Theresa May is a politician on the edge. After two years of bungled negotiations, she has whipped out a deal that literally no one seems to like — not even her. She grimaces in defence of her own political legacy like a magician at a child’s birthday party, rummaging in their own top hat in the certain knowledge that the rabbit is already dead. None of this should surprise us. She’s spent her troubled premiership trying to fend off competing critics and appease vested interests with vague, contradictory promises impossible to actually deliver. The DUP are unhappy. The frothing hard-Brexiteers are unhappy. The far right are unhappy. Many rightwing remainers are unhappy, from inside the party and outside. The left, obviously, is unhappy. And everyone is for a moment united in bewilderment.

But with the vultures circling, May and her team know that defeat of the bill would likely spell an end to her leadership — and strengthen the case for a general election just when the Labour party are edging ahead in the polls. All political careers end in defeat — but some end more dramatically than others, much in the way that a car journey ends when the car slams into a brick wall. So, she has taken a leaf from the thousand shameless plutocrats before her — that where popularity fails to galvanise obedience, fear works just as well.

The message is clear: either it’s this deal, or no deal at all — a choice between reluctant pragmatism and national suicide. But here’s the thing — the ruse is paper-thin.

Reports from her team, and admissions from the newly-rehabilitated Amber Rudd tell all. Scaremongering about the possibility of a No Deal is attempting to terrify the nation — its markets, its electorate, and the more pusillanimous reaches of the Labour party — into passing a bill they hate for fear of avoiding a nightmarish No-Deal scenario which would see planes grounded, trade blocked, and millions of citizens scrabbling to stockpile food and basic medicine.

May and Rudd have both admitted that if the deal was to be rejected, then the decisions would fall to parliament — whether to press for amendments, or to trigger the kind of ‘substantial political change’ Michel Barnier has indicated would provide sufficient grounds for renegotiation, or extending or revoking Article 50. In either scenario, parliament has the power to slap amendments on any bill to prevent a No-Deal situation. If they want to. For a political caucus known to get hot and heavy at the idea of parliamentary sovereignty, May’s acolytes now balk at the idea that it could prove their undoing. Clearly, parliamentary sovereignty looks a lot more appealing when you’re sovereign in parliament.

Given the mechanisms of parliament, No-Deal seems unthinkable. But it is nonetheless, possible. Those hard-Brexit Tories willing to sink the deal from within — Dominic Raab, Esther McVey, Jacob Rees-Mogg and the rest — have done so because it is not quite vindictive enough to workers or careless enough with environmental or consumer protections to realise their fantasy of turning Britain into a neoliberal nightmare-scape of ‘Singapore on Thames’, where capital roams free and citizens are locked into penury and debt. (Setting aside for a moment the sheer craven instinct to distance themselves from a toxic deal for which they are partly responsible.) And to realise this policy platform, the economic shock of a no-deal Brexit may actually prove useful. Where the idea of disaster is a useful tactic for May, the shock of actual disaster may prove a useful reality for her party opponents.

The EU has played a far from glorious role in protecting UK workers — it’s not the panacea that some liberals make it out to be. Nonetheless, it remains the case that vast swathes of our laws our laws and practises are woven into to the huge iron heart of Europe’s bureaucracy — and a sudden Brexit promises to rip out all of those stitches at once. In the shock of a no-Brexit, legislative gaps can be plugged with the most. In the midst of economic and constitutional chaos, those at the helm would find it easy to push their radical reforms through. A country suddenly stripped of human rights laws, environmental law, worker protections, consumer protections and trading regulations, a country scared enough to accept parliamentary despotism — it’s a playground for hard-Brexiteers.

No-Deal is a risk of course. But one many are willing to take, insulated by their wealth from the cruellest reaches of whatever economic disaster could be visited on the country by crashing out without a deal. Eye-watering wealth is a kind of lifelong crisis insurance which makes it easier to take fabulous risks with other people’s lives. (To see this in action, look at Kim Kardashian and Kanye hiring private firefighters to protect their house from wildfires whilst their poorer neighbours blazed. To see this in action, look at the 2008 financial crash. To see this in action, look at the First World War).

This is the kind of nightmare politics-without-people that many Left Remain voters feared when they ticked the No box despite their reservations about Europe. Whilst the Lexiteers diagnosed the EU as a fatally neoliberal institution, designed to smother any socialist ambitions in the UK, the ambitions of the Tory stewards made it likely that Brexit would be a killing cure; a brain bleed requires a trip to the doctor and not the guillotine.

Of course, some industrialists are still terrified of a no-deal future. Sometimes we talk about ‘capitals interests’ as if they are monolithic — as if great battles both metaphorical and gruesomely literal haven’t been fought to sort out the conflicting interests of capitalists. Such a battle is currently being fought over the future of Britain. The interests of finance capital are not necessarily the same as private healthcare companies, or those of the automotive industry or the tech sector. The interests of arms manufacturers are not necessarily those of US agribusinesses to whom Liam Fox, arch-partisan of untrammelled free trade, is determined to flog off UK agriculture.

To wrangle with these competing interests, the stewards of British capital are forced to confront the questions of — what kind of industries will be prioritised? What kind of labour the economy will be founded on? What kind of settlement will be founded between state and capital interests, and how these are enshrined? Is this settlement is best helmed by the the supra-state of the EU, or by Britain’s age-old coalition of international capital and domestic aristocracy?

And these questions aren’t new. They have defined the slow and steady financialisation of the British economy over the last fifty years, the rise of new industries and the collapse of the old. But Brexit lends them an unusual urgency. Precisely because of the tempting contours of different disasters which, for them, look a lot like opportunity.

Happy birthday, abortion.

The 1967 Abortion Act passed on October 27th — fifty years ago today. A truly transformative moment in the lives of many women, who could for the first time have sex unencumbered by the terror of having to choose between an illegal abortion and an unwanted child. But it’s hard to totally jubilate when the government is propped up by a frothing cabal of anti-abortion reactionaries known as the DUP, and the next favourite for leader has declared his total opposition to the practise — even in cases of rape. Over the other side of the pond, Planned Parenthood is facing federal cuts that could see it lose 40% of its operating budget overnight. Neither administration is known for their rank-and-file unity — but this craven parade of suits tends to agree that, in these troubled times of economic paralysis and rocketing inequality, the first order of business, is to roll back on hard-won gains in reproductive rights. In all honesty, I’m terrified. When I mention this to a friend, he is incredulous. ‘But they won’t actually make abortions illegal, will they?’ A well-meaning thought. But my only reply is ‘well, why not?’ Posturing on abortions conjures unity among the ranks of reaction in a time of ceaseless back-biting and faction fighting. For the rest of us, it provides a quick dial-in distraction for reliably woeful economic outlook. Such an easy tool for them, bargained for the low low price of the lives of millions of women.

I get it. The incredulity is understandable; anyone in the UK mainland of childbearing age has grown up in a world where abortion access is a given. Veiled in shame, a continual political football — but always there. You might have to troop through a group of god-botherers praying for your immortal soul and that of the ‘unborn child you’re murdering’, but the services are ultimately there. There’s an overwhelming power to the manta that — all this is normal. Then again, normality is a moveable feast.

