Metropolitan feminists, obsessed with the politics of strip clubs and lads’ mags, are failing to see the wider picture

By Carrie Hamilton [this article originally appeared here]

BBC Four’s recent three-part documentary Women was enough to make any seasoned feminist weep with despair. After sitting through the obligatory first instalment on celebrity second-wavers, and cringing through the second week on post-feminist consumerist mothers, I looked forward to the finale. “Activists” promised to celebrate the resurgence of feminist activism in the contemporary UK. How disappointing, then, that this new feminism turned out to be nothing more than a small group of London-based women who have attracted media attention over the past couple of years with their single-issue campaigns on violence against women.

There is not a feminist on the planet who isn’t outraged at sexual and domestic violence, as well as the overwhelming evidence of the complicity of governments, police forces and justice systems in perpetuating this violence and protecting its perpetrators. Violence against women is rightly a major focus of any feminist movement. But this serious problem cannot be understood, or challenged, in isolation from other forms of violence and oppression, such as racism, restrictive labour and migration laws, and poverty. Yet the groups featured in “Activists” – Object and the London Feminist Network – treat violence against women largely in isolation. They have lots to say about the media objectification of women but, bizarrely, little to say about consumerism or capitalism.
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