The real F-Word (sorry foodies, we're talking Feminism)

I dug this one out of the archive because it's something I feel really, really strongly about. I don't think 'enjoy' is the appropriate salutation to send you on your way with, but please do me a favour and read it.


So Ulrika’s alleged rapist has finally been named. At the time of writing, things are still uncertain: did he do it, or didn’t he? Will she talk about it or won’t she? Tongues are wagging: “Who’d have thought it, the one off This Morning - he seemed like such a nice guy!” (because of course, it’s dead easy to spot a rapist, isn’t it?). “He’ll never work again!” (because of course, work means everything, doesn’t it?). And the most disturbing of all: “Well, Ulrika’s always been trouble, hasn’t she?”. Excuse me? We’re talking alleged rape here, not Richard Madeley stealing gin from Tesco’s! Why has the truth about Ulrika’s experience of rape – prefix the word with ‘date’ if you need to make the reality of the act more palatable – become nothing more than a scrap of salacious gossip? Or is it the case that Ulrika – a successful, intelligent, honest and beautiful woman –
merely ‘deserved’ everything that she got because that’s the price that women should have to pay for ‘having it all’? Whoever raped Ulrika left her with internal bruising and the age-old advice from an anonymous ‘friend’ to contend with: “It’s not worth making a fuss about, love – after all, you’d gone on a date with this guy, and you’d had a bit to drink, hadn’t you?”. And the tongue-waggers sneer, “Fifteen years ago? She should have got over it by now”. That’s as good as saying, “oh yeah, well we’ve all been raped – it’s part and parcel of being a woman”. Well get this, sisters: it damn well isn’t.

For me, the most sinister aspect of this whole debate is that the comments quoted above have mainly been made by women I know – women who I honestly trusted to know better. Women are suddenly judging Ulrika as a hard-hearted tart who, working backwards through a very public history, ‘ruined’ Sven and Nancy’s marriage (Sven may be a monosyllabic buffoon, but did he not have any say in who’s bed he chose to take a tumble?) and took a very literal, public blow from
footballer Stan Collimore (his fists were nimbler than his feet, it seems) after working her way up from ditzy weather girl to the erudite, funny woman who stole the limelight from Vic and Bob in Shooting Stars. And now, in her autobiography, she’s told the truth about her life. This woman should be a feminist icon, not the subject of bitchy, jealous speculation!
But what does feminism mean, these days? Nothing more, it seems, than the right of a sad bunch of 40-something girlies to repeatedly whine “I wear lipstick and a G-string for myself, not him”. Meanwhile, ‘he’ comments that ‘she’s let herself go’ if she goes shopping in joggers, and she simpers and rolls her eyes at statistics such as the fact that the average working woman spends twenty seven hours a week cleaning the family home while he spends only three. Emily Pankhurst must be turning in her grave and wondering why she bothered. Meanwhile, Germaine Greer has given up altogether and become a high-brow chat show supremo – and who can blame her? After almost a century of feminism, women have lost the plot and gone back to square one, and the Ulrika situation represents this more than any amount of housework statistics ever could. In a sinister return to Victorian values, Ulrika’s ‘revelations’ seem to be turning into a crime against John Leslie, just like rape used to be a crime against either the husband or the father of the victim. How long will it be before Ulrika is dubbed a witch?

Whatever the truth about this front-page whodunnit, Ulrika should not be derided for telling the truth about her life. Because she had the balls to say “this happened to me”, ‘ordinary’ women everywhere – survivors of rape whose non-celebrity lives are of no consequence to the newspapers - might privately be given the courage and strength to face another day of survival without feeling like a freak with a dirty secret. No woman –celebrity or a prostitute, drunk or stone cold sober – deserves to be raped. If John Leslie is innocent, then I'm sorry for what he’s going through – nobody deserves trial by press, either. But if he turns out to be guilty, he deserves all he gets, and a ruined career is the smallest price he should have to pay. As for Ulrika, I applaud her bravery. She really is going this one alone, with no apparent back-up whatsoever from what was once ‘the sisterhood’. Womankind is in one hell of a sorry state, and for that, we’ve only got ourselves to blame – sisters.