Invisible Women - Heading into another lockdown like...

Well, GFPs, I can’t pretend I’m not gutted. Back in March, when Invisible Women was Waterstones Book of the Month and there were adverts for Invisible Women in trains stations all across the country, the UK locked down. They were even stocking it in airports, which is genuinely something I never thought would happen to a book I wrote. And it sucked – it really, truly sucked; those sales and the sales that would have come off the back of those sales, are never coming back. That amazing opportunity was gone forever, and honestly I was devastated.

But it also felt like we we were in it together, we were all hurting, and that the government really had no choice. We had to buy time.

Nearly eight months later, Invisible Women is a Waterstones Paperback of the Year. I am lucky enough to get a second bite at the apple. Maybe being part of window displays and piles of books by the door, by the till, can make up for what was lost in March.

Except, no it won’t, because here we are, locking down again.

I know, I know, there are so many so much worse off and in the grand scheme of things this must seem trivial to many of you. But the sense of absolutely gutting unfairness that it’s now happened twice in one year, well it just sucks. It really and truly sucks.

And it particularly sucks because this doesn’t feel like the first time when we didn’t have any choice. This time we can look around at countries around the world who didn’t squander the time they bought by locking down, and have now managed to return more or less to normal. Many of them, are, like us, island nations.

Meanwhile what have we spent the past eight months doing?

All of which to say, I don’t feel like this was an unavoidable force of nature, as the PM suggested in his three-hour-delayed press conference on Saturday night, but rather the result of almighty mismanagement on a catastrophic scale. So, yeah, I’m angry, and upset, and utterly gutted. So if you haven’t yet bought a copy of Invisible Women, or if anyone you know hasn’t yet bought a copy of Invisible Women, well, now would be a lovely time to do so.

Look, I’ve even made it easy for you with some links:

Waterstones Blackwells Hive Bookshop

Yes, other booksellers are available, but it’s the brick and mortar ones who are going to be hit by this second lockdown, so if you can buy from them instead of amazon, please, please do. We would really miss IRL bookshops if they went.

There are so many people who will be hard hit with this second lockdown, but I’m currently feeling particularly devastated for the live arts, who were only just getting back onto their feet after the first one. I watched The Royal Ballet: Back on Stage on Saturday while waiting for the PM to deign to show up and tell us all what we were and weren’t going to be allowed to do for the next month.

It handily fit neatly into the 3 hour delay and while it was beautiful and a joy to watch, it was also utterly heartbreaking seeing these amazing dancers, so happy to finally be back on stage, anticipating a new season they had just announced – knowing all the while the axe was about to fall on them.

If you enjoy dance, I can thoroughly recommend paying to watch some of the Royal Ballet content online. It all helps to keep them afloat and watching an art done so spectacularly well really does help with the lockdown gloom.

In news that should surprise precisely no one, it turns out that when it comes to covid, despite the vast majority of health professionals being women, including in biomedical sciences, and despite women suffering disproportionately from the economic and social fall-out, the media has been mainly talking to….men.

The research, by the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at King’s College London, is based on an analysis of 146,867 articles related to Covid-19 published between 1 March and 31 July, in 15 leading news sources across the UK, Australia and the US.

And the results are pretty damning.

The good news it, this male dominance didn’t hold for every topic. Women dominated when it came to classic “women’s issues” like domestic violence and childcare, because famously, women are beating themselves up and make children all by themselves.

This table is kind of grimly fascinating: you can actually track the socially-deemed significance of an issue relative to how many female voices are included.

Just a totally unimportant aside, last year a UK Home Office analysis found that the social and economic cost of domestic violence in England and Wales for a single year was £66 billion. That is equal to the cost of Brexit to the entire UK economy over three years! A US analysis found that the federal government spent $55 billion a year simply dealing with the impact of domestic violence on children. And of course domestic violence has risen sharply during the pandemic. But still, just an unimportant women’s issue.

Meanwhile, several economic analyses have shown that investment in care would be a far more effective route out of the Covid downturn than a traditional investment in construction. Still, where’s the fun in a major policy announcement that doesn’t include hard hats?

Because we all need a laugh, instead of our usual gloomy fare I’m giving you this amazing and extremely funny essay from Ursula K. Le Guin, filched from the excellent Helen Lewis’s newsletter, which you should all sign up to.

Come for the default male, stay for the brutal Hemingway drive-by.

First up, my mum, who now she is feeling better is fighting the good pockets fight

Not to be outdone, my very horsey aunt wrote in to her fave mag…

My work here is done.

Quite a few interesting responses from GFPs to last week’s ramble about rambling!

One GFP noted the intersection between rambling and gender:

which made me think about the not very scientific experiment I ran (which I thought I mentioned in a previous newsletter but can’t seem to find) when I was shouted at by a man for passing by him as socially distanced as I possibly could on a pavement while wearing a mask, while the man who walked past immediately after, and who made no effort to distance, passed by unremarked. Or this exchange currently going on in my mentions.

A cursory glance at google doesn’t throw up any research on whether women are more subject to generalised intimidation, aggression and bystander policing (I just made that term up but let me know if there is an actual name for this!) than men, but my experience certainly suggests that they are. Any GFPs know?

Another GFP wondered, in response to the stat I cited about half of England being owned by less than one per cent of its population, how much of England’s land is owned by women? Very good question to which I have been unable to find an answer – if any GFPs know hit reply!

This week, instead of a toilet queue, comes a chance to end toilet queues forever! At least in the UK, where the government is holding a consultation on the provision of toilets for women (soz, international GFPs). Here is what I had to say on the subject in Invisible Women:

Strongly recommend that UK-based GFPs write in! I had intended to provide a template response in this email but I’m running out of time this morning – and in any case, individually written responses always carry more weight. The info I’ve provided above gives you the basic facts; also always worth checking out what Prof Clara Greed aka Queen of Toilets has to say on the subject. If there is huge GFP demand I will try to put together a response for next week’s newsletter.

Organised by the Data + Feminism Lab at MIT, ILDA and Feminicidio Uruguay.

The sessions are free of charge and open. Dates as follows:

Heading into another lockdown like…

That’s it, GFPs! I will close with two recommendations.

1) If you are not watching The Queen’s Gambit, sort it out. You can thank me later.

2) If this song doesn’t get you swaying your hips there is something wrong with you

Until next time, GFPs….support your local bookshop by buying my* book!

*ok ok ok, *a* book. (But also mainly my book.)

xoxoxo