Grinning ghoulishly from the high windows of power, figures like Jacob Rees-Mogg, Donald Trump and even Arlene Foster can easily seem like relics from a long-dead past. Museum exhibits. We stare at them in fascinated horror, from behind the thick glass of progress protecting us from their teeth and claws. This is 2017, we tell one another. The dead cannot hurt you. But really, we are the curiosity. Modern history is the history of syringes full of soap water injected into uteruses, tactical tumbles down the stairs, botched backstreet surgeries, live babies abandoned, or families with an impossible number of unfed stomachs. When measured against this long sweep of violence, fifty years is nothing. The blink of an eye.

Abortion is still not a right: you can’t demand one simply on the basis that you don’t want a child. Instead, you have to persuade two doctors that the prospect of an unwanted child would drive you mad, or else cause you physical harm. This double-handed medical check is more than the law requires for open heart surgery, or indeed for carrying a pregnancy to term — both of which carry far greater risks than your average abortion. Despite this patrician hangover from the days of full criminalisation, we cannot underestimate 1967 reform transformed lives. People were granted unprecedented control over their own bodies, unprecedented power to steer the course of their own futures. But not all women in the UK were so lucky. Ireland is one of only two nations (the other being Chile) in which foetuses are protected not just by the law, but by the constitution — putting the kibosh on any standard move towards legalisation. Over in the United States, where abortion is technically legal, pro-life legislators and private insurers have constructed a maze of financial, practical and technocratic barriers to abortion so unnavigable as to make its technical legality of little practical value. To serve a country of 300 million people, there are less than 600 clinics where a pregnant person can obtain an abortion.

Such settlements provide the backdrop to a grim procession of cartoonish cruelty visited upon pregnant people. Recall Savita Halappanavar, who died in 2012 from complications from a septic miscarriage. Her repeated requests for an abortion had all been denied because doctors determined that there was still a foetal heartbeat. Recall that some US states require those seeking abortion to undergo a trans-vaginal ultrasound — an invasive and medically unnecessary process repeatedly called “state-sponsored rape”.

Begs the question of how — even clositered in the strange golden sociopathy of extreme privilege — legislators could allow this to happen to people. A brief scan of the history of anti-abortion legislation makes the answer clear: it’s not really happening to people. Women are not really people. Such legislation is a playbook of social and legal trickery used to make women’s personhood disappear.

That life begins at conception was never a settled fact even among the most determined of fundamentalist christian pearl-clutchers. In the Middle Ages, the soul was considered to enter the body when the foetus ‘quickened’; started moving and kicking. But wherever you draw the line, debates that take the personhood of foetuses as their central shibboleth end up treating their hosts like human-shaped incubators. Their personhood is not what matters; only whether and how their vital functions can be used to support a foetus. No wonder then, that we dispose so easily of the bodies of women; they are compliant fleshy automata who can be decommissioned as and when their purpose is fulfilled. This is a familiar story in the history of criminalisation. In 16th- and 17th -century Europe, more women were executed for “infanticide” than for any crime other than witchcraft. And the former was often cited as a sure sign of the latter. The need to ‘protect life’ in the abstract makes the lives of actual, specific women, wholly disposable.

In 1929, The Infant Life (Preservation) Act legalised abortion in certain cases where the mother’s life was endangered. This legislation cleared a little ground for some women to procure lifesaving treatment — including, famously, a 14-year old victim of rape, whose clandestine abortion was declared legal on the grounds that “the probable consequence of the continuance of the pregnancy [would be] to make the woman a physical or mental wreck”. But it’s hard to cast this as a triumph for female autonomy, given that women must declare their own mental vulnerability before being allowed an abortion. A woman’s physical existence could be protected, but only by affirming her mental and legal incompetence. Moreover, the Act also created the offense of ‘child destruction’, which specifically criminalised “any wilful act [that] causes a child to die before it has an existence independent of its mother” — a crime punishable with “penal servitude for life.”

To each generation, its own complex legal and social architecture constructed to dehumanise women. A cursory attempt to trace its foundations finds justifications cobbled together from a mixture of private bigotry, religious conviction, medical concern, political convenience, anxiety about public health and moral decline. None of these sit easily either with one another; or explain why, when the justifications change, the legislation stays pretty much the same. Where a reason is needed for criminalising abortions, a reason will be found.

So instead of asking why abortions are criminalised, perhaps we should ask instead: what purpose does such an architecture of dehumanisation serve? In Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici charts the beginning of the modern criminalisation of abortion in an attempt to answer precisely this question. Defining the crime as the the broad rubric of ‘infanticide’, she catalogues state disciplinary methods adopted to break women’s control over reproduction during a moment of economic crisis and demographic shift:

“From the 1580s to the 1630s we see the onset of severe population decline. Markets shrink, trade stops: this is the first international economic crisis. The new leaders of mercantile capitalism agree that the number of citizens determine a nation’s wealth. A fanatical desire to replenish the population –- expressed by writers like Jean Bodin — is reflected in new policies. Infanticide becomes a capital offense. Pregnancies must be registered with the authorities. Marriage is encouraged, and illegitimacy is criminalized. […] Midwives are enlisted as spies for the authorities, and doctors begin to replace them in the birthing room, as they are suspected of infanticide.”

A moment of intense paranoia. Understandable, perhaps, given that the society’s survival depended — as it still does — upon women performing the hard graft of babymaking, child-rearing and all the domestic labour that comes packaged along with it. In this task, they were failing. Something had to be done.

According to Federici, this history of violence was creative as well as destructive: The erasure of women’s agency and personhood meant that they could be freely treated as productive units, whose bodies and lives must be dedicated to domestic work and social reproduction. Such bodies don’t need to house properly people. Indeed, it’s a little troublesome if they are; those people might have other ideas about how they might like to spend their time. The woman’s unproductive body was the primary site of resistance to capitalism and, as such, needed to be disciplined in order for capitalism to flourish. To be made productive — to put them to work in gestative labour — women had to first be unmade as people. As Federici puts it, “The human body and not the steam engine, and not even the clock, was the first machine developed by capitalism,”

In Caliban and the Witch, Federici explores how witch trials established a patriarchal order by punishing women’s intrusion into the public space as healers, sages, artisans and minor landowners. Those who home-brewed abortion medicines were decried as irredeemably in cahoots with the devil. ‘Witches’ were specifically condemned for their role in defying the godly duty to procreate: the Papal Witch-Bull of 1484 denounced them for “hindering men from performing the sexual act and women from conceiving” and having “slain infants yet in the mother’s womb”.

Disciplining women in this way established women as domestic, gestative and reproductive labourers to replenish the populace of productive workers. In this sense, the Early Modern war on women was an act of ‘primitive accumulation’ comparable to land enclosure: both providing the raw materials for this new mode of production, allowing capitalism to spring from the ashes of feudalism. Set against this historical analysis, two things become clear. Firstly, that social reproduction is vital economic work. Secondly, that anti-abortion legislation is a programme of systematic conscription, enlisting women’s bodies to this cause.

