Lisa Martin

English teacher, obsessive reader, occasional blogger and tweeter. PG Cert in Teaching Creative Writing at Cambridge University.

[Calgie @christiancalgie]

Do you reckon when we die and go to meet our maker, he will finally at long last reveal the secret of what exactly the point of a Sparks card is?

[Trevor Phillips @TrevorPTweets]

My thoughts on the @EHRC guidance laid yesterday; this is not about non-existent "rights". It is about the safety of women - mothers, sisters, wives, daughters. We men need to hear their voices. Virginia Woolf : "Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes".

My intro on @TimesRadio yesterday:

Where I live there are two different routes to and from the tube station. One, let’s call it Acacia Avenue, is quiet and residential. The other, London Road, is a busy major route with lots of traffic. At all times of the day, I automatically head for Acacia Road. It’s just much nicer.

The women in my family, on the other hand, will never willingly make that walk after dark. They live with an anxiety that most men find it hard to imagine, and frankly, rarely think about unprompted.

Last year 739,000 women were sexually assaulted in Britain. Virtually all such assaults - nine out of ten - are perpetrated by men. One in four women have been attacked at some time in their lives. Acacia Avenue is exactly the sort of place in which most women fear that they become vulnerable, and they are right.

As the author Virginia Woolf once wrote " Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes".

I think this is the right context in which to understand the furore over the guidance being laid today by the government, over the meaning of the words man and woman when it comes to providing services and facilities in workplaces.

Many men think this is about a rather arcane dispute about who gets to use what loo. For their mothers, sisters, wives and daughters, it isn’t.

In a previous life, as Chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, I had a hand in writing this country’s equality laws, in particular the 2010 Equality Act. It never occurred to any of us that there could be any confusion or dispute over the meaning of the words man and woman. But it has taken a decade of campaigning, a Supreme Court judgement and now hundreds of pages of guidance to settle the issue.

This is not about so called trans rights, which are completely unaffected by this guidance, since no-one has ever had the right to walk into a changing room reserved for teenage girls.

What it does mean is that women and girls are guaranteed the protection they deserve, and that their safety, which we spent half a decade drafting law to ensure, is protected.

But the whole business illuminates some serious issues in our politics.

First that many of our institutions, in spite of the fact that they always knew what the right thing to do was, decided to ignore the fears of their women customers and employees, under pressure from noisy pressure groups. Instead, the people who were supposed to be the grown ups behaved as though the law said what campaigners wanted it to say, rather than what it actually said. They settled for what they hoped would be a quiet life.

In a democracy, there’s little point in Parliament deciding anything if the law is then made an ass by activists intimidating bosses in companies, schools, universities and the media into doing something different.

Second, at the heart of the campaign to undermine the Equality Act is an idea that we specifically rejected in 2010, so called self-identification. That is to say, that it should be up to the individual to decide whether they have what’s called a protected characteristic - are you male or female, are you black or white. The problem is that self-ID would destroy the operation of any law against discrimination.

Look, it would almost certainly have been to my advantage as a young man to self-identify as a handsome, white public schoolboy. None of those things is true of me. And at various points I am pretty sure it’s been to my disadvantage. It is certainly statistically likely to have been to my disadvantage.

But according to the logic of those who say that self-ID should be the rule and that anyone should be able to decide for themselves whether they are male or female, black or white or Asian, were I to complain about racial discrimination, it would be difficult for anyone prove that I’d been discriminated against because of my race since anybody to whom I’d lost out could just tell the courts that they too were black.

I know that sounds like Alice in Wonderland but you can google the case where a chap, both of whose parents are white, insisted he should get money from the Arts Council because he so identified with the black struggle that he considered himself black, and everyone should accept his point of view. In the United States and Brazil exactly such outlandish claims have been made and people rewarded to the disadvantage of people actually born into minority families.

I have even been told about firms who, when reporting their gender pay gaps have put men who just happen to like wearing dresses at weekends - nothing wrong with that, let me be clear - into the female column and told their women employees that they really haven’t got anything to moan about because statistically they are paid equally, and they should get back in their box.

