It is no mystery that women are in a more difficult position than men at the Oxford Union. A lot of people have commented ‘how great it is to have a female President’ but I actually think it’s a disgrace that out of 600 Presidents I’m the 21st woman to hold office. I don’t think the fact that I’m a woman should even be remarked upon!

So why do we have so few female Presidents and our committees are male-dominated? One reason would be the misleading perception of the Union as an aggressive, male-dominated political institution, which may discourage some from participation.  I would like to categorically dispel certain assertions people might have about the Union – and encourage all girls out there to join our Women’s Initiative and attend our ‘Get Involved’ sessions.

Myth 1: The only way for a woman to win an election is to sleep her way to the top.

Unfortunately, ‘sleeping one’s way to the top’ is an empty phrase used to imply somehow that any woman who has entered into liaisons with a male member of committee is given an electoral advantage. Surely the opposite is true; you just have to look at gossip columns relating to such alleged ‘affairs’ and see how disparaging they are towards women. Men can sleep around as much as they like and will never be criticised for doing so whereas women who have entered into relationships are damned for doing so. But perhaps this has come to light as a result of there being so few women in the Union? Homosexual relationships – of which there are many more than heterosexual relationships – rarely receive any mention (nor should they do) – but still it seems that the attention is focused solely on female candidates.

The aim of the Women’s Initiative this term is to encourage women to find out about the election process and to stand themselves. Merely talking about the problems facing women may only reaffirm perceptions that women are somehow ‘handicapped’ and unable to be elected alone. 

Myth 2: The Oxford Union is a misogynistic society; men do not tolerate women in high positions.

It’s true that throughout my time on committee there have been those who automatically deem women to be less competent. But rather than allowing them to have any sort of justification for their irrational beliefs, my outlook was to force them to change their pre-judgements about me via the visible results of my actions and aims. It’s incredibly frustrating at times that on competence men are innocent until anyone can be bothered to prove them guilty whereas women are immediately condemned until they go to such efforts to overturn accusations. I found that if you want the respect of your male colleagues it’s vital that you challenge them on their own turf; asking people to feel sorry for you purely by virtue of being female is no way to be held in high esteem by your peers. The key is to retain composure and be professional even in painfully difficult situations.

Myth 3: For a woman to win an election, she has to be good-looking.

This is one of the most damaging perceptions of the Society. To win an election, you need a whole range of skills and looks, although admittedly might sometimes be helpful, are by no means important. The nature of any political society is that you will be challenged in an aggressive manner, compelled to organise various events and deal with unpredictable situations.

By taking all these myths to task, I just hope that more women continue to step up to the challenges that are part of leadership offered by societies across Oxford. The more who do so, the less ‘unusual’ it will become for men to see women in roles of authority. From this will follow the culture-change that will dilute and eventually erase the ridiculous prejudices that continue to face women. 

Cherwell.org is by no means unique in giving its users the freedom to comment on articles. Online commentary is often amusing to read, encourages criticism of the article itself, and sometimes highlights a new perspective.

But the amount of whingers on the web is just plain silly. I’ve got no problem with a good whinge – hence this heckle – but more often than not, comments make it abundantly obvious that the author hasn’t read the article properly, if at all; sometimes it’s as if they’ve simply read the headline and then scrolled down to the comment box below to inject their opinion on the topic. These unchecked commentators have their pet peeve which is going to be regurgitated, regardless of the article’s actual content.

Likewise, serial whingers cotton onto key words; cutting and pasting entire paragraphs from their ‘controversial’ manifestos.

There’s also the trolls: people who play devil’s advocate purely to get attention. They blurt out some blatant statement, shocking readers with breathtaking ignorance and tempting them to respond in kind.

But ‘angry’ commentators are probably the worst. Please, no one takes a blind bit of notice of your EXCESSIVE USE OF CAPITAL LETTERS, the web equivalent of shouting.

Finally, there’s the question of anonymity. By brandishing a digital disguise, people revel in their ‘power to address the world’ while concealing their identities. Self-righteous venomous personal attacks often ensue. If you were responding to a tutor or friend’s email you wouldn’t use the same words or tone. But that’s exactly what you’re doing on a public website. I only hope that over time these whingers will grow up and reserve their comments for insightful and well thought-out points.

