As feminists fall out, it’s not just the patriarchy that’s under fire

UK grassroots feminism is flourishing at the moment, with the journalist Julie Bindel leading from the front as troublemaker-in-chief. In a long history of activism that began in the 1980s, campaigning against male violence in Leeds while Peter Sutcliffe stalked the streets, Bindel has always been straight to the point, full of heart and un-interested in placating middle-class sensibilities. Her new book is no different. Feminism for Women is an impassioned manifesto for the kind of feminism she favours — indeed, the only kind she’s willing to acknowledge as worthy of the name.

Bindel’s feminism is unashamedly focused on women and girls of the old-fashioned female kind, and what tends to happen to the most vulnerable of them — poor, working-class, black, young, old, lesbian or trafficked — at the hands of males. She is scathing about the way other feminists (she would use inverted commas) have twisted the original Second Wave project out of recognition. In a combination of interviews, personal anecdotes and lively argument, she argues that women are exposed to a series of injustices: first from the males who assault them; then from a judicial system that belittles and ignores them; third, from a porn-addled culture that turns their humiliation into male pleasure; and finally from the careerist feminists and the ‘Blue Fringe Queer Brigade’, who either can’t or won’t intervene to change any of it, so obsessed are they with avoiding linguistic violence by the use of a misplaced pronoun.

The book zips along, larded with jokes and memorable phrases (‘trans-plaining’; ‘the “nagging and shagging” defence’; ‘I wasn’t born fancying the midwife’). Some readers — probably the male kind — might wish for a bit more complexity in the causal story offered, in which patriarchy is the perennial villain.