Infighting on the left and a real left-wing alternative

Oh, the infighting on the left. If only they could get along and get their act together, and maybe they’d achieve something.

In the aftermath of #coponcomrades, and after a couple of years of complete lack of consensus around Corbyn’s Labour leadership in the UK, it is easy to feel like the infighting on the left has become a pet peeve of many, interestingly especially those who aren’t actually that far out on the left. And I’m starting to feel frustrated by it. Not the infighting, that is – but the opinions.

As things stand in Ireland, billionaire business man Denis O’Brien is the owner of Communicorp and significant minority shareholder of INM, the companies that control significant media outlets including the Irish Independent, the Sunday Independent, the Herald, the Irish Daily Star, Newstalk and Today FM. News Corp, of which the Murdoch family controls 39% of the voting rights, owns the Irish Sun and the Irish edition of the Sunday Times. Our government, at the same time, is fighting the European commission’s call for Apple to repay billions in back taxes, while adding new tax breaks to make up for the phasing out of the double Irish tax structure – anything to please the big multinational players.

What I’m saying is this: Ireland is a fan of neoliberal fiscal policy, and its mainstream media isn’t going to be asking any questions.

But what’s that got to do with infighting? Quite a lot, if you ask me.

I had already left London when Jeremy Corbyn, somewhat controversially, took the helm of the UK Labour party, but the divisions were clear: there was no way he’d ever be a successful leader of a Labour party in a country with a first-past-the-post electoral system, centrist Labour voters said. The hard left was told to give in and accept a softer, more liberal leader. In Ireland, their peers are singing to a similar tune, as the left decries the lack of a viable left-of-centre alternative to end the Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael ping-pong game. If only the infighting on the left would stop – then we could all hold hands, laughing all the way to the Dáil.

Except, of course, a conversation like that around #coponcomrades is never going to go mainstream enough to impact on the potential for a real left-wing alternative in Irish parliamentary politics. And sure enough, if we had a Corbyn equivalent, the O’Briens and the Murdochs would fry them long before they became party leader – just like the UK media tried to do.

My problem with the criticism of the infighting on the left is that it’s almost always populist; the idea is that we’ll never make a realistic enough alternative to Varadkar and his crew. We need to get it together and seem like we’re all on the same page; we need to agree on some not-too-leftist policies and bring them to the ballot box – and then we can iron out the details. It’s almost as if people thought that ‘the left’ was this homogenous anti-Varadkar gang, all subscribing to the same politics and the same worldview; as if anyone who doesn’t tick O’Brien’s boxes must be anti-market liberalism enough to be happy to throw just about any other principles under the bus for the chance of a bit of redistribution of wealth.

A republic with a single-transferable-vote system and a neoliberal mainstream media will never make a good breeding ground for new lefty alternatives. The voting system alone is designed to perpetuate status quo in order to favour stability, and a media that plays by the rules of the free market is bound to play into the hands of neoliberal values. Combined, they’re a Fine Gael dream and couldn’t care less about infighting on the left – though given the chance, I’m sure they’d use it if they had to.

If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution. Give me a left-wing alternative that throws working class women under the bus, and I’ll pass. If it’s not intersectional, it doesn’t matter how proud Robin Hood would be.

The left, in and of itself, is anti-establishment; it feeds on the criticism of the neoliberal status quo, not the waltzing with it. So you say we need to play by the rules of the market to get in the door, before we can change the rules of the game? Fine – who will we sacrifice along the way? How much can we play ball and still call ourselves a lefty alternative?

I know so many people who are burnt out right now, activists who are on a break, who care too deeply to stop – until they’re so broken they have no other choice. People give and give and give, because that’s how important this is.

When you say that we need to stop the infighting, you are inadvertently saying that the details don’t matter, that maybe some minorities can wait. Or, if that’s not your intention, you are blind to the power of the status quo and a media that funds the already rich and drinks pints with those already in power. A left-wing alternative was never going to walk in the front door all suited up, shaking hands with Varadkar. And if it wasn’t willing to take the difficult conversations, it was never a true alternative in the first place. 

Normalising hate speech – on John Berger, the Irish Times, and the recontextualisation of meanings

I watched the first episode of Ways of Seeing, the BBC John Berger mini-series from 1972, last night. Explaining how images are given new meanings in different contexts, carrying ideological biases depending on their presentation and contextualisation, Berger ends the episode with a warning: “But remember that I am controlling, and using for my own purposes, the means of reproduction needed for these programmes. The images may be like words – but there is no dialogue yet. You cannot reply to me. […] You receive images and meanings, which are arranged. I hope you will consider what I arrange – but be sceptical of it.”

The alt-right article and glossary* by Nicholas Pell published yesterday in the Irish Times has been called many things – propaganda, a shit storm, an utter disgrace. It is safe to say that readers were sceptical of it, and indeed, when the opinion editor justified the decision to publish the piece by arguing** that the stance of the paper itself has previously been made abundantly clear on its leader pages, Berger’s theses appear highly relevant. In the context of the paper, the words of an alt-right advocate on the opinion pages should not be interpreted as propaganda, the editor’s argument went, but rather as democratic viewpoint airing and an opportunity to face the debate head on. Clearly, readers were not convinced.

We are often fed a hands-off interpretation of our media outlets, told that involvement and meddling equals censoring, that no-platforming is discrimination, and that a laissez faire approach is always the most democratic. After all, the public reads what the public wants; as was pointed out, readers have the ability to make their own minds up. And it’s no coincidence, of course, that a media exposed to market forces adopts the language and logic of the market. It’s perhaps got less to do with consumer satisfaction than it tries to convey – or else the so-called shit storm would have justified the taking down of the original piece and not just the creation of another one in response – but sure enough, the clickbait must have brought home impressive figures for a decent advertising revenue boost, thus justifying the piece in purely financial terms. As readers, we voted with our clicks.

Yet the Irish Times stance in relation to the debacle remains far from unambiguous. The context of the paper as known by the public extends far beyond any position on far-right extremism expressed on the leader pages; for example, a range of articles dubbing both pro-choice and anti-abortion campaigners extreme have been published of late, boasting similar views of these campaigners as must have led to the opinion editor’s using their messages as examples of previously published material deemed just as questionable and contentious as the alt-right glossary. And perhaps this is exactly why I – while gobsmacked by the fact that said glossary was even considered for publication, and while entirely in agreement with others, including the paper’s own columnist Una Mullally, who insist that it was a terrible mistake – still struggle to back up my position with what feels like a reasonably rational argument. Because in the context of Ireland, in a highly conservative, Catholic country, what is there to say that the extreme, shrill pro-abortion brigade won’t be denied a platform next, should a paper like the Irish Times decide to turn away an extremist like Pell? While the difference is crystal clear to me, it clearly is not to the paper.

The bare minimum purpose of the controversial article, it was argued, was to decode the language of the alt-right movement. Not that the racism is ever explicitly labelled as such, and the sexism is allowed to pass by all but unnoticed; in fact, the refusal to label the so-called alt-right sympathisers as fascist, neo-Nazi, sexist, racist, misogynist, white supremacists tells a tale – they’re extreme, a bit like the abortion fanatics, and here they are explaining their funny little extreme views. Enjoy! While the Irish Times seems unwilling to go anywhere near the words describing the true ideologies behind the alt-right movement, it seems to find the expressions and worldview behind it just fine – somewhat extreme, but legitimate all the same.

