Writing
Bridget Christie’s feminist quiz of 2013
Written by Bridget Christie in The Guardian on December 23rd, 2014
Sexism never takes a year off. But a new wave of women are fighting back – including the Edinburgh comedy award winner. How will you fare in her quiz?
1. In her brilliant book I am Malala, Pakistani schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai tells how she was surprised when she heard the Afghan Taliban had banned women from doing what?
Blowing their noses in public
Laughing out loud
Wearing 3D printed masks of their own faces over the top of their chadri
Coughing (even when choking)
2. On Newsnight, what did nimble-tongued Labour MP Stella Creasy accuse tousle-haired Toby Young of doing?
Sitting in a corner of the green room and eating all the Hula Hoops
Tweeting about a female MP’s breasts
Ruining education
Farting
3. What did Lily Allen do that resulted in some people calling her a racist?
Dressed up as a black-and-white minstrel for her gig on the London Eye
Married Nick Griffin
Had Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech tattooed on to her back
Used black women in a music video to satirise how women are used in music videos
4. What was Caroline Criado-Perez campaigning for when she received a deluge of hostile tweets that included up to 50 rape threats an hour?
To legalise paedophilia
To bring back racism, homophobia and bullying in schools
To have a woman’s face on a banknote
To have every football in Britain destroyed
5. Which Irish singer-songwriter wrote a letter to Miley “Twerk” Cyrus giving her advice on how to be a woman in the music industry?
Shane MacGowan
Daniel O’Donnell
Dick Byrne from Father Ted
Sinéad O’Connor
6. Who said live on air that Marion Bartoli, the French Women’s Wimbledon champion, was “not a looker”?
Gérard Depardieu
Shrek
John Inverdale
Kim Jong-un
7. How did Democrat senator Wendy Davis spectacularly defeat the controversial Texas abortion bill?
By staging an 11-hour filibuster
By hiding all the pens in the building so that no one could sign the bill
By pointing out to the lieutenant governor that it was the year 2013
By eating it
8. Whose image appeared on the side of the Unitarian Church in north London on International Women’s Day?
Matthew Hopkins the Witchfinder General
Mary Wollstonecraft
Hugh Hefner
Tony Abbott
9. What stationery product received a huge (and hilarious) online backlash and inspired a very funny sketch by Ellen DeGeneres (a year after I did mine)?
A left-handed compass
An ergonomically designed gender-specific pen for women, called a Bic for Her
A pink “shopping calculator” for women that explodes when it reaches the permitted amount set by the woman’s husband, father, brother, uncle, nephew or son
An Islamic fundamentalist desk globe with the west missing
10. What did Godfrey Bloom call a room full of women at Ukip’s annual conference?
Racists
Marxists
Sluts
Bitches (the literal meaning)
11. Why did the French dinner lady Raymond Blanc doubt The Great British Bake Off finalist Ruby Tandoh’s baking abilities?
Because she didn’t know what a cake was, even when Mel and Sue showed her one
She’s too thin
She thought the oven was to keep her legs warm
Because only French men are allowed to make cakes
12. In September 2013 broadcaster Charlotte Green became the first woman to read what live on air?
John Inverdale’s tea leaves
Jeremy Clarkson’s palm
Sid the Sexist’s Top 10 chatup lines
The classified football results
13. What did Russell Brand say his “ol’ sexism” was like?
His granny’s racism
His grandad’s homophobia
A cascading dichotomy of nuanced empiricism and the uneducated needs of his old working-class winky
That of a milkman in a 1970s sitcom