Three cheers for the UN: female genital mutilation is male insecurity defined

“If an Ohio punk has the right to have her genitalia operated on, why has not the Somali woman the same right?” feminist author Germaine Greer once asked.

Greer is, of course, wrong about almost everything. She once famously refused to sign a petition defending Salmon Rushdie because he was, she said, a “megalomaniac” and “an Englishman with a dark skin” (as if there's any shame in that).

When it comes to FGM, Greer’s mistake is to confuse female genital decoration with mutilation. Surprisingly for a supposedly “feminist” author, she also ignores the blindingly obvious difference between the two “procedures”: the first is a purely aesthetic choice, whereas the second is but one weapon in a much larger and timeless attempt to police women’s chastity.

Fortunately, it’s been reported today that the UN has not listened to the council of cultural relativists like Greer, and has instead called for a ban on what it correctly refers to as the “grotesque practice” of female genital mutilation.

About time I say.

Feminist activist and author Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who was put through the procedure herself, describes FGM as follows:

“As much of the clitoris as possible is removed along with the inner and outer labia. Then the inner walls of the vagina are scraped until they bleed and are then bound with pins or thorns. The tissue on either side grows together, forming a thick scar. Two small openings roughly equal to the diameter of a matchstick are left for urination and menstruation respectively.”

However in some quarters, almost every measure that’s ever been devised to control female sexuality, be it niqabs, burkas, the cult of virginity, prudishness about promiscuity and, ultimately, a procedure that literally hacks off those parts of the genitalia that respond to sexual stimulation, are viewed as no such thing, but rather as sort of benign forms of cultural expression. The historical context – i.e. male insecurity about women’s sexual choice - is seemingly redefined as an innate feminine inclination towards modesty and wholesomeness; or in Greer’s case, is ignored entirely.

Some western liberals are of course fond of comparing the way in which women are treated in countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia with the apparently “sexualised” portrayal of women in the west. While it would be foolhardy to say that there isn't some way to go in terms of gender equality in the West – there is a significant pay gap and rape is vastly under-reported, to give just two examples – this sort of comparison is curious to say the least, and is especially fatuous when one considers that the “sexualisation” of women in its Page 3-esc form is far preferable to its opposite, of which FGM is just one manifestation.

For until you recognise what’s really going on – what has, in reality, always been going on – you are likely to flounder, and even, like Greer, exonerate the very mindset you ought to be combating. Many men, regardless of their country of origin, are terrified of the degree of sexual choice women have, and Martin Amis was correct to describe Islamism, the ideology of splenetic woman hatred, as male insecurity on steroids.

And that, in the end, is what FGM is: male insecurity defined. Until you recognise that, you will utterly fail to understand one of the major fronts on which the battle for sexual equality is being fought: the equal right to have sex. 

Three cheers for the UN, then.

Originally published @the Independent.

The culture of offence takes aim

This is a guest post by HegemonyOrBust.

Helen Flanagan is an actress who used to appear in Coronation Street and was lately a contestant in ITV’s ever popular “Celebrity Jungle Torture”, or whatever it’s called. She’s one of that new brand of celebrities who tweets herself (rather than having a PR tweet for her, which is often the case), and treats us to the mundane minutiae of her day.

On Monday evening, she ran into a bit of a problem. Being hungover, she posted an image of herself taken in October, showing her in lingerie, pointing what appears to be a very obvious toy gun towards her head, with the caption “headf**k”.

Cue outrage.

As everyone who casts even a vague glance at the news would know by now, there was the small matter of the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre last Friday. Twitter decided, in its hundreds, that Ms Flanagan was “insensitive” and “offensive”. Several newspapers – chief amongst them the Sun and Mail – decided to follow suit (complete, of course, with the offending image, because Ms Flanagan in lingerie is, one assumes, guaranteed to sell newspapers even without the addition of a very obvious toy gun). Ms Flanagan, who states she is diagnosed with bipolar disorder and attention deficit disorder, ends up having to appear on Daybreak, ITV’s bland early morning snoozathon, to apologise profusely for her “crime”.

Each newspaper’s story included within it quotes from parents of children killed in the massacre. These parents were unnamed and unidentified.