I think the clue is in the fear of labelling. If the ideology you’re trying to decide whether or not to provide a platform for is one the name of which you wouldn’t touch with a barge pole, it’s probably one you shouldn’t amplify. The reason you shouldn’t publish Pell’s work is that he’s an unapologetic racist neo-Nazi – but no one’s explicitly admitting that, are they? And in failing to label him for what he is, the publishing of his glossary far from decodes the language of his movement – it normalises it. A pro-choicer, a socialist, an alt-righter – the Irish Times might be a tad uncomfortable with all of them, but each to their own, right? If the alt-right guys are everywhere – on Twitter, in the White House, in our biggest dailies – they can’t be that bad.

Lindy West expressed it very well in the Guardian earlier this week when she wrote about her decision to ditch Twitter:

The white supremacist, anti-feminist, isolationist, transphobic “alt-right” movement has been beta-testing its propaganda and intimidation machine on marginalised Twitter communities for years now – how much hate speech will bystanders ignore? When will Twitter intervene and start protecting its users? – and discovered, to its leering delight, that the limit did not exist. No one cared. Twitter abuse was a grand-scale normalisation project, disseminating libel and disinformation, muddying long-held cultural givens such as “racism is bad” and “sexual assault is bad” and “lying is bad” and “authoritarianism is bad”, and ultimately greasing the wheels for Donald Trump’s ascendance to the US presidency.

Lo and behold, our broadsheet print media is next in line.

In the context of an alt-right propaganda leaflet, the views of men like Pell are what they are: highly offensive, incredibly ignorant, but at least more-or-less clearly labelled. I wonder what Berger would have thought about the recontextualisation of these messages as presented in the Irish Times, told as part of the Irish media story, one that boasts about a commitment to provoking strong debate – even if the provocation comes in the form of something a little extreme. Perhaps a word of warning is in order: there is no dialogue yet; you receive meanings, which are arranged. Consider what they arrange – but be sceptical of it. 

*I will refrain from linking to it for, I think, obvious reasons.

**As above.    

A feminist childcare model - and mammies doing it wrong

“Children of working mothers have better social and everyday skills,” read an Irish Times headline last week. A few days later, The Guardian reported on another study suggesting that mothers should spend as much time with their children as they can afford, and went with the headline “Child’s cognitive skills linked to time spent with mother”.

Such is the game of pitting mothers against each other: you’re damned if you do, and damned if you don’t. This of course is nothing new; the stream of new studies seems never-ending, and media loves reporting on them – likely because new mothers never fail to fall for the clickbait, desperate for some sort of evidence that they’re doing something right in this most difficult job they’ve ever tried their hand at. But perhaps there’s no coincidence that we’re seeing two of these stories in two leading newspapers in such a short space of time in the build-up to Christmas. Guilt is a powerful marketing tool – not least as we are bombarded with images of mothers hard at work on delivering the perfect family Christmas: finding the best deals on those most sought-after toys; creating the perfectly relaxing yet fun ambience in the home; doing all the food shopping, perhaps ‘getting away with’ using a ready-made stock pot; then standing in a doorway somewhere in the periphery looking selflessly blissful while watching their loved ones enjoy themselves.

Timely or not, these types of studies would perhaps be at least somewhat useful if it wasn’t for the fact that few parents feel as if they have any choice at all in the decision of whether to return to work or not. At the very least, thinking outside the box will involve a significantly lowered standard of living for most.

In Ireland, as Minister for Children Katherine Zappone unveiled the government’s new childcare scheme as part of Budget 2017 a couple of months ago, the new programme was heavily criticised. Many highlighted the complete failure to support stay-at-home parents, along with anyone opting for childcare provided by a family member or neighbour, while some went as far as to refer to the full-time crèche subsidy as an incentive for the “institutionalisation of babies and toddlers”, citing studies of young children’s most basic needs.

Further north, said institutionalisation of children is in full swing: in Sweden, quality controlled, local government funded nurseries are available for all children from around the age of one, and a full-time place costs no more than 1,287SEK (about €130), or 3% of the gross household income, per month for the first child. The cost drops significantly for the second and third children in a family, and the fourth goes free. Forget about ‘a second mortgage’, as Irish parents have come to refer to childcare costs – these working parents have two salaries to spend.

With a feminist foreign policy, a ministry made up of 50% women, and parental leave in place of gender-specific maternity leave since 1974, including three months earmarked for fathers since earlier this year and an equality bonus for parents who choose to split the 480 days equally, Sweden may be the promised feminist land; yet choosing the longer-term stay-at-home route comes with a huge loss of earnings as that second disposable salary is lost. Moreover, crucially, I have yet to stop receiving messages on an all too frequent basis from friends who have had enough, who just can’t make emotional ends meet, who are burning the candle at so many ends they don’t even know what’s up anymore.

Institutionalisation critics, meanwhile, are mostly concerned with the failing confidence of parents; Sweden’s childcare culture has resulted in a generation of parents who think that they can’t keep their children at home during the summer holidays because they simply don’t trust their own ability to entertain and challenge them. When siblings come into the world, children in Sweden are entitled to between 15 and 30 hours in crèche per week, something that’s been heavily questioned: why would parents send their children away when they’re at home?

A quick recap: we feed parents an endless diet of academically proven ways in which they are most likely failing their children, and then we blame the childcare system for making them doubt their parental ability.

The feminist elephant in the room is of course unpaid labour: the emotional labour that pushes mothers working outside of the home over the edge, and the housework and childcare work that is stubbornly unseen, unpaid and simultaneously always criticised. Because all these critics have grand ideas about what children need, but no one’s asking how their mothers* are doing. Don’t get me wrong: the last thing I want is to play into the rhetoric that poses that happy mothers have happy babies, as if having a bad day or struggling sometimes is somehow a failure. But the chirpy ‘getting mothers back into the workforce’ spiel is starting to sound a bit tired. We’ve been working all along – and that work won’t go away just because society refuses to value it.

So what does a truly feminist childcare model look like? A good first step might be one that doesn’t tell parents that their most important job in this world is to be productive in the sense of contributing to economic growth; one of flexibility and lack of judgement, one that levels the playing field not just in a financial sense but also when it comes to equality of choice and wellbeing. And a feminist media? Alas, it’s a long road ahead. 

*And yes, to be clear: I do mean mothers, not parents. A close friend who became a father recently remarked when returning from a stroll with his baby daughter in the sling how easy it is to be celebrated as a super dad, what with all the smiles and encouraging comments. I’ve yet to meet a mother who feels quite that loved and supported by the general public. Also, refer again to the Christmas commercials. I rest my case.     

On The Niall Boylan Show and getting ignorant answers to ignorant questions

Is the general public “right to be angry at the sense of entitlement” of a homeless, pregnant mother-of-two in temporary hotel accommodation? asked The Niall Boylan Show on Facebook the other day. Linking to screen grabs of a journal.ie article about the woman and a selection of comments on the same, the radio show noted that Laura from Cork was “not getting a huge amount of sympathetic thumbs up” on the site.

Cue the radio show’s Facebook fans telling Laura to “close [her] fucking fanny”, stop having more kids and start looking after the ones she already has, get a job, and start paying for a living. Her “sense of entitlement”, of course, is never questioned – that’s already been established by the question asked.

