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Angela McRobbie (Sociologist & Cultural Critic)

Appraises 'Post-Feminism' from the 90s onwards

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Angela McRobbie "Post Feminism + Beyond"

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Eleanor Roosevelt (wife of the American president Theodore)

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Eleanor Roosevelt (wife of the American president Theodore)

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See critique and corrections about how this post is titled below

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Simone de Beauvoir (Novelist & Philosopher)

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Simone de Beauvoir (Novelist & Philosopher)

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on being a woman:

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Featuring:

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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Beyoncé - ***Flawless ft. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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TED Talk

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1,986,795 views | Roxane Gay • TEDWomen 2015

When writer Roxane Gay dubbed herself a "bad feminist," she was making a joke, acknowledging that she couldn't possibly live up to the demands for perfection of the feminist movement. But she's realized that the joke rang hollow. In a thoughtful and provocative talk, she asks us to embrace all flavors of feminism -- and make the small choices that, en masse, might lead to actual change.

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Roxane Gay: Confessions of a bad feminist

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When writer Roxane Gay dubbed herself a "bad feminist," she was making a joke, acknowledging that she couldn't possibly live up to the demands for perfection of the feminist movement. But she's realized that the joke rang hollow.

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We Should All Be Feminists

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We should all be feminists | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | TEDxEuston

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'In Our Time' on Radio 4

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History of Ideas on Radio 4

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Feminine Beauty: A social construct?, Historian Simon Schaffer on Beauty and Evolution, A History of Ideas - BBC Radio 4

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Simone de Beauvoir: Resistance to male stereotypes of beauty can mean greater equality.

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'Men look at women, women watch themselves being looked at…'

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John Berger / Ways of Seeing , Episode 2 (1972)

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Feminism & the Subversion of Identity

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The Gaze Revisited

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Ted Talk summarising Kilbourne's study of Advertising Images of Women

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The dangerous ways ads see women | Jean Kilbourne | TEDxLafayetteCollege

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Never miss a talk! SUBSCRIBE to the TEDx channel: http://bit.ly/1FAg8hB Pioneering activist and cultural theorist Jean Kilbourne has been studying the image of women in advertising for over 40 years. In this rapid-fire, passionate, and highly entertaining talk, she discusses the experiences that inspired her to create this new field and vividly illustrates how these images affect us all.

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TED talk from the founder of EverydaySexismProject

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Everyday sexism: Laura Bates at TEDxCoventGardenWomen

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Project to catalogue and challenge everyday sexism experienced by women

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I was out for a run in my local community. As I ran past a group of builders I heard a comment directed towards. I stopped and asked the person what he said. He immediately held his hands up in defence. Another builder spoke for him and said 'he said good morning'. I replied 'good morning'. As I was running off another said 'he fancies you' and there was a background of jeers.

The point is - did they think a woman out running alone wanted to engage with a group of male builders? No, they were showing off in front of eachother at my expense, intimidating and embarrassing me for their entertainment.

I always stop and challenge men in these situations and I hope other women will do the same. The fact remains that I was worried about running home the same way.

Today I was on a bus home from work. After a few stops an intoxicated and potentially mentally unwell man got onto the bus, he initially sat next to a man on the top deck of the bus. He then moved forward a seat to sit next to a woman, where he moved closer to her and rested his head on her shoulder. I was the only person who moved when this happened, I stood up, waiting to see if she needed help, everyone else on busy top deck looked away, a few of the men and women around her moved to the lower deck. She shoved the man and he fell onto the floor, and sat opposite her, continuing to sing, and stare at her for the following 10 minutes.

I froze, aware the man was both intoxicated and very large, and I feel I should have done something to help her in that situation, but I can't quite believe no one on the bus stepped in.

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I was out for a run in my local community. As I ran past a group of builders I heard a comment directed towards. I stopped and asked the person what he said. He immediately held his hands up in defence. Another builder spoke for him and said 'he said good morning'.

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On Women

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Illustrated summary of Mulvey's seminal text

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Laura Mulvey-Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema examples

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Speech on Gender Equality

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Emma Watson to United Nations: I'm a feminist

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Germain Greer, Author of 'The Female Eunuch' & 'The Obstacle Race'

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Germain Greer, Author of 'The Female Eunuch' & 'The Obstacle Race'

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Montage of clips from the 70s

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Germaine Greer in debate after publication of 'Female Eunuch', 1971

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Last part of this video: a standing room only audience of local literati and feminists packed New York City's Town Hall to watch Norman Mailer, who had just written The Prisoner of Sex, grapple with a panel of passionate feminists, among others: Germaine Greer, Jill Johnston, Jacqueline Ceballos and Diana Trilling (on the evening of April 30, 1971).

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In conversation about her book

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The Open Mind - Naomi Wolf on Beauty - A New Trap for Women

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Explore digitised images from the ground breaking feminist magazine from the British Museum Archive

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Explore digitised images of this ground-breaking 20th-century magazine and discover the context in which it was created

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Visual Pleasure & Narrative Cinema

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Mary Wollstonecraft, Author of 'A Vindication of the Rights of Woman' 1792

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Mary Wollstonecraft, Author of 'A Vindication of the Rights of Woman' 1792

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Hunger games star Jennifer Lawrence voices anger over discovering inequality in pay between her and the male leads of the film.

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Jennifer Lawrence expresses anger at Hollywood's gender pay gap

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'I'm over trying to find the adorable way to state my opinion,' the Oscar winner says of her disappointment at finding she was paid less than her male co-stars

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Feminism & Women's Magazines

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She is rake-slim, tanned. Her eyes gaze placidly out from skilled maquillage, her expression indecipherable. Her hair is glossy, clothes casually cutting-edge. She is all-woman - and yet none. She is magazine-girl.

Do you know her? Because I don't. And I don't think I want to.
Women's magazines are actually extremely reactionary
In the preface of her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique, Betty Freidan wrote: "There was a strange discrepancy between the reality of our lives as women and the image to which we were trying to conform". Although the vast majority of women's lives have changed beyond Freidan's greatest hopes since she wrote those words, the disparity between the media's view of women and women's real lives is still in some ways present. While adopting a veneer of feminism, women's magazines are actually extremely reactionary, oppressive and old-fashioned. Open up your average mag and what do you see? How To Be Better In Bed. This Season's Key Pieces. Eyeliner 101. Celebs talk about their boyfriends. "My Night As A Lesbian". The World's Most Romantic Holiday Destinations. Luxury Health Spas. Recipes For A Summer Barbeque. Passing lipservice is paid to independence and career, but the main message girls are getting from the magazines meant to represent their interests is that what is really important is sex and fashion. In theory they've got bright futures - but in practice, get thin and get a boyfriend!

Our culture is cursed by its obsessive scrutiny of "image", and its preoccupation with the construction and maintenance of the "correct" appearance is making us sick - literally. An estimated 2% of women aged 15-30 suffer from anorexia. A further 4% suffer from bulimia. Other illnesses such as body dismorphic disorder, self-harm and binge eating are also affected by media pressure. A 1998 survey by Exeter University of 37,500 young women between twelve and fifteen found that over half (57.5%) listed appearance as the biggest concern in their lives.
Magazine pictures are electronically edited and airbrushed
Anorexia information charity ANRED says: "Magazine pictures are electronically edited and airbrushed. Many entertainment celebrities are underweight, some anorexically so. How do we know what we should look like? It's hard.

"Most people want to be happy and successful, states that require thought, personal development, and usually hard work. The media, especially ads and commercials for appearance-related items, suggest that we can avoid the hard character work by making our bodies into copies of the icons of success. "Reading between the lines of many ads reveals a not-so-subtle message? 'You are not acceptable the way you are. The only way you can become acceptable is to buy our product and try to look like our model, who is six feet tall and wears size four jeans - and is probably anorexic'."

In 1995, before television came to their island, the people of Fiji thought the ideal body was round, plump, and soft. After 38 months of Melrose Place, Beverly Hills 90210 and similar Western shows being beamed into their homes, Fijian teenage girls showed serious signs of eating disorders.
They have hijacked our right to enjoy our appearance and turned it against us yet again
What is feminism doing about this? Thirdwave sees the reclamation and celebration of women's appearance as part of its project. It's about refocusing our campaigns from the scrutiny of women's private lives back to the social and economic inequalities that still exist. Young women are free to take joy in their appearance, after secondwave feminists claimed the right for us not to do so. Women's magazines are the lowest common denominator of this attitude - just as image-fascist as the unreconstructed sexists Freidan wrote about in 1963. They have hijacked our right to enjoy our appearance and turned it against us yet again.

Even the Riot Grrrls, liberated and assertive women, may not have helped as much as they intended - Courtney Love, quoted in Poppy Z Brite's biography The Real Story, fears the movement was co-opted or its threat neutralised as the Riot Grrrl "style" developed and became fluffier. "Courtney wondered whether these [young] girls understood the irony of this look, or if they were just being encouraged to appear young, cute and harmless," Brite writes. Love told Melody Maker she feared that Riot Grrrls had become too "teensy weensy-widdle-cutie. I think the reason the media is so excited about it is because it's saying females are inept, females are naive, females are innocent, clumsy, bratty ... I wore those small dresses [too], and sometimes I regret it."

And it is certainly true that female musicians are easier for the media to accept when their music is presented with traditionally "feminine" accoutrements; Courtney tells Brite about touring after Kurt Cobains's death: "In Minneapolis I wore a dress that was so restricting and shoes that were five inches high, I could barely stage-dive. "Then I got the best write-ups - for being feminine, I guess. I couldn't move well and I was restrained, which equals great review. That's pretty horrid."

Thirdwave is not to blame for this, of course - but it has to defend its territory. Just because some women see through the myth these magazines are trying to flog does not mean that all do. Far too many girls suffer and are unhappy because a cosmetics company suit wants to sell more makeup, or a clothing company needs to shift lots of stock. Magazines have to recognise the power they have over women's lives, and the responsibility that carries. They must also be forced to see that makeup, sex, clothes and holidays are just part of our lives - there is so much about their readers that they are ignoring. These are supposed to be our magazines - reflecting our concerns, debating our issues, of interest TO US. Let's stop letting the suits tell us what to read and buy. Let's tell them.
Kate Allen is a national news journalist and is very interested in direct action and activism. she thinks newsagents shouldn't put music magazines in the "men's interests" section.

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Diet Grrrl - Feminism and Women's Magazines

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She is rake-slim, tanned. Her eyes gaze placidly out from skilled maquillage, her expression indecipherable. Her hair is glossy, clothes casually cutting-edge. She is all-woman - and yet none. She is magazine-girl. Do you know her? Because I don't. And I don't think I want to.

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Who Do You Think You Are?

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S ometime​ in the 1970s, at the home of the feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey, I found myself in the company of another critic, who had just returned to London from the Berlin Film Festival. Over dinner he took pleasure in regaling us with stories of the male to female transsexual prostitutes he had met on the city's streets, and how difficult it was to 'complete' the transaction since the transsexual body interprets the surgically created vagina as a wound which it tries to close. The nature of his interaction with these women was unclear, but his delight in telling the tale of sexual encounters which, by his account, could only be sadistic on the part of the man and painful for the women involved, was repellent. He was boasting. Doubtless he thought he was promoting their case. He registered my disapproval. Twice I declined when he offered to refill my glass with red wine. Finally I put my hand over the glass to make myself clear. Refusing to take no for an answer, he proceeded to pour the wine over the back of my hand.

Just a few years earlier, in 1969, Arthur Corbett, first husband of the famous male-to-female transsexual April Ashley, sought an annulment of their marriage on the grounds that at the time of the ceremony, Ashley was 'a person of the male sex'. In the course of the proceedings, Corbett - 'The Honourable Arthur Cameron Corbett', as he introduced himself to Ashley after initially using the alias 'Frank' - presented himself as a frequenter of male brothels and a cross-dresser who, when he looked into the mirror, never liked what he saw: 'You want the fantasy to appear right. It utterly failed to appear right in my eyes.' He then explained how, from their first meeting at the Caprice, he had been mesmerised by Ashley. She was so much more than he could 'ever hope to be': 'The reality ... far outstripped any fantasy for myself. I could never have contemplated it for myself.' It took a while for Ashley, along with her medical and legal advisers, to realise what Corbett was up to (nine medical practitioners gave evidence in court). He was, in her words, portraying their marriage as a 'squalid prank, a deliberate mockery of moral society perpetrated by a couple of queers for their own twisted amusement'.

For Justice Ormrod, the case - 'the first occasion on which a court in England has been called on to decide the sex of an individual' - was straightforward. Because Ashley had been registered as a boy at birth, she should be treated as male in perpetuity. The suggestion that she be categorised as intersex was dismissed: medical evidence attested that she was born with male gonads, chromosomes and genitalia. Although there had been minimal development at puberty, no facial hair, some breast formation, and what Ashley referred to as a 'virginal penis' because of its diminutive size, the judge also ruled out these factors (he believed the breast formation had been artificially induced by hormones). That Ashley had undergone full surgical genital reconstruction - there had been some (unsatisfactory) penetrative sex between her and Corbett - made no difference: 'The respondent was physically incapable of consummating a marriage as intercourse using the completely artificially constructed cavity could never constitute true intercourse' (what would constitute 'true intercourse' is not specified). Ashley was not, to Ormrod's mind, a woman. This was more to the point, as far as Ormrod was concerned, than asking whether or not Ashley was still a man. At first he had been sympathetic to her, but as the hearing proceeded, he became progressively less persuaded of her case: 'Her outward appearance, at first sight, was convincingly feminine, but on closer and longer examination in the witness box it was much less so. The voice, manner, gestures and attitude became increasingly reminiscent of the accomplished female impersonator.' In the words of one of the expert witnesses, her 'pastiche of femininity was convincing' (you could argue that a convincing pastiche is a contradiction in terms).