Unlike his former fellow Trotskyite, Christopher Hitchens, Terry Eagleton is by his own admission, “fixed in the groove of my adolescent beliefs, clinging to my leftism like a toddler to his blanket.”  Marxism has become unfashionable, but that doesn’t stop Eagleton from next year releasing a book, “mildly and unprovocatively titled” Why Marx Was Right. When he was Warton professor of English at Oxford, Eagleton styled himself “a barbarian inside the citadel”, but, he interrupts, “that was just to annoy the Daily Telegraph”. 

This resistance to convention and academic expectation at times seems wilfully perverse.  While Richard Dawkins incited controversy with what Eagleton calls his “inverted Evangelical” atheism – “he’s as obsessed with religion as puritans are with sex” – Eagleton defied expectation yet further by defending religion.  Dawkins’s attacks are so crude and ignorant, he claims, as to “make a first-year theology student wince”, yet Eagleton himself admits that Dawkins’ plan to arrest the pope for crimes against humanity is a “seductive” suggestion.
What Eagleton objects to in the argument of Dawkins, he explains, is its laziness; he has, Eagleton claims, “bought his unbelief on the cheap, he has rejected a version of religion that nobody in their right mind would accept”. It is, Eagleton insists, “a matter of intellectual justice to confront your opponent at his or her best, otherwise you just set up a straw target and knock it over, and get a thrill out of doing so”.   

In Eagleton’s talk at the Union and our follow up interview, there emerges his unwillingness to buy any notion “on the cheap”, even if it means he must embrace indecision, he will do so in the stead of dubious judgement.  What shall we do, someone asks in the audience, in the face of fundamental Islamic terrorism, if not condemn it?  “Attempt to understand it”, is Eagleton’s answer, “do not reduce it to caricature”. But, he admits, “it may be too late for that now”.
Eagleton’s entire life, however, seems to be informed by contradiction. He was described by Elizabeth Jane Howard (Kingsley Amis’ widow) as “a lethal combination of a Roman Catholic and a Marxist”; he is a liberal who detests “mushy liberals”; his professed Marxism infuriates critics who point out his ownership of three houses as well as his apparent longstanding regret at having turned down a job at the Open University despite his legendary Oxbridge careerism.

When I worked on the Wadham telethon and spoke to former students of his, the memories they expressed were as ardent as they were bipolar. Even his talk that I watched at the Union on Monday night, punctuated as it was by erudite and apparently ad hoc witticisms, can be seen to be repeated almost verbatim on an interview available on Youtube. 

‘Whether I believe in God or not, it certainly fed a lot into my work’

There is something irresistibly theoretical about this point of repetition; seeing the king of theory enact and repeat a ‘performative gesture’ of ‘self-formation’, one is tempted to see ‘Terry Eagleton’ as more of a role the he plays: the character of renegade academic, the throwback Marxist. But to do so would truly be to set up a straw target and knock it over.  Eagleton’s views are above all – and by his own admission – complex.  Yet, as he points out, so is the world.  “Religion has been responsible for some horrendous crimes, probably more so than most social institutions; it’s been peculiarly cruel and obnoxious and dogmatic”. What he doesn’t agree with, though, is the prototypical Dawkins “blanket rejection of religion on the basis of caricature, which would be the equivalent of someone saying to Dawkins, ‘Oh Darwin, it’s just about how we’re all monkeys really’.”

In 2007 Eagleton prompted a media furore by accusing Martin Amis of Islamophobia.  Amis had commented that he felt a “definite urge” to make the lives of ordinary Muslims uncomfortable until Islam “gets its house in order”; he suggested strip-searching anyone who looked like they came from Pakistan or the Middle East and deportation, “not letting them travel”.  Amis has since distanced himself from the comments, which Christopher Hitchens defended as “a thought experiment, or a mood experiment”.  I nervously ask Eagleton what he would say to this, unsure of his willingness to discuss Amis. Surprisingly, he reasons openly: “I think it’s outrageous”, he says immediately, “what strikes me about that is the fact that Amis has refused to apologise for the disgusting things he said. He offended a lot of people, he should have the moral courage to come out and say so.” 

Did he have the right to say it though, I wonder; does everyone have the right to voice their opinion, however unsavoury? The answer from Eagleton is, predictably, complex.  “Almost”, he says with a smile, “I think liberalism is almost right.  I don’t think people have the right legally or ethically to voice opinions that are racially insulting, and I think it’s quite proper that the law should take account of that. On the other hand, in no sense do I want to censor Amis. What I admire about him and Hitchens is that they’re both good liberals that have grown conservative. They’re right tilting liberals, it’s the cliché of old age, from radical to conservative; Hitchens who detests a cliché should realise he’s one himself and become more ironic about it.” 

