Vol 018 | July 1 2021

Nice to see you! This is the eighteenth edition of The Persistence, which rounds up female-focused reads to help you feel seen, save time and make sense of the world. Know a friend who would be at home here? Please pass it on!

FIRE

For the last few weeks I’ve been keeping a list of where in the world women are protesting. It’s grown every few days, and is both heartening and depressing as hell. Look, it’s not just you / your job / your stupid government. Phew! But also, FFS.

India, Spain, Mexico… It feels like half the world is currently fighting for their rights of one kind or another. Which, you know, they kinda are. On the heartening days, I’ve been optimistically day dreaming about where this growing global outrage might lead. Had we not been collapsing under the domestic load thanks to Covid-19, and trying to cling on to jobs and sanity, would we have had the headspace to harness our collective energy - say, repeat the 1975 Iceland women’s strike, but on a grander, global scale? Or might we have mobilised en masse, much like the Women’s Marches in 2017, in another co-ordinated show of solidarity? In truth though, would any of it have bought us any closer to mass support for meaningful change?

Turkey, Switzerland, Colombia, Pakistan…Disaster movies always have that moment when the penny finally drops. The disbelievers recognise the enemy in their midst and join forces with the whistleblowers. Evil is vanquished! If my list of protests were actually scenes in a film, then Britney Spears’s recent testimony would surely be the catalyst to unite one and all. In reality, injustices are often ‘excused’ as isolated incidents rather than links in a global chain. A ‘lone wolf’, a bad breakup, cultural differences... Bill Cosby’s release today is due to a technicality, not because the legal system respects loopholes over women’s lives you understand. But Britney’s living nightmare lays bare the truth - that no matter your wealth, your fame, your smarts, where you live, or what you do, if you’re a woman, society is set up to make you a second class citizen.

So yes, we should absolutely keep encouraging women around the world to use their voices, lend ours to support Cosby’s victims, and amplify Britney’s. But I can’t help thinking that the onus from now should be on men’s. Until the good guys are also calling out the injustices, sexism is going to remain hard wired into society. Quite frankly, we can’t build a more equal world if the old foundations are still being reinforced.

Does that make it sound like we need a knight in shining armour? We need quite a lot of them actually. But not to rescue us. To rise up too.

3 stories giving me hope:
1. Beyond marching: 260 activists from 64 countries are calling on the UN to create a unique international treaty against gender violence. This piece reveals the creative thinking behind the pioneering idea and how it takes inspiration from global regulations around tobacco products, of all places.
2. The good guys: Well, this is a brilliant concept. The If I Had Been Born a Girl project asks successful men to consider just that, kickstarting honest conversations around gender stereotypes in a reflective, non-judgemental way. Their podcast is next on my playlist.
3. Peaceful protest: It still stinks, but now it’s official. A British parliamentary inquiry has found that police breached “fundamental rights” and used “excessive force” in their highly controversial clash with women at the vigil for murdered Sarah Everard. Small but significant justice.

HOPE

WHY YOUR SUITCASE IS A SYMBOL OF EQUALITY

We could probably all riff whimsically about our fondness for wheelie suitcases right now, what with travel feeling like the forbidden fruit for the last year or so. Interesting then to see it hailed as a symbol of freedom of another kind - from gender stereotypes, no less.

In The Mystery of the Wheelie Suitcase, Katrine Marcal examines how preconceptions about both genders meant this simple invention very nearly didn’t make it in to the mainstream. “At the time, there was this macho feeling,” says Bernard Sadow, the ‘official’ inventor. “Men used to carry luggage for their wives. It was … the natural thing to do, I guess.”

This was the 1970s, not the 1870s by the way. Marcal highlights how gendered assumptions - assuming women were ‘wives’ and that men wouldn’t rather conserve their energy for sightseeing or IDK, slaying dragons - are equally harmful to both sexes. She also offers an absorbing reminder of how multiple stars must align for good design to be a commercial success. Whilst reading her argument, see if you can figure out which head-smackingly obvious inventions are currently being ignored due to sexist limitations. Baggage, eh? We’ve all got it.

POWER

SYRIAN WOMEN SPEAK OUT

Female refugees so rarely get a voice, but in this striking photo essay six Syrian women reflect on 10 year’s of civil war from the Lebanese settlement they reluctantly call ‘home’. From the woman who escaped by boat when 8 months pregnant to the 75 year old who left her comfortable life with only a picture of her husband, ‘We thought we would return' lays bare the daily challenges of being displaced, and breathes emotional oxygen in to the stale refugee debate.

And another thing: For an even rarer perspective from a Syrian woman, I highly recommend this gripping profile of Azeema, a fighter with the all female militia, the Women’s Protection Units. Azeema “was known for her relentless willingness to lead from the front, her swashbuckling manner, her chain-smoking ways and her wry sense of humor. She ...faced off against ISIS on the ground each day, fighting the men of the Islamic State room-by-room and house-by-house.” An action-packed, heart-stopping tale of courage and danger, you’ll need to regularly remind yourself that this is sadly, fact, not fiction.

HEALTH

WE ARE NOT OVARY-ACTING

“Let’s face it, the only thing that’s supposed to ever come out of the uterus and the cervix is a baby. We’re shoving things up there, so let’s not pretend like your body’s not going to have a very visceral reaction to it.”

Could we be about to see a medical Me-Too moment? Lucy Cohen thinks so. She’s the ‘other’ woman behind all the IUD headlines at the moment (Britney, of course, being the first), having started a petition in the UK for better pain management during the procedure. Now I’m no doctor, so maybe there is another time when patients have a small metal object inserted in the body without pain relief on offer. All I know is I get my gums numbed at the dentist for far less.

Of course this is about more than just IUDs. Women’s pain and symptoms are routinely brushed off as par for the course, which in turn teaches us to accept it. Gynae gaslighting if you will. One of my personal favourites was lying in a hospital bed being told by a consultant that he felt way worse due to a “head cold” than I did with hyperemesis gravidarum, even though the latter had led to three hospital admissions in three months of pregnancy (and as the only one of us to have experienced both, I was arguably better placed to judge).

But hey! These are just women’s problems right? So yeah, it stands to reason that we’ve all got our own stories to tell. Female Pain is Still Not Taken Seriously is Lucy’s. What would yours be?

Enjoyed this? Then follow us on Insta too! And do let me know your feedback - on these stories, the state of the world or just what the hell’s for dinner tonight. I reply to every one.

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