The radical right’s problem with women

I’m not sure I fully grasp what this article by Jean Hatchet is saying about the latest Sydney Sweeney advert, but I’m pretty sure most women will. I’m not all that interested in the politics of Sydney Sweeney, or much else about her as it happens (pretty Hollywood women are two a penny), but the establishing paragraphs are quite interesting.

If a man wants to humiliate a woman; control her; degrade and debase her; embarrass and dehumanise her; he might strip her naked in public for all to see. Enforcing her nakedness is used as a form of punishment against women and has always been. “Revenge porn”, where men publicly share images of women naked that they have taken is a crime under the Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015. Forcibly or non-consensually stripping a woman is a criminal offence under the UK Sexual Offences Act 2003.

Women had to fight like bears, and against the equivalent of bears, to secure laws which would protect them from such degrading acts. Women, almost unfathomably, had to outline why these acts were harmful to them and required legal restriction well into the 21st Century.

In medieval and early modern Europe a man could routinely beat his wife as a form of “correction”. As late as the 19th Century a man could put a rope around a woman’s neck and sell her at “market” if she displeased him. It was not until 1991 that the 1736 common law, established by Sir Mathew Hale, that a man could rape his wife was overturned.

It was not until the Married Women’s Property Act of 1870 that a woman in the UK could keep her own earnings and inheritances, extended in 1882 to give women the right to own their own property. In the United States a woman could not, until the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974 take out a mortgage, credit card, or loan without a male signing for her.

The final European country to give women a vote was Switzerland, in 1971.

It took a very long time for women to get even close to being seen as people in the same way as men were. It is hard to tell younger women this, harder still to make them care.

It is hard for them to place in perspective how recent some of these restrictions on their freedoms were, including their right to be respected as an autonomous human being, and not a mere sex object to supply men with sexual arousal and satisfaction.

Women achieved all these very basic rights and protections by working together for them and even then they needed at least some men who would support their demands. This began a backslide with the advent of “Liberal Feminism” which declared it was “every woman for herself” and any choice she made was a sign of empowerment, however much it did not empower her in reality, and however much it reflected on other women who were also expected therefore to accept her low standards when it came to how men used them or abused them.

Prostitution for example, the basic inhumane act of purchasing a woman to rape, became merely “sex work”, a choice a woman could make, almost exactly the same as working the checkout in Tesco.

Moving from selling sex to sport, the men’s National Basketball Association was established in 1937 whereas women’s right to the same - the WNBA - was established nearly 60 years later in 1996. The English ‘Football Association’ was established in 1863, but female professional footballers in the UK were banned from playing on FA pitches for 50 years in 1921 when it was declared “unsuitable” as a pursuit for women. Talented sportswomen women had filled stadiums whilst men were overseas fighting in France and they had done it after fulfilling gruelling shifts in munitions factories. The disrespect of this ban was astounding.

Women who play sport are keenly aware of how precarious the history of their being allowed to play sport is, even without the lack of respect female sportswomen always endured, with women’s sport even now seen as much less important and women less skilled than the same sport for men. Any sport, any ball.

Women should always be keenly alert to any move which threatens any of the gains women have made over centuries. They should have alarm bells ring like a nuclear war is starting, when any attempt is made to normalise returning them back to their place as second class citizens in their own lives. They should be viciously protective of the girls and women who will come after them and have to live with what they leave behind.

Western countries are keen to hold up “those dreadful countries which oppress women” such as Afghanistan, without acknowledging that in our own countries rights for women are still precariously held. Rates of violence against women are at epidemic levels and justice for the same, scant. In Afghanistan - girls could go to school until four years ago and now they can’t. In Iran women could uncover their hair until 1983 and now they can’t. You can’t confidently point to ‘“over there” without also worrying about maintaining a better record on women’s rights “over here” and should be looking for any sign of a backward slide or emerging threat.

This is what actual feminism looks like. This is all relevant to my studies regarding the electability of the radical right. We have already seen how Restore Britain has a problem with Boomers and Jews, and their treatment of Orla Minihane was equally grotesque when she pointed out that we have a duty to protect all women and girls in Britain - regardless of their ethnicity.

This bring into focus Hatchet’s point about the tendency to talk about “over there”. While Restore has exploited the grooming scandal to the fullest (for that exact purpose), even to the extent of hosting a fake inquiry, they’ve proven that they’re not all that keen on women either.

Certainly, if you look at the comments of Restore supporters in Lindsay Clancy discourse, they’re looking for any excuse to roll back women’s equality. More than a few of think don’t even think women should vote. The proposition is that Clancy killed her children because of “hormonal depression”, and if acquitted then the precedent is that women are somehow not capable of taking on adult responsibilities. Or words to that effect. It’s even worse in the Lotus Eaters comments section.

Restore, meanwhile, projects an image of traditional conservatism based around the traditional family unit, casting women primarily as home makers. I suspect the boys of the Zoomer Right actually just want a Catholic theocracy and an obedient trad wife. Enough to make any normal British woman’s ovaries recoil.

Ultimately, the argument that we must “protect our women” is not going to go over well coming from a party that sees women exclusively as a policy instrument for demographic restoration. Many women will agree that immigration must be addressed, but for the reasons outlined by Hatchet, they have cause to view Restore with deep suspicion - especially when it’s increasingly captured by the Zoomerwaffen which blames feminism for everything they can’t pin on Jews.

There’s a broader point for me in Hatchet’s essay, though. Rights are hard won but easily lost. Both Restore and Reform have a general intention to mass repeal Blairite legislation and the ECHR, and while I don’t necessarily disagree with all of it, there are a great many important safeguards for women and the disabled that could be deleted in the process - that would take years of campaigning to reverse. This is especially likely given the slopulist’s lack of attention to detail and inability to see the world from any perspective other than their own. They’re probably too distracted by Sydney Sweeney’s tits.