I was very excited about Caitlin Moran’s new book How to be a woman. She’s intelligent and colourful and interesting, and I thought that maybe she would be the woman to breathe a bit of life into this country’s seemingly quite dead feminist debate.

Hence I was also quite disappointed when, in her guide to being a modern feminist in the last issue of Stylist, she used the opportunity to reach over 400,000 readers to talk about whether or not it’s OK to wear heels, why Lady Gaga’s refined sexual imagery is more acceptable than Rihanna’s “willing” approach, and how Nicole Kidman in flip-flops at the Oscars is a sign that feminism is working.

Many feminists reacted to the article by claiming that you don’t have to qualify to call yourself a feminist, and that it’s not about what you wear (I couldn’t agree more), while other feminists responded that you’re an idiot if you suggest that looks are irrelevant to the feminist debate (and funnily enough, I agree with them too). What’s so frustrating, and in fact also symptomatic, about this article by the supposed modern feminism pioneer, is that she simply wasn’t able to go any deeper than the surface: it was all shoes and S&M and sexy dresses.

While it’s important to acknowledge that, as Caitlin Moran says, you can wear whatever you want and read whatever you want and sleep with whomever you want and still call yourself a feminist, it’s even more important to look beyond the thick layer of foundation and lip gloss and talk about who we really are, who we are expected to be, who we are allowed to be, and why.

Gaga can be as willing or unwilling as she wants (and by the way, didn’t Moran once quote Courtney Love’s signature slogan “you can’t rape the willing”?), and talented women can collect Oscars with their tits out for all I care – my point is that they have the right to be judged by what they do, not what they wear. (Moran’s solution? If boys don’t listen to what you say when you’re wearing a short skirt, cover up and they might just listen. Don’t expect them to change – just adapt to the circumstances and get over it.)

How are we ever expected to get anywhere at all if we insist on talking about women only in terms of what they wear and how they wear it and whether or not they should be wearing it, when in fact this is just yet another symptom of the patriarchy? Covering up in the hope of being taken seriously does not make us free.

We have to stop telling teenage girls that they look cheap and instead think about why they feel the need to cake themselves in make-up. We have to stop asking rape victims what they wore and start asking ourselves how the rapists ended up thinking the way they did. If we’re too busy judging each other for wearing heels and telling each other what type of sexual imagery is refined enough, feminism won’t get anywhere – labelled modern or not.

Now, who’s up for talking about the real issues?

***

(By the way, I will read Moran’s new book, and I’m still hoping – and expecting – that there’ll be both depth and real reflection in there. Somehow, I’m hoping that she just underestimated the Stylist readers, for which I can forgive her. Say what you want, but she certainly has created debate. You have to give her that. Now: fingers crossed. Then: a proper review.)

I was one of those people who found the killing of Osama bin Laden slightly nauseating. No matter how certain Obama felt that it was the right thing to do, the lack of a legal process just made the whole thing seem like a slap in the face of international law and of anyone who believes in justice as a concept greater than revenge.

But I know that there are those who disagree. An eye for an eye, echoes the Bible.

I have argued that it’s a principle: not even the most monstrous of actions would justify the killing of another person. If Obama can take the law into his own hands like that and kill a man for killing others, doesn’t he too deserve to die? Are we really that uncivilised?

Turns out maybe I’m not as civilised as I like to think I am. When I read about a woman cutting a rapist’s penis off and bringing it in to the police station as evidence, it didn’t make me feel nauseous, nor did it make me shake my head disapprovingly. Instead, I smiled at the thought of this brave Bangladeshi woman and thought that maybe one day, justice will prevail.

They say revenge is sweet, and maybe they’re right. I think of myself as someone who always puts justice first, but when the line between revenge and justice gets blurred because of the lack of an institutional process, when personal becomes political, when you’re standing there, knife in hand, facing the man who raped you, will you really stick with some righteous principle? And who am I to call you uncivilised?

In an industry that is rarely anything but superficial, shallow and dishonest, Dove has managed to become the black sheep – in a good way. When other beauty brands stick pictures of fake-breasted, botoxed-up anorexics in your face and tell you that you need yet another anti-wrinkle glow-promoting formula, Dove keeps it simple and says it like it is. Like in this old campaign (sorry, embedding disabled).

I’m writing this as a brilliant brands post because I like Dove’s marketing strategy, despite the fact that it is just that: yet another marketing strategy. It does, however, come with a warning: fire the blind art director who worked on this new poster campaign – WHAT ON EARTH WERE YOU THINKING? – or the ‘brilliant brand’ stamp of approval will soon fade…

Does the Guardian employ too many Oxbridge graduates? The question was posed by readers’ editor Chris Elliott yesterday. But it’s a stupid question, if you ask me, and you only get as good an answer as the question you ask. What Elliott and other editors should really be asking themselves isn’t if they hire too many of these graduates, but why there seems to be an unmistakable pattern.

