On how you can’t win as a feminist in a capitalist patriarchy – or, the right to choose not to play ball

I remember very clearly the first time a friend of mine, a self-professed feminist, mentioned in passing that she uses Botox. At first, I was just really surprised. Soon enough, I realised that I felt disappointed. Worse, I felt deceived. I’d thought we had an unspoken agreement, a feminist pact not to engage with the bullshit inventions of patriarchy. But she mentioned it with such poise that I quickly realised she knew something I didn’t, that I was the one being naïve. What was this slippery slope I’d missed? Were we going for labiaplasty next?

I have internal battles about shaving. I know that I’m modelling a lot of things for my sons, and if I shave my armpits, that’ll be what’s normal to them. Then I cut myself some slack, knowing that this, too, is a conversation starter. They too will face all sorts of external pressures, and talking about the things people do and why they do them is probably not a bad thing. I justify wearing make-up, if far from every day, but I’ve vowed not to discuss my weight or talk about body fat as a bad thing. I draw lines in sometimes arbitrary places, justifying them to myself as I go, knowing that perfection is a goal that would break me but that, as a feminist, I have to try.

My body, my choice. It’s a pertinent slogan, utterly non-negotiable. And yet, like I’ve argued before, choice is a funny word. I’m not alone in that shower, removing body hair; I’m enveloped by every single message I’ve ever been fed by the patriarchal capitalist world that raised me. I’m self-aware and self-critical. I know that, deep down, I wish I wouldn’t feel the need to – but I only have the energy for a certain amount of rebellion, a certain number of battles. Not all of them. Not this one. Not today.

Can you use Botox and call yourself a feminist? It’s a ridiculous question, of course. I’ve yet to meet a feminist whose every action is a feminist one, and I’d hate to live in a world where we set the bar that high for each other. We’re already scrutinised by patriarchy itself and put under immense pressure to conform to beauty norms, and then judged for trying too hard and called shallow when we care. Injecting a neurotoxic protein into your face is not a feminist thing to do – but a lot of feminists do it. Their body, their choice.

On the other hand, minimising the issue by framing it as one about choice alone is both naïve and counter-productive. We make choices about scalpels and needles because we’re forced into corners. Some are left in those corners without the means to choose. Others can afford to buy their way out but are left worse off than before, already paid less than their male equivalents before they even begin to splash out on beauty treatments to stay in the game. And those who come after us start younger and younger, playing catch-up in a culture where refusing to play ball comes at a huge cost.

The takeaway? I don’t believe in shame as a catalyst for change, but I think we need to dare to consider the connection between the individual and the structural. The question isn’t whether you can have Botox and call yourself a feminist. The question is how we can break the cycle – because if we don’t, more and more of us will feel the need to play along, inadvertently perpetuating the beauty norms that got us here in the first place.

Ultimately, it boils down to this: I don’t want the right to choose whether or not to inject Botox into my face. I don’t want to have to choose either to spend money and time on beauty rituals and treatments in order to just about scrape in as good enough, or to blatantly refuse to conform and end up an outcast. For as long as that’s the choice we’re given, we’re not all in this together.  

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***This post follows on from a Bits of Me podcast episode, in which I spoke to Gillian Roddie of @evidentiallyyou about body image, ageing and Botox. You can listen here!***

A waste of space of a man – on mammy memes and narratives of fatherhood

“Women are being edged out of the workforce,” says an article on The Lily that was doing the rounds at the beginning of the summer. In it, Aimee Rae Hannaford, a co-founder and chief executive of a Silicon Valley tech company, explains why she decided to dissolve the company and live off savings when the schools closed as a result of the pandemic, despite the fact that her son’s father was already on a career break at the time. “I can’t do it,” her husband had said. “I can’t watch him for this long.”

First, I rolled my eyes at this useless waste of space of a man. Then, I imagined the voices of Swedish feminists, asking who on earth would ever stay in a relationship with a guy like this, before going off to print T-shirts saying: DUMP YOUR BOYFRIEND. And then, I could hear Irish feminists step in: there are plenty of men like this out there, they’d argue, and they don’t exactly come with big, fat warning signs – so stop putting the blame and responsibility on the women who end up having kids with them; put the responsibility back where it belongs.

They live in different worlds, of course, the Swedish and Irish feminists. It’s not all that easy to walk away from a relationship in Ireland when you have kids, with childcare costs being what they are and most of the school system built on the assumption that there’s a parent at home on at least a part-time basis. Sweden is the country, after all, where there was talk of parents being paid 70-80% of their wages in the eventuality that the schools would be closed in response to the pandemic, which in the end they weren’t. Then again, recent research has suggested that Swedish mothers are working the equivalent of 2.5 full-time jobs – so maybe it’s not the gender equal bliss it’s painted out to be, and maybe those DUMP YOUR BOYFRIEND T-shirts aren’t selling so well.

Around the same time as the circulation of said The Lily article, Erica Djossa shared a meme on Instagram with the headline “The invisible load of motherhood: Working from home during Covid”, featuring 12 illustrations of the different kinds of challenging situations so many of us have suddenly found ourselves in.

Like added stress as a result of reduced capacity. Like constantly switching roles throughout the day. Like managing your children’s distance learning and meeting their emotional needs. And the thing went viral, as relatable memes do, and I sat there feeling… well, almost as confused as I did when reading Hannaford’s story.

I am but anecdotal evidence. I don’t expect memes to revolve around me, nor do I think that feminism works like that: that’s not my experience, so it isn’t real. I know, I KNOW. And yet, it has to be said: in the first month of lockdown, 100% of the home-schooling in this house was done by my partner, the father of my children; he does the majority of the bedtime routines at the moment, and that constant switching of roles throughout the day has been a far greater problem for him than it has for me.

And I know that there are plenty of men out there like Aimee Rae Hannaford’s husband, plenty of useless fathers who leave their partners burning the candle at both ends, spreading themselves so thin they’re only just about still there; I know this, and I get that, to their thinly spread partners, this meme is about motherhood.

