The Mail is keen for there to be more unmarried mothers. Don’t look so staggered, it’s on today’s front page. “NHS spends £1m a week on repeat abortions: Single women using terminations ‘as another form of contraceptive’”, the headline wails, and the body copy adds plaintively, “According to the statistics, single or unmarried women account for five out of every six repeat terminations.” There’s only one implication I can see: the Mail thinks abortion should be available exclusively to those with a ring on their finger. Continue reading
Sarah Ditum
Freelance writer and journalist
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Why I am a feminist
Last weekend, I took part in my first ever feminist direct action when I attended the counter-protest to the SPUC anti-abortion vigil in Bath. If you’d asked me whether I was a feminist ten years ago, you’d probably have got very strange and hesitant answer out of me: I wasn’t anti-feminist, but I wasn’t sure that I was one, either. In my early 20s, my main contact with feminism as a political movement came through university, where I was studying English literature. Continue reading
Sky News Sunrise: extreme diets
I snuck my way onto Sky News Sunrise yesterday morning to talk about the perils of extreme diets – in this case, a nasogastric tube diet, which I wrote about in a piece for the Guardian. My giant news head (friend on Twitter: “This particular extreme diet involves being large enough to eat only unsuspecting news anchors.”) managed to get a few decent comments into the discussion. Continue reading
Behind the scenes at the Good Men Project
Earlier this week, Paperhouse was invited to sit in on an editorial meeting at the Good Men Project, where we were privileged to witness the genesis of one of the greatest, most boundary-breaking works on sexual desire ever to appear on the internet: Mark Radcliffe’s In Praise Of Small-Breasted Women, in which he bravely explained how more than a handful’s a waste and he would like to get his hands all over them titties, girl. The following transcript gives a key insight into how the GMP is working to reflect the multidimensionality of men and manhood (and if you don’t understand that long word, it’s probably because you’re a dumb broad with a big chest). Continue reading
Feminism’s zombie stats: 63% of young women would rather be glamour models
Zombie stats are numerical factoids that just won’t quit, however dead they get. They lurch up from their graves in every subject, drawn to the juicy warm flesh of public consciousness by some unkillable primal instinct, spreading their intelligence-murdering contagion wherever they shamble. There’s a special pang in seeing their rotten heads pop up in a debate you know and care about, so this week, I am going to bust the mouldering brain pans of feminism’s favourite zombie stats.
“There are upsides to being this obnoxious”: why newspapers hate me for being successful
By the Daily Mail
The other day, I got over 1.5 million hits. “They’ve come from Twitter,” explained the digital editor, “to tell you what a repulsive pustule on the face of journalism you are.”
You’re probably thinking, “What a lovely surprise!” But while it was lovely, it wasn’t a surprise. At least, not for me.
Throughout my online life, I’ve regularly had hordes of readers sent my way by people who think they’re better than me and want their friends and followers to share in the glow of moral superiority that only right-wing rags can shed over liberal-leaning punters. Continue reading
Pornwars! A New Left Project debate with Gail Dines
This week, New Left Project has been running a debate between me and Pornland author Gail Dines, “the world’s leading anti-pornography campaigner” and “a highly regarded academic” (according to this profile by Julie Bindel). Parts one, two and three have been published, with Dines’ final response due to appear shortly. The initial invitation from NLP arrived in November 2010, meaning that this conversation has been rumbling away for over a year, and the result is neither very illuminating on its ostensive subject nor particularly flattering to Dines’ academic credentials.
Lansley’s attack on abortion: expensive, disruptive and unjustified
Almost 600 routine inspections of hospitals and care homes have been cancelled by the Care Quality Commission in order to pursue a direct order from health secretary Andrew Lansley to make the investigation of abortion clinics “a priority”, according to a report by the BBC. In a letter from the CQC to the Department Of Health, obtained through a Freedom Of Information request, the CQC also said that the interruption to its scheduled activities had cost £1 million and required the equivalent of 1,100 working days. Continue reading
Pandas are perverts
Pandas are terrible at sex. Today I learned that female pandas are only fertile for two days a year. For Edinburgh zoo resident Tian Tian, that brief knocking-up window started today. If pandas had any sense of responsibility to their genes, this would be the prompt for some mad panda action. They would be at it, and at it good. But no, because as well as being practically infertile by design (two days, pandas! What, did you confuse “menarche” and “menopause” when you were working out your evolutionary strategy?), pandas are also lazy, lazy lovers.
Dogs of the stars
In the late ’90s, a story emerged that made dogs a rebuke to post-Communist Russia. Ivan Mishukov ran away from his neglectful mother and her alcoholic boyfriend aged four, and survived two years on the streets of Moscow by begging for food and sharing his spoils with a pack of stray dogs that became his protectors. Adult humans abandoned, ignored or abused the city’s street children; the dogs were more humane. During the 1950s, though, dogs were the wet-nosed vanguard of Soviet progress. The successful launch of Sputnik 2 put a living creature into orbit for the first time, and that creature was Laika, a female Moscow stray mongrel, captured and trained for space flight. Continue reading
