Davina McCall wouldn't walk home alone in the dark

[MrGHardy]

twitter.com/ThisisDavina/status/1370302344575995904

Quite an interesting take for someone who most likely never has to walk home alone in the dark from work. Problem solved, eh?

"I wouldn’t walk home alone in the dark. And lots of men I know wouldn’t either... because there are some ( very few relatively ) bad people out there. But your response is say you view all men as a danger and I don’t think we should be spreading that message."

I think DM is just on the road to articulating the point that male violence is the problem.

Lots of stops on the journey - NAMALT is one of them: the insight that it's not all men, some can be victims too.

A point radicalised by some men to try and act as a 'gotcha' - but which fails because it still leaves the point that male violence is the problem.

The feminist insights and analyses around male violence are the result of over 50 years of hard, hard work by women.

We have yet to get those insights recognised by legal and social systems that still operate to ignore those insights - and thus implicitly facilitate male violence.

For example, taking seriously 'minor crimes', and reports of offences by women.

So in SE's case, it looks very much as though the Met learned nothing from the case of John Warboys.

And so it's not surprising DM might write something that isn't fully informed by feminist analyses of male violence.

She'll probably get there.

Male violence is the problem.

Today is the anniversary of the Dunblane massacre.

What links the two events? Male violence.

That's why 'solutions' that essentially 'privatise' the issue - turn it into a question of educating individual men, teaching girls about boundaries - aren't really going to do very much.

We need a systemic shift in how male violence - and its effects - is understood.

We need a systemic shift in power relations.

So, I'm not overly vexed that DM hasn't articulated that point of view in a tweet.

I am a bit vexed that the DM tweet is getting so much traction in a misogynistic world - a world where social media is vile to women and often acts as a meta-scold's bridle: pretending to give women a space to speak but ruthlessly punishing them for speaking.

So DM hasn't enunciated a fully-formed feminist opinion? Well, that's unfortunate. But why is the attention going to that, rather than the many other struggles we have?

Another feminist point: much of social media is deeply, deeply misogynistic. Any analysis we do if women's speech within that milieu has to take the deep misogyny into account.

Sometimes, that may look like 'holding women to a different standard.'

Well, that's fine by me - because women aren't playing in a level playing field on social media. Women are treated differently on social media.

I'm reminded of Mary Beard's experience after tweeting about aid workers in Haiti. The response was disproportionately aggressive, however half-formed her vocalisation was.

Personally, I think we also need to deepen our insight of how social media works for women, and refine our responses to that.

And, of course, remember that the big problem is male violence/power. Keep putting that front and forwards.

It’s not just the rare stranger abduction that adds to women’s fears (which it does). It’s every drama on TV, so many films, documentaries on Netflix etc. So many have female victims, young women mostly. All for our entertainment even if true stories. An example recently is the drama on bbc2 on the gruesome death of journalist Kim Wall. She was murdered in a horrifying way 3 (yes 3!) years ago and yet here we are enjoying a drama ( not a documentary) about her death.
Girls grow up watching that on the TV, it’s everywhere and very depressing.

Really good post TheCatFromJapan

So true Sash.

Imagine a world where all the sex based drama plots were turned on their heads.

Handsoff if you know davina in rl ask her what my dd should do when her supermarket shift finishes after dark or in winter starts so early it's dark, in order to get to the bus stop that is a, ten minute walk through her estate? I'm dying to know how she avoids walking alone in the dark. While you're at it, tell her she's a fucking idiot, from me.

Thing is this whole debate has women check mated. It’s a choice between raising a very real issue, but in so doing spreading a lot of fear that will result in people living in that fear. Robbing them of the liberty to fully take part and engage in society. On the other hand you try to minimise the perceived threat and you’re leaving women vulnerable.

This is an excellent point, and could be countered with the proposed curfew for men.

Any man who complains - I don't want my freedom to do whatever I want curtailed! - well, women don't either. Suck it up.

The problems are big though. One, we are all just coming out of an enormous curfew anyway, and two, who would effectively police such a curfew given that the alledged perpetrator in the current news story is a serving police officer.

Multi-millionaress can afford never to walk the streets after dark.

Multi-millionaress is on record to victim blame her close friends if they are mugged/attacked if they walk home. Just that. Walk home.

Multi-millionaress thinks it's all 'japes'.

An extremely unhelpful and victim blaming remark from Davina - regardless of who her fucking friends are!!

The fact is many of us don't have a choice, shift workers relying on buses etc. Or what if there are no buses near their homes?
The point is we should be able to walk where we want and when we want without being in fear of our safety and our lives. And to point out that men can be a fucking danger without people saying, not all men are a danger.
It's not complicated!!

Also ... there's a point to be made about how we are still devaluing/rendering invisible women's work.

Thinking that DM should have arrived at a perfectly-formed, feminist point of view by osmosis, 'naturally', is simply failing to see the - frankly gruelling - Labour many, many women have done, over many, many years.

For example, I'm seeing a lot off posters ask why there is this response to this murder.

I'm seeing a lot of daft answers.

The daft answers focus on the particularity of this case ('she was young, pretty and white'; 'she was snatched from a busy street', etc).

No.

All these answers fail to look at changes in our attitudes brought about by the bloody hard work of many women.

We now see SE's abduction and murder as part of a wider context.

We now join together the murders of women, rather than see each one as a particular, with a particular, individualised, context.

Women worked for many years to get that into the mainstream.

And we managed to get to the point where a female MP, Jess Phillips, reads out a yearly list of murders women in Parliament.

Drawing in the intense, focussed work of another woman, Karen Ingala-Smith.

That is a massively important legitimisation of a feminist argument about the nature of femicide.

It didn't come out of nowhere. To get to that point we needed: to get women's education; to get women into power in places of education; to get women's arguments legitimated as relevant objects of study; to get women accepted as MPs, to get all-women shortlists so we had a number of women MPs ... and so on.

Women's work.

And we also needed power on a widely-distributed basis.

I think it's no accident that this is getting taken more seriously now, when it is normal for women to be part of the workforce, when we are able to argue that we carry enormous multiple-demands and execute them successfully, and it is anachronistic that the law does not fully-recognise our rights - to walk and live free of the threat of male violence.

Women's work, all of it: from women doing small acts of empowerment, to the big collective demands, to the boundary-pushing work of the likes of K I-S and J P.

So, all that work.

Cultural shifts don't happen by osmosis.

They're not 'natural'.

I really think that expecting every woman to come out with fully-formed ideas about male violence does serve to underplay the work of many, many women to push feminist analysis towards the mainstream.

And stops us recognising our real successes, too.

And if you don't acknowledge the success of your work, it can serve to stop you acknowledging that you have the power to demand and achieve more.

This.

Looking at the replies she's dismissive, condescending and clueless.
I wouldn't be surprised if this tweet ends her career. I'm pretty sure the shows she presents have a large female audience.

Good post cat. Really good.

Floisme, with respect, I don’t think an all female jujitsu class compares with krav maga. DD learned it in a mixed group and was able to deal with 16 stone men. It was pretty hard core - they had to be able to deal with attackers armed with knives, attackers grabbing their throat from behind, etc.
DD now volunteers to help with security at feminist meetings and marches.

I was not having a go at Davina or her circle of friends. But she very clearly stated "I wouldn’t walk home alone in the dark" - there is no misinterpretation here. And how many 'normal' women can do like her? That is what my point was.

This comment is essentially just one step away from the police saying "women don't go out at dark at night alone", because her logic agrees with that. She is saying she already follows that advice.

Then of course the whole Not All Men that she added to this and you get that she fundamentally misses the entire point of this.