The week of International Women's Day is typically terrible for women

 

International Women's Day landed in yet another week that was largely terrible for women everywhere. The sad part is that the reasons why this week has been terrible for women were the same sort of reasons for this last week, and the week before that, and the week before that and so on. And next week will no doubt be terrible for depressingly similar reasons. And the week after that, and the week after that, and so on.

Around the world, women have protested on International Women's Day for a range of causes that serve to demonstrate why feminism is still necessary.

This week alone, here are a few terrible things that have happened.

- In Clapham, a few miles from where I am sitting now, Sarah Everard disappeared as she walked home from Clapham to Brixton. Today, it was announced that a serving police officer has been charged in connection with her disappearance and a search for her is underway in the area where she was last seen. We still cannot walk home without fear. And depressingly, the advice is for women in the area to stay home. That doesn't solve anything. It just fails to hold men accountable for the actions against us and simply says, "You stay home, ladies, and maybe the women in the next neighbourhood will be preyed upon instead.". I am not here for any advice where the message is: "Don't touch me, touch that other woman instead.".

- In Mexico, protests by angry women will probably have little impact. Women took to the streets because President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador's party continues to back Felix Salgado, a candidate for governor, even though allegations of rape and sexual harassment have not been properly investigated. The protests turned violent and despite photographs to the contrary, police have denied using any kind of gas on the women. The only decent thing to do in such circumstances is for the accused to step down until a proper investigation has been carried out. The president's response has been to gaslight every woman who marched by saying the protests are motivated by conservative and foreign interests. His popularity appears to be unaffected by this scandal.

- In Australia, allegations of rape dating back to 1988 have been made against the attorney-general Christian Porter. The woman who made the allegations committed suicide last year. The coroner has ruled that the investigation is "incomplete" and has asked for further investigations before he decides whether to hold an inquest into the circumstances of her death. The prime minister, Scott Morrison, has already publicly given Porter his full support and refused to commission an inquiry. See above for advice on the only decent thing to do in such circumstances...

- Rape allegations have also been politicised in Senegal. The opposition leader, Ousmane Sonko was arrested last week on rape charges. This week, he has been freed from detention pending an investigation and civil unrest has ensued, including clashes in which a schoolboy was killed. Sonko has claimed the rape charges are politically motivated by President Macky Sall. In the midst of all the noise, one person has been largely forgotten - the woman who made the allegations. She works at a beauty salon where Sonko received massages and she slips to the bottom of news reports as Sonko and Sall continue a war of words.

- The 40 Days For Life anti-abortion protests started on 17 February and continued here in the UK and elsewhere on International Women's Day and beyond. Two weeks ago, Edinburgh Council agreed to support the introduction of buffer zones around abortion clinics in Scotland so protesters have to stay at least 150 metres away from clinics. This is good news. Unfortunately, the rest of the country has been slower to act and women are being harassed by protesters every day while they access legal medical procedures. Click here for more information about how to join the BPAS Back Off campaign.   

These are just a handful of examples of things that are utter crap for women in different parts of the world. I could sit here all day and add more. It is a neverending stream of horror for women everywhere. We cannot and will not be silenced or gaslit into believing we're just being hysterical, that it's all in our heads. We must fight on.   

Photography by Maria Plashchynskaya/Pexels 

Periods are still bloody hard

Metro ran a comment piece on its website about period poverty and the role the government can play in helping end this monthly nightmare, particularly for disadvantaged teenage girls.  It was written by the founders of the excellent Red Box Project, a UK-wide scheme to provide sanitary products in schools. Inevitably, when the story was posted to the newspaper's Facebook page, plenty of people felt the need to say there is no such thing as period poverty, largely because you can buy pads and tampons for a quid at Poundland and every young person has a mobile phone - the usual asinine responses to a complex issue...  

Tragically, one of the commentators on the newspaper's Facebook page said she had to use toilet paper as sanitary protection when she was growing up and therefore couldn't see why poor teenagers today couldn't do the same thing. Race-to-the-bottom comments like this are frustratingly common, where people boast of their suffering and see no reason to prevent others from suffering, even if such suffering could easily cause infection and even if there are solutions to prevent the suffering from continuing.

It is indeed true that sanitary products are available for £1 at Poundland but there are households where every pound spent has to be carefully considered. If there is an alternative to sanitary protection, such as loo paper filched from schools or public toilets or even socks, a poor family may forego buying £1 boxes of pads and tampons for the girls and women and spend that pound on food instead. If you are donating to your local food bank, please consider adding pads or tampons to the pile of tinned food and pot noodles.

And if you have the awful misfortune to be menstruating and homeless, your options for a hygienic and comfortable period are even more limited.

It is not an issue that many people like to discuss but if the hideous realities of periods for the poor are not confronted, girls and women will continue to suffer here in the UK and other developed countries, just as surely as they suffer in cultures where menstruation is seen as unclean and periods mean monthly banishment and disenfranchisement of girls and women as they miss out on educational and employment opportunities. 

Plan UK introduced the period emoji (see at the top of this page) to encourage more open discussion about menstruation - obviously an emoji won't solve everything but it's a start. The mere fact that plenty of ignorant people responded to the simple drop of blood with revulsion illustrated why it's needed in the first place.

Every discussion about period poverty inevitably results in someone, usually well-meaning but privileged, demanding we all use moon-cups. The moon-cup is a great idea - it is an eco-friendly, reusable means of dealing with periods. However, it is still out of reach for many people with a starting price of £21.99. And it needs to be used in hygienic conditions - this is not always possible for poor people and it can be especially impractical for the homeless. We are not yet at a place where girls and women are frequently seen rinsing out their moon-cups in public bathrooms and school toilets - and there are plenty of grotesque public and school conveniences out there where it is not hygienic to rinse a moon-cup properly. And some girls and women just don't like them or have trouble using them - this is not a character defect, it's just the way it is.

Likewise, reusable fabric sanitary pads are a great, eco-friendly idea but they are not practical for anyone who struggles to access good laundry facilities.

So we need to talk about solutions to ensure everyone has a hygienic and comfortable period. After all, periods are the one biological fact of life that affects every girl and woman. We won't all experience pregnancy or childbirth or miscarriage or endometriosis or gynaecological cancer but menstruation cannot be avoided if you have ovaries and a uterus. 

Menstruation is the one biological event that has an impact on our lives across the entire time we are fertile. It comes with emotional challenges and joys as well as physical challenges.