The fact the journal.ie readers were indeed quick to judge – suggesting that Laura must start taking responsibility, sarcastically highlighting that they themselves actually have to pay when staying in a hotel, and citing anecdotal evidence of random friends who do social work and know of people turning down offers of houses – naturally doesn’t help. But the Niall Boylan Show is only delighted to amplify them, making readers feel righteous in their outrage at this woman’s lifestyle. They are “the general public”, so the radio show said – and, as another commenter points out, it’s the general public that foots the bill for that hotel room. So the circle of hatred is complete.

The fact that there are a thousand and one ways to get pregnant against your will and not a single one to stop being pregnant if you’re a single mother without someone to mind your children while you nip off to the UK to splash out on an abortion, these people seem to have forgotten. Likewise, they seem just a tad ignorant about the difficulty in getting a job when already five months pregnant, not to mention the equation of one income to cover not just rent and bills but also childcare costs for two children.

But what’s outrageous about this isn’t primarily what’s in the comments; anyone who’s spent more than two minutes skimming through comments on any article about anything to do with women will know to expect nothing less. For The Niall Boylan Show to fake upset at the lack of sympathetic thumbs up in the comments on the original post, however, only to go on and amplify said lacking sympathy, cement the idea of a homeless mother-of-two in temporary hotel accommodation as entitled, and do nothing by way of moderating the ensuing vitriol on their own page – that’s what I call irresponsible hypocrisy in its most disgusting form.

A political hero of mine, Swedish politician Gudrun Schyman, talks a lot about a concept she calls ‘problemformuleringsinitiativet’ (go on – give it your best shot). The Swedish multi-syllable word loosely translates as ‘the problem defining initiative’ and refers to agenda-setting power, highlighting that the power to define a problem by extension comes with the power to appoint responsibility and thus also propose wherein the solution might lie.

The question of whether the general public’s anger at Laura’s sense of entitlement is justified or not comes with a number of already established assumptions: that the ignorant people who take time to spew hatred at someone like Laura in the comments section on journal.ie represent the general public; that Laura is definitely to blame for the situation she’s in and we should put all spotlights on her rather than our politicians; that she does indeed feel a sense of entitlement; and that having a sense of entitlement when it comes to the country you live in supporting you when you’re in deep shit to make sure that your children have a roof over their heads would somehow be a bad thing. It’s no wonder that their most unenlightened fans come out of the woodwork at the sight of a post like this. The answers you get are only as good as the questions you ask. It’s an ignorant question, so they’ll get ignorant responses.

I wonder did the radio show ever think to question our elected representatives’ sense of entitlement. I wonder did they pick up on the frustration of the general public at Enda Kenny’s schmoozing with American Vice President elect Mike Pence and ask whether it was right. I wonder did they note the anger marching through the streets of Dublin back in September and put it to their Facebook fans whether the fury of Ireland’s women is justified. That’s the kind of social media clickbait I’d get behind.

I oppose irresponsible programming - not free speech

So The Late Late Show decided to book Katie Hopkins – British tabloid columnist, vocal Trump supporter and bigoted racist extraordinaire – to fly over from England to discuss the context and outcome of the US election. RTÉ received over 1,000 complaints in little over a day, but the complainants were quickly labelled smug and opposed to democratic, basic free speech, and accused of – wait for it – denying Hopkins a platform.

Let’s be very clear about one thing: this has nothing to do with free speech and everything to do with poor programming.

“RTÉ, as the national public service broadcaster, shall reflect the democratic, social and cultural values of Irish society and the need to preserve media pluralism,” reads the first guiding principle of the Public Service Broadcasting Charter. The third principle adds that “no editorial or programming bias shall be shown in terms of gender, age, disability, race, sexual orientation, religion or membership of a minority community.”

So The Late Late Show, notorious for under-representing women amongst its guests, went and booked a woman who not only regularly engages in hate speech and famously referred to immigrants as 'cockroaches' but has explicitly endorsed and amplified rape threats. The irony would be hilarious if it wasn’t so frightening.

RTÉ justified the decision by highlighting what a big event the US election was. Presenter Ryan Tubridy added that Hopkins’ ‘thing’ is to state controversial opinions, which start important conversations. Shorthand, if I may: we're broadcasting a bit of racism and misogyny to spark debate. Reflecting the values of Irish society, huh? This is the media equivalent of the Taoiseach congratulating Trump on his victory on behalf of the Irish people. Not in my name.

There are endless ways to analyse the context in which a man like Trump can be elected President of the United States, without inviting along a hateful person with an already significant platform, not to mention the fact that she seems like quite a far-fetched choice in an Irish-American context. I can think of countless ways to bring to the fore controversial issues while providing a platform for women with voices that are otherwise seldom heard. How about starting by inviting immigrant women from direct provision centres onto the show for a different perspective?

Far from wishing to deny someone a platform, I want to extend that platform to include more voices in an aim to embrace that charter pluralism principle. Far from being smug, I’m worried about a public service broadcaster that should refrain from demonstrating programming bias in regards to everything from gender to race, yet finds it so hard to find suitable women that it resorts to inviting one with a fondness of hate speech and controversy. This is irresponsible broadcasting, plain and simple – at any time, all the time, but especially in the current political environment.

Want to have a debate about free speech and pluralism? Bring it on. But the way things stand, if anyone's smug it's Katie Hopkins.

Why politics needs passion: on tone policing, Repeal jumpers and rational reasoning

Is tone policing the new master suppression technique?

What is a master suppression technique? you ask. It is a way to suppress and humiliate an opponent, according to Norwegian psychologist and philosopher Ingjald Nissen, who articulated the framework of such techniques in 1945.

And tone policing? A tone argument is one which isn’t strictly concerned with what is being said, but rather with the tone in which it is expressed. Tone policing, consequently, is a strategy of dismissing arguments irrespective of their legitimacy or accuracy. It’s a derailing tactic and, I would suggest, a master suppression technique on the rise.

Ireland boasts an impressive selection of recent examples of the latter, thanks to a series of articles published across various national dailies arguing that the problem with the public conversation on reproductive justice and a repeal of the 8th Amendment to the Constitution is not in its sheer existence or even the motivations behind its existence, but rather in what it sounds – and looks – like.

“Abortion is, understandably, an issue that arouses deep passions but that shouldn’t preclude an effort by all sides to listen to opposing views and try to understand the reasoning involved,” argued Irish Times columnist Paul Cullen yesterday. He was writing in the hope that today’s debate wouldn’t have to resort to “plumbing the depths” the same way it did in the 1980s – yet, he noted, “the signs aren’t good”.

Much of the recent criticism of the pro-choice movement has engaged in some or a great deal of tone policing. In the most literal sense, those who fear for the outcome of the debate have pointed out that shrill tones and anger won’t win over middle Ireland, that extremists with fists in the air are not exactly attractive. Similarly, Cullen dismisses the “strident voices on the two ends of the spectrum, each group deeply attached to absolutist views on the subject”.

Others have pointed to a naivety, suggesting that the pro-choice campaign doesn’t engage with the important moral debates, instead increasingly resembling a trend-conscious clique. “The push for liberalising abortion law sometimes feels more like a marketing campaign than a political debate,” Cullen chips in, pointing to the Repeal jumpers and focus on personal stories.

But that’s exactly where the tone police get it wrong: this very much is personal.

