Yasmin Alibhai-Brown believes that feminists need to speak out against females who connive against each other as well as male dominance.
I have mixed feelings about International Women’s Day. There will be much celebration and good cheer when it arrives today.
But also despondency. Why? Because as more women rise up to top positions, too many of them forget the rest of their sex and become apolitical, or apathetic and self-obsessed.
The struggle for gender equality is but a distant memory.
These women wear the power suit and heels, join the boys’ club, barely glance down at those beneath them - the pathetic weaklings who never understood the game. Triumphant women do pass on advice about aspiration, confidence, “frozen talent” (like frozen ovaries?) and indomitability.
Good of them to share, but all they are doing is shifting the responsibility to the excluded individual. The system is never questioned. That would not be good for ambition.
Men still rule and control the world, of course. And they are mostly to blame for keeping females down, and out. But, increasingly, the masculine power base is protected by willing handmaidens.
So, this year, I think feminists need to speak out against female connivance and ruthlessness as well as male dominance. Fair criticism is required; bitchiness, not.
A growing irritation, for me, is women who have it all and still seek our attention and sympathies.
A London exhibition titled The Pram in the Hall, by Alice Instone, opens tonight, just in time for International Women’s Day. She talked to famous women and asked them how they juggled their various tasks, then turned the responses into artworks.
One list goes: “Call Jason Donovan, buy Secret Santa gifts, then write to Melinda Gates.”
Do they think at all about moms who survive on benefits, do menial jobs and can’t even afford a bath at night? Or Syrian mothers trying to keep their children alive in places only hours away from these isles? Narcissism posing as feminism is not good.
Online, female furies are pitiless.
Jerry Hall has been whipped and punished by she-trolls and bloggers since she got married to Rupert Murdoch this weekend. This grown woman, intelligent and beautiful, made her choice and I hope she finds happiness. But they, the mercenaries of discontent, had to spoil it by filling the web with poison and ill will.
Last Christmas I made contact with one of my online persecutors, and told her how she made me feel week after week. She said she was sorry but that I “asked for it” and that she had the right to say what she wanted because we live in a free country. It was a dispiriting encounter.
A woman, Isabella Sorley, was convicted in 2014 after sending violently threatening tweets to Brazilian-born British feminist activist and journalist Caroline Criado-Perez.
This nasty ethos is shared by a generation of young girls who stalk and try to break each other online. Are we feminists to say nothing about this? Are we avoiding this duty because it is simpler and easier to blame men and boys?
Which brings me to my final item that needs to be on the agenda this Women’s Day. We need to talk about men and boys: those who are deeply depressed and anxious, the thousands who end up in prisons or kill themselves. They were born to women and most raised by their mothers. Their pain should matter to feminists.
We women and girls must continue to fight male oppression, to claim our equal rights and place, to refuse inferior status.
The huge risks and burdens carried by mothers and daughters are crimes against one half of humanity. However, internal collaborators do almost as much harm to our cause as external enemies.
It is time to get tough with women who betray other women - high-flyers who are only interested in themselves and their own good fortunes.
The Independent
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