The first period can be a time of excitement for those who can't wait to grow up, it can be terrifying or confusing for those who experience menarche at an early age, it can be a relief when it finally happens to a late bloomer or it can be seen as an inconvenience, something that needs to be dealt with, its impact on everyday life minimised. Indeed, it was only last month that mass outrage erupted when the UK Faculty of Sexual & Reproductive Healthcare of the Royal Collage of Obstetricians & Gynaecologists released guidelines stating that there is no need to have the pretend period you get when you take the sugar pills in your contraceptive pill packet. Cue masses of furious women thinking about the money they have spent on sanitary protection over the years, the holidays ruined, the sexual encounters messed up, the time lost from work or school with cramps, the excuses they had to make for not going swimming and so on, all of which could have been avoided if myths about needing to take the sugar pills hadn't been peddled by everyone from their mothers to their doctors.

As we get older, our periods continue to govern our lives - there is the relief when a period arrives after an unwanted pregnancy scare, the sadness of a period arriving when one is hoping to be pregnant, the realisation when a period arrives in March that one will probably not have a baby that year, the sheer joy when a period doesn't come and a pregnancy, either planned or a happy surprise, is happening, and the relief or sadness when one is perimenopausal and the period years are coming to an end. 

Periods are a big deal and it can be hard to explain this to anyone who has never had a period. Menstruation is something that simultaneously demands that those experiencing it can have privacy and good sanitation - and that those experiencing it can talk about it without being howled down, accused of being hysterical (a word which has its origins in our wombs being the source of ungovernable emotions), or told to simply toughen up because we are no longer in the Tudor era of rags and the belief that periods were a punishment from God because of Eve's temptation in the Garden of Eden is no longer widely held in the UK.   

In 2016, 19-year-old Ryan Williams, a self-proclaimed "meninist", embarrassed himself by posting on social media that tampons were a luxury, that taxes on sanitary products should not be abolished and that "if you can't control your bladder then that's not the taxpayers' problem" - when people aren't even aware that period blood and urine orginate from different places and out of different orifices, we really do need to talk. It's not just men who need educating either. I remember telling a female friend at university - we were both 20 at the time - that you don't need to remove a tampon in order to do a wee and this was a revelation for her.  

So, instead of being revulsed by a period emoji or rushing to be the first to say that period poverty is not real, how about being constructive instead? How about we discuss ideas to ensure that hygienic, comfortable periods are a right, not a privilege? How about we make sure it is widely known that skipping periods while on the pill is not harmful? How about every pupil who receives sex education at school knows how periods work so we don't have another generation of people thinking we simply piss out our periods at will? How about we don't rest until this basic dignity and comfort is afforded to every girl and woman on the planet? 

If we fail to do this, we really are no better than those who punish menstruation through banishment. Hiding menstruation away is misogyny. 

The day after the NHS march...

As most people in the UK are probably aware by now, there was a rather large march for the NHS in London yesterday. Most people know this because it actually was covered by the much-derided mainstream media, including the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, the Mirror, the Daily Mail, the Daily Express, the Evening Standard, the Guardian, the Telegraph, Sky News and Metro.

This did not stop the internet lighting up with people claiming the march was not covered or seeking out conspiracies where none exist.

"It's the mainstream meeja's fault!"

On the Big Up The NHS Facebook page, one person thought it was suspicious that the Evening Standard and the Mail Online used the same photograph, even though it was an agency photo which would be available to any major news outlet with a PA subscription, which is all of them. 

On the same page as well as on Twitter, multiple people pounced on the inverted commas used by the BBC in an online headline about the march, with "hospital cuts" in inverted commas. If anyone bothered to read the story, they would see that the inverted commas are used to refer to quotes from the protesters rather than any specific cuts and it is, therefore, accurate journalism, but the left-wing media bashers are not interested in accuracy or learning about how journalism works. They'd rather scream about media conspiracies, as if we journalists spend our spare time in a darkened bar, smoking unfiltered cigarettes, drinking whisky neat, and colluding with each other about how to create a Tory dictatorship. 

This is a shame because such paranoid nonsense only serves to distract from the very real issues facing the NHS. And speaking of distractions, one of the biggest and dumbest banners at yesterday's march, bafflingly, said: "SICK OF MEDIA LIES ABOUT JEREMY CORBYN". 

Firstly, Jeremy Corbyn's address to yesterday's march was very well covered, including by the right-leaning Daily Mail, Express and Telegraph. The brutal truth is that marches are usually not that interesting to cover unless violence breaks out. In terms of media coverage, you have images of marching, shouting people with placards and banners, footage or quotes from the speeches and, er, that's about it. From a journalistic point of view, it is pretty limiting as to what can actually be said about a march before it gets repetitive. So for yesterday's march to glean the coverage it did should be seen as a positive. Whining about media conspiracies makes campaigners look certifiable.

Secondly, that banner is absurd at a march specifically about the NHS. Campaigners who want people to seriously focus on the many things that are bringing the NHS to its knees and want to attract people of all political persuasions - as well as the apolitical and apathetic - need to look outside the Corbyn-loving echo chamber in which many of them are stuck. These people (and I hasten to add this is not all NHS campaigners) need to realise that NHS campaigns which come across as Corbyn fan clubs, when he is simply not resonating with people outside the Labour Party and Momentum in particular, will not be effective.  

And then it gets complicated...

On top of all this, the Health and Social Care Act 2012 devolved all responsibility for health services to local Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) and that is where the real lobbying and engagement needs to take place, with elected MPs and local councillors along to ask hard questions about where money will be spent in their regions. In theory, CCGs make sense - the healthcare needs of a seaside retirement town will be vastly different to an inner city borough of young families, for example, so one size does not fit every area. 

That said, the basics such as accessible A&E, cancer treatment, and GP services should be available to people equally across the country - although in the case of GP services, this also varies between different areas. The retirement town won't have the same demand for GP services on evenings or weekends that the inner city area full of time-poor working people will. 

If the message that engagement is required locally at CCG level as well as nationally has not been properly communicated to the wider community as a result of the march, better communication from campaigners is required. This is also needed from Labour at all levels if they are serious about being a proper opposition and forming a government at the next election. 

Yes, the future of the NHS is about adequate funding at the Westminster level, where plenty of MPs have vested interests in private healthcare, just as much as it is about CCGs being financially responsible and lobbying the government if there are local shortfalls, particularly if people cannot be discharged from hospital because of inadequate social care. The financial interests of CCG members are as important in this equation as that of MPs because right now there is nothing to stop members commissioning from businesses or non-profits in which they have an interest.

It is complicated and it is not simply about throwing money at the NHS if it will only end up mismanaged at a local level and the CCGs are not held accountable. 

Do not be naive - we will have a Conservative government in this country until at least 2020 and therefore we will have CCGs at least until then.

So, what next for the NHS?

What happens next for the NHS will depend on what is seen as politically expedient because, like it or not, the NHS is political. 