Now, there’s only two interpretations one could read of this: the first, is the charitable one, which is the Sun and the Mail made up these quotes. I’ve got no idea whether they did or not, by the way, and am not accusing them of doing so. But, as I say, that’s the charitable interpretation. The uncharitable interpretation is this: a minor British celebrity posts a picture of herself on Twitter that only those stretching, reaching, aching for a connection, could actually connect to Sandy Hook and get “offended”. Ms Flanagan holds no assault rifle. Ms Flanagan is pointing the “gun” at nobody bar herself. Ms Flanagan offers no threat. Ms Flanagan, as the accompanying tweets show, is talking about having a splitting headache. Meanwhile, at the UK Cinemas, hundreds of thousands of people go and watch “Skyfall” and “Seven Psychopaths” and Tom Cruise in “Jack Reacher”, revelling in fictional guns being used violently. On BBC1 on Monday night, the late film was “Matador”, featuring a washed up hitman. On the weekend, hundreds of thousands of people tuned in to watch “The Killing” and “Homeland”, which both feature death, violence and the threat of violence. In this context, Ms Flanagan’s tweet is a mere drop in the ocean, it’s offensiveness diluted to almost homeopathic concentrations, and it takes a reach of almost gargantuan proportions to connect it to Sandy Hook. Convinced they have been “offended” by her “insensitive” behaviour, and determined to share the genuine pain of actual victims through their posturing, hundreds of people take to Twitter to berate a woman with self-confessed mental health issues. The British tabloid press, not to be outdone, decides the best thing to do in this situation is to run with the story and contact the families of victims just days after their children had died, to ask them their opinion about “news” they would never have heard of were it not for the Sun and the Mail contacting them.

Now, putting the story like that, one needs to ask, what’s really insensitive and offensive here? Because for the life of me, I can’t see that it’s Ms Flanagan.

Tax avoidance ought to be as socially unacceptable as drink driving

A thug wearing a suit is still a thug, and a crime is no more acceptable when it is committed by a “respectable” member of society than when it is carried out by what the right-wing press like to think of as the criminal classes. 

Yet the concept of one law for all, while an invaluable legal principle, is in reality something of a sham. Racial prejudice, unequal access to a costly legal team, as well as a public preference for the tough sentencing of some crimes over others, all contrive to make the idea of equality before the law an ideal rather than a reality. So while a thief who pilfers a bottle of water from a store can receive six months in prison, when it comes to white collar crime politicians have traditionally preferred to take a more, shall we say consensual approach. The phenomenon was first recorded in 1949 by the American criminologist Edwin Sutherland, who noticed that: 

“There is a consistent bias involved in the administration of criminal justice under laws which apply to business and the professions and which therefore involve only the upper socio-economic group…”

The same holds true for morality, and for those things which fall under the heading of deviance rather than criminality. So while the poor supposedly need threats and sanctions to get them to behave in a civilised manner, the rich require “incentives” – and are, lest you forget that, ready to pull down the roof should it ever look like things aren’t going to keep going their way. 

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the debate over tax, and more specifically in the language used by the great and the good to justify their tax arrangements. There are a variety of stock phrases that anyone who has ever discussed tax avoidance will have heard, all of which imply that we would all be doing clever things with our money if only we had the cash to pay an affective accountant. As the U2 guitarist David Evans, aka “The Edge”, once rhetorically asked (presumably during time-out from telling the Irish government to give more money to Africa): “Who doesn’t want to be tax-efficient?”.

Indeed, who wouldn’t want to be tax efficient?  

 The answer I suppose depends very much upon what sort of efficiency it is you are aiming at. Were the question phrased more honestly – i.e. bearing some relation to what the consequences of being “tax efficient” actually are - I suspect the answer would be somewhat different. After all, lessening your tax bill through financial acumen may be satisfying from a purely self-interested point of view, but depriving cancer patients of otherwise affordable medical treatment, or preventing a dementia sufferer from getting the care they require in old age - both of which are consequences of depleted treasury coffers – hardly cover you with glory.

According to the TUC, £25billion is lost annually through tax avoidance by individuals and businesses; more than five times as much as is lost through benefit fraud and error. To put that figure into some kind of context, George Osborne’s first budget planned for cuts of £6.2 billion and public sector workers currently face a three per cent rise in their pension contributions to save the state just under two billion. A modern hospital costs in the region of £90 million, and a state-of-the-art environmentally friendly school costs between five and £10 million. Free school dinners for every primary school child in the country would cost an extra billion, if you felt that way inclined.

 David Cameron, to his credit, recently informed the House of Commons that he was “not happy with the current situation”. “I think the HMRC needs to look at it [tax avoidance] very carefully. We do need to make sure we are encouraging these businesses to invest in our country, as they are, but they should be paying fair taxes as well,” he said. 

And yet I don’t think it’s just me who suspects the Prime Minister’s language would have been a little more robust had such a colossal sum disappeared via the benefits system. Again, it appears that if you wear a suit and have money, it won’t only be that you sleep in a warm bed with a full stomach at night, but you will go through life playing by a completely different set of rules to your working class counterparts. If you are wealthy and don’t fancy paying tax, you might be encouraged to pay more, but that’s about as far as it’ll go.

That isn’t to say that we should leave it to politicians to tackle tax avoidance. We ought to be able to leave it to them of course, but the major political parties have in recent years demonstrated such a palpable unwillingness to do anything about the problem that a new approach is required.

