The macho culture that cost lives - I am angry
We all understood it was happening, and now the evidence shows just how bad the macho approach to Covid-19 was.
On 30 March 2020, I wrote an article for the Guardian about the dangers lockdown posed to victims of domestic abuse. I interviewed a woman, let’s call her Alison, swapping messages on Facebook Messenger when she was in the garden, her partner indoors. She described how she spent all her time on the balcony to escape his moods. She shared photos of the aggressive notes he left all over their shared home. Not only was she afraid by his moods and drinking, she worried his cavalier approach to lockdown rules was putting her health at risk.
For months after, I thought about Alison. I would think about the photos she sent. How I urged her to delete my messages and checked over and over again that she was safe to message me. Long after the article was published, I would feel relief if I could see that she was online on Facebook Messenger. I was scared for her, during our conversations, I was terrified her partner would see the messages. I was scared for her because in the month after we messaged, 16 women were killed in suspected domestic homicides.
My article was dubbed “hysterical” by Spiked Online, which felt like a badge of honour, but now feels like the prevailing view of the Government at that time.
It wasn’t hysterical when Ruth Williams died. Her husband killed her, blaming the stress of the pandemic, he got five years. Or the 16 women who were killed in the first month of lockdown – a figure that was higher than the average.
Hysterical women. Silly women. Dead women.
That Guardian article was not the only time I wrote about women and Covid. I reported on the impact of Covid restrictions on domestic abuse survivors who were also asylum-seeking women, or who had insecure migration status. I reported on how men fronted the Downing Street pressers (the one woman, Priti Patel, managed to mangle her numbers and never returned to the lectern). I reported on how women healthcare workers had PPE that didn’t fit, which put their lives at risk. I reported on care workers, and the economic impact of the pandemic on women, particularly working class women.
Hysterical.
I reported on how emergency measures led to the Department for Work and Pensions to suspend enforcement on child support payments, leaving women destitute with no warning that the payments were not coming. One domestic abuse survivor, let’s call her Angela, told me how the DWP suggested she got in touch with her abusive ex to arrange payment. The man who threatened to kill her. The man who cannot know where she lives with her children.
Yesterday (1 November), the former Deputy Cabinet Secretary Helen McNamara gave her evidence to the Covid Inquiry. She described how a macho, male-dominated culture meant that issues around women’s safety such as domestic abuse were not considered by those in charge. She shared how issues that disproportionately impacted women – from care, to school closures, PPE, pregnancy and abortion access – were not considered. We all remember how pubs opened before classrooms, right? We all remember the bizarre conversations about the need to honour the Glorious 12th while kids living in tower blocks had no where outdoors to play.
“The exclusion of a female perspective led to significant negative consequences, including the lack of thought given to childcare in the context of school closures. There was a serious lack of thinking about domestic abuse and the vulnerable, about carers and informal networks for how people look after each other in families and communities. There was not enough thinking about the impact on single parents of some of the restrictions.
“There was a disproportionate amount of attention given to more male pursuits in terms of the impact of restrictions and then the lessening of the same (football, hunting, shooting and fishing). There was a lack of guidance for women who might be pregnant or were pregnant and what those who were key workers should do (this was particularly significant in education and the NHS given the demographics of their workforces). The restrictions around birth and pregnancy care seemed unnecessarily restrictive and were comparatively slow to adapt. I never understood this.”
Other things I remember from that time.
How MPs did not understand that care workers on zero hour contracts moved from house to house, providing care, and that this made them vectors for disease.
How pregnant women were forced to give birth without their partners present, or even if their partner was present, were separated shortly after birth.
How the vast majority of healthcare workers are female, as are careworkers, but that the people in charge were men whose approach left nurses with PTSD.
How single parents did not know what to do about seeing non-resident children, because the government forgot to put it in the social distancing guidance.
How the Government seemed to assume that everyone had a garden and a car.
How families on free school meals were given restrictive vouchers rather than cash allowances, and the mother of an autistic child describing to me how she could not buy the food her son liked on the vouchers (autistic children can have food sensitivities). Ben Bradley MP was forced to deny he said free school meals vouchers were "effectively" used for crack dens and brothels in the summer.
When Lee Cain gave his evidence this week, he said how he asked who in the Cabinet had been on free school meals, and no one put up their hand. The ignorance and arrogance starts to make sense, but it remains unforgivable.
