This Woman’s Work (Or, what the Government would rather women were doing than claiming benefits)

On Saturday, Bluebird TV posted a job on DirectGov, a Government-run website allowing users to access information about public services, including jobs. The advert was for “Females (sic) Presenters required for home internet work for internet babe chat” for Loaded TV, an offshoot of the lads’ mag of the same name.

A quick look on either website suggests that the chances of this being anything other than soft porn at best are slim. This job comes with the implicit approval of the Department of Work and Pensions. This is what the government would rather women be doing than claiming benefits.

I’m sure that by tomorrow morning they’ll have come up with an explanation, but I find it hard to believe that there are no checks in place for prospective employers who want to advertise on the site. If that’s the case, it’s negligent. If it’s not then someone, at some point, decided that this was OK. That exploiting women was fine, because that’s one more woman who won’t be claiming JSA this week.

You can argue that women who want to work in this industry, who are doing so entirely uncoerced and of their own volition, should be able to find employment the same way any other prospective employee would.

I am so fucking sick of the pornification of our culture. Of normalising the exploitation of women, of promoting rape culture. I want to see Page Three of The Sun taken up with what they laughably call news, not with pictures of naked women. I want to walk into the newsagents and not be afraid to raise my eyes above a certain level because I know I’ll end up with magazines like Barely Legal in my sightline. And I don’t want companies like Bluebird or Loaded given legitimacy by getting advertising on a Government-funded jobseekers website.

There’s a reason there are no adverts for gigolos or Chippendales on DirectGov. It’s not that women don’t like casual sex, don’t like looking at men. It’s that men’s bodies are not commodified in the same way that women’s are. Men are lauded for intellect, for physical fitness. Women’s are valued for how fuckable they are.

I’m under no illusion about how hard this recession is biting, especially for women. It sickens me that women, made vulnerable by financial hardship – especially in the run up to Christmas, for fuck’s sake – might see this ad, think it’s an easy way to make money and swallow their pride and their disgust and that last bit of self-esteem and go for it. Because they can’t find another job, because their benefits are being slashed, more women are going to end up in some variant of sex work. And the Government aren’t just allowing that to happen – they’re promoting it.

Strangely enough, on the drop-down menu of reasons for not applying for the job ‘because this demeans women’ is not listed.

Abortion is a moral choice

“Abortion is written in women’s lives and in women’s blood.” – Merle Hoffman

About three years ago, I went on a pro-choice demonstration outside the Houses of Parliament. We were protesting against the amendment to a particular bill, although the exact details escaped me. I made a placard with cardboard and a red Sharpie, and I stood in Westminster with about fifty other women, chanting ‘Not the church, not the state, women must decide their fate!’ Although important, it seemed abstract. More like a rite of feminist passage than a real struggle against the anti-choicers, it all felt a bit retro. I grew up with legalised abortion, in a family that fully supported a woman’s right to choose. I never envisaged, when I read about the struggles of the pro-choice movement in its early years, that I would see those rights eroded.

On Tuesday, I attended the joint APPG (All-Party Parliamentary Group) on Population, Development & Reproductive Health and Sexual & Reproductive Health at the House of Commons. Chaired by Baroness Jenny Tonge, the group was joined by pro-choice pioneer Merle Hoffman, reading from her recently published memoir Intimate Wars: The Life & Times of the Woman Who Brought Abortion from the Back Alley to the Boardroom. As well as sharing her story of how she entered the pro-choice movement and founded her clinic CHOICES Women’s Medical Center 40 years ago, she discussed the current situation both in the US and UK, and in the developing world*.

If you’ve read a paper or listened to the news over the past few weeks, you can’t have missed the increasing scrutiny that abortion providers have come under. Whether it is the allegation that clinics have used pre-signed consent forms as a means of avoiding the frankly patronising rule of having two doctors agree that an abortion is acceptable before a woman can be referred – in some cases causing delays to the procedure – or anti-choice organisations being given a platform in schools to make false claims linking abortion to breast cancer and calling rape “the ultimate unplanned pregnancy”, women’s right to choose is under attack.

What I had considered a backlash against women’s reproductive autonomy, Merle sees as simply the continuation of the attempts by the anti-choice movement, attempts that are helped by the apathy of a generation who have grown up accepting legalised abortion as the norm. But whilst we’ve laid down our weapons, the other side haven’t stopped fighting – the battle to save women’s reproductive freedom in the UK and the US is ongoing, and the time to fight back is now.

Abortion Rights, the national pro-choice campaigning organisation in the UK, are staging a protest this Friday in Bloomsbury to counter the actions of US-based organisation 40 Days for Life, who are demonstrating outside the clinic during Lent:

Anti-choice group 40 Days for Life are currently staging a 40 day protest at the BPAS clinic in Bloomsbury, central London. They are outside every day, 8am to 8pm, praying, approaching people entering and leaving the clinic, handing out inaccurate information and on at least one occasion filming staff and clients.

