Chris Barker

You don’t get to choose your introduction to feminism. That’s sometimes a bad thing.

Reading Julie Bindel articles

I grew up in a liberal UK household, and as such, the main newspaper we read was The Guardian¹.

When I started reading newspapers at the beginning of the 2000s, the main things I was interested in were the film and book reviews. I did take some time to read the articles in between, though, and one recurring columnist I noticed was Julie Bindel, at the time a respected second-wave feminist.

Bindel’s style was and is deliberately confrontational: a typical column from 2006 has the title ‘Why I hate men.² Most of her newspaper writing from that era had a similar tone: basically a challenge to anyone reading to stop and mentally argue with her.³

It was good marketing, because in order to argue with her, you needed to read her. Bindel was, at the time, primarily a feminist rather than a TERF, and she had a lot of sensible things to say about the mistreatment of women, even if I wasn’t ready to accept all of it at the time.

Bindel’s columns also taught me two other important lessons: 1) arguing is fun, even arguing with a newspaper article in your head 2) you can publish whatever you like, even something your audience will disagree with, so long as it can make its own case for itself.

Having said that, it was difficult not to notice Bindel’s quirks.

Terf wars

British feminism has split into two factions over the trans issue, with the faction represented by Bindel unfortunately seeming to have the upper hand⁴. Bindel’s rhetoric on trans people has been consistent for decades.

Bindel basically seems like an essentialist. Her focus was always on men as a homogenous sex, determined by biology, hence her numerous ‘joking’ calls for them to be put into camps or given a curfew. She doesn’t seem to be able to conceive of a solution which doesn’t involve SOMEONE being oppressed.

That lack of flexibility probably contributed to her stance against trans people, bisexual people et al, and it definitely came out in her writing.

I stopped reading Julie Bindel articles

I stopped reading Julie Bindel articles because I felt I had argued them down mentally already, which was made easier by Bindel being obviously wrong about a lot of things.

I wouldn’t quite call myself a sexist little shit at that point, but I would say I didn’t have a good understanding of the challenges women faced. I think that’s true for most men, until and unless they encounter something which changes their perception of the world.

I know I was capable of understanding feminist arguments, even though they were pretty far outside the Overton Window of early 2000s culture, and I know that because I was ‘converted’ to feminism in the 2010s.

I first became interested in feminism again in my mid-twenties, when I spent a lot of time reading the news as part of my first real job, and stumbled into the blogospher and Jezebel. Those writers were also confrontational- they had a lot to be confrontational about, in the MeToo era- but were much more human and sympathetic, not as rigid and frankly crank-adjacent as Bindel.

Maybe one consequence of feminism being generally looked down on where I grew up⁵ was that EVERYONE advocating it seemed vaguely extreme. People with genuinely fringe ideas, like Bindel, didn’t stand out as more unacceptable than the mainstream feminists.

Bindel was basically the worst possible messenger. I wonder what would have happened if The Guardian had published feminist writers with the same attention-getting approach, but more nuanced underlying ideas.

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1. Still the most popular left-wing newspaper in the UK despite publishing horrible articles about trans people ↩︎
2. Don’t worry, it has the subtitle: ‘At least those who perpetrate crimes against women and those who do nothing to stop it.’ Not awkward at all! ↩︎
3. I would be interested to hear whether women had the same experience with those articles and got the same things out of them ↩︎
4. Bindel being a respectable published columnist for decades probably had something to do with that. Thanks, Guardian! ↩︎
5. To give you some idea, the town where I went to school was Reform’s first by-election win in history ↩︎