It is pretty clear that there is an appetite for destruction when it comes to the NHS under Theresa May's government. If she genuinely cared, one of her first orders of business would have been to ditch Jeremy Hunt, the failed marmalade mogul who has been play-acting at the Health Secretary job since September 2012.

The government is smart enough to know that British voters will not stand for a complete replication of the American system. While there are always calls to charge so-called health tourists for NHS services, the free-at-the-point-of-use mantra has been effective. Except it has been effective for the Conservative Party and this is a hurdle for the opposition.

The privatisation conundrum

As long as health services remain free at the point of use and people are not filing for bankruptcy because of medical bills, it is really hard to get people to care about whether the services are being provided directly by the NHS or the NHS has farmed it out to a private company.

On top of this, Corbyn's rhetoric about stopping all NHS privatisation is simplistic. For starters, GPs have always been privateers. Any attempt to nationalise GP services, forcing GPs to work certain hours and potentially reducing the flexibility for GPs to work part-time, will result in a shortage, particularly among GPs who are parents - this will disproportionately affect women GPs so hardly a great victory to be had there. 

The big financial pressure here is the cost of administering the tender process, with estimations between £4.5 billion to £10 billion per year. But if we keep farming out services - which can be anything from cleaning the loos to cancer treatment - the government has to run a proper tender process, which is not cheap. Thus the government needs to acknowledge that this will be the case as long as services are open to tender - this is not an expense it can pretend doesn't exist.

Additionally, the NHS is not subjecting private companies involved in bidding for contracts to the same freedom of information rules that government departments are subjected to - so this makes transparency much harder. Indeed, I tried and failed to get solid information from my local hospital trust on whether the rise in MRSA infections had anything to do with farming out the cleaning services to a private company, but I was stonewalled. This government is not going to do anything about this given it already has form in trying to restrict existing FOI access. 

Similarly, there doesn't seem to be any bans on companies being able to bid for or keep contracts after catastrophic events. G4S should have been banned from any government contract after the Olympics security debacle and they continue to run the patient transport services at my local hospital despite killing an amputee in one of their vehicles owing to insufficient staff training. Virgin, meanwhile, has also done an abysmal - and lethal - job of running the Urgent Care Centre at Croydon University Hospital, yet continues to hoover up NHS contracts, including a £700 million contract over 200 hospitals late last year. 

These are fundamental problems with the way things are run at the moment but even if all NHS services were returned to the NHS, the NHS still has to procure stuff it can't make itself. 

It is absurd to expect the NHS to set up its own factories for bedlinen, cutlery, crockery, windows, uniforms and the thousands of other things it needs to purchase in order to function. 

While one idiot once said to me with a straight face that the NHS will indeed make all its own things once the workers control the means of production, that is clearly ridiculous. Instead, the NHS should use its huge purchasing power to get the best possible deals on all it procures. There is no excuse for waste here and the NHS will continue to buy stuff from private companies. Sorry, it will. It's just that the procurers should do a better job of it.

The technology conundrum

Actually, this should not be a conundrum at all. If there is good technology out there that can contribute to saving lives, money and time in the provision of healthcare, the NHS should look into procuring it for the best price possible. 

I have noticed a rejection of technology among elements of NHS campaign groups. There was a placard at yesterday's march that said "TECH IS CHEAP BUT AN APP CAN'T WIPE YOUR BOTTOM". This is very true - there will always be a need for human beings in hospitals to perform such tasks but if there are apps that can improve the way care is provided, this should be looked into.

I've seen NHS campaigners complain about advances such as telemedicine, even though it can be used as a way to improve access to care and relieve pressure on GP surgeries. Again, it cannot always be used as a substitute for an in-person physical examination but it can play a role and this sort of thing should not be dismissed out of hand.

I suspect nostalgia for the good old days of the NHS comes into play here instead of recognising that society has changed since the NHS was established in 1948, the population has increased, amazing advances have been made in medical science, and technological changes have happened and a modern NHS needs to be about making all this work for everyone.

And again, if there is technology that can be used to improve patient care, it will have to be purchased from private companies. Like I said, Corbyn's anti-privatisation rhetoric is simplistic.

The Australian model?

As I said, if services are still free at the point of use, there are millions of people who won't care if the services are provided by a private company.

What I do see happening is a move towards the hybrid Australian system rather than an all-American system, with a mixture of public and private services side by side. I dared to suggest this on a local campaign Facebook page last year and was howled down. I never said the Australian system was perfect in my comments, merely that, as someone who has experienced both the Australian and UK systems, I could see the trends happening over here.

It is important to bear in mind that just as we have postcode lotteries with care in the UK because of differences in how CCGs spend their money, the American system is actually multiple systems on a state-by-state basis - so to simply say: "We're going all American!" is also simplistic. We will see more involvement by American companies in the NHS, particularly if we are left wide open to this in a post-Brexit trade deal with the US. It is important to remember here that American companies are very nimble and thus good at adapting to trading in diverse markets. 

From McDonalds varying its menus across cultures to big oil companies making money in countries with a wide range of tax and regulatory systems, it's what American companies do. Healthcare is seen as no different by American companies.

Like America, Australia has differences in health systems between states but with public-private hybridisation across them all. I can see this Australianisation happening in microcosm form at my local hospital, St Helier.

St Helier could well lose its A&E department in the near future, which will be disastrous, forcing people to spend longer in ambulances or in traffic or on public transport seeking medical attention. 

But I predict it will keep its maternity unit, bolstered by its expanding assisted conception unit. Currently, IVF patients undergo pre-IVF testing and appointments as well as egg extraction at St Helier but the eggs are fertilised at Kings Hospital. The transfer of fertilised eggs also takes place at Kings. When St Helier's assisted conception unit expands to include its own embryology department, it will become a one-stop shop for IVF patients. Under local CCG rules, one round of IVF per patient is funded on the NHS but there is nothing to stop St Helier from receiving paying private patients - this should prove a handy source of income for the hospital and I suspect we will be seeing more and more of this across NHS hospitals all over the country. This sort of thing is not unusual in Australia and the funds raised from the private business helps keep the public services afloat.

The IVF example is an interesting one because, like privatisation but services being free at the point of use, it is also an example of what the public will tolerate here in the UK. In Australia, there are some Medicare rebates on fertility services but, by and large, it is an expensive undertaking with plenty of couples spending thousands in their quest to have a family.