I was thinking a while back about why I felt so angry when a friend – a male friend, I should say – told me he identified as pro-life. It wasn’t exactly a surprise, and I’m sure there are plenty of his kind in my network of friends and acquaintances. But then it hit me: the privilege of putting the opinion out there, of making me aware of his stance against my right to bodily autonomy, and then suggesting that we agree to disagree in this supposed ‘debate’ about my life and health, is absurd to the point of being offensive. In saying it, he didn’t just side with the people who insist it is right to see me endure pregnancy against my will, give birth against my will, and parent a child against my will just to allow for a potential life to develop; he also equalled his right to staying true to a principle to my right to make decisions about what happens to me, my body and my life. An opinion against a feeling; an argument versus a lived experience.

We talk about reason and rational deliberation as cornerstones of a functioning democracy, about needing to prevent emotions from running high and stopping us from thinking sensibly. This notion of emotions as the antithesis of rational thought is nothing new, especially not for anyone familiar with rational choice theory, which sees citizens voting to maximise individual utility, completely free from emotional and societal bonds. But is this really a useful interpretation of society?

Studies of citizens and different social contexts have shown that, perhaps unsurprisingly, passion and talk of personal experiences are mostly seen to belong in the domestic, private sphere, while rationality should prevail in the political, public sphere. Activists are painted out to belong to an extreme fringe of society, while power and leadership is almost exclusively represented in media by serious figures of authority with no feelings and no displayed personal interest.

But the notion of rationality and passion as mutually exclusive has time and again been questioned by political engagement theorists. ‘Apathy’ means ‘without passion’, argues researcher Cheryl Hall, so the problem with apathetic citizens is a lack of political passion. Cognitive attention is not enough to spark political engagement – citizens need to care about something and have a vision in order to act. Put bluntly: politics needs passion.

At the end of his opinion piece, Cullen writes about Kathleen Sebelius, Barack Obama’s former health secretary, who identifies as anti-abortion but pro-choice. She believes that life begins at conception but accepts that it is not her business to impose her views on others. “Perhaps it is time we started hearing more of those voices,” the Irish Times columnist concludes. Ironically, those voices are very much heard throughout the pro-choice campaign: for instance, the work of Ann Furedi, chief executive of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, has been circulated and celebrated widely of late, and she too is almost coldly rational about how the notion of life from the moment of conception is compatible with passionately pro-choice views; and many others, myself included, have written extensively about the complexities of notions of life and pregnancy loss, yet without for a moment compromising on our pro-choice conviction. Perhaps it is time we started listening to more of these voices – even if they are angry. Perhaps it is time the mainstream media started amplifying them – even if they are shrill.

It is easy to write calmly, sensibly and rationally about just about anything, irrespective of how passionately you feel about it; you may notice how I haven’t been interrupted once in the almost 1,000 words in this post thus far. But the “productive national conversation” Cullen is calling for won’t take place on the opinion pages of our national newspapers – it will have to be a two-way thing, and it will cause friction.

I’m convinced that the huge majority of people agree that we need a productive national conversation on reproductive rights, but I think that the liberal rational choice ideal has sold us a lie about what such a conversation should look like.

Passions are informed by reason, and personal experiences inform our political beliefs. Show me a supposedly superior moral principle and I’ll show you the door; wear your heart on your sleeve and I’ll listen.

A word on choice and tone-policing – or, why balance is a sham

We’re used to being told that we’re doing it wrong. We’re used to being told that we’re too aggressive, too angry, too shrill. But when, all of a sudden, we start hearing it from people supposedly on our side, alarm bells start ringing.

These alleged pro-choice supporters with the vocabulary of anti-choicers started voicing their concerns in national newspapers recently, airing their fears that the repeal campaign may be failing and revealing that they wouldn’t be joining the March for Choice after all. Why? First we were told that we were failing to take the debate about the unborn’s right to life, and that we’d need to do so in order to win over Ireland’s ‘mushy middle’. It’s a debate campaigners are taking every day, of course, but it turns out that the argument was just a tool used to evoke the image of a poor, innocent baby before going on to shame women for not grieving and feeling guilty enough.

Next we were informed that we were being too aggressive, something that of course makes perfect sense to anyone sharing our pro-choice views and generally agreeing that having been refused bodily autonomy for what seems like forever is more than a bit disgraceful. But this too turned out to be a hoax, followed by an endless stream of reasons why liberalised abortion legislation would be a bad thing, including that sexually transmitted diseases are on the up, that solo parenting might not be quite as horrific as you think, and that many people struggle to get pregnant in their forties. Oh, and just as a side note, we were all overreacting to the video evidence of a faux abortion counselling service telling lies about cancer and parental abuse, and we should all calm down and be civil.

You could think of such poorly staged attempts to package a conservative anti-choice agenda in a less fundamentalist, ever so slightly semi-enlightened guise as harmless. Or you could look at a public discourse obsessed with a literal notion of balance and start to feel robbed. Ring up the paper that published the two aforementioned examples and they’ll refer to them as pro-choice opinion pieces. Transparent or not, it doesn’t take a media scholar to realise that we’ve just lost an important platform along with the chance to define who we are.

The repeal campaign deals with the conversation around the unborn all the time, but if a supposed representative of the movement suggests that it doesn’t, it’ll quickly start to seem suspicious, as if campaigners are hiding something. When an alleged insider drags issues of STIs and infertility into the abortion discourse, it piles on the work of the pro-choice movement to refute such ridiculous claims. And no number of calmly eloquent reproductive rights activists on TV will ever erase the discomfort experienced by some people in relation to the rage also fuelling the movement, once someone who says she’s on their side takes issue with their anger and frustration, even describing them as deluded and condescending. For every column width of anti-choicers posing as pro-choice allies, we are little by little losing control of the narrative.

Isn't it funny how the majority of people seem happy to turn a blind eye to what looks quite a lot like defamation of an entire movement, yet when Helen and Graham Linehan spoke about their experience of losing a baby to a fatal foetal abnormality the BAI upheld a complaint pointing out that the coverage wasn’t balanced enough? Isn't it funny that RTÉ paid out a total of €85,000 to journalist John Waters and members of the Iona Institute after Rory O’Neill referred to their views as homophobic, yet none of the thousands of people who are about to take to the streets for the March for Choice this Saturday is likely to see any sign of a cheque for being described as deluded and “losing their collective minds”, their views completely and utterly misrepresented and the campaign recontextualised to a ridiculous degree?

The Press Council of Ireland’s Code of Practice states that content should not have “been inappropriately influenced by undisclosed interests”. The articles produced by our two faux pro-choice friends – both of whom are, just to be clear, sharing unquestionably anti-choice content on Twitter – are, as such, failing to meet the council’s standards. So why is it allowed to go on? It’s been suggested before that calls for balance in media reporting are almost always part of a conservative agenda, aiming to preserve the status quo; the Broadcasting Act of 2009 holds that broadcasters should not present anything that “undermines the authority of the State” or is “likely to promote, or incite to, crime”. Not only does this highlight beyond any doubt that we’ve given up on the idea of media as a fourth estate, which should monitor our elected leaders to hold power to account, but it also poses some important questions about the notion of balance in regards to the reproductive rights debate, seeing as abortion is still a criminal offence in Ireland.

Perhaps it is time we accept that our idea of balance is a sham – that it is used to protect the privileged and powerful but time and time again fails to deliver when those who dare to question the status quo are being silenced. We have a public service offering that welcomes commercial interests along for the ride, with broadcasters relying on advertising revenue and sponsorship deals to deliver their content. How could we ever fool ourselves to believe that investigative journalism is fully and freely investigative when the work is funded by advertisers with vested interest in its findings? What happens the day a guest of the Late Late Show decides to talk about the need to invest in public transport and increase motor tax, when every week an audience member leaves the show with a brand new Renault?