Debates rage on as to whether criminalising abortion actually results in more babies. Economist Steven Pinker has controversially linked falling crime rates to a legalisation of abortions; unwanted children most likely to turn to crime were simply not born. The inverse of this implies. On the other hand, The Lancet recently published a study suggesting that criminalising abortion simply drives the practise underground, herding people into the hands of unsafe and sometimes unscrupulous backstreet abortion providers. In either case, criminalising aboriton gives pregnant people the legal status of meat or machinery, putting their needs second to the needs of production. It performs a neat triage of women into a) those accepting their role as procreator, carer, mother, or b) those who can summarily be burned.

A flamboyant irony, that people who organise under the flag of being ‘pro-life’ can show such scorn for the lives of actual women. Then again, the sanctimony has only ever provided the thinnest of veils for a contempt for the lives of women, and the lives of women of colour in particular. As Angela Davies points out, in Racism, Birth Control and Reproductive Rights, legislation that banned abortions in the US often laid easily alongside forced sterilisations of poor women and women of colour. Where in age of Atlantic slavery, black women were programmatically raped in order to produce more slaves, reconstruction-era whites were struck with paranoia about being ‘replaced’ or ‘overrun’ by the people they could so recently brutalise unchallenged. Theodore Roosevelt procliamed in 1906 that ‘race purity must be maintained’ - “blatantly equating the falling birth rate among native-born whites with the impending threat of ‘race suicide’” The result was an whitelash against the possibility of black life. From 1909–1979, state-run programmes sterilised around 20,000 people. Not only black people, but anyone ‘undesirable’: immigrants, unmarried mothers, the disabled, the mentally ill. Practises like it continue through the present day. Though Israel is sometimes praised for its relatively liberal legislation on abortion, that enlightened attitude to female choice didn’t prevent it administering birth control to unwitting Ethiopian women. Clearly, reproductive control is not simply about encouraging production — but about stamping out the ability for ‘undesirable’ people to reproduce themselves. In the crux of enormous population change and economic crisis, lawmakers redouble efforts to consolidate their control of the means of reproduction; crafting their ideal population from the unbidden mass of human life.

Stop me if this sounds familiar. Coupled with supreme economic stagnation, we’re seeing an ageing population, a fever-pitch stoking fears of ‘white replacement’. Alt-right mouthpieces like Richard Spencer are scaremongering about ‘white genocide’. “Nearly one in three births are to foreign-born mothers as rate hits record high”, ran a recent Telegraph headline. On the right, migrant women and women of colour are on the hook for their dreadful fecundity — and in more liberal zones, its celebrated as the fore that could deliver us from demographic slump, providing a fresh army of young workers. They are both sides of a creepy, intrusive debate that casts peoples wombs as tools to be used for the overall health of the economy. The only question at stake is whose bodies are used, and how. Little thought is given to the idea of providing services to help them in this apparently critical task of world-building. Let alone to the thought that they should be paid for the innumerable hours of domestic labour this implies. Employers, as a rule, only begrudgingly coughs up enough wages for workers to survive — and even that is subsidised by public programmes to . One can only imagine how they would gape and flounder flounder if asked to stump up the cost of the labour making those workers in the first place.

Feminists down the years have dragged some support from the hands of business and government; in the form of child support, pre-school care, healthcare, paid maternity leave. But under the tight-lipped supervision of austerity tsars, even those basic services have been cut to the bone. Naturally — people will still have kids, and do their best to feed them, and to care for themselves and one another. They will simply have to do silently, unpaid and unaided. Where the welfare state shrinks, women’s labour attempts to paper over the cracks. According to some measures, 86% of the austerity burden falls on women. This It is, we are told, a necessary evil to get the debt down, get our house in order. The health of the economy scraped and toiled for by women. Then again, that’s what we are supposed to be for. Disciplined bodies. Productive machines.

So, what reproductive work once briefly was shouldered by public institutions is now being re-privatised, shut off from view, cloistered in the secrecy of homes. The invisible hands at the gears of society are not those Adam Smith predicted. Perhaps this is how demagogues and reactionaries can so easily shrug off the prospects of defunding reproductive services and criminalising abortion. All that work happens behind closed doors. All that violence in bedrooms and makeshift hospitals. Jacob Rees-Mogg has proudly declared that, despite being father to seven children, he has never changed a nappy. (He was not drawn on whether the same is true for his wife, who is presumably wealthy enough to outsource the more exerting parts of femininity to an army of nannies and cleaners). Strange, perhaps, that women are historically the ones condemned as witches when the worlds inhabited by men like Mogg are utterly mystical. Ruled by laws of infinite motion and spontaneous generation. Children spring up from nowhere, grow untended, learn unbidden. Food cooks itself, dirty laundry disappears, and reappears only once white again. The production of life is, in the true sense of the world, occult. And women — whether or not they can give birth — seem reliably associated with this mysterious process. One can only wonder what he imagines happens closed doors. I would be suspicious, too, of the power to make life spring apparently from nowhere. I might start building pyres too.

Any one knows that a witch doesn’t go easily to her grave. Federici underscores the ‘double-nature’ of social reproduction; that birthing and labouring and caring produces workers — but it also produces resisters, rioters and radicals. Those undesirable populations some legislators have tried to stamp out before they are born. Women across the world are organising to demand reproductive freedom, childcare and wages for housework. In base economic terms, this cashes out to — the ability to choose their work, and the right to be . In Poland and Ireland, this organising has taken the form of mass women’s strikes. It seems exhausting, numbing even, to have to re-fight the battles won by previous generations. But these previous generations also serve as an example that victory is indeed possible. In 1970s Italy, autonomist feminists took to the streets with banners declaring “Tremate, tremate, le streghe son tornate”: tremble, tremble, the witches have returned.

This dubious confrontation didn’t stop a groundswell of sympathy from far-righters across the world, who have funded the mission to the tune of over €100,000. Though their initial efforts were quickly stymied by the coastguard, the group have been clear that this is only a “trial run” for a much larger, more ambitious mission. Advocacy group HOPE Not Hate, who have been tracking their activity, are clear about how dangerous these stunts can be. According to a spokesman, “It’s a volatile situation. When tensions are frayed, people could really get hurt. […] I can’t imagine the people smugglers will like their boats being blockaded.”

Defend Europe is a catch-all organising banner for an alliance of far-right, “identitarian” agitators from across Europe. It’s the latest tumorous outgrowth of “Generation Identitaire”, a far right movement begun by French nativists, which has now sprouted groups in Italy, Austria, Germany, Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Slovenia. Its mission: to defend “European identity” from the twin evils of Islam and cultural Marxism, as well as from the cabal of globalist politicians who they perceive as wreaking havoc with the European way of life. Though the group is fairly new, they have links to neo-Nazi groups across Europe, including Bloc Identitaire in France and the National Democratic Party in Germany.

To track these boats, DE mobilised a horde of keyboard warriors, who have sifted through data and triangulated the positions of different NGO vessels patrolling the route from Libya. It’s no small feat. The EU-Turkey deal tamped down the route which had previously taken Middle Eastern migrants over land via the Balkans, and across the sea to Italy and Greece. Since then, this route has dwindled to a relative trickle, and the alternative route via North Africa has become the busiest migrant passage across the Mediterranean.

