This September, Women and Equalities Minister Liz Truss announced the government’s intention not to pursue any significant reforms to the GRA and attempted to soften the blow to trans activists by making some minor concessions—for instance, waiving the £140 administrative fee usually charged to those applying for a legal sex change. But, crucially, Truss’s statement made clear that the government would not be adopting a system of co-called “self-ID”, as most LGBT advocacy organisations had urged.

Such a system would have permitted transgender people to change their legal sex with minimal gatekeeping: no psychiatric consultation, no need to “live as” the opposite sex for a period before making a formal application, and no necessity to undergo any medical interventions. In other words, under self-ID, any person, at any time, could have simply declared themselves a member of the opposite sex, and the government would have been obliged to officially recognise that declaration.

Feminist critics of self-ID—who describe themselves as “gender critical”, but are described by their opponents as “trans exclusionary radical feminists” (TERFs)—pushed back hard against the move, pointing out that although the reforms might make life marginally easier for transgender people, they would likely have a negative effect on natal women, and that this effect had not been taken into account by the government. Research organisations such as Fair Play for Women argued that women’s sports and single-sex services would be imperilled by the move, and groups such as A Woman’s Place UK organised public meetings to discuss the proposals, which were regularly besieged by angry protestors. Nonetheless, this campaigning effort cut through.

The grassroots feminist response to the proposed GRA reforms clearly surprised the government. As James Kirkup wrote in the Spectator following Liz Truss’s announcement this September: “. . . when the May government announced a consultation on GRA reform, a system of self-ID was effectively the default option. Most politicians paid no attention to the detail, instead outsourcing their judgement on a complex and seemingly obscure issue to officials who were often very (too?) close to highly-effective professional advocacy groups such as Stonewall, which has led the push for self-ID.”

Despite this initial hostility, not only did feminist campaigners succeed in persuading the government that self-ID was not the default option, they eventually succeeded in producing a U-turn on the entire GRA reform project.

A crucial player in this campaigning success was the parenting platform that this year turns 20: Mumsnet. From roughly 2015 onwards, the Mumsnet feminist forum became a key platform for gender critical discussion—or, as one less sympathetic American magazine dubbed it, “the ground zero for British transphobia”.

A new book by Sarah Pedersen, The Politicisation of Mumsnet, brilliantly chronicles the ascendance of the website as a force for political change. Pedersen, a Professor of Communication and Media at Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, suggests that the GRA debate brought forth a new side to Mumsnet, previously characterised by researchers as a site of consumerist middle-class “choice feminism” dominated by discussion of aspirational expenditure: the best private schools, the best expensive buggies, and so on.

Nowadays, though, the feminism messageboard of Mumsnet leans decidedly towards the radical, and Pedersen describes Mumsnet’s relationship with groups such as Fair Play For Women and A Woman’s Place UK as “symbiotic”—the two activist platforms having developed concurrently in response to the threat of self-ID.

The politicisation of Mumsnet was in motion even before the GRA debate came along. Gordon Brown and David Cameron were the first party leaders to cotton on to the fact that Mumsnet contained an unusually high proportion of floating voters, and they therefore chose to participate in live chats with the site’s users that have since become a mainstay of election season.

Media coverage of these live chats has often tended towards the dismissive, with particular emphasis on the one question that is always asked of any participant: “What is your favourite biscuit?” Of course, the “biscuit question” often gets a politicised response, no doubt formulated in discussion with special advisors. But it has a tendency to wrong-foot politicians who mistakenly assume that the Mumsnet audience are only interested in trivia. Thus, particularly in the early 2010s, live chats often revealed participants to be well prepared on childcare policy and other “softer” topics, but regularly flummoxed by more technical questions relating to the economy or defence.

And, within the last five years, live chats have become considerably more difficult for politicians as a result of the GRA debate. Pedersen describes one such incident:

A February 2017 webchat with Jess Phillips (Labour) and Flick Drummond (Conservative), co-chairs of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Women and Work, was framed as an opportunity to discuss the Group’s first annual report, which focused on the issue of women returning to work—assumed to be of interest to Mumsnetters . . . 51 questions were posted by Mumsnetters. Twenty-five of these—almost half—were on the issue of self-identification, definitions of women and, in particular, the proposed changes to the GRA.

Phillips and Drummond attempted to avoid engaging with this contentious issue, but with little success. Phillips issued a pre-prepared statement on the GRA question that carefully avoided taking a side before pivoting to the biscuit question. The tactic didn’t work. “Wow,” commented one user. “Is this really a webchat with 2 women MPs completely ignoring the biggest concern women posting have asked questions on?” The chat moderators pleaded for calm—“we don’t want our webchat guests to be harangued”—but to no avail. Mumsnet users were not having it.

The strong feelings on this issue are hardly surprising. Although its users do include both men and childless women, Mumsnet’s political priorities are set by mothers and, given their life experiences, many have proved reluctant to accept the trans activist claim that the biological differences between men and women are unimportant. The radical tone of the Mumsnet feminist forum has led to an influx of women into the GRA debate, particularly since 2018, and these were often women who had come to the site for non-political reasons. Pedersen quotes one user who described her own journey: “came for the babies, stayed for the feminism”.

The Mumsnet format lends itself well to discussion of controversial subjects concerning women, particularly the issue of self-ID. The site is unusually large for a female-dominated platform and, unlike on Facebook, its users can be anonymous and, unlike on Twitter, are unlikely to be met with a flurry of furious responses. Mumsnet moderators have periodically attempted to censor discussion, partly in response to the threat of losing advertising revenue. But these attempts have been intermittent, half-hearted, and reliably met with fury from Mumsnet users. Despite widespread efforts to shut down the “ground zero of British transphobia”, Mumsnetters have prevailed.

The Times columnist Janice Turner—a consistently gender critical voice—has described the GRA debate as “gender’s version of Brexit”. She’s quite right, and not only because of the frequently toxic nature of the debate.