At the risk of being accused of moralising, the problem is deeper than that, anyway. Politicians will only act if there is a genuine groundswell of opinion that sees tax avoidance as a major issue. At present, there isn’t. Not yet, anyway. UK Uncut has done much to change things with a number of brilliant awareness campaigns aimed at those firms which squirrel their money overseas, but more needs to be done to link in the public mind the real cost of tax avoidance – the hospital closures, the children denied otherwise affordable cancer treatment, the pensioners freezing in their homes – with the supposedly amoral act of becoming “tax efficient”. Tax avoidance, either by companies or individuals, is as anti-social as drink driving, and like getting behind the wheel in a state of inebriation, it has a devastating human cost that no amount of obfuscation and jargon should be allowed to skirt over.

Cigarette companies ordered to apologise, but is junk food the new tobacco?

A US judge has ordered tobacco firms to fund a public health campaign detailing their "past deception" over the risks associated with tobacco use.

The move is predicated on the notion that tobacco companies “deliberately deceived the American public about the health effects of smoking”.

The President of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids described it as a "vitally important step" that would require tobacco companies to “finally tell the truth" about the "devastating consequences of their wrongdoing”.

And the judge appears to have a solid case. For years smoking was portrayed by big tobacco as an enjoyable, even glamorous habit, and the harm it was doing to customers was ignored, downplayed, and finally, when the lawsuits began to pile up, grudgingly acknowledged.

Even though the industry did finally admit that smoking was addictive and damaging to health, it continues to spend money fighting against campaigns aimed at warning people of the dangers of cigarette smoke; as well as on initiatives which seek to "counteract the ‘denormalisation’ of tobacco".

It isn’t only the tobacco industry which is looking anxiously towards the courts, however. Researchers in the US have begun to argue that corporations which produce junk food are the new big tobacco. They claim that, like the tobacco companies before them, corporate food giants are portraying themselves as reputable companies who take their social responsibilities seriously, when in reality they care little about the spiraling "obesity epidemic" they are in large part responsible for creating.

"It took five decades after the initial studies linking tobacco and cancer for effective public health policies to be put in place, with enormous cost to human health. Must we wait five decades to respond to the similar effects of Big Food?" a report published earlier this year in the influential PLOS journal asked.

In a not unrelated development, this side of the Atlantic a European consortium is investigating whether or not such a thing as food addiction exist; and if so, whether it should be recognised at a clinical level alongside addictions to drugs and alcohol. Speaking of alcohol, it was also reported that researchers at King’s College London believe they have found the gene which makes people binge drink. Lead researcher Professor Gunter Schumann said people were inclined to "seek out situations which fulfill their sense of reward and make them happy, so if your brain is wired to find alcohol rewarding, you will seek it out".

If there is any message we might take from all of this it’s a reassuringly absolving one: it isn't your fault. If you happen to be overweight and if your liver is shot from too many Sambucas, not to worry, it isn’t your doing and those whose doing it is will soon be brought to task.

In the case big tobacco, those who’ve suffered a deterioration in their health because of smoking do have a strong case: the tobacco industry did lie to them, and in doing so it behaved abominably. It would take a particularly cold heart to argue that smokers who were oblivious to the harm they were doing to themselves are responsible for their later ill health. Personal responsibility is after all compromised somewhat when the choice a person makes is built on a foundation of sand.

That said, pointing the finger of blame at others for our obesity, or for the consequences of our nights out on the sauce, or because the burgers in McDonalds are a little too appetising, or because junk food is too cheap to begin with (as if that’s a bad thing!), is to hide from reality – people are aware that being overweight is unhealthy and carry on regardless. Why? Because doing unhealthy things often feels very, very good.

Were it not for the fact that the NHS is facing a looming disaster, it wouldn’t matter. But as it was reported on Monday, the NHS is facing a funding shortfall of £54 billion by 2021/22. Even if proposed efficiency savings are implemented, the health service still faces a potential financial black hole of £34 billion. Researchers predict that if current trends continue, up to 48 per cent of men and 43 per cent of women in the UK could be obese by 2030, which translates as a £2 billion per year cost to pay for obesity-related diseases.

Blaming others for our poor health is rapidly becoming a way to deflect attention from the fact that the very idea of a health service is incompatible with modern lifestyles. The NHS is rightly viewed as a national treasure, and the politicians who meddle with it do so at their peril. But we seem to have forgotten that healthcare has a cost attached, and that we are responsible to each other if not to ourselves for maintaining at least a modicum of good health.

Blaming the food industry for making you fat is a bit like blaming Hooters because your husband likes breasts. It may be comforting to curse the corporate giants as you reach for another chocolate Digestive, but attitudes like this will destroy the NHS.

Originally published @the Independent.