They’re part of a growing tide of anti-choice activity, which is increasingly mimicking the tactics of hardline US groups – from harassing women attempting to access abortion services, to hacking the websites of providers, to targeting those who rent premises to clinics.

At a reading of Merle’s memoir at The Big Green Bookshop earlier tonight, one audience member revealed that one member of 40 Days for Life was a self-professed fascist who was heavily influencing the group’s agenda in the UK. These are the people we are dealing with, these are the people who want control over our bodies in the name of morality.

The anti-choice movement has claimed the moral high ground for too long. They have controlled the narrative and sensationalised the issue and decried the opposition as selfish, as cold-blooded, as murderers. We need to turn out in force – not just on Friday but at every opportunity possible, to tell our side of the story – the story of the back-street abortions that killed countless women until 1967, of women forced to endure pregnancies they didn’t want or who died because their lives were judged less important than that of their foetus.

If you’re in London and free on Friday, please, please attend the counter-demonstration. It’s important that we show that 40 Days for Life are not the only voice out there, that the spirit of reproductive justice is alive and well and fighting.

 Where: Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3HP (nearest tube Tottenham Court Road)

When: 7.00pm on Friday 30th March

Details are on Facebook and follow @BloomsburyPCA and @Abortion_Rights on Twitter for updates.

If you can’t attend for whatever reason, please spread the word. It’s vital that we get as many people out as possible. Alternatively, a pro-choice activist has set up an online fundraising page to raise money for the British Pregnancy Advisory Service – where you can donate an amount, no matter how small, for every day that 40 Days continues their campaign of harassment. Because that’s what it is. I don’t care if they have candles, or if they’re praying – this isn’t a vigil, it’s intimidation.

Stand up for a woman’s right to choose, because no matter what the anti-choicer movement say, abortion is a moral choice, women are moral agents who have a right to determine when and if they become mothers, and every child should be a wanted child.

*I’m not 100% sure this term is correct/acceptable – if there’s another one I should be using, drop me a comment and I’ll change it. Thanks!

Handbags & Gladrags: Why Margaret Thatcher matters

She may have claimed she owed “nothing to women’s lib”, but do today’s women owe anything to Margaret Thatcher? This morning’s panel – titled Ironing it out: Margaret Thatcher – feminist icon? - attempted to answer that question. Journalists Natasha Walter, author of Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism,  Ann Leslie - who travelled around China with Thatcher when the latter was Leader of the Opposition – were joined by Laura Liswood,  Secretary General of the Council of Women World Leaders to discuss women’s relationship with the Iron Lady.

It was a subject close to my heart – sitting through Meryl Streep’s Oscar-winning performance earlier this year, I realised that I knew very little about her outside the political satire that dominated the left wing newspapers and comedy shows of the early 1990s. Reading John Campbell’s impressively detailed two-volume biography - The Grocer’s Daughter and The Iron Lady - I found myself fascinated by a woman whose struggles I recognised.

But as the most divisive politician of the 20th century, how could I – as a left wing feminist whose earliest political memory was my father slamming the door in the face of a pollster who wanted to know if he backed Thatcher in her final fight against the colleagues that deposed her – honestly say that I admired her? Over the past few months I’ve kept quiet about my conflicted feelings, but today Natasha articulated everything I’ve been too embarrassed to say.

Afterwards I spoke to ReeRee Rockette, who had spoken up during the panel to say that when it comes to her importance as a role model for women, Thatcher’s policies aren’t important. The fact is that she achieved something no other woman had before – and tellingly, her three successors have all been men – and with a dearth of high profile female politicians, women have to take what they can get. She may have double-glazed the glass ceiling as soon as she’d smashed through it, but the fact that she got as far as she did is a triumph for feminism whether she likes it or not.

Ann made the point that Thatcher didn’t like women “because she knew that we knew what she was up to.” She wasn’t above using her feminine – and sexual – wiles for her own ends, but her real achievement was taking on the trappings of masculinity and making them work for her. Laura explained that the majority of female politicians have a less direct way of speaking, and are more modest in their descriptions of themselves and their views. Thatcher had none of that – there was, she so often said, no alternative. It was her way or the highway and politicians who didn’t get on board were dismissed as ‘wets’ and shuffled out of the Cabinet.

Although there’s a lot to be said for consensus politics, it’s refreshing to find a woman who wasn’t afraid of speaking her mind and had no intention of changing it. When asked if we considered her a feminist icon, only a handful of women raised their hands awkwardly. I was one of them. I may not like her convictions, but her courage in them is inspirational. I’ve gone from using her surname as an insult to finding her something of a role model – sorry Maggie, but this is one lady who is for turning.