Many of the denizens of Defend Europe hail from Germany and Austria where Nazism is strictly prohibited; and as such they “stay clear of neo-Nazi language and symbols.” Prominent spokesperson Martin Sellner has also disavowed his past membership of a neo-Nazi party. Young, slick, and media-savvy, they’re trying to present themselves as reasonable, peddling the idea that they’re also on a “Search and Rescue” mission.

It aimed to stop the boats that they see as working as a “pull factor” — de facto in cahoots with people smugglers”. Sellner, leader of the Austrian branch of this identitarian network, claims that “The problem are those NGOs, […] They are working as water taxis, ferrying migrants from the Libyan shore to Italy, basically cooperating with human traffickers.” They say they aim to work with the Libyan coastguard to return migrants they intercept to a place of safety — which is tricky, seeing as Libya has no functional government controlling its coastline — which means that, according to HOPE Not Hate, the “Libyan coastguard” doesn’t really exist. Besides, your average rescue mission tends to have more medics on board, and fewer former members of neo-Nazi groups. It seems like this rescue mission is less about saving migrants from Europeans, and more about Europeans from migrants.

The mission hit the news recently when Mail Online columnist and gurning hate-salesman Katie Hopkins turned up in Catania, Sicily to lend her support to the good ship C-Star in person, which before its launch was moored alongside ‘Vos Hestia’, the rescue boat run by Save the Children. She proudly tweeted photos of herself with “Team C-Star” — although rapidly tried to delete one that pictured her with one crew member, Peter Sweden, who turned out to be a holocaust denier. She seemed less coy at nailing her colours to the mast of the mission in general; the young people determined to “stop the Islamisation and destruction of Europe”, found an easy ally in a commentator notorious for tweeting that “Muslim men raping white women is consistent with the teaching of Islam. Revoke their citizenship and deport the bastards. Asian my arse.”

The mission is hodge-podge, and easily thwarted — the captain of the C-Star was even briefly arrested (ironically, for people smuggling). But however outwardly absurd, this mission proved uncannily efficient when it came to corralling together an unholy alliance of far-right commentators, politicos and demagogues from across Europe and North America — from Richard Spencer (of being-punched fame) to Nick Griffin, shaved-owl impersonator and former leader of the BNP. We might usually think of the far-right as inward-looking, possessed by national pride. But theirs is an international project of white indignation whose fury cannot be contained by national borders. This is nothing new for Defend Europe, known for its splashy stunts accusing national governments of lazy complicity in the “islamisation” of Europe. They dropped a banner from the Brandeburg gate saying “HYPOCRITES”, accusing nations of Europe of pretending to represent national interests whilst doggedly refusing to be sufficiently sadistic to migrants.

The irony is, their attempt to sabotage migrant passage across the Mediterranean is totally surplus to requirements. The “migrant crisis” may have tested the political institutions of Europe nearly to breaking point — a situation unlikely to be resolved by a motley crew of 25-odd activists on a boat. More fundamentally, and without the help of a bunch of internet racists, the EU has been building its legal and literal battlements higher and higher. The EU’s Operation Sophia is essentially a high-tech version of the C-Star mission; policing the Libyan coast in an attempt to stem the flow of migrants at its source — except this time, with nearly 12 million euros of yearly funding, recently extended to the end of 2018. Designed to tackle “people smuggling”, the operation has to date picked up 13 000 migrants and turfed them back to the places from which they were intending to flee. The logic is the same as that inspiring the Defend Europe; that tackling the migrant crisis is a matter of reducing the ‘pull-factors’ of NGO rescue boats who will ferry migrants to the relative saftey of Europe, ensuring that the mediterranean is well-policed enough to simply re-place displaced people. And according to a recent report from Goldsmiths University — talk of ‘pull factors’ wholly misunderstands the problem: “The violence against migrants in Libya is so extreme that they attempt the sea crossing with or without search and rescue being available.” “The evidence simply does not support the idea that rescues by NGOs are to blame for an increase in migrants crossing.” These operations are a distraction from the overlapping policy-failures and international crises that have left local EU authorities overwhelmed by sudden population booms. This seems to have made little dent in EU policy; the European commissioner recently urging that nations need to “get serious” about anti-migration policy. More migrants have died at its gates of Fortress Europe than Defend Europe could possibly hope to “search and rescue”.

Not that this damped their hopes. In their efforts to defend whiteness from a spectral muslim peril, they’ve managed to accidentally caricature modern whiteness. It’s always been an international project, with defenders ever-willing to take to the high seas to put down those they deem a cultural or racial threat. They’re over-equipped, mercifully out-numbered, and unsure whether they’re supposed to be triumphant ubermensches or courageous underdogs. They’re gleefully entertained by the suggestion that they’re pirates — and in one sense, that’s always been true for white people. However murderous or foolhardy your mission, being white lets you pass yourself off as hero in your own tale of derring-do, unaware that to everyone else you look like a gun-toting murderer with a drinking problem and a chronic lack of vitamin C — who makes a living plundering other people’s wealth and passing it off as yours by right of conquest. And moreover, as any privateer knows, they can be easily recruited to the cause of any nation state with the promise of gold and glory.

Defend Europe might consider themselves anti-government heroes of the new right — but alone, they won’t stop migrants from crossing from Libya. But whilst they’re clowning around in the margins, easily dismissed as extremist nutjobs — Operation Sophia and the other armaments of Fortress Europe begin to look more and more reasonable.

A deft coil of metal winds its way between the unsteady legs of a deep-sea oil rig. It will perform routine inspections, even carry out basic maintenance. A regular craft could never do it — so designers took their lessons from the way eels and sea snakes navigate so effortlessly depths that would crush a human to a breathless pulp. Tasked with the enviable duty of designing the future, engineers may sometimes look for inspiration in the inscrutable horizons of science fiction. But when it comes to putting that utopianism into practise they look not ahead, but around them — to the myriad functions of nature whose intricate operations evolution has spend millions of years developing. Robotics steals all its best tricks from the animal kingdom. Hooking up cockroaches to motion-capture cameras, examining exactly how the muscles of a kangaroo’s legs store and release such incredible power.

The same is true for human animals. The trajectory of automation takes its cue from human life: attempting to mimic, perfect, streamline . So we develop robot surgeons to stitch people back together, robot line-workers to build cars, cyborg hearts to pump blood round the body. We are seeing the rise and rise of therapy-bots and artificial intelligences that work as part-butler, part-personal assistant, part-librarian. This is no accident: the push for automation is precisely the push to replace human workers and their capacities — phasing out workers that come with troublesome things like free wills and demands for wages. So human functions are slowly part-replaced by newer, shinier, and more pliable cyborg proxies.

That this push for automation is designed to replicate human functions is rather telling; it gives us a litmus test for what the designers think people are for. This is no more cartoonishly clear than in the case of female robots; coded as feminine, or woman-shaped, they expose our assumptions of what roles women are expected to fulfil. Assistant AIs and therapy-bots are given feminine voices and ‘personalities’ — cleaving neatly to the idea that women are meant to soothe and serve. The prospect of artificial wombs have lead some — feminists and MRA cave-dwellers alike — to predict the ‘end of women’. And among the first imaginative steps into the field of lady-bots gave rise — inevitability — to sex robots; fleshing out the fantasy of the perfect sexual partner; pneumatic, uncomplaining, endlessly available, and whose sole function is to please.

