A nightclub has been granted permission to host “sexual entertainment” during next month’s Cheltenham Festival. After a day spent exploiting racehorses, male visitors to the town can spend an evening exploiting women. 

I’ve lived in Cheltenham for fifteen years, but I have never attended the festival myself. Even if it hadn’t caused the deaths of an estimated 116 horses since 2007, it just doesn’t look any fun. People dress for a night out, before standing around in broad daylight, getting cold and losing money. Then afterwards, thanks to the generosity of Cheltenham councillors, they can spend whatever remaining cash they have objectifying women whose names they don’t know and whose circumstances they don’t care about. 

It is not just women who work in the nightclubs who are affected by this. According to Maggie Stewart of Gloucestershire Rape and Sexual Abuse Centre, other women change their behaviour during race week, going out less and avoiding walking through streets alone. I recognise this myself. The routes I use for running usually approach the race course, but I alter them (packs of drunk men do not like women in lycra overtaking them; perhaps if they could place bets on us, as though we were actual livestock, they’d appreciate it more). 

Ignore those pearl-clutching Mary Whitehouses, who probably just don’t like sex

To be fair, Gloucestershire constabulary have sort of acknowledged the problem. Campaigns against sexual violence have been launched to coincide with past race weeks. These have featured posters reminding everyone that sexual harassment is a crime — if you want to treat women like objects, you’ve got to pay for it! What this selective approach fails to acknowledge is that sexual assault flourishes within an system that insists female bodies must be available to men, if not through social, then financial coercion. This is a system which might harm some women more than others, but it dehumanises us all. 

When deciding whether nightclub Under the Prom should be granted permission to function as a sexual entertainment venue, local councillors were told that “they could not consider objections made on moral grounds”. There’s something about this phrasing in particular that has irritated me. Moral grounds! It sounds so twee, so trivial. Ignore those pearl-clutching Mary Whitehouses, who might “feel very strongly”, but probably just don’t like sex. 

I’m particularly aware of this after having spent the past Saturday at the Education for Women’s Liberation conference, held at University College London. There women spoke about sexual violence and the way in which the constant indulgence of male sexual entitlement restricts their lives. They did so whilst outside, protestors complained about the event taking place at all, seeking to drown out the voices of the women speaking. You want to see moral panic? It’s right there, amongst those who cannot bear the idea of female people congregating to talk about what matters most to them. It is amongst the people who feel erased and excluded when women who remind them of their mums have inner lives of their own. In a particularly depressing twist, Saturday’s protestors were not men’s rights activists, at least not by name — some even called themselves feminists. 

Who will scream in their faces? Who will tell them they’re hateful?

The conference panel I sat on explored what our culture teaches girls about their bodies. One theme that came up repeatedly in the talks and the discussion that followed was the impact of pornography and the sex trade. We talked about the relationship between the commoditisation of female flesh and the urge felt by many teenage girls to disidentify from the body, either through eating disorders or the wholesale rejection of femaleness. We talked and outside, protestors screamed because to them, if you treat disidentification from the female body as anything other than finding one’s “true self” — if you treat the sex trade as anything other than a way for women to “exercise their agency” — then you are a bigot. The fact that so many men and boys hate women, and so many women and girls hate themselves, is apparently all our fault. 

We don’t know how many women who work in the sex trade are doing it by choice (however one might define that). We know that grooming, trafficking and coercion exist at all levels, and that many women who no longer work in these industries report being traumatised by their experiences. Men who attend clubs such as Under the Prom do not know the backgrounds of the women they are watching. Part of what they pay for is the “right” to dispense with the inconvenience of behaving as though these women are fellow human beings.

It angers me that an event for women to discuss these issues is considered so beyond the pale that two UCL academics will compare the hosting of it to “enabling the likes of eugenics conferences”. Meanwhile, what is being done to prevent women and girls being reduced to pieces of meat? God forbid that anyone should protest outside the multiple venues where men visit to get their “dehumanisation of women” needs met. 

Women gathering to centre female humanity is an outrage; men gathering to piss all over it is perfectly acceptable. The most we get are posters, treating men as helpless little boys who need to be encouraged not to touch the nice ladies — at least, not the ones they haven’t paid for. The most we get are crass little films in which men are encouraged to “have a word” with themselves (“then your mates!”). There’s no suggestion that anything, ever, will be taken away from men and boys. In some ways it reminds me of the drinks industry advising us to drink responsibly. The objectification industry wants you to objectify responsibly. We all know women aren’t people; just make sure you know which occasions require you to pretend otherwise. 

Next month male race goers will descend on Cheltenham, visit the clubs and take what they like. Who will scream in their faces? Who will tell them they’re hateful? Absolutely no one. 

That is not the way groups facing actual oppression respond. For examples of panic and hate, you need to look at those shouting at women for wanting the world to be different.