Ormond may have found for the plaintiff on the grounds that Ashley couldn't fulfil the role of a wife ('the essential role of a woman in marriage'), but it is obvious from Corbett's statements that this was never exactly what he had had in mind. For Corbett, Ashley was not an object of desire, but of envy. He coveted her freedom, her scandalous violation and embodiment of the norm. She was someone he wanted to emulate. Corbett's wording is precise. Ashley was his fantasy or dream come true, the life he most wanted, but could not hope for, for himself: 'The reality ... far outstripped any fantasy for myself. I could never have contemplated it for myself.' He did not want her, as in desire; he wanted to be her, as in identification (in psychoanalysis this is a rudimentary distinction), or rather the first only as an effect of the second. In this, without knowing it, he can be seen as coming close to obeying a more recent transsexual injunction, or piece of transsexual worldly advice. As Kate Bornstein, one of today's best-known and most controversial male-to-female transsexuals, puts it towards the end of her account of her complex (to say the least) journey as a transsexual: 'Never fuck anyone you wouldn't wanna be.' (Bornstein's memoir is called A Queer and Pleasant Danger: The True Story of a Nice Jewish Boy who joins the Church of Scientology and Leaves Twelve Years Later to Become the Lovely Lady She Is Today.)

One of the ways trans people challenge the popular image of human sexuality is by insisting, in the words of the writer and activist Jennifer Finney Boylan, that 'it is not about who you want to go to bed with, it's who you want to go to bed as.' This, it can be argued, is the province of gender: how, in terms of the categories of male and female, you see yourself and wish to be seen. In fact the modern distinction between sex and gender was created with reference to transsexuality a matter of months before the Corbett-Ashley case by the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Robert Stoller, who proposed the distinction in his 1968 study, Sex and Gender - the second volume was called The Transsexual Experiment. For Stoller, gender was identity, sex was genital pleasure, and humans would always give priority to the first (many transsexual people today say the same). Talk of a gender dysphoria syndrome was therefore as inappropriate as talk of a 'suicide syndrome, or an incest syndrome, or a wanderlust syndrome'. Stoller's most famous transsexual case was Agnes, who had secured genital reassignment surgery having duped Stoller and his associate Harold Garfinkel into believing that her female development at puberty was natural (they diagnosed her as a rare instance of intersex in which an apparently male body spontaneously feminises at puberty). Five years later, she returned to tell them that since puberty she had regularly been taking oestrogens prescribed for her mother: 'My chagrin at learning this,' Stoller wrote, 'was matched by my amusement that she could have pulled off this coup with such skill.'

Cruel and outdated as the Corbett case may be, it makes a number of important things clear. The transsexual woman or man is not the only one performing; she or he does not have a monopoly on gender uncertainty; what makes a marriage is open to interpretation and fantasy - there is strictly no limit to what two people can do to, and ask of, each other. Above all perhaps, the Corbett case suggests that a transsexual person's enemy may also be their greatest rival, embroiled in a deep unconscious identification with the one they love to hate; while the seeming friend, even potential husband, may be the one furthest from having their interests, their chance of living a viable life, at heart. After the annulment, Ashley fell back into penury, where, like many transsexual women, she has lived a large part of her life (her fortunes fluctuate wildly). Both Mark Rees and Juliet Jacques, the author of the 2015 memoir, Trans, fall in and out of the dole queue. Even before the trial, Ashley's career as one of the UK's most successful models had been brought to an abrupt end when she was outed by the press. Up to that point, like many transsexual people who aim to pass, she had lived in fear of 'detection and ruin' (in the words of Garfinkel, one of the first medical commentators to write sympathetically about transsexuality).

T ranssexual​ people are brilliant at telling their stories. That has been a central part of their increasingly successful struggle for acceptance. But it is one of the ironies of their situation that attention sought and gained is not always in their best interest, since the most engaged, enthusiastic audience may have a prurient, or brutal, agenda of its own. Being seen is, however, key. Whatever stage of the trans journey or form of transition, the crucial question is whether you will be recognised as the other sex, the sex which, contrary to your birth assignment, you wish and believe yourself to be. Even if, as can also be the case, transition does not so much mean crossing from one side to the other as hovering in the space in between, something has to be acknowledged by the watching world (out of an estimated 700,000 trans women and men in the United States, only about a quarter of the trans women have had genital surgery). Despite much progress, transsexuality - 'transsexualism' is the preferred term - is still treated today as an anomaly or exception. However normalised, it unsettles the way most people prefer to think of themselves and pretty much everyone else. In fact, no human can survive without recognition. To survive, we all have to be seen. A transsexual person merely brings that fact to the surface, exposing the latent violence lurking behind the banal truth of our dependency on other people. After all, if I can't exist without you, then you have, among other things, the power to kill me.

The rate of physical assault and murder of trans people is a great deal higher than it is for the general population. A 1992 London survey reported 52 per cent MTF and 43 per cent FTM transsexuals physically assaulted that year. A 1997 survey by GenderPAC found that 60 per cent of transgender-identified people had experienced some kind of harassment or physical abuse. The violence would seem to be on the rise. In the first seven weeks of 2015, seven trans women were killed in the US (compared with 13 over the whole of the previous year). In July 2015, two trans women were reported killed in one week, one in California, one in Florida. In the US just 19 states have laws to protect transgender workers (only in 2014 did the Justice Department start taking the position that discrimination on the basis of gender identity, including transgender, constitutes discrimination under the Civil Rights Act). The House of Commons report Transgender Equality notes the serious consequences of the high levels of prejudice (including in the provision of public services) experienced by trans people on a daily basis. Half of young trans people and a third of adult trans people attempt suicide. The report singles out the recent deaths in custody of two trans women, Vicky Thompson and Joanne Latham, and the case of Tara Hudson, a trans woman who was placed in a men's prison, as 'particularly stark illustrations' (after public pressure, Hudson was moved to a women's jail). 'I saw,' Jacques writes in Trans, 'that for many people around the world, expressing themselves as they wished meant risking death.'

That Telesford was a woman of colour is also crucial. If the number of trans people who are murdered is disproportionate, trans people of colour constitute by far the largest subset - the seven trans women murdered in the US in the first seven weeks of 2015 were all women of colour. Today, those fighting for trans freedom are increasingly keen to address this racial factor (like the feminists before them who also ignored it at first) - in the name of social justice and equality, but also because placing trans in the wider picture can help challenge the assumption that transsexuality is an isolated phenomenon, beyond human endurance in and of itself. It is a paradox of the transsexual bid for emancipation that the more visible trans people become, the more they seem to excite, as well as greater acceptance, a peculiarly murderous hatred. 'I know people have to learn about other people's lives in order to become more tolerant,' Jayne County writes in Man Enough to Be a Woman (one of Jacques's main inspirations), but 'sometimes that makes bigotry worse. The more straight people know about us, the more they have to hate.'

Feminists have always had to confront the violence they expose, and - in exposing - provoke, but when a transsexual person is involved, the gap between progressive moment and crushing payback seems even shorter. County exposes the myth, one of liberalism's most potent, that knowing - finding oneself face to face with something or someone outside one's usual frame of reference - is the first step on the path to understanding. What distinguishes the transsexual woman or man, the psychoanalyst Patricia Gherovici writes in Please Select Your Gender, her study of transsexual patients, is that 'the almost infinite distance between one face and the other will be crossed by one single person'. Perhaps this is the real scandal. Not crossing the line of gender - although that is scandal enough - but blurring psychic boundaries, placing in such intimate proximity parts of the mind which non-trans people have the luxury of believing they can safely keep apart.

T rans​ is not one thing. In the public mind crossing over - the Caitlyn Jenner option - is the most familiar version, but there are as many trans people who do not choose this path. In addition to 'transition' ('A to B') and 'transitional' ('between A and B'), trans can also mean 'A as well as B' or 'neither A nor B' - that's to say, 'transcending', as in 'above', or 'in a different realm from', both. Thus Jan Morris in Conundrum in 1974: 'There is neither man nor woman ... I shall transcend both.' Even that is not all. If transsexuality is subsumed in the broader category of transgender, as it is for example in the Transgender Studies readers, then there would seem to be no limit; one of the greatest pleasures of falling outside the norm is the freedom to pile category upon category, as in Borges's fantastic animal taxonomy which Foucault borrowed to open The Order of Things (no order to speak of), or the catechisms of the 'Ithaca' chapter in Ulysses, whose interminable lists doggedly outstrip the mind's capacity to hold anything in its proper place. At a Binary Defiance workshop held at the 2015 True Colours Conference, an annual event for gay and transgender youth at the University of Connecticut, the following were listed on the blackboard: non-binary, gender queer, bigender, trigender, agender, intergender, pangender, neutrois, third gender, androgyne, two-spirit, self-coined, genderfluid. In 2011 the New York-based journal Psychoanalytic Dialogues brought out a special issue on transgender subjectivities. 'In these pages,' the psychoanalyst Virginia Goldner wrote in her editor's note, 'you will meet persons who could be characterised, and could recognise themselves, as one - or some - of the following: a girl and a boy, a girl in a boy, a boy who is a girl, a girl who is a boy dressed as a girl, a girl who has to be a boy to be a girl.' We are dealing, Stryker explains, with 'a heteroglossic outpouring of gender positions from which to speak'.

combat boots, threadbare Levi 501s over a black lace bodysuit, a shredded Transgender Nation T-shirt with the neck and sleeves cut out, a pink triangle, quartz crystal pendant, grunge metal jewellery, and a six inch long marlin hook dangling around my neck on a length of heavy stainless steel chain. I decorated the set by draping my black leather biker jacket over my chair at the panellists' table. The jacket had handcuffs on the left shoulder, rainbow freedom rings on the right side lacings, and Queer Nation-style stickers reading SEX CHANGE, DYKE and FUCK YOUR TRANSPHOBIA plastered on the back.

She was - is - wholly serious. It is the myth of the natural, for all of us, which she has in her sights. This is her justly renowned, exhortatory moment, unsurpassed in anything else I have read:

Hearken unto me, fellow creatures. I who have dwelt in a form unmatched with my desire, I whose flesh has become an assemblage of incongruous anatomical parts, I who achieve the similitude of a natural body only through an unnatural process, I offer you this warning: the Nature you bedevil me with is a lie. Do not trust it to protect you from what I represent, for it is a fabrication that cloaks the groundlessness of the privilege you seek to maintain for yourself at my expense. You are as constructed as me; the same anarchic Womb has birthed us both. I call upon you to investigate your nature as I have been compelled to confront mine. I challenge you to risk abjection and flourish as well as have I. Heed my words, and you may well discover the seams and sutures in yourself.

For many post-operative transsexual people, the charge of bodily mutilation is a slur arising from pure prejudice. It's true that without medical technology none of this would have been possible. It's also the case that the need for, extent and pain of medical intervention puts a strain on the argument that the transsexual woman or man is simply returning to her or his naturally ordained place - with the surgeon as nature's agent who restores what nature intended to be there in the first place. Kaveney's medical transition, for example, lasted two years, involving 25 general anaesthetics, a ten-stone weight gain, thromboses, more than one major haemorrhage, fistula and infections. She barely survived, though none of this has stopped her from going on to lead one of the most effective campaigning lives as a transsexual woman. In 1931, Lili Elbe died after a third and failed operation to create an artificial womb (the film The Danish Girl sentimentally changes this to the prior operation to create a vagina so that she dies having fulfilled her dream). When I met April Ashley in Oxford in the early 1970s - she was in the midst of the legal hearing and Oxford was a kind of retreat - she expressed her sorrow that she would never be a mother. On this, female-to-male transsexuals have gone further. In 2007, Thomas Beatie, having retained his female reproductive organs on transition, gave birth to triplets through artificial insemination. They died, but he has since given birth to three children.

But for Stryker, mutilation is at once a badge of honour and a counter to the myth of nature in a pure state. There is no body without debilitation and pain. We are all made up of endlessly permuting bits and pieces which sometimes do, mostly do not, align with each other. We are all always adjusting, manipulating, perfecting, sometimes damaging (sometimes perfecting and damaging) ourselves. Today non-trans women, at the mercy of the cosmetic industry, increasingly submit to surgical intervention as a way of conforming to an image; failure makes them feel worthless (since nature is equated with youth, this also turns the natural process of ageing into some kind of aberration). 'I've seen women mutilate themselves to try to meet that norm,' says Melissa, mother of Skylar, who had top surgery with his parents' permission at the age of 16. Shakespeare described man as a thing of 'shreds and patches', Freud as a 'prosthetic God', Donna Haraway as a cyborg. Rebarbative as it may at first seem, Stryker's vision is the most inclusive. Enter my world: 'I challenge you to risk abjection and flourish as well as have I.' What you would most violently repudiate is an inherent and potentially creative part of the self.

T he image​ of the trans world as an open church that includes all comers, all variants on the possibilities of sex, is therefore misleading. There are strong disagreements between those who see transition as a means, the only means, to true embodiment, and those who see transgenderism as upending all sexual categories. For the first, the aim is a bodily and psychic integrity that has been thwarted since birth: 'Lili Elbe's story,' Niels Hoyer writes, 'is above all a human story and each faltering step she takes is an awakening of her true self ... [she] was willing to make the ultimate sacrifice to become the person within.' (Hoyer is the editor of Elbe's own notes and diaries, not to be confused with David Ebershoff, on whose ghastly novel The Danish Girl is based.) Jan Morris defines her transition as a journey on the path to identity: 'I had reached Identity'; Ashley speaks of her desire 'to be whole', and her 'great sense of purpose to make things right, make everything correct'; Chelsea Manning writes of 'physically transitioning to the woman I have always been'. Such accounts seem to be the ones that most easily make it into the public eye, as if a shocked world can heave something like a collective sigh of relief ('at least that much is clear, then').