That we could use robots as essentially person-shaped sex toys should not be necessarily concerning. But they do have a unacnny ability to unveil our most unsetling attitudes about sex the human mind can harbour. And true to form, this drive to develop the perfect partner has taken a sinister turn, as the sex robot brand True Companion has revealed their new model ‘Roxxxy’. Roxxxy comes full-equipped with multiple ‘personalities’, which determine how she responds to your advances; there’s ‘Wild Wendy’, and there’s ’S&M Susan’ — and then, there’s ‘Frigid Farrah’. According to their website, if you touch Farrah “in a private area, more than likely, she will not be too appreciative of your advance.” This, in short, is a robot who can be raped. This makes the following pretty clear: they consider that being raped is one of the functions that women perform. That being-raped is simply another of the things that women are for, another feminine faculty to be automated, perfected and made eternally available to real people (read: men).

In response to criticisms, the company has rather audaciously claimed that this rape-setting will actually help women, by allowing rapists to exorcise their worst vicissitudes, shifting the burden of being-raped from human women onto their plastic proxies. For people tasked with the mimicking of the most intimate aspects of human sociality, they seem to flounder when it comes to understanding how humans actually work; that we use technology as a learning tool, even when we don’t mean to. When we get positive feedback from using technology — be that the endorphin rush of a new notification or the endorphin-rush of an orgasm — it reinforces and concretises certain patterns of behaviour. A rapeable robot rewards and normalises rape. As a mostly-human woman, that’s not exactly a reassuring prospect.

Moreover, this technology allows us to continuously rehearse and re-enact in dangerous myths about sexual violence: that refusing sex is simply one of a myriad ways in which women titillate their partners, that no doesn’t always mean no. That rape is primarily a way of having sex rather than a way of doing violence. That the urge to rape is a primal urge of men that demands sexual catharsis rather than social solution. But rapists aren’t like heroin addicts needing an outlet for a simple unreconstructed urge. They are people who make the decision to hurt other people. If Farrah came readily equipped with a wallet you could steal, or a knife you could use to hack off her limbs — with lifelike screaming and squirting blood! — we would rightly be concerned about what behaviours these technologies encourage. But we’re comfortable enough with the idea of rape as an unextraordinary part of sexual life for Farrah to be marketed along with fleshlights and skimpy lingerie.

This technology does nothing to challenge some men’s assumption that they are unalienably entitled to women’s bodies. It just gives them the capacity finally rape a woman, finally re-assured in that sneaking conviction they’ve had all along; that this woman is not really a person. One can only hope that Farrah has a sleeper-agent setting built in which True Companion have tactfully neglected to include in their press releases. “She will not be too appreciative of your advance” — and any man that tries her will get a stilettoed robo-boot right to the solar plexus. That, friends, is a teaching technology I can get behind.

Doctor Who has never traded in the seriousness of ‘hard’ science fiction, often laden with po-faced predictions of humanity’s hand-spun fate at the mercy of the technologies and the politics it creates. It’s more a fairytale spacetime cabaret — an exploration of the gloriously impossible rather than merely the improbable, which celebrates a universe in which the world can be set to rights by kick-boxing space zombies into the next dimension with the Power of Love. But the show’s unremitting silliness the seriousness with which it’s treasured in the cryptic heart of the anglophone cultural imaginary. The wellspring of a thousand weepy adolescent fanfics, and a thousand grown men spending their Saturdays making fiendishly clever costumes out of tin foil and cardboard. But maybe this is unsurprising. To call it just a silly story rather misses the importance of silly stories.

Doctor Who, which has always been something of an ideological chameleon. Whatever your political inclination, you will likely find something in the , you’ll mostly likely find in the rip-roaring tumble of glorious nonsense, something to mirror back your own particular vision of the world. Right-wingers will find a history whose course is steered largely by the occasionally murderous but ultimately noble acts of a single great white hero, aided by a trusty female sidekick. Leftists can excavate coded critiques of capitalism, imperialism and the machinery of war. But up until now, one single thread has bound together the sometimes baffling contradictions. That whatever stories are made, they are made largely about and largely by men.

So cherished is this narrative that many frothing internauts have taken to their keyboards in outrage that the new doctor is a woman.

The perennial response goes that it is utterly implausible that the Doctor could be a woman, after fifty-odd years gracing our television screens in familiar man-shape. Mark Collett, greasy basement-dweller and author of ‘The Fall of Western Man’ was apoplectic, tweeting: “The new Dr Who is a woman! I wonder if they will top it off with a black love interest & a weedy white cuck assistant that she friendzones?” Suspending for a moment the fact that that is obviously an amazing line-up and I would be totally here for it — clearly, it is of utmost importance to defend even the silliest of stories, when they remind men that they and they alone can be trusted with the duty of saving the universe, time and time again.

People have also raised concerns that a woman could travel back to any time beyond the 1960s and still find herself taken as seriously as a male doctor. The Doctor does six impossible things before breakfast and rounds it off with Lunch on the third moon of Jupiter. The character can defeat planet-killing hordes of deadly ghosts, psychic snow and invasions of space-spiders. But it seems defeating the vicissitudes of human male contempt seems rather a bridge too far. Those who readily suspend disbelief in aliens, time travel, space whales, diamond planets and killer clockwork spiral into full-on meltdown when asked to contemplate the possibility of women being in a leading role. (Fans easily swallowed the idea that the Master, the embodiment of Time Lord evil, could suddenly flip genders. Perhaps the idea that a woman can be conniving and devilish is an easier sell.)

Which rather is telling of the enormous stranglehold that patriarchy has over our imaginations. One twitter user @scotti2427 summed up the problem. “Can’t actually think of anything worse. End of Doctor Who for me after 43 years.” He’s spent forty three years watching planets crumble and humanity threatened a hundred times by a hundred different kinds of monster, and still couldn’t think of anything worse than a woman in charge. And that pretty nearly encapsulates what’s going on here: that the unfailing and unimpeachable presumption of male supremacy represents nothing less than a failure of imagination. This particular piece of spacetime genderfuckery presents a huge sweep of narrative possibilities — how will the Doctor contend with being flung far into the past, or to the outermost limits of the galaxy — and how will a female doctor toy with our expectations of what and who gets to play the hero? It raises a hundred questions; the Doctor has a wife — does this mean that the Time Lord is not just a woman, but a queer woman to boot?

Does this mean that the Doctor is gender fluid, or that gender is just another one of the quirks of regeneration — like age or hairstyle, or in the latest case, Scottishness? In the face of these possibilities, male supremacy is the brain-killer, a failure of imagination sousing the spark of narrative complexity.

And more importantly, the following should by now be clear: that representation matters. Allowing little girls to see themselves as the heroes is a seed change not simply in the fairytale world of Doctor Who, but in our own world as well. It represents the rather daring contention that perhaps girls can change history too, even if they’re not flaunting the rules of causality to do it. A victory for women here is also a victory for storytelling. — and vice versa. I‘m only a little sad that when I was a kid watching old Doctor Who re-runs, no one on screen was there to remind me that girls can time travel too.