It would not surprise me if, in the coming years, IVF on the NHS becomes virtually unheard of. I believe this is something the public will tolerate overall. Breast implants, unless they're for mastectomy patients, is another service I can see being chipped away, along with transgender procedures. Prochoice activists will also need to be vigilant about any attempts to limit abortion access - Jeremy Hunt has publicly said he'd like to see the time limit reduced to 12 weeks and if the government thinks it can save a few more pennies this way, or give the impression of being fiscally sensible, without taking too much of a hit on election day, I wouldn't put it past the May regime. Hunt was shot down in flames by people across the political parties last time but that was 2012. Britain has become a more conservative place in just five short years. 

I am not saying any of this is right - especially as such cuts would target women disproportionately - but it is the kind of thing this government can get away with if it doesn't anticipate harm at the ballot box. Hell, you've only got to look at Labour's catastrophic humiliation in the Copeland by-election, losing a safe seat to the Tories at a time when local maternity services are under threat to see what resilience this government has right now in terms of withstanding removing NHS services. 

The other Australian trend that has already gained plenty of traction here in the UK is increased take-up of private insurance. The advertising is ubiquitous, the deals often sound affordable, there is an increase in employers offering private cover as part of the package for staff. Around 50% of Australians have private health insurance, compared to an estimation of around 8.7% of people in the UK. Figures up to the end of 2015 show a surge in uptake of private health insurance in the UK. Again, plenty of people will not see this as a bad thing, especially if they find they can be treated faster if they go private.

Apologies for the long blog post

I have ranted for longer than usual this time but it is a complex subject. Just as there needs to be follow-up after the women's marches in the wake of Trump's election, there is a long road ahead if the NHS is to be preserved. I do not expect the NHS to survive in its current form and, despite yesterday's impressive march turnout, there is plenty that voters will tolerate in terms of cuts particularly if it doesn't affect them directly. Too old for an abortion? Not a woman? Intolerant to transgender people? These are the people who probably will turn out to vote in 2020 and they might not seek to punish the Tories over the NHS. 

It's a massive issue and none of it fits nicely on a placard.

Photography: Loco Steve/Flickr

A rant about pants

A friend of mine asked me for my thoughts on a new invention. Special underpants, with a multi-layer gusset, that can be worn instead of a pad or tampon during menstruation, to be precise. They're called Thinx.

Clearly I am the go-to girl if you’re not sure what to think about periods. Obviously.

Anything that advances the lives of women, makes menstruation more comfortable, and helps women to study, live and work on an equal footing with men, unencumbered by the monthly annoyance that is getting your period gets my full support. Anything that helps stop periods being taboo, anything that stops girls and women from being shut away, out of sight, out of mind, rendered unproductive for a week or so each month has got to be a good thing. Obviously.

So I read up on these special period pants. I’d probably give them a go if I spotted them in Boots, I thought to myself. And then I started mentally placing a few qualifiers on my desire to try them out. I wouldn’t dare try them while wearing tight trousers, I thought to myself. What about with light-coloured summer dresses? Out of the question! They’d be a handy back-up plan while using a tampon, I told myself. And I’d consider them for the annoying times at each end of a period – when your period is due and you’re not sure when the Red Sea will start flowing, and at the pitiful end when you’re not entirely sure if the crimson tide has ebbed for the month. A nice substitute for a panty liner!

It is easy for me from my place of privilege, where I can see two shops where I can buy feminine hygiene products from my desk, to view these pants as a nice-to-have rather than a need-to-have. With my bathroom cupboard a veritable treasure trove of products of varying degrees of absorbency, I have the luxury of tailoring my sanitary protection needs to suit my lifestyle, my wardrobe and my flow. For girls and women who aren’t as fortunate as to live in a developed country, these pants could be their only hope for a hygienic period each month.

And then another friend mentioned the rinsing. Oh good Lord, the rinsing, the rinsing, the goddamn rinsing. Ideally, you’d own a few pairs of these pants, but you’d still want to rinse them separately before throwing them in the washing machine. Rinsing and wringing! And to do this, you need access to clean water and decent laundry facilities.

For this product to truly be a success in developing countries, an obvious market for such pants, access to clean water is essential. Nobody wants to rinse their period pants in a dirty river or a stagnant puddle. Nobody wants to queue at a village standpipe for a miserable dribble of water, hiding blood-stained pants under the less embarrassing dirty washing.

Also, they are retailing online at $24 for the thong, up to $34 for the hip-hugger brief - for the affluent woman in the developed world, it makes sense to buy a few pairs. Spending $100 on knickers is nothing compared to a lifetime's pad and tampon expenditure, if you are not poor. It'd be a harder sell for poor women, especially if they cannot simply jump online with a Visa card and order a few pairs with effortless ease.

By all means, donate these pants by the truckload to Oxfam. Be entrepreneurial and sell them to distributors across developing countries - although at present Thinx are only sold online. Do what you can to help girls and women have a happier time each month.

I wish the developers of Thinx well, I really do. From what I can tell, the company is an ethical, female-friendly employer. They employ women in Sri Lanka. The company also supports the AFRIPads charity. This is all good.

But it is important to think about the practicalities too. Access to clean water is essential for communities across the world to flourish, to be productive, to succeed, for good sanitation to finally prevail. It’s not as simple as imposing pants on impoverished girls and women - the period issue is part of a much bigger picture. Make a regular donation to Water Aid. Call on your government to dedicate some of its foreign aid budget to clean water projects. Call on corporations to consider access to water as a CSR project. Clean water projects benefit everyone and have positive knock-on effects for local economies.

And, besides, girls and women in the developing word deserve better than to merely have underwear or pads thrown at them.

Period dramas...

I'd never heard of Ella Whelan before last week and I am quite sure she doesn't much care about my existence either. But, Christ on a cracker, has she missed the point of Plan UK's #JustATampon campaign.

Or, what is probably more likely, is that she understands Plan UK's campaign perfectly well but she fancied being the voice of contrived contrarian lefty-bashing feminism that The Spectator clearly needs among its bloggers.

She unleashed a bucket of faux ignorance on the world last week in her piece about the West being obsessed with the contents of the knickers of developing countries. In particular, she called out Plan UK's campaign to help women and girls in developing countries become more educated about menstrual health and to help these women and girls access sanitary products.

Ella seems to object to Plan UK's assertion that "stigma and embarrassment attached to women's periods contributes to gender inequality worldwide". Except that it does, Ella. But instead of acknowledging that women and girls around the world suffer enormously because of a lack of menstrual care, she insists that the campaign will only serve to perpetuate the perception of African countries as being dirty, unhygienic and unaware of periods. Except that many women and girls in many African countries do experience their periods in horrible conditions that would make the average western woman recoil in horror.

Why pretend this isn't happening?