For those who, on the other hand, see transgenderism as a challenge to such clarity, the last thing it should do is claim to be the answer to its own question, or pretend that the world has been, could ever be, put to rights. This is simply a normative delusion, exacerbated by a neoliberal world order that offers itself as the only true dispensation and which now more or less covers the earth - rather like Scientology, of which Bornstein was a paid-up member in what we might call her formative years. Scientology, Bornstein tells us, 'is supposed to erase all the pain and suffering you've ever felt in this and every other lifetime'. It is also a type of surveillance state which prohibits any kind of secrecy or privacy on the part of its members (unflinching eye-to-eye contact obligatory during any conversation), and which cast Bornstein into the wilderness as a 'suppressive person' as soon as her ambiguous sexuality was revealed. This despite the fact that, according to Scientology, each human contains a thetan, a spirit which - unlike in, say, Christianity - isn't separate from the body but embedded within it. Crucially, thetans have no gender. Bornstein's transsexuality is, therefore, indebted as much to Scientology (something she acknowledges) as it is her escape from it.

For Bornstein in her new life, as for Stryker, transsexuality is an infinite confusion of tongues. Neither of them is arriving anywhere. For Jay Prosser by contrast, the transsexual man or woman is enfolded in their new body like a second skin (his 1998 book, one of the most widely circulated and debated on the topic, has the title Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality). As he describes on the first page, two weeks after completing a course of massive testosterone treatment, he began living full-time as a man - 'documents all changed to reflect a new, unambivalent status'. As it happens, Prosser is completely attuned to the ambiguities of sexual identity. He knows that transition, however real, is achieved at least partly by means of fiction, that it is through story-making that transsexual people arrive at the resolution they seek (hence the 'body narratives' of the title, narratives which in his analysis track the complexities of sexual being carried and enacted by these narratives). Partly because he is so immersed in psychoanalytic thinking, he understands how far sexual being - on the skin and in the bloodstream - reaches into the roots of who we are. Transition is testament to the fact, at once alterable and non-negotiable, of sexual difference: 'In transsexual accounts,' he writes, 'transition does not shift the subject away from the embodiment of sexual difference but more fully into it.' This is why, for some, transsexuality, or rather this version of transsexuality, is conservative, reinforcing the binary from which we all - trans and non-trans - suffer. Freud, for example, described the long and circuitous path to so-called normal femininity for the girl - originally bisexual, wildly energised by being all over the place - as nothing short of a catastrophe (admittedly, this isn't the version of female sexuality for which he is best known).

Yet for Prosser, to move from A to B is a conclusive self-fashioning or it is nothing. In the special issue of Psychoanalytic Dialogues on transsexual subjectivities, Madeleine Suchet draws on Prosser in her analysis of Raphael, a female-to-male transsexual who explains: 'Boy has to be written on the body' - an idea she struggles to accept. She has to move from her original stance that sexual ambiguity should be sustainable without any need for bodily change ('Crossing Over', the title of her essay, refers as much to her journey as it does to his). Prosser talks of 'restoration' of the body. Note how 'restoration' chimes with the 'born in the wrong body' mantra which, while deeply felt by many trans people, is also the child of a medical profession which for a long time would accept nothing less as the basis for hormonal or surgical intervention. In the 1960s, the profiles of candidates for medical transition were found to be strangely in harmony with Harry Benjamin's then definitive textbook on the subject: 'strangely', until it was realised that all of them had been reading it and brushing up their lines.

T he question​ of embodiment therefore brings another with it. Does the transsexual woman or man, in her or his new identity, count as real? I am genuinely baffled how anyone can believe themselves qualified to legislate on the reality, or not, of anyone else, without claiming divine authority (or worse). 'Once you decide that some people's lives are not real,' Kaveney wrote, 'it becomes okay to abuse them.' Nonetheless, in 1979 Janice Raymond pronounced in The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male that male-to-female transsexuals are frauds (on this issue, female-to-male seem to pose less of a problem even though surgical transition is much harder in their case, as phalloplasty is rarely a complete success) and should therefore be excluded from women-only spaces, since these are spaces which feminists have struggled, after centuries of male oppression, to create for themselves. In today's parlance, Raymond was the first TERF, or 'trans-exclusionary radical feminist' (the term used by some trans people and by those feminists who oppose her position). For Raymond, male-to-female transsexuals are patriarchy writ large, the worst embodiments of a phallic power willing to resort to just about anything to fulfil itself - hence 'transsexual empire '. Although I am sure this was not the intention, I have always found this argument extremely helpful in explaining to students the difference, indeed the gulf, between phallus and penis since, according to this logic, the authority and stature of the former would seem to require the surgical removal of the latter.

Raymond hasn't been without influence. In 1980 she was commissioned by the US National Centre for Healthcare Technology to write a paper on the social and ethical aspects of transsexual surgery, which was followed by the elimination of federal and state aid for indigent and imprisoned transsexual women and men (Raymond has denied her paper played any part in the decision). A year later, Medicare stopped covering sex-reassignment, a decision only overturned in May 2014. That didn't stop the South Dakota State Senate from passing a bill in February requiring transgender students to use locker rooms and toilets that correspond to their birth-assigned gender, on the grounds that male-to-female transsexuals sneaking into women's toilets were a danger to women (similar legislation has been proposed in Texas, Arizona and Florida). This completely ignores the fact that it is the trans woman forced to use men's toilets and locker rooms who is likely to be subject to sexual assault.

Germaine Greer is perhaps the best-known advocate of this position, or a version of it. She famously described male-to-female transsexuals as 'pantomime dames', had to resign as a fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge more or less as a consequence (after opposing the appointment of transgender Rachel Padman to a fellowship), and is now the object of a no-platform campaign. 'What they are saying,' Greer responded when the issue arose again in November 2015, 'is that because I don't think surgery will turn a man into a woman I should not be allowed to speak anywhere.' She is being disingenuous. This is Greer in 1989 (the quotation courtesy of Paris Lees, one of the most vocal trans activists in the UK today):

On the day that The Female Eunuch was issued in America, a person in flapping draperies rushed up to me and grabbed my hand. 'Thank you so much for all you've done for us girls!' I smirked and nodded and stepped backwards, trying to extricate my hand from the enormous, knuckly, hairy, beringed paw that clutched it ... Against the bony ribs that could be counted through its flimsy scarf dress swung a polished steel women's liberation emblem. I should have said: 'You're a man. The Female Eunuch has done less than nothing for you. Piss off.' The transvestite held me in a rapist's grip.

'All transsexuals,' Raymond stated, 'rape women's bodies by reducing the real female form to an artefact.' With the exception of incitement, of which this could be read as an instance, I tend to be opposed to no-platforming: better to have the worst that can be said out in the open in order to take it down. I also owe Greer a personal debt. Hearing her as an undergraduate in Oxford in 1970 was a key moment in setting me on the path of feminism. But reading this, I am pretty sure that, were I transsexual, I wouldn't want Greer on any platform of mine.

Apart from being hateful, Raymond, Greer and their ilk show the scantest respect for what many trans people have had to say on this topic. However fervently desired, however much the fulfilment of a hitherto thwarted destiny, transition rarely seems to give the transsexual woman or man unassailable confidence in who they are (and not just because of the risk of 'detection and ruin'). Rather, it would seem from their own comments that the process opens up a question about sexual being to which it is more often than not impossible to offer a definitive reply. This is of course true for all human subjects. The bar of sexual difference is ruthless but that doesn't mean that those who believe they subscribe to its law have any more idea of what is going on beneath the surface than the one who submits less willingly. For psychoanalysis, it is axiomatic, however clear you are in your own mind about being a man or a woman, that the unconscious knows better. Given a primary, universal bisexuality, sex, Freud said, is an act involving at least four people. The 'cis' - i.e. non-trans - woman or man is a decoy, the outcome of multiple repressions whose unlived stories surface nightly in our dreams. From the Latin root meaning 'on this side of' as opposed to 'across from', 'cis' is generally conflated with normativity, implying 'comfortable in your skin', as if that were the beginning and end of the matter.

Who, exactly, we may therefore ask - trans or non-trans - is fooling whom? Who do you think you are? - the question anyone hostile to transsexual people should surely be asking themselves. So-called normality can be the cover for a multitude of 'sins'. The psychoanalyst Adam Limentani described the case of an apparently perfectly heterosexual 'vagina man' who during intercourse fantasised that he was himself being penetrated, which meant that to have sex was to be unfaithful to himself (he was fucking another woman), and that he could never, psychically, be father to his own child - whose child would it be? Women can share the same syndrome: a fantasy that their vagina is not really their own but belongs to somebody else, although, since they appear to be 'normal,' no one would ever guess. Even with the apparently straightest man or woman, there is no telling.

This is a selection of quotes from transsexual narratives, suggesting that as often as not the authors both know and don't know who they are, or even - in some cases - who precisely they want to be:

Some transsexuals are no happier after surgery, and there are many suicides. Their dream is to become a normal man or woman. This is not possible, can never be possible, through surgery. Transsexuals should not delude themselves on this score. If they do, they are setting themselves up for a big, possibly lethal, disappointment. It is important that they learn to understand themselves as transsexuals.

April Ashley, The First Lady

The trans prefix implies that one moves across from one sex to another. That is impossible ... I was not reared as a boy or as a young man. My experience can include neither normal heterosexual relations with a woman nor fatherhood. I have not shared the psychological experience of being a woman or the physical one of being a man.

Mark Rees, Dear Sir or Madam

'I live as a woman every day.'

'Do you consider yourself to be a woman?'

'I consider ... Yes, yes, but I know what I - I know what I am ... I do everything like a woman. I act like a woman, I move like a woman ... I know I'm gay and I know I'm a man.'

Anita, a Puerto Rican transgender sex worker interviewed by David Valentine in Imagining Transgender

My body can't do that [give birth]; I can't even bleed without a wound, and yet I claim to be a woman ... I can never be a woman like other women, but I could never be a man.

Susan Stryker, 'My Words to Victor Frankenstein'

I certainly wouldn't be happy with the idea of being a man, and I don't consider myself a man, but I'm not going to try and convince anyone that I'm really a woman.

Jayne County, Man Enough to be a Woman

It had been such a relief for me when I could stop pretending to be a man. Well, it was a similar relief not to have to pretend that I was a woman ... I was now a lesbian with a boyfriend, but I wasn't a real lesbian and he wasn't a real boy ... no matter what I bought - I'd look in the mirror and see myself as a man in a dress. Sure, I knew I wasn't a man. But I also knew I wasn't a woman.

Kate Bornstein, Queer and Pleasant Danger

I have a male and female side ... I don't know how they relate ... [I] had to ask myself: how trans did I want to be?

Juliet Jacques, Trans

As the oestrogen started to change her body, Jacques felt for the first time 'unburdened by that disconnect between body and mind.' She even wondered whether one day the original disconnect might be 'hard to recall'. But this didn't stop her in the same moment asking: ' What kind of woman have I become? ' Soft-spoken and deep-voiced, understated and urgent, Jacques comes across as a woman carrying an ambiguity she doesn't seem to want or feel able fully to shed. She is also as keen to talk about Norwich City Football Club and the underground music and counter-culture scene as she is to tell her tale of transition - why is it assumed that transition is all transsexual people have to talk about? No performance (except to the extent that anyone appearing in public is of necessity performing); no exhilaration (she is one of the few transsexual people I have read or heard willing to explore her own depression); no definitive arrival anywhere. Affirmed and subdued by her own experience, she confounds the distinction, not just between male and female, but also between the emotional atmospheres which the various trans identities are meant - 'instructed' may be the right word - to personify. On this matter, the argument, the insistence on playing it one way or the other, can be virulent.

The statements I quoted are not uncontroversial. Bornstein has been labelled 'transphobic' and picketed by some in the trans community for refusing to identify as either man or woman, and for her stance on the issue of women-only spaces: 'I thought every private space has the right to admit whomever they want - I told them ... it was their responsibility to define the word woman. And I told the trans women to stop acting like men with a sense of entitlement.' 'I give great soundbites when it's about sex,' she apologises to a furious Riki Anne Wilchins who had invited her to speak, 'but I always fuck up politics.' In a wondrous twist, Paris Lees credits Germaine Greer with guiding her to insight on this matter:

Greer caused me to question my identity, and form a more complex one. She was right: I am not a woman in the way my mother is; I haven't experienced female childhood; I don't menstruate. I won't give birth. Yes, I have no idea what it feels like to be another woman - but nor do I know what it feels like to be another man. How can anyone know what it feels like to be anyone but themselves?

Not all trans people take this position. At the In Conversation with the Women's Liberation Movement conference, held in London in October 2013, I sat behind two trans women who objected when the historian Sue O'Sullivan described how 1970s feminism had allowed young women for the first time to explore their own vagina, to claim it as intimate companion. Her account was seen by them as transphobic for excluding trans women who most likely will not have had that experience in their youth but who are 'no less women' for that (there are trans women for whom, on similar grounds, the word 'vagina' or 'vulva' shouldn't ever be used). But this is not the whole story - or even half of it. I would say it is because of the journey they have made, and because so many of them have suffered such pain in prising open the question 'Who is a real woman?' that transgender women should be listened to. And not just because it is so manifestly self-defeating for feminism and trans, two movements fighting oppression, not to talk to each other.

A further reason​ why trans and feminism should be natural bedfellows is that male-to-female transsexuals expose, and then reject, masculinity in its darkest guise. This side of the argument is missed by Greer et al, who tend to overlook the fact that if you want more than anything in the world to become a woman, then chances are there is somewhere a man who, just as passionately, you do not want to be. 'I stopped my life living as a man,' Bornstein writes of her father in the prologue to A Queer and Pleasant Danger, 'in large part because I never wanted to be a man like him' (coming to terms with his ghost is one of her motives in writing the memoir). One of Nina Arsenault's earliest memories is of boys knifing magazine images of women: 'I know that this is exactly what I will be when I grow up.'