Personally, I am agnostic on Brexit. I voted Remain primarily out of fear for the economic consequences of leaving the EU, and I would likely vote the same way again if another referendum were held. But I am sympathetic to the interpretation that sees Leave voters as a “left behind” majority who had been consistently ignored by Westminster and dismissed by the cultural elites as backwards, stupid, and bigoted, only to be finally given the opportunity to have their voice heard on this one issue.

We might apply the same narrative to feminism, dominated for decades by a cultural elite who hold power in academia and the media, but constitute a small minority of women. It was this feminist elite that most vigorously embraced self-ID and in doing so failed to consider the effect on, for instance, women in prison who risked being housed with male sex-offenders as a result. When GRA reform was put on the agenda, there was an outcry from the much larger majority of women who weren’t willing to accept the outlandish claims made by trans activists. Those women, having finally been pushed too far, organised a concerted campaign—based mostly, but not exclusively, online—in an effort to have their voices heard. They were presented as backwards, stupid, and bigoted. They still won.

And they are newly enlivened as a result. As we enter a new year, my prediction is that the Mumsnet effect on feminism will only become more important. This group of politicised women have proved themselves adept at changing the political narrative, and they are unlikely to quieten down now. For, as Pedersen puts it, “contrary to popular opinion . . . women do not lose the ability to think once they have had a baby”. 

The post Mum’s army appeared first on Standpoint.

“TFW No GF” is internet slang for “that feeling when you have no girlfriend”—a feeling that the five subjects of the documentary know only too well. Though they are never actually referred to as “incels”, they are all involved in the incel subculture, an online community focused around the experience of being “involuntarily celibate”, typically defined as not having had sex for six months or more. Many self-defined incels have been celibate for much longer than that, usually as a result of some combination of physical unattractiveness and social anxiety. They are mostly—but not exclusively—white and male. They are also mostly young. The documentary TFW No GF offers an unusually sympathetic and intimate insight into the lives of five young, white, male incels, and as a result it has been flamed.

The film critic Eric Langberg described the film as “one of the most irresponsible docs I’ve ever seen” and Variety accused it of “giving five incendiary attention seekers exactly what they want”. A more positive review in Jacobin was denounced by the American feminist Jill Filipovic, who tweeted that “[t]here is apparently no bottom to making excuses for violent, racist, misogynist men who fantasise about killing women, and sometimes follow through”. These critics of TFW No GF condemn as dangerous the decision to foreground the voices of the film’s subjects, exclude commentary from family members or cultural commentators, and underemphasise the violent acts committed by some incels.

Incel subculture became the subject of media attention in 2014, when 22-year-old Elliot Rodger killed six people and injured 14 before committing suicide in Isla Vista, California. Rodger claimed that the act was part of a “war on women”, and that he was motivated by his inability to attract a sexual partner. In 2015, another young man, Christopher Harper-Mercer, killed nine people, apparently in imitation of Rodger, and in 2018, Alek Minassian killed ten, writing on Facebook before his attack: “the incel rebellion has already begun!”

As a consequence of these atrocities, incels have been represented as dangerous extremists, and in some cases that characterisation is accurate. There is plenty of misogyny within incel subculture: since these men are brought together by their inability to attract a sexual partner, resentment towards women is not infrequently whipped up into outright hatred. Critics of TFW No GF have suggested that this theme is not explored nearly enough, quite fairly pointing out that, although the director, Alex Lee Moyer, is a woman, the film itself doesn’t feature any women, except for a few pornographic shots of female bodies that briefly pass across the subjects’ computer screens.

Critics are also right to point out that one of the producers of TFW No GF, a crypto-anarchist and gun rights activist called Cody Wilson, has an extremely dubious history. Wilson was described by Wired magazine in 2017 as one of the ten “Most Dangerous People on the Internet”, by virtue of the fact that he is the founder of a group, Defence Distributed, that sells DIY firearm blueprints, enabling anyone to 3-D print their own firearm components or even entire guns at home. Wilson is also a convicted sex offender, following an incident in which he paid a 16-year-old girl $500 for sex in a hotel room in Austin, Texas, in August 2018. Alex Lee Moyer acknowledges that Wilson helped her to gain access to the film’s subjects, but otherwise downplays his involvement with the film. Nevertheless, his association with the project does its reputation no favours. 

Despite all of this, the film is nevertheless valuable in that it provides a sensitive perspective on the lives of young men who are not dangerous extremists, even if they live in worrying proximity to other men who definitely are. Thus the New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino misses the mark when she writes of the subculture as a whole: “Incels aren’t really looking for sex; they’re looking for absolute male supremacy. Sex, defined to them as dominion over female bodies, is just their preferred sort of proof.”

“Dominion over female bodies” isn’t quite right, at least for most incels. The esteem of their peers is closer to the truth, and incels’ inability to attract a romantic partner is strong and painful proof of the lack of that esteem. A non-existent sex life is only the most obvious sign of a deeper problem that incels face, which is that they are constantly rejected by other people, male and female alike. Jordan Peterson, no fan of the incel subculture, puts it bluntly: “If you’re a young man and all the women are rejecting you, who’s got the problem? . . . If all the women are rejecting you, it’s you.” There is no sugarcoating that distressing self-realisation.

While there is no doubt that some incels are misogynistic and aggressive and bring their unhappiness upon themselves, that’s not true of all of them. The hard truth is that some people are ugly, and some are ugly and also have trouble with social interaction. These people struggle to find sexual partners because, sadly, scientific research reveals that beauty isn’t really in the eye of the beholder. Sexual attractiveness is both objective and brutally hierarchical: some people win only because others lose. And if (as I do) you insist that no one should ever be pressured into unwanted sex, and if no one wants to have sex with incels—well, then, here lies the problem. Some people will forever be unlucky in love, and they will probably be miserable about it.

Blaming incels for their own misfortune is a lot easier than thinking hard about their conundrum. Because their conundrum is sad and difficult, which means that thinking about it is sad and difficult. What TFW No GF does very well is encourage viewers to engage with a topic that is often easier to ignore: what is it like to be one of life’s losers?

