Rita Panahi: Feminists still avoiding the real human rights issues
Many feminists would rather applaud an anti-manspreading chair than fight for downtrodden women targeted by activists, writes Rita Panahi.
Rita Panahi
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Welcome to the brave new world of social justice where women, including migrant women, operating small businesses are accused of discrimination and dragged through legal proceedings for refusing to touch male genitalia. We live in an age where a woman who doesn’t want to touch a stranger’s penis and scrotum can be slandered as a bigot, lose her livelihood and find herself before a human rights tribunal.
Jessica Yaniv, who was called Jonathan before transitioning, has filed 16 complaints with the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal claiming the female beauticians are transphobic for declining to wax her biologically male nether regions. Some of the women Yaniv has targeted operate from home while others have small salons and beauty shops where waxing services, including Brazilians, are offered to female clients.
It’s easy to understand why they decline to perform the service for those with dangly bits; for one it requires a different level of expertise and two, they shouldn’t bloody well have to justify why they don’t want to handle someone’s doodle and googlies.
There are beauticians who provide Brazilian waxing for men, so one has to wonder why Yaniv bypassed them to book appointments with women who wax only female private parts.
The stress and financial strain of the legal action has seen some of the women go out of business, including Marcia Da Silva, a Brazilian migrant, who closed her home business after Yaniv accused her of discrimination, according to The Post Millennial.
Yaniv has boasted on social media about closing another business in British Columbia’s biggest shopping centre. She posted: “This business that I’m taking to the BC Human Rights Tribunal on Friday no longer exists at @MetropolisatMet after I let the landlord know about it” along with a picture of a vacant shopfront.
When taken to task for gloating about the closure, Yaniv tweeted: “A business that purposefully discriminates and refused service to protected classes need not be in business.”
Some of the women targeted have settled their cases in mediation while others still face payouts if the tribunal finds in Yaniv’s favour. Lawyer for the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, Jay Cameron, who represents some of the beauticians, told the tribunal that Yaniv had targeted a number of women from ethnic and religious minorities.
“Some of my clients have been very significantly affected on a personal level. (Another client also) closed her business; she has been depressed, anxious, sleepless and that has gone on for a period of many months,” he said. “It is a very serious thing to launch a human rights complaint against a person. My clients are people. They have a right to make a living and this has interfered with their livelihood.”
Yaniv, who wants compensation of up to $8200 from beauticians and $27,500 from corporate salons, wants the Human Rights tribunal to prohibit refusal of waxing. “When you start discriminating against certain service elements and certain protected classes that’s when we really have an issue,” she said.
Since the case hit the headlines it has emerged that Yaniv has engaged in some disturbing behaviour — from hurling deeply misogynistic abuse at women who question her activism to an unhealthy interest in underage girls’ use of menstrual products.
Where are the feminists prepared to stand with these beauticians? The silence from the bulk of the sisterhood is deafening, although one must acknowledge a few who took a stand, including Meghan Murphy and Lindsay Shepherd, who were then banned by Twitter for misgendering Yaniv.
Many feminists uncritically back transgender activists or stay silent for fear of being labelled a TERF, a “trans-exclusionary radical feminist”, the slur used to describe some old school feminists such as Germaine Greer. Modern feminists feel safer railing against trivial and imagined offences such as sexist airconditioning — again — and the evils of manspreading.
But there’s good news for them on that front with Laila Laurel winning a prestigious national design award in the UK for creating chairs that stop manspreading.
Inspired by the Everyday Sexism project, Laurel designed male and female chairs that look hideously ugly and uncomfortable for both genders but stop men from spreading their legs.
Laurel explained that manspreading can be a form of “microaggression” and she was motivated to design a chair with a “feminist slant” to bring awareness to this important issue.
“It came from my own experiences of men infringing on my space in public,” she said. “With my chair set, I hoped to draw awareness to the act of sitting for men and women and inspire discussion around this.”
Perhaps feminists will eventually work out that men tend to sit differently because they have external genitalia. Not everything is a patriarchal conspiracy or an example of male privilege.
It would be infinitely more useful if feminists cared about protecting female privilege, including the rights of women not to touch male genitalia, even when attached to those who identify as female.
Rita Panahi is a Herald Sun columnist
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