Elliott did some informal research and asked his colleagues about their background. Of 178 respondents, 67 held degrees from Oxford or Cambridge, and many had a thing or two to say about it. Some suggested that the complaint of a high proportion of Oxbridge grads indicates that the public fears “that the Guardian shows the bias of a metropolitan elite” while others argued that Oxbridge is an elite selected by ability, and hence “to object to Oxbridge graduates having places in government/media/academia should, in theory, be like objecting to the fastest runners getting all the places in the Olympic team: absurd.”

It only gets interesting when someone highlights that Oxbridge itself isn’t the problem, but that privately educated people are overrepresented there and hence are “likely to be massively overrepresented at any organisation which they dominate.” Suddenly the concept of ability is up for interpretation. Who has the ability to make it to Oxbridge, and why? How much is nature, and how much is nurture, or should I say class?

If we agree that systematically, whether consciously or not, employing a disproportionate amount of people from particularly wealthy sections of society is problematic, we’ve got a situation worth thinking about. Elliott highlighting that he left school at 16 and that the Guardian does in fact hire fewer of these particular graduates now than in the past just seems a bit irrelevant, the same way that one woman at the top of an organisation doesn’t prove feminists wrong and women getting the right to vote wasn’t the end of the women’s rights movement.

Some say that we hire people we like, or better still, we hire people like ourselves. With a majority of Oxbridge grads at senior positions, is this what’s happening at the Guardian? If so, how can this change?

Elliott and fellow senior editors might say that I have non-Oxbridge-graduate-writer victim complex written all over me, and that’s fine. The truth is actually that I have missed out on more opportunities because of graduate training schemes being open exclusively to ethnic minorities, and you don’t see me going after them. I’m not on a personal mission here.

But if we’re going to ask these questions, let’s do it properly. Let’s be honest about it and admit that a CV with Oxbridge written at the top of it gets a magic glow to it, while it’s easier to miss out on something unique on a CV that reads former polytechnic. Let’s not pretend that all children have equal opportunities when they start primary school, and that a stable upbringing with private school education doesn’t help. Let’s remember that there are other great, creative, forward-thinking universities out there that encourage highly intelligent, articulate students to think for themselves and critically analyse the world they live in. And if we’re too lazy to go find these students, let’s not be hypocrites: let’s just admit that we’re happy to compromise on socio-economic equality because it’s easier that way.

I’m not going to lie: it did disappoint me when David Mitchell wrote that politics shouldn’t be about ideas but about money. Maybe because I admire him so much, both as a writer and as a political commentator, and I didn’t want him to eliminate every bit of hope I’ve ever had for the world. Maybe because the truth hurts.

Or maybe it was because I’ve been wanting to write about the importance of ideology for some time now, and his black-and-white reasoning challenged my arguments further. And I’m just not sure I’m quite ready to start arguing with Mr. Mitchell.

I’ve seen a lot of political freestylers around on Twitter lately, many of whom are highly intelligent, politically clued-in writers. They advocate what you could call a go-with-the-flow kind of approach to politics, suggesting that you don’t have to sign up to any particular school of thought but can make your mind up about any given policy in complete isolation.

I realise that this isn’t exactly what David Mitchell is saying, but in the absence of the fancy ideas he’s laughing at, we’re kind of left with nothing but freestyling, whether we like it or not. There is of course something quite attractive about this trust-your-gut attitude that people are promoting, but it’s got a flip-side too: if politics is all about money, surely it’s not a go-with-the-flow kind of person we want in charge? At the end of the day, how can we trust that tomorrow she’ll spend money the way yesterday she promised she would?

Mitchell’s column was inspired by the news that retail guru Mary Portas had been hired by the government to save the high street, and he’s got a point: it’s a gimmicky idea that probably does a better job ticking PR boxes than saving a sinking retail ship. Agreed. But he draws the conclusion that ‘we get distracted into thinking that politics is about ideas, innovation and “thinking outside the box”, rather than seeing the mundane truth which is that it’s primarily about money. Governments decide how much tax we pay and what to spend it on. They should express their values and priorities through how they take money from us and how they give it back – and that’s what we should judge them on.’

There are two important words here: values and priorities. To me, these words sum up politics better than any budget or equation ever will. When a government acts – when a budget is drawn up, when cuts are made, when funding is moved from one area to another – it puts our money where its mouth is, to use Mitchell’s clever words. But this is only one of many steps in a political process which, I will continue to insist, depends on ideology as some sort of backbone.