Many on the Left are so concerned by inequality linked to race, class, and sex, that they are unable or unwilling to think about how other forms of inequality might have just as much impact on a person’s life. So they look at the young white men in TFW No GF and see only privilege and entitlement, forgetting that traits like intelligence, charm, and beauty are also very important in determining an individual’s outcomes, even if they are less often spoken about. 

The impact of “lookism”, in particular, deserves far more attention than it typically receives. The academic Francesca Minerva has found, for instance, that in the United States, physical attractiveness has more impact than race on male income. People who experience lookism suffer all kinds of adversity at disproportionate rates: they are passed over for promotion, struggle to make friends, are sometimes abused in the street, and of course struggle to attract romantic partners. Being born ugly is not a trivial misfortune.

But the subjects of TFW No GF are not actually especially unattractive or unintelligent—what they lack above all is charm and an ability to motivate themselves. Deprived of any externally-imposed structure, they drift from one temporary source of dopamine release to another. This may partly be a result of a tendency towards self-indulgence—perhaps aggravated by incel ideology—but there is also a graver political problem that TFW No GF brings into the spotlight.

In a would-be meritocracy like ours, the personality trait that is financially and socially rewarded above all others is a kind of “on your bike” vim that most incels conspicuously lack. Watching TFW No GF, I was reminded of a piece by the Guardian journalist  John Harris in which he described watching the 2005 Labour Party Conference speech given by Tony Blair: 

“Change is marching on again,” he announced, in that messianic tone that had begun to emerge in his speeches around the time of 9/11 . . . “The character of this changing world is indifferent to tradition. Unforgiving of frailty. No respecter of past reputations. It has no custom and practice. It is replete with opportunities, but they only go to those swift to adapt, slow to complain, open, willing and able to change.”

I watched that speech on a huge screen in the conference exhibition area. And I recall thinking: “Most people are not like that.” The words rattled around my head: “Swift to adapt, slow to complain, open, willing and able to change.” And I wondered that if these were the qualities now demanded of millions of Britons, what would happen if they failed the test?

Set this beside a quote from “Kantbot”, one of the subjects of TFW No GF:

People used to graduate and go get a job, and that used to work pretty well for them. But now that’s impossible, you have no experience in anything, you’re from a small-town background and you don’t have any connections, so you end up living back at home, and your parents are telling you to apply to McDonald’s or something because it’s better than you staying at home.

While of course it is possible for highly motivated people from humble, small-town backgrounds to make it big (that’s the promise of the American Dream, after all), the truth is that, as Harris puts it, “most people are not like that”. And a society in which any-one not blessed with unusual talent is condemned to misery is not a healthy one. More and more commentators are now starting to think about the suffering of meritocracy’s losers, with two new books by David Goodhart (see page 20) and Michael Sandel published on the subject only last month. TFW No GF is an addition to this emerging genre.

Most responses to the film have asked us to either sympathise with or condemn incels, but I don’t think we have to limit ourselves to either. Like it or not, there is a group of people (mostly male, mostly white) who are disaffected and angry, and they’re not going away. Their suffering is real, and a consequence of societal problems as well as individual ones. They may be bigoted, obnoxious, and self-pitying, but they shouldn’t be dismissed.

The post Don’t dismiss incels appeared first on Standpoint.

Anokye is not alone in attempting the so-called “rough sex” defence. I work for We Can’t Consent To This, a campaign group that documents cases in which defendants facing charges of homicide or non-sexual assault claim that their victims consented to violence as part of “rough sex”. We have found that the use of this defence tactic has become increasingly common within the last few decades and it is also increasingly likely to meet with success.

In July, the Domestic Abuse Bill was revised by the government to include a clause making clear that “consent for sexual gratification” cannot be relied upon as a defence in cases of serious injury or death. Case law from 1994 had already made clear that any injury that was more than “transient and trifling” could not be legally consented to, but the We Can’t Consent To This campaign found evidence that this case law was not being consistently applied, and that statutory provision was therefore essential.

A further amendment to the Domestic Abuse Bill, still being considered, is designed to address a form of violence that is all too often dismissed as “transient and trifling”, despite its terrifying effects: non-fatal  strangulation. According to the Centre for Women’s Justice (CWJ), although Crown Prosecution Service guidance “indicates that non-fatal strangulation and suffocation offences should result in a [more serious] charge of ABH rather than common assault
. . . in our experience this does not take place in a great many cases”. Most cases of non-fatal strangulation, if they are prosecuted at all, are prosecuted only as common assault, and punished lightly with a maximum sentence of only six months imprisonment. The amendment to the Domestic Abuse Bill therefore proposes a separate offence of non-fatal strangulation, carrying a more severe punishment.

There are two reasons to consider non-fatal strangulation as a unique form of violence. The first is its unusual effect on the body. Dr Helen Bichard, a clinician at the North Wales Brain Injury Service, has recently published an alarming study on the range of injuries caused by non-fatal strangulation, which can include cardiac arrest, stroke, miscarriage, incontinence, speech disorders, seizures, paralysis, and other forms of long-term brain injury. Dr Bichard tells me that the injuries caused by non-fatal strangulation may not be visible to the naked eye, or may only become evident hours or days after the attack, meaning that they are far less obvious than injuries like wounds or broken bones, and so may be missed during a police investigation.

The second factor that differentiates non-fatal strangulation from other forms of violence is the startlingly gendered nature of the crime. Strangulation is overwhelmingly committed by men against women, and only very rarely by women against men. One study in San Diego found that, of 300 forensic records reporting strangulation, 298 involved a man strangling a woman.

Non-fatal strangulation is very often suffered by victims of domestic violence. The UK charity Refuge reports that 48 per cent of women using their services report having been strangled, choked, or suffocated, and women who have previously been strangled by their partners are eight times more likely to be killed by them. The CWJ, along with other feminist campaigners, hope that if the UK were to follow the lead of countries like New Zealand and introduce a separate offence of non-fatal strangulation, there could be an increase in the number of prosecutions, harsher sentences, and a greater awareness of the harms of this form of violence, particularly within the criminal justice system.

But one group pushing back against this effort is, somewhat surprisingly, a sub-section of feminist women. Specifically, “sex positive” feminists who argue that, although non-fatal strangulation may be a form of violent abuse for some, for others it can be a source of sexual excitement. Last month, Men’s Health magazine ran a feature titled “Breath Play Is a Popular Form of BDSM. Here’s How to Do It Safely”, which was criticised by several prominent feminists, including Laura Farris MP, a key actor in the campaign against the “rough sex” defence within Parliament. Farris was met with a huge backlash on Twitter, largely from young women who insisted that consensual strangulation or “choking” can be a harmless form of kink. Gigi Engle, for instance, a sex writer for Men’s Health, tweeted “Nope. Laura, sweetie, choking can be a very fun Sex act when done safely and consenually [sic].”

There’s no doubt that, within the last several decades, strangulation or “choking” has been normalised to the point that,  particularly among young people, it is now widely considered to be an expected part of sex. Research conducted by ComRes in 2019 found that over half of 18-to-24-year-old UK women reported having been strangled by their partners during sex, compared with 23 per cent of women in the oldest age group surveyed, aged 35 to 39. Many of these respondents reported that this experience had been unwanted and frightening, but others reported that they had consented to it, or even invited it. This point is emphasised by “sex positive” feminists such as Engle: yes, it can be a form of abuse, or even murder, but it can also be a “very fun Sex act”.

It’s a claim that Dr Bichard rejects on medical grounds, describing the idea that strangulation can ever be done safely as an “urban myth”. “I cannot see a way of safely holding a neck so that you wouldn’t be pressing on any fragile structures,” she tells me. And, given the possible consequences of non-fatal strangulation, until recently only partially understood, Dr Bichard argues that the vast majority of laypeople are not capable of giving truly informed consent to it.

Jessica Masterson, a Philosophy PhD candidate at the University of Birmingham, is also sceptical about the idea that consent negates the harm of strangulation. Masterson’s research is focused on the ethics of consent to BDSM, and she tells me that the influence of porn has an important role to play in the normalisation of strangulation:

The image of peak desirability has shifted through pornification, with the emphasis now being on the emulation of porn trends . . . The porn industry is a competitive market, and every producer or production company wants to have an edge on the competition—this is being achieved by being the most extreme, the most graphic, the most violent.

This is the context within which young women are coming of age, and many are influenced by the ubiquity in porn of sadistic painful sex that includes strangulation, and the ability to endure, and even enjoy, this kind of sex is now, as Masterson describes it, “an integral element of the female sexual ideal”.

This is also the context in which Andy Anokye perpetrated his crimes. During their investigation, detectives used video discovered on Anokye’s phone to track down other women who had been subjected to his violence. Several of these women gave evidence for the prosecution, but one did not. Detectives described the videos featuring this woman as “violent” and “brutal”, but she rejected that characterisation, telling the court, as a witness for the defence, “it wasn’t a rape—I consented to this behaviour and the activity”. Other women interpreted their experiences differently, with one victim insisting that Anokye’s abuse had been so bad that at one point she had “wanted to die”.

Many “sex positive” feminists would have us believe that what matters is not what Anokye did, but what his partners wanted. The fact that one of the women who experienced his “violent” and “brutal” behaviour consented to what was done is, according to this argument, enough to make it right. On that basis, they would also insist that any law against non-fatal strangulation must permit consent as a defence.

But do we really want to leave this defence tactic available for the perpetrators of a crime committed against almost half of domestic violence victims? Strangulation typically takes place in private, almost always committed by a man against his female partner. If she later insists that she did not consent, no witness can back her up. It is her word against his. And, in a culture in which strangulation is widely regarded as a “very fun Sex act”, it is not difficult to imagine what the court’s verdict would be. If “sex positive” feminists won the day, we could see a situation in which non-fatal strangulation cases were no longer rarely prosecuted, but instead never prosecuted. And men just as dangerous and sadistic as Andy Anokye might therefore walk free.   

The post The rise of “choking” appeared first on Standpoint.

It was in that year that Section 63 of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act criminalised the possession of certain forms of extreme porn. According to this legislation, it is illegal to possess pornographic material featuring any of the following: necrophilia, bestiality, any act likely to cause serious injury to a person’s genitals, anus, or breasts, and any act that threatens a person’s life. In 2015, further legislation criminalised the possession of pornography depicting rape. Crucially, such pornography need not depict “real” crimes against people or animals—it need only look real, from the perspective of a reasonable person.

This legislation was, in part, a response to the murder of Jane Longhurst in 2003. Longhurst’s killer, Graham Coutts, confessed during his trial that he had a long-standing neck fetish and obsession with strangulation, and the prosecution argued that Coutts’s use of extreme porn, depicting strangulation, rape, and necrophilia, likely contributed to his murderous intent. Following Coutts’ conviction for murder, Jane’s mother Liz Longhurst, with the support of then Home Secretary David Blunkett, petitioned the government to ban “extreme internet sites promoting violence against women in the name of sexual gratification”. Ultimately, the 2008 Act did not ban such sites, but instead criminalised those who accessed them—focusing on the demand for extreme material, rather than the supply.

The legislation on extreme pornography has since attracted sustained opposition, with critics suggesting during the passage of the Bill in 2008 that many thousands of people in the BDSM community might find themselves prosecuted for engaging in consensual and harmless acts of fantasy. The pressure group Backlash was founded in response to this perceived threat, and over the last decade has supported several people prosecuted under extreme pornography laws. Myles Jackman, a lawyer who specialises in defending cases related to porn, provides pro bono legal advice to Backlash, and in 2012 successfully defended Simon Walsh in a case seen to be a test of the 2008 legislation. Walsh, a barrister, magistrate, and former aide to Boris Johnson, was prosecuted for possession of pornography featuring anal fisting and urethral sounding (the insertion of medical instruments into the urethra), but was acquitted after Walsh’s defence team successfully argued that such acts were not “likely to result in serious injury”.

Jackman is something of an eccentric. He has a taste for wearing Batman socks and, in his central London office, has hung a portrait of himself dressed as the Pokemon character Pikachu. His taste in clients also has a carnivalesque tone to it. In one notable case, Jackman represented a man prosecuted for possession of bestiality pornography seemingly featuring a woman having sex with a tiger, although in fact the tiger in question was actually a man dressed in a tiger skin suit. Jackman succeeded in convincing the court that the material did not reach the “realistic” threshold by pointing out that, at one point in the film, the tiger is seen to talk.

But absurd cases like these, memorable though they may be, are outliers in prosecutions for extreme porn. Research published last year by Clare McGlynn and Hannah Bows, both academics at the University of Durham, collected information on the people charged with extreme pornography offences in England and Wales. They found that the number of successful prosecutions remains small. The vast majority of defendants were male and, in most cases, the extreme pornography charges were brought together with other sexual offences, seemingly because the material was chanced upon during examination of a suspect’s computer in relation to another offence. Most surprisingly, 85 per cent of charges related to bestiality material. Cases of suspects charged with possessing rape pornography were particularly unusual. It seems that there has been no real appetite on the part of police and Crown Prosecution Service to pursue prosecutions.

Meanwhile, the last 12 years has seen an explosion in the availability of online pornography, and a mainstreaming of forms of violent sex that were once confined to a niche within the BDSM community. A recent investigation by the Sunday Times, for instance, revealed that strangulation (or “choking”) pornography is now widely available on social media platforms such as Instagram, Pinterest, and Tumblr, which are marketed as suitable for children aged 13 and over. Strangulation, particularly to unconsciousness, ought to fall under the category of acts that “threaten a person’s life”. And yet, not only is the possession of strangulation pornography not being prosecuted, it is in fact being normalised. The Sunday Times report features an interview with a 23-year-old student who described coming across such material at the age of 14:

I’d inadvertently see a lot of pornographic material because accounts would use the hashtags of other popular TV shows or media to bring followers to their porn sites . . . After my experiences with Tumblr, I felt that choking was normalised as a sexual behaviour. It’s shown as an expression of passion and it’s something that girls are kind of groomed into doing, but it’s only recently that I see that being critiqued as something criminal.

Fiona Vera-Gray, also an academic at the University of Durham, confirms that
extreme pornography is now easily accessed, not only by those who seek it out, but also by users of mainstream porn sites, and even casual users of social media. “I don’t think still, to this day, the general public are aware that it’s illegal to view this material,” she tells me, pointing out that extreme material, particularly rape porn, can often be found on the front pages of some of the largest pornography platforms.

Vera-Gray suggests that the existing legislation on extreme pornography serves a largely symbolic function, allowing the state to signal its disapproval of pornography that features violent, dangerous, and degrading acts. But unfortunately that symbolic function has been lost as a result of the government’s failure to widely advertise the existence of the legislation, a task made more difficult by the rapid development of the online pornography industry in the years since it was first introduced.

The precise effects of the increase in the availability of extreme online pornography are not easy to discern. Our society has changed so much in recent decades, it is difficult to disentangle this one factor from others that might be contributing to changes in sexual norms. It is also difficult to persuade research participants to be entirely honest about their pornography use and sex lives. However, there are reasons to be concerned. Research conducted by ComRes at the end of last year, for instance, found that over half of 18-to-24-year-old UK women reported having been strangled by their partners during sex, compared with 23 per cent of women in the oldest age group surveyed, aged 35 to 39. Younger women were also more likely to have experienced other forms of aggression that are commonplace in porn: hair pulling, slapping, or being spat on. More than half of respondents to this survey, across all age groups, reported that these acts were either sometimes or always unwanted.

The increased use of the “rough sex defence” is also suggestive of an unwelcome shift in our sexual culture. The We Can’t Consent To This campaign documents cases in which UK women have been killed or seriously injured and their attackers have claimed in court that their injuries resulted from consensual “rough sex” (disclosure: I work as Press Officer for this campaign). The use of this defence tactic has risen rapidly in recent decades, with a tenfold increase between 1996 and 2016. Graham Coutts was not able to persuade the court that Jane Longhurst died accidentally during consensual strangulation, but many killers have successfully relied on a similar defence. In 45 per cent of the homicide cases where defendants used a “rough sex” defence, they were able to avoid a murder conviction, despite the fact that case law in England and Wales makes clear that consent cannot be a defence to serious injury. This phenomenon seems to be the result of a greater public tolerance for violent sex which has percolated into the criminal justice system, meaning that police, juries, and judges are all increasingly willing to believe defendants when they present such narratives. Last month, the government introduced new provisions in the Domestic Abuse Bill that, if passed, will put existing case law into statute, making clear that the ‘rough sex’ defence cannot be relied upon in cases where a victim has suffered serious injury.

All of which suggests, argues Clare McGlynn, that the availability of extreme pornography may be having some effect. There is no randomised double blind trial proving that the consumption of this kind of material inevitably leads directly to sexual violence, but then that kind of research is probably never going to be produced. “You’re never going to find a study that proves the case either way,” McGlynn tells me, but she draws a comparison with advertising: “It’s not that I watch adverts and then go out and buy a particular washing powder. But on some level it is having some influence on me, and companies spend billions on advertising.”

Shouldn’t we also expect extreme material to have at least some effect on its users?

There seems to be the will within government to act on the issue of pornography regulation, but recent attempts at action have proved unsuccessful. During the 2015 general election, the Conservative government proposed a new system of age verification to prevent children from accessing porn. But, after years of reported technical difficulties, the implementation date was repeatedly delayed, and the project ultimately abandoned at the end of 2019.

Experts such as McGlynn and Vera-Gray insist that the time has come to turn away from failed efforts to regulate the users, and instead regulate the platforms. Globally, the pornography industry is certainly worth many billions of US dollars, with some placing the figure as high as $97 billion. And there are giants within the industry, such as the Canadian site Pornhub, owned by MindGeek, which is the 10th most trafficked website in the world. And yet, unlike figures such as Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey, the senior executives of MindGeek and similar companies are not household names, and they have thus far been able to keep out of the media spotlight, accumulating vast wealth without the burden of accountability.

But they are starting to face a greater degree of scrutiny. The American campaign group TraffickingHub documents cases in which sex trafficking and child rape films have been hosted on the Pornhub site. One 15-year-old girl who had been missing for a year was found after her mother was tipped off that her daughter was being featured in videos on Pornhub—58 such videos of her rape and abuse were discovered. Another girl, 14-year-old Rose Kalemba, was gang raped at knifepoint. Footage of the attack was posted on Pornhub. Kalemba contacted the site repeatedly over a period of six months, asking for the video to be removed, but with no success. Meanwhile, Pornhub continued to profit from the footage of her assault.

Right now, the law is not functioning as intended. Contrary to the fears expressed by groups such as Backlash, we have not seen widespread intrusion of the state into the private lives of its citizens, nor a draconian crackdown on the pornography industry in the years following the 2008 Act. Instead, what we have seen is a very small number of prosecutions, some poorly judged, at the same time as a rapid normalisation and increase in the availability of pornography that is technically illegal, but only rarely pursued. Criminalising the users of extreme porn is not working—it’s time to change tack. 

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The term doesn’t encompass all violence committed against women and girls. If a female member of the public is killed by a terrorist, for instance, we wouldn’t classify that as VAWG. In practice, VAWG is used to refer primarily to sexual and domestic violence: categories of crime that are overwhelmingly committed by men against women.

VAWG looks quite different from other forms of violence. It is much more likely to be sexually motivated, for instance, and also much more likely to be committed again and again, over a long period of time, with the same perpetrator repeatedly attacking the same victim, and often within the home, “behind closed doors” as the old cliché has it.

VAWG—or, at least, a certain category of it—has been attracting more media attention than it usually does. An increase in domestic violence, including murder, is widely expected to be one of the terrible consequences of the coronavirus lockdown. Karen Ingala Smith is chief executive of Nia, a charity that supports women who have experienced sexual and domestic violence, and also founder of The Femicide Census, a project that catalogues cases in the UK in which women have been killed by men. She has found that, since the lockdown began, the rate of femicide has risen to more than double what we would usually expect, suggesting that there has indeed been an increase in domestic violence murders. But she cautions against approaching these figures simplistically, writing: “I don’t believe coronavirus creates violent men. What we’re seeing is a window into the levels of abuse that women live with all the time.”

This is a point worth emphasising. Some media reports have drawn a spurious link between the lockdown and domestic violence, suggesting that perpetrators are being provoked by financial worries or other forms of stress caused by the crisis. In fact we know that the vast majority of these murders are not the consequence of a sudden loss of temper, but instead the culmination of a long period—maybe years, sometimes decades—of calculated acts of control, threats, and escalating abuse, often carried out by perpetrators who are skilled at hiding their crimes. Lockdown increases the risk of domestic violence, not as a result of the pressure put on abusers, but rather because it is now more difficult for victims to seek help.

And adults are not the only people at greater risk. It is not acknowledged often enough that a startlingly high proportion of child sexual abuse is committed by family members, most commonly stepfathers. These victims will also be finding it harder to seek help, since they now have fewer opportunities to speak to adults at school, or to call a helpline at a time when the perpetrator is not at home.

But it’s important to remember that abuse within the home is not the only form of VAWG. Although it is still too early to see the detailed impact on crime statistics, it is likely that rates of some forms of violence will have dropped as a result of lockdown. For instance, domestic abuse is not only committed by perpetrators who live with their victims, meaning that the “domestic” part of the term is somewhat misleading, even for criminals. A police officer once told me about a particularly dim-witted abuser who, when told he had been arrested because he was suspected of domestic violence, protested: “But I never hit her in her house!” The group most vulnerable to domestic abuse are teenage girls aged 16 to 19, closely followed by young women aged 20 to 24. These younger victims are more likely to be living apart from their abusers, and thus may well be having less contact with them during lockdown.

Girls in this age group are also at the highest risk from sexual violence, with the age of vulnerability peaking at 15. Although boyfriends and ex-boyfriends are the most common perpetrators, they account for a minority of assaults, with friends, acquaintances, colleagues, and strangers—yes, sometimes even strangers in dark alleys—also committing sexual crimes against women and children of all ages. It tends to get emphasised that sexual violence is usually committed by someone known to the victim, very often within the family, because it is this sort of “private” crime that has historically been ignored or dismissed as unimportant. But plenty of VAWG is perpetrated by someone outside of the victim’s household, and rates of this kind of crime may well be lower now than in normal times.

So the relationship between lockdown and VAWG is not a simple one. Lift it, and certain types of violence are likely to increase; keep it in place, and other types of violence are likely to increase. From the government’s perspective, every option has its costs.

The solution to this is both dull and profoundly important: funding. For shelters, police, courts, the NHS, social services, and specialist charities. There really is no other way. Right now, domestic violence is getting a lot of media attention, and the Home Office has responded with a modest increase in spending on support services. But what worries me is what might happen down the line, if the result of this crisis is a deep recession, and the government chooses to impose yet another wave of cuts to services already depleted during the austerity of the 2010s.

This crisis could well contribute to an increase in violence against women, but not in the way we expect.

This article is taken from the May/June 2020 issue of Standpoint. To subscribe to the print and digital editions, including a full digital archive, click here.

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It has been rather naïvely suggested that nobody would seek to pretend transsexual status in prison if this were not actually the case. There are, to those of us who actually interview the prisoners, in fact very many reasons why people might pretend this. These vary from the opportunity to have trips out of prison . . . through to wanting a special or protected status within the prison system and even (in one very well evidenced case that a highly concerned Prison Governor brought particularly to my attention) a plethora of prison intelligence information suggesting that the driving force was a desire to make subsequent sexual offending very much easier.

This came not from a radical feminist group, still less from conservative religious campaigners against LGBT rights. It was submitted by the British Association of Gender Identity Specialists (BAGIS), as part of a much longer document that also implored the government to do more to alleviate the suffering of patients diagnosed with gender dysphoria.

Five years later, during the current Labour leadership campaign, Lisa Nandy was asked during a hustings whether Christopher Worton, a convicted child rapist who now identifies as a woman, should be transferred to a women’s prison. “Trans women are women and trans men are men so they should be accommodated in the prison of their choosing,” Nandy responded, seemingly oblivious to the real risk that such a policy could be open to abuse. Like BAGIS, Nandy expressed support for transgender people. Unlike BAGIS, she did not address the dangers of reforming prison policy on sex-segregation. In doing so, she failed to express compassion for another, all too often forgotten, group: female prisoners.

Transgender activists and their allies who are pushing for reforms to the Gender Recognition Act argue that the current system imposes an unfair burden on transgender people, requiring them to undergo a lengthy administrative process in order to be legally recognised as their preferred sex. They advocate self-identification (or “self-ID”) in which people were permitted to officially change their sex without any medical or legal gatekeeping. This would mean that male-bodied people who identify as women would have as much right as natal women to access sex-segregated spaces, including women’s prisons.

In the current system, sex segregation in prisons reflects sharply different patterns of offending. Less than 5 per cent of prisoners are female, and 82 per cent of them are serving time for non-violent offences. Only 129 women, as of March 2019, were in jail for sex offences, in comparison with 13,789 men. In England and Wales male sex offenders alone comprise more than three times the total number of women in prison for any offence. So few female prisoners are dangerous enough to require Category A security that none is provided.

Against that background, even a small number of prisoners transitioning to the female estate makes a big difference. And numbers are already mushrooming. An official survey last year found that one in 50 male prisoners are now identifying as transgender, compared with roughly one in 200 in the general population. In some sub-groups of prisoners this figure is higher, with one in 10 Irish Travellers currently identifying as transgender. Although some of these inmates have been permitted to transfer to women’s prisons, most remain within the male estate, where they are provided with the usual protections afforded to vulnerable prisoners.

Currently, these prisoners are being housed in a variety of men’s and women’s prisons, with each individual being assessed on a case by case basis. But sexual predators still slip through and female prisoners are already paying the price. Research conducted by the campaign group Fair Play For Women found in 2017 that 41 per cent of male-bodied trans prisoners were convicted sex offenders, in contrast to just under 20 per cent of the non-transgender male prison population. These figures suggest that BAGIS were right to warn that sex offenders might be eager to “pretend transsexual status in prison.” In 2018, it emerged that a 52-year-old transgender prisoner called Karen White (pictured, left), who had previously gone by names including Stephen Wood and David Thompson, had committed several sexual assaults against female prisoners while housed at HMP New Hall near Wakefield. White had been convicted of multiple sexual offences against women, including pleading guilty to rape in 2003, but had nevertheless been granted access to the female estate.

Anne Ruzylo has been warning about this since leaving the prison service in 2013. A feminist, trade unionist, and former Labour Party women’s officer, she worked as a prison officer for 18 years, in both men’s and women’s prisons, including working with sex offenders. Such people, she says are “often very secretive and highly manipulative. They get a thrill from being able to get away with more and more and more”.

At stake is the welfare of female prisoners, the majority of whom have been victims of domestic violence or sexual abuse at the hands of men. Ruzylo warns that allowing male-bodied sex offenders like Karen White to be housed with these women not only physically endangers them, but also exposes them to daily harassment and intimidation, damaging their mental health.

She provides me with testimony from a female prison officer currently working in a women’s prison in England, who has asked to remain anonymous. This officer reports that several male-bodied prisoners who identify as transgender on arrival immediately stopped dressing in feminine clothing and reverted to masculine presentation. When women prisoners ask “is that a man?” confidentiality rules mean she is not allowed to reply directly.

Self-ID policy would easily lead to a situation in which more than a quarter of prisoners in women’s prisons were male, many of them convicted of sexual crimes against women. “Transwomen are women” is a comforting mantra for the woke. But it sentences women prisoners to a double, and wholly undeserved, punishment.

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They have launched a counter-campaign with stickers of their own. Halloween-themed messages included “Pumpkins against bigots” and “Ghosts for trans”, as well as cartoon penises in the colours of the trans flag. That might seem like a classic university spat, with all the silliness and over-seriousness that marks student politics, and lacking only the pen of a satirist such as David Lodge. But satire is long dead. Thames Valley Police confirmed to me by email that they are investigating the allegedly transphobic stickers as a public order offence.

The episode is only the latest in a series of confrontations between police and gender-critical activists over the last 12 months. In October 2018, the writer and comedian Graham Linehan, co-creator of TV shows including Father Ted and Black Books, was given a verbal warning by West Yorkshire Police after he was accused by a trans activist of “misgendering” her during an argument on Twitter. Misgendering, for those new to the issue, is using pronouns appropriate to a person’s biological sex, where this conflicts with the gender they identify with.

The journalist Caroline Farrow also fell foul of police after a similar altercation on Twitter, this time with Susie Green, who runs the trans advocacy charity Mermaids. In March of this year, Farrow was contacted by Surrey Police who told her that she was being investigated under the Malicious Communications Act following a report by Green. Farrow tells me that she was informed by a police officer that she had misgendered Green’s trans daughter but, before a formal interview could go ahead, Green withdrew the allegations and the case was dropped.

More worryingly, in January 2019, a former police officer called Harry Miller was contacted by Humberside Police to be informed that he too had been reported for allegedly transphobic tweets. A limerick that he had shared was apparently a particular cause for concern, and Miller’s tweeting was therefore formally recorded as a hate incident. Although no crime had been committed, Miller reports that the police constable told him that his behaviour was worthy of investigation because “we need to check your thinking”. He was also told that Humberside Police would continue to monitor his social media accounts for further misdemeanours.

Following this experience, Miller organised a public meeting to discuss what he saw as the increasingly sinister behaviour of police in responding to reports of transphobic speech on social media. Out of this meeting came the organisation Fair Cop, a campaigning group that calls for existing laws governing freedom of speech, conscience and assembly to be enforced with greater transparency and fairness. Rob Jessel, co-founder of Fair Cop, tells me that he sees their campaign as responding to an urgent threat to political freedom, since the behaviour of police “all adds up to a chilling effect whereby people are scared of approaching the trans issue . . . and free speech affects everyone”.

“A small coterie of trans activists seem to be making the vast majority of the complaints,” says Sarah Phillimore, a barrister and member of Fair Cop. Given the guidance on transphobic hate crime issued by the College of Policing and handed down to local forces, police officers are under pressure to respond to such complaints with firm action or else risk being accused of transphobia themselves. “This isn’t about bashing the police,” Phillimore adds. “They need guidance that they can actually work with which is lawful, and an understanding that human rights are difficult—they’re often in tension, they often compete.”

The recording of “hate incidents” is a particular source of controversy. The College of Policing’s guidance, published in 2014, defines a hate incident as “any non-crime incident which is perceived, by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by a hostility or prejudice against a person who is transgender.” Defending their policy, a spokesperson for the college told me that such incidents “can cause extreme distress and be the precursor to more serious actions or crime”, which is no doubt true. Yet the wording of this guidance is so vague, and so reliant on subjective interpretation, that it could be open to misuse by politically-motivated actors.

On November 20, Miller’s counsel put this argument to the High Court as he brought judicial review proceedings against Humberside Police and the College of Policing. The court’s decision is expected to be released before the end of the year. His case will, says Miller, challenge “the idea that a law-abiding citizen can have their name recorded against a hate incident on a crime report when there was neither hate nor crime”.

If he wins, the ramifications could be huge. At the very least, the College of Policing will be tasked with reforming its guidance on hate incidents, and other public bodies may also be forced to re-examine their policies. And if he loses? If we are faced with a situation in which controversial opinions are liable to be criminalised, and police are free to enforce political orthodoxy with impunity? Well then, says Phillimore, “society had better get ready to build a lot more prisons.”

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In a 2014 article in Feminist Current, Meghan Murphy argues that just as white people in blackface appropriate exaggerated cultural stereotypes of ethnicity in order to mock black people, drag queens mock women by appropriating exaggerated cultural stereotypes of womanhood. These include hairstyles, make-up, nails, dresses and supposedly feminised traits like “cattiness”. Worse, just as white people who don blackface typically have whiteness-related privileges that black people lack, drag queens typically have male-related privileges that women lack.

So do drag queens mock women? Individual intent is less relevant than it might seem. In his defence, Trudeau rightly avoided talking about whether he had intended to mock anyone, referring instead to racism he didn’t see at the time. The real question, raised by Murphy, is if drag has a mocking cultural meaning beyond its practitioners’ intentions. In fact, drag often isn’t directed towards humour at all. In his book The Changing Room, historian Laurence Senelick describes the antecedents of modern drag: shamanism, aimed at ends like divination and the expulsion of spirits, and various stylized forms of theatre, such as Japanese Kabuki and English Elizabethan. Even so, he does little to dislodge the suspicion that drag is very often misogynistic. “[T]he contaminating reality of woman was to be sublimated by means of abstract, masked impersonation”; “The perfect universe of poetic illusion is best configured by a youth in women’s garb, rather than a girl in men’s clothes”; and “women in local theatre troupes . . . faded into the background because they were being women, rather than playing women” are just a few sentences from the book.

The central question is whether drag’s modern, Western, humorous incarnation has a misogynistic, mocking cultural meaning. I think it does. As with blackface, a fundamental source of humour operates independently of any wittiness, observation, or timing. Namely: a white person as a black person, or a man as a woman, is found by audiences to be hilariously incongruent, given the presumed superior social status of the performers relative to the “inferior” groups they respectively impersonate. The temporary, assumed degradation of a performer’s status is in itself funny. This explains why drag kings—women performing as men—or black people playing white people, are not usually found funny at first sight, though witty or well-observed material may make them so. It also explains the outcome of the following thought experiment: for any given drag performance, an identical performance, though this time given by what the audience knew to be a woman underneath equally heavy make-up and sequins, would not be as funny.

Some in the gender studies field argue that drag queens positively “queer” gender: that is, they subvert otherwise rigid cultural binaries that would put men and masculinity on one side, and women and femininity on the other, and assign heterosexuality to both of them. The philosopher Judith Butler argues (jargon alert): “Parodic proliferation deprives hegemonic culture and its critics of the claim to naturalised or essentialist gender identities.” Yet drag has been around for millennia, and the binaries still look pretty stable to me. Far from drag queens making it more acceptable for men to exhibit femininity, in the UK at least it seems rather to have become more acceptable for young women to look like drag queens. I am not sure if that is much of an advance.

A further problem with Butler’s thesis is that contemporary drag queens tend to aim for humour, and humour is often highly conservative. Many jokes depend on shared norms between the performer’s persona and the audience, in order to subvert those norms for comic effect. But usually the subversion is only temporary, and purely instrumental—to produce the belly laugh, leaving the norms untouched, and arguably even reinforced by the enjoyably cathartic experience. The laugh reveals, at least to others, if not to its owner, the structure of prejudices but does not challenge them. Much laughter towards drag queens depends on, and simultaneously nurtures, the attitude that a man can be made to look preposterous by dressing up as a woman, but not vice versa.

Performers can and do use creativity and intelligence to try to work subversively against drag’s inbuilt reactionary grain. To that end, they may call upon its long, rich history for inspiration, to quote or satirise. (As Ru Paul has said: “I don’t dress like a woman, I dress like a drag queen”.) The fact remains, though, that in uncreative hands, drag collapses all too quickly into “look at the silly man in the dress”; with an accompanying persistent undertone of “aren’t women silly?”

If there can be non-misogynist drag, then the door is left open, in some distant but possible world, for a performance in blackface to challenge and genuinely subvert the racism in which actual cases of blackface, in our actual world, are thoroughly grounded. Those who reject this suggestion as outrageous need to explain why creative recuperation is eternally impossible for blackface, but not for drag. And the answer can’t simply be “because misogyny’s fine, but racism isn’t”.

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