In the first half of Conundrum, Morris offers the reader a paean to maleness: the feeling of being a man 'springs ... specifically from the body', a body which, 'when it is working properly', she recalls, is 'a marvellous thing to inhabit ... Nothing sags in him' (never?). But this selfsame masculinity, epitomised by an assault on Everest timed to coincide with the queen's coronation, is 'snatching at air', a 'nothingness', that leaves Morris dissatisfied - 'as I think,' she concludes, 'it would leave most women'. 'Even now I dislike that emptiness at its climax, that perfect uselessness' (as good a diagnosis of the vacuity of phallic power as you might hope to find). If you are a man, you can spend a lifetime striving for this version of masculinity, never to discover the emptiness and fraudulence at its core. Somewhere Morris is, or rather was, an upper-class English gent imbued with the values of his sex and class - the family on his mother's side descends from 'modest English squires'. When Morris sheds maleness, it is therefore a patriotic, militarist identity, with its accompanying imperial prejudice, that is, at least in part, discarded: 'I still would not want to be ruled by Africans, but then they did not want to rule me' (though even this does not quite make it to the question of who Africans might want, and not want, to be ruled by). This legacy is hard to relinquish. Released from 'my own last remnants of maleness', she returns from Morocco where she underwent her transition, 'like a princess emancipated from her degrading disguise, or something new out of Africa'. Morris was operated on by Georges Burou, the surgeon who had operated on Ashley in 1960 and one of the first to undertake the procedure. By 1972, the operation was available in the UK, but Morris chose to go abroad when it was made a legal condition that before having surgery she divorce her wife with whom she had fathered five children.

W hat​ are you letting yourself in for if you choose to become a man? What is the deal? At a key stage of his transition, Raphael, the female-to-male transsexual who believes 'boy has to be written on the body', said to his analyst: 'If I want them to treat me like a guy, I have to be a guy.'

'He is quiet. We are both quiet,' Suchet observes. 'There is a growing sense of unease in the space between us. I sense my body tensing up. Who am I going to end up sitting in the room with?'

'You really think you have to be a misogynist to be recognised as a guy?' she asks him.

'I am afraid I am going to become a complete asshole,' Raphael replies. 'What if I am this sexist bastard?'

It turns out that it is only as a man that Raphael can allow himself a form of passivity and surrender that was too dangerous for him as a girl. Over the years the analysis uncovers that as a female child he had been the receptacle of vicious maternal projections and may have been abused by his mother. Becoming a man allows him, among other things, to become the girl who, as long as he was lodged in a female body, he could never dare to be. 'I want my body to say: "Here this is Raphael. He's a guy, but he's not only a guy. He's a female guy, who sometimes wants to be able to be a girl."' (Raphael is the patient Virginia Goldner describes as 'the girl who has to be a boy to be a girl'.)

Raphael doesn't welcome the link Suchet proposes between his being transsexual and his childhood abuse and complains that she delegitimises and invalidates his experience by analysing it as the disturbed outcome of a traumatic past (although, as should not need stating, trauma is not pathology but history). He isn't alone in making this case. Although the incidence of mental disturbance among transsexual people is no greater than among the population at large, transsexual people have to fight the stigma of psychopathology, not least because any sign of it during medical consultation is likely to disqualify them from surgery, where the only narrative that passes is the one that confidently asserts that they have always known who they really are. In 1980, transsexuality (adults) and Gender Identity Disorder (children) entered the American Psychiatric Association Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSMIII) - homosexuality had been officially removed from the registry in 1973. The struggle to have these categories dropped in turn, precisely as delegitimising, then runs up against the problem of seeming to imply that all other disorders in the manual legitimately belong there. Gender Identity Disorder was subsequently replaced with Gender Dysphoria, intended to be less pathologising (being included in the manual has the 'advantage' of allowing some insurance companies to cover the transition process).

For me this is a false alternative. Why, in an ideal world (not that we are living in one), should the ethical question of how we live be severed from knowledge of how we have come to be who we are? What, we might ask instead, is the psychic repertoire, the available register of admissible feelings, for the oppressed and ostracised? It is a paradox of political emancipation, which the struggle for trans freedom brings starkly into focus, that oppression must be met with self-affirmation, as in: 'I have dignity. You will not overlook me.' To vacillate is political death. No second thoughts. No room for doubt or the day-to-day aberrations of being human. At moments, reading trans narratives, I have felt the range of utterances the trans person is permitted narrow into a stranglehold: 'I am discriminated against.' 'I suffer.' 'I am perfectly fine.' 'There is nothing wrong with me.' I think this might be the reason I often get the sense of a psychic beat missed, of there being parts of the story which do, and don't, want to be told, moments that reach the surface, only to be forgotten or brushed aside in the forward march of narrative time. As though the personal could also be a front for the personal, covering over what it ostensibly, even generously displays (or as Jacques puts it in relation to 'before' and 'after' photographs, having 'the strange effect of masking the process of change as they appear to reveal it'). Mark Rees was one of girl twins, registered as a girl at birth: his twin sister died five days later and his parents tried to hide their disappointment when three years later another girl was born - they had wanted a boy - who then turned out, compared with Mark, to be the 'perfect' female child. A male-to-female transsexual who prefers not to be named was identified as dyspraxic as a young male child, born to a mother who had earlier suffered an ectopic pregnancy and who subsequently gave birth to a girl child with no trace of disability who at last fulfilled the parents' dreams. There can be no 'wild' analysis of these histories, but it is hard not to see the shadow of death and an intolerable burden of idealisation fall, along the rigid axis of sexual difference, on these young bodies and minds. These moments are coercive, but given their due place, they also increase the options for understanding. They show transsexuality, like all psychic identities, as an exit strategy as much as a journey home.

There is rage against the original body in many of these stories, especially in the male-to-female narratives I have read. April Ashley, Mark Rees, Juliet Jacques all write of the hatred, revulsion, abhorrence (their words) with which they viewed their male genitals before surgery. Jacques: 'I just want this fucking thing off my body right now.' Weeks after her surgery, she wakes up to the 'horrific realisation' that ' It's still there!' before remembering that transsexual women who underwent surgery before her had warned her that this is the dream. 'Other forces,' Lili Elbe wrote in her memoir, 'began to stir in my brain and to choke whatever remnant of Andreas [Einer Wegener] still remained there ... Andreas has been obliterated in me - is dead.' The pre-surgical body is, it seems, ungrievable (Judith Butler speaks of 'ungrievable' lives, referring to the dead bodies of the enemy in wartime that do not count or matter). But without some recognition of how deep the stakes, how driven the impulse, the story is hard to fathom and risks being delivered straight into the arms of a crazy narrative, beyond all human understanding. Nor do such insights necessarily undermine the more straightforward tale of a mistake being at last redressed. They are rarely to be found in each other's company, but no one gains by believing that the two forms of understanding are unable to tolerate each other.

In saying this, realise I am repeating, in psychoanalytic terms, the call made by Sandy Stone as early as 1987, in her reply to Janice Raymond, 'The Empire Strikes Back: A Post-transsexual Manifesto', in which she writes about having been personally attacked for working at an all-woman music collective. The process of ' constructing a plausible history', in other words 'learning to lie effectively about one's past', Stone wrote, was blocking the ability of trans people to represent the full 'complexities and ambiguities of lived experience'. The one thing Dean Spade learns from counselling sessions, is that 'in order to be deemed real, I need to want to pass as male all the time, and not feel ambivalent about this.' 'We have foreclosed the possibility of analysing desire and motivational complexity in a manner which adequately describes the multiple contradictions of individual lived experience,' Stone warned. 'Plausible' is the problem. It obliges the trans person, whatever the complexity of their experience, to hold fast to the rails of identity. It turns the demand to take control of one's own life, which is and has to be politically non-negotiable, into a vision of the mind as subordinate to the will (the opposite of what the psychic life can ever be). And it leaves no room for sexuality as the disruptive, excessive reality and experience it mostly is. I have been struck at how little space for sex many of these accounts, before and after, seem to offer. Bornstein is one exception (she always pushes the boat out). In discussion with Paris Lees in London in February this year, her refrain, first spoken loud and clear and then muttered more or less throughout the exchange, was 'sex, sex, sex'. In A Queer and Pleasant Danger, she invites her readers, should they be so inclined, to skip several pages near the end of the book where she recounts an intense, in the end personally self-defeating, sado-masochistic interlude. Bornstein herself makes the link back to the operating table. In the prologue, she describes cutting a valentine's heart above her heart as one way of dealing with searing pain. Once one barrier falls, then, if you choose not to keep the lid on, so, potentially at least, do all the rest.

T oday​ trans is everywhere. Not just the most photogenic instances such as Bruce Jenner and Laverne Cox, or The Danish Girl at a cinema near you, or the special August 2015 issue of Vanity Fair on 'Trans America' (co-edited by GQ, the New Yorker, Vogue and Glamour), from which a number of my stories are taken; but also, for instance, the somewhat unlikely, sympathetic front-page spread of the Sun in January 2015 on the British Army's only transgender officer ('an officer and a gentlewoman'), plus the Netflix series Transparent, Bethany Black, Doctor Who's first trans actress, EastEnders's Riley Carter Millington, the first trans actor in a mainstream UK soap opera, and Rebecca Root of Boy Meets Girl, the first trans star of a British TV show; or again reports of the first trans adopters and foster carers, or the 100 per cent surge in children seeking gender change, as shown in figures released by the Tavistock Clinic in November 2015. From 2009 to 2014, the number of cases referred to the Portman NHS Trust's Gender Identity Service rose from 97 to 697.

Transgender children in the UK today have the option of delaying puberty by taking hormone blockers; they can take cross-sex hormones from 16 and opt for sex reassignment surgery from the age of 18. Cassie Wilson's daughter Melanie announced he was Tom at the age of two and a half (now five, he has annual appointments at the Tavistock); Callum King decided she was Julia as soon as she could talk. In 2014, the mental health charity Pace surveyed 2000 young people who were questioning their gender: 48 per cent had attempted suicide and 58 per cent self-harmed. 'They kill themselves,' Julia's mother commented: 'I want a happy daughter, not a dead son.' Julia gives herself more room for manoeuvre and defines herself as 'both'. She likes to ask her girlfriends at school if they would like to be a boy for a day just to see what it would feel like and, whatever they answer, she retorts: 'I don't have to because I'm both.'

It would seem, then, that the desire for transition comes as much, or more, from the parent and adults than from the child. One mother in San Francisco was told by the school principal that her son should choose one gender or the other because he was being harassed at school. He could either jettison his pink Crocs and cut his long blond hair, or socially transition and come to school as a girl - he'd abandoned the dresses he used to like wearing and had never had any trouble calling himself a boy. She was wary: 'It can be difficult for people to accept a child who is in a place of ambiguity.' At a conference in Philadelphia attended by Margaret Talbot, the journalist who wrote about Skylar, one woman admitted that she was the one who needed to know: 'We want to know - are you trans or not?' 'Very little information in the public domain talks about the normality of gender questioning and gender role exploration,' Walter Meyer, a child psychologist and endocrinologist in Texas, remarks. 'It may be hard to live with the ambiguity, but just watch and wait.' 'How,' Polly Carmichael of the Tavistock asks, 'do we keep in mind a diversity of outcomes?' What desire is being laid on a child who is expected to resolve the question of transition? On whose behalf? Better transition over and done with, it seems, than adults having to acknowledge, remember, relive, the sexual uncertainty of who we all are.

The increase in the number of trans children may be a striking, and for some shocking, new development. But transgenderism is not new. Far from being a modern-day invention, it may be more like a return of the repressed, as humans slowly make their way back, after a long and cruel detour, to where they were meant to be. One of my friends, when she heard I was writing on the topic, said we should all hang on in there, as the ageing body leads everyone to transition in the end anyway. (I told her she had somewhat missed the point.) The Talmud, for example, lists six genders (though Deuteronomy 22.5 thunders against cross-dressing). 'Strange country this,' Leslie Feinberg quotes a white man arriving in the New World in 1850, 'where males assume the dress and duties of females, while women turn men and mate with their own sex.' Colonialists referred to these men and women as berdache, and set wild dogs on them, in many cases torturing and burning them. In pre-capitalist societies, before conquest and exploitation, Feinberg argues, transgender people were honoured and revered. Feinberg's essay, 'Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come', first published in 1992, called for a pangender umbrella to cover all sexual minorities. It was the beginning of a movement. The first Transgender Studies Reader stretches back into the medical archive then forward into the 1990s: the activism of that decade was the ground and precondition of the engagement, the defiance, the manifestos which, in the face of a blind and/or hostile world, the Reader offered. These volumes are vast, they contain multitudes, as if to state: 'Look how many we are and how much we have to say.' We need to remember that these bold and unprecedented interventions predated by more than two or even three decades, the phenomenon known as 'trans' in popular culture today.

Like any story of a person's life, all the stories I have discussed are caught in histories not of their own choosing. They also need to be told. Ashley, for example, a child of the Second World War, finds herself in a circle that includes Goebbels's sister-in-law, who inherited Goebbels's wealth and property after he and his wife murdered their six children and then killed themselves. 'I was to find,' Ashley writes of their growing friendship, 'that most people had secrets - some in their own way, as delicate as mine.' The link between them goes deeper than she may have realised. Magnus Hirschfield, sexologist, founder of the first gay rights organisation and an early advocate for transgender people, was described by Hitler as 'the most dangerous man in Germany'; the Nazis destroyed his institute and burned his research collection. The war is her story. Ashley's mother, who hated her and would regularly pick her up by her ankles and bang her head on the floor, worked at the Fazakerley bomb factory, losing much of her hair and all her teeth from being around TNT. 'As a child growing up during the Second World War,' Ashley begins her memoir, 'I was generally badly treated by everybody.'

