Feminism

I like to prance around showing off in hats and shouting at men as much as the next broad but – apart from the fact that I can get it at home – there were several reasons why I chose not to join a whole batch of my bitches on the Women’s March this weekend. Firstly, I was sure it would be full of ‘Strong Women‘, a phrase I hate at the best of times – and feel should only be used if the lady in question can tear a telephone directory in half with her bare hands – and which seemed especially inappropriate to describe a bunch of overgrown Violet

Can you be a Disney princess and the feminist messiah? I wondered this earlier this week, upon seeing new images released for the new Beauty and the Beast film. It stars She Almighty – Emma Watson – the woman who hates female subjugation, gender stereotypes and all-round sexism, yet will be in a franchise that romanticises all three. In fact, Watson’s career choice confirms my suspicions that she is not the militant campaigner the world has taken her for, but mushy and romantic. As I saw her in Belle’s yellow gown – which I had myself aged four – I tried to imagine Germaine Greer and Camille Paglia doing the same,

Glamour magazine has announced its annual women of the year awards, and, this year, they’re naming a man of the year too. Paul Hewson – or as we know him, the prat in glasses, or, Bono – has been given the award for being one of the ‘most outspoken advocates for women and girls’. Glamour certainly knows how to create a headline. Last year, it was transgender athlete Caitlyn Jenner who won woman of the year; this time round the magazine has gone for a smaller, less stylish, but equally annoying bloke to grab some attention. It was Bono’s ‘Poverty Is Sexist’ campaign, which draws attention to the fact that ‘powerful

Talking to Camille Paglia is like approaching a machine gun: madness to stick your head up and ask a question, unless you want your brain blown apart by the answer, but a visceral delight to watch as she obliterates every subject in sight. Most of the time she does this for kicks. It’s only on turning to Hillary Clinton that she perpetrates an actual murder: of Clinton II’s most cherished claim, that her becoming 45th president of the United States would represent a feminist triumph. ‘In order to run for president of the United States, you have to spend two or three years of your life out on the road

You know you’re getting old not when the policemen start looking young, but when a public figure dies and you say ‘O, I thought they were dead already!’ So it was for me when I heard that the Australian writer Richard Neville had died of dementia at the age of seventy four last week. Neville was never any sort of hero of mine – I was too busy promising my soul to Satan for a quick lick of Marc Bolan. But when I was thirteen and at the peak of my shoplifting prowess, I nicked his book Play Power on exactly the same robbing rampage that saw me take proud possession of The Female Eunuch,

As far as the bride was concerned, the wedding was perfect. Her dress was beautiful, the vows were traditional and she changed her name after the ceremony. The clifftop scenery was breathtaking, the seven bridesmaids were encouraging and supportive: move over Princess Di. There was only one thing missing: the groom. Like a growing number of single women, Sara Starkström had decided to marry herself. ‘I thought about people marrying other people without loving themselves first,’ says Starkström, a writer, explaining what many would call a bizarre overreaction to finding herself single at the age of 29. ‘How could they pledge to do all this stuff for another person when

When I think about love, that old line by William Goldman about Hollywood comes back to me: Nobody knows anything. It seems that as we grow franker about sex (witness the Naked Attraction TV show, recently described as ‘Blind Date in a brothel’) love reveals less of its mysteries. Just as we’ve all now seen on screen 1001 ways to kill someone and yet know nothing about death, we now know 69 ways to screw someone – once more, often seen on screen for the less adventurous amongst us – and nothing about love. Not even the most basic stuff – how to avoid falling in love with someone we shouldn’t,

Forget Pimm’s, sunburn and rain abandoned picnics. What really makes summer is a heap of outrage directed at an old white man for saying something feminists think is beyond the pale. Last year it was Sir Tim Hunt and his quip about the problem of women in labs. This time it is Kevin Roberts, chairman of Saatchi and Saatchi, who has suggested gender bias is not an issue in the advertising industry. For this crime against feminism, Roberts has been suspended and will spend this summer in his garden rather than in the office. Unpicking the obligatory social media bluster about ‘misogyny’ and ‘the patriarchy’ to work out where exactly