Being a woman – in a world where it sucks to be a woman

Being a woman means many things, some of them good and some of them bad, but quite often it mostly means that you can’t really forget that you’re a woman. As a woman, you’re not usually allowed to go through the world as a neutral being, merely existing. Something will often come along and remind you of your own reality, and your gender.

In day-to-day life, this constant, tedious reminder may come from cat-calling in the street, or from men being patronising, leering or – excitingly! – both at the same time. Sometimes, however, it mostly comes from reading the news. You pick up the papers, skim the headlines and everything screams “you’re a woman! In a world in which it sucks to be a woman!” at you.

This week has been one of those weeks – well, the past 48 hours at least. It actually began on Thursday, when Lady Elish Angiolini released her report into Wayne Couzens, the police officer who murdered Sarah Everard. It was utterly damning, and found that the Metropolitan Police never should have hired him in the first place.

There were too many red flags to list in full in this column. He both watched extreme pornography and showed it to colleagues; was accused of having raped at least two women; was alleged to have had indecent images of children, and to have attacked a child; originally failed vetting to become a police officer. He was the subject of multiple reports to the police for indecent exposure; the last one of them occurred days before he kidnapped Sarah.

As her family said in a statement, “Warning signs were overlooked throughout his career and opportunities to confront him were missed. We believe that Sarah died because he was a police officer – she would never have got into a stranger’s car”.

Speaking of malevolent men in positions of power, the news then broke a few hours later that plans to exclude MPs accused of serious offences from the Palace of Westminster were being put on hold. The debate was due to take place on Monday but, following some complaints from luminaries such as Christopher Chope and Philip Davies, got postponed with no new dates forthcoming.

Will it happen before the election? You may not want to hold your breath. Of course, this may not feel like a massive priority, especially if you do not work in Westminster. Still, it feels symptomatic of where the power balance truly lies in our political sphere.

Who should get treated as a priority, victims of assault, abuse and harassment or the – let’s face it – mostly men who have been accused of said assault, abuse and harassment? These are the people who make our laws. That they do not see measures like this as worthy of addressing should worry us all.

Then again, maybe some voters just don’t care all that much about these things. The cherry on top of this particular cake came when the nation woke up to find that George Galloway had once again become a member of Parliament, this time for Rochdale.

Back in 2012, Galloway dismissed the allegation made against Julian Assange that he had penetrated a woman while she slept as “bad sexual etiquette”, adding that “not everybody needs to be asked prior to each insertion”.

In 2015, when he lost to Labour’s Naz Shah, she called out his campaign against her as “misogynistic, vitriolic, very dangerous”. What a delight, then, to see him return to the green benches nine years later, following a by-election during which few people thought that these comments were worth mentioning.

Luckily it is Friday, meaning that hopefully we can now get to the end of the week without being reminded again of the fact that the world, in 2024, remains a place in which women just don’t really matter. It may not be wholly healthy to want to mostly live in denial, but whatever gets you through the day, right? Even women should be allowed to go through life not always thinking about how little society cares about them. On which note: I think I’ll go treat myself to a nice lunch now.