Feminism

Sweden’s prime minister-elect has resigned seven hours after being appointed the country’s first female political leader.

Students lose thousands to sugar daddy con artists

No, no, the money is supposed to flow the other way…….

Police and fraud investigators are hunting conmen who dupe young women out of thousands of pounds by posing as sugar daddies on internet dating websites.

At least 40 women have become victims of the “sugar daddy scammers” but many more are thought to be too embarrassed to come forward.

Although there’s a fun point here. Being scammed is apparently more embarrassing than selling sex these days.

As we all know, the modern thing is equity, not equality. A difference of outcomes is, by definition, hate and discrimination:

The average woman in her 20s today will have a £250,000 pension by the time she retires age 68 – £100,000 less than the average man. That is despite women needing £85,000 more than men to cover the costs of a longer life span and higher care costs.

A 25-year-old man today will live to 86 while women can expect to reach age 89, according to the Office for National Statistics. One in four women who are 60 today will live to 94. Women must save an extra £50,000 to cover income for the additional years and will need £35,000 to pay for care as they spend 460 days in care homes on average, compared with just 100 days for men.

Jackie Leiper, of Scottish Widows, said: “Even if we close the gap between how much men and women have saved by the time they retire, true equality would not be achieved. Women need to fund a longer retirement and shell out more on care.”

So how’s that going to be equalised?

Transgender prisoners who identify as female and have been convicted of sexual offences should be housed in male estates, peers have urged as they call for a change in the law.

This week, the House of Lords will debate a tabled amendment to the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill that will call for female transgender prisoners, who were born male, to serve their sentence in male estates if they have been convicted of sexual offences.

As I’ve been saying for some time now, sometimes the differences between cis and trans matter, even if most of the time they don’t. The thing being that when they do matter then we need to discriminate in treatment – the definition of when they matter being when the discrimination is necessary.

At one end, checking prostates is obvious enough. At a wildly silly other end of the same spectrum, the right to trial by jury isn’t something that varies dependent upon a GRC or not.

OK, so which prison? Someone unsurgically reconstructed and quite possibly not even on hormones found guilty of rape? Into the female or male estate? I don’t find that a difficult question to answer but apparently some in our society do….or rather they’re quick enough to answer in the wrong manner.

Sex and the City effect roars back to make its mark on our wardrobes

That “our” might be a bit too all embracing. Some decades of experience tell me that styles for late middle age women don’t quite gel on me. An oddity no doubt but there we are…..

Nicola Sturgeon’s Government is making tampons and sanitary towels available in its male lavatories in case they are needed by transgender civil servants, The Telegraph can reveal.

The Scottish government said it was “providing sanitary bins and a varied selection of sanitary products” in men’s lavatories “in those premises where gender neutral facilities do not exist”.

The number of female to male trans working as civil servants in the Scottish Government I’d put at low. A handful.

There are some 22,000 civil servants working in the devolved government (which may or may not be all those covered by this but it’s a start at size estimation). Depends who you believe but trans is 0.1% to 2% of population. Call it 1% then, half of whom – even that’s not accurate of course – will be female to male.

110 folk. For whom something has to be rolled out in all bathrooms?

Hmm, dunno. Wouldn’t surprise to find that that’s the number with colostomy bags. But hey ho, minor issue, why the hell not?

The point being that sometimes – just sometimes – these distinctions really do matter. Save breath for those that do.

Strictly Come Dancing’s Shirley Ballas: ‘Like a lot of women, I suffer in silence’

Women suffer most from climate change

Emma Thompson and Diaka Salena Koroma

Just to ask the obvious question, say this is true, what are we men supposed to say or do about it?

Phew, that’s good, us off the hook then?

Self-harm is revered on social media, says an MP’s daughter whose experiences have inspired his fight to crack down on tech giants.

In an article for The Telegraph, Claudia Collins, 14, said self-harm content was still “as dominant as ever” on social media four years after Molly Russell, also 14, took her life after being targeted with self-harm and suicide content on Instagram.

Ms Collins, daughter of Damian Collins, the chairman of the committee helping draft new duty of care laws, said: “Self-harm is not just prominent on social media, it is revered. Molly’s death reflects an online world fuelling an epidemic.”

Seems fairly important to work out which part of that headline is true. Because that will determine whether the crackdown is upon social media or teenage girls, no?

Campaigners have condemned the conviction of a woman for murdering her husband despite claims she suffered years of violently abusive and controlling behaviour at his hands.

Penelope Jackson was sentenced to life with a minimum term of 18 years on Friday after being found guilty at Bristol Crown Court of murdering her husband David.

Women’s rights groups have said the case is another example of women who “resist” male violence being punished more severely than men “who snap and kill for no reason” and “get off lightly”.

Equality means equality.

The DIY investment boom is leaving behind women as a wave of young male traders who have entered the market since the start of the pandemic has widened the gender gap among investors.

The number of women holding stocks and shares Isas with Hargreaves Lansdown, Britain’s biggest broker, rose by 17pc last year to 320,110. But that was outpaced by the 19pc rise in male customers, to 535,864.

Men are more risk loving/accepting than women. As Harriet Harman noted with her Lehman Sisters comment.

And?

Not a comment upon the actual policy itself, rather on the intellectual judo that has been done here:

Liz Truss, the equalities minister, said that LGBT+ people deserved to live their lives free from the threat of harm or abuse. “There should be no place for the abhorrent practice of coercive conversion therapy in our society,” she said.