Caitlyn Jenner says she will still vote Republican, even for Donald Trump, despite the party's dire record on LGBT issues. She is being consistent. As Bruce, the famous athlete, Bizzinger recalls, she had been a weapon in the Cold War: 'Mom and apple pie with a daub of vanilla ice cream for deliciousness in a country desperate for such an image.' 'He had beaten the Commie bastards. He was America.' In an article in the New York Times in 1977, Tony Kornheiser described Jenner as 'twirling the nation like a baton; he and his wife Chrystie are so high up on the pedestal of American heroism, it would take a crane to get them down.' Who is to say that something of that dubious political aura has not made its way, like a lingering scent, into the phenomenon that is Caitlyn Jenner today?

For Jayne County being trans was a ticket to the other side, what she calls the 'flaming side of gay life'. One of the most successful plays she wrote and performed, World: Birth of a Nation, included a scene where John Wayne gives birth to a baby out of his anus (not the way most people like to think of the birth of a nation, or indeed John Wayne). The Village Voice gave it a rave review. County was brought up in right-wing rural America where biblical prophecy ruled and the Beast took the shape of a United Europe with Germany at its head (Germans would apparently unite with the Arab nations against the Jews). She credits Bill Clinton with fostering an atmosphere in the 1990s that made the US 'wide open for people of all variations of sexuality, including trannies of every shape, size and colour'. But already by the middle of the decade when County returned from the Berlin underground, the Conservative right were taking power, and the Democrats, with their liberal stand on abortion, gay rights and prayer in schools, were seen as disciples of Satan 'by Baptist bastards, Republican retards and right-wing Christians' (no change there then). 'This,' she asserts, 'just makes me more defiant than ever. I'll get more and more outrageous just to freak them out' (she had been planning to retire to her home community, dress in more subdued fashion, and settle down). These are the last lines of her book. We do trans people no favours if we ignore these contexts. As if, after all, trans is merely a tale transsexuals are telling themselves, cut off and leading a strange life all their own (which must increase the voyeurism, the over-intense focus from which they suffer).

In 1998, the Remembering Our Dead project was founded in the US in response to the killing of Rita Hester, an African American trans woman who was found murdered in her Massachusetts apartment. By 2007, 378 murders had been registered, and the number continues to climb today. Commemoration is crucial but also risky. There is a danger, Sarah Lamble writes in the second Transgender Studies Reader, that 'the very existence of transgender people is verified by their death': that trans people come to define themselves as objects of violence over and above everything else (the violence that afflicts them usurping the identity they seek). 'In this model,' Lamble continues, 'justice claims rest on proof that one group is not only most oppressed but also most innocent,' which implies that trans people can never be implicated in the oppression of others. Apparently, the list of victims in the archives gives no information about age, race, class or circumstances, although the activists are mostly white and the victims almost invariably people of colour, so that when the images are juxtaposed, they reproduce one of the worst tropes of colonialism: whites as redeemers of the black dead. At the core of the remembrance ceremony, individuals step forward to speak in the name of the dead. What is going on here? What fetishisation - Lamble's word - of death? What is left of these complex lives which, in failing fully to be told, fail fully to be honoured?

On the other hand, I would tentatively suggest that we are witnessing the first signs that the category of the transsexual might one day, as the ultimate act of emancipation, abolish itself. In 'Women's Time' (1981), Julia Kristeva argued that feminists, and indeed the whole world, would enter a third stage in relation to sexual difference: after the demand for equal rights and then the celebration of femininity as other than the norm, a time will come when the distinction between woman and man will finally disappear, a metaphysical relic of a bygone age. In the second Transgender Studies Reader, Morgan Bassichis, Alexander Lee and Dean Spade call for a trans and queer movement which would set its sights above all on a neoliberal agenda that exacerbates inequality, consolidates state authority and increases the number of incarcerated people across the globe. Today, the official US response to the regular and fatal violence meted out to trans and queer people is hate-crimes legislation, tacked onto Defense Bills, which lengthens prison sentences and strengthens the hand of the local and federal law imposing them. In 2007, the Employment Non-Discrimination Bill was gutted of gender-identity protection. Bill Clinton - pace Jayne County - may have liberalised the sexual life of the nation, but it was on his watch that the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act limited aid and increased penalties for welfare recipients. Viewed in this light, Clinton becomes, like Cameron, a leader whose social liberalism, including on sexual matters, is what allows him to drive through brutally unjust economic policies with such baffling ease.

'Critical trans resistance to unjust state power,' Bassichis, Lee and Spade argue, 'must tackle such problems as poverty, racism and incarceration if it is to do more than consolidate the legitimate citizenship status of the most privileged segments of trans populations.' As soon as you talk about privilege, everything starts to look different. Bassichis, Lee and Spade call for trans and queer activists to become part of a movement, no longer geared only to sexual minorities but embracing the wider, and now seen as more radical, aim of abolishing prisons in the US. 'We can no longer,' they state, 'allow our deaths to be the justification of so many other people's deaths through policing, imprisonment and detention.' Trans people can't afford to be co-opted by discriminatory and death-dealing state power. The regular and casual police killings of black men on the streets of America comes immediately to mind as part of this larger frame in which, they are insisting, all progressive politics should be set.

Death must not be an excuse for more death. Obviously it is not for me to make this call on behalf of trans people. I have written this essay from the position of a so-called 'cis' woman, a category which I believe, as I hope is by this point clear, to be vulnerable to exposure and undoing. Today, trans people - men, women, neither, both - are taking the public stage more than ever before. In the words of a Time magazine cover story in June last year, trans is 'America's next civil rights frontier'. Perhaps, even though it doesn't always look this way on the ground, trans activists will also - just - be in a position to advance what so often seems impossible: a political movement that tells it how it uniquely is, without separating one struggle for equality and human dignity from all the rest.
Among the texts consulted for this article:
The First Lady by April Ashley and Douglas Thompson (Blake, 2006, out of print)

Transgender Equality: First Report of Session 2015-16 by the House of Commons Women and Equalities Committee (January)

A Queer and Pleasant Danger: The True Story of a Nice Jewish Boy who Joins the Church of Scientology and Leaves Twelve Years Later to Become the Lovely Lady She Is Today by Kate Bornstein (Beacon, 258 pp., £11.30, July 2013, 978 0 8070 0183 7)

Dear Sir or Madam by Mark Rees (Mallard, £8, Kindle edition)

Trans: A Memoir by Juliet Jacques (Verso, 330 pp., £16.99, September 2015, 978 1 7847 8164 4)

The Transgender Studies Reader, edited by Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (Routledge, 752 pp., £41.99, 2006, 978 0 415 94709 1)

The Transgender Studies Reader 2, edited by Susan Stryker and Aren Aizura (Routledge, 693 pp., £46.99, March 2013, 978 0 415 51773 7)

Tiny Pieces of Skull or A Lesson in Manners by Roz Kaveney (Team Angelica, 190 pp., £9.99, April 2015, 978 0 9569719 7 5)

Man Enough to be a Woman by Jayne County and Rupert Smith (Serpent's Tail, 1996, out of print)

Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratising of Trangenderism by Patricia Gherovici (Routledge, 316 pp., £29.99, February 2010, 978 0 415 80616 9)

Conundrum by Jan Morris (Faber, 160 pp., £8.99, 2002, 978 0 571 20946 7)

Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Vol. 21, Issue 2 (2011), Special Issue: 'Transgender Subjectivities: Theories and Practices'

Man into Woman: The First Sex Change, a Portrait of Lili Elbe edited by Niels Hoyer (Blue Boat, 2004, out of print)

Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality by Jay Prosser (Columbia, 282 pp., £20, 1998, 978 0 231 10935 2)

Trans(per)forming Nina Arsenault: An Unreasonable Body of Work edited by Judith Rudakoff (Chicago, 160 pp., £20, July 2013, 978 1 84150 571 8)

Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category by David Valentine (Duke, 312 pp., £16.99, 2007, 978 0 8223 3869 7)

Vanity Fair Special Edition: Trans America (August 2015)

In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives by Judith Halberstam (NYU, 238 pp., £10, 2005, 978 0 8147 3585 5)

Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transssexual and Transgendered People by Viviane Namaste (Chicago, 354 pp., £22.50, 2000, 978 0 226 56810 2)

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Jacqueline Rose · Who do you think you are? Trans Narratives · LRB 4 May 2016

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S ometime​ in the 1970s, at the home of the feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey, I found myself in the company of another critic, who had just returned to London from the Berlin Film Festival.

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Le constat

En France, la période des années 60 est marquée par une intense activité de théorisation de la condition féminine en France. Différentialistes, féministes libertaires ou libertariennes, constructionnistes, féministes marxistes, .... essayons de nous y retrouver.

Votre sexe n'est là que pour la dépendance :
Du côté de la barbe est la toute-puissance.
Bien qu'on soit deux moitiés de la société,
Ces deux moitiés pourtant n'ont point d'égalité :
L'une est moitié suprême et l'autre subalterne ;
L'une est toute soumise à l'autre qui gouverne ;...

Tirade satyrique d'Arnolphe à sa pupille Agnès Scène II Acte III,
L'école des Femmes, Molière, 1663

Antoinette Fouque - le MLF

Fondatrice du MLF, le Mouvement de Libération des Femmes, en 1970, Antoinette Fouque défend des positions différentialistes et essentialistes. La philosophie de ces mouvements féministes repose sur le constructionnisme qui étudie les modalités de la construction sociale de la différence des sexes, c'est-à-dire la manière par laquelle la socialisation impose des rôles sociaux différents aux personnes des deux sexes. Le terme de sexisme se répand et les féministes radicales et matérialistes élaborent le concept de patriarcat pour définir le système social d'oppression des femmes. Elles affirment que le domaine de la reproduction (maternité, corps, famille, travail domestique...) est un espace d'exploitation privilégié des femmes. Pour elles, aucune égalité entre les sexes ne peut être obtenue à l'intérieur du système patriarcal : elles préconisent donc de renverser ce système et d'instaurer de nouveaux rapports entre les sexes.

Gisèle Halimi - le mouvement Choisir

Née le 27 juillet 1927 en Tunisie de parents juifs, elle entre au barreau de Tunis en 1949 et poursuit sa carrière d'avocate à Paris en 1956.Son enfance dans une famille traditionaliste sera l'origine de son combat dans la lutte féministe. En effet, dès son plus jeune âge, elle remet en cause ses obligations de fille au sein de sa famille. C'est pourquoi, à l'âge de 13 ans, elle entame une grève de la faim afin de ne plus avoir à faire le lit de son frère. Au bout de trois jours, ses parents cèdent et elle écrira dans son journal intime de l'époque : " aujourd'hui j'ai gagné mon premier petit bout de liberté ".

Fondatrice et présidente de l'Association Choisir et avocate au bureau de Paris, Gisèle Halimi organise le procès de Bobigny. Puis en 1979 et en 1983, député européenne, elle défend la " Clause de l'Européenne la plus favorisée ", cherchant à indexer les lois européennes sur le contrôle des naissances sur les pays les plus généreux en matière de délai d'avortement, de gratuité de la pilule du lendemain, des congés maternité et paternité...

Pour aller plus loin, les citations de son livre, Ne vous résignez jamais, paru chez Plon en Mars 2010.

Le Manifeste des 343 Salopes de 1971

Paru le 5 avril 1971 dans le magazine français Le Nouvel Observateur, le Manifeste des 343 Salopesest une pétition signée par Marguerite Duras, Françoise Sagan, Catherine Deneuve, le Planning Familial et de nombreuses personnalités de gauche et de mouvements féministes affirmant avoir eu un avortement, déclaration qui les exposait à l'époque à des poursuites pénales pouvant aller jusqu'à l'emprisonnement.

Les nouveaux courants du Féminisme français - Marxisme et radicalité

Depuis la fin des années 90, divers groupements, se réclamant ou non du féminisme, se sont créés de nouveau. Parmi les plus médiatisés, on peut citer par exemple les Chiennes de Garde qui se réclament avant tout féministes dans l'héritage du MLF, tandis que depuis 2003, le mouvement français Ni putes ni soumises, présidé par Fadela Amara, veut interpeller sur la situation des femmes notamment dans les cités, sans pour autant vouloir être perçues comme féministes. Ses membres, surtout originaires de banlieues, ont ainsi fait connaître les problèmes des mariages forcés, du viol ou de l'excision. Ni putes ni soumises s'est d'ailleurs insurgé contre la Gestation Pour autrui comme un nouvel esclavage des femmes.

L'étude belgeBarricade 2011 Quand le plancher craque, - les moteurs de la mobilisation féminine, expose les différents courants féministes :

" Pour le courant féministe marxiste, il faut abolir la société capitaliste divisée en classes et cela mettra fin automatiquement à l'oppression des femmes.

Elles revendiquent cependant des réformes concrètes concernant l'égalité des chances dans l'emploi, l'éducation, la création de garderies, les salaires, l'avortement libre et gratuit, etc. Pour atteindre ces buts, les féministes marxistes tablent sur l'évolution des lois, les manifestations, les groupes de discussion. Pour les féministes radicales, le renversement du patriarcat est prioritaire via la réappropriation par les femmes du contrôle de leur propre corps, la création d'alternatives, d'espaces exclusivement féminins, par des offensives directes contre le patriarcat (manifestations contre la pornographie, les concours de beauté, les déploiements militaires, les mutilations sexuelles, etc.). Les féministes radicales sont opposées à la mixité dans les réunions et débats. "[i]
Marcela Iacub - le Féminisme libertarien

La théoricienne du Féminisme, juriste, essayiste et chercheuse, née en 1964, Marcela Iacub explique dans :

" La maternité précarise. Les femmes sacrifient leur destin personnel à la reproduction de la société ".

