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The fifty-eighth session of the Commission on the Status of Women takes place at the United Nations Headquarters in New York from 10 to 21 March 2014. This is a guest post by Rowan Harvey about the negotiations over what goes into the "outcome document" at the end of the Commission. Rowan is the Women's Rights Advocacy Adviser at ActionAid UK and a Governor at the LSE. She tweets at @RowanHarvey1.

This years' United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) kicks off in New York on Monday and promises to give a fascinating insight into the current state of the global debate on the rights of women and girls.

It comes at a key moment as the UN leads a process to determine the framework that will replace the Millennium Development Goals - the plan that will decide which development issues will receive the world's focus over the next 20 years.

The outcomes from CSW will feed into that process and will most likely be held up as reflecting the views of the world's women and outlining their priorities.

The stakes really couldn't get much higher. It's ironic that while thousands of women's rights activists will attend, the vast majority are unable to enter the formal negotiations and can only influence from the sidelines, because most of the decisions will be taken by government delegations, some of which are comprised entirely of men.

The shame is that there is almost complete consensus amongst the women's rights activists as to which recommendations CSW should be putting forward in its annual outcomes document. There is unanimous support for issues such as ending violence against women and girls, realising women's economic rights and comprehensive action in support of sexual and reproductive rights. The women attending know what they want but there's real doubt over whether their governments are prepared to hear them.

The first drafts of the outcome document, seen by ActionAid, while giving space for measured optimism, show clearly how difficult the fight is likely to be. In the first lines, while some states are trying to hold on to past agreements on women's rights, other countries have made clear that they are happy to abandon landmark international agreements, such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. In effect, they want to roll back the clock by 20 years and stop the fight for gender equality in its tracks.

Yet there are some positive developments. This year European Union states have managed to come together and build consensus, which they weren't able to do last year. British-based NGOs are pleased that the UK Government is engaging at a high level, with International Development Secretary of State Justine Greening attending alongside two other ministers, as the UK government's agenda is closely aligned with the outcomes that civil society wants to see.

Equally, the Vatican, who last year proposed more amendments to the text than any other member, have this year proposed none. Women's rights activists are hoping that this signals a new approach under a new pope, but it's entirely possible that they are waiting to weigh in later in the process. Sadly, last year the Vatican chose to support countries like Iran and Syria over moderate and progressive predominantly catholic countries like the Philippines and Mexico, both of whom are working flat out in the negotiations to further the rights of their women citizens.

And over everything looms once again the 'sovereignty clause', a paragraph that effectively acts as a wrecking amendment, stating that countries should only have to realise women's rights if it is 'consistent with national laws and development priorities'. Essentially, if your laws disadvantage women or you'd rather work on other things, you can ignore the outcomes document entirely. Proposed by the Africa group last year, this paragraph was only shot down in the final hours of last years' negotiations. It wasn't a surprise to see it again this year but it's deeply worrying that there's still so little recognition that women's rights are a vital achievement and essential to the wellbeing of all nations.

Image attribution: The CSW58 logo at the head of this piece is from the UN website's Commission on the Status of Women page.

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This is a guest post by Nichi Hodgson exploring the conflict between personal desire and collective politics. Nichi is a 30-yr-old journalist, broadcaster and author of the erotic memoir, 'Bound to You'.

Ever since Paris Lees' Vice magazine cat-calling piece was published last week, I've literally been losing sleep. Firstly, because my comment made it look like I was saying women that don't enjoy street harassment are snobbish, which I absolutely was not. I don't have enough words here to clarify that but have done on my own blog. And secondly, because it proved how far feminism has to go when discussing the tensions between personal desire and collective politics.

Many women in the feminist Twittersphere criticised Lees for asking what they considered to be the wrong question. The focus on whether personally enjoying cat-calls made you a 'bad feminist', was, they said, beside the point because it detracted from the better kind of world we envision for all women. What's more, even if we believe heckling to be, in its mildest form, crude flirtation, there's a power asymmetry at the heart of it - by and large, men dole it out, women receive it, (often without recourse to a reply if it's a man shooting past in a vehicle). And as blogger Stavvers sagely remarked, when women challenge it, they're are often met with less than benign follow-up line - "Hey you look gorgeous" becoming "ugly bitch". Fair point.

However, even if we accept that the "Am I bad feminist?" question is the wrong one to ask, that still doesn't solve the problem of how we grapple with the very complex intersection of personal desire - which is by its very nature amoral; where we draw the line between flirtation and harassment (something nobody seemed very willing to discuss at all) and how feminism deals with those contradictions.

In a follow-up post for the New Statesman, Glosswitch criticised Lees' celebration of cat-calling: "We've reached a point where sex-positive feminism is doing the patriarchy's work for it. All those good girls who grew up fearful of breaking the rules? They've discovered a way to do exactly what's required of them without acknowledging the impact on others".

I don't use the term myself but as a published erotic memoirist and sex columnist, I'm obviously a fierce advocate of people embracing their desires, and enjoying sex. But the term "sex positive feminist" came about not just because some women still want to be the patriarchy's petting toy, but because many of us still want to flirt and sexually engage with men, and because there was and is an absence of positive discussion going on in contemporary, mainstream feminism about how to negotiate this. The fact Lees was so roundly jumped upon for daring to try and explore the contradiction between personal desire and collective values only goes to prove this.