So today’s guidance isn’t just another tiresome chapter in culture wars. It is , I hope, a halt to the efforts to undermine one of the most important pieces of legislation on the statute book, by people who, for their own reasons, would prefer us to be living in the 1950s world of Mad Men.

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

Why do leaders of the Greens have such difficulty naming the particular demographic likely to be most ‘shaken’ and ‘affected’ by two men from their community having their throats cut on a London street?

[Lisa Martin @Mreaderofbooks]

@melliellimelli @tombennett71 @sheebadigeebies Exactly this.

[Lissa Evans @LissaKEvans]

Meet Mackenzie Bly (not his real name; see back cover).
I wanted to write something purely funny, but I fell in love with my lead character along the way.
It's out in August, but the lovely proofs have just arrived.
Retweet before tomorrow (Sun) evening, and I'll pick 2 winners.

[Alexandra Petri @petridishes]

Macbeth quaking in Dunsinane castle

[Jessica Anne C. @CAnne39964]

@MeachamDr I'm just amazed that the woke mob has been around since 1492.

[Lisa Martin @Mreaderofbooks]

@VictoriaCoren @BBCTwo I really love hearing you read a bit of Paradise Lost at the end of each episode. Please continue until you have read the entire poem! ❤️👼👿

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

Umberto Eco, who owned 50,000 books, had this to say about home libraries:

“It is foolish to think that you have to read all the books you buy, as it is foolish to criticize those who buy more books than they will ever be able to read. It would be like saying that you should use all the cutlery or glasses or screwdrivers or drill bits you bought before buying new ones.

“There are things in life that we need to always have plenty of supplies, even if we will only use a small portion.

“If, for example, we consider books as medicine, we understand that it is good to have many at home rather than a few: when you want to feel better, then you go to the ‘medicine closet’ and choose a book. Not a random one, but the right book for that moment. That’s why you should always have a nutrition choice!

“Those who buy only one book, read only that one and then get rid of it. They simply apply the consumer mentality to books, that is, they consider them a consumer product, a good. Those who love books know that a book is anything but a commodity.”

[Feanor @nimgaladh]

“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”

― J.R.R. Tolkien

[Boze Herrington, Library Owl 😴🧙‍♀️ @SketchesbyBoze]

“Why are folks getting dumber?” Because they don’t read. “Why aren’t men as romantic & poetic as they used to be?” Because they don’t read. “Why are people so vulnerable to propaganda?” “Why is everyone a conspiracy theorist?” Because they don’t read. Because they don’t read.

[Tashy McTashface @TashP351]

Flawlessly belted out Neneh Cherry’s Buffalo Stance in the car this morning, word for word.

But forgot to buy Weetabix 3rd time in a row.

Swings n roundabouts.

[Victoria Smith @glosswitch]

Feminists, since forever: "so, there's women's disproportionate share of unpaid labour ..."
Man: "I was thinking more along the lines of 'having fancy nails'"

[Bella Wallersteiner 🇺🇦 @BellaWallerstei]

“Rather hoped I’d get through the whole show. Go back to work at Pratt & Sons; keep wicket for the Croydon gentlemen; marry Doris. Made a note in my diary on the way here. Simply says: ‘Bugger’”

Never fails to bring a tear to my eye.

[Posy Hill @PosyHill1]

@MartineBBC @BBCNews 👍

[Alicia Kearns MP @aliciakearns]

Strangulation during sex is considered the second most common cause of strokes in women under 40.

Violent pornography has normalised it, and that’s why I laid amendments to ban non-fatal strangulation in porn.

The Government voted against it twice. Now they have accepted it must be banned. It shouldn’t have taken months of delay and political pressure to get here, but I’m relieved the ban is coming.

[Lisa Martin @Mreaderofbooks]

Someone should have volunteered as tribute #Strictly

[Charlotte Tutton @Char_Tutton]

@ellbu_ They’re my favourite left-til-the-end ones