Jesus. What a way to spend my thirty-fifth birthday. Locked in a fucking prison cell like a criminal. But I suppose that’s what I am now, a criminal. This morning I was a free woman, at least free on bail that is, and now I’ve had my day in court and this is the result. Guilty as charged. And so here I am, locked up in a cell with three walls of concrete and one wall of steel bars surrounding me. I’ve got a bed, of sorts, a toilet and a washbasin to keep me company, and not a lot else, unless of course I count the chains. I look down at my hands, linked together by handcuffs and fastened to a substantial leather belt that goes around my waist. A chain runs down from the belt to a pair of matching cuffs on my ankles, although these have just about enough chain between them to allow me to walk, albeit only carefully. The industrial and functional looking restraints make a stark contrast with my delicate and stylish high-necked black dress and high heeled shoes. Dress femininely was the advice of my solicitor, but not over sexually. Are they so afraid of me that they need to keep me chained up? I’m in a locked cell for fuck’s sake, isn’t that enough?

 

And so I’m a convicted criminal, but I don’t feel like one. I haven’t done anything wrong. Illegal yes, but not wrong. I’m sort of a political prisoner, a prisoner of conscience rather than a real criminal. All I did was take part in a protest. We should be allowed to protest about what we feel is wrong shouldn’t we? I suppose my real crime is that I belong to a group of people whom society has decided to make scapegoats for all the problems it has.

 

It is of course a very human trait to blame others for problems for which we ourselves are responsible. We never lose our keys, someone else has always moved them, and when things go wrong it’s always ‘them’ who are to blame and never ‘us’. Throughout history minority groups have always been the root of all evils. The poor old Jews of course, Catholics, Muslims, immigrants, asylum-seekers, even bankers have all been singled out as villains and conveniently allowed society to wash its hands of any responsibility for its own failings. And today of course it’s women that our wonderful chauvinistic government is singling out as the cause of societal decay. I suppose to be fair to them it’s not women that they seem to hate, it’s feminists and feminism. As long as we’re happy to be subservient, beauty-obsessed sex and baby machines then they love us. They even have a ‘femininity code’ and if we sign up to abide by it then we pay no tax, travel for free, get extra days off work at ‘that time of the month’ and get discounted prices on all sorts of female-related stuff. And don’t think I haven’t been tempted. The thought of popping into town on the train for free to buy shoes form the likes of Jimmy Choo and Kurt Geiger for half price, and then getting to sit in the best seats at a concert, the ones reserved for ‘certified ladies’, has nearly tempted me enough to make me sign away my rights as a citizen and promise to behave like some Victorian caricature of a woman for the rest of my life. Unfortunately my self-respect won and I joined the feminists instead.

 

Like all great believable lies, the scapegoating of feminism has some small amount of truth in it, I’d have to give them that. Feminism has failed, they say. It has failed the nation’s children by depriving them of their mothers.  A crass distortion perhaps, but could anyone really say it is good for a child to be shunted off to nurseries and child minders so its mother can go off to work?  They also say feminism is wrong because it tells women that they are a failure if they aspire to ‘only’ be a mother and a wife. Well I couldn’t really argue against that. Is bringing a new person into the world, nurturing them and bringing them up to be a good member of society not the most noble of all professions, and not just something for second-grade women who can’t manage a proper job? And as the coup de grâce, they tell us feminism has apparently failed women because it has not made us happy. It has filled us with unrealistic expectations that we can never fulfil. The idea that we can have it all, a job, a career, a captaincy of industry, and at the same time be a wife and a brilliant mother to our children. And does that part not ring a little true as well? All the jokes about women multi-tasking and juggling everything come from somewhere. For most of us it’s just not possible to achieve it all, at least not properly, and unfulfilled expectations are the root of most unhappiness. I can feel it myself. I have a job as a music teacher at a college and I have eyes on the head of department position that will become vacant soon when my boss retires, but I’d also like to be a wife and mother at some point, and I can feel my biological clock starting to tick. But I can’t imagine being able to properly bring up my child and do a decent job of running a large music department at the same time. I’ll have to give up on one of them, or else end up doing both, but doing neither very well. It doesn’t seem like a recipe for happiness to me.