The gist of the two fraudulent articles comes down to this: that the fury of abortion rights advocates is offensive, and that women who need abortions should be ashamed of themselves. Look at the lies that are published in our name without as much as a blink of an eye, and ask yourself why it might be that we’re angry and shrill. Look at the BAI endorsing the view that the Linehans’ grief should have been attacked live on air, and ask yourself who should be ashamed. It’s easy to be calm and civil when you’ve got the status quo and every regulatory body in the country on your side. When your uterus is treated as public property and every single mainstream media outlet will fight for its right to tell you what to do with it, all while patronisingly pretending to have your best interests at heart, there is no such thing as calm.

Join the Abortion Rights Campaign to March for Choice this Saturday in Dublin, starting at 1.30pm at the Garden of Remembrance.  

From #NotAllMen to #AllVictimsMatter

I started writing a piece the other day called ‘From #NotAllMen to #NotAllMedia’, which I had yet to publish. I wanted to clarify yet again how my criticism of the reporting of the Cavan murders was a structural critique of sorts, aiming to start a conversation around the wider media climate and its impact on the real-life experiences of its audiences, and how making it personal and debating individual journalists’ performances and accomplishments would be to drastically miss the point. Naturally, I responded to requests to debate individual tabloid journalists on air with a firm ‘no’. I wasn’t going to engage with that level of debate at all.

Then the Crime Editor of the Irish Times went and published an opinion piece entitled ‘How #HerNameWasClodagh missed the media’s real failing’, launching the hashtag #AllVictimsMatter, and here I am. I will assume that I was at least to some degree included in the group he defends himself against, dubbed “one ill-informed corner of social media”, “spectacularly wrong” and an “echo chamber of social media and blogging” – and I would happily accept those monikers if it seemed as if the editor had understood at least the most basic ideas behind the criticism of the coverage he writes about, but alas. What this is, then, is not so much a defense of my views as it is an attempt to highlight the privilege behind such hashtags of blind self-righteousness.

“We were told journalists – all of them, it seems – wanted to package this case as a family tragedy and quickly move on.”

I have explicitly repeated over and over again that the journalists pointing out that they in fact did something right are catastrophically missing the point. I have also said explicitly on more than one occasion that I don’t think that journalists consciously went out on a mission to erase the memory of Clodagh. In fact, I have said the complete opposite: that we’ve all grown up as part of a society full of patriarchal tropes, and that what we need is a discussion around how we can avoid perpetuating said tropes. There is a narcissistic streak in the urge for a journalist to take my critique personally, similar to the narcissism that has fuelled hashtags such as #NotAllMen.

“Many of them hopelessly mistook the placing of Alan Hawe at the centre of the coverage as misogyny in a world where the actions of violent men are somehow accepted by the media and their female victims do not matter. The truth is that the case of the Hawe family was treated no differently to any other; with the media focused on the perpetrator over, and at the expense of, the victims. This has nothing to do with gender, no matter how hard some people try to make it so.”

The crime editor is privileged enough that he can compare the reporting of one case with the reporting of another like for like, completely disregarding the context in which those crimes take place and the role of media in augmenting or undermining certain accepted narratives in society. To think that the reporting of a case of brutal domestic violence has nothing to do with gender is not just naïve, but frankly irresponsible and, yes, misogynistic. But then again, that inability to see the bigger picture is inherent to all the aforementioned hashtags.

“Having had the same conversation with many people on the periphery of such cases, I have found that when people speak of a killer’s talents and strengths, they are not condoning or minimising their violence. They are pondering – often in shock – how the life of the perpetrator was apparently so “normal” and at odds with the violence they committed in their final moments.”

No one is criticising the people behind the quotes, those grieving and those in disbelief. It is the blind regurgitation of such quotes by media that is problematic. There is a reason why a seemingly ‘normal’ person committing such a horrendous crime is met with such disbelief and shock; and a media discourse that doesn’t silence but rather trust and support the voices of women who have experienced domestic abuse could significantly help us understand the culture that creates men like Alan Hawe. If we remove the spotlight from the Cavan killings for a moment and point it to the editorial offices of our mainstream media instead, we can start to talk about considered narratives as opposed to spontaneous reactions of shock, and we might be onto something.

“In these cases, local people who knew the family often feel freer, in my experience, to say more about the perpetrator, to whom they understandably have less loyalty, than the victims. This is especially so when, like Kilkenny man Alan Hawe, the perpetrator is not originally from the area where the murders and suicide have taken place but the victims and their extended family are, as was the case with Clodagh Hawe and her Cavan-based extended family.”

The entire history of tabloid coverage of murders, disappearances and similar goes against this theory, but even if it were true, media do not just choose what questions to ask; they also choose what to print. Is a ‘We just wrote what they said!’ kind of media really the kind the editor wants to associate himself with?

“It is interesting that the deaths of forgotten victims – women and men – from poorer social circumstances have not whipped up the same strength of feeling in the past from those most vehemently behind the #HerNameWasClodagh campaign. There are huge lessons in this case for the media, but not the gender-based ones suggested by the echo chamber of social media and blogging; the media needs to focus more on victims. #AllVictimsMatter”

Oh no he didn’t. But of course he did, in one punchy finishing line proving all his critics right. Because this is exactly what this is about: the privilege that won’t give way for scrutinisation; the literal interpretation of the notion of equality that refuses to accept that equal treatment of those without equal starting points does not equality make.

What does #AllVictimsMatter have in common with #AllLivesMatter and #NotAllMen? That people in positions of power and privilege accuse those criticising the status quo for forgetting to care about those already cared for by the status quo: women’s rights activists are accused of not spending enough time campaigning for men’s rights and #BlackLivesMatter spokespeople are accused of discrimination – but those lashing out, naturally, have never bothered to campaign for either cause. All victims do matter, but not all murder victims potentially represent thousands of other victims who are still alive and reading the papers, told that their side of the story won’t be heard. I was told when my piece went viral that Alan Hawe is the centre of attention because he had agency while the others didn’t. Oh the irony of the fact that journalists – those holding the pens that write the stories of how we view ourselves – consider that an unquestionably, already cemented starting point.

Rest in peace, invisible woman

Five people die in Cavan, and in the days to come, Irish newspapers are full of questions. “Why did he do it?” asks one national daily, picturing a man and his three sons. “How could he kill those poor boys?” asks another.

It is almost immediately clear that the father, Mr Hawe, has stabbed the other four to death: the mother and the three sons. He has then killed himself. And in search for answers, we are told what an honourable man the murderer was: “a valuable member of the community”, “very committed” and “the most normal person you could meet”. Soon follow the calls for increased funding of mental health services.

Two days have passed since the tragic news broke, and today the Irish Times ran a front page reading “Wonderful children who will be missed by all who knew them”. “Killed in their pyjamas by father in frenzied attack,” goes one Independent headline alongside a photo of the boys. It is almost as if we’ve already forgotten: they were a family of five. Rest in peace, invisible mother.

The picture of the man who killed her, however, is becoming more multi-faceted by the day. Mr Hawe was “quiet and a real gentleman”, says one representative of the local council. His brother goes on to talk about his big passion, handball: he’d “won a number of titles”, “played from about eight years of age” and used to play “with his brother and his cousin”. A neighbour offers more praise: “He was the sole person who would do anything for anybody at any time of day or night. He was very obliging.”