Technically speaking, though, none of the 12 things listed relate specifically to motherhood. It’s called parenting. Unless we’re willing to resort to the same kind of rhetoric that calls fathers being with their children babysitting, this is parenting. Anna Whitehouse, a.k.a. Mother Pukka, summarised the same points pretty well: “The majority of men don’t just spunk and leave. Even if not living with their partner, they’re dads, parents and they aren’t ‘babysitting’, they’re raising their spaghetti hoop-encrusted child, too. It’s hard for everyone.”

So can a mother not vent anymore, is that what I’m saying? Are we not allowed to name the reality of the unfair division of emotional labour and more, which there’s plenty of research to back up? Hell, is it not our responsibility as feminists to name it, to visibilise it, to point at all this unpaid work we’re doing and the reality of what it’s doing to our mental as well as physical health, not to mention our careers and pensions?

Of course we can, and of course we should. Maybe we need more of it. And while I wish that more mothers would take this meme and stick it on the fridge and talk to their partners about it, I recognise and respect that the mother who ended up with a waste of space of a man and is now at breaking point is not going to be having that conversation with him, nor is he going to listen – and she, more than anyone, needs to be allowed to vent.

But still, I can’t get escape the feeling that the labels matter. If, when we vent, we make parenting synonymous with mothering, we’re doing everyone – not least mothers – a huge disservice. Because the thing is, if we want to change the reality of that The Lily article, we need to change the idea of what fatherhood looks like. If we want to change the fact that women are walking away from their jobs in droves because it just makes no financial sense for their higher-earning partners to quit, we need to change the notion of ‘woman’ meaning mother meaning maternity leave and sick days while ‘man’ means none of those things, ever. And if we keep labelling all the things that relate to children’s needs as motherhood, that shift just ain’t gonna happen.

And do you know what else isn’t going to happen unless we stop this stereotyping nonsense? Mothers aren’t going to stop feeling that guilt, and they’re not going to stop prioritising everyone else’s work while their own work accumulates. I’m so tired of that image of the naturally selfless, self-erasing mother in the periphery that I think I might explode – but then, sorry, that wouldn’t be very motherly of me, would it? Memes like this aren’t just relieving fathers of the duties (and joys!) of parenthood; they’re perpetuating the notion of mothers as altogether self-effacing and naturally, ceaselessly caring for everyone but themselves.

Want to see another mammy meme that made me want to scream? This one:

Just stop it. Stop telling mothers to ‘just keep going’. Stop making motherhood a competition in self-destruction. This is not what motherhood was meant to be, this relentless keeping going, putting up with stuff and burning out, and it’s certainly not what I want to teach my sons that they should expect of women.

I’m hoping that the way we are with our two sons, the conversations we’re having with them and the choices we’ve made, will make them into sensitive, caring, responsible fathers if they ever end up having kids. But I can’t help but wonder what they’d feel if they saw these memes. I wonder about the fathers-to-be who grew up with useless, absent dads and are looking to break the cycle, what’ll they take from memes like these and the many hundreds if not thousands like them.

I wonder if it would kill us, in the mammy groups, if we edited the headlines of the memes to talk about ‘the invisible load of parenthood’ instead. And in the groups that have consciously labelled themselves for ‘parents’ as opposed to ‘mothers’, if we talked about all these things we do without immediately and explicitly excluding fathers from the conversation, would the guesstimated 1.3% of members in there who are in fact dads perhaps feel a tiny bit less out of place as they try to do all these things they’ve been raised to view as women’s work? Might they even add their daddy friends to the parenting groups?

I think we can do both. I think we can name the inequalities, point to the statistics and complain about the injustice of it all and still label parenting for what it is, so that there’s no doubt in anyone’s mind: this thing is for all of us, for mothers as well as fathers. If you have a kid and you’re not trying to meet their emotional needs, you’re doing it wrong, and you’re the waste of space. That doesn’t mean that those of us who are already doing it should stop, or that we should suffer in silence – but it means that we need to leave that door wide open.

Thoughts on sharing birth stories

I’ve seen a good few comments recently about how it’s great that we can talk more openly about our birthing experiences, but how we need to make sure to also emphasise that it isn’t always like this, that some people give birth in the dreamiest of ways and ‘bounce back’ in no time.

That’s true of course, and I get why the caveat is so often added – and yet I’m uncomfortable with the way in which it’s often framed.

Why?

Because we’re not the problem. I know most of the time, that’s not what’s implied, but hear me out. The stories we share of birth trauma, obstetric violence and difficult recoveries are real, and those of us who want to talk about our experiences must be allowed to do so without being made to feel as though the expectations of every future birthing person are our responsibility.

Approximately half of all those who give birth will develop pelvic organ prolapse. About 18% of those giving birth vaginally do serious damage to the anal sphincter. Incontinence is very common. The reality is that if a person fears birth and the various things that could possibly go wrong, the way to reassure her is not to silence those who have gone before her and pretend that she’s imagining the risks and it’s all in her head. That’s gaslighting. The way to reassure her is to make sure that the necessary support and care and services are there for her, should she need them. We’re not the problem – the persistently lacking funding, research, resources and care are.

There’s a tendency in many contexts to only really be receptive to the stories of those who’ve had difficult experiences and come out the other end – stories with happy endings. We’re not all that comfortable with brokenness, and we’re not very good at holding discomfort. But if we only share our experiences once we’ve healed and figured it all out, when we can breathe a sigh of relief and aren’t forced to scrutinise the health care system in general and maternity system in particular, then nothing’s ever going to change.

We need the discomfort, because that’s what’ll trigger action. We need to listen to those willing to speak out about their experiences – not in spite of what it might do to those hoping to give birth in the future, but because of how it might help them get the care they deserve.

There’s always a caveat, of course. Mine isn’t about those who choose to share their stories, but about those who don’t. Many of those of us who were part of the campaign to repeal the eighth amendment to the Irish constitution know that speaking out can be powerful and cathartic, but that it can also come at a high price and have a retraumatising effect.

This post is not, therefore, to say that talking is better or that anyone who’s had a particularly bad experience has a responsibility to share it – not at all. It’s to say that, when someone does, we all have a responsibility not to interject with caveats but to listen. Health care practitioners and legislators, more so than the rest of us, owe us that much.

This post was first shared on the Bits of Me podcast Instagram page.

