Feminism

Thursday

Naomi Alderman

Thoroughly modern Buffy

Cards on the table. Before I’d published my first novel, or written for newspapers, or won awards for my writing, before all of that, in 2004, I presented a paper at an academic conference about Buffy the Vampire Slayer in Nashville, Tennessee. I couldn’t really afford to go to that conference. I didn’t have time to be there. I wasn’t an academic; it wouldn’t help my career. It was just that when I heard there was an academic conference about Buffy the Vampire Slayer I knew I had to be there. Not in an ironic way, not as silly fun. I desperately needed to be around people who could talk

Tuesday

Joanna Williams

Saatchi’s sexism row suggests feminists can’t handle debate

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

Thursday

Helen R Brown

‘I wish you were never born’

All parents worry about the extent to which their children will expose their private weirdness to the world. They tell their teachers that Daddy takes his tea into the toilet and Mummy ‘actually pulled the car over’ for a closer look at the dead badger they passed on the school run. But the traumatic new memoir by the journalist Ariel Leve lifts the lid on a whole new league of maternal craziness. Although Leve disguises her mother as ‘Suzanne’ in this book, a quick google reveals her to be the poet and feminist film-maker Sandra Hochman. When People magazine’s Patricia Burnstein visited Hochman’s ‘elegantly appointed’ Manhattan penthouse in 1976, it

Wednesday

Charlotte Gill

The show’s over for the Women’s Equality Party

In the post-Brexit upheaval, the Women’s Equality Party (WEP) has fallen out of sight. Its members once told us ‘WE can, WE will’, but now WEP isn’t doing anything at all. Not since 24 June when leader Sophie Walker offered her most prophetic statements to date. In Newsweek Europe, she wrote that post-Brexit, we would urgently need ‘women on the table’, and that ‘Britain leaving the EU means more women will get involved in politics’. Little did she know her words would ring true, in the most unexpected way; as weeks later, a woman would not only be on the table, but head of it. And since Theresa May became Prime Minister, it’s

Thursday

Sarah Ditum

Daddy dearest

In 2004, after a 25-year estrangement, Susan Faludi’s father reappeared in her life via email. ‘I have had enough of impersonating a macho aggressive man I have never been inside,’ it read, and was signed, ‘Love from your parent, Stefánie.’ The 77-year-old had embarked on a new life as a woman, both a dramatic abruption and the continuation of a biography full of reinvention. He was born as a Hungarian Jew called István Friedman, survived the Holocaust thanks to a talent for imitating Nazis, adopted the name Faludi to show he was ‘100 per cent Hungarian’, and later settled in the US, where he became Stephen Faludi, archetypal ‘American Dad’

Saturday

Melanie McDonagh

The reason Theresa May is the better candidate has nothing to do with motherhood

Well! It hasn’t taken long for the commentariat to get over their excitement at the prospect of another female prime minster, has it? Can you imagine what the Guardian would be making of it were the contest between Angela and Maria Eagle, Venus and Serena Williams-style (or even, David and Ed Miliband-style)? It’d be triumph for feminism, a belated victory for the kind of positive discrimination gender politics which has proved so terrifically successful in the Labour party. Well, it turns out that it’s not just a woman that feminists wants, it’s a particular kind of woman. Their kind of woman. No others need pretend to the gender. The knives,

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

Baby with the bathwater

Bustle, an online newspaper ‘for and by women’, has published ‘six common phrases you didn’t know were sexist (that you’ll now want to ban from your vocabulary)’. One of them is ‘Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater’. By chance this phrase was used by Sir Ernest Gowers, the enemy of officialese and cliché, in his book H.W. Fowler: The Man and his Teaching. ‘We can,’ Sir Ernest wrote, ‘rid ourselves of those grammarians’ fetishes which make it more difficult to be intelligible without throwing the baby away with the bath-water’. That would annoy someone called Julie Sprankles, a writer for Bustle. ‘The most popular theory is that in medieