A scare story planted in the press here on Bank Holiday Monday warns that high street shops could face criminal charges and harassment suits for stocking ‘lads’ mags’. We see these periodic scare stories coupled with righteous indignation every few years. There was a time when they were far more aggressive, but the people behind these facile campaigns have realised specious arguments are a lot more persuasive to most people than hysteria and violence.
Anyone who doubts this should check out The NCROPA Virtual Archive - currently under construction - which includes correspondence and other material from the 1970s onwards relating to the attempts by feminazis and their fellow travellers not only to ban so-called pornography but to demonise anyone involved in its production, and its consumers.
On Monday, Kat Banyard of the group behind this latest attempt appeared on the BBC where she spouted her nonsense while wearing an incredibly sexy black dress. The group concerned is UK Feminista, which describes itself as campaigning “for a world where women and men are equal.”
That is the rhetoric; the reality is of course very different, but here is some more rhetoric from the UK Feminista About Us page.
In the UK:
Approximately 100,000 women are raped each year, and just 6% of reported rapes end in a conviction.
Men outnumber women in parliament 4 to 1, and just 4 of the 23 cabinet members are women.
Women working full-time earn 16% less than men, and two-thirds of low paid workers are women.
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Readers with nous with recognise these factoids as statistical sexism; it shouldn’t be necessary to debunk them, but here we go.
There are not 100,000 women raped in the UK every year. According to official statistics - which in this case mean something - there were 1,058 offenders convicted of rape in 2010. That is bad enough, but it is nothing like 100,000, even if we multiply this by 20, and there is no reason we should.
Women working full-time earn 16% less than men, and two-thirds of low paid workers are women.
This is the mythical gender pay gap again. In the first place, women - or some of them - have babies. While some women can juggle a career with a family, many can’t, and many don’t want to. This means that many career women lag behind their male counterparts. The biggest earners in the country are also men, including our overpaid footballers and most bankers. When you make allowance for women taking out time to raise families and the high earners, that 16-17% gender pay gap all but disappears.
What has all this to do with lads’ mags in supermarkets? Not a lot, but it demonstrates a willingness by Miss Banyard and her ilk to twist the truth. Not that they aren’t doing that already.
Can a photograph of a semi-naked woman on the front cover of a magazine really be described as harassment? Not really, certainly not if it is tasteful. Of course, in the name of sexual equality we could also include magazines that contain photographs of semi-naked men. Er, actually we do.
Take a gander at some of the front covers here.
In the unlikely event that UK Feminista succeeds with this latest ludicrous campaign, it will be scoring an own goal, because some of the highest paid women in the country if not the world are topless models. Indeed, one thorougly modern woman who is as talented as she is stunningly attractive if not more so is a certain Lady Gaga. Last year she decided to record one of her albums in the nude. Anyone - male or female - telling her to cover up to avoid harassing women is likely to be given a two word answer, the second being off.
Leaving aside all the above, we live in interesting times, as the proverb goes. We have recently seen a serving soldier murdered on a South London street in the most horrific manner possible by fanatics who adhere to an ideology that truly does harass and oppress women. Perhaps Miss Banyard would prefer life under the Taliban? We are also facing manufactured austerity, which with the resultant attack on our health services is a bigger threat to women’s health - and those of their children - than any manufactured harassment which in this case exists only in the tiny minds of UK Feminista and its brainwashed supporters. Does the media, especially the BBC, need to give space to this sort of nonsense when there are genuinely important stories out there?
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