On mob rule, female rage, and the death of a Swedish star

I sang at a friend’s wedding a few years ago. The song was a Swedish classic, the main singer of which, Josefin Nilsson, died in 2016 after years of pain, anxiety, health complications and surgery following a violently abusive relationship back in the ‘90s – I just didn’t know that at the time.

Last week, to coincide with what should’ve been the singer’s 50th birthday, a documentary produced by the Swedish national broadcaster SVT was released. In it, her sister, best friend and band mate, along with a number of other illustrious Swedish musicians and actors, talk about her, her life and the fears the struggled with. The abuse she suffered is covered in detail, but the man who abused her – a famous Swedish actor – remains unnamed.

A couple of days after the documentary went online, a candle-lit vigil was held outside Dramaten, Stockholm’s Royal Dramatic Theatre, the state-funded place of work of the unnamed abuser, in memory of Josefin and in protest of her abuser’s continued employment at the theatre.

And soon enough, it was dubbed a lynch mob.

As a Swede abroad, initially without access to the documentary, I mostly followed the unravelling of all this through Instagram and the accounts of various more-or-less established feminist voices. And yes – they were angry. They were furious after watching the documentary and realising what Josefin had been through, knowing that her abuser had been convicted of assault, breach of restraining order and more – but released on probation. Their fury took many different expressions: some shared their own experiences of domestic abuse; others took it upon themselves to share, anonymously, the stories of those still too afraid to speak out; some wrote blog posts and opinion pieces, sharing statistics and calling for stricter sentencing; others complained to the theatre.

Some named the abuser – and thus came the verdict: lynch mob.

What does ‘lynch mob’ mean? ‘A lynch mob is an angry crowd of people who want to kill someone without a trial, because they believe that person has committed a crime,’ goes one definition. And sure enough, these people knew the famous actor had committed a crime – but no one was trying to kill him. ‘You can refer to a group of people as a lynch mob if they are very angry with someone because they believe that person has done something bad or wrong,’ goes another definition, and at this point, it starts to make sense.You can bet your life these people were very angry, and you can bet they thought he’d done something wrong. It’s no secret that he’d thrown Josefin into a wall with such force that the wall collapsed, and that he’d threatened to kill her, kicked her so badly that her spine started to rot and she required repeated surgery.

So that’s what a lynch mob is now: peaceful, justified anger?

Or perhaps the expression was merely used to invalidate the anger, to shut down the criticism and restore the peace?

***

I’ve been thinking a lot about rage lately. I carry it around – sometimes simmering and undefined, other times clear and, to me, entirely sensible. For many women, this rage has had a natural outlet in recent years thanks to the global #metoo movement, the abortion rights movement here in Ireland, and a number of other movements and platforms for feminist mobilisation and organising – but justified though that rage may seem, we are continuously told that we should tone it down. We’re coming across as just a bit hysterical.

Mind you, no one’s telling the famous, Swedish actor to calm down. He’s served his sentence. Moreover, he’s a respected artist.

Swedish feminist author and doctor of economics Nina Åkestam spoke about anger in a podcast interview I listened to recently, where she discussed the various ‘traps’ she thinks feminists tend to keep falling into these days, as presented in her recent book Feministfällan (‘The Feminist Trap’). In looking at what she defines as ‘the emotional trap’, she argues that while it’s understandable and natural to be angry, acting out the anger won’t get us anywhere – and feminism is nothing if we can’t successfully affect change. In conversation with sceptics, she explains, acting outraged about their ignorance is not exactly going to get them to let their guard down; you need to listen to people if you want them to listen to you, and you need to ask intelligent but kind questions if you really want them to start asking some questions for themselves.

There’s very little arguing with her logic here; I’ve yet to shout someone into identifying as a feminist. And still, a part of me wonders what kind of equality we’ll end up with if the methods that take us there require us to play by the rules of a system that insists on viewing us as two-dimensional characters to be managed and controlled, as people the real feelings of whom are scary and offensive. All around us, we see womanhood defined by caring kindness and soft selflessness, while men are depicted as hard, cold and, indeed, sometimes angry.

But isn’t rage a fundamentally feminine disposition in our modern, patriarchal world? I look at my friends, women past their mid-30s, trying to contain themselves as these progressively stubborn waves of frustration and ire arise inside. For most, it seems, this is increasingly what being a woman feels like: a negotiation with fury in a world that deifies the notion of the rational man. But rage as enveloped in womanhood isn’t aggressive or dangerous: we’re naming abusers and building human walls, not breaking people’s spines. This anger is dynamic and productive – not controlling, manipulative and murderous. ‘Lynch mob’ not only gets it wrong; it fundamentally underestimates it.

***

‘Why didn’t she leave him?’, we often hear in response to stories of domestic violence. ‘Why didn’t she just walk away?’

Of course, Josefin did walk away. She even dragged him through court – but she died anyway. It wasn’t his fists that became the final straw, but her pain and suffering started with him. The loss of her hair and her confidence, the morphine and confusion, the physical injuries and relentless fear – she never escaped them after his work was done. As for the actor, he was put centre stage at the country’s national theatre, celebrated as a gifted artist – complex and unpredictable, sure, but isn’t that what male artists are like?

Those who talk about a lynch mob say that we live in a democracy, and we are nothing unless we trust that democracy. By naming this abuser, they say, we cross that line into mob rule, a situation where no one is safe. He has served his sentence, they say – except of course in the end he didn’t.

I wonder what they think democracy means. I wonder how they think of the rule of law. If 20% of women are abused in their home by a partner at some point in their lifetime, and there is less than a 1% chance that the perpetrator is convicted – are we to sit and cry nicely in silence? And if public funds put abusers on stage, if we must be quiet to protect their future lives and careers, can the judicial system really claim to be just at all?

If we are serious about ending men’s violence against women, we have to stop pretending that the form of abuse he subjected her to can be brushed under the rug as a number of drunken mishaps. We have to stop getting hung up on the details of just how directly or indirectly the abuse contributed to her death, and we have to stop pretending that Josefin’s experience was one of a democratic society with a fair judicial system. It is true that his name is irrelevant. He is just one of many men, and he shouldn’t be in the spotlight here – but that’s exactly the point: he is, on Sweden’s much cherished national stage for theatre. Structuralist analysis in all its glory; if it’s so blind to individuals that you can all but murder a woman and still remain a national treasure, it is pointless.