Despite this, he acknowledges that any religious leanings in later life are also clichéd. “It’s probably a sign of age. I’m getting nearer heaven or whatever that other place is called”, he says. But this isn’t just the desperate godliness of an old theorist. His theology is of a kind of Christianity “that is politically radical and ethically engaged. And whether I believe in it or not, it certainly fed a lot into my work”. Interestingly, he never explicitly reveals whether or not he does believe in God. I suppose that would be too simple.

The world, he says, is split into two groups of people. Those that believe too much, and those that believe too little, and “each keeps feeding the other”. Western scepticism, he jokes, has got to the point where even ‘It’s 9 o’clock’ sounds dogmatic; “It’s like ‘9 o’clock’ is so much more indeterminate, it’s very postmodern”.

The point for Eagleton though is that whatever he believes in, he does so wholeheartedly. “What I believe now is pretty much what I believed at the age of fifteen”, he says, “I don’t think consistency is itself a virtue, if things change, one should change. But I haven’t changed because I see no sign that, fundamentally, the system I oppose has changed.” Eagleton will accept complexity, but never compromise.

So what exactly is the big problem?

In 1993, Israel agreed to withdraw from the Palestinian territories of the West Bank – an area about a quarter of the size of Israel between the River Jordan and East Jerusalem – and Gaza, a smaller region by the Egyptian border. This division between Israeli and Palestinian land has been called the ‘two-state solution.’ It is recognised as a promising basis for peace, but in recent years the ascendance of Hamas and the movement of Israeli settlers into the West Bank have threatened to jeopardise it.

There are further fundamental difficulties: should Jerusalem be an undivided capital for the Israeli state, or shared between Israel and Palestine? What will happen to the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees outside Palestine? How will absolute consensus on borders ever be achieved? ‘The biggest problem,” says Rogan, “is getting both the Israelis and the Palestinians to recognise that they need to broker the two-state solution immediately, that the status quo is untenable for both sides. Ironically, democracy is the main impediment: the Knesset usually returns weak coalition governments reliant on minor parties and incapable of decisive action.”

What can the international community do?

“We need to work within established legal parameters. It confuses an already confused situation when countries try to reopen questions like borders or refugee rights. The international community “should recognise the two-state solution along the lines of UN Security Council Resolution 242. Drafted over Israel’s overwhelming defeat of the Arab States in the Six-Day War in 1967, this resolution pioneered the ‘Land for Peace’ agreement. According to this deal, Israel would return land she had occupied during the war – such as Sinai in Egypt and the Golan Heights in Syria – in exchange for her first ever peace treaty with the Arab states. “If you recognise the bounds of resolution 242, issues like settlement are put in their correct legal context, which is to say that the settlers are putting buildings on the sovereign state land of another country, and should be treated as expatriates.”

What can other Middle Eastern states do to help?

“The Arab states have made a major contribution, when in 2002 they made a plan pledging full normalisation of relations in return for all territory occupied by Israel in 1967. The thing about that plan is that the best way forward is to recognise the international legal positions on boundaries. The UN and the EU should encourage Arab initiatives, and Israel should work with them – there would be no better way to demonstrate Israel’s full acceptance into the Middle East. All West Bank territory should be returned to the Palestinian Authority, the Golan Heights should be returned to Syria, the Shebaa farms to Lebanon. The demands for the restoration of territory are the absolute condition of the Arab peace effort.”

What can be done to promote this solution in Israel and Palestine?

“I think the only way for Israel to move forward would be an election on the specific agenda of the two-state solution. It would take a period of negotiations producing terms of peace that would satisfy Palestinian demands, and also Syrian demands. You need to come up with a Plan that the PA would be able to agree to with US support, and then put that plan to the electorate.
There is enough will in Israel. Polls taken in 2007 showed that the majority of the Israeli people still want the two-state solution. Also, if current population trends continue, it is thought that there will be more Palestinians than Israelis in Israel within a decade.”

And Palestine? “Hamas and Fatah must reconcile their differences and agree to work together under the structures of the Palestinian Authority. Divided, the Palestinians will never be able to negotiate a two-state solution with the Israelis. They owe this to the Palestinian people, who want to build their lives; they want economic stability and freedom of movement; they want peace.”

Dr Eugene Rogan is Director of the Oxford Centre for Middle Eastern Studies and University lecturer in the Modern History of the Middle East.