**As featured on Liberal Conspiracy  

NEW FOR TOPMAN WINTER ’11 FASHION COMES ‘MISOGYNY CHIC’, PLUM SHADES SLOTTING between the heady glamour of wife beating and comparing your girlfriend to a dog.

To many, the concern is how clothing with unapologetically misogynistic branding had ever been put on sale. To Brendan O’Neill, it is that removing them from the hangers is an act that sees the “controlling and censoring of men”.

Faced with the selling of t-shirts with the slogans “You provoked me” or “What breed is she?”, what really matters is over-sensitive women robbing a man of his freedom to dress like a fool.

“The dumping ground for society’s killjoys and miserabilists”, feminists, according to O’Neill, just didn’t get the wit, willfully refusing to find the funny side of trivializing domestic violence or being dubbed less than human.

In doing so, he reaffirmed women’s place as the only group to suffer harassment whilst being told it is their fault for not getting the joke. We were pressed, not for the first time, to ‘stop going on’ about it, to attempt to overcome the sense of humour bypass that comes with having breasts.

More than one in four women will be abused by a partner at some point in their life. 100 women will be murdered this year, by someone that sleeps in their bed.

The men that come home to punch, ridicule, or rape don’t do so because of what’s sitting in their wardrobe. And contrary to O’Neill’s distortions, no one is claiming that they do.

Adorning a hateful t-shirt does not transform a boy into an abuser. As the top snakes over his head, his mind is not in an instant contaminated by the slogan’s stain. He is though given yet one more societal hint that these are crimes to be trivialised – as the young girl next to him is given another to teach her these are not matters over which she should make a fuss.

There is something deeply disturbing in taking the abuse of women – prevalent, and growing, and real – and making it into something consumable, to produce a profit and a self-congratulatory laddish laugh.

This is the problem, despite what O’Neill states – not that women aren’t able to see the lighter side of domestic violence, but that we exist in a culture that would dare suggest we should. It’s a warped hatefulness littered through O’Neill’s own reasoning, never more prevalent than when finding hypocrisy in feminists who have campaigned for permission to dress like “slags.”

His choice of words says plenty, as does comparing a woman’s fight for the right to dress as she wants without risk of rape to a man’s right to dress in a way that takes the same crime and makes it a joke.

Women hating clothes aren’t the direct cause of a misogynistic society, but they are without doubt one of the many symptoms of the disease. To the outrage of some, this particular symptom has been quashed.

O’Neill really needn’t panic over not having a t-shirt to announce he’s full of anti-woman bile. He can do that all on his own.

WITH PREJUDICE DRESSED AS FACT AND AN UNDEMOCRATIC SWAY, THE ANTI-ABORTION  agenda is back and packing full clout. Without parliamentary debate, The Department of Health announced yesterday that clinics and medical practitioners would be stripped of their exclusive role in counselling women seeking terminations. Bent to the pressure of anti-choice lobbyists, it will be compulsory for women to be offered additional counselling, dubbed by key supporter Nadine Dorries and co as ‘independent’.

Current counselling, this move not only infers but outwardly states, is biased. Those giving therapy to women considering an abortion are, as we speak, putting a desire to make money over their responsibility of care. Control over reproduction is a commodity and those giving advice on the ‘purchase’ are the equivalent of second hand car dealers and the enthusiastic assistants in Topshop who tell you that dress looks great. Charity run services such as the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) are plagued, it is said, by an inherent conflict of interest in their advising of women – they have a financial incentive to actively encourage terminations.

There is of course, no evidence to support any part of this, but rather simply a range of conjecture based on ideological ignorance. Dorries’ claim that clinic counsellors encourage women to have abortions in order to make their bosses’ the maximum profit sits next to her ‘Hand of Hope’ myth as being nothing more than a damaging lie. A fan of falsities and confused science, she is clearly no stranger to fabrication, but it’s nothing short of terrifying that what was once rantings is now the basis of policy changes.

The idea that there is a need for an ‘independent’ alternative to existing provisions is entirely without factual basis. Not only does it depict a view of current therapy that is offensively prejudiced but it disingenuously presents the proposed additions as without an agenda. There’s an irony – funny if it were not so distasteful – in that the accusation that pro-choice therapists are riddled with bias stems from the anti-abortionist’s attempt to spread their own. By claiming that with ‘independent counselling’, 60,000 of the 200,000 abortions each year could be prevented, their purpose is unashamedly clear: use additional therapy to reduce the number of women choosing an abortion. This is not independence but the very politically biased ulterior motives that they falsely accuse pro-choice therapists of holding. As Education for Choice have found, therapists charged with discussing options who are ideologically opposed to abortion are already a disturbing problem – one that introducing ‘additional counselling’ risks compounding.

Dorries, after all, counts Dr. Paul Saunders as a key advisor – head of the Christian Medical Fellowship and the man who led the anti-abortion campaign Alive and Kicking. A fear that drives his work is the risk that abortion is becoming “convenient”, and indeed with these proposals, the process can be made more difficult. The thought process lurking behind this move is the sort of prescriptive patronising attitude to women’s reproductive rights that treats us as children, not only essentially whores but ones that need a lesson. Women are viewed as needing instruction, unable to make the ‘correct’ decision without additional persuasion. Deliberately, the move aims to drag the decision process out, with the implication that if a woman’s choice cannot be curtailed, it must at least be slowed. Such tactics at best add further strain to those seeking a termination and at worst, due to time delays, risk their ability to have one. They are, of course, literal tactics; the sort relied on by US anti-choice campaigners who, unable to ban abortion, dedicate their energy to interfering in the process. It’s a method that instead of debating ethics with honest thought disguises an anti-abortion agenda as a form of ‘help’.

If Dorries and friends were truly concerned with helping women they would treat them with respect, not as individuals who need protection from their own choices and their rights diluted. If she held a genuine desire to empower she would, rather than campaigning for additional therapy, put an end to her support for welfare cuts and hysterical opposition to sex education.    

Masking an anti-choice agenda in a term she makes a mockery of, Dorries has the nerve to state “This is a women’s rights issue.” She is correct (though clearly, not for the reasons she intends). In being a move that threatens to dilute a woman’s right to choose and drag hard-fought progress back twenty years, this is a woman’s rights issues – and one that in announcing their support for change, the Government takes the wrong side on.