They keep asking why she didn’t leave him. But where was she supposed to go? Into the arms of a society that cherished and protected him? Perhaps it’s time we start asking why we, as a society, don’t leave. Perhaps it’s time we start to turn our backs on abusers, kick them out of our offices, stop inviting them to our parties, tell them our theatres are not for them, and walk away.

Whom do you trust?

We’ve heard it all before: a man brutally murders a woman, and everyone’s in shock. Perhaps after the debate that followed the reporting of the murder of Clodagh Hawe and her three sons by her husband a couple of years ago, journalists and editors are thinking twice, even thrice before publishing praise of Mark Hennessy, the man now found to have strangled the young Jastine Valdez to death in Wicklow. But no editor can make the words of locals go away, describing him as a “quiet man”, a “normal fellow”, “a normal dad” from “a well-respected family”.

Of course he wasn’t all that normal. Married with kids, sure – but convicted of abusive behaviour and due in court for drink driving, crashing into vehicles and leaving the scene. The neighbours did describe him as a “weirdo”, after all.

And still, everyone’s in shock. That an abusive weirdo who hits and runs would murder a young woman in the context of a small country where ten women are murdered by men every year and 42% of women experience sexual violence, is apparently unthinkable. Perhaps it doesn’t matter whether he was normal or an oddball – that a man, any man, among us would brutally murder a woman is just shocking, full stop.

In a week when we are taking to the polling stations to decide whether we trust women to make sound decisions about their families or not, this feels poignant. The NO side keeps talking about ‘social abortions’, ‘abortion on demand’ and abortion ‘for no reason at all’, while the YES side insists that many reasons are in fact pretty good, important reasons – but even those of us who believe it barely dare to say out loud that maybe women should just be trusted to decide themselves which reasons are good enough and which aren’t. Because that would just be a bonkers notion, wouldn’t it – trusting women, no rules. Giving them rights, not regulations.

The evidence shows that it makes sense: you can trust women to make their own reproductive decisions. No floodgates tend to open, and they don’t tend to go off having a load of abortions – that’s what the statistics say. They still have kids, families still prosper, despite the lack of a constitutional amendment forcing them to. It just seems unlikely, shocking almost. Trusting a man is easier, somehow – even when the evidence shows he’s a murderer.

How many family men must go rogue for it to become a trope? How long must we behave for the trope of the selfish, loose woman to go away? When a man like Hennessy all but murders a woman, raping her and leaving her pregnant, then whom do we trust? Then an abusive weirdo continues to walk among us, and she becomes the criminal.

If the polls are right, we might just win it. Not unregulated access – but some access. A little bit of trust, within reason. Yet it’s looking close enough still that it’s clear that a huge amount of voters in Ireland are genuinely convinced that women would have abortions ‘for no reason’ if you only let them. Enough people think that women’s judgement is so poor that they don’t even realise they’re ready and able for pregnancy, birth and motherhood, so clouded that we need to be forcibly kept pregnant in order to demonstrate the value of motherhood. Then we’ll live happily ever after – or maybe not, but at least our babies will be born.

That’s reasonable to a huge number of Irish voters. Sensible, normal – not shocking in the slightest. With the week that’s in it, I have to admit that’s pretty hard to stomach.

So you think you were hired on merit? Gender quotas and the perception gap

‘So, I guess you support gender quotas too, then?’

I’m sure I’ll have to fend off heaps of pantsuit accusations for writing this post, but a colleague asked, and I’m not going to turn down the chance to explain why yes, indeed, I do support gender quotas.

I think the thing that makes gender quotas hard for some liberals to stomach is that, in contrast to issues like bodily autonomy and ending violence against women, they don’t seem quite as immediately right and fair. If equality is what we want, surely we should be treating everyone equally?

Cue that illustration that’s been doing the rounds lately, explaining how the word ‘equality’ can in and of itself be a tad problematic: if social justice is what we’re after, giving each and every one ‘equal’ treatment won’t get us very far, because we’re all born in very different and in fact unequal circumstances. Instead, we should be focusing on equal opportunity, and to provide that we’re going to have to rely on all kinds of different support systems – including breaking down a whole horde of barriers preventing us from building a truly just society.

I do find it funny how many people look around, shake their heads at the thought of gender quotas and say that, no, we can’t do that because nothing is fairer than merit. We have offices and boardrooms full to the brim of straight, white, middle or upper class men, and yet people talk about merit. Even in environments traditionally dominated by women, we see a load of men at the helm – and they keep talking about merit. What these people are really saying is this: men are simply better at all this stuff. They think all these men have got where they are just because they worked hard.

I hate to burst that bubble (OK, I don’t). Not the one about hard work, that is; I’m sure they all had top marks in school and studied very hard and are paying off a load of student loans and have taken their career oh so very seriously. It’s just a bit smug to think it’s that simple.

Let’s talk about objectivity and non-partisanship. Because of what the world looks like, and because of how women’s experiences are routinely silenced and invisibilised, we have developed a skewed perception of gender equality. As the Geena Davis Institute for Gender in Media found, crowd scenes on screen tend to be made up of about 17% women – and we’ve gotten used to it as the new (old?) normal. Men experiencing said crowd in a room tend to estimate that it consists of about 50/50 men and women. Increase the number of women to 33% and men will say that there are more women than men.

Sady Doyle writes in In These Times that:

“… men “consistently perceive more gender parity” in their workplaces than women do. For example, when asked whether their workplaces recruited the same number of men and women, 72 percent of male managers answered “yes.” Only 42 percent of female managers agreed. And, while there's a persistent stereotype that women are the more talkative gender, women actually tend to talk less than men in classroom discussions, professional contexts and even romantic relationships; one study found that a mixed-gender group needed to be between 60and 80 percent female before women and men occupied equal time in the conversation. However, the stereotype would seem to have its roots in that same perception gap: “[In] seminars and debates, when women and men are deliberately given an equal amount of the highly valued talking time, there is often a perception that [women] are getting more than their fair share.”

