For my 13th birthday in 1995 I requested — and got — my own ‘line’. This meant that I could jabber all night without taking the phone out of service for everyone else. Getting your own line was a rite of passage for teenage girls in America back then, and everybody just sighed and let us get on with it. Talking on the phone all the time was simply something girls did. Women, meanwhile, at least according to film and TV, spent their time sitting by the phone eagerly awaiting calls from men that usually didn’t come.
But then the feminised world of the endless, open-ended voice call dwindled with the arrival of mobile phones and a preference for texting, messaging, tweet-messaging, and the easy WhatsApp voice note. And as phones began to come with us everywhere, we began answering them less. Millennials’ terror about picking up is well documented.
A discussion of ‘wokeism’ ended up as a bloody inquisition against evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein
All of which makes the stratospheric success of Clubhouse rather odd.
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