I should like to think well of the Berlusconi-esque spectacle of Katie Price as a defender of feminism at our much loved Union, and here’s why: Consider the state of black America when it was represented by Malcolm X and Dr. King, and South Africa when it was represented by Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, and the Kurds who are currently represented by Dr. Barham Salih and Jalal Talabani.

There’s an inverse relationship between the quality of a ‘community representative’ and the state of that community (if Steve Moxon is the official representative of oppressed western manhood, I can rest assured that the primrose path lies before me).  So I should like to be cheered by Ms. Price’s appearance.

But I’m not. I’d just finished Julian Baggini’s Welcome to Everytown, in which he notes that most women in the UK feel unhappy with their appearance, and the concomitant rise of eating disorders such as anorexia, and this is fueled by the lads mags culture that Ms. Price draws her pay from.  Baggini makes an astute point that magazines like FHM and Loaded are far more pernicious than pornography.  Pornography openly sells fantasies, but lads’ mags pretend to describe real relations between the sexes, and actively shape views of women (to an idea of the level of this, Zoo offered a competition titled “win a boob job for your girlfriend”).

There’s certainly enough of a problem to power another feminist movement, but such a movement would have to begin by making a few self-criticisms.  For the ethos of sexuality unbounded by responsibility is a corner-stone of much of feminist writing.  On Question Time, the reliably irritating Germaine Greer recently complained of the excessive sexualization of women, conveniently ignoring that this is exactly what she championed in her own youth.  That view still floats around; in Love in the time of Darwinism, Kay Hymowitz quotes the ‘feminist’ blog Jezebel “I’ve gone through phases in my life where I bounce between serial monogamy, Very Serious Relationships and extremely casual sex  [..] I’ve slept next to guys on the first date, had sex on the first date, allowed no more than a cheek kiss, dispensed with the date-concept altogether after kissing the guy on the way to his car, fucked a couple of close friends and, more rarely, slept with a guy I didn’t care if I ever saw again.”  One can muster many boring arguments about this, but anyone who cannot see the direct link between this form of ‘empowerment’ and the lads mags, doesn’t want to.

There’s an even worse form of this self-involved obliviousness.  Over one hundred and thirty million women worldwide have undergone some form of female genital mutilation.  Slavery, sexual and otherwise is still rife.  If any of this was mentioned at the debate, I must have blinked and missed it.  I’ve attended several feminist-themed debates and the union, and the plight of women who, let me be blunt, are not First World University students goes ethereally noted.  Our Union even voted for the proposition, “This house believes the veil empowers women”, a statement that ranks alongside “This house believes the Klan Hood promotes black liberation”.

I’ve written about this before, and I don’t mind being boring for the following reason: the sort of people who perpetuate these conditions, and who think it’s clever to poison schools for teaching girls, are also the people who will be placing a knife to all our throats very soon.  Women’s emancipation isn’t a matter of principle anymore.  It’s a matter of survival.  It’d be nice if more people got that.