Our perception is so severely twisted we wouldn’t know merit if it slapped us in the face. Since we perceive women and men differently, we can’t hold them to the same standards, no matter how hard we try. The job description might be the same, but what does ‘forthright’ mean and how do we perceive it in a woman and a man respectively? If we expect of a candidate to demonstrate leadership qualities, can we be sure we won’t find one of them ‘bossy’? You think one candidate talks too much – but does she really? I’m not sure we even know what objectivity and non-partisanship look like anymore. TV3 sure doesn’t, and neither does Newstalk. Academia? Nope.

More explicitly HR-related research is unequivocal, too: so-called ‘resume whitening’ at least doubles job applicants’ chances of being called for an interview, while women are consistently ranked as weaker candidates than men with identical CVs. In addition to such ‘latent biases’ in regards to gender, there’s a cultural bias as people tend to employ candidates they can relate to and understand – future buddies, basically. At the extreme end, we tend to hire people who remind us of ourselves.

Too long; didn’t read: lads hire lads, and male-dominated boards won’t change because women get more qualified and ‘lean in’.

With gender quotas, at best, we get a few women into positions of hiring power, and we start to see change as they begin to hire people who are more or less like themselves and girls grow up to see people other than duplicates of their grandads in positions of power. At worst, these women too carry the biases so ingrained in society and media narratives, for instance in the form of internalised misogyny, that this simply isn’t enough.

A reactionary drop in the ocean? Sure. Gender quotas won’t smash the patriarchy, nor will they undo capitalism. Here’s what else they won’t do: address the injustice.

Back to the illustration. Gender quotas are in the middle, a far-from-perfect image number two, propping up a broken system by making its flaws less ugly, but surviving it – sometimes marginally, other times beautifully. And I don’t like it either. I don’t like hiring by numbers, I don’t like box ticking, and I don’t like focusing on those who have already done so well that they can even begin to think about what that glass ceiling looks like. But until we remove the systemic barrier that is all of the above, all the patriarchal indoctrination and the new normal, it is better than nothing, better than the status quo.

Nobody wants to need those supports – or, as the anti-quotas camp likes to put it, no one wants to be hired because they tick the quota box. But by the same token, I don’t think anyone wants to be hired based on a skewed perception of what they are, or what their competition is not.

What’s that, you’re sure you were hired on merit alone? Really?

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. 

Why have kids if you don't want to spend time with them?

A few days ago, I snapped at a friend I haven’t spoken to in years. It was on Facebook, which I guess just makes it less surprising and more pathetic, but anyway, I did*. She put up an article entitled ‘Why have kids if you don’t want to spend time with them?’ and I thought ‘finally a piece that rips that stupid question to threads!’ and clicked on it. But the article did no such thing; it was just another entitled article describing the selfish behaviour of parents who put themselves first sometimes, who want ‘me time’, who don’t cherish every moment with their children enough.

It’s worth talking about the choices we make and how they impact on our children. Actually, it’s crucial that we do. It’s important that we, as a society, have an ongoing conversation about the needs of children and how their many relationships affect them, not least their relationships with their parents. They don’t get a say in this, so we have to take that responsibility. Articles that ask why you’d bother to have kids in the first place if you don’t want to be with them, however, don’t tick that box.

The article in question was published in a Swedish tabloid, so it must be understood in the context of Swedish norms; childcare is heavily subsidised and all children over the age of one have the right to a full-time place in crèche, most of them funded by the local council, with the huge majority of parents working. Workers have a right to a minimum of two consecutive weeks off work, and most white-collar employees take at least a full month off during the summer, with the country almost going into shut-down for two months after Midsummer. This particular article was triggered by a crèche note about planning the summer season, reminding parents of the importance of giving their children a break and spending your holidays with them.

‘All this never-ending talk of me time. I hear it everywhere,’ the writer complained, insisting that the fact that a crèche even needs to remind parents to spend time off with their kids is a sign that our need for ‘me time’ has gone overboard. And I get where she’s coming from; it’s sad that some parents feel that their children are happier and more stimulated in crèche than they are at home, and it sucks that many parents are so exhausted that they’ll consider using their holidays for a break over time with their probably just as exhausted children. What pushes all my buttons is the question: ‘Why have kids if you don’t want to spend time with them?’

I went for a morning stroll by the sea the other day before I started working. I’m lucky that my job allows me to do that, and boy did I need it; it’s been a hectic few months. But it wasn’t without a moment of guilt – because I know how people talk, and I know people like the author of that article. Where were my kids? In childcare, of course. Other times, I’ll go for a run instead of taking a lunch break – again, I’m lucky that way. I could meet a friend for a coffee at 11am and work through my lunch; if I’m really tired and stuck for inspiration, I could even wrap up early, get some fresh air, and pick up work after the kids have gone to bed at night.

Not everyone’s lucky. Many people are stuck in their remote office building even on their breaks, can’t check in on personal messages and social media in work, and can just about leave five minutes early even in exceptional circumstances. When they’re run down and having a bad month, where are they supposed to catch their breath? Compare those who live in the same town as grandparents, old friends and cousins and can easily get a Saturday afternoon to themselves to run errands or hit the gym, to those with no family support at all. No one’s asking parents why they had children in the first place when they leave them with the grandparents for the weekend, do they?

The author of the article is clearly disgusted that some parents occasionally add a few hours to their children’s schedule when they’re not actually working – hours they instead spend cleaning, resting or just enjoying themselves. The children, she argues, are stuck in crèches with overworked staff who don’t have time for the children’s individual needs. Funnily enough, she doesn’t seem to take issue with the children being there on a full-time basis. She doesn’t argue with the fact that parents have full-time jobs. No, it’s when parents stop being productive, when they’re being selfish – that’s when the children come into view. Sure if we’re working, we’re working, right?

In Ireland, the situation is different. Childcare is a costly thing – a ‘second mortgage’, we’ve come to call it – and it’s far from a given that both parents in a two-parent household will work. As there’s no such thing as paid paternity leave, bar the recently introduced two weeks, the by far most common scenario is that mothers stay at home with babies and then choose whether to return to work or not. If they do, they tend to go back much earlier than Swedish mothers – and not always by choice.

