Nude writer Victoria Bateman has a raw sense of self (importance)
Feminist activist and Cambridge historian Victoria Bateman is known for protesting and even lecturing naked. She now seems to be manufacturing reasons to rip her kit off.
In 2019, a diminutive 43-year-old British feminist activist, Victoria Bateman, addressed an audience at Oxford. Or perhaps I should say: she undressed. She took to the stage wearing a suit, and a neck scarf. She stripped down to voluminous underpants, which she dropped before announcing: “Brexit leaves Britain … naked!”
Since that golden moment, Bateman – who has a doctoral degree from Oxford – has demonstrated an even greater commitment to exhibitionism than to the political convictions that apparently fuel her oddly expressionless public disrobing.
She has protested naked to halt economic inequality, going so far as to attend the Royal Economic Society’s Annual Conference gala dinner, that most august of events for British economists, naked (this was, of course, “a demand for respect for women”) before being escorted outside by security.
She has protested naked – in a scarf, with a handbag over her pudendum, and between two stone pharaohs in a park – to stop Brexit; and she is currently protesting naked to combat puritanical feminism and misogyny, with a focus on the Third World. She has been featured naked – and pixelated – on daytime television, on BBC radio, before audiences and in videos, and appears to strip not only at the slightest provocation but with no provocation at all.
If anything, she now seems to be manufacturing reasons to rip her kit off, as her latest polemic, Naked Feminism: Breaking the Cult of Female Modesty, suggests.
In one of the book’s promotional trailers, Bateman, with the usual Weimar Era-style head plait and naked other than a neck scarf tied in a vast bow under her chin (was her throat cold?), perches on a primrose yellow damask love seat – questions relating to upholstery are not to be borne – to address her global audience, a number of whom remember nothing that she says.
This is not a sexist remark. I would find it equally difficult to concentrate if confronted by A. C. Grayling’s testicles shimmering in my line of vision.
Bateman’s husband, an asset management type with an Elizabeth I hairline and disquietingly shiny eyes, does little to dispel her Mensan Dogger je ne sais quoi.
In February 2015, City lawyer Margaret Rowe made the British tabloids when she told the Central London employment tribunal that she lost her £184,000 p.a. position when she objected to Bateman’s husband, one of her superiors, circulating a naked portrait of Bateman – in particular, to junior female colleagues who “did not know how to react or not to react.” Rowe added that it was “unusual for a male boss to send to women on his staff a nude portrait with no context.”
His involvement in Bateman’s naked activism appears to be instrumental. As she writes in the acknowledgments of her new book, “The unfailing and unconditional love of my husband of seventeen years (and counting) is something I never take for granted and goes to show that immodest women can – and should – be treated with love and respect.”
The implication being that Bateman’s husband is so philosophically evolved that her “immodesty”, as she puts it, has no relationship to his tender feelings for her, rather than the less noble possibility that it may, in fact, be the very axis of his devotion (“I’ll be watching through a crack in the wardrobe door, darling – you won’t even know that I’m there!”).
Bateman, in her work, raises many interesting points in addition to her husband’s. Other than the primrose yellow damask upholstery, one of her sticking points – there are too many to list – is “the way we judge women who monetise their body [sic]” – namely, “the most ‘immodest’ of all women: sex workers.” Her view is that women “should be free to monetise their body or their brain [sic]. It is intellectually elitist and hypocritical for feminists to say otherwise”.
Like the majority of white, over-educated, middle-class “sex positive” feminists, Bateman is stupefied by her own sense of self-importance.
Secure on her primrose yellow damask love seat with her shiny-eyed husband, Bateman has no real understanding of the cost of middle-class pornography consumption and prostitution on the disenfranchised – say, the non-compliant sex workers whose jaws are broken and who are then expected to perform fellatio; the frequently-abused children of sex workers (who, one study found, “face the risk of separation from parents, sexual abuse, early sexual debut, introduction to sex work as adolescents, low school enrolment, psychosocial issues arising from witnessing their mother’s sexual interactions with clients”, and so on); the mental health issues (close to half of all sex workers experience depression and almost a quarter consider suicide); the murders (sex work has been referred to as the most dangerous of all professions); the substance use disorders (sex work, as the British Medical Journal reported “is frequently linked to problematic drug use”); and the rates of violence (as the Urban Justice Centre reported, sex workers have a 45 to 75 per cent chance of experiencing sexual violence while working).
In contrast to the grotesque realities of sex work, Bateman, with her silk pussy bows and fantastical visions of a feminist utopia, appears to be one scone short of an afternoon tea.
Professor Germaine Greer exposed her anus and vaginal cavity to the general public decades ago, if with an entirely different intent: to illustrate that such a display simply didn’t matter.
The fact that Bateman believes – or pretends to believe – that the sight of her arrestingly dense pubic thicket will have any impact on world hunger, child prostitution, the economy, or whichever crisis she is riding into the public eye, beggars belief.
Yes, her nakedness attracts attention; yes, I defy anyone not to spend at least three minutes marvelling at the disconnect between her fluty oratory and friendly breasts; and yes, she is not an idiot, but her nudity is, in essence, nothing more than the rebellion of an extremely strange middle-aged woman who will, at any cost, not be ignored. Which is no bad thing, really, but the books are superfluous.
Follow Antonella on www.instagram.com/gambottoburke. She is a rock star as well as a writer; her new single is out now.
Naked Feminism: Breaking the Cult of Female Modesty
Read related topics:Brexit