Feminism

Channel 4 has pulled all episodes of Married at First Sight UK (MAFS) after two women claimed they were raped by their on-screen husbands during filming.
A third woman claimed she had an abortion following a non-consensual sex act by her partner on the reality television show.
The three former contestants said they were not adequately protected by the show, in which single people agree to marry strangers after meeting for the first time at their mock weddings.

Is there some lack of knowledge here, an information gap, about what marriage entails or summat? Or is the claim that new hubby beat ‘er around the head and shagged while she shrieked no, no?

Charlotte Proudman, Lizzie’s barrister,

Ahhhh, now, that does bias me, yes it does.

A third contestant Shona Manderson, who has waived her anonymity, alleged that Bradley Skelly, her on-screen husband, engaged in a non-consensual sex act by ejaculating inside her without permission.

So it’s not, not quite, as Whoopi said then…..

The area has become more European now but back then it was quite wild, and while lots of dual-nationality couples (French, British and Canadian women with Moroccan partners)

Seems a little biased there, no?

AI deepfakes reveal exactly what the bird would be saying without deep fakes. Isn’t that, therefore, a glorious revelation?

Their results of those tests revealed something never before documented in British history. Lavinia and Michelle are twins who grew together in the same womb, were born from the same mother, and delivered within minutes of each other – but have different fathers.

Oookay.

Heteropaternal superfecundation – the vanishingly rare biological process to which Michelle and Lavinia owe their existence – is both a mouthful to say and a mind-boggling concept to grasp. It happens when a series of very unlikely events occur at precisely the right time. A woman has to release more than one egg during the same menstrual cycle. She has to have more than one partner during her fertile window. More than one egg must be successfully fertilised, with sperm from different men, and the resulting embryos need to survive long enough to become babies. Michelle and Lavinia are twins and half-sisters.

So we’re saying that Mum was shagging around then, are we?

My doctor husband is married to his job so I sleep with other men

File this one under selfish bitch, do we?

Last month, the International Olympic Committee announced that transgender women athletes would be barred from competing in all Olympic events in the women’s category – but not the men’s events.

Err, yes?

The new rules effectively redefine womanhood – but not manhood – as a novel and previously unrecognized category consisting only of those with a specific set of genetic prerequisites.

It’s a very odd hill to decide to die upon and it’s a strange way of doing so too.

Those who support the bans claim that testosterone, male puberty or male genetics confer an advantage in athletics, and that trans women must therefore be banned in order to preserve the integrity of women’s competitions. This sounds like the kind of argument someone could make without being unreasonably motivated by bigotry; the IOC, for instance, claims that its new ban is backed up by science and evidence. But the actual science of sex development, hormone therapy, and their impact on athletic performance turns out to be quite complicated, with a broad variation across both individual athletes and different sporting events. The science of how to ensure fairness and measure advantage in these contexts is “not settled at all”, said Eric Vilain, a University of California, Irvine, geneticist who advised the IOC on gender for more than a decade. This new insistence that a complicated scientific question is in fact a simple one – and that it is determinative and relevant only for women, and not for men – suggests that something other than a robust commitment to fairness is at play.

They’ve all got it in for me. Or them at least, a grand conspiracy to explain something as simple as nose on face. The reason we have “women’s” sports is because without the classification no woman would ever win anything. So, there must be policing of the classification becuase that’s why we have the classification.

Women’s middle distance running for example. Was it the women’s 2016 1600 where the first truly XY came in fourth?

It all is an odd hill to die upon.

When the Grammy award winning songwriter, Olivia Nervo, agreed to start a family with her partner she believed she was in “a monogamous, committed relationship leading to a future”, and had never heard of reproductive coercion.

Her world came crashing down when she was six months pregnant and she found out that her partner was in a relationship with another woman who was also pregnant, and with whom he already had a child.

Clearly not gentlemanly behaviour (tho’ given some past definitions of gentleman, perhaps very much so).

She said: “If you have sex with someone and you don’t disclose the fact that you have an STD (sexually transmitted disease), that’s assault [if you are infected they can be charged with grievous bodily harm] and that’s criminally chargeable. And if you remove a condom covertly that’s considered rape. But if you deceive someone into having a child, or just even having sex, you just fall between the cracks.

“I can’t get over it, I don’t think I’ll ever get over it. And I just feel like reproductive coercion needs to be considered properly within family courts, at the very least. I would love it to be a standalone offence, but I understand that’s a big wish.”

A 2022 poll of 1,000 women aged 18 to 44 found 50% believed they had experienced reproductive coercion of some form, including pressure around pregnancy, abortion, sex and contraception.

Reproductive coercion is recognised in England and Wales as a form of coercive control under the Serious Crime Act.