It all starts to make sense but it remains unforgivable.
I am so angry. So angry that I feel numb. We knew what was going on in Government and we knew the failures in its decision-making. We reported on it at the time – about how women were just forgotten. I wrote in my book how one of the consequences of the pandemic was the destabilising of women’s economic security, how in some ways the lockdowns served a far-right imperative of pushing women out of the public and into the domestic sphere, and how part of the reason the government did not care is because they like it that way.
There is a line in feminist thinking that I tend to disagree with because it’s nonsense and based on basic gender stereotypes - the one that says if women were were in charge, there would be no wars and everything would be managed better. I prefer the maxim that we will know we have equality when women can be as mediocre as mediocre white men.
But while the “women are peace loving nurturers” stereotype is nonsense, it is completely true and correct that if you do not have women in the decision-making room, then women’s interests and safety will be ignored. It will be ignored maliciously, and it will also be ignored because comfortable middle-class straight white men simply do not see the realities of women’s lives (or the lives of anyone who does not look and live like they do).
This was the lesson fo McNamara’s statement: that a lack of diversity, a sexist culture, and a complete inability to see from another perspective, meant women’s lives were not only not considered, they were lost.
Such a lack of diversity and women’s voices is bad enough when you have, for example, a transport ministry that only cares about roads, and ignores bus provision. But during the pandemic, that lack of diversity, and the arrogance that came with it, meant women died.
Hysterical.
Obligatory book plug
After a summer of warzones and Covid, I have loads of book-related events coming up.
This weekend I will be speaking with amazing sister Maya Oppenheim at the Women’s Equality Party conference.
On Saturday 11 November I will be in-conversation with Sarah LeFanu at the Clifton Literature Festival.
Then straight on a train to Edinburgh to speak at the Radical Book Fair on Sunday 12 November.
After a brief stop in the North East, I’ll be back in the South West on 14 November to talk about Bodies Under Siege on 14 November at Toppings, Bath.
What I’m writing
So I am very aware that I have been a bit slack on the ole SubStack front over the summer on account of the trips to warzones and Covid, and then my birthday, and Labour Party Conference, and going to Kenya last week. And I have been writing SO much that I can’t even remember what I’ve written.
Here is a selection of what I think you may have missed…
For the Observer
With my feminist investigative journalism sister, Sascha Lavin….
Historical sexual harassment claims not acted on by doctors’ watchdog
Then by me...
How the UK’s dying high streets are being given new life by pop-up shops and galleries
Alarm at rise in use of mixed-sex wards in NHS England hospitals
Animal refuges in Britain are ‘full to bursting’ as owners give up pets in cash crisis
And with Mark Townsend:
For the i paper:
‘This Barge is Death’ about the Bibby Stockholm boat
I’ve ditched indie gigs and raving for the opera and found a whole new connection to music
For The Lead UK:
'PATRIOTIC ALTERNATIVE' AND TOMMY ROBINSON FANS PRAISE BRAVERMAN SPEECH
WORK BAN FUELS ABUSE, CAMPAIGNERS WARN
I think that’s most of it? All the Ukraine reports were included in the last SubStack.
What I am reading
Again, on account of being slack, the list is so long!
I got really into Janet Malcolm, reading Nobody’s Looking At You and Iphigenia in Forest Hills, and have some more to read.
Loved Louise Tickle’s debut novel Between the Lies although it really upset me.
I quite liked Vladimir by Julia May Jones; didn’t really enjoy Fyneshade which was highly recommended but maybe I wasn’t in the mood.
I read Whips by Cleo Watson when I had Covid and it was the perfect read for when you can’t get out of bed and need a hit of ridiculous shenanigans.
Adored Everything is not Enough by Lola Akinmade Akerstrom.
Lots of Christie: Cards on the Table; One Two Buckle My Shoe; Dead Man’s Folly; Cat Among the Pigeons; Halloween Party; At Betram’s Hotel
The Fraud is the first Zadie Smith novel I’ve read since White Teeth and I thought it was superb.
I started I Love Russia by Elena Kostyuchenko, and need to get back to it. The title is a bad title though.
What I’m watching
Still Succession
That’s it from me. Angry and numb. But not hysterical. Not that.