Hmm. Well, generally I disagree. Agree with the coercive bit, of course, but the general idea that someone might have a chat with someone who might convince them that surgery is too extreme a response to same sex attraction seems fair to me.

But that’s not the point here. Rather, this:

Adults who try to persuade children to change their gender will face criminal sanctions under government plans.

From next spring it will be illegal to convince someone to change their sexuality or gender identity, with extra safeguards to protect adolescents.

Government sources suggested that organisations such as Mermaids, a charity that offers advice and counselling to children with gender dysphoria, could be outlawed. Trans rights groups said that the proposals risked having a “chilling effect” on free speech.

If conversion therapy is to be outlawed then conversion therapy is to be outlawed. Both ways.

It’s as with that shouting that domestic violence or controlling behaviour etc must be made illegal so it was. And then swathes of birds were dragged up before the courts which wasn’t what the campaigners meant at all.

That is, even when talking about turning geese into ganders the law is mighty in its equality.

The usual suspects aren’t going to like this at all which is what makes it such lovely intellectual judo.

The first survey examining sexual violence by male UK students has shone a light on misogyny at universities, with scores admitting to rape, sexual assault and other forcible acts.

Of the 554 male students surveyed, 63 reported that they had committed 251 sexual assaults, rapes and other coercive and unwanted incidents in the past two years, according to researchers at the University of Kent.

Sigh. Motte and bailey. The wider definition includes sexual aggression, unwanted sexual contact. So, propositions that are not well taken. This is then used to equate with rape. When questioned everyone would say “No, it’s rape plus sexual aggression” but they’ll not correct those who say “rape”.

The finding ends up as 20% of women at British universities get raped. Which is the American result and so that’s right then, isn’t it?

This hitting that rather firm barrier that if going to uni led to a one in 5 chance of being raped then parents wouldn’t be sending their daughters, would they? One in five getting an unwanted pass though…..

‘A transgender woman with a deep voice, a square jaw and a penis that you do not want to have sex with is not a man. She is a woman that you don’t find attractive.’

No, really, this is from a pro-trans open letter…..

A mother in Spain has lost custody of a one-year-old boy because she lived in a small village in the “backwards” rural region of Galicia, where he could not possibly “grow up happy”, it emerged in a ruling made public on Monday.

Well, if all decisions are to be made on the basis of the interests of the child, perhaps so.

….the judge said it was sexist to assume a woman has “special qualities or abilities to provide better care”.

The mother must also pay 150 euros in monthly child maintenance and will only be able to visit her son every other weekend in Marbella, some 700 miles away.

Well, yes, it would be sexist to assume that. However sensible we might think such sexism is….

No, go read.

Scotland’s civil service agreed to delete the word “mother” from its maternity leave policy in response to pressure from transgender rights activists, it has emerged.

That maternity rather implies the existence of mother? That, with a bit of cod linguistics, we’d even say that it’s the state or process of being a mother – mater?

But what’s much more fun is the outrage:

Female Spanish thriller writer Carmen Mola revealed to be three men

And? Given that the entire field is about made up stories the problem is?

Beatriz Gimeno, a feminist, writer, activist – and former head of one of Spain’s national equality bodies, the Women’s Institute – attacked the men for creating a female persona in their publicity for Carmen Mola books, over several years.

“Quite apart from using a female pseudonym, these guys have spent years doing interviews. It’s not just the name – it’s the fake profile that they’ve used to take in readers and journalists. They are scammers,” she said on Twitter.

There goes the sound of a less successful writer screaming “Why the hell didn’t I think of that?”

Last year, a regional branch of the Women’s Institute recommended one of Mola’s works as part of a selection of books by female authors including Margaret Atwood that could “help us understand the reality and the experiences of women in different periods of history and contribute to raising awareness about rights and freedoms”.

Perhaps the correct reaction is to celebrate the manner in which at least some men are fully in touch with their feminine side.

Texas Senate passes bill requiring students to play on sports teams corresponding with biological sex

The reason we have sex based teams is because certain important to sport attributes of humans – muscle mass, lung capacity, bone structure – are sex determined. So, when determining who goes in which sex team we have to use sex as our marker.

This really isn’t one of those difficult distinctions to make now, is it?

Highly feminist originality:

This idea that women might “forget” to have a baby is perpetuated in modern culture. My generation spent much of their teenage years being told not to get pregnant lest it “ruin your life”. In our 20s, that changed almost overnight and we were told not to leave it too late, lest it (again) “ruin your life”. When women enter their 30s and 40s, they face a maelstrom of misogynist peer pressure, from “when are you going to have a second child” to “is it not unfair to have a baby in your 40s?”, not to mention the classic levied at the child-free: “but who will care for you when you’re old?”

Ms. Cossett’s writing was, a decade back, all about how terrible the patriarchy was because it hadn’t solved the good sex with no brats problem. Now it’s about clock ticking and how terrible the patriarchy is. Another decade and it’ll be how terrible the patriarchy is because middle aged Mums don’t get enough support.

The development of subject matter will be exactly the same as those writing for FeMail. Step by step in lockstep with developments in her own life.

The specific year may well vary but the decadal output won’t. We’ve got the patriarchy’s a bastard for only providing the one grandkid yet to come. Plus, of course, the apotheosis of every feminist’s writing career, the gardening column in The Oldie.