Like Mitchell writes, the way a government spends money is an expression of its values and priorities, and this is key; the values come first, not the money. At the very heart of a democratic system is an electorate that votes for candidates who represent their values and worldview – and the day they vote for something else, be it charisma, populist promises or a PhD in Economics, accountability goes out the window.

Let’s think about this go-with-the-flow attitude. In fact, let’s use as an example last year’s general election in the UK. Say you’ve always voted Labour. Then a wildcard is thrown into the pot, promising to abolish higher education fees. This is important to you, so you vote for them – it’s just one of many policies, but one you really care about. The wildcard, also known as Lib Dems, goes into coalition with the Tories and compromises on the one issue you really cared about, probably hoping that its sympathisers will appreciate a number of other liberal policies they manage to push through. Labour ends up representing the opposition. Now what? You feel robbed – but as long as Lib Dems keep fighting for their liberal core values, you can’t really complain.

In addition to values, Mitchell mentions priorities – because there’s a lot of prioritising and compromising in politics. This is why the freestylers have it wrong: you do have to make your mind up, sign up to some sort of ideology, and choose sides. You do have to decide what kind of world you want to live in, and accept that politics is about more than just the money in your wallet at this very moment. You do have to accept that in order for your values to be represented overall, compromises will have to be made – but it’s keeping your eyes on the goal that will make it all make sense.

That is why the go-with-the-flow people have it wrong. Motions get ignored and policies get compromised on. Circumstances change. But scrutinise yourself, and you’ll find that your core values – the way you look at people, your idea of what justice really is, your opinion on freedom versus obligations – don’t change that quickly. They’re bigger than that.

Decide where you stand and vote for a party that stands near you, and soon you’ll find that – more often than not – they’ll use your money to create your kind of world. Or go with the flow. Freestyle. Vote with your wallet. Follow your gut and vote for whatever feels important today, right now, for you. And end up feeling robbed, like those responsible for Lib Dems’ success in the last election – the students.

OK, I’m not going to repeat my most recent post. I’m just going to go and bang my head against a wall over here for a while.

It’s happened again. One of our key politicians has spoken without censoring himself, and everyone’s in shock. But should we be? How much more do we need to hear to realise that this is the reality of politics in the western world?

Kenneth Clarke talked about a distinction between “serious rape” and “date rapes”, referring to the latter as “17-year-olds having intercourse with 15-year-olds”. Serious rape, he explained, includes “violence and an unwilling woman”.

Mind-boggling, yes. But frankly not so surprising, at least for those who knew that Clarke has previously commented on how “a woman can make an anonymous complaint, the man can eventually be convicted, after going through a long and probably rather destructive ordeal, and the woman retains her anonymity as she walks away, with her ex-boyfriend or ex-husband left to live with the consequences.”

Not only does he seem incapable of distinguishing between rape and consensual sex between people under the legal age of consent, but it also seems like he’s sympathising with the offenders. This, ladies and gentlemen, is our justice secretary.

What next? Well, far from promising to read up on equality, he has vowed to choose his words more carefully in the future – just to make sure that his offensive world view doesn’t punch us in the face again.

But let’s put him back into the context in which he works. Most of you will remember Cameron’s, the prime minister’s, “calm down, dear” fiasco from a few weeks back. And then we have the rape allegations against now former MD of IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, which media keep referring to as a “sex scandal“, highlighting how DSK always was a bit of a “womaniser” with a “tangled love life”, thereby categorising the whole thing as similar to, say, Bill Clinton’s consensual affair with Monica Lewinsky.

French journalists even went as far as to defend Strauss-Kahn on the basis that he never had any issues with getting what he wanted – the logic being that a man who gets laid doesn’t need to rape – while one Libération writer explained that “it’s a flaw known about in the media” that the IMF head often is “too forceful” in his relationship with women.

Many have insisted that, in Ken Clarke’s defence, he is sharp but clumsy – he is “clumsy, not evil,” someone tweeted – and I don’t doubt that for a second. On the contrary, I think that this is what we have to understand: many of the big boys in charge, be it on a national or international level, really do look at the world this way, and so do a large number of journalists at the major newspapers. When they speak their mind, the truth comes out. And the truth ain’t pretty.

We don’t elect journalists, but we do elect politicians. So why do we keep voting for them? Why does no one seem to be calling out for real change?

Check out this amazing little blurb from the Fathers to get six months’ paternity leave article that was published in The Guardian in January 2010, a year and three months before the legislation was finally pushed through:

“Dads will be able to take up to six months’ paternity leave while their child’s mother returns to work, under government plans announced today. [...] The measure would allow mothers who earn more than their partners to return to work earlier…”

See, it would allow “women who earn more” to return to work. It wouldn’t allow fathers who want to spend some quality time with their children to stay at home, would it?

