Nina Power's Blog

Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture edited by Roxane Gay and On Rape by Germaine Greer – review

Are Germaine Greer’s views on rape as controversial as first thought?

Do we live in a “rape culture”? What, in any case, is a “rape culture”? According to Roxane Gay, editor of the essay collection Not That Bad, the term refers to “a culture where it often seems like it is a question of when, not if, a woman will encounter some kind of sexual violence”. Indeed, many of the 30 pieces here – overwhelmingly personal accounts rather than analytic essays, and written by both men and women – discus...

Why don’t women stop playing this rigged capitalist game? | Nina Power

Maybe suspended Saatchi chairman Kevin Roberts had a point. Instead of being ambitious in an immoral system, we should champion values such as care, compassion and collectivity

If the game is rigged, should players bother competing or should they look for a new game altogether?

When Kevin Roberts, the now-suspended executive chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi, suggested in a recent interview that “the fucking debate [about gender] is all over”, he unleashed a wave of anger in an industry in whic...

Lecturers are striking against low-paid, casual work, which hurts students too | Nina Power

The contemporary university is a highly unbalanced and unfair place, with casualised workers bearing the brunt of the labour but the least amount of pay or security

Today and tomorrow thousands of academic staff will walk out of UK universities over pay and conditions. Following the collapse of talks with the Universities and Colleges Employers Association, the University and College Union (UCU), has called the strike for several reasons: because the offer of 1.1% fails to address the 14.5% pa...

Why I protest – five activists on the new age of dissent | The panel

Activism can defend historic liberties, push back against injustice, and even get your geography report changed. No wonder mass protest is big news again Continue reading...

What does the university gender gap mean for the future of our society? | Nina Power

More women than men are attending university – despite rising costs. But the way to an egalitarian system would be to bring back grants and scrap tuition fees

As any university lecturer can attest, the £9,000 fee regime has had a series of negative impacts on student, institution and teacher alike. Students, particularly outside the Russell Group universities, are often exhausted or absent from class owing to the multiple jobs they have to take on in order to pay rent and buy food.

Anxiet...

Is misogyny worse now than before the internet?

We asked five feminists whether sexism has become more prevalent in the digital age, or simply more visible

Earlier this week, Monica Lewinsky wrote about being "possibly the first person whose global humiliation was driven by the internet" (recalling the biting sexism she experienced in the late 1990s), and tonight, in a BBC2 documentary, Kirsty Wark is exploring whether men have a newfound freedom to be abusive to women, online and off. We asked five leading feminists whether, in t...

So much for the so-called people's police, if they treat protesters like this

From Stephen Lawrence to today's Taser revelations, Britain's forces of law and order have defiled the idea of the public sphere

"The police are the public and the public are the police," said the force's modern founder, Robert Peel, in the early 19th century. Never has a fundamental principle come to sound so hollow. Everything from the treatment of domestic violence victims and the appalling treatment of the Lawrence family to the Hillsborough campaign smears, undercover spying on...

So much for the so-called people's police, if they treat protesters like this | Nina Power

From Stephen Lawrence to today's Taser revelations, Britain's forces of law and order have defiled the idea of the public sphere

"The police are the public and the public are the police," said the force's modern founder, Robert Peel, in the early 19th century. Never has a fundamental principle come to sound so hollow. Everything from the treatment of domestic violence victims and the appalling treatment of the Lawrence family to the Hillsborough campaign smears, undercover spying on...

Sexism and misogyny: what's the difference?

An Australian dictionary has changed its definition of misogyny to reflect the fact that it is now used to mean 'entrenched prejudice against women', not just hatred of them. Six feminists tell us what the term means to them

The criminalisation of protest is part of the elite's class war

Trenton Oldfield's sentence for disrupting the Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race makes it clear which class is being protected

What price the preservation of the spectacle? Trenton Oldfield, who disrupted the annual Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race in April this year to protest against inequality, was sentenced to six months in jail for the offence of "public nuisance". Although the race was restarted 25 minutes later, Judge Molyneux made it clear that Trenton had disrupted the smooth running of...