Probably because it is easier and more clickbait-friendly for Ella to use her soapbox to bash popular targets of the right as Jenny Eclair and Jon Snow. Why is she afraid to acknowledge that having your period in horrific conditions, often with the added stigma of cultural taboos and myths about menstruation, means that you might miss days of school and not complete your education, or you might not be able to go to work, or care for your family properly? These are real issues and helping girls and women have less horrific periods is part of the solution.

Ella is partly right to say that the problem for women in developing countries is not a lack of education about periods but that there isn't a branch of Boots on every corner. Of course, it'd be nice for women in Africa's deprived regions to have the same easy access to pads, tampons and Mooncups that we enjoy here in Britain. But getting many African countries to that point will take time. Some parts of Africa are already there. It is a big and diverse continent.

This is why the countries in which Plan UK works are called "developing countries". It is short-sighted and defeatist to slag off an entire campaign because it seems easier to sit back and wait for capitalism to happen. Plan UK does great work to help women and girls in particular to be part of the solutions to poverty, such as ensuring they have access to healthcare and education and do not disappear from the world in forced marriages.

The #JustATampon campaign just one component of the wide-ranging work Plan UK does. Sure, it's  a gimmick to have people take selfies with tampons and I frequently scoff at such campaigns because I am unsure how many selfies actually convert into donations (See also, the ice bucket challenge and no make-up selfies). But if the campaign leads to more people choosing to support Plan UK, a secular charity with no ulterior motivation to convert anyone to or from religion, that's a good thing.

Plan UK cannot solve the world's problems alone but, in particular with their programmes involving access to education and eliminating child marriage, they are doing something. Access to clean drinking water and access to reliable energy are other challenges which need to be addressed so that developing countries can attain Ella's Boots-on-ever-corner menstrual utopia.

And lack of menstrual care is not just a problem for girls and women in developing countries.

Given the lazy approach Ella took to her piece in The Spectator, I wonder if she could be bothered to acknowledge that it is an issue for homeless women in Britain and in other supposedly civilised countries. The Homeless Period campaign explains this more eloquently and powerfully than I can. Click here to find out about this great campaign.

And, as outlined in this rather upsetting piece in the Guardian, lack of access to menstrual products is an issue in some US prisons. Just don't read the comments at the end unless you really enjoy reading the work of dullard mansplainers who have never had a period in their life advocating a system where women in prison as deserve to spend days caked in their own menstrual blood.

Having a period that is as comfortable as it can possibly be is something most of us take for granted. Is Ella having to wad her own underwear with toilet paper scavenged from a public toilet like a homeless woman every month? Is she banished away from her community until her period is over because menstruation is seen as a taboo? Has lack of access to pads and tampons impacted on her ability to get an education or work for a living? Is she imprisoned and forced to ration her maxi-pads?

These things are still happening to girls and women in 2015. Anyone who is taking steps to ensure these things don't happen should be congratulated. They do not deserve the petty vitriol of an arrogant columnist.   

The great Beach Body backfire

Bright yellow advertisements for weight loss products have improved/degenerated the commute for Londoners on the tube network in the past few weeks. These ads scream the stupid question: "ARE YOU BEACH BODY READY?" at us alongside a picture of a woman in a bikini looking both slim and impressive of bosom all at once. In other words, she possesses a body type few of us have thanks to Mother Nature, some of us will attain through assorted methods, and most of us will never have.

In reality, if you share the model's waist size, you are more than likely to be small-breasted. If you share her generous cup size, the rest of you may well be in proportion too. Of course, there are exceptions as there are no hard and fast rules when it comes to body type - and that is why it is ridiculous that body types go in and out of fashion over the decades.

The obvious answer to the stupid question is: "Yes, I am beach body ready. I have a body and I am capable of taking it to the beach where I will be ready to do beach-related things."

There has been an outcry over these ads. The Advertising Standards Authority received more than 200 complaints. The posters have been improved/vandalised by protesters. I saw one on the tube tonight that had "Stop objectification" written on it.

So what has happened as a result of the brouhaha? Sales of the weight loss products went up.

Of course they did. Proving that any publicity is good publicity, the winner is Protein World. Which sounds like the worst-ever amusement park.

The two most likely reasons for this sales spike are equally depressing. If people have decided to spite those awful feminists by buying Protein World products, they are a bit sad. They are probably the same idiots who hijacked the #FeministsAreUgly hashtag on Twitter.

And the other equally depressing reason why Protein World got a boost in sales is that people wanted to see what all the fuss was about, decided they were not "beach body ready" and, as a result, have been conned into buying a completely moronic product. We are talking about capsules and meal replacements. Short-term quick fixes.

It is a get-rich-quick scheme for Protein World that does nothing to promote learning to prepare healthy meals or the benefits of regular exercise. These shysters are selling crap like "green tea extract powder" for £12. You can buy 80 green teabags for £2.80 today at Sainsburys. They're even fair-trade teabags.

So it would seem Protein World is appealing to snide feminist-haters, uneducated consumers and people desperate for a quick fix rather than a healthy lifestyle change.

Changing your lifestyle is boring but it works out cheaper and more effective in the long run than replacing meals with a £62 package of "The Slender Blend" meal replacement potion and multivitamin capsules.

If you bought Protein World products because you hate feminists, the joke is on you. You are now the proud owner of stupid, overpriced supplements all because you wanted to make a pathetic point. If you were fooled by the advertising campaign and truly think replace meals with overproduced slop in a glass is the way forward, I feel sorry for you. You have been tricked by a marketing campaign where not only does the model have a rare body type, she also has the benefit of good lighting and possibly the miracle of PhotoShop.

Protein World and similar companies will continue to use such models for their campaigns. Of course they will. Let's be realistic. Ann Widdecombe will not be the next face and body of Protein World.

But that does not mean you have to be an idiot consumer. All this beach body brouhaha has demonstrated is that many people are easily fooled. And that is most depressing of all.




Photography by Gerhard Lipold

Because I am well overdue to share with you another installment of World Of Stupid!

All manner of things have been setting off my Damn Fool Radar of late and my Zero Tolerance of Idiocy policy has again taken a hammering. Here is a selection of choice morsels of recent stupidity in no particular order.

1. "OH MY GOD! MICK JAGGER HAS A SEX LIFE!"
Seriously, everyone who is outraged at the recently bereaved Mick Jagger apparently finding a new girlfriend after the suicide of L'Wren Scott needs to get a grip. There is no statute of limitations on how long one must be celibate after the death of a partner. It is precisely nobody's business. Trust me, I know all too well that it can feel weird to have sex again after losing a partner, as if you're cheating on them, especially if you were perfectly happy when they died. There is no timetable for grief just as there is no timetable for scheduling in a convenient death but the two things that can outlive a lost partner are one's sex drive and desire to be loved.