It makes sense to draw the conclusion that the man must have been carrying some very dark, difficult secrets, that he must have been mentally tortured somehow. Why else would such a lovely man kill his wife and children before taking his own life? (There's a study in here somewhere, comparing the reporting of events like this with the discourse surrounding abortion and mental health, with women being labelled murderers for ending pregnancies, stopping the growth of sometimes near-invisible clumps of cells, regardless how mentally tortured or suicidal they are.) But while a note found at the house suggests that Mr Hawe had been in “a vulnerable state of mind” at the time of the murders – and while I wholeheartedly agree with calls to end the stigma around mental illness – there is a different and important narrative for framing these events.

We hear about tragic killings like these every now and then. Nine times out of ten (I don’t have statistics, but my hunch is that the figure is far higher), the perpetrator is a man. Lots of people, men and women and non-binary people, struggle with mental illness, but it takes more than mental torture to brutally murder your own children. There is a patriarchal narrative that runs through this entire story, from the act itself to the reporting of it, and we need to allow ourselves to see it if we are to find a way to prevent similar events from happening again.

As Paul Gilligan of St. Patrick’s University Hopsital points out, killing a child requires a certain view of children, an idea that they must be controlled and managed and, in the case of murder suicides, that they cannot go on to live without the murderer. This ideal of control is part of the same patriarchal worldview that refuses to label domestic violence for what it is; that insists on publishing praise for a man who has just brutally murdered his wife and three children; that almost entirely omits the one woman from the story.

“Killed in their pyjamas by father in frenzied attack – before mother-in-law found note,” reads another headline. The narrative, of course, is from the viewpoint of the murderer: she was his mother-in-law. She was the children’s grandmother, the murdered woman’s mother. The murdered woman, then, is most often referred to as the murderer’s wife – relevant only as what she is in relation to the man who killed her. Her name is Clodagh.

A man murders four people in Cavan, and we are fed questions and statements of disbelief alongside praise of the murderer as a community man. On the front pages, we see the man and the three children he murdered. Two days in, Clodagh has all but become invisible. And you ask why feminists are so loud and angry?

It's your own fault you feel shit, ladies

‘Women are their own worst beauty critics,’ says Dove in the latest instalment of its Real Beauty campaign. In other words, women are those whose insecurities are most effectively exploited by an industry that unashamedly rips apart women’s looks in general and bodies in particular every chance it gets. Shocker.

Luckily, Dove is here to show women that they are more traditionally beautiful than they think. How? An experiment that sees an FBI artist sketch the faces of women he hasn’t met based on descriptions by themselves and people they meet respectively demonstrates that the drawings based on strangers’ accounts result in skinnier women with lighter hair, straighter noses, fewer moles and less droopy chins.

The lesson? ‘You are more beautiful than you think!’

Or:

1. How you look IS important.

2. It’s your own fault that you feel shit. Relax and stop being so hard on yourself and maybe you’ll be happy.

3. Beauty is what it always was: see, you’re not as fat as you thought you were, and your eyebrows are actually very well-formed, and your lips could almost be described as full and sexy!

I respect Dove for trying, I really do. The problem is that a beauty product manufacturer depends on its audience wanting to be beautiful. And try as it might to convey that beauty comes from within, that’s not where it’s going to make its money – and, actually, it keeps failing miserably, every single time.

LOVELY, said a choir of clued-in, sensible, politically-conscious women on Twitter, and I died a little inside. ‘Dove is committed to building positive self-esteem and inspiring all women and girls to reach their full potential,’ reads the copy on the campaign site. It’s bullshit. Don’t buy it, girls. They’re part of an industry that makes money off your sense of inadequacy, and no matter how beautiful you are, they’ll keep doing it.

Women are their own worst beauty critics – mad, eh? No, not remotely. There’s nothing mad or surprising or shocking about the fact that people who are bombarded day in and day out with images creating an unobtainable ideal become experts at finding and focusing on their own flaws. It’s no wonder if, in a world where modelling agencies find their future stars outside anorexia clinics, women start to become both paranoid and neurotic.

I won’t judge anyone with an interest in beauty, but let’s not pretend it’s anything but shallow. And Dove, don’t you dare suggest that the hatred comes from within. It’s being handed down to us from a never-ending supply, sustained by companies just like you.

Angry, impolite, shrill-sounding, hysterical women

Calm down, dear. David Cameron was undeniably patronising towards female MP Angela Eagle, but there’s more to that phrase than just superiority and arrogance. I’ve done a lot of thinking lately about my own tone, particularly on online platforms like Twitter, wondering if I should indeed calm down. I’m furious with the Tories over the cuts; I’m sick to death of the widespread sexism in media; I tell brands who cement old-fashioned gender stereotypes to piss off; yes, I’m pretty sure that if you ask any of my followers on Twitter, they’ll say if not that I need to calm down then at least that I seem pretty angry a lot of the time.

So I thought to myself that maybe I should take a chill pill. Maybe this is not how deliberative politics should work, after all. Michael Kelly of The Irish Catholic certainly finds the anger a bit much: people should be able to disagree on various issues without the debate getting out of hand, he insists. We must be polite.

There you go, I thought, an Irish Catholic who has more sense than I do – I definitely need to calm the hell down. So far so good. But Kelly uses the word ‘calm’, too. Senator Ivana Bacik claimed during a hearing that the Catholic Church’s anti-abortion stance was based on sheer hatred of women, an opinion which, according to Kelly, wasn’t expressed quite calmly enough:

‘Calm? Hardly. … A gentleman is one, the old saying goes, who can disagree without being disagreeable. The same surely applies for ladies. Shrill caricatures have no place in mature debates.’

See, I don’t think this is about civilised debate.

‘Many Irish people passionately believe that gay couples ought to be allowed to get married, many others believe that marriage should be a unique institution between a man and a woman. This should be a point that people of good faith can legitimately disagree about. … Sadly, however, it usually descends into name-calling and charges of homophobia.’

This is a bit like the neoliberals who don’t like to be called neoliberal, not because they aren’t, but because the word is sometimes used in an accusatory manner. You know, thinking you have the right to tell someone what they can or can’t do simply because they’re gay is homophobic, at least in my vocabulary. Calling a spade a spade is not name-calling.

But when Cameron tells Eagle to calm down and Kelly refers to Bacik’s voice as shrill, they consciously or subconsciously evoke the idea of female hysteria. What Kelly fails to understand is that the abortion debate simply cannot be polite and civilised – that’s the nature of the debate – and this is the case with most women’s rights issues. We can disagree politely for all eternity, but politeness is not – I’m sorry, Caitlin Moran – what gave women the right to vote. Asking politely is not what changed this shocking situation in the 1970s in Ireland.

‘Any woman trying to speak about [sexting] will be greeted with a volley of “you’re just jealous as no one wants a photo of your fanny”,’ as Grace Dent put it. Or you’re not polite enough. Or you need to calm down. Or your voice is starting to sound a bit shrill. Or you’re just hysterical and need a good seeing to. ‘Too often in our political discourse reasonable voices are shouted down by shrill opponents. It’s not a sign of maturity when some voices are silenced or bullied out of the public sphere,’ says Kelly. Or, maybe, voices become shrill, loud and angry in a discourse that keeps silencing them. Because you can say a lot of things about the climate for the current abortion debate in Ireland, but you can’t say that the conservative, anti-choice voice is being bullied by a bunch of progressives in a liberal left-wing hegemony. You can try, but with only 15% women in the Dáil and a constitution that still talks about women’s duties in the home, as a middle-aged white man you’ll only sound pathetic at best. When one group starts telling another to calm down, you can be pretty sure that they’re not in any major rush to challenge the status quo.