Ironically, the ‘why have kids if you don’t want to spend time with them’ question is still a thing, but in Ireland mostly directed at mothers who work. It’s funny, that – isn’t it? Swedish norms allow mothers to work, because working is the done thing and not really deemed selfish, but as soon as they clock out they become greedy if they want to do anything bar being with their kids. In Ireland, because returning to work after having a baby is a new thing, comparatively speaking, that’s what’s seen as a mother’s road to freedom – her little bit of ‘me time’, her being selfish. Why have kids if you’re going to spend all day every day in an office? Unless you’re a man, of course. If you’re a man, who knows why you’d have children at all anyway, other than to make your wife happy.

I thought about the fact that the criticism of parents, or mothers, is the same despite the culturally different norms, and I realised that there is one very clear exception to the rule in both countries. Not once did I ever hear a straight couple asked the why-have-kids question when getting a babysitter for a romantic night out. Everyone agrees that relationships require a bit of effort every now and then; couples need make-up and nice drinks and a change of scenery to keep that spark alive. See, a night with your spouse doesn’t qualify as ‘me time’, no matter how much your kids are being minded by somebody else. A woman isn’t being selfish when she’s out with her man.

‘If you choose to have one or more kids, ‘me time’ isn’t something you can take for granted the first ten years,’ writes the mother-of-two, who works as an account manager for a big IT company and still lives in the town where she grew up. I don’t know how much family and friends she’s got nearby, nor do I know how many struggling single parents she knows, how much her friends talk to her about their post-natal depression or the fact that they regret having kids and can’t wait for the next ten years to pass. ‘Being with my children beats everything else in life,’ she adds. ‘I enjoy every moment they want to be with me.’ She’s one of the good mothers, in case you’d missed her point.

But seriously though: why have kids if you don’t want to spend time with them? To those of you desperate for ‘me time’, who had kids and fear that it might have been a big mistake, those of you who love your children above all else but would kill for a day away just to remember who you are underneath it all, who are stuck in the house and haven’t been able to get out for a drink in years, those who hate your jobs but can’t manage without the salary and love the weekends with the kids but would just like to be really, really selfish and alone for once – there’s the question you should ask yourselves. I hope it helps. 

*And here’s where I apologise for snapping and acknowledge that I do that to the people I love and admire all the time, because I suck at keeping my thoughts to myself and think talking stuff through is good and healthy – and, clearly, inspiring.

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.    

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.

On reproductive justice, the failures of neoliberalism, and why ‘choice’ is complicated

It’s a funny one, the word ‘choice’. I spend so much of my time promoting it, explaining it, demanding it – yet whenever I stop to really think about it, I realise that it’s a word I’d much prefer not to have to embrace.

For as long as laissez-faire or economic liberalism has existed, ‘choice’ has been one of its most important buzzwords, second only to ‘freedom’. In fact, the Swedes, keen on optimising language to become its most functional and least wasteful, would talk about a combination of the two: ‘valfrihet’ – freedom of choice. In the name of freedom of choice, neoliberalism has torn down many a welfare state in the hope that the free market, as an invisible hand, would bring us all greater utility by way of rational choice.

In the context of present-day Ireland and the current discussions around reproductive rights, I am unequivocally pro-choice; yet if you tried to twist my words into some sort of neoliberal utopia, I’d cringe.

I grew up in a society steeped in social democrat heritage, where parents shared generous parental leave rights and state schools taught all children from the local area regardless of faith or socio-economic status. I grew up in a country where the school canteen served up free lunches for all, complete with a side serving of the notion of ‘folkhemmet’ – a vision for a society resembling a small family where everyone contributes and everyone’s looked after – and a glass of milk for strong, healthy bones.

Then, in 2006, the liberal-right alliance won the election and neoliberalism swept through the country, the since privatised trains stopped running on time, and finding a good school became all about social capital. Maternity wards got over-crowded, sending women in labour off to the next town or city and midwives home on sick leave due to exhaustion. Many school kitchens stopped serving milk.

I spent a good few years in London, watching the shift from Ken Livingstone to Boris Johnson and hearing David Cameron speak of the ‘big society’, which soon enough turned out to be a cowardly rhetorical device to describe what Thatcher had so bluntly asserted years before him: there is no such thing as society.

I don’t drink milk, yet I liked ‘folkhemmet’ better than what slogans about choice brought about. More often than not, choice-based policies turned out to be get-out clauses for governments who didn’t want to carry any responsibility, for leaders to be able to point to citizens and blame them for choosing wrong instead of providing choice in the real sense, along with care and support. Choice appeared to be to modern-day liberals what the big society was to Cameron – an empty promise, a chance to walk away.

But what’s in a word? Choice can refer to ‘the action of choosing’, ‘the power of choosing’, the sheer ‘fact of having a choice’. At first sight, it seems pretty simple: you either have the right to choose or you don’t. But the action of choosing requires a lot more. I’ve heard campaigners, especially lawyers, point out when pro-choice representatives insist that healthcare and abortion rights don’t belong in the constitution that, in fact, the right to reproductive health should absolutely be enshrined as such. Without a guaranteed, positive right, many people don’t have any right at all.

It struck me as I was thinking about all this that the word for choice isn’t used in the reproductive rights discourse in Sweden. A friend who works in the field explained it to me: abortion rights have in Sweden for quite some time been campaigned for within the realm of sexual, reproductive health rights (SRHR), and in that context the conversation tends to revolve more around justice, access and intersectionality. The dualism of being for or against choice doesn’t really exist.

Turns out, the reproductive justice (RJ) movement, which is growing globally, has already problematised the use of the word choice and its discriminatory and exclusionary tendencies. The right to choose to have an abortion – the fact that a jurisdiction allows for a procedure to take place, more or less without judgement – is not enough for the woman who can’t afford to pay for one, the pregnant person whose local abortion clinic has closed down, the asylum seeker without valid health insurance. And does the right to procure an abortion really qualify as choice if the person needing it has been denied sex education or suitable contraception? What about those forcibly sterilised, what good does choice in regards to abortion and maternity care do them? If the alternative to procuring an abortion, in the event where said procedure is safe and legal, is a life in poverty, judged by mainstream media and society at large – what kind of choice is that?

