Molly Guinness

Missed opportunity

A World According to Women: An End to Thinking, by Jane McLoughlin<br /> The Noughtie Girl’s Guide to Feminism, by Ellie Levenson

issue 22 August 2009

A World According to Women: An End to Thinking, by Jane McLoughlin
The Noughtie Girl’s Guide to Feminism, by Ellie Levenson

Jane McLoughlin is furious with women. We have let the feminists down and turned off the rational sides of our brains in favour of the thrilling emotional life that popular culture provides.

The feminists were too intellectual and too angry with men to win the sympathy of most ordinary women, who generally liked their husbands and fathers. Instead, popular culture took possession of female psyches and has left us unthinking, disunited and unable to cope with, or even identify, reality.

A lot of the time McLoughlin is convincing. Soap operas gave lonely, housebound women after the war a sort of community and common ground, and melodrama was necessary to keep up the audience figures. Popular culture is manipulative, especially now that election results and even political decisions have come under its power.

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