So am I angry? No, I’m well beyond angry, and no, I won’t calm down. I’ll calm down and be polite when women are treated as equals – in political debate and in society as a whole. Until then, I’ll be as shrill as I want to be.

Pretty in pink and cool dudes in blue

‘Pretty in pink’ and ‘Cool dudes in blue’ read two of the three headlines in my first ever mailout from Mamas & Papas. High on excitement about becoming a parent, I had somehow gone and allowed myself to hope that it wouldn’t be like this, that things really can’t be quite as bad as they seem. The mailout, then, came like a slap in the face of my ideas about gender-neutral parenting, and I tweeted Mamas & Papas and told them to grow up and piss off. Needless to say, they didn’t respond.

A friend did respond, though, saying something along the lines of ‘no shit, they’re still playing that stupid colour game’. No shit. And sure, it is hilarious that in 2012 you still can’t go to a kids’ clothes shop without being told that it’s great that you know that it’s a boy so that you can stock up on blues and forget all about the yellows and other in-betweens. It’s laughable that Mothercare, despite having a non-gendered newborn tab in their drop-down menu for baby clothes, feel the need to add a caption below the picture of babygros in pink saying ‘for girls’ – just to make sure you don’t misunderstand and, god forbid, buy pink clothes for your unborn son. But it’s not about the colours, really, is it? I’d happily dress my baby boy in head-to-toe blues, even if it happens to be one of my least favourite colours. Frankly, I think good parenting is about much more than fashion.

But what’s in a colour? ‘Pretty in pink’ and ‘Cool dudes in blue,’ read the headlines. And no, it wasn’t the colours per se that made me explode in a tweet. The colours, of course, are just signifiers for gender stereotypes and the expectations we put on little girls and boys of what they should grow up to be. Dress your girl in pink as much as you like: it’s not until you start telling her how pretty she is that you really start to tell her what matters. When your son is labelled as ‘tough,’ it’s no longer about the colour of his t-shirt. And as Mamas & Papas describe your daughter as ‘precious’ and your little boy’s jeans as ‘durable,’ we’ve gone way beyond fashion as simply a visual experience.

Last year, it was discovered that Lindex, a big Swedish high street chain, produced clothes for boys that were bigger than the same size clothes for girls, despite using ‘centilong,’ a size directly related to the height of the child in centimetres. The rationale, a Lindex staff member explained, was that boys like to mess around more and need loose-fitted clothes. In other words, parents can’t be trusted to know their own children and decide how tight-fitted clothes they need; instead, a boy centimetre was made bigger than a girl centimetre. Pure logic.

So boys need durable, loose-fitted clothes, because they mess around; softer fabrics will tear, and tighter clothes will be restrictive. Girls, the implication becomes, are calm and quiet. And as a friend warned us that boys can be a handful as toddlers, more so than girls, I realised that this is a widespread preconception.

I’ve been told countless times since having my son that boys are more ‘hard work’ than girls, and that may be true – I really don’t know, and frankly I don’t care. I may be of the belief that we are pretty good at living up to society’s expectations of us, and that even kids become a lot like what people tell them they should be, but the thing is that even if I’m wrong, even if the majority of boys are born louder, messier and more active than girls, there will always be exceptions. There will be bold, lively girls and calm, quiet boys – so why the need to tell them to change, to presume that deep down they’re not naturally like that? Why the need to make them feel inadequate only because of their gender?

I don’t know what happens when we tell boys that they are tough and cool, but I can guess. I don’t know how girls respond to being complimented on their looks, but research on body image tells a tale. ‘Pretty in pink’ and ‘Cool dudes in blue’? Grow up and piss off, Mamas & Papas.

The token woman and the panel show

Four episodes of this season’s BBC1 panel show Would I Lie To You have been broadcast so far, and they all had one thing in common: a token woman.

Please forgive me. I don’t mean to underestimate the value these female guests bring to the show, or suggest that they don’t have what it takes to join forces with the regulars who take up a majority of the panel show air time available today (and there’s plenty). In fact, I’ve avoided writing about this simply not to do that, not to make them into a token, a gender and a box ticked. Until I read Elin Grelsson’s column on the topic, that is.

Grelsson writes about the artist Marie Capaldis, whose paintings were displayed at the Gothenburg museum of art alongside a sign explaining that the museum since 2005 has a gender awareness policy which is taken into account when art is purchased.

Gender perspective? Well done. But in describing a woman’s art while boasting about the institution’s gender awareness policy, all they do is highlight the fact that the male artist is still the norm, completely undermining Capaldis’s work.

“How can you promote marginalised groups without making them into exceptions, which in the long run only reinforces the norm?” asks Grelsson. I think the answer is that it’s incredibly difficult, and this explains very well my reaction to the Would I Lie To You trend.

Friends who work in the industry will say that it’s not due to lack of effort. The few successful female comedians around are approached indeed – but they don’t want to take part. You can’t get women on the panel shows, goes the explanation.

I think they’re telling the truth, but I don’t think it’s good enough. When you week in and week out invite a relatively unknown female comedian to take part in a show with a male presenter, two male team captains and three famous male guests, you’re merely ticking a box, while the culture that stopped other female celebrities from accepting the offer remains as strong as ever.

All the token woman does is clear the conscience of production companies that should be asking themselves where it all went wrong.

I don't know how he does it

“If you want to have it all, it’s your job to work out how to do it. If you can’t, give something up.” That’s David Cox’s advice to Kate, the high-flying fictitious character in the film I don’t know how she does it.

I suspect we’ll read many a harsh critique of the super-woman film, but I wasn’t quite prepared to read this in the Guardian. I’m not saying that this Hollywood plot doesn’t need some ripping apart – the have-it-all approach to life indeed deserves questioning – but your way of criticising something says a lot about your outlook on life. And I guess, somehow, I keep forgetting that even the most liberal publications in the UK look at parenting as a one-woman job.

Many would agree – and I’m sure I will too if I ever see the film – that the plot is nothing but a boring cliché. My idea of the real world, however, differs quite a bit from Cox’s. He answers the question of how she does it with the accusation that Kate uses her poor husband, a man who wishes to focus on furthering his own career but is forced to bring their injured son to the hospital when selfish mammy is at work. He explains her success by pointing the finger at the way she expects of her employer to be flexible, thereby, he suggests, somehow undermining the efforts of women who don’t need flexibility at work because they don’t have a family: they’ve had to make a sacrifice, means Cox, so why should we let selfish Kate get away with not making one?

“Motherhood is voluntary,” Cox reminds us. But “fulfilling all other aspirations at the same time may or may not be practicable.”

This is where I lose him completely. We’re supposed to look at Kate as a “scumbag” for wanting it all (but, he insinuates, not doing it well enough), yet her husband is described as a victim. Isn’t fatherhood voluntary as well? What does he mean?

Here’s what I think he means. Fatherhood isn’t that demanding, after all. Most fathers manage very well to combine fatherhood with successful careers, thank you very much. And so no one ever says, ‘I don’t know how he does it’. Why? Because parenting is a mother’s job. It’s a mother’s fault when a child is malnourished; the mother is the one who’s neglected a child who doesn’t learn to talk when other kids do. Laundry, school runs, hospital visits – it’s all done while the father’s at work. That’s how he does it: he’s got a wife.