Now, estimates here vary. Wildly. But that one about 10% of kids aren’t of the bloke who thinks they’re his. That, clearly, falls under a wide definition of this reproductive coercion. So when do the prosecutions start? For it ain’t, by a long shot, only men who lie about such things, is it?

Luba Kassova, lead author of the report, said: “What we concluded by doing this analysis is that the gender-inequality lens is all but missing from coverage of the Epstein story. This means that news coverage does not get to the root causes of the problem.”

Birds able to screw $50k a year – which is the sort of value of a freebie apartment in New York – out of blokes for the very occasional blow job. Taking advantage of male idiocy in this way is very gender unequal.

Media coverage of violence against women and girls and misogynistic harassment is at a “pitiful” low, despite a proliferation of high-profile cases of men abusing women and children, and a rise in AI-assisted violence against women and girls, new research shows.

Of course, given that this report stems from the same “university” that used to employ Spud – Islington Tech – they get this the wrong way around. This is, of course, abuse of male sexuality by those with the monopoly on what men desire.

As Laurie Penny will not agree to:

Which is what happened in 2014. In May of that year, the terrorist Elliot Rodger killed six people and brought global attention to “incels” – young men radicalised by sexual resentment.

80% of women have to stop doing what they are doing, chasing the top 20% of men, and start plugging uglies with the ugly. Then there would be no incels.

Does having children make you happier? Apparently not, according to a new study published in Evolutionary Psychology which, despite involving more than 5,000 participants in 10 countries, including Britain, could find no strong evidence that parenthood led to a measurable increase in positive emotions. The researchers, led by Menelaos Apostolou of the University of Nicosia, looked at both hedonic wellbeing (day-to-day emotional states such as joy, sadness and loneliness) and eudaimonic wellbeing (a feeling of purpose and meaning). With the exception of mothers in Greece, who felt a greater sense of the latter, there was no statistically significant difference between parents and non-parents, suggesting that becoming a parent leaves your emotional wellbeing largely unchanged.

There’s rather a lot of study of this which suggests that humns have a pre-set happiness level. Not wholly, not exactly, but some folks are happy, some ain’t. And while those levels can change fairly drastically given events – losing a leg say – they do seem to gravitate back to that pre-set level over about 6 months.

Pity a column about all of this didn’t include all of that really, no? Just the usual navel gazing – “but am I happier?” – plus the nod to correctness – but of course people can be happy if they decide not to have children. Sigh.

Do we really need truncheons and pepper spray to fight off London’s ‘feral’ teenage shoplifters?
Zoe Williams

We could probably do it with an increase – a substantial one – in the number of fathers sticking around to clout their kids over the ear when they think of doing something this damn stupid.

I know many women, too, who feel acutely aware of their economic circumstances and how they differ from those of their peers. And I know many women who are only on the property ladder because they married “well” to a man with an inheritance – of the three-bed semi variety as opposed to a great estate in Derbyshire, but still.

This is the bird who rose to prominence writing a fiercely feminist blog, recall. Marrying for a 3 bed in Pinner, eh?

For celebrities and influencers, and certain literary types, I suppose it’s true. I do wonder if this has trickled down to comprehensive schools, though. From my conversations with teenage girls, some of whom still feel a need to hide their intelligence to avoid teasing or even bullying, I suspect not. I think back to those years and remember how painfully self-conscious I was: both about how I looked (big eyes, freckles, flat chest) and how clever I was. Even typing the word “clever” in relation to myself felt hard just now, more than 25 years later. Admitting to it wasn’t something you did.

And that? It’s the other birds who do the teasing and bullying, no? Teenage blokes don’t – well, from distant memory they don’t – know nor care if a bird’s clever or not.

Even when friends deserted him over his decision to leave Julia, his wife of 34 years, for Lucie, he had a few reliable coping mechanisms. “For a long time, I was persona non grata,” he reflects. “I was left with a lot of very angry wives, and I wasn’t invited to much, if anything at all. I remember one Christmas Day, the best Christmas of my life in fairness, when I sat with a bottle of champagne, a can of tuna, and I watched The Great Escape, Where Eagles Dare and The Guns of Navarone. Back-to-back-to-back. Three magnificent movies. Actually, I’ve wanted to do it many times since.”

So the wimmins finally get true choice. It is indeed possible to enjoy that shaggin’ bit and yet also not have 10 kids.

So now they moan about how difficult choiecs are.

Welcome to reality, Honeys.

Sigh.

Here we are with that second lesson of the two that economics teaches us. There are always opportunity costs. Sorry about that but doing the one thing means not doing some, or many, others. That’s just the way the universe operates. There ain’t nuttin’ anyone can do about it either. So, please Dear Lord, shut it and get on with it?

It is a monumental shift that means transgender women and athletes with differences in sex development (DSD), who were reported as female at birth but have internal testes and have undergone male puberty, are now banned from the female category at all future Olympics.

Science intervenes!

