When our human worth is stamped on our bodies, our culture is deeply misogynistic

By Laurie Penny

Labour should be ashamed of Tom Harris MP for his public bullying of teenage mothers – some of the neediest and most disempowered of his constituents. Harris’ misogynist moral tubthumping is just one more reason to support free speech: without it, many members of the political overclass would be unable to expose themselves for the unreconstructed sexists they really are.

Harris, along with the hundreds of commenters who agreed with him, believes that the sexuality of teenage girls is ‘morally wrong’, without providing even a cursory nod to the sexuality of teenage boys. Either something’s the matter with his moral reasoning, or someone just needs to explain to this man precisely how babies are made.

Teenage conception rates have, in fact, gone down by 10% in the past decade – but at the same time, popular panic over women’s sexual and reproductive freedom has exploded. Along with policing women’s choices to procreate, the government has moved to restrict the right of women and girls to terminate pregnancies. After some dealmongering over 42 days, the long-awaited extension of abortion rights to women in Northern Ireland was swept from the table – meaning that the only option for those morally deviant, accidentally-pregnant Irish teenagers is to carry their pregnancies to term, or to resist the constant social and physical cues that drive them, like all teenagers, to experiment sexually. How does this hypocrisy square with Labour’s claim to be the party most concerned with women’s equality? It doesn’t.

In the playground, in the workplace and in the home, women are expected to constantly look sexually available, but never to actually be so. This intensely feminine paradox is deeply enmeshed with the big-spending New Labour paradigm, and many young women like myself, still prepubescent in 1997, have grown up knowing nothing else. We live in a world oozing with sexuality, but we are not allowed to take our share from it – instead we are taught that, in order to be adults, we have to give incessantly for the gratification of male sexuality. Combined with a woeful lack of education about sex and contraception in schools – sex education that, like our teenage pregnancy rates, is just about the worst in Europe – the damage that has been done to British women sexually since the feminist backlash of the early 1990s makes it surprising that more teenage girls don’t get pregnant.

What are the messages we pick up, as young girls? Our human worth is stamped on our bodies, on our faces and between our legs. Whatever we achieve at school or at work will be meaningless if we are not also sexually appealing to men. If we get raped – and one in four of us will be raped – it’s our fault. If we have sex, we’re sluts; if we don’t, we’re frigid bitches. If we have babies, we’re wasting our lives and being a drain on the state; if we have an abortion, we are walking moral abomination. If we slave all day to look like Paris Hilton then our college grades are of no importance; if we don’t, we’re ugly and therefore valueless. Being a prostitute or a stripper is a valuable and fulfilling career. Most of our role models are professional wearers of skimpy outfits, where our brothers’ role models play international sports, work on gene theory or run the country. If we choose to work for money, we will be constantly exhausted and unfulfilled; but if we choose to raise children instead, we have failed morally, personally and financially. No wonder the kids are confused.

The sexual damage done to young women over the past 12 years is both shocking and indicative of the culture of greed and exploitation which the New Labour’s tenancy has fostered. Instead of condemning my generation of young women for their moral failings, those in power need to take seriously the pressures that young women face in the culture we are living in – a culture which is still, at its core, deeply misogynist.