 

Of course that’s all academic now that I’m a convicted criminal. I’ll be lucky if I still have a job at all, let alone promotion when the dust settles from this. What a mess to have got myself into.

 

I was never really much of a feminist. I liked being a woman and I flatter myself I was, and still am, very good at it. There are things I like doing and there are things I like getting a man to do for me. If I get a flat tyre, why do I want to mess about with a jack and a spanner when a nice set of high heels and a sexy smile will get the job done much quicker and without breaking my nails. But like most women I wasn’t happy when the government starting stripping away our rights. I marched with the four million when they took the vote from us, but for the most part I just quietly got on with life while the world seemed to turn increasingly against the cause of women’s equality. But it was the dress code thing that was my watershed. Don’t get me wrong, I like wearing a skirt or a dress when I want to, but being forced to because the government wants to turn the clock back to ‘the good old days’ when women knew their place and concentrated on making themselves beautiful above all else, well that was a step too far for me. I and my friend Sarah who teaches history at the college joined this underground women’s group to protest about it all. But it was hard to find a way to protest other than just holding more marches, of which there seemed to be so many since the country had begun its slide into authoritarianism. The government had sneakily avoided making any actual laws about what we could and couldn’t wear and so there were no rules to defy in protest. Instead they had got businesses to do their dirty work for them, insisting in licensing regulations that they couldn’t serve women customers who were not correctly attired, and giving companies tax breaks for having dress codes for their employees. The government forced others to make the rules so that it couldn’t be challenged directly. But our group thought we had found a way.

 

The local council had brought in a rule that women could not use public libraries unless they were correctly attired in a skirt or a dress. We and some other groups thought we could challenge this and thereby challenge the government, the council being a sort of proxy for the government. So we decided to descend on the libraries en-masse, all wearing trousers and occupy them, demanding to be allowed to take books out. The local library was big enough that several hundred people could fit inside and with other libraries also being targeted we hoped that well over a thousand women would have to be arrested to restore order. Too many, we hoped, to be dealt with harshly without attracting lots of bad publicity. We naively thought we’d all just get cautioned and sent home.

 

But we were just amateurs and the authorities were pros. The police came storming in with smoke bombs and all hell broke loose. The fire alarms went off, all the fire exits opened and there was the sound of gunshots. Most of the protesting women panicked and ran out, escaping the police and avoiding arrest. At first it seemed like the police had made a complete hash of things but we realised later that it had all been deliberate. They didn’t want to arrest us all. They wanted to break up the protest and have most of us escape so that they wouldn’t have to deal with hundreds of arrests and the publicity that would bring. They only wanted the ring leaders and a few token ‘misguided unfortunates’. The ring leaders could have the book thrown at them and be made an example of to deter others from following in their footsteps, while the ‘misguided unfortunates’ could be shown leniency and released to demonstrate the fairness and compassion of the authorities. I was never sure where they thought Sarah and I fitted into that equation, but my solicitor assured me it was the latter.

 

As I sit here in my cell waiting for, I’m not really sure what to happen, it’s hard to feel that I have experienced leniency and compassion. But then I suppose my sentence is pretty light compared to what our group’s organisers will be getting. Everyone knows that high-profile convicted feminists get remanded to a ‘re-alignment’ centre into which they disappear for about six months and then suddenly turn up preaching subservience to men, the importance of personal beauty and the sanctity of motherhood, or some such tripe. At first everyone thought there was some sort of brainwashing going on, but now it’s known that it goes much deeper than that. One former feminist turned femininity promoter was injured in a road accident and taken to hospital where she had an MRI scan, the image of which got leaked to the press. It revealed tiny devices implanted in her body and brain. The exact nature of them could not be determined but experts who analysed the scan said they appeared to be designed to stimulate nerves and hormone producing glands. One device was said to monitor the activity in areas of the brain connected with reasoning and problem solving and limit the blood supply to these areas if they became heavily active. The woman said she just got very tired if she tried to think too much and it was better to leave the thinking to men. Whatever the exact nature of the implants and whatever mental conditioning had been used, the effect was clear. Previously strong and independent women were reduced to nymphomaniac air-heads. The serious press coined the term ‘The Stepford Process’ while the tabloids came up with an infinitely more colourful name, ‘The Bimbolizer’.  