Then there was the science. It is hardly news that males are stronger, faster and have better endurance than females. As the IOC policy document makes clear, that advantage is 10-12% in most running and swimming events, and greater than 100% in events that involve explosive power, including collision, lifting and punching sports.

Of course we still have morons among us:

“Mandatory genetic sex testing and rigid biological criteria as a condition for participation in the women’s category violates fundamental and universal human rights … including the right to equality, non-discrimination, dignity, privacy, and bodily autonomy,” said Professor Paula Gerber, an international human rights lawyer at Monash University.

If there is to be a women’s category then we require a definition of women who are elegible to be in that category. Using the actual definition of women – human female – seems a reasonable enough one to use.

“As several UN independent experts have noted, binary definitions of sex reinforce harmful stereotypes and erode progress toward substantive gender equality. Any testing of athletes needs to be individualised and evidence-based, not arbitrary or degrading.”

XX? You’re in. Not XX? You ain’t. Nowt arbitrary about that.

“The IOC’s move to mandate sex testing across the female category risks undermining both evidence-based policy and athlete wellbeing, while diverting attention from the real priorities in women’s sport,” said Dr Ada Cheung, a professor of endocrinology at the University of Melbourne.

Actual evidence is not evidence based policy?

Of the tens of thousands of athletes who have participated in Olympic events since 1999, just one has identified as a transgender woman – Laurel Hubbard of New Zealand. She did not place in her event.

Well, yeah, but Caster Semenya and that Moroccan boxer also need to be considered, no?

Online commentary from men insisting that women should not advocate for higher salaries because their leagues are allegedly less profitable or entertaining exemplifies this obstruction.

Allegedly. The leagues might be less profitable, or more, or less revenue generating or more, but those are facts to be established, no? In fact, facts that are establised – they are less.

But then this whole piece is a confection of idiocies. Perfectly sensible looking bird is a wimmins basketball coach. How appalling that folk talk about her as perfectly sensible looking. Disgusting eh?

This is also rather funny:

Rooks addressed this dynamic on a recent podcast with Lou Williams and Spank Horton. She was forced to assert that, despite the sexualized attention she receives, her looks have not influenced her work – a statement prompted by repeated suggestions that she secures the “best interviews” with NBA players because of her “pretty privilege”.

Umm

or a journalist like Taylor Rooks being memefied as if her rapport with NBA players exists solely because they find her attractive,

The players are all lesbian munters who melt at the thought of talking to an attractive woman. Well, it’s an idea, I guess.

Women feel put under pressure to have medical procedures such as caesareans during their maternity care, according to a report.

The charity Birthrights collated the experiences of 300 people in England who said they had felt or witnessed coercion within a maternity setting.

It said caregivers used authoritative language that undermined the idea of women being able to make informed decisions regarding their maternity care.

Difficult to understand here.

Hazel Williams, the chief executive of Birthrights, said: “This crucial report documents the rise in coercive practices as a systemic problem across the maternity system, with Black and Brown women and birthing people facing the worst attacks on their human rights, choice and bodily autonomy.

“Women and birthing people are repeatedly being told you are ‘not allowed’ or threatened with children’s services referrals, not given full facts and denied genuine informed choice. Coercion has no place in safe maternity care and must stop now.”

Or is this in fact the madwives themselves complaining about technological intervention? For anyone who goes around saying “birthing people” is, obviously, mad.

“The one thing that I think that even now is underestimated by all actors in industry … is how disruptive these technologies are,” Karp said. “If you are going to disrupt the economic and therefore political power significantly of one party’s base – highly educated, often female voters who vote mostly Democrat, and military and working-class people who do not feel supported – and you believe that that’s going to work out politically, you’re in an insane asylum.”

He added: “Like … this technology disrupts humanities-trained – largely Democratic – voters, and makes their economic power less. And increases the economic power of vocationally trained, working-class, often male, working-class voters. These disruptions are going to disrupt every aspect of our society.”

The Slaughter of the Power Skirts. And why wouldn’t society want that to happen?

A cultural shift is also needed – one that can’t happen without young men first taking accountability for their attitudes towards women. They also need compassion – to be told that they do not need to wear the faulty armour of machismo; and that wealth does not define them. Above all, it is rising inequality that blocks their path to a good life – not women.

Except UK inequality is falling. So, erm….

The NHS is pausing new referrals for masculinising or feminising hormone treatment for 16 and 17-year-olds after an in-depth review found there was insufficient evidence to support its continued use.

Prescriptions for hormones had been available in England for under-18s with a diagnosis of gender incongruence or dysphoria who met certain criteria.

Thought we were told that no treatments of kiddies did happen? Or is that statement now inoperative?

Somehow kiddies being treated into growing – or losing – the tits they’re too young to take a photo of just doesn’t seem like not treating kiddies. You know?