Elle défend le droit à la prostitution, au mariage et à l'adoption pour les homosexuels et lesbiennes, aux méthodes de procréation artificielle, et au végétarisme.

[i] Lorsque le Plancher craque, les moteurs de la mobilisation féministe, par Nicole van Enis, Etude Barricade 2011, Fédération Wallonie- Bruxelles.
[ii] http://endehors.org/news/marcella-iacub-et-le-feminisme-libertaire

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Le Féminisme en France depuis 1960 - Woman Attitude

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En France, la période des années 60 est marquée par une intense activité de théorisation de la condition féminine en France. Différentialistes, féministes libertaires ou libertariennes, constructionnistes, féministes marxistes, .... essayons de nous y retrouver. Votre sexe n'est là que pour la dépendance : Du côté de la barbe est la toute-puissance.

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Talk at the Whitechapel Gallery in London

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Whitechapel Gallery - Timeline | Facebook

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GuerrillaGirls live from Whitechapel Gallery

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Women Fire Fighters

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Wearing bright, bold colours gives us confidence. But not every woman can let her true colours shine through. That's why Dove searched for four women who deserved more colour in their lives and treated them to a very special occasion.

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The story behind the campaign

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A new breed of feminism has been rearing its big, beautiful head. The fourth wave has swept in on the tides of the internet the last decade, and though it isn't yet as defined or action-based as its older sisters, it is more inclusive than them in nature and diverse in its messages. As well as traditional feminist issues like unequal pay and domestic violence, fourth-wave feminism tackles a new host of problems, from online misogyny and slut shaming to campus rape and the rights of women in developing countries. It's also marked by a strong emphasis on the body positive movement, particularly the reclaiming of female bodies, which is fucking awesome considering how much razor heads cost these days.

The movement is championed by Millennials who, thanks to the multitude of platforms the web has spewed forth, can communicate with and express themselves to a limitless following. Prominent artists like Filthy Ratbag and Frances Cannon use their drawings to spread the message. Creatives like Big Dumb Pissbaby and social influencers like Adele Labo do it by exercising control over their bodies. In an even bigger spotlight, there's Nakkiah Lui, Lena Dunham, Beyoncé, Miley Cyrus, Nicki Minaj and Emma Watson - the list goes on.

Then there's H&M.

About two weeks ago, the Swedish multinational brand released the video for its autumn 2016 Collection. If you haven't seen it, you can watch it here. The ad is set to a (particularly glorious) Lion Babe cover of Tom Jones' 'She's a Lady' and features a wealth of phenomenal women challenging stereotypes of what it means to be ladylike. Muay Thai boxer Fatima Pinto admires herself in a little black dress, hairy-pitted model Arvida Bystrom reclines in a bed, musician Jillian Hervey picks her teeth in a restaurant, model Iselin Steiro sits spread-legged on a train and business mogul Pum Lefebure chairs a boardroom meeting. A shaven-haired Casja Wessberg, 72-year-old model Lauren Hutton, trans model and actress Hari Nef, Gurls Talk founder Adwoa Aboah and plus-sized models Paloma Elsesser and Katy Syme also play a role.

The media, of course, exploded.

Predictably, dunny-roll tabloid The Daily Mail wrote about the campaign video's "wobbly bottoms" and "far from demure scenarios", but the Sydney Morning Herald, TIME, the Huffington Post and Pedestrian TV applauded the clip, some going as far as to call it "stunning" and "awesome" and all giving the multinational corporation a wet-dream's worth of free publicity. The Twitterverse was equally stoked.

the h&m commercial is a masterpiece. im a 5'4 asian thick-thighed girl with braces, but im still a lady. a goddamn beautiful one.

- gisele bundt cake (@hautearmani) September 16, 2016

The new H&M #ladylike campaign is an absolute game changer, so much love

- Tara // (@immabeahippo) September 19, 2016

But while the video is undeniably fabulous, there is one looming problem. It's an ad. It's an ad that, at its core, is designed to promote the idea that H&M stands for something great. By championing an empowering feminist ethos, the retailer hopes to sell the shit out of its latest range and make consumers feel good about themselves when they buy it.

According to a spokesperson for H&M, "The latest campaign celebrates diversity as well as inspirational women from various backgrounds, encouraging women around the world to embrace their personal style and take pride in who they truly are and what they stand for."

But H&M doesn't stand for women.

Earlier this year, a report compiled by the Asia Floor Wage Alliance found that the fashion giant was routinely exploiting its supply staff. Based on 251 interviews with garment workers, the report alleged that employees from 11 out of 12 Cambodian supplier factories claimed they had witnessed or experienced employment termination during pregnancy. It also claimed that every single one of the 50 staff surveyed in India said that women were often fired when they fell pregnant. In a predominately female industry, this is a colossal problem, particularly when coupled with the workplace sexual harassment that was also reported as commonplace.

Heck, H&M doesn't stand for basic rights in general. Syrian refugee children were recently found working in its factories in Turkey, and last year's Human Rights Watch report into Cambodia's garment industry found factory staff were not allowed to refuse excessive overtime, but were not paid any overtime wages. Speaking of income, despite the Fair Wage Method project that H&M initiated in 2013 and rolled out to 20 of its factories in Cambodia, staff in the south-east Asian nation are still earning below the stipulated industry median of $178USD per month.

As for its purported stance on diversity and body positivity, one look inside a H&M store will tell you that's puffery at best. Plus-size models may have rocked their bods in the autumn vid, but most H&M stores don't even stock a plus-size range. Sydney's Pitt St store is one of many without a plus-size department, and this month, every New York store pulled its plus-sized garments from its floors because, according to a H&M spokesperson, they don't have room for it. Actually, come to think of it, maybe the plus-size models in the ad were only wearing underwear because they couldn't find any H&M clothes that fitted.

So I guess what that H&M spokesperson really meant was We sat down with advertising agency Forsman & Bodenfors to discuss what would help us sell our latest range of cheaply-made, poor-quality clothing. We settled on feminism and body positivity, because we've noticed it's trendy and popular at the moment.

H&M doesn't care about women. They do not care to muddle the feminist message in their campaign with affirmative action in their garment factories. They just want to capitalise on the idea of empowering females in order to sell their clothes. But feminism isn't a trend to be enjoyed for autumn 2016, nor is it a privilege that is only supposed to be accessible to women who can afford to shop. It's a longstanding commitment to equality in both the developed and developing world.

And another thing. Though the reach of H&M's campaign is incredible (the video has already clocked more than two million views) and the conversations it has spawned make it a welcome catalyst for female-centric dialogue, girls, come on: we don't need an unethical multibillion-dollar apparel company to tell us that it's okay grow our armpits out and order hot chips for dinner, just like we don't need our soap telling us we're beautiful a la Dove's #choosebeautiful campaigns. Greatness of the video aside, H&M will exploit anything to make a sale - just ask the women who work in its factories. I'm not buying it: the sentiment or the clothing

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A new breed of feminism has been rearing its big, beautiful head. The fourth wave has swept in on the tides of the internet the last decade, and though it isn't yet as defined or action-based as its older sisters, it is more inclusive than them in nature and diverse in its messages.

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Strong Women?

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Guardian article on controversial campaign

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o you know how to swim? Yes? OK. Do you need sunscreen for your skin tone? Yes? No? OK. How about a bathing suit? Do you have one of those? OK. Prefer to go naked/keep your shorts on? That's fine too.

I now declare your body ready for the beach. You are beach body ready. Off you go, have fun. And that is where this article should end.

Instead, it is just about to start. Because the same advertisement that was banned in the UK over body confidence and health concerns at the end of April has now been in the US for almost a month - with little controversy.

The ad features a black and white, svelte-yet-curvy, fair-haired and fair-skinned woman in a bright yellow bikini. Her hair is long and lush, her lips full, and her waist is tiny. Next to her is the simple question: Are you beach body ready?

The question is almost immediately followed by the introduction of "the weight loss collection". As if to suggest you probably are not beach body ready, and that clearly the step to remedy that involves losing weight.

After sitting in a subway surrounded by the body-shaming-for-profit ads one too many times, and walking by a gigantic, skyscraper-sized version of the ad on 42nd Street, next to Times Square - and staring up in shock - I decided to investigate.

Armed with accessories my body loves to take to the beach (a snorkel, a beach ball, goggles) - accessories that indeed give my body a great sense of beach-readiness - I headed to the foot of the gargantuan Times Square ad on Friday morning. I asked passers by what they thought. Perhaps, after all, I was the only New Yorker worried about my perfect 13-year-old cousin becoming a woman in this kind of world.

Sherrie Griffith, an 18-year-old New Yorker who is getting ready to attend college (not the beach) in the fall, looked up at the massive neon yellow image featuring the white Barbie-meet-Iggy-Azalea-lookalike figure - henceforth "Godzilla-Barbie" - and took a minute to think.

"I know we both have different shapes. I have more of a gut than her," she said grabbing her midriff.

"This ad makes me feel less beach body ready because we are in a different position. She's that," Griffith said pointing upwards. "I am that," she said, pointing at herself.

But Darlene Watler is pretty confident Photograph: Rose Hackman/Instagram

Griffith said she was not sure whether she was beach body ready. She initially confided she wasn't, and then settled on unsure. (Griffith is beautiful, and I told her so.)

Darlene Watler's body is ready to go to the beach, she declared.

"If you don't want to look at my body while I am at the beach, then I don't care."

The 50-year-old, who works in customer service, appeared excited at the prospect of getting beach-prepped.

"A bathing suit ... I'll get my hair done. Maybe wear a little makeup. That's all I need!"

Emelie Nasman, a 28-year-old teacher from Sweden, said she was rushing by the ad and preferred not to think about it too much.

Why not?

"The answer to the question ... It's no," she said. "No. I don't feel beach body ready. This ad reminds me of that."

She added this kind of ad would never be allowed in Sweden. "People would complain too much about it."

Robin McConnell, a 62-year-old teacher from North Carolina, said that once upon a time, she used to look like that, pointing up at Godzilla-Barbie, not without a certain degree of glee.

Robin McConnell not offended at all: 'If I was 40 years younger I would probably wear something like that'

"It doesn't bother me because I see so much stuff like that on TV," she said, referring to weight loss ads and ladies in bikinis.

"If I was 40 years younger I would probably wear something like that," she mused.

Nowadays, she is a grandmother, and wears a one-piece, but she is happy to watch the next generation look great in bikinis, she said.

"My daughters-in-law look like that."

'I am shocked by the close-up on her bikini line'

Mary Dillon, a 75-year-old retired office manager, really did not like the zoom-in to Godzilla-Barbie's bikini bottom.

"Showing the line where you have to shave and all. I don't go for that."

"Women have been showing their boobs - I don't think they should - since I have been going to the beach. But that part of the crotch: I think it's indecent."

Dillon stressed she was open-minded. She didn't mind the fact that I had cut my hair short, and had dyed it ("if you don't do it now, then when can you!") she offered, by way of illustration.

Eduardo Brandt, a 28-year-old lawyer in New York, said he didn't feel offended by the ad because he was a man, but he realized women may be offended.

His friend and fellow New York lawyer, Federico Rodriguez, 30, said he was so used to seeing near-naked women on billboards, he hardly noticed them anymore. "You become immune," he said.

Showing empathy for the ladies

The pair were quite blasé about the whole thing, until I asked them what they would think if they had a daughter, and how they would feel if their daughter came across the ad. Then, they became quite articulate.

"I would feel bad because it's trying to impose a very unreachable standard for women," Brandt said. "And I would feel bad for her that she would think that she needs to reach that standard to be happy."

Do they feel beach body ready? No, they both said. Rodriguez ventured he felt a little fat.

Fouss Sangare, a 38-year-old sports agent visiting from Paris, said if this ad was about getting ready for the beach - literally - then it did a poor job of it.

"If you want to talk about the beach, then you need to have a beach in the ad," he said.

"Here I am not projecting the beach. I am a man. When I see this body, my mind does not go to the beach."

Where does it go to?

"I am a man. My mind is not going to the beach."

What do you mean?

"I am not going to spell it out."

Pity.

Charlotte Sunnen, a 25-year-old designer from Switzerland, was at first flattered when a man approached her on 42nd Street, in close proximity to the Godzilla-Barbie ad, and asked her whether she was the model on the giant billboard.

"It made me feel good. It means that my own perception of my body is wrong. I am too tough on myself," she said.

"It's the kind of body I am trying to reach, but always falling short. When you see that, it's very difficult to enjoy your own body when this is your idea of perfection."

But then, she said, the man who asked her whether she was Godzilla-Barbie touched her arm, without permission. He added that he loved walking down the street and seeing naked women on billboards, Sunnen recounted.

"It's a free country! God Bless America," he told her as he left.

Shortly after hopping into his car, parked on 42nd Street, he honked his horn.

"He was disgusting," she said.

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Are you beach body ready? Controversial weight loss ad sparks varied reactions

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o you know how to swim? Yes? OK. Do you need sunscreen for your skin tone? Yes? No? OK. How about a bathing suit? Do you have one of those? OK. Prefer to go naked/keep your shorts on? That's fine too. I now declare your body ready for the beach.

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Spoof image from Huffington Post

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Male suicide rates in the UK are 3.5 times more than females. Is this because showing emotion is seen as 'too feminine' or weak?

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The male suicide rate in the UK was 3½ times that of women in 2012, the highest ratio between the sexes in more than 30 years, official figures show .

The data was published as the University of Bristol and the Samaritans announced the launch of a project to investigate the impact of the internet on those with suicidal thoughts amid growing concerns about its effect on vulnerable people.

There were 4,590 male suicides registered in 2012, compared with 1,391 female, equating to 18.2 per 100,000 men and 5.2 per 100,000 women, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

When the data series began, in 1981, the male suicide rate was 1.9 times that for women. But the rate for women halved, with a much smaller decrease (from 19.8 in 1981) for men.