2. BoJo offers to be cannon fodder
It was a stunt, pure and simple. A moronic distraction. Boris Johnson went ahead and bought secondhand water cannons from Germany, shitty, outdated water cannons that the Germans stopped using with one of the main reasons being safety concerns, such as poor visibility for the driver. It is easy to imagine bumbling Boris stumbling aimlessly around a used water cannon yard while a greasy-haired, shiny-suited salesman rubs his hands together in glee because another sucker has come through the door. And just to prove they are the law enforcement equivalent of being struck by a water pistol, Boris offered to be hosed by one of these beasts. He knew full well that (a) despite countless volunteers to either fire the water cannon or replace the water with their own urine, he was never going to be hosed and (b) it would prove a huge distraction to stop people talking about real issues such as policing by consent and why water cannons are ineffective.

3. Tony Blair: Middle East peace envoy
A farce and a joke. Except it's a sick, horrific joke that has killed countless people and will continue to do so. Nobody sane thinks Saddam Hussein was a lovely bloke. But more than 10 years ago, former Australian politician Carmen Lawrence got it right when she said that the scale of the original invasion was excessive for getting rid of just one man. Classic case of using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut on a deadly, expensive, tragically futile and violent scale.

4. A bloody mess in Spain
A group of Spanish performance artists, Sangre Menstrual, took the streets in apparently menstrual blood-stained jeans as part of their "Manifesto for the Visibility of the Period". They say they are tired of the shame that accompanies menstruation even in 2014. Except that in Spain, and indeed any developed country, the days of women being declared unclean and made to remove themselves from society during their periods isn't happening. Sure, some people, both men and women, might be grossed out by period blood, but plenty of us are also grossed out by other perfectly natural bodily fluids such as urine, excrement, vomit, bile and pus. It doesn't mean we want to walk the streets smeared in any of them.

Painful periods and heavy periods are real and they can be incredibly debilitating - it is important that if a woman is suffering like this, that she can access whatever healthcare she needs. If she needs time off work or school, that should also be acceptable. For women in the developed world, there are over-the-counter fixes for period pain, we can choose from tampons, menstrual cups, sea sponges and sanitary pads and most of us can attend to these needs hygienically and privately. To be able to menstruate and still get on with one's day thanks to all these things is wonderful. It levels the playing field between men and women. It means we do not have to be weakened by our periods.

Overall, a woman on her period in a developed country is not being oppressed. The girls and women who are being oppressed while menstruating are in places such as the Democratic Republic of Congo. ActionAid, a most excellent charity, is helping girls and women in such countries to access the menstrual accoutrements women in the developed world take for granted. They do not deserve to be insulted by a protest by women who fail to see how privileged they are. Click here to find out more about ActionAid's work in this field.



Photography by Petr Kocurek

10 reasons why I am maintaining the hospital rage

Back in May, I wrote about the threat to St Helier Hospital in my pocket of South West London. Under the "preferred option" cobbled together by a group under the Better Service, Better Value (BSBV) umbrella, we have the prospect of both St Helier and Epsom hospitals losing A&E and maternity units. St Helier would also lose its renal unit and paediatric intensive care and its hip fracture clinic, considered the best in the country by the National Hip Fracture Database, is also in danger because it is attached to the A&E unit.

Nobody with even a passing interest in the politics of the NHS would be surprised to know that this is all about money, in particular, saving money across a swathe of hospitals that serve an area of London where the population is both growing and ageing.

Since May, there has been a small victory. The consultation period was going to take place over the summer holidays, when people are often away and when consultations such as these are not meant to take place. This has been postponed until at least November. At this rate, it might just keep getting pushed further and further back until the next election rolls around and it may then become a moot point.

But this is not a time for complacency. It would be an anti-climax if it did become a moot point. However, the whole sorry process may not be abandoned and campaigners need to maintain the rage and keep up the pressure. Since May, the @Save_St_Helier Twitter feed has been very busy with challenging questions being asked of whoever manages the BSBV Twitter feed.

These 10 points are reasons why I am still angry as are so many people in my area.

1. BSBV claims that existing staff will be better deployed rather than either any investment in new staff or any job losses to save money (despite the whole process being about saving money). This may sound reasonable until you realise that it wouldn't matter if there was one gigantic hospital to serve the area or there was a little hospital on every street, the fact remains that there simply are not enough members of staff. The whole plan does nothing to address the issue of not enough junior doctors going into emergency medicine.

2. BSBV is extremely GP-heavy in its membership. While the rhetoric about more care in the community and a smaller number of A&Es again sounds laudable, one of the biggest issues is, quite simply, access to GPs. It is easy to bash GPs as lazy but when people have to wait a week for an appointment, it is obvious why many non-urgent cases end up overburdening A&E departments. We need more examination of innovative solutions such as group consultations for patients at risk of diabetes. This is working well at a GP clinic in Smethwick and it is this sort of creative thinking that prevents more cases of diabetes and reduces pressure on A&E departments.

3. If St Helier and Epsom lose A&E and maternity departments, the already-overburdened St Georges Hospital in Tooting will receive a massive multi-million pound upgrade. If you ever visit St Georges, you will find that parking is a nightmare and it is hard to see where the hospital can expand significantly without the compulsory acquisition of neighbouring homes. When asked how the cost of such a huge upgrade was arrived at, we were simply told "capital estimates". There has been no response to the question of whether these estimates were based on real quotations from architects or construction companies. We have been told that such massive work will "pay for itself in five years". We are still not sure if this is five years from now or five years from 2016, when St Helier and Epsom are slated to be downgraded under the preferred option, or five years from whenever construction might start at the already chaotic St Georges site.

On nine occasions in one 12-month period, St Georges had to divert ambulances to St Helier because it could not cope - BSBV is alarmingly calm about this and claims that the upgrade to St Georges will mean this won't be a problem if St Helier is A&E-free. I wish I knew where they keep their crystal ball.

And remember, the money needed to upgrade St Georges so it has any hope of coping with an increased flow of patients is taxpayers' money.

4. The plans to upgrade St Georges are made even more farcical by the fact that St Helier is in the midst of a massive upgrade. Already, £5 million has been spent on St Helier's A&E and £2 million on maternity and there is a big banner across the front of this Art Deco monolith proclaiming the hospital is in the midst of a £219 million upgrade. There have been no satisfactory answers as to what will become of this ongoing project if St Helier is downgraded. The giant banner really needs to come down with much fanfare as it is lulling local residents into a false sense of security about the hospital's future.

And remember again, the money already spent upgrading St Helier is taxpayers' money.