When I was first politically awakened, I couldn't find any really good books which discuss the practicalities of sex as a feminist, only ones that denounced entertaining the patriarchy's fantasies. Who talks about whether flirting, or traditional courting rituals can be tailored to contemporary feminism? Not Millet, not Adrienne Rich, not Dworkin, nor Naomi Wolf attempted it. Germaine Greer is the only one who got close and that was more than 40 years ago. Instead, it has been those outside of the canon and who don't necessarily answer to the name 'feminist' - Nancy Friday, Erica Jong, and more recently, Brooke Magnanti and Emily Dubberley have explored desire, separate from politics.

I've also never seen the feminists that are currently criticising porn culture and "sex positivity" offer alternatives. How to co-parent, how to make it in a male-dominated work place, how NOT to be a sex object - all those things are covered - but how to explore your own sexuality - even the things you feel drawn to that aren't politically correct - and then go get sex on your terms? As far as I can see, not even Glosswitch has attempted it.

What's more, what women want on the streets for each other, and what they want in their heads and their beds, for themselves, are going to be different and contradictory things because of the way human sexuality works.

Take 50 Shades. From a strictly feminist perspective, the tale of a young virgin seduced and dominated by an older, more powerful man in a way that is dubiously consensual, does not smack of equality. But 50 Shades isn't a political manifesto. It's erotica, the place where your political beliefs are allowed to have a night off while you indulge your fantasies, safe in the knowledge you are not selling out the Sisterhood, but rather embracing your right to sexual desire, something women have been denied for too long. It seems the problem with Lees' article is that she was trying to explore where the line between the two was to be drawn, which is more than our current feminist debate seems to be able to handle - partly because we are still so busy fighting for an end to harassment and abuse, and partly because we need to accept that, when it comes to sex, the personal and the political won't always desire the same things. And that's ok. What we need to get better at from here on, is opening up the dialogue on these contradictions. The only thing more threatening to feminism, and harmful to women than talking about desire, is not talking about it.

Image attribution: The image at the head of this post is a digitally-manipulated composite landscape photo called 'Line in the Sand'. It is from Imageation's Flickr photostream and has been cropped and resized by Helen in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.

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Hello and welcome to the weekly round up! Much as we'd like to, we don't always find the time to blog about all the interesting things we read/see/come across. So, here are some links The F-Word collective chanced upon last week.

Please note a link does not imply endorsement and that some content might be triggering, so please exercise caution.

Let us know what you think via comments below!

Poor taking items back to food banks as they can't afford to cook, Oxfam claims (Independent)

Avery Edison on Toronto, travelling while trans* and how things can get complicated (She Does the City)

An Annotated Index of Ross Gellar (Shakesville)

Women radio presenters under pressure 'to sound more like men', says Mary Beard (Independent)

The fetishisation of Lupita Nyong'o (Black Feminists)

'It's only a joke': How far is too far in comedy? (The Telegraph)

Reaching Out to Save (and Sustain) Scarleteen (Miss Mary Max)

Why abortion is still the secret that women won't reveal to their friends (Independent Ireland)

I Am Not Your Poster Child (Gender Terror)

A Step by Step Guide Through Jared Leto's Trans Ignorance (Trans Hollywood)

The Racist Things You've Been Saying in Class? Harvard's Black Students Heard You (Colorlines)

Not Bringing Charges Doesn't Mean an Accusation Was False (Melhoukia)

The Overwhelming Heteronormativity of 'Born This Way' (Consider the Teacosy)

Women hold up half the sky (Harpy Marx)

In which I review a book that I read: Playing the Whore (Stavvers)

Danish government proposes free access to legal change of gender (ILGA Europe)

Not 'gay' enough for gay bars (Diva Mag)

Abolishing the Independent Living Fund (Touch Stone)

Reframing the conversation about domestic and sexual violence and abuse (A Room of Our Own)

Welcome to Paradise (Telegraph)

Street Harassment - a response to Paris Lees in Vice (Sian and Crooked Rib)

Prostitution: Caveat emptor (The Economist)

Why Did the BBC photoshop Patty Hopkins out of this Photo? (Arch Daily)

British Pregnancy Advice Service fined £200k for Anon hack, data protection breaches (The Register)

Feminist Street Art collected in honour of IWD (Urban Times)

Say Yes to Success (Women's Sport and Fitness Foundation)

Nazis Come to Power for the First Time Since World War II: Where is the Outrage? (iacknowledge)

New attack on HTTPS crypto might reveal if you're pregnant or have cancer (Ars Technica)

The Indian sanitary pad revolutionary (BBC)

Triggered (Shakesville)

Paddy Power's Oscar Pistorius ad to be pulled after record 5,200 complaints (The Guardian)

Violence against women: an EU-wide survey. Main results report (European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights)

Hull's Rape Crisis centre faces closure as staff given redundancy notices (Hull Daily Mail)

All hail the vampire-archy: what Mark Fisher gets wrong in 'Exiting the vampire castle' (open Democracy) (This link is from 2013 but interesting nevertheless.)

Image of sunshine bursting through clouds, uploaded by Flickr user Sean McEntee, used under a Creative Commons Licence.

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