I’m not sure about the idea of ‘folkhemmet’ as applied to society the way it looks today; I’m not convinced it’s got the scope for pluralism, at least not in its former guise. But the live-and-let-live ideology that left trains derailed and school children discriminated against won’t be good enough. I don’t want to be handed a token notion of choice only for the decision makers to turn around and walk away. I want to prove Thatcher wrong.

“My feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit,” Flavia Dzodan famously declared. Of course the right to choose is a hugely important issue in Ireland, for all kinds of historical and pragmatic reasons. And sure, before you have the right to choose, you’re not going to be marching the streets demanding access. So I will show up for every pro-choice march to demand that most basic of rights; but when the politicians think they’ve awarded it to us, I will keep showing up to try to make it real – to make it free and accessible, complete in every sense of the word, and inseparable from care and support. My reproductive justice advocacy will be intersectional – or it will be bullshit. 

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.

We need to change the way we talk about politics

I’ll remember the morning Donald Trump was elected as the morning I cried while stirring the porridge. Some people will say I am exaggerating. I can only hope they’re right.

The Ku Klux Klan are celebrating, as is the anti-abortion brigade. Marine Le Pen, Nigel Farage, the friends of Brexit – these are the people who feel as if they’re on the right side of history in this.

People say that feminism has gone too far, but a man who talks of “grabbing [women] by the pussy” has just been elected to the White House. People say that white lives matter, as the new President of the United States of America prepares to build a wall between ‘us’ and ‘them’, between those born with a right to the American dream and those who need to get out.

I think we need to change the way we talk about politics. This is what happens when politics becomes a financial transaction, when we swap votes for promises of personal gain. When we talk about what’s happening in my back garden, in my wallet, what imagined threats there are to my personal safety, we erase a reality about the bodies across the Mediterranean Sea, about backstreet abortions and those who couldn’t care less about a wallet in the first place.

Trump’s American dream may boast about unity, but it suffers from a severe dearth of solidarity. This is not the President of a world where we take responsibility for each other as citizens.

I think we need to change the way we talk about politics, but not just politics. All this #NotAllMen and #WhiteLivesMatter – this is what has become of it. Do you laugh at the talk of safe spaces and trigger warnings? Do you think gender neutral pronouns are over the top? Do you joke about how feminists need to take a chill pill? Well the joke is on you. You have put your discomfort with the things you don’t understand above the safety of those less privileged than you. Just like the Trump voters.

Maybe you’re also of the opinion that it was all the same, that whatever the outcome of this election it would have been a disaster. But say that to the face of a Mexican in a southern state. Say that to someone with a ‘pussy’.

I think we need to change not just the way we talk about politics, but how we do politics. I look at the friends who supported another alternative, and I wonder how they feel; I wonder if they realise that those alternative votes make the difference between a bad, neoliberal first-ever woman president of the US and hell on earth for many people.

Yet they’re not the bad people here: they dared to hope for better things to come. The first-past-the-post system is always going to be a race to the bottom; it’s always going to protect status quo. Right now, Donald Trump is status quo.

We need to change the conversation, and we need to change it now. White, male privilege won today. Racism won, rape culture won. Let’s make its victory a turning point. Let’s reach out and listen to each other, talk about the things that make us uncomfortable, and try to tease out the things we cannot understand. Let's make today the beginning of the end of a politics of fear.

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.

Free, safe, legal: on the importance of compassion, and why I won't be playing strategic games

I’m going to come out and say it: I’m for abortion on demand, if that’s what you insist on calling it. Without restrictions.

Time and time again we’re being told to tone it down. Again and again, newspapers insist on publishing opinion pieces telling us to be more strategic and less extreme. Not only are we too angry and shrill; our arguments are simply too much for middle Ireland to take.

But I feel sick every time I think about playing the strategy game, and I can’t help but think that it’s them and not us who are doing it wrong. It is clear as day that volume and persistence works. 30,000+ people don’t turn up to march for choice in the rain during an ongoing bus strike for nothing. Moreover, I’m convinced that it’s worth giving real conversation an honest chance, no matter how difficult that conversation is. Because at the end of the day, it’s all about compassion; and try as politicians might to suggest that Ireland has none, I beg to differ. 87% told Red C during a poll commissioned by Amnesty International Ireland that they want abortion access expanded in Ireland, and 68% agree that we should trust women when they say they need an abortion. And that’s not Dublin’s radicalised women; that’s near consistent across the counties and genders.

Maybe if I were trying to convince the most convicted of so-called pro-life advocates to change their ways I would get into the science about whether or not a foetus can experience pain and try to tease out whether life really does begin at conception. But in conversations with anyone else, I don’t think it really matters.

I’m not here to tell you when life begins. You’re allowed to think of an embryo as the child it may one day become – I’m not going to take that away from you. I’m here to ask you to think of women as people and to take that compassion you have, however deep down, for the woman who is told that her baby is not compatible with life, and extend it to pregnant people in all kinds of different challenging, untimely, complicated situations which you don’t know the details of.

I’m not here to tell you not to feel. You’re allowed to think about the potential of life and the amazing miracle of childbirth and wish for an ideal world where abortions aren’t needed – I’m not going to take that away from you. I’m here to ask you to deal with the complicated greyscale that arises the moment we accept that perfectly healthy zygotes are discarded every day in IVF clinics; that most parents, wherever they stand in the abortion debate, wouldn’t hesitate for a second if forced to choose between saving the life of their living, independently breathing toddler or that of a fertilised egg in a petri dish or even an already implanted, growing foetus.

When does life begin? I don’t know. What does it mean to be alive?

There are situations where we are compelled to empathise with a person who needs access to a termination of a pregnancy, and in those situations we learn that 'life' is not that black and white. But we don’t create laws based on our ability to empathise; we don’t write laws about women’s bodies based on how you feel. Because this isn’t about you.