Many accounts London’s first iconic inferno — the Great Fire of 1666 — marvel at the miraculous fact that so few died. Reports vary, but the settled number is six — only six — people perished as the flames ripped a path of desolation through the city. Most of them choked to death on the fumes. Some however, are casting doubt on that extraordinarily low toll. Though we know the names of only six people who died, the fire turned nearly a third of the city to a smouldering heap of ash and charred timber. According to some historians, it seems unlikely that all the denizens of that third made it out alive — particularly those in the poorer quarters, who couldn’t hot foot it out on private coaches, who stayed to beat the flames back from their homes. Houses were thrown together in untended, cramped conditions, crammed with wax and turpentine, lined with flammable material like thatch. The fire consumed them easily. But the fire made proper record-keeping nigh-on impossible — and with no deeds, no death certificates, no censuses, no neighbours left to report families disappeared, we will simply never be certain of the number.

Counting the dead of Grenfell is no breezy roll-call exercise. In the chaos left in its wake, we cannot simply count the living and see whose names have gone unanswered. It would be tricky enough for any large residence; people go on holiday, they stay out all night, they have guests, they sublet their rooms. But the case of Grenfell is trickier still. Like any other tower block you’d care to name, among its former residents are people with insecure migration status — undocumented migrants, failed asylum seekers, people who’ve outstayed their visas. With no access to public support and every reason to avoid the scrutiny of border enforcement by dodging formal rental agreements, people end up staying with family, sofa-surfing or subletting under the radar. But without the testimony of these people, we may never know for certain who died in the inquest. In response to this conundrum, Diane Abbott called for a full migrant amnesty: that those irregular migrants who come forward as victims of (and witnesses to) the tragedy at Grenfell should be granted indefinite leave to remain, as well as access to the services needed to begin, tentatively, to rebuild their lives.

A minimal measure, you might think, to ensure that the public enquiry or inquest has the best possible information to hand — and to spare survivors the secondary trauma of summary deportation. In order to finally settle the question still lingering over Grenfell, the government might have to do its most dizzying policy U-turn yet — roll back on its determined course to make britain a “hostile environment” for migrants. In response perhaps to still-fuming public outrage, the government have offered a sop to still-fuming public outrage; that anyone irregular migrants will be granted a twelve month period of amnesty. During this time they can work, be housed, gain access to public funds; all the basics supposedly afforded those with a british passport. This rather skirts the question of what happens after those twelve months are over. After they’ve come forward, registered for work and housing support — after local authorities will know exactly who and where they are. After those twelve months, immigration officers known for ghosting migrants into detention and onto charter flights in the middle of the night, will know exactly whose door to knock on.

That’s a big risk to run. Those who fall foul of UK Border Agency can be detained indefinitely without charge and without trial in immigration detention centres, which are dogged by reports of squalid conditions in which disease runs rampant. In her tenure as Home Secretary, Theresa May denied UN Special rapporteur on women’s rights access to the notorious Yarls Wood Detention facilitaty, after its staff were accused of repeated counts of physical abuse and sexual abuse. This is to say nothing of the mental distress caused by stagnating in indefinite detention, a legal power available to border enforcement no other country in Europe. After being deported to Jamaica, one former detainee told researcher Luke de Noronha “If you’re not mindsharp, they will fuck your head. They will destroy you. They will ruin you. Brick by brick. Block by block.”

Many migrants threatened with detention and deportation have been here for decades — building lives, building communities, building families. Recently released from Yarls Wood after a successful legal appeal, Mabel Gawanas spent nearly three years locked away from her two young children. Many migrants come to the country as children, meaning some have been have not known any other country as an adult. For these individuals, the prospect of removal means being torn away from family, jobs, friends, and support networks, and dropped into the middle of an unknown country. This fact carries little weight in the home offices efforts to determine where they are ‘from’. Until the practise was deemed illegal by the European Court of Justice, LGBT asylum seekers could only avoid removal by ‘proving’ their sexuality. This sometimes involved submitting explicit, personal images and videos to the UK courts.

Even those with pending judicial reviews or asylum claims can be removed on charter flights back to ‘popular destinations’; Nigeria, Pakistan, Ghana, Jamaica, Sri Lanka. these charter flights have been criticised for landing asylum seekers right back in the middle of war zones, or places in which they risk harm or death — flouting international law on non-refoulement of asylum seekers. In 2013, the government was ready to load Tamil migrants onto planes back to Sri Lanka where they faced being tortured. This was stymied last minute by a high court intervention — an inconvenience that the government has proved keen to avoid. Letters sent from the Home Office to the Royal Courts of Justice before removal flights outline that due to the “costs involved in arranging charter flights, it is essential that these removals are not disrupted or delayed by large numbers of last minute claims for permission to seek judicial review.” Repeatedly, the Home Office has stressed that such flights are principally a cost-saving measure. Coorporate watch have shown that they don’t even sucessfully cut costs — but perhaps this is of little consequence. Under the logic of austerity, the need to cut costs operates more as an ideological excuse than a financial imperative. The contents of the final tally-sheet are immaterial; invoke the name of austerity, and all sins are pardoned.

For anyone who has been following the coverage of Grenfell, this may come as little surprise. The disaster unveiled the breathtaking profundity of official contempt for the lives of those with no money, those traditionally shut out of the halls of power in which reports can be quitely ignored, housing merrily defunded. Government at both the local and national level has proved itself of using the fraudulent need to ‘cut costs’ as a reason to dismantle protections that serve the most vulnerable in society. So why should the irregular migrants of Grenfell come forward? Hidden as they are, those who survived this crime against London’s they’ve found some sort of informal witness protection, cloistering themselves (for now) from the vicissitudes of its perpetrators: our very own government.

Fearmongerers let me tell you — London is fine.

I was stuck out last night, spilt from the guts of a festival where London was tens of thousands of young people, inexplicably both sunburnt and rain-drenched, cheerfully elbowing each other in the head to the tune of ‘Lie, Cheat, Steal’. London was people with glitter streaked across their cheekbones trying to mud-ski across the wasted fields on pairs of crushed Tyskie cans.

London was the packs of people crowded at the closed tube stop, clustered into corner shops for beer and strawberry laces. London was the old bloke peering topless through the window.

London was the warmth of the Blind Beggar pub, once patrolled by the Kray twins, now ruled over by a cantankerous ginger tom. London was a game of three-on-three snooker, played terribly because it lasts longer that way, and London was a very precarious pint of beer.

London was the Raj Mahal sweet shop which will fill you to the eyes with sugar syrup at any hour god sends, which offers bulk-buy bargains for iftar.

London was a hundred keep safe messages glowing blue in your friend’s palm.

London was a man carrying an old dog-basket filled with back issues of ‘Take a Break’ Magazine.

London was waiting with your phone near dead for the tubes to open or something to happen.

London was the graceful quiet of the central mosque across the road, frocked with clothes shops and pancake houses.

London was a gin-soaked lock in at the toys Vauxhall tavern, where drag queens and queers and waifs offered their Like-A-Prayers to everyone on the other side of the bolted doors.

London was the stumbling pairs and threes of high-heeled revellers, clung to the edges of buildings like the road was trying to buck them from its back.

