ONE of my favourite free activities in London is eavesdropping – although the ear-blasting volume at which so many people speak makes me question if it qualifies as such.
On the edge of Parliament Square on Saturday, I was trying to find a phone signal when I overheard two strangers – a young English man and a middle-aged American woman – discussing the Supreme Court judgment, and the women who had fought for it.
It was unfathomable, they agreed. Why on Earth would anyone have taken this case to the highest court in the land? What were they thinking? What beliefs lay behind this action? It was truly baffling. The man wished aloud that he could speak to one of those women, to sit down and have a conversation about it and really try to understand her point of view. The woman agreed this would be an enlightening experience.
You can probably guess what happened next. I had not intended to get into any conversations after observing the scenes in and around the square. I had just finished taking photographs of banners, including one proudly held aloft by a young man that portrayed a “terf” drinking not champagne – with which the For Women Scotland campaigners toasted the ruling with last week – but the urine of the patriarchy.
The artist had very politely censored the cartoon penis from which the drops of urine were flowing. I lacked the nerve to ask him about this choice but remain fascinated by it. Was showing a cartoon penis – of the kind scrawled on walls, bus shelters and in caves throughout the world – “too much”?
Was he concerned this image might be triggering to others in the crowd, such as those – all quite clearly female – who brandished signs suggesting it would be ludicrous for them to use women’s toilets? Did he maybe imagine his artwork, with its insightful message, might make the evening news (or the pages of a newspaper), but only if the offending penis was obscured?
We will probably never know, although if the chap in question wishes to sit down and discuss his thinking with me I would happily take him up on the offer. I would bring my own refreshments.
It will perhaps come as no surprise to learn that the other young man, who so clearly stated his wish to sit down with a woman who could explain the thinking behind the Supreme Court case, did not wish to do so on Saturday.
His initial stunned response was that he was “too emotional just now”. He was saved by an incoming phone call from a friend trying to find him in the crowds. To his credit he returned to me after locating her to politely thank me for the offer and repeat his reason for declining.
He did not request any contact details, so we will not be arranging a sit-down in less emotional circumstances. In the very unlikely event that he is reading this, the offer still stands. I strongly believe we have much more in common than divides us. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s busy dining out on his experience of being accosted by an undercover terf.
The American woman looked taken aback when I informed her that feminist meetings in the UK had for years been aggressively picketed by noisy, masked activists. She questioned whether I had actual proof of this happening.
I was there, I told her and it’s all been very well documented. I did not sneer at her to educate herself, or to “do the work”. Perhaps she was feigning ignorance, perhaps she wasn’t. It’s easy to lose patience with people who refuse to entertain the idea that well-organised feminist women might be worth listening to when it comes to matters of women’s dignity, privacy and safety. It’s no surprise that they were outraged to see such women publicly celebrating after years of tireless campaigning. How dare they gloat! Where is their empathy for the marginalised?
When self-proclaimed trans allies claim the desire for single-sex spaces demonstrates a lack of empathy, empathy for other women clearly does not count, because women are supposed to be the ones being empathetic towards others, not being empathised with.
The placard with the censored penis was double-sided. The flipside bore a list of things that “real women” (underlined) do not do. “Attack the vulnerable” was number one, followed by “support patriarchal ideals of womanhood”, “police other’s [sic] bodies” and “gatekeep safe spaces”.
The notion that real women do not attack the vulnerable is itself, of course, a patriarchal ideal of womanhood based on the same-sex stereotypes this arrogant young man promotes when he insists that real, kind women must not “gatekeep”. Their most vulnerable sisters can, of course, be ignored altogether.
These men truly believe they are being virtuous, even when scrawling penises on to cardboard, and they are blind to the social conditioning that leads them to disregard anything “nasty women” might say.
There’s a lot more work to do. Challenging sexist stereotypes has never been an easy task. Let’s take it one conversation at a time.
