Drawing The Wrong Conclusion Again...

 

In preparation for interviewing Pussy Riot’s Maria “Masha” Alyokhina at the Charleston festival, I was reading her new memoir, Political Girl. I thought I remembered the group’s origin story pretty well – in 2012, they performed their anthem, Punk Prayer (Virgin Mary Banish Putin), and two band members were imprisoned for two years in a penal colony, then released slightly early in order to sanitise the country’s reputation before the Sochi Olympics in 2014.

Oh, Russia, awful country where you aren't free to say what you think, eh Zoe?  

The detention of Pussy Riot signalled a significant shift towards the aggressive authoritarianism that is now self-evident, and, in those early days, was expressed and mobilised through misogynistic, patriarchal values-setting built on Christian nationalist foundations.

Say, isn’t there a religion with all those hallmarks that's not Christian, Zoe? I'm sure there is.

Far-right movement-building always includes, and very often starts with, the repression of women. The obvious jumping-off point is reproductive rights, since that’s easily the most effective: a woman who can’t control when and whether to have children isn’t in control of anything.

Funny you should mention repression of women, Zoe…. 

This is why Reform’s Makerfield candidate, Robert Kenyon – surprise, surprise – allegedly has been both anti-abortion and toxically misogynistic on social media and this, crucially, is why Reform’s high command has said explicitly that it has no plans to censure or investigate him.

Reform may not be the answer in the end, but their refusal to play along with the fake concerns from the progressives and censor themselves will get them my vote every time! And focusing on Christians is like shrieking in terror at seeing a grass snake in the garden, while importing black mambas into the neighbourhood.

Again, liberal arguments go in on exactly the wrong pressure point, trying to make it make sense – why, when women constitute so very much of the electorate, would any politician set out to alienate us? We know, from any democracy on Earth that has thrown up a far-right victor, that women don’t vote en masse in the interests of their gender; that some are as susceptible to the politics of domination as some men are. Yet we try to rationalise it on our own terms, and treat misogyny simultaneously like a side dish to the meat of a policy platform, and like a mistake so self-evident that people can be argued out of it.

Now who is making 'a mistake so self-evident'? And if you've failed to notice the elephant in the room marked 'Islam' in this column, I don't feel like wasting time trying to argue you out of ir, I'll just point and laugh instead.