In September, the UN hosted a conference on gender equality and kicked off the #HeforShe campaign with a speech from Emma Watson. Hailed as a win for women everywhere, Watson’s speech was the same old "feminists must be nice to men because they have sad feelings" discourse that cushions the status quo – the kind that allows the UN to host a conference on gender equality without inviting any women. The reason #HeforShe was so successful was because it was safe - it failed to challenge any structural power. Instead, it begged men to recognise women as human by hitting the button that said ‘I agree’, something my cat can manage by plunking her arse on the keyboard. What my cat couldn't do this year, however, was afford the must-have feminist fashion accessory of 2014: the Fawcett Society and Elle ‘this is what a feminist looks like’ t-shirt. But, at £45, who could? Certainly not the women who made them.
We also saw William Hague host a global conference to end sexual violence in war whilst his government slashed services to support victims in the UK. Threats of sexual violence and death continued unabated for any woman who dared to have an opinion, and female celebrities became victims of sexual assault en masse when a group of men hacked into their private iCloud accounts and released intimate photos of them. The inevitable consequence was that even larger numbers of men deliberately searched out these images, and online mass sexual violence became ‘totes awesome’. Women were, of course, labelled hysterical for calling it sexual assault.
Yes, we may have seen party leaders staring awkwardly into the middle distance whilst wearing some overpriced t-shirts, but make no mistake: 2014 was not the start of a new feminist movement; it was a full-scale assault on women’s bodily autonomy.