Clare Wyllie, head of policy and research at Samaritans, said the figures showed that the highest suicide rate was among men aged 40 to 44, at 25.9 deaths per 100,000. This bore out the charity's own studies, which have found middle-aged men of low socioeconomic status to be most at risk. "They will grow up expecting by the time they reach mid-life they'll have a wife who will look after them and a job for life in a male industry," she said. "In reality they may find that they reach middle age in a very different position. Society has this masculine ideal that people are expecting to live up to. Lots of that has to do with being a breadwinner. When men don't live up to that it can be quite devastating for them."

Additional factors were the perception that it was more acceptable for men to turn to drink or other risky behaviour to cope with difficulty, and men being often reticent about talking about their feelings.

Paul Bristow, from the Mental Health Foundation, said: "We urgently need to know more about why being male is itself a risk factor in suicide and to do more to help men, especially young men, seek assistance rather than suffer in silence."

The study conducted by the University of Bristol and the Samaritans has funding from the Department of Health policy research programme.

It follows high-profile cases of young people who have taken their own lives after visiting self-harm sites, including Tallulah Wilson, 15, who died after being hit by a train in October 2012. At an inquest last month, her mother, Sarah Wilson, said Tallulah had been "in the clutches of a toxic digital world".

In a statement to the inquest, Wilson said that there was a need for a greater understanding of the impact of the internet on young people. She had been shocked by the ease with which children could access self-harm and suicide blogs. "Tallulah entered a world where the lines between fantasy and reality became blurred," she said. "It is every parent's worst nightmare. I appeal to big brands to withdraw their advertising from those sites who continue to host inappropriate self-harming and suicide-promoting blogs to stop this poison spreading."

But Wyllie said the research would also look at whether the internet could be a positive force.

She said: "There's a lot of material on the internet and from what we know about suicide the material carries risk with someone who's suicidal, but we also know lots of people go online for support."

There were 64 fewer suicides in 2012 than in 2011 and a slight reduction in the overall suicide rate per 100,000, from 11.8 to 11.6, despite a marginal increase in the male rate from 18.1 over the same period. But in 2011 there was a significant increase in both the number of suicides and the suicide rate from 2010.

Wyllie said that since 2007 the overall rate had risen, "tracking the economic climate". She said: "While we are pleased there hasn't been an increase [from 2011], we must not be complacent."
The Samaritans' 24-hour helpline is 08457 909090. Topics

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Male suicide rate in UK discovered to be 3½ times that of women

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The male suicide rate in the UK was 3½ times that of women in 2012, the highest ratio between the sexes in more than 30 years, official figures show . The data was published as the University of Bristol and the Samaritans announced the launch of a project to investigate the impact of the internet on those with suicidal thoughts amid growing concerns about its effect on vulnerable people.

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Feminism taken to the extreme. Papa Bless

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Feminism taken to the extreme. Papa Bless

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Crazy Feminist Gets Triggered Ft. Hugh Mungus

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Student Ruth Clemens, 25, slated H&M for its 'unrealistically small' clothes

P ost shows her failing to fit into size 16 jeans - despite her being a size 14

Spotted jeans in shop and said 'I thought I'd try them on. It did not go well'

H&M responded to viral post saying they will 'take on board' her feedback

A student has shamed fashion chain H&M by posting a changing room snap of her struggling to fit into a size 16 pair of jeans - despite being a size 14.

Ruth Clemens, who is studying for a PhD in Comparative Literature at Leeds Trinity University, took the photo after visiting the Leeds H&M store on Monday.

Despite being a size 14, she picked up a pair of £10 size 16 jeans in the hope they would easily fit.

As she tried to tug the jeans up, however, she realised they were 'inches short' on the waist - making it impossible to do up the top button.

The 25-year-old also tried on a medium vest top, but found it only came to her midriff.

The viral Facebook post has racked up 65,000 likes, nearly 7,000 comments and has been shared more than 8,000 times,

She wrote in a message to bosses at H&M saying they made jeans 'unrealistically small'.

The post said that she had spotted a 'bargain' pair of jeans at the store and gone to the changing rooms to try them on - only for them to not fit.

'As I'm sure you're aware, size 16 is the largest size you stock (apart from in your plus size range, which is very limited in store and does not offer the range of styles for the fashion-conscious that are available in smaller sizes),' she wrote.

'I am not overweight (not that that should matter) and although I'm 5 foot 11 my body is pretty average shape-wise.

'It's already difficult enough for me to find clothes that fit well because of my height, why are you making jeans that are unrealistically small?'

She then goes on to question the store, asking 'am I too fat for your everyday range?'

Among the thousands of comments included Kay Aspey who wrote: 'Unbelievable!!! It comes as no shock that many people including children/teens have low self esteem when it comes to their body.

'Will H&M sort this out?? I highly doubt it, and that is the upsetting thing!!! Fantastic that you have posted this x'

Courtney Burgess wrote: 'This so ridiculously true!! I am typically a size 12 and some of the size 16 clothing didn't even fit me.

'I am never shopping there again because I will not be made to feel bigger than what I am!'

Brett Whyman said it wasn't just women that were affected by the sizing policy, adding: 'Doesn't just happen to lasses, they don't do clothes to fit me in H&M.

'Think max size in jeans is a 34, and I'm a xxl shirt and they never have them.'

A spokesman for H&M - a Swedish firm with more than 250 stores in the UK and nearly 4,000 worldwide - replied to the post saying it valued her feedback.

'I THOUGHT I'D TRY THEM ON. IT DID NOT GO WELL': THE VIRAL POST IN FULL

Also vote remain

'We are sorry to hear about your experience in store recently,' it read.

'We always want our customers to have an enjoyable time when shopping in store and to leave feeling confident in themselves.

'At H&M we make clothing for all our stores around the world, so the sizing can vary depending on the style, cut and fabric.

'We value all feedback and will take on board the points you and other customers have raised.'

And a spokesman told MailOnline: 'Everyone is welcome at H&M and we value all feedback.

'H&M works with the same measurements and sizes within all concepts, across all 62 markets and online, however the fit of a garment may vary depending on the style, cut and fabric.'

H&M were one of the many high street chains slammed for using ultra-skinny mannequins in their stores.

They measured just 23.5ins last year - but the average British woman has a waist size of 33ins.

Even young women who wear size eight clothes generally have a 28in waist.

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Size 14 student shames H&M with snap of too small size 16 jeans

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Student Ruth Clemens, 25, slated H&M for its 'unrealistically small' clothes P ost shows her failing to fit into size 16 jeans - despite her being a size 14 Spotted jeans in shop and said 'I thought I'd try them on.

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Why does the above post say "wife of the American president Theodore?"

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Why does the above post say "wife of the American president Theodore?"

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Why have you described her with an achievement of her husband? She was an activist, a politician, diplomat and had many achievements as a human rights activist. These should be the things describing her not her husbands achievements.
He, in fact, isn't actually her husband. He was her Uncle. She was married to Franklin D. Roosevelt.

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Google Search For Feminism and it comes up with Beyonce

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Google Search For Feminism and it comes up with Beyonce

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AUSTIN, Texas (WOMENSENEWS)- With the release of the remix of "Flawless," a new book about her published last week called " Beyoncé: Running the World: The Biography" and her recent performance in front of a large image of the word "FEMINIST" at the MTV Video Music Awards, it's worth reflecting on whether Beyoncé's displays of individualism are feminism in action, or something else.

Full disclosure, I am not a fan of Bey, nor am I a detractor; I tend to approach her and her products with skeptical distance, as a scientist studies natural phenomena. In the past, I would have shaken my head and thought "You go, girl!" at her boasts in "Flawless"-"You can say what you want, I'm the shit."

However, my position on the fan spectrum shifted toward the negative when, during her performance of "Blue" at the Video Music Awards, she sang to what appeared to be a home movie of herself post-partum, reclining in a hospital bed holding newly born Baby Blue Ivy, sharing what must have been a tender moment with husband Jay-Z.

I admit to being touched by the sentiment: it made me recall the wonder of meeting my son and becoming a mother. A moment later, shaking myself out of the reverie, I felt angry that Beyoncé seemed to be peddling an extremely rarefied version of motherhood, one made possible by her wealth, beauty and respectability as part of what seems to be a successful marriage. Not to put too fine a point on it, but that image edged me toward the detractor camp.

Different Things to Different People

Do such displays make Beyoncé a feminist, and what does feminism even look like in 2014? Throw out antiquated ideas of women burning bras! Today, it means different things to different people.

Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo, would tell us that feminism means making it to the top so that you have the power, prestige and resources to build a nursery next to your executive office inside the corporate headquarters.

Sheryl Sandberg, the Facebook executive of "Lean In" fame, would have us believe that it means getting an elite education, using your networks to climb the professional ladder, working long and hard and selecting a supportive partner who will go halfsies on domestic duties.

For Beyoncé, it means profiting off the beauty and labor of your own body unselfconsciously and marketing your likeness strategically.

Each, in her own way, seems to prove definitively that women can have it all because-"Look, no hands!"-each has created a successful career, made buckets of money and formed a perfect nuclear family.

What they don't tell you is, "I'm special, exceptional really." They don't tell you their strategies won't work for other women who don't have the same resources at hand. "Nevermind," they say, "that I am an outlier, the exception to the rule rather than the example that proves it. I worked hard, and I deserve this."

An Exceptional Outlier

I recognize their positions, for I, too, am an exceptional outlier: through my wits and doggedness, I have created a thriving career, attained a measure of financial security and participated in the making of a family. A major difference between Beyoncé, Mayer and Sandberg and this professional woman is the recognition of privilege.

When I nursed my children past the recommended six-month mark and through to their second years, or when the nanny retrieved the children from school so that I could squeeze in the last bit of work for the day and cook dinner, I felt a deep sense of gratitude that my career and partnership allowed me such flexibility. At the same time, I understood that other working mothers are not afforded the same extraordinary privilege.

Feminism isn't just about getting yours, and it isn't about your individual privilege. It isn't just about making sure you get paid. It isn't about your kids getting a meal of home-cooked organic food every night. It isn't about finding Mr. Right who respects your professional ambitions and participates domestically. It isn't about the fact that you have never experienced spousal abuse.

Maybe it's old-school, but even in 2014, feminism is about seeking to end violence against women, leveling the economic playing field so that women earn salaries equal to their male counterparts, allowing women to decide what is appropriate for their bodies, changing perceptions about women's abilities, reforming family leave and child care and ending systemic gender discrimination.

When Beyoncé markets herself as feminist, it might come off as the (not so) humble brag that says "I am a common woman, and you can achieve this too." But the real message is "I'm different and special, and you can be too."

Feminism is about more than the individual rights of individual exceptional women.

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Why I'm Not Buying Beyoncé's Brand of Feminism

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It's not about having a successful career, making buckets of money and forming a perfect nuclear family. Maybe it's old school, but for me feminism is still about caring about the women out there who are still stuck in a raw deal.

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I'm not aware of the origin of this image, but it would be interesting to find out.

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Video Account

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Are women still objectified? | Laura Mulvey Male Gaze theory explained!

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Collection of Contemporary Ads that gave rise to offence

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Life

If you thought that misogynist advertising was restricted to Mad Men and, y'know, the non-liberated past, think again. Earlier this year, the world saw Germany's transport ministry come under fire for their new advertising campaign on bicycle safety.

The posters featured model Alicija Köhler wearing nothing but lacy underwear and a cycling helmet. The slogan - a lesson in wit if ever we saw one - read: "Looks like shit. But saves my life." And the reaction was... well, it was less than positive, quite frankly.

"It is embarrassing, stupid and sexist for the transport minister to be selling his policies using naked skin," said Maria Noichl, chairwoman of the SDP, as quoted by The Guardian.

Despite new rules around sexism in advertising introduced by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) which were introduced in June, this is by far from the only sexist ad out there.

Indeed, these 18 adverts all somehow managed to get greenlit in the 21st century, serving as a stark reminder (as if it were needed) that, when it comes to the way we speak to and about women, we still have a very long way to go.

1) Not Just Cooling's icky air con advert

As the UK battled with a heatwave in July, a sexist advert by air con company Not Just Cooling appeared on a billboard in Nottingham.

The advert - which showed a woman wearing denim hot pants and a tight t-shirt, along with the caption "Your wife is hot! Better get the air conditioning fixed" - had previously been blocked from running on the sides of public buses.

It suggests that the woman isn't capable of sorting out the air con in her own home, which emphasises the tired trope that the "man of the house" needs to do it.

According to a BBC report, the male designer ran the idea past his team of male colleagues before going ahead with it.

"I saw an advert like this in America, I chuckled to myself and thought 'why not?'. Air conditioning is a very hard thing to advertise," he said.

"The subliminal message about society is that it's OK to comment on women's bodies, and comment on women's bodies as if they are the possession of someone else - 'your wife'," responded Professor Carrie Paechter, director of the Nottingham Centre for Children, Young People and Families.

"If I had young children, I wouldn't want them passing that on the way to school, because of the messages it gives them about society."

We couldn't agree more.

2) Audi's awful decision to compare a woman to buying a car

In one of the biggest 'wtf' advertising moments of 2017, Audi (the German car manufacturer) decided to compare buying a vehicle to finding a wife. Because, obviously, women are a form of property, their value and self-worth wholly dependent on their physical appearance, and men have the right to 'buy' whichever of us they deem worthy.

In the ad - which aired in China - a bride is seen being manhandled by her mother-in-law on her wedding day. The older woman even grabs hold of her future daughter-in-law's jaw, peering forcibly inside her mouth to... to what? Count her teeth or something?

"What are you doing?" the groom asks, before his mother finally approves his bride. The couple are then shown sighing with relief, before the mother's eyes fixate on the horrified bride's breasts... suggesting that further objectification is to come.

At the end of the ad, a red Audi drives along a road as a man's voice states: "An important decision must be made carefully."

