24 April 2022 29SOCIETY
Rosamund Urwin
Fix the System, Not the
Women
by Laura Bates
Simon & Schuster £12.99 pp204In every panel discussion
about how to achieve greater
equality in the workplace,
someone always pipes up to
say that women just need
more confidence. Buck up
your ideas, ladies! Lean in! It’s
on you to find the self-
assurance to succeed. So
whenever I have been asked
to speak on this subject, I flip
it around. If you look at the
worlds of politics, business
and, yes, even journalism,
you’ll find a panoply of
examples of hubris; if the men
at the top had a little more
self-doubt, we might end up
with a better-run world.
The feminist campaigner
Laura Bates, who founded the
Everyday Sexism project,
which collects women’s
stories about misogyny and
discrimination, takes this
argument much further in her
new book. She argues that
while society often blames
women and tells them to
change, what really needs to
be transformed is the
“system”. This extends from
how children are treated
— girls given T-shirts with the
slogan “Mummy’s little
cupcake” while their brothers
get “Mummy’s little soldier”
— to schools, the police, law
and the media, structures
that she believes are all
imbued with patriarchal
prejudice.
Submissions from
Bates’s project
pepper the book
and are among its
most powerful
parts. There’s the
teacher at a
secondary school
who suffersharassment from her pupils,
including a boy — in Year 8
— who regularly gives himself
an erection, then calls her
over to “help” with his work;
management told her this
was just part of the job. Or
the teenage girl who tells her
mother that she was raped,
only to discover that both
her mother and grandmother
had been sexually assaulted
too.
The rest of this short book
relies heavily on recent news
stories to build its argument,
from the murder of Sarah
Everard in 2021 to the way
additional household labour
disproportionately fell to
women during lockdown. It
works as a summary of the
injustices women face — and
the way that these interact
with other forms of prejudice
such as racism — but would
have benefited from more
original reporting. She also
dedicates a chapter to media
misogyny, without noting that
many of the issues discussed
in her book have come to light
thanks to journalists.
Gender-critical feminists
will have a bigger complaint.
I had expected Bates to skirt
their fight with transgender
activists; a brief dip into these
issues tends to generate more
heat than light. Instead she
suddenly turns near the end
to the question of whether
trans women should be
welcomed by the feminist
movement, adopting a “the
more the merrier” approach.
But this swerves the real
debate: how to balance the
rights of the trans community
with the rights of women to
access single-sex spaces such
as prisons and refuges.
This isn’t a book full of
answers anyway; it is
more a primer on the
worst elements of
being a woman in- On this Bates
leaves the book’s
best line to Gloria
Steinem: “Women
don’t have the
power to be
our own
worst
enemies.” c
Burrell shrieked as the police
led him away, having found
boxes of Diana’s personal
items, including underwear,
in his attic: “I want white lilies
on my coffin.” It goes on.
We learn that for Harry’s
30th birthday Charles sent his
son a suit, but one of the legs
and one of the arms were too
short and Harry, already
frustrated by his father’s lack
of interest, angrily sent it
back. Brown claims the
Frankensuit marked the start
of the collapse in Harry’s
relationship with his father,
a slippery, precipitous series
of events that culminated in
the Oprah interview.She picks her way
gingerly through Megxit,
pointing out how rude the
duchess could be to staff, but
also how racist some
members of the royal family
have been. “Every day a
different Blackamoor crying
on her shoulder,” Princess
Margaret once told someone
about a Commonwealth
summit, “and you know... she
knows all their names”. It is
full of zingers like this.
I found it interesting that
Brown claims it was former
girlfriend Cressida Bonas who
encouraged Harry to try
therapy, not Meghan: not for
the first time in the book, you
think, how would Brown
know that? On Cressida’s
advice Brown claims he
ultimately turned to a series of
shrinks from MI6, who are
used to dealing with people
who have two different
personas. Reading how
compassionate, gentle
goddess Cressida transformed
the troubled (and stingy)Why it’s hard
to be female
Everyday Sexism’s Laura Bates on what
still needs to change for women in societyprince, I wondered: could one
of Brown’s sources be Bonas
herself?
Fergie comes across as
similarly fragrant; Brown even
finds a way to excuse Budgie
the helicopter. Andrew, by
contrast, is a vulgar, rude
“coroneted sleaze machine”,
whose ligging is disgusting.
When not consorting with
various undesirables, he is
humiliating his ex-wife, asking
a visitor to Royal Lodge,
“What are you doing with this
fat cow?”
There is one moment when
Brown appears to have missed
the scoop of her life, though. In
late 2010 she’s invited to a
dinner with Andrew, Jeffrey
Epstein and Woody Allen —
the famous “predators’ ball”
the prince is supposed to have
thrown to welcome Epstein out
of prison. For the first time in
for ever Brown turns down an
invitation — something she
now, unconvincingly, describes
as a “relief ”. What an anecdote
that would have been. cAndrew is a
‘coroneted
sleaze
machine’
Campaigning
for change
Laura
BatesSIGGI HOLMJOE PUGLIESE/REUTERS. INSET: MAX MUMBy/GETTy IMAGES