a men’s rights activist told her husband that if he went through with the marriage to her, “her husband would one day come home to find that she had burned the house down, stolen his money,murdered their children and absconded with a coven of lesbian witches.”
So obviously, men’s rights means hatred of women. Feminism is often portrayed as catty and divisive, and hating men but I have never found this. Women support each other in difficult situations, hence setting up the Women’s refuges, the rape crisis centres and so forth.
Women have long been demeaned by the lad culture. Girl university students can go through hell during Freshers week. And I quote; “I was sexually assaulted on the dance floor and regularly groped by boys in my year”, and; “Women were often talked of as sluts.”
There are two expressions allowed on television: Son of a bitch and motherfucker. Both of those insult our mothers. I would never have thought of my mother in those terms but they seem acceptable in our society.
“This treatment of women over the many decades has changed very little. The media may have been different, but the attitude to rape victims was appalling in the mainstream press, police and courts and the misogyny and mocking of women was continuous.
Being the target of sexist jokes was so pervasive, it was just part of being a woman.
One of my clients, a rape victim, in the 60s, went to the police, they took her into a room and surrounded her, saying things like; “You liked it didn’t you? “, “You were asking for it, “, “You had an orgasm didn’t you”, and so on. She had been physically raped and the police dragged it over her again.
Now we have more vocabulary to name what is done to women. Maybe that’s a good thing as we can see how women are insulted, such as fat-shaming, slut-shaming, body-shaming and so on.
Germaine Greer, the famous feminist writer once wrote; “Women have very little idea of how much men hate them”.
Frank Heston, a prominent donor to the Tory party, was quoted as saying that he disliked an MP, called Diane Abbot, so much that she should be shot. She has done absolutely nothing to him, except that she is a woman and an MP of long-standing, 28 years and the first black woman MP in Parliament. She is the most trolled, insulted and abused MP in Parliament. She travels by bus and is in a very vulnerable position.
Dominic Cummings under Boris Johnson was able to say of a woman; “…if I have to come back to Helen’s bullshit…I will personally handcuff her and escort her from the building. I don’t care how it’s done but that woman must be out of our hair—we cannot keep dealing with this horrific meltdown of the British state while dodging stilettos from that cunt.”
The Rochdale girls were treated horribly by the men who groomed them and the police. One young girl was raped twice but because she was reluctant to report the crime against her the police recorded the crime as “requiring no further action.
Sarah Rowbotham, leading the intervention team, confronted a social worker, who told the girl’s parents that the child was a prostitute, by saying; “Me and you, we’re looking at the same thing: but where I see kids (girls) being turned inside out by abusers, you see only slags who bring it on themselves.”
A woman who worked as a cook on an all-male freighter was quoted in the Shere Hite report; “I enjoy sex but never have I experienced a more concentrated dose of chauvinism than being the only woman on a freighter with young men I am unwilling to fuck.”
I worked with women’s issues at the GLC under Ken Livingstone when I had to deal with the fire service and women.
A woman started her job at a fire station and they said she had to undergo an initiation ceremony so they tied her up and they all peed on her.
We dealt with it by instructing the fire service that no woman was to be on her own in any fire station so there always had to be a minimum of 2 women there.
On social media platforms there is extreme woman hatred from teenagers’ screens to become normal in the children’s playgrounds. This girl hatred in mixed schools is now embedded in youth culture.
To this day, I am extremely grateful that I was sent to all-girls schools and of course there was no social media at that time.
When I was a part of setting up the first Rape Crisis Centre in the UK in the 60s, on our first day with the telephone line, we were inundated with calls by women who had been raped when younger, during the war etc, and had told no-one even their husbands. They just wanted to express their feelings and tell their stories.
At the end of the day, we, the volunteers, wept. Rape is still being used as a weapon of war.
Over the years I had hoped that woman – hatred would get better but now when some men go out for the night they take rape drugs with them because they plan to do exactly that.
We need men who do not behave like that and who hate male attitudes towards women to have the courage to stand up and be counted. They need to stand beside us in this battle so that one day women will be able to live in a decent society and feel safe.
