Welcome to my book notes. I always love to read books that make me think by having so many thought-provoking topics, or that I learn something from, if they’re those kinds of books. So, this is a place for me to share any notes, reviews, favourite quotes, main lessons, tips, and any thoughts that I got from any books that I read.
Another book by Laura Bates. Kind of why I got this one in the first place. I enjoyed her previous book, Men Who Hate Women. This was basically another similar book to the first that, again, is entirely focused on feminism and women’s rights and issues. Except this time, it’s looked at from a different lens.
The previous book focused on the effects of the manosphere, whereas this one focused on women being affected in different areas. It has definitely been very informative on a lot of the issues and how they are still affected systematically without many even realising. It’s filled with so, so many stats and figures and examples.
It does open your eyes to a lot of stuff that is some kind of disturbing and concerning. And because I’m also looking to educate myself about the issues going on, it is a good resource to actually see how bad things are, especially when you’re not the person that it affects.
Overall, it is a book that I’d recommend reading in general, and especially if you are looking more into politics and issues.
Here are some of the main highlights from the book(I tend to highlight a lot) and quick notes that came from them:
I learn that, among my peer group, a girl’s value is measured by how many boys find her attractive and want to have sex with her.
I never feel completely safe in a public space, but I am not really conscious of this and I cannot put my finger on the exact moment it began. It is just my reality.
At school, we have one session just for the girls where a policeman tells the girls to shout ‘fire’ instead of ‘rape’ if they are attacked. People are more likely to respond, apparently.
At fifteen, I receive inappropriate emails from a senior male colleague at my part-time holiday job; I am called into a manager’s office to be reprimanded for causing this, having worn a short skirt.
When I say that the script is kind of sexist, my audition partner tetchily tells me that it’s actually very true to life: it reflects the dynamic of every couple he knows.
(The term ‘intersectionality’, which describes this overlap and interaction, was coined by lawyer, scholar and advocate Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw.)
Both could only arise from a society in which the sexual objectification, harassment and oppression of women were commonplace and in which the superiority, privilege and entitlement of usually white, heterosexual, non-disabled men went unchallenged.
We have to be allowed to talk about the ‘minor’ things as though they matter – because they do. Because the low-level attitudes and behaviours we cement with the thousands of ‘little’, ‘unimportant’ things we don’t talk about are the foundation of more serious abuses.
If you ask a woman how many of these images she has received in the past year, she will probably run out of fingers to count on. But, when you turn to a man and ask him how many unsolicited vulvas he has seen recently, he is likely to look at you like you’re mad.
Almost from birth, we are trained and socialised in a world in which the inevitability of male aggression and dominance and the importance of pretty, pliant female submission is completely normalised.
How early does it start? Well, as soon as babies begin drooling, gendered bibs are offered.
It’s not just girls who are affected by this. The slogans and messaging aimed at boys repeatedly suggest that they are less worthy of love, cuddles and kisses, that they should be independent, powerful and strong, and that it is only acceptable for girls to show vulnerability and emotion or to reach out for help. Later on, all this will reach its logical, devastating conclusion in the fact that suicide is the leading cause of death for men under fifty.
They affect our whole lives. Studies have repeatedly shown that, by the age of six, girls already perceive women to be less ‘brilliant’ and smart than men and that they have already begun to apply these stereotypes to themselves.
Clinical psychologist Dr Sophie Mort tells me:
On average in the UK, one rape per school day is reported to the police as having occurred on school premises. Almost a third of teenage girls say they’ve been sexually assaulted at school. Almost 80 per cent of girls say sexual assault happens ‘sometimes’ or ‘a lot’ between people their age at secondary schools and colleges.
Ofsted inspectors carrying out an inquiry into sexual harassment in schools in 2021 were told by pupils that sexual harassment had become completely normal – such a routine part of girls’ daily lives that they don’t see any point in challenging or reporting
The idea that boys will inevitably harass, that girls are responsible for ‘protecting themselves’, and that female bodies are to blame for making boys act badly are all conveyed to young people at an impressionable age by their own educational institutions.