 

And so I suppose I’m lucky that I’m not being shipped off to have my mind and body altered like that. Instead I am to be the lucky recipient of one of the new punishments that twenty-first century society and technology has to offer.

 

I would imagine that there have been prisons for just about as long as there has been human civilisation. Civilisation requires rules, and once you have rules you need a way to deal with those who break them and there has to be something a little less drastic than execution. But today prison is increasingly looked on as an out-dated, unnecessary and above all, expensive way to deal with offenders. Perhaps we should all have got worried when our government started paving the way for effortlessly punishing thousands of ‘criminals’ at almost zero expense to the taxpayer and the economy, but at the time we all thought it was just ‘progress’. Their new way of depriving someone of their freedom and protecting the public from wrongdoers is called ‘corrective restraint’. It’s a thing that grew out of the electronic tags that came in around The Millennium, where a GPS was basically strapped to an offender’s ankle so that their location could be monitored and a curfew enforced. The problem of course was that some criminals tend to be rather clever with locks and anti-tamper devices and simply removed their tags, went out and committed more crimes and then found they had the perfect alibi in that their tag said they’d been home all night. The solution to this was the ‘smart tag’. The offender had a chip injected under the skin of the ankle and the smart tag monitored its own proximity to the injected chip, phoning an automatic alarm to the police if it decided it had been removed. Despite the human rights issues of injecting offenders with ID chips, the new smart tags were totally successful and enabled offenders to be incarcerated in their own homes and continue in their jobs, rather than being locked up in prison at the taxpayer’s expense.

 

And now smart tags have evolved into smart cuffs and smart collars. The idea being not so much to monitor and control the offender’s location, but to restrict freedom of movement in a more literal sense and to impose a degree of public humiliation too. And they seem to delight in imposing their ‘corrective restraint’ on anyone who opposes the drive to return women to the kitchens and the maternity wards. And I guess that includes me now.

 

So for my part in the library protest, or riot as it was called in court, I’ve got a year of corrective restraint to look forward to, six months of which will be suspended if I sign a paper and record a video, both saying that I condemn my actions and that I think feminism is wrong and women should concentrate on looking good, getting a good man to look after them, and being good mothers, and blah blah blah. That’ll be a no-brainer. Six months off for recording a stupid video that everyone will know I don’t agree with. Of course I’ll do it. But I still don’t know exactly what my corrective restraint is going to be. The magistrate imposes the duration, but then it’s down to an assessor to decide on the details of the restraint and ensure that it both punishes me for my crime and also allows me to keep my job, and therefore keep paying tax to the government. They want to restrict us to being housewives and mothers, but they seem to like us working and making money for them too.

 

I have to say I’m a little intrigued, as well as a whole lot nervous, to know what I’ll get. Of course I’ve been on the web a lot since my arrest and I know what’s usually metered out to minor feminists like me. I’m likely to get three delightful accessories to make my life unpleasantly difficult for the duration of my sentence.

 

The first of these will undoubtedly be a smart collar. It will have three purposes, to be generally uncomfortable and unpleasant to wear, to show the world that I am a convicted criminal, and to monitor me to make sure I don’t get up to any more wrongdoing. I’m hoping that having a rigid tube of metal clamped round my neck won’t be too unbearable once I’ve got used to it, and as for the public humiliation, well I’m hoping that I will be able to feel proud of a symbol that shows I at least tried to do something to halt the terrible things that are happening in our country, although the collar won’t distinguish me from a shoplifter, or a fraudster, or a prostitute. Of course there seem to be a lot of people who nowadays would put a feminist protester well below any of those three. But I think the worst thing about the collar will be the total lack of any privacy. It will have a webcam at the front and it will see anything that I see. It will have microphones and it will hear anything I say. And it will have a state of the art 6G mobile data connection so that it can upload its snooped data whenever it feels like it, along with where I have been and whom I have met. Even in my bedroom in the middle of the night, someone could be watching through the camera and listening in on what I’m up to.

