Women of ill repute

Let's stop asking if they somehow deserve it

At university in the 90’s, I was bullied by a male house mate. He locked my printer in his room, saying I owed him money, and left big signs up on my door, and elsewhere in the house. The signs said SLUT. And WHORE. And other similar words. I went to the landlord, got the key to his room, retrieved my property, and went straight to the Uni welfare, who urgently rehoused me in one of the colleges.

Once there, a male student offered me support. He was the head of the college I’d moved into, and wanted to make sure I was ok and make me feel welcome. Because he was the head of the college, he had his own flat. He also had very nice arms, and could play the guitar. And reader - he cared about me! Of course, it didn’t take long, and I fell for it completely. But within a week or so, he’d lost interest. I went up to his flat to fetch my belongings and found another girl in my place.

As a woman I’m so used to getting the blame that even now, 25 years later, a part of me still thinks that I deserved to be treated in these abusive ways. At the time, my reputation was ‘tarnished’. I was ‘the girl who had to move out of that house’, or ‘the girl that so-and-so fucked and chucked’. In the weeks that followed, someone wrote SLAG in the dirt on the boot of my Austin Metro.

People, both male and female, tend to have misogyny as a default mode, even if it’s deep under the surface. Just as I still wonder if I deserved it, maybe you’re wondering the same. Maybe, even as you’ve read the brief details of these stories, you’ve had questions - what did she do to the guy she shared the house with? Did she owe him the money? Had she slept with him? What made him so angry? Maybe you’re wondering if you’re missing a detail here that somehow justifies his behaviour. (You’re not).

I’ve always been a ‘difficult woman’. In my late teens, friends nicknamed me The Pitbull and would seat me next to sexist men at dinner parties because they knew I would annihilate them with a razor sharp humour they wouldn’t be able to keep up with. I did actually want to be loved by a man but I struggled to find a match. Many of them wanted to sleep with me but none of them wanted a Pitbull on a long term basis. I would not conform or tone myself down and therefore my reputation preceded me.

Last weekend in New Zealand chaotic scenes surrounded Kellie-Jay Keen’s ‘Standing for Women’ event. Rumour had it that Keen was not only anti-trans, but Nazi. These ideas gathered momentum in the twittersphere, encouraged by the likes of Billy Bragg. Police seemed to stand by as protestors pushed down barriers, a 70 year old woman was punched in the face, and Keen herself had tomato soup and other liquids poured over her as the crowd pressed around her.

Simon Anderson @SimonRAnderson1

NEW: Here is the zoomed footage of the TRAs breaking through the barrier and assaulting an elderly woman. This is the footage Police Minister @ginnyandersen and @NZPCommissioner Andrew Coster don't want you to see. in my opinion, both are complicit. #NZPol #LetWomenSpeak

Keen is a difficult woman. Even among feminists or gender critical thinkers, she is divisive. Some feel she should do more to distance herself from far right elements who turn up to her events. I have found myself also thinking this at times. But in the past week, with the spotlight on New Zealand, I remembered my own reputation there, and started to see just how impossible it is for women to be ‘liked’ if they won’t conform.

Back in 2021 I was deplatformed from a midwifery conference in New Zealand. I have written the full story here, but the potted version is, I was booked to speak about my book Give Birth like a Feminist, but when I outed myself as having concerns about the impact of changes to language (terms like ‘birthing people’) on women’s rights and children’s health care, a petition was launched to stop me coming. In the course of the campaign against me, I was described as, ‘posing immediate risk and harm’ to people, ‘promoting and encouraging hate speech’, and as ‘the devil incarnate’.

Obviously many people believe these things to be true. The New Zealand petition was successful. In the world of birth and maternity, where I was once a popular figure, I am now persona non grata. I used to speak at a birth event around once a month, sometimes more often. Now I am not invited. Presumably because the organisers either genuinely believe me to be a bad person or because they don’t want to draw the heat of those who do.

Maybe some of them are on the fence about me, but a part of them assumes, ‘no smoke without fire’. Why would she be vilified in this way if she didn’t, somehow, deserve it? Other, far greater women join me on this list of women of ill repute: Rosie Duffield, JK Rowling, Helen Joyce, and so so many others. Nazis, bigots, TERFs. These are difficult slurs to shake off. They also make any ill-treatment of us completely justified.

Other feminist organisations have had the same problem. Woman’s Place. FiLiA. Women’s Declaration International. The Radical Notion. And more. Each of them smeared with the idea that there is something rotten at their core, even if it’s not immediately obvious. Even if they are fun to be with at parties, or useful, or intelligent - don’t get into a long term relationship with them, for they are damaged goods. What you see is not what you get. If you see them being abused, remember they probably deserve it.

Recently I’ve been thinking and chatting to people about the links between the way you get attacked and smeared on social media if you talk about women’s abilities to birth or breastfeed their babies and the attacks you get if you stick up for women’s words or how they get to speak about or define themselves. Before I’d ever been called a Nazi / TERF, I was sometimes accused of being a ‘breastfeeding Nazi’, or a member of the ‘Birthstapo’.

Coincidence? What are the common denominators here? Is it connected to the female body, and the female experience of a life in that body? Is it simply saying that women have a power that makes us different? That sex matters? That sex is not something malleable: a dad with a bottle, for example, as wonderful as this may be, is not the same as a mother with a breast, and that we won’t lie about this to make people feel better? Likewise a man cannot literally become a woman, because ‘woman’ is something physical and unconnected to a person’s actions or clothing. Whether we are talking about childbirth, menstruation or gender identity, is it somehow a robust defence of unique female biology that makes us ‘Nazis’?

These questions are interesting, but ultimately, I think the simpler answer is that it’s about women who refuse to conform, who refuse to say what everyone wants them to say, even if they don’t believe it themselves. Feminists are often called ‘Feminazis’, so maybe the Nazi thing is less to do with the female body, and more about just holding the line. I don’t really know why my 90s housemate hated me so deeply, but I suspect it’s because I was not like his mummy. I was a ‘loose woman’, wild, fighty, lewd, out of his control. I didn’t cook his tea or wash his socks or tidy his room (not that, as his housemate, I was obliged to, but I suspect he would not have declined). I went out drinking instead. I didn’t fit the mould. I wouldn’t accept that having a female body somehow automatically made me second fiddle. So I was, in his view, worthy of the worst labels he could think of.

Reputational smears are an age-old way of undermining women’s voices and slowing their progress. The above cartoon was created about the suffragettes (you can see more examples here, including one that suggests they (like 90s me!) are sluts, and others that suggest they (like present day me!) are old, ugly, witches, emasculating etc) Something broke in me this week when I watched the events in New Zealand. I realised that even I (the Pitbull!), was conforming, in a way. I was allowing myself to believe the smears about Kellie-Jay Keen, just as others have allowed themselves to believe the smears about me. Both of us are whole women, we are undoubtedly flawed, but are we ‘Nazis'? Errr…nope.

So, going forwards, I’m going to stop believing the lies I’m told about women who won’t conform. Because this is conformity too. And by not conforming in this way I know I’ll expose myself in turn to further smears to my own reputation. They probably won’t write them on my door or in the dirt of my car these days, but they’ll put them out there nevertheless. But to channel another woman of ill repute, Germaine Greer, “I don’t care”.

Women's Voices @WomenReadWomen

"I think misogyny plays a really big part in this... That a man will be a better woman than someone who was born a woman." — Germaine Greer, 2015

If this is your graphic please let me know so I can credit you! I do care about that!

UPDATE! Graphic is by Louise Woodward-Styles who you can find on twitter and instagram! Thanks Louise.

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