5. Mr Hassan Shehata is one of the best obstetricians in the country. He is the Joint Director of Women and Children's Services for the Epsom and St Helier NHS Trust. He has been instrumental in the creation of RCPG guidelines for maternal care. Yet he is being ignored by BSBV. This is probably because he has repeatedly and publicly stressed the urgency of getting women in labour to hospital quickly, especially when things go wrong. Here is a letter he wrote for the local paper about how in some cases, five minutes can be the difference between a good and bad outcome for some women. But if St Helier and Epsom lose their maternity units, women in labour, an event that can change for the worse very quickly, will have to travel for much longer than five extra minutes to get to a maternity unit.

Indeed, just last week a local woman gave birth in the car park of Epsom Hospital where she was then fortunate to be taken in to receive excellent medical care by that hospital's maternity unit. BSBV have not responded to my question as to whether she would have had the same outcome if she had to travel all the way to St Georges. Maybe the BSBV crystal ball wasn't working that day.

6. One of the oft-repeated comments from BSBV is that there are better outcomes for some patients if they spent longer in an ambulance and are taken to specialist A&E units, such as specialist stroke, trauma or cardiac units. This is already happening. It won't be something new that will suddenly start happening after St Helier and Epsom lose A&E units. But for the many, many cases, such as asthma attacks, bumps to the head or serious but not necessarily life-changing fractures, the nearest A&E is generally the best place to be. It is all well and good to constantly cite the case of star footballer Fabrice Muamba as an example of a patient surviving because he went to a specialist cardiac unit further away from where he collapsed - but his is an extreme case. And any similar cases to his are already being treated in this way.

7. If St Helier and Epsom lose A&E departments, they will be downgraded (and it is a downgrading, no matter which way you cut it...) to Urgent Care Centres (UCC). It is hard to get a clear definition from the NHS website as to exactly what treatment you can expect from a UCC. When I asked Dr Marilyn Plant, joint medical director for BSBV, about when patients should go to a UCC, she replied that this should happen when a patient "feels" their condition is not life-threatening. Right. So bad luck if you rocked up to the UCC rather than an A&E because you "felt" that your chest pain was a spot of nasty indigestion when it was in fact a heart attack. Whoopsie!

8. And while we are on the subject of these UCCs we can expect if St Helier and Epsom lose A&E, they may not be open 24/7 like A&E departments are. Understandably, this has scared a lot of people. So I asked BSBV about this. Here's the really freaky news - BSBV cannot guarantee that any new UCC will be open 24/7 and it is up to local Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCG) to determine opening hours based on "clinical need". Firstly, BSBV is, as they are fond of reminding us constantly, largely made up of CCG members across a number of trusts but at the same time, BSBV is not prepared to commit to a guarantee of 24/7 opening hours. Secondly, it again seems like a case of the BSBV crystal ball working overtime. The minimum requirement for UCC opening hours is just 12 hours a day. It is intriguing that BSBV is confident people might not need urgent medical attention outside of certain hours. Because that's how it always works in real life...

9. As we are maybe - or maybe not - leading up to the consultation period, it has also become difficult to get any straight answers about what this means for the ongoing privatisation of the NHS. Croydon Hospital, one of the hospitals affected by the BSBV review, already has an UCC run by Virgin. But if anyone dares ask if St Helier or Epsom will also have privately run UCCs, the answers are vague and unclear. Indeed, Dr Marilyn Plant herself was interviewed on video for the local paper and she kicked off proceedings by saying she didn't want to talk about privatisation. We get told that any facilities will still be free at point of use for patients but we are not getting any confirmation as to whether such facilities will end up making people like Richard Branson even wealthier. Many CCG members across the trusts involved in this saga have declared interests in companies such as Virgin, Assura and Harmoni. Is it a crazy coincidence that these people are decision-makers who are involved in determining how money is spent?

Once again, this is taxpayers' money.

10. Finally, the cost of the whole BSBV programme is a bone of contention that campaigners are, quite rightly, not prepared to bury. I aksed for a breakdown of costings - with a figure of £11 million being bandied about, I wanted details. But instead I was given a very basic breakdown of phases two to five of the programme, a grand total of a not-insignificant £6 million pounds but no breakdown of the first two phases. I asked again today about this and got another load of fobbing off - I was told this information wasn't kept by BSBV (because, hey, why would they bother to keep a record of how they're spending our money - that's just nuts!) and that it was on an old website but not the new website and then I was told to make an FOI request. Which isn't always free and can take at least 20 days. Finally, I received word today from BSBV that they would soon share this information.

This is the tweet they sent:

"It's a perfectly reasonable request though, so will access and publish phases 1 and 2 figures on our website."

Good to know that is is "a perfectly reasonable request" to access information about how taxpayers' money has been spent on a programme aimed at saving money in ways of which many clinicians are raising serious doubts.

I eagerly await this full breakdown of how £11 million has been spent. I do wonder if the salaries of the communications team will be outlined in this breakdown. This would be the team that blocked a local doctor's Twitter account but is not explaining why. Good to see that people being paid with our money are stifling free and open discussion at our expense.

If you have read this far, congratulations. I just hope that at least one journalist on a national newspaper or the BBC or Channel 4 or Sky News picks it up and runs with it too. I can only do so much from my little blog but I couldn't simply do nothing.



Image courtesy of Noel Foster.

Pap smears and privilege

The notion of privilege is a rubbery one. Just because someone is a wealthy, white male living in a wealthy western country, for example, that does not make him immune from experiencing violence, depression or serious illness. And someone who is living in disadvantaged circumstances, such as a family with inter-generational unemployment, may have privileges that would be denied them if they were in the same circumstances elsewhere.

Sometimes what should be a universal right is a privilege, something available to some but not others. An example of this is Britain's NHS, available to people across the socio-economic spectrum. It is not perfect, accessing certain treatments can be a postcode lottery, and every time Jeremy Hunt, the inappropriate and unqualified Health Secretary, opens his mouth, I am terrified he is going to announce its disbandment - but what it does offer is free pap smears for women aged 25 and above.

Yes, lying back on a narrow bed in a clinic, taking off your pants, spreading your legs and having an instrument that resembles a plastic duck bill inserted into your vagina so that a few cells can be gently brushed off for pathological analysis is a privilege. This is a privilege denied so many women across the world.

Women in Guinea and Burundi have the world's highest rates of death by cervical cancer, at 23.7 and 22.4 per 100,000 respectively. Women in countries such as the United Arab Emirates, where healthcare for expatriate women is dependent on the level of insurance offered by your employer, often miss out on receiving pap smear coverage, especially if you're unmarried and the insurer lumps pap smears in the same category as "fertility treatment". The rationale is that because premarital sex is illegal in the UAE, unmarried women shouldn't be having sex and thus don't need fertility treatment, even though a pap smear is not actually a fertility treatment. For local Emirati women, a lack of education and taboos surrounding the open discussion of sexual health issues, can also mean cervical cancer screening is not as common as it should be.