This is about compassion, and I’m convinced that talking about life that way is worth it. I don’t want to play games, pitting women against each other; I don’t want to pretend that I agree with the pinciple of a foetus’s right to life, but only in the instances where I can’t empathise with its mother. And I refuse to play along with a debate that paints young women in need of abortions out as wanton, when the contempt for young single mothers is just as bad.

The rhetoric about abortion on demand and late-term abortions is a dishonest trick. No one has an abortion for fun. No floodgates are going to open, and no red light abortion districts will take over our high streets. We only have to look to Canada, where abortion is no longer regulated by law – available at any time, for any reason – and abortion rates are at the lower end amongst developed countries.

I want us to get real about the fact that pregnant Irish people have abortions, in Ireland and elsewhere at considerable financial and emotional expense, not to mention the completely unnecessary risks to their health. We have to decide how to deal with it: by toning it down and continuing a narrative of shame, or by admitting that this is what life is and working on being compassionate – even when it’s hard.

Why I'm marching: for real care and real respect, without judgement

I remember vividly the feeling the first time I found out I was pregnant: the magic of it all, trying to comprehend that what was there inside me was the beginnings of a new life, the beginnings of what could become our firstborn, half me and half him. One loss and two unfathomably amazing children later, I sit here trying to imagine the feeling of finding out now: the panic of it all, knowing full well what that teeny, tiny thing inside would be the beginnings of and how life-changing it would be.

We hear the anti-choice campaign talk about the right to life. I’m marching on Saturday because I don’t think ‘life’ is that simple.

I remember vividly the moment everything changed – a sonographer’s silence as she turned the screen away from us. I had experienced grief before and immediately recognised it: a black curtain that closes in front of your eyes, forever shutting out the world as you once knew it. He kicked furiously inside me. “It’s good that it’s happening to us,” I kept telling myself. “We’re strong – we can get through this.”

Along with the sadness I feel when I think about our firstborn, there is a deep, deep sense of gratitude. The care we received was so utterly dignified, the consultant so objectively professional yet supportive, the midwives so warm and caring that we spent weeks talking about them afterwards. It was the definition of ‘care’. I hate the memory of those Whittington corridors, the feeling of walking down the hill from Highgate in leafy north London. But the NHS will always have a special place in my heart, because at a time of numbing grief, we were treated with nothing but respect.

Life isn’t black and white. It comes in full colour, full of bright highs and all different shades of tough, indiscernible grey. There’s no such thing as sheer existence – we feel it, we try to make sense of it, we make decisions and move on. And therein lies the power of it all: we can’t choose what will happen to us, but we can choose how to deal with it – provided our jurisdiction trusts us to.

We hear the anti-choice campaign talk about the right to life, about the need to voice the interests of the voiceless. I’m marching on Saturday because I’m not convinced they can.

We trust pregnant people to mind themselves throughout the sometimes tumultuous experience of a pregnancy, to prepare for the arrival of a new human being who will need their complete attention every moment of every day for years to come, to deal with all the difficult decisions and choices they’ll face as they rise to the challenge of being a parent. How can we decide for their unborn children that sheer existence, the idea of life as absolute, is the best thing for them – no matter how their mother feels, no matter the challenges she’s facing or her feelings of doubt?

We hear the anti-choice campaign talk about the right to life. I’m marching on Saturday because most of the time, it sounds more like they’re talking about the right to birth – the right to arrive into this world no matter the cost, no matter the implications for their siblings, no matter how suicidal their mother is or if she’s been absolutely certain her entire life that motherhood is not for her; indeed no matter the experience of the pregnant person facing months of answering well-intended questions about due dates and plans, knowing that the baby is slowly but surely dying and there will be no such thing as a life at the end of it.

We hear the anti-choice campaign talk about the right to life, and I’m growing really, really tired of it. I’m marching on Saturday because all too often, people tell me they’re pro-life but that what we went through was different – and that’s got nothing to do with life, nor does it have anything to do with choice. That’s telling me that my choice was allowed because I grieved, and that next time, maybe, if they can’t put themselves in my shoes, they’ll deem me a criminal. It’s draining life of all its rich, challenging colour, leaving a watered-down version seeping with shame and fear.

I’m marching on Saturday because I want real care and real respect, and the way things stand, Ireland gives me none of it.

This was written for and originally published by the Abortion Rights Campaign. 

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?

Real change or spare change? Or, why adopting the language of the establishment won't fix it

“See how your income would change with the Renua Ireland flat-tax tax calculator,” my local Renua candidate tweeted today. That’s how Renua is planning on winning votes – literally: click a button and see how many quid you’ll save.

I went to a Dublin civil society group meeting recenty where, among other things, the art of talking to canvassers was discussed. “They’re politicians,” one of the organisers said, “so you can’t talk ethics with them. You have to make financial sense.”

It stayed with me, that idea of politicians as cold-hearted sales people with euro signs in their eyes. Not because I don’t think there’s a smoking gun – but because I found the attitude disheartening. There it was, right at the heart of one of Ireland’s major campaigning bodies: the disillusion.

I don’t mean to say that you get what you deserve. But as much as I take issue with idea that we can think ourselves happy in a flash, I think that there’s a lot to be said for the power of expectation.

Parents have all heard it: don’t tell a child that they’re bold; explain how a specific action is wrong. We must describe kids in positive ways as often as we can, because our perception and expectations of them will make up their sense of self. If they hear often enough that they are bad, pretty soon they will be.

There’s a narrative about politics as corrupt bullshit, about politicians as greedy, power-hungry liars. Then they turn up on our doorstep, and they’re asked: “What’s in it for me?”

I wonder what kind of politicians this rhetoric attracts. I wonder what happens to those deeply devoted to democracy. We can talk about a political class void of ethical concerns, but if we want to talk ethics, we need to put it on the agenda. If we want to live in a world where politics is about more than a transaction of vote for personal gain, we have to start talking about that world when the politicians come knocking on our doors. If we play the neoliberal game and start talking individualism and financial gain the minute they ask us to vote for them, all we’ll get is a flat-tax tax calculator.

“Real change, not spare change,” goes the poster slogan of local AAA candidate, Michael O’Brien. I hated it when I first saw it, found it over-simplistic and banal. The closer to election day it gets, the more profound it seems.