FEMINISM FOR WOMEN
THE REAL ROUTE TO LIBERATION JULIE BINDEL
Constable, 248pp, £16.99 The writer and campaigner Julie Bindel is a co-founder of Justice for Women, which advocates for those convicted of murder after having experienced male violence. She is, as the Observer’s Rachel Cooke put it, a person of ‘integrity, bravery and determination’. For Melanie Reid in the Times she is ‘a rockstar of modern feminism’. But Bindel’s unfashionable views on sex work, pornography and biological sex have led in recent years to her being de-platformed following protests by trans activists and their allies, among them those who argue that ‘sex work is work’. At one debate, her opponent, a pornographer, was given a warm welcome by students who’d tried to get Bindel herself taken off the bill. Asked Cooke, ‘Is it really such a crime to believe, as she does, that sex is a material reality, and gender a social construct?’
In Feminism for Women, Bindel takes her axe to modern shibboleths. The Metoo industry; the surrogacy business (‘a reproductive brothel for impoverished women’), porn and, of course, the trans debate. The cover comes with a puff from JK Rowling which, as Reid says, is a ‘red rag to a bull’. Reid applauded her courage: ‘Why should young women in universities and other settings be silenced, forced to accept a form of feminism that benefits men and is harmful to women?’
In Unherd, Kat Rosenfield agreed with Bindel’s argument that feminism had begun to ‘eat itself’, no longer making common cause among women because they are women but fragmented into the minute subdivisions of power demanded by ‘intersectionality’. Rosenfield found the Bindel polemic sometimes ‘overwhelming’, writing that this is ‘never truer than when Bindel turns her focus to men, and the women who love them’. However, ‘This is not to say that Bindel’s identity as a lesbian precludes her from talking to and about heterosexual women. Indeed, the notion of identity as a be-all-endall litmus test for determining who does and doesn’t get to speak on a given topic is just the sort of nonsense that this book rightly pushes back against.’