Ugh.

Obviously Audi has since come under heavy criticism for the ad, which has been branded a "disgusting" example of sexism. Some have called for the firm to be boycotted.

"From the inception of this idea to its broadcasting, was there a single woman who worked on this commercial?" asked one Weibo user.

Another tweeted: "Audi is being disgusting for making such ad. Women are not products and stop materialising them."

"I will not buy an Audi in this lifetime," another said.

Audi have yet to apologise for the deeply offensive ad, but a spokesman has told the South China Morning Post that they have taken note of criticism and will be looking into the advert (which they hastened to point out had been made with a joint venture partner).

Even glue. Even glue is a sexist issue nowadays.

Give us strength.

Somewhat ironically, one of the Fairtrade principles is gender equality. Genuinely.

So, unsurprisingly, people were outraged - and Co-op soon found themselves the subject of a serious Twitter backlash.

Cue the supermarket promptly pulling the ad and penning an apology.

"We are proud of our organisation's equality and diversity," they said.

"We are sorry."

The 2016 ad sparked fury amongst all those not living under a rock, with many calling out the gym for its "sexist", "inappropriate", "obscene" and "utterly awful" advert.

However, rather than apologise properly for their gross misstep, one of the gym's managers simply said: "It wasn't our intention to offend people and it wasn't at all done in a sexist or derogatory manner."

Right.

6) Marsh & Parsons' casual comparison of a woman to property

In March 2017, commuters were confronted by the sight of yet another obnoxious billboard - this time comparing a woman to a house extension.

Estate agents Marsh & Parsons produced a poster in which a young woman is pictured draped over an older man with the caption "A charming period property with a modern extension."

Sleazy? Absolutely. But worse still was the fact that the text reduced the woman to a lifeless object.

The backlash was immediate and vitriolic - and, while the billboard was later removed, the estate agents didn't exactly own up to their mistake.

David Brown, CEO of Marsh & Parsons, said: "Marsh & Parsons has a recent history of tongue-in-cheek advertisements that compare people to property and reflect that the range of people we work with are as diverse as the types of properties we sell and let...

"The campaign, created by a team of men and women, is designed to be thought-provoking and to prompt conversation, but it was not our intention to cause offence.

"It would appear that this particular advert - taken apart from the rest of the campaign - has done so and we will be taking steps to remove it as a result."

Yeah, no kidding. Just a simple "we're sorry" will do next time.

7) Belvedere Vodka's unforgivable rape advert

Never have we seen a more unacceptable advert than Belvedere Vodka's 2012 campaign, which featured a smiling man forcefully grabbing at a fearful and struggling woman from behind.

"Unlike some people, Belvedere always goes down smoothly."

Yes, Smiley Joe is trying to force his companion to perform oral sex on him. Yes, she's horrified at the idea and desperately trying to escape. And yes, Belvedere really did make a twisted joke about sexual assault in a bid to sell alcohol.

The message was unclear. Were they trying to say "drink our vodka and feel uninhibited enough to rape women"? Or something more along the lines of "use our vodka to render a woman too drunk for consensual sex - and then assault her"?

The demeaning, triggering, and disgusting ad sparked ire all over the world. So much so that it was removed within an hour of publication.

Company President Charles Gibb, responding to outrage, said: "It should never have happened.

"I am currently investigating the matter to determine how this happened and to be sure it never does so again. The content is contrary to our values and we deeply regret this lapse."

While the company's initial apology failed to address the worrying rape implications, they later included a donation to America's Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN) "as an expression of our regret," Gibb said.

8) Saint Laurent's 'porno chic' fashion campaign

In March 2017, Saint Laurent was asked to change its spring 2017 advertising campaign after being accused of featuring models in humiliating "porno chic" poses.

Speaking on behalf of the French advertising watchdog, Autorité de Régulation Professionnelle de la Publicité, Stéphane Martin told The Hollywood Reporter that the photos "suggest an idea of sexual submission, trivialise sexist stereotypes, and are in this sense likely to shock [public] sensibility".

She added: "I am not sure that [Saint Laurent's] female clients would like to be associated with these images.

"We had a similar type of porno chic [in fashion advertising] a decade ago, and here we have it coming back again, which isn't acceptable."

9) Sprite's "brutally refreshing" campaign

In 2016, Coca-Cola launched a new advertising campaign for Sprite in Ireland - and decided to target it at a mainly male audience.

However, the company was dubbed "awful", "misogynistic" and "absolutely shocking" when the #BrutallyRefreshing promotion was unveiled on Twitter.

"She's seen more ceilings than Michelangelo. A two at 10 is a 10 at two."

Hmm. There's nothing quite like an outrageous show of slut-shaming to sell a few bottles of fizz, eh?

Responding to the outcry, a Coca-Cola spokeswoman said: "We're sorry for any offence caused by the #BrutallyRefreshing Sprite campaign in Ireland, which was intended to provide an edgy but humorous take on a range of situations.

"Since its introduction in Ireland, Sprite has been associated with individuality and self-expression and we have always been committed to ensuring we deliver the highest standard of advertising.

"We recognise that on this particular occasion the content did not meet this standard and we apologise. The campaign has now come to an end and the advert in question will not appear again."

10) USPAAH's tone-deaf #SaveHimself campaign

USPAAH - a mobile spa service - decided to employ outdated gender stereotypes for its recent advert on the London Underground.

Featuring a close-up on a man's pleading face, the billboard read: "Out with the guys 'til 4am again? Keep her sweet with a spa mani/pedi at home."

As if that weren't offensive enough, it rounded things off with a tone-deaf hashtag: "#saveyourself"

Another bad ad, another Twitter backlash. But, despite priding itself on its "female friendly" ethos, USPAAH didn't exactly apologise for the billboard.

"Just because it is 2017 does not mean couples don't argue and as far as we are aware it's still ok to receive a gift as part of an apology," they said, in an official response statement. "As a company, we are incredibly sensitive to what matters, and mean no offence by our tongue-in-cheek adverts.

"For all the negativity we've also received tonnes of positive and supportive messages from many people on how difficult it is to not offend someone in 2017."

11) Ultra Tune's "unexpected" objectification

During the coverage of the Australian Open in 2017, viewers were forced to sit through a series of sexist ads - all of which came courtesy of car repair service, Ultra Tune.

The worst of the bunch, however, was probably video number five in their 'Unexpected Situations' campaign.

Check it out:

Nothing says 'roadside assistance' quite like a wet T-shirt competition, eh?

The ad may have been focused on highlighting the unexpected, but the subsequent backlash was incredibly predictable - as was the response of Ultra Tune chairman Sean Buckley, who previously dismissed critics of his controversial ads as "middle aged feminists".

"I'm very sick and tired of all the boring ads that go on television," he said. "They've got no spunk, no life.

"We decided a couple of years ago to go down a path of making our ads interesting, and topical, and funny."

He added that both of the women who star in the series are "publicity junkies" and insisted that the "love the attention".

Ultra Tune? More like Ultra Gross.

She then proceeds to fondle an unusually sexualised - and wine-drunk - kangaroo. Because of course.

No wonder critics have labelled it "one of the worst ads of all time".

13) The casual objectification of this Nando's ad

We get it - we really do: chickens have thighs, and breasts, and legs -and so do actual human women. And morons everywhere have found a source of amusement in this oddly banal fact for years - that's why so many idiotic barbecue guests have pointed out that they "prefer the breast" over the years.

But, when Nando's India decided to compare their wares to parts of female anatomy, they reduced women to something edible, something up for display before the male gaze.

Even more concerning was the imagery used: it is distinctly reminiscent of sexual violence, assault, and rape.

"We don't mind if you touch our buns, or breasts, or even our thighs," the ad read.

"Whatever you're into, enjoying any Nando's meal with your hands is always recommended."

Nando's India ultimately issued a public statement, apologising for their contribution to everyday rape culture.

"Sorry," they said. "We sincerely apologise for any offense caused by our ad... our intent was not to offend anyone.

"We promise to do better in the future."

14) Toyota's assumption that women are not as good at skiing as men

Yes, really.

In 2016, Toyota decided to advertise their new car on the slopes at Australia's Thredbo Resort.

Promoting the Kluger as a "great place to raise a snow-loving family", the banner went on to match the three types of ski runs with different family members.

For those unfamiliar with the terminology, a green run is often reserved for a beginner, a blue run indicates it would be appropriate for a moderately skilled skier, and black diamond runs are reserved for seriously confident skiers - aka the experts.

Guess which one 'mum' was given?

The ad was dubbed "lazy", "dumb", and "downright stupid" - all of which are pretty fair summations, in our opinion.

And Toyota clearly agreed with critics, promptly removing the banner and releasing an official statement of regret.

"We simply wanted to highlight that Thredbo, much like the Kluger [car], has something for everyone," a spokeswoman said.

"We have printed the new marketing material and expect that they will be displayed at Thredbo within the next two weeks subject to weather conditions."

15) Rethink Breast Cancer's "save the boobs" campaign

It had the best intentions: this 2009 ad was released in the hope that it would catch the attentions of heterosexual men and increase awareness of breast cancer as the second most common cause of cancer death in women in the UK.

However, the message was almost entirely lost.

The video opened on a shot of a pool party, with a crowd of women and men enjoying themselves in the water. Then, to the amazement of everyone, MTV's Aliya-Jasmine Sovani walks in, wearing a white bikini.

Everything suddenly slows down as the camera zooms in excitedly on Sovani's breasts, revealing the motion of them with every step she takes. The men at the party are excited, while Sovani's fellow women look on in envy and disapproval.

The caption reads, "You know you like them. Now it's time to save the boobs."

This particular ad sparked a fierce debate rather than outright ire: some said it put objectification to good use, while others pointed out that breast cancer is a brutal, unsexy disease - and focusing on breasts and breasts alone reduces women's value to the sum of their body parts. What message does this send to those who have undergone a single or double mastectomy?

M.J. Decoteau, founder of RBC, defended the ad, and said that the organisation had to find a way to reach young people who believe they're invincible to a disease.

"The spots are definitely not for everyone," she said. "Young people are picking up pamphlets with a 65-year-old woman on the cover and probably tossing them out. We're really about creating a bold way of communicating the message in a fun way that's going to stop them in their tracks.

"We're hoping that they get the take-away message that is to be breast aware."

16) Bic's attempt at an inspiring International Women's Day message

This one needs no introduction:
Look like a girl.
Act like a lady.
Think like a man.
Work like a boss.

It's almost impossible to comprehend how a tweet like that was penned in 2015, isn't it?

When women all over social media objected to being advised to look, act, think, or work like anyone other than their own magnificent selves, the publicity team at Bic South Africa penned an apology for their Facebook page.

It read: "Let's start out by saying we're incredibly sorry for offending everybody - that was never our intention, but we completely understand where we've gone wrong.

"This post should never have gone out."

The creators of the infamous ' Bic for Her ' range (yes, they're just pink pens) added: "The feedback you have given us will help us ensure that something like this will never happen again, and we appreciate that."

17) Protein World's horrendous 'Beach Body Ready' billboards

One of the biggest advertising gaffes of 2015, Protein World's billboards saw a bikini-clad woman plastered all over the London Underground.

All well and good - save for the fact the sexist ad (peddling weight loss supplements) was emblazoned with the words: "Are you beach body ready?"

Thousands of outraged people signed a Change.org petition calling for the ad to be removed, with founder Charlotte Baring writing: "Protein World is directly targeting individuals, aiming to make them feel physically inferior to the unrealistic body image of the bronzed model, in order to sell their product.

"Perhaps not everyone's priority is having a 'beach body' (by the way, what is that?), and making somebody feel guilty for not prioritising it by questioning their personal choices is a step too far."

Protein World did not, of course, apologise.

Instead, they released a statement which read: "It is a shame that in 2015 there are still a minority who aren't focusing on celebrating those who aspire to be healthier, fitter and stronger.

"We now run Britain's largest protein facility, selling our products in over 50 countries to more than 300,000 customers. Most of them are women. How could we possibly be sexist?"

They later went on to target their critics directly on Twitter, writing: "Surely as feminists, you understand that no one takes you seriously?"

Who run the advertising world? Pitiful excuses for human beings, that's who.

18) HDS Builders' completely unnecessary 'naked' shower tour

That's right, building chiefs at HDS Builders decided to create a virtual tour for its bathrooms - and include a naked woman posing seductively in the shower.

The technology involved meant that people could freeze the image, change the angle, and zoom in on the woman however they pleased. And, unsurprisingly, it wasn't long before complaints began to pile up.

The Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) has since condemned the ad as "sexist" and "demeaning to women", insisting that it's taken down and never used again.

"The woman was fully nude, shown full-length side on, with her bottom sticking out, her back arched and with some of her breast visible under her folded arms," a spokesperson said.

"In light of the nudity, we considered the pose was provocative and could be seen to be sexually suggestive, with the tone further enhanced in the virtual tour because it was possible to freeze the image, zoom in and out and change the angle."

HDS Builders was seemingly unperturbed by the uproar it had caused - and insisted that the ad was perfectly suitable for public consumption.

Why? Because "people don't shower [whilst] wearing clothing", apparently. Talk about missing the point.
Images: Getty/Twitter

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Kayleigh Dray

Kayleigh Dray is editor of Stylist.co.uk, where she chases after rogue apostrophes and specialises in films, comic books, feminism and television. On a weekend, you can usually find her drinking copious amounts of tea and playing boardgames with her friends.

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Facebook timelines have been filled since Sunday nightwith women posting the status "Me too," in an attempt to prove how widespread sexual harassment and assault are in our culture.

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If "Me too" makes you feel empowered, by all means, type those words. But it's also important to recognize the campaign's limitations. No woman should feel pressure to tell painful stories about being violated, but every man should feel a responsibility to stop behavior that leads to sexual harassment and assault.

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