The ‘Women Eating On the Tube Protest’ Was Weird

Photos by Jake Lewis

There’s recently been some media coverage and a lot of hoo-ha surrounding a Facebook page set up to gather pictures of women eating on the London Underground. Before it was removed from Facebook, the group—titled “Women Eating on the Tube”—provided an outlet for camera-wielding voyeurs to take a break from sneaking up-skirts and instead indulge in a far more manageable, less arrestable form of creepiness.

The page’s founder is “filmmaker and artist” Tony Burke. He claims that taking candid iPhone shots of women mid-chew is “an observational study” and “reportage photography,” as opposed to a bunch of assholes embarrassing busy people for indulging their basic human need to feed themselves.

The page was taken down last Friday. On the day of its demise, Burke visited the Radio 4 studios to sit down with pissed-off student Lucy Brisbane McKay, who had announced a protest on the Circle line against the page: “Women Eating Wherever the Fuck They Want.” McKay was correct in what she said—he policing of women’s behavior in this way is unacceptable, weird, degrading, and pretty embarrassing for Burke. But McKay said she wanted it to be a “celebration of women eating.”

What there is to celebrate about eating, I’m not too sure. There’s also something a bit top-hats-and-monocles about a picnic protest on the tube, so I went along to see if the organizers had figured out what point they were trying to make between the radio interview and the moment they stepped through the turnstile.

The feast was to begin at High Street Kensington station. A total of ten to 15 people showed up, mostly young women of student age, along with the odd older lady and a couple of guys thrown in to round out the demographic. One of the men was dressed as a sort of strip club musketeer and was defiantly eating a weird lunch of plain penne pasta with a spoon.

There was also a self-described “stand-up comedian, feminist, socialist, activist, and joy distributor” named Chris Coltrane, who you can see taking a picture of himself in the photo above.

Frances Scott (second from right) with some people she gave 50:50 shirts

Before we set off, a woman called Frances Scott arrived. Scott is the organizer of the 50:50 Parliament campaign, a venture calling for a more balanced House of Commons. She handed out T-shirts and posed for photos with the young ladies at the center of the event, but the girls soon removed the shirts, accusing Frances of attempting to hijack their protest.

Once we got on the train, it turned into an uncomfortable mini-frenzy, mostly because there’s just not much room for a protest on a train car. Seasoned TV journalists and photographers jostled and argued with each other about shots and interviews, and I was personally interrupted about three times by some busybody from some TV station who wanted to speak to the girl I was having a conversation with.

The camera crews were obsessed with the girls who’d brought giant, showy picnic bags along for the ride. They seemed most interested in one who had about five bunches of bananas on her. I asked her if she’d ever encountered media attention like this before. She looked away for a second before completely ignoring me and chatting to her friend. It made me feel alone.

I turned to one of those women who weren’t being bombarded by cameras, and asked her how it felt being ignored by cameras at a protest held to encourage people to ignore women with their cameras. She gave me the kind of daggers you’d normally give someone after he’d kicked your dog in the face.

I went down the train to speak to a few commuters. Though they agreed in principle that the page was a bit gross, they were all basically uninterested.

The author, eating on the tube in solidarity 

The more I thought about it, the more bizarre the whole event seemed. The train was unbearable to be on—journalists elbowing each other out the way for photo-ops while scribbling stuff in shorthand that anyone who isn’t an idiot would probably already agree with. I can understand people uniting in resistance against some grand, overarching, damning social paradigm, but a gathering against a couple of dickheads with smartphones felt a bit pointless.

Still, anything organized to kick back against pricks who write stuff like “Everywhere I go, I see women eating on Tubes. Like little mice hiding packets of chips and cookies in their bags and purses. Slowly, secretly, guiltily raising each bite-sized morsel to their salty lips in the hope that no one’s watching. Well, I’m watching. And I’m photographing, documenting the fascinating world of the Women Who Eat on Tubes” can’t be all bad.

The great public transport feast of Spring 2014, then: not all that great but nowhere near as bad as Tony Burke. For everyone else, it was just a bunch of people eating cheap sushi and cheese and onion chips on the tube.

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