Unison should realise that making men respect women's boundaries and spaces would be a damn sight more "workable" if you weren't constantly framing the very existence of women's rights as a grave injustice that no decent person can be expected to accept
Being a famous woman is so traumatising you have to write a book about it, whereas being a poor woman sharing a prison cell with a male sex offender is obviously just part of life's rich tapestry
There are provincial museums full of Victorian tea sets covered in hand-painted, simpering field mice in smocks and bonnets which are less kitsch and played out than this.
Here's a story that will tell you a bit about @UniofOxford (and a bit about me). When I was an undergraduate in the 80's I had a girlfriend, who I will call C, who was not at my college (Trinity) and not on my course (PPE). Her college and her course had an eminent, youngish, left wing don, with a significant profile and a feminist-friendly reputation. But he was a bit of a drunk, and quite bit of a lecher, who made C feel uncomfortable, in the days when that meant something. C, being C, a socialist feminist, decided to do something about this, and put the word out that she wanted to do something. C arranged a meeting and *every single female undergraduate on that course in the whole college* - some twenty people- turned up. They reported the same sorts of behaviour conducted in private: drunk tutorials, inappropriate remarks, sitting down, too close, to individual student on the sofa, leering, organizing one to one tutorials, with the female students but not the males, oversharing about his private life, all the actions you can imagine. Every single woman knew what he was like, every woman objected, despite the fact that many of them had applied to that particular college because of their respect for him. By acting, C broke the spell. They arranged to see the head of the College. All of them, every single female student studying X at college Y. The head of the college had to act, and an unsatisfactory Oxford compromise ensued. The don in question was relieved of all undergraduate teaching and moved to a graduate only college. He wasn't dismissed, and there was no publicity. But I remain full of admiration for C.
Sexual harassment at Oxford is not new - and this 👇is sexual harassment. Some clever men in positions of authority engage in this sort of action with impunity, particularly putting female students on edge, even when their behaviour is otherwise formally correct.
It takes great courage to call them out, especially for female undergraduate students . But maybe, when you do, you will find that lots of female students feel the same.
She called for “a bit of kindness, a bit of generosity of spirit, a willingness to get into the grey area to talk about these things calmly. To try and find common ground is the only path through this and it’s one that I’m committed to.”
In my *extensive* efforts on this; in my years of research and talking, reading and writing on this, there is one thing - and one thing alone - that gender activists sometimes have consensus on, which is that, despite our different belief systems, women shouldn't get death threats or hounded out of their livelihoods.
And EVEN THEN, that is bloody rare. And rarer still that they will ever dare to say so publicly. So rare, it was astonishing to my publisher we got someone to endorse my book, Hounded, from the other side.
There is one side, and one side alone, focused on kindness and generosity, and they're as calm as they can be given the hell we've been up against. People have to stop expecting some magical 'calm' solution. Women are either real and have rights as females or they don't. And they do, we've already won that, and it was never kind nor generous to abuse us with impunity for saying so.
I do hope, however, that we might finally get to the stage we can undo the horrific damage done. We're not there yet, though, as long as people refuse to understand the extent of the abuse women labelled 'TERF' have gone through. You don't get to abuse women then just tell them to 'move on.' And it has been horrific abuse, psychological, social, economic. I hope Dugdale is willing to understand that.
https://t.co/OPMj6QO1mG
@teaforpterosaur@sheebadigeebies Reminds me a little bit of that terrible 'spend Sunday with me' column that Gregg Wallace wrote a while ago when he was like 'at 2pm i spend a bit of time with my son that I never wanted'