 

Not that I’m likely to be getting up to much in my bed at night because the second item that is an almost certainty is a chastity belt. I suppose it’s an obvious thing for a misogynistic establishment to impose on a woman to punish her, but it’s a whole lot scarier to me than the thought of a collar. I’m sure I can go without sex for six months, but having something so brutally unyielding constantly clamped over my most intimate and sensitive parts fills me with a dread I can’t describe. I’ve been trying to convince myself that it won’t be that bad. According to the web, the chastity belt market in Britain has been worth over four hundred million pounds in the last five years and if we said five hundred pounds might be the average price of a belt then that would mean close to a million women might be wearing these things and managing to get on with their lives without anyone else knowing. But the prospect still scares the shit out of me. Maybe that will be the only way to get the shit out of me once I’m locked in a belt. Oh God.

 

And of course the whole idea of the punishment is ‘corrective restraint’ and so if the first two are supposed to be my corrective punishments, then the third thing I’m bound to be in for is something to restrain me. They say that a woman can do pretty much everything she needs to be able to with a 250mm chain linking her wrists. I’ve watched the video blogs posted on the web by women undergoing corrective restraint and it does seem to be at least partly true. Of course it presumably depends on what exactly a woman is expected to do. As long as it’s just cooking, cleaning, having sex, giving birth, taking notes, typing and wearing halter necked dresses, then there doesn’t seem to be a problem. But I’m a music teacher. I might still manage a clarinet, but the piano, violin, viola and my speciality, the cello are all going to be a bit difficult. So I don’t really know what they’re going to fasten me up with. I guess I’ll find out when my assessor arrives, whenever that will be.

 

I don’t know how long I’ve been waiting in this cell, but it must be at least a couple of hours now. I’m a bit scared, but I’m also bored and frustrated. If I was waiting in a hospital or a station I’d be giving the manager a piece of my mind over the crappy service, but I have to keep reminding myself that this isn’t like that. I’m not a customer, I’m a convict and I’m in prison, and they’ll see me when it suits them. I don’t think shouting at them through the bars of my cell would be a good idea.

 

There’s something else that’s bothering me too. I need to go to the loo. It should be easy because there’s one right beside me in the cell, but there are two issues that are holding me back. The first of these is the fact that I’m chained up. My handcuffs have perhaps three inches of chain between them and it’s been passed through a metal ring on the front of the belt around my waist. The belt is very snug, too snug to be comfortable actually, and is fastened behind my back, well away from my hands. So I’m not sure how I can manage the loo like this. I’m sure I could use my fingers to work my skirt up around my hips, but I’ve got a slip on underneath which I’d have get pulled up too. Perhaps if I lay on the bed then I wouldn’t be working against gravity and could manage it. The problem though is my knickers. I don’t know how I would get them pulled down to let me pee. I could maybe push them down my thighs a bit at the front with my hands, but I’ve got a nice, round bottom and I can’t reach behind me to push my knickers over it. Perhaps rubbing my bum up and down on the bed will work my knickers down enough to let gravity take over when I stand up. It’s just as well I’m wearing stockings because I’d have no chance with tights.

 

The other issue that’s making me test my bladder capacity is something that’s not actually in the cell, it’s on the wall at the other side of the wide corridor that my cell opens out onto. A camera. If I walk up to the bars I can see a line of cameras stretching off along the corridor in both directions. There’s one looking into every cell. I’m sure they’d say it’s for security or safety, but I think it’s just to make sure the inmates get no privacy whatsoever. I doubt if anyone is actually looking at me right now. I’m probably just one of a whole wall of screens in some control room, or maybe there’s just one screen and it cycles through all the cells, just giving a quick glimpse of me. Unless of course I’m doing anything interesting in which case I’m sure all the guards will be crowded round the screen and laughing. I’m trying to tell myself that it doesn’t matter, that I’m just going to pee and I don’t need to feel ashamed about it. If someone has put me in chains to make it difficult for me and then wants to watch, then who is the one with the problem, me or the sick pervert? I’m also aware that if I’m going to spend the next six months wearing a collar with a spy camera, then I have to get used to the idea that someone could be watching. Okay, so my collar-cam won’t actually see me sitting down and doing my business, but anyone looking through it will know. How I’ll actually be doing my business if I’m locked up in a chastity belt will be another matter of course. The thought of that makes me shiver. Fuck the voyeurs, I need to get my mind off that belt and I need to pee, so here goes.



Continued in  The Accidental Feminist, Part Two