Research into Key Stage 3 texts, for example, found that 75 per cent of pupils aged between eleven and fourteen never read a book or play by a woman, while 84 per cent of texts taught have a male protagonist.
It can be subtle: pupils who leap to their feet when a male teacher (‘Sir’) comes into the room, but who lounge in their chairs when a female teacher (addressed by her first name) enters. Students who insist on ‘checking’ a female teacher’s answer with a male teacher instead.
And perhaps the most consistent lesson we learn, from childhood onwards, is that it is all our own fault. That, if we speak up, we will be blamed and that it is our own weaknesses, bad choices, failings and mistakes that are at the root of our negative experiences. Not misogyny. Not institutionalised sexism. Not male violence.
(Men are 23 per cent more likely to ask for a pay rise than women and the majority of women – 57 per cent – have never asked for a pay rise at all.)
When we use the word ‘patriarchy’, we are talking about a historical system that has been designed by and for those who have always held the most power in our society: white, wealthy, non-disabled men. A racist, classist, heteronormative, ableist system.
On average, when a heterosexual couple co-habit in the UK, women do approximately sixteen hours of household chores a week, while men do six. During the COVID-19 lockdown, mothers spent 77 per cent more time on childcare than fathers.
One in eight HR decision-makers say that they are reluctant to hire women who may go on to have children; almost a third of young women report sex discrimination while working or looking for work; and one in five is paid less than her male colleagues for the same or similar employment.
Even when women do act in the way people suggest – trying to be more assertive, standing up for themselves, negotiating and generally behaving ‘more like men’ – studies repeatedly find that they are punished for it.
One in eight American women experiences depression in her lifetime – twice the rate of men. Research in 2020 found that 30 per cent of women in the UK aged between eighteen and twenty-four suffered from anxiety – double the percentage of men.
One woman, who had been raped twice, wrote: ‘I still can’t wash away the uncleanness, pain and lost years. I cannot be in a relationship and avoid medical procedures. I don’t want anyone near me… I hate being like this when I have so much life I want to live.’
Once again, we tend to individualise, to make excuses for why things have just ‘worked out this way’. ‘It just makes more sense for me to do the childcare.’ ‘He just hates hoovering.’ ‘It’s just easier to do it myself than to teach him how.’
Most often practised on girls and young women under eighteen years of age, 200 million girls and women alive today have undergone FGM.
Cosmetic labiaplasty is surgery to reduce the size or change the appearance of the labia minora for no medical reason.
The blind spots in our utterly disjointed responses to these issues show how closely white supremacy and patriarchy are intertwined. ‘You cannot talk about race without talking about gender.
This is violence. Don’t call it tradition. Don’t call it culture. Language is such a powerful tool. To me, cultural tradition is food, dancing, the dress I wear. But, if you call one of the most horrific experiences of my life culture, that’s offensive and racist. If it was white women or white girls, you just wouldn’t. We need to acknowledge that we are still living in a society that upholds a patriarchal system. And it’s racist.
And that’s how often women are murdered by men in the UK. Worldwide, 137 women are killed by a family member every single day. These are not isolated incidents.
One in four women in the UK will experience domestic abuse and 85,000 a year will experience rape or attempted rape.
A boy I knew from uni used to talk about how he loved walking outside at night, just by himself. He could walk for hours in deserted streets under the stars and even watched the sunrise a few times. The joy and serenity he spoke of made me so envious that I nearly teared up. When he asked me why I didn’t do the same, I knew he didn’t understand at all. I’m a woman.
‘She was just going for a run’, thousands of people tweeted, after 23-year old primary school teacher Ashling Murphy was murdered in Tullamore, Ireland, in January 2022. As if that was what made it unbearable. Not the overwhelming tragedy of her death, but the fact that she hadn’t stepped outside the lines. She had done nothing to ask for it.