If only women across the world could enjoy the same access to pap smears.

I have already blogged on this a couple of days ago because it is Cervical Cancer Awareness Week - the age for your first pap smear on the NHS should be lowered from 25 to 20. The age was raised from 20 to 25 in 2003 because "only" around 3% of cervical cancer cases affect this age group and the high number of abnormal smear test results in the age group leads to more false positives. But this is cold comfort to those who have lost daughters, sisters, friends, partners and wives to cervical cancer under the age of 25. Surely it would be better to revise the raised age once the rates of teenage girls receiving the HPV vaccination reaches much higher levels?

Britain's easy availability of the HPV vaccine, which prevents many forms of the cervical cancer-causing human papillomavirus, is another privilege everyone's daughter should be enjoying.

Since 2008, the HPV vaccine has been available to girls in Year 8 of high school. But there are still issues with the uptake of this and the problem lies with the poor example many parents are setting their daughters. A University of Manchester study of 117,000 girls showed that the uptake of the vaccination was just 58% among 12-13-year-olds whose mothers had never been screened for cervical cancer. In the same age group, the uptake was almost 84% among girls whose mothers had been screened in the past five years.

Mothers who are not setting an example to their daughters by not getting regular pap smears and, presumably, not talking about it either, are the ones most likely to have un-vaccinated daughters. We don't know the circumstances behind each and every vaccination refusenik - is it a case of girls not liking needles? Are parents unconvinced by the need for the vaccination? Are parents ill-informed about the vaccinations? Are there parents out there who truly believe it is a "slut needle" in the same way Rush Limbaugh believes that birth control pills are for "sluts"?

Is it simply a matter of cervical cancer not being discussed in many British households? Well, I'm sorry, but the time has come to have those discussions, to get over yourselves, to quit being prudes, to recognise that words like "vagina" and "cervix" are not rude words, but anatomical terms every young woman needs to know about and be able to say without hiding behind the sofa and turning beetroot-red.

Add to this the fact that 20% of women eligible for pap smears on the NHS simply don't bother. My friend Jai Breitnauer blogged eloquently on this as well as the HPV vaccination uptake scandal this week and I urge you all to read it.

The women and teenage girls of Britain are in a privileged position when it comes to cervical cancer screening and prevention. Sometimes privilege doesn't come in obvious forms such as wealth and power. But a privilege that comes in the form of a needle, a speculum and a brush is one that will save lives. And one day, when every woman can receive cervical cancer screening, and every young girl can be vaccinated against HPV, that privilege may become a worldwide right.


Image courtesy of www.kozzi.com

Today I shall talk about cervical cancer...

This week is Cervical Cancer Awareness Week. But for any awareness week to actually be effective, all the awareness-raising has to translate into action.

These actions should include booking a pap smear if you are a woman (er, obviously...) and you are due for one or you've never had one before and encouraging your female friends to have a pap smear if they are due for one or have never had one before.

The good news is that with early detection, cervical cancer does not have to be a death sentence. But pap smears are essential for early detection and subsequent early treatment.

It is important for all sexually active women to know about pap smears, to know why they are important and to not be afraid of them. It is a few moments of slight discomfort and pants-off mortification in front of a doctor or nurse who has probably seen more vaginas than all of Motley Crue combined and, as such, will not find yours to be horrible or weird. But the discomfort and mortification could save your life. I'm not even being melodramatic - a pap smear probably did save my life.

My story - and why women in Britain need to lobby the government

I was very lucky. I was 21, living in Sydney, when I had an abnormal smear test. In Australia, the rule of thumb for pap smears is to start having them from the time you turn 18 or a year after you become sexually active, whatever comes first. Pap smears are generally covered by Medicare, just as they are by the NHS. But the NHS rule is that you should start having them every three years at the age of 25. This is too late for many women who have died tragically young.

My abnormal smear revealed CIN 1 cell changes - the lowest level abnormality - and it was sorted out very easily. By a gynaecologist I rather embarrassingly ran into at a party a year later when it turned out he was a friend of my landlord. To my eternal shame, I pointed to my face and asked him if he recognised me from that end. To his eternal credit, he laughed. Ahem...

For the next two years, I had a smear test every six months, and now I have one every year. Imagine if I had to wait another four years after I was 21 before my first smear test - that would have been plenty of time for the cells to develop into something far more sinister.

In Britain, Dr Chris Steele has been a leading advocate for women under 25 to receive smear tests. His Too Young To Die campaign needs more support - you can start here. And here is a link to the Facebook page for the Mercedes Curnow Foundation, which campaigns to lower the age of pap smears in the UK from 25 to 20.

But we also need to lobby the man in charge, Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt. If you go to his webpage, whoever put it together has included a link to click on if you are not one of his constituents but you do want to contact him in his capacity as Health Secretary. Unfortunately, this will take you here, to a rather soulless online form. It only gives you the option of receiving a reply by email or post but not by telephone. How do we know Hunt will read any of the feedback that comes via this link? How do we know if anybody reads it at all? Still, if we all bombard this link with our questions about the availability of smear tests to women under 25, who knows? Maybe something will happen?

The HPV vaccination - the pearl-clutchers hate it but it will save lives

Hurrah! Medical science has advanced to the point where cervical cancer has the potential to become a thing of the past! There is now a vaccine against many forms of the Human Pappiloma Virus (HPV) but here's the thing - it has to be administered before the young woman becomes sexually active. It is too late for me but it is not too late for our daughters. The UK National HPV Immunisation Programme takes place when girls are in Year 8 of high school.

Naturally, there are people out there who panic at the thought of girls aged around 13 being given a such a shot. The moronic mentality seems to be that giving girls a vaccination that will help them when they become sexually active will cause them to automatically become sexually active. Yes. And having more fire extinguishers around will cause more fires. Anti-vaccination people generally make my piss boil. As such, I suggest everybody educate themselves here before they troll me.

More ways to take action regardless of whether you have a cervix or not...

Everyone should watch this segment from ITV's This Morning to hear Dr Dawn Harper explain more about cervical cancer and hear these real-life stories.

Making a donation to Jo's Cervical Cancer Trust is another great thing to do this week - they support women who have the disease as well as their families, and advocate for early screening and prevention.

And while you're at it, make a donation to Inspirational Friends - two women, Hannah Lawton and Jessie VanBeck, are planning to row across the Atlantic in the Talisker Whiskey Atlantic Rowing Race to raise money for Jo's Cervical Cancer Trust and Myton Hospice. This is in memory of a friend who lost her battle with cervical cancer in May last year.