I don’t care that much about my appearance. I don’t waste time chasing after arbitrary beauty standards. I get my hair done, though, and I’ve started to have it coloured since I turned 40, but that’s very low maintenance: four …
Has Sadiq Khan sacrificed women?
Six months ago, I was abruptly removed as independent Co-chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board, an unpaid role I’d held since 2013. For more than a year, I had been trying to get an …
The fake feminism of Carrie Johnson
Tory loyalists have found a form of feminism to stroke, like a magic unicorn. Of course, it is individualistic and, laughably, in the service of just one individual: Carrie Johnson, the Prime Minister’s wife.
She is the subject of First …
What progressives get wrong about abortion
Shortly after Hillary Clinton failed to become President, I attended a meeting of American abortion providers to discuss the problems they and their staff would face under Donald Trump. Already they struggled with protests and blockades outside clinics; death threats …
Raquel Rosario Sánchez won’t be silenced
Raquel Rosario Sánchez should be graduating this month with a PhD from one of the UK’s most prestigious universities. Instead, she will be in court, suing the University of Bristol for allegedly failing to protect her from bullying and harassment.…
Stop saying the UK is transphobic
When it gathered in Strasbourg on Tuesday to condemn “the extensive and often virulent attacks on the rights of LGBTI people”, the Council of Europe singled out a small collection of the most inhospitable countries. It contained the usual suspects …
The death of intimacy
The sexual entrepreneur keeps a spreadsheet of every encounter she’s ever had. It’s populated with all kinds of information: how much they talked, the different positions they tried, whether it was the first or second or fifth time, and, of …
Breast milk is not for men
The “pumping room” at Ambrosia Labs in Cambodia is an airless and dystopian space. I see 20 or so women packed in, being “milked”. Their tops are off and they all have tubes attached to both nipples; their breast milk …
The truth about the Women’s March
Five years after the Women’s March, it’s hard to remember how much changed in 2016: politics, seemingly overnight, became the most popular entertainment of the day.
It’s not that there hadn’t been things for Leftists to protest. But even as …
The misogyny of the NHS
When it became clear two years ago that the NHS could be overwhelmed by a terrifying new virus, Britain leapt to its support: we clapped, we donated and we decided to paint rainbows. What we didn’t do, however, was question …
Kamala Harris was set up to fail
When I was a young girl in Somalia, I would listen to the grown-ups around me ask my brother: “What would you like to be when you grow up?” No one ever asked me this.
But I always interrupted. I …
Why are women becoming witches?
Seattle-based Bri Luna, aka @thehoodwitch, has 472,000 followers on Instagram. On her website, thehoodwitch.com, her profile picture shows an attractive young woman wearing a black dress that reveals both tattooed cleavage and one tattooed thigh, holding a crystal ball in …