London was the 243 trundling past, its top deck windows whited with the steam-heat of three dozen bodies, faces ghosted up against the panes. They weren’t holding their breath — just thinking home now.

I feverishly refreshed TFL, the Met twitter page, the check-in function of Facebook — and everything told me go home.

Shivering against a lamppost, I thought — I’m already there.

London is my home — my adopted home. It’ll break your heart and nick your wallet soon as look at you, but it’s still home. This morning it’s seven lives poorer, and that fucking hurts — because, it’s home.

There’s a lot of grim shit in this city. You have to scrape it grey-black from the undersides of your fingernails when you get in the door every evening, if you can. Kids leave each other stabbed and bleeding in carparks. People in smart suits meet in the cool of hotel lobbies to bargain over bulk-sales of ammunitions to be shipped off elsewhere, so it doesn’t matter. People are left to freeze and starve on the pavements. People breath in scum and dust and petrol fumes every day. People fling themselves under trains and into the river. Walking back from the tube stop, I fist my keys wolverine-style through the gaps in between my knuckles — like most other women i know. Hijabis get their headscarfs ripped off. Black men are shot down by cops. Migrants are ghosted away in the middle of the night. There are swastikas on the insides of toilet doors. There’s a lot of grim shit in this city.

And it’s still home. That’s why you fight for it. It’s still home even when the pipes freeze over and there’s a strange rattling sound from , when there are weeds in the garden and your landlord is hassling you for rent. That’s why I refuse to be scared. Because if you’re scared, it isn’t home any more.

I’m still calling it home.

Terrorism is a slippery word. It adheres most easily to the bodies of people of colour. When mournfaced ministers traipse to the press podiums to talk combatting terrorism — they rarely means the violence perpetrated by the likes of Dylan Roof, Thomas Mair or Anders Breivik, who struck at the heart of what they considered a poisonous multiculturalism. In a media landscape crowded out by the Murdoch press and those willing to lazily peddle cabinet press releases, it’s hard to collectively decide on working definition of terrorism that avoids being a) unhelpfully vague or b) kowtowing to racist myth-makers by automatically exculpating white folk from suspicion. (A recent media quest to dredge up spurious links between the Labour Party and IRA attackers has accidentally admitted the fact that white folk are perfectly capable of terrorism as well. No one claimed the Daily Mail was out to make sense.) But if we can get a grip on it at all — it’s perhaps helpfully understood something that uses violence to carve out a space of fear. A space where you hold your breath every time the tube rattles. A space where you don’t trust the person on the bus next to you. A space where you have a word in the ear of an officer because that young man with the dark beard is acting a little funny. With people so breathlessly yammering that last night’s brutality were muslim attacks on western freedom, it’s perhaps easy to think that folks who pray to the same god at the attackers are somehow exempted from this space of fear.

It that were the case, then we could assume that terrorism, despite its persistence as the first resort in a patchwork campaign of would-be guerrilla warfare, is spectacularly inefficient. But ISIS are not stupid. Murderous, yes — evil, certainly. But not stupid.

The space of fear is not the exclusive preserve of white Londoners so hasty to claim a muslim conspiracy of silence, to decry the failings of multiculturalism and ‘PC culture’ turned murderously lax. Its priority members are in fact muslims and people of colour. It’s worth remembering at times like these that throughout the world, the vast majority of victims of terrorist attacks are themselves muslims. Just the other day, a triple-suicide bombing in Kabul claimed the lives of twelve people. But crucially, these are the folk who bear the brunt of a relentless white-lash against the apparent source of the threat. Theresa May was quick to underline the importance of a strong border policy and dystopian surveillance powers — policies she’s being reliably rolling out ever since her tenure as home secretary. Fascists are crawling out of their gutters, using these incidents as clarion call to action to ‘defend’ white nationhood from a spectral muslim menace — unleashing a poisonous slew of hate crimes on anyone, as the BBC’s Nick Robinson once notoriously gaffed, “of muslim appearance”. The propagandising of reactionary theocrats often cleave neatly to those of white nationalists and would-be-autocrats.

That’s what makes terrorism such an effective tactic — if we let it. The propagandists of ISIS and organisations like it trade on tales of the west’s endemic and immovable hatred for all things muslim, for its willingness to stamp out muslim life wherever it finds it. What better way to spin the tale than to convince the gullible racists of western nations to attack their neighbours, to call them cockroaches and call in the police and border agents. What better way to sharpen young men’s anger and disaffection than by ensuring that their own government treats them as a cancer to be cut out of the body politic — or by ensuring that disastrous, abortive foreign incursions continue apace. They are always in need of new recruits.

That’s what makes it such a miraculously efficient tactic — if we let it. Their project of systematically alienating muslims to prop up their own power-grab has been seamlessly outsourced. It’s been neatly parcelled off to everyone from your average mouth-breathing street fascist, to border-policing neocons in the cabinet, to your auntie who’s the sweetest woman in the world if you tune out her her ‘legitimate concerns’ about her muslim neighbours. When it works, these sporadic acts of terrorism make the everyday violence it takes to sustain a propaganda campaign — well, somebody else’s problem.

This is why London is fine. Because it has to be. Because this tactic only works if we let it. If we let it turn us against one another. It only works if we allow it to become a foil to racists and reactionaries. Because to say ‘London is fine’ is not simply a statement. It’s a promise to keep each other safe — to stand up to islamophobes in our home streets and in our halls of power just the same. To keep London a home for everyone.

So, say it again…

London is ours. London is fine.

The women of the Salpêtrière were mostly plucked from the growing ranks of Paris’ urban poor as more people flocked to the cities at the height of the industrial revolution. They were seamstresses or sex workers or servants of drifters; women against whose indigence and wantonness society had to be protected. For their own wellbeing, and that of the politer denizens of Parisian society, they were carted off to the new sanitariums. Though recently revamped, these buildings still held true to their original purpose; serving as places to house the mad, the poor, and the otherwise dangerous and inconvenient. The bodies of these women were examined and found wanting. They were held under water until great pelts of skin peeled off them. They were held over pits of fragrant smoke. Fascinated from an early age with anatomy, Charcot described the institution as a kind of living mortuary where he could advance his various medical enquiries. Audiences collected in the hospital’s public lecture galleries as the patients were undressed, probed and cut. Hysterics had a reputation for ‘flowing’; blood, spittle and phlegm and oozing out of their skin, out of their eyeballs, out of their — wherever. Clusters of doctors listened to them talk about childhood sexual assaults and wrote sad tracts bemoaning their ‘lascivious natures’ and ‘garrulous speech’; traits typical of your average hysteric. Authors wrote popular pulp fiction about ‘romances’ between doctors and their inmates. Most women who were admitted died in hospital. They didn’t survive the terminal diagnosis of being a woman.

Many of the best bodies I know are hysterical. The ones that can be violated, that can be summoned and dismissed, that can be used and disposed of. The bodies that are unruly, that must be contained. They weep and bleed, they make trouble for themselves, and for those entrusted with their stewardship. If they cry out against their pain it is only further proof that they are troublesome, and must be managed.