And that’s the system. It’s okay to mourn one or two high-profile deaths when they fit into the wider system of women’s training to behave, to keep themselves tightly locked up, never to step outside the lines.
And yes, of course, men experience violence, too. Yes, that’s a valid problem to discuss (though raising it in this context, as so many did, was a clear and deliberate attempt to move the focus away from violence against women).
Because, in the UK now, even in the rare situation when a rape case is reported to police, there is just a 1.4 per cent chance it will result in a charge or summons for the perpetrator.
Despite Libby Squire, despite so many other women like her, fewer than a tenth of the 113,000 women who experience indecent exposure each year (according to the ONS) report it to the police. And little wonder: of almost 11,000 cases of ‘exposure and voyeurism’ reported to police in the year to March 2020, just 594 suspects were taken to court.
As it turns out, it wasn’t just the twelve potential ‘bad ’uns’. Almost 600 sexual misconduct allegations were made against Metropolitan Police officers between 2012 and 2018, but only 119 of those were upheld,
Data gathered by the Centre for Women’s Justice in 2020 found a total of 666 reports of domestic abuse-related incidents and offences perpetrated by police officers, police community support officers and other staff during a three-year period.
A 2016 survey of over 1,700 police staff members across England, Scotland and Wales found that 49 per cent of the staff had experienced the repeated telling of sexualised jokes, almost a fifth had received sexually explicit emails or texts and almost a fifth had been touched at work in a way that made them feel uncomfortable.
there are ten police forces in England and Wales in which 80 per cent of domestic abuse allegations are closed without charge, strongly suggesting that the issue
The police [told me] that I hadn’t been assaulted, that because I had kissed this guy earlier I had consented to all sexual acts that followed.
Describing a form of inequality as institutionalised does not mean accusing every individual involved in that institution of being prejudiced. It means recognising that the problem is sufficiently pervasive and unaddressed within an institution that it goes further than just isolated incidents, resulting in it impacting on the culture and output of the institution.
‘She never should have submitted.’ As though it were her fault. As though it would have made any difference if she had tried to refuse. As though women are not socialised our whole lives to be submissive and pliant and non-confrontational. As though we shouldn’t have every reason to trust a police officer.
Since 2016–17, rape prosecutions have plummeted to an unprecedented low: in 2020–21, there were just 1,557 prosecutions in England and Wales, despite over 55,000 cases being reported to police. Charges in rape cases are now exactly half what they were in 2015–16, representing an alarmingly rapid decline.
‘Sexual offenders often target vulnerable victims, such as children, people with disabilities and people with chaotic lifestyles, because they know it is unlikely that they will be believed by a jury,’ the whistle-blower’s statement noted.
The same judiciary, by the way, in which fewer than a third of court judges are women – only 26 per cent of judges in the High Court and above, and 17 per cent of Queen’s Counsel barristers.
When someone is the victim of arson, nobody goes digging through their past to find out if they ever attended a bonfire party to imply that they might actually have secretly loved watching their house burn to the ground.
It’s like we just can’t help ourselves. We cannot stop finding excuses for male violence. It starts with ‘boys will be boys’, it morphs into ‘just a compliment’, ‘he couldn’t help himself’ and ‘she was asking for it’, and it ends up here.
Between 2009 and 2019, the use of the ‘sex games gone wrong’ defence rose by 90 per cent.
Firstly: that laws were mostly written by privileged white men.
Everjoice Win is a Zimbabwean feminist activist who has spent decades working for gender equality through feminist and social justice movements in her home country, across the African continent and globally.
A 2020 study of over 700 solicitors, barristers and other women working in the legal profession showed that 58 per cent had experienced or witnessed sexism first-hand, but almost half did not complain for fear of the impact that doing so would have on their careers.
consider a 2021 study examining sexual violence by male UK students. Out of 554 students surveyed, sixty-three of them admitted that they had committed sexual assault, rape or another ‘coercive and unwanted incident’ in the past two years alone.