About mothers, Cox writes that “if they can’t work as hard as their childless colleagues to get a seat on the board, they could manage without one.” But of course, a majority of the board members aren’t childless. They’re fathers. And fathers don’t have to make sacrifices, we all know that. Right, Cox?

[All of the above is of course based on yet another of the patriarchy's great myths: the idea that not getting to spend a lot of time with your kids isn't in itself a sacrifice for fathers. But that's another discussion for another post.]

Voluptuous doesn't cut it: androgyne is the new pinup

“In this society, if a man is called a woman, that’s the biggest insult he could get.” The words are Andrej Pejic’s, and he sure has a point. But his life story turns this idea upside down, and then back around again: he has not only been dubbed the prettiest boy in the world – but also, to quote his mother, “the most beautiful girl I’ll ever see in a wedding dress.”

It’s a heart-warming story, the one about Bosnian Andrej who as an 8-year-old moved with his mother and siblings to Melbourne in Australia via Serbia, discovering hair dye and make-up along the way, eventually returning to the more androgyny-friendly Europe to realise his dream of becoming a professional model.

He is the boy who left his “gender open to artistic interpretation” and denied the need for a strong gender identity: “I identify as what I am.” Mixing appearances on men’s catwalks with jobs showcasing women’s collections, Andrej allows fashion gurus to, as New York Magazine puts it, “feel progressive without having to actually challenge the aesthetic norm.”

It’s probably the progressiveness without challenge that rubs me up the wrong way. While Andrej is free to be who he really wants to be – and I salute that whole-heartedly – it’s difficult not to feel like the fashion world is jumping on a very tempting bandwagon that is really only opportunism in disguise. New York Magazine hits the nail on the head over and over again without even realising it, writing that “he is six-foot-one, thin as the stroke of a paintbrush”, that in Melbourne “he was too beautiful to be an obvious choice for men’s campaigns”, and that “spending time with Pejic is like losing a race to someone who’s not even running: if he were not a man, he would be the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in the flesh”.

Everyone’s full of praise for Andrej, but while he himself is talking about moving beyond gender, it seems like his employers do nothing but use him to reinforce unobtainable ideals for both men and women. Despite being thin as the stroke of a paintbrush, Andrej admits that he has had to lose weight to fit into women’s wear; at the same time, he didn’t fit the bill for the “relatively macho Australian market”, and still in the US he says that he tries to be stronger when working with men’s wear – and it was not until the then editor-in-chief of French Vogue put him in women’s wear that he really made it as a model.

There’s nothing new about this, really. I think about Rickard Engfors, the Swedish performer and drag queen who was once voted Sweden’s hottest woman. “I lived up to all the female ideals, but I wasn’t good enough as a man,” he told DN. “I was too thin, too unfit, not well-endowed enough” [my translation].

Andrej talks about how his behaviour wasn’t acceptable for a boy, how he “closed in” for years before eventually letting the platinum blonde out. A moment of freedom for him, of course; but it seems sadly ironic that the fashion industry confirmed that it still isn’t acceptable for a boy – that you don’t make it as a boy with platinum hair, you make it as a boy who is constantly assumed to be a woman. Or, like Rickard, as a drag queen.

What really made me think twice, initially, was probably the fact that I didn’t hesitate for a second when I saw a picture of Andrej on the catwalk, shirt unbuttoned to reveal a flat, hairless chest: to me, Andrej was doubtlessly a woman. Why? Because not even the complete lack of breasts would make me question the catwalk ideals that are so ingrained in my way of thinking. In the world of fashion, voluptuous doesn’t cut it – no womb or ovaries or oestrogen will ever win over “the impossibly hipless and curveless women the fashion industry fetishizes” [sic].

And that’s what I take away from all of this: that women are no longer unfeminine enough to fit the bill in a fashion world that can’t deal with diversity but is still as focused on gender as ever, that still indeed differentiates between men’s and women’s collections, no matter how much they brag that they don’t want to put their models in a box. To me, that’s got nothing to do with “side-stepping the gender issue”. Andrej may be beautiful and flexible enough to work on both sides of the gender divide, but he’s still always forced to act either/or: strong and masculine or brittle and feminine.

Androgyne appears to be the new pinup, but the way we talk about gender tells a tale. The masculine and the feminine are still as defined as ever – most of us are just never quite good enough. And that dissatisfaction, of course, is the secret to the success of the fashion industry.

What the royal wedding taught us

1. You are what you wear – if you’re a woman

If I hear one more fashion editor’s orgasmic praise of the stupidly expensive creation of some ‘it’ designer of the moment, or see another picture of a ridiculous headpiece that does nothing but hinder its owner from entering a building with normal doors (as if that would ever happen on the day of a royal wedding), I think I might throw up. Seriously. The stupidity of one commentator’s outbursts fades in comparison to another’s, and the scrutiny of the bodies and dress senses of the women who were invited to today’s big event seemed endless. Was anyone betting like crazy on what colour suit Prince Charles would wear or what stylist would get the honour of doing Harry’s hair? Did anyone really care that Nick Clegg looked like he hadn’t slept in weeks?

2. A veil is a veil is a veil

As the burqa ban in France is dubbed “a victory for tolerance” on the basis that covering one’s face is an act against liberal values and openness regardless of its motivation, and similar laws are considered in other European countries on grounds of equality and women’s rights, Kate covers her face with a silk ivory-tulle veil as her father walks her up the aisle. Not as an act against openness or because she needs it to protect her, nor because her future husband refuses to share her beauty with the world, but maybe to invoke a sense of purity and innocence, or perhaps simply because of tradition. But as she is handed over to the prince and her veil is lifted, rightly or wrongly, the fact that a veil is a veil becomes painfully clear; us westerners suddenly seem hypocritical at best, and I can’t help but wonder: what’s behind the veil, when does it stop being beautiful and start being controlling, and who am I to decide what another woman can or can’t wear?

3. The monarchy, along with the wider aristocracy and the church, is patriarchal through and through

The royal wedding was like a satire of something from the early 1900s, where women are good for nothing but pleasing the eye. While no one will be surprised that The Very Reverend and his buddies were all male, I was surprised and disappointed – perhaps naively so – by the fact that not one single woman bar Kate’s sister, who mainly got to run around like a servant, got to participate in the ceremony in an active way. The interiors were thought out by a male designer, the music was provided by a boys’ choir, and the wedding song was composed by a man. And as much as I hate to sully the fairytale tradition of a father walking his daughter down the aisle to hand her over to the new man in her life, the restrictive, almost aggressive way in which this was done as Kath’s father lifted her hand and put it into the priest’s, whereby he grabbed it and lifted it across to put it firmly in Will’s, made me wonder why she bothered at all to remove the line where she would vow to obey her husband forever.

4. Britain’s class system is as strong and present as ever

That a well-educated woman who went to a private boarding school and whose parents are successful business owners is repeatedly referred to as a “commoner” is just one of many signs of how protective the aristocracy is of its status, but as millions of Britons of different backgrounds clearly think that it’s perfectly normal to watch these two random people get married, spending billions of tax payers’ pounds, I’m forced to admit that it’s not just the well-off themselves who seem keen to preserve status quo.Some people have eagerly suggested that Kate, the commoner that she is, will change the image of the royal family forever. I wouldn’t hold my breath. As Guardian writer Amanda Marcotte was quoted to have said, “I’m glad that the royal family has caught up to the 1920s. I look forward to an exciting new future when the women start wearing pants and the men learn how to hold infants.”