That’s what I was reminded of, as I sat and watched the inauguration of a braying idiot demagogue who bragged about sexually assaulting women and was rewarded with one of the greatest positions of political power on the planet. A man who spun headlines by humiliating, abusing and assaulting women, by promising to deport and imprison them. Here is a man who said that pregnancy was an inconvenience to employers, but that women should be punished for having abortions, and who has mopped up misogynist votes by funding planned parenthood. After being accused of multiple rapes — charges which MRA-types bemoan as liable to ‘ruin a man’s life’ — he shrugged it off as the typical perfidy of lying women, fuelled by the democratic electoral machine and the fainting politically-correct liberals that cheer it on. I watched it unfurl and that’s what I was reminded of. That mine is supposed to be a violable, biddable body. That I have been diagnosed as female, and for that unfortunate position, the state feels free to take whatever steps necessary to manage or curtail my terminally problematic existence. Anti-choice legislation can be cast as an attempt to ‘protect womens health’. When a fourteen year old is raped, a judge can declare her ‘older than her chronological years’. The women of Yarl’s Wood detention centre can be assaulted and deported and few people bat an eyelid — not least the state that blithely oversees such violence.

It dominates the new cycle — but it is far from news. Today is a coronation, not a revelation. We have always been taught that our bodies our violable; that if we are assaulted, raped or killed it will always be something of our fault, neglecting as we have to adequately manage the responsibility that comes with living as a woman, continually on the precipice of having some violence done to her. That is the way the world is, and the way that men are. This is just a symptom of the condition of being a woman.

When I leave bars late at night i kiss my friends goodbye. The women and the non-binary people among them all wish a safe journey. A recent report found that 38% of young men (as well as 34% of young women) think that if i were to be assaulted on my way home — late, at night, possibly with alcohol running through my bloodstream — that i would be at least partially responsible. I watch the news, and I kiss my friends goodbye at night, and I wonder how to be safe in such a dangerous body.

My white, cis, passport-bearing body is less disposable than others. It is occasionally afforded the dubious protection of possessive white men, if only to mark their apparent moral superiority over men of colour. If you want to pass laws putting it beyond my control, you might need to couch it in the same concerning language of those long-dead doctors; claiming that it is to preserve my dignity, my innocence or my health. If I am raped or killed — then it is a tragedy. Perhaps it is to be expected — what else can one expect when a woman walks home alone at night in a short skirt? — but it’s nonetheless tragic. This admission of tragedy is not afforded to those bodies testament to the manifold sins of failing to be man, failing to be white, failing to be straight — the sins of failing to be rich and failing to be a healthy, productive citizen. For these bodies, they hardly need an actual fascist to be swept into the Whitehouse on a high wind of bigotry to be reminded that they are more disposable. Where the sanctified bodies of white women are offered up as prizes to inaugurate the triumph of angry white men and reassure them of their dominance. Less valued, more violable bodies are those to be defeated and disposed of in pursuit of that dominance. When queer black women are deported to their deaths, the government feels no need to scrap around for excuses. We need to close our borders, because Britain, of course, is full. When hijabi muslim women are beaten in the streets, and these ladies have only themselves to blame for wearing their bodies in a way so defiantly, obviously muslim. Multiculturalism has failed, and we must return to the security and stability of the white, christianised nation. To uphold the integrity of the state and the white nuclear family that undergirds it, the necessity of these violences is self-evident.

It might be tempting now to allow oneself to be reassured. And if you look for it, reassurance is there. On election night, after fourteen hours spent on twitter watching Trump crowing with delight over his growing stack of electoral college votes, dizzied with the combined effects of caffeine and insomnia, I heard people saying not to despair. I read people saying that we have survived worse than this before. we have survived war and despots and we’ve managed to still claw our way through to 2017 without blowing each other to smithereens. People still eat ice cream and file tax returns and bruise their knees and forget their wallets. Life goes on. And for a moment it was comforting. But really this ‘we’ never really applied to those most acutely craving comfort right now. America survives, for now. But many others don’t make it, broken on the turning wheels of history. Black folks get blithely gunned down by police, trans women are being murdered at historically high rates. Women bear the brunt of plummeting living standards. Domestic abuse services see their funding stripped away, leaving more women to be murdered by their partners. And the people responsible — those commit violence, those who stand by perpetrators — go unpunished. These people become President of the United States. President Donald J Trump will live the next four years surrounded by armed guards. If anyone were to try and hurt him they would not be allowed to continue existing. Whether they gunned them down right in the act or whether they waited till they could be publicly stuffed full of poison or run through with a thousand volts. Because his body, the body of America, is sacred; it is inviolable.

Trump revels in the pageantry of peacocking how easily he can use and dispose of women bodies. He will decide if you can be considered beautiful, if you can be allowed to in the country, or indeed live at all. He can assault you and glory in the exquisite consequencelessness of that violence. In short, the pageantry of his power depends on our bodies being continually available, continually vulnerable and absolutely violable. What a pathetic spectacle. Sad. He needs so badly for us to be perfectly biddable — and yet, despite him, we continue to be human, to demand our dignity, to show our teeth.

That is the miraculous thing — that even in these most dangerous and unacceptable of bodies, even without entourages of burly men full-toothed with tasers and guns, we survive somehow. We persist. When the forces of reaction conspire to guarantee that women live more dangerous, more precarious lives- to persistence is an act of defiance. To survive is extraordinary. It happens every day but it is nonetheless extraordinary; to insist on remaining whole and human. To demand life and dignity when you can so blithely disposed of without a whisper of a fuss.

The doctors of the Salpêtrière knew one thing: that women’s bodies are dangerous. About this, he was absolutely right. Women’s bodies are dangerous to society because society depends so entirely upon them. They are responsible for the overwhelming majority of social reproduction that allows society to keep ticking over; the childrearing, the domestic labour, the excruciating, exhausting emotional labour. They perform the low-paid precarious work that society sneers at, but without which it would cease to function. Those carefully colluding to unravel minimal legal protections to female safety depend acutely on the work of our bodies for their existence. do not make their own meals or raise their own children. They do not clothe themselves or clean their houses and office buildings or comfort one another when troubled by doubts as to how far their power extends. The powerful must collude in our precarity, must convince themselves that we are disposable, because otherwise they might be confronted with the reality of how powerful our bodies are.

Yesterday, I stood on the steps of trafalgar square howling freedom at Nelson’s coattails as the winter light fell. I was not alone. There were a hundred thousand of us crammed into the streets of London. We brought the city to a standstill. Across the world, hundreds of thousands more trooped through the streets. We yelled, we danced, we sang, we smashed window panes, we painted walls, we keyed cars — and the world kept spinning on its axis by the unsung labour of women seemed to slow a while to listen. That same world that had spent a long time listening to the smug, froggish bloviation of a man who reserves a particular contempt and disgust for women, or indeed anyone with a womb. When he talks about menstruation, about reproduction, when he talks about sex, when he runs his eyes over a beauty queen like a lumberjack looks at an untouched acre of forest — he squirms, he crinkles up his nose as if to say that however much he desires them, female bodies are revolting. At the last estimate, over a million women worldwide marched on Saturday. So, I have this nagging suspicion that he might, after all, be right.