How likely is it that male jurors, with no legal expertise, will convict someone of sexual assault in a society in which they are reasonably likely to have done the same thing themselves? How likely is it that, at the very least, this will influence their decision-making? And can you think of any other crime in which this would be the case?
While secrecy surrounding NDAs makes it difficult to gather accurate statistics, we know from charities like Pregnant Then Screwed that their usage is rife – pushing women into an impossible choice between the right to speak out and the money they desperately need, while allowing companies to act as badly as they like and simply pay to keep these incidents quiet.
Should laws that will devastate women’s lives really be enacted by men with no knowledge whatsoever of the consequences of their actions and decisions?
Which really shows what can be achieved when things are considered a ‘political priority’.
In the year following the resurgence of the #MeToo campaign, the percentage of male managers in the US who said they were uncomfortable participating in a common workplace activity with a woman, such as mentoring or working one-on-one, increased by 32 per cent to 60 per cent.
Black people are also 2.4 times more likely than white people to be searched for drug possession, despite being less likely to use drugs.
One woman was beaten bloody by her abuser, leaving her with significant head injuries. But he was so confident in the power and safety that the system gave him to abuse her that he actually drove her to the police station. He taunted her: ‘Go on then, choose. Are you reporting or are you staying with me?’ She was so terrified to report to the police that she chose to stay with the perpetrator.
To argue that trans youth aren’t deeply injured by gender stereotypes, binaries and pressures is surely facetious.
A commission on disability today. An LGBTQ inquiry tomorrow. As though these groups are all mutually exclusive. Which is only a natural assumption if you are taking a straight, white, non-disabled, cisgender, middle-class man as your default ‘norm’.
We have wasted decades telling women and girls how to fix things. How to fix themselves. How to stay safe. It hasn’t worked. Because women were never the problem in the first place.
When people suggest measures that constrain all women’s lives, these are hailed as ‘just common sense’. A small price to pay for the luxury of being able to move through the world unassaulted.
The single most important thing to recognise is this: if the problem is systemic, the solution must be systemic. We need structural change.
In 2021, a judge in Switzerland reduced a convicted rapist’s prison sentence on the basis that the rape only lasted eleven minutes and that the victim had not been severely injured. A judge in India in the same year asked a man who had raped a schoolgirl if he would like to avoid jail by marrying her. A judge in Peru acquitted an accused rapist in 2020 because the complainant was wearing red underwear, which he said suggested she was willing to have sex. In Afghanistan, female judges have been hunted by the murderers they convicted after the Taliban took control and released thousands from prison.
The debate around abortion is not focused on whether or not a foetus is considered fully human; it is really about whether or not women are.
And yes, these systemic shifts will require investment, but it is an investment that will bring massive returns. The annual social and economic cost of domestic abuse is estimated at approximately £66 billion in the UK alone.
The Istanbul Convention – one of the most comprehensive and progressive pieces of legislation ever to address violence against women and girls – recognises the connections between domestic violence, rape, sexual assault, FGM, so-called honour-based violence and forced marriage.
As Simon says: ‘We will never police our way out of violence against women, so the need to educate younger people and address the underlying issues of harmful gender norms, sexism and misogyny remain some of the most important things we can do now.’
A government campaign about sensible drinking between 1989 and 1994 saw a 300 per cent rise in the public’s understanding of alcohol units. And research has attributed 13.5 per cent of the decline in smoking prevalence between 2002 and 2009 to tobacco-control mass-media campaigns. When there is willingness to invest both government finance and focus, dramatic results can be achieved.
This is where men need to step up. With their friends. With their sons. At work. In the locker room. Down the pub. On the pitch. In the streets. When they see it. When someone says it. When they hear about it. When nobody has said anything at all and it’s difficult and awkward and uncomfortable.
the majority of women only stand for political office because somebody else asks them to (75 per cent, compared to 54 per cent of men); and the number-one reason women report sexual violence to the police is to stop it happening to someone else.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.