Cambridge academic Victoria Bateman Naked at Royal Economic Society

ast March, the Cambridge academic Victoria Bateman walked into the annual conference of the Royal Economic Society in Brighton wearing “nothing but shoes, gloves, a necklace and – of course – a smile”. Smiling is a big thing in naked protest; that, and the idiosyncratic hair (a deep commitment to the overhead plait), bestows Bateman with an obscure seriousness of purpose. This is otherwise quite difficult to put across when you are not wearing any clothes.

Her point, originally, was that economics has failed to put women at the centre of any analysis. In fact, it has largely ignored them, leaving the discipline fatally myopic. This is the subject of her forthcoming book, The Sex Factor, which makes the original but obvious point that classic explanations of prosperity fail: markets are not enough to explain growth; neither are innovation or democracy. People prosper through freedom outside as well as inside the marketplace – the emancipation of women has a demonstrable, strikingly positive economic effect.

Bateman has been mischaracterised as a kind of next-gen Catherine Hakim (a sociologist at the London School of Economics who argued that sex is a material female advantage because men want it and women don’t). That’s wrong. Bateman’s point is not to monetise sex but to refocus the study of economics so that it includes the social spheres from which real economies draw so much energy. Anyway, that tension has been eclipsed, rather, by Bateman’s anti-Brexit nudity.



https://www.theguardian.com/politics/shortcuts/2019/feb/12/could-debating-naked-really-solve-britains-brexit-woes