So much has has happened in the world of gender inequality (that is, the actual world) during this blog’s lengthy hiatus, it would be foolish to attempt to cover everything.
I long to say how glad I am that, since I last posted, we now live in a culture where women who have campaigned to get a female face on an English banknote aren’t systematically targeted with death and rape threats, and that when they are, they are taken seriously by the police; or that female prime ministers are not publicly attacked with sexist abuse; or that it is regarded as just plain weird that magazines full of near-naked women would sit on supermarket shelves next to Peppa Pig magazine and the New Scientist; or that topless women were not compared with vegetables by tabloid newspapers in a sad attempt at wit. I wish I could be glad that statistics were not manufactured and misattributed by lazy journalists attempting to victim-blame and underplay the impact of a serious crime (as journalist Peter Lloyd did in a recent Daily Mail article, attributing a statistic to UK charity Rape Crisis that ‘almost 1 in 10 rape allegations are fake’ – a completely incorrect statement for which Rape Crisis has demanded a retraction and apology). I wish I could be happy that we live in a country where council cuts haven’t caused the destruction of essential services, meaning that the lives of women and children are put in danger.
But sadly I can’t.
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