As if it’s the financial difference that would make parents share the time spent at home with their baby; as if fathers don’t actually have any interest in spending time with their newborns other than at weekends; as if mothers are mothers and fathers are breadwinners by nature. And this is The Guardian!

Yes. I laughed out loud at this sign this morning. Get over it.

That’s it, they’ve gone and done it. Stylist managed, if not always very convincingly, to dress itself as a politically correct and sometimes even forward-thinking magazine for independent, intelligent women (with some bits about make-up and fashion and seasonal must-haves, of course) for quite some time. It was never particularly deep or groundbreaking, but I have to say that I was quite impressed for a while.

No one will be surprised, however, to hear that they went and put their foot in it; they took an important political issue and simplified it to the unrecognisable in order to explain it to its supposedly stupid readership. The issue was the upcoming AV referendum, the article got the title The referendum made easy, and the result was something better referred to as The referendum made stupid.

Let me break down their arguments for you.

First past the post PRO: Leads to stable government (i.e. one party or candidate wins).
Right. OK. Not a lie. Since a vote on any candidate other than one that is already very popular is wasted, most people will vote for one of the two or three most popular candidates, in this case most often representing Labour or Conservatives, or possibly Lib Dems. This in turn leads to a so-called two-party system, where one major party is running the show and another major party is criticising it. Stable? Yes, because with a majority government like this, they can almost always push through any changes or decisions they want. Stable over time? Well, if stable means that one party comes in and rips apart the stability that another has just created by doing completely the opposite for a mandate period, then yes. If stable means that it’s easier to hold a party accountable for its legacy simply because it’s always very clear what it’s done (always the complete opposite of the last government: privatise, nationalise, privatise, nationalise…), then yes. As for long-term stability and policies that can grow and actually one day reach their full potential – not really.

First past the post CON: 66% of MPs are elected with less than 50% voter support, undermining democracy.
I’m not going to argue with this, not at all. Well done Stylist. I will, however, argue with their choice of “con” where there’s only space for one. An open general election is one of the most fundamental cornerstones of any democratic system, and the whole point of this election is for the electorate to vote for someone who represents them and their values. As explained above, voting for, say, a Green party representative, should you think that they represent your values very well, is a bit like not voting at all in most constituencies, because this candidate will never get elected (and the more people who think like this, the more difficult it gets for the newbies). So you’re probably more likely to vote Labour just for the sake of it then – like the least bad of two not very good options (if that happens to be your opinion). The First past the post system encourages this kind of strategic voting, while other systems, like AV, give you the chance to say that, “this person is who I would like to represent me, but should they not become an option at all due to a small amount of votes, I’d really prefer this dude over this other guy,” meaning that you don’t have to vote for one of the bigger parties just to make sure that the BNP guy doesn’t get in, because you can use your second or third vote for this purpose. In my opinion, the glaringly obviously most important con is this: unless you agree with everybody else, your vote is a waste – and we’re wondering why the turnout for general elections is so low?

Now to AV, the simple way:

Alternative vote PRO: Voters get more choice, so candidates must work harder.
“Voters get more choice,” they say, as if that magically happens just because we change the voting system. What do they mean? They are probably referring to my theory about strategic and non-strategic voting above – so why on earth won’t they just say that? Regarding candidates working harder, I’m not so sure. But indeed, it’ll be harder for someone who has misbehaved to get elected a second time when they must get a minimum of 50% of the votes.

Alternative vote CON: Constly to administer and likely to result in hung parliaments.
They keep saying it, regurgitating some old myth that David Cameron’s PR came up with in his (yes, I will go ahead and just assume that David’s PR is a “he”) sleep. But really, how costly is it? A few more ticks? A bit more counting, sure, and some one-off spend on a campaign to inform the public of the new system – but if Cameron and his buddies hadn’t already done such a good job of confusing people with lies and misleading information, it wouldn’t actually be so bad. As for the hung parliaments, I have never before come across a nation so scared of the idea of a hung parliament (could it be because of the picture of doom and gloom the expression itself paints?). It’s the one thing that everyone in the UK seems to agree on as a bad, bad thing. But what does it mean, really? OK, no party gets a majority of the seats. Fine. They have to collaborate with other people. Scary. They form a coalition government, and occasionally a lot more debate is needed before a decision is made; not everyone will agree in parliament, because they actually represent us, the people, and we don’t always agree. But why is a rushed decision better than a considered one for which you may have to be a bit patient? Surely, if long-term political stability is what we want, a parliament of debate, open-mindedness and collaboration is ideal? You know, I happen to know of a place where proportional representation, which always leads to coalition governments, works just fine…

There you have it: Stylist’s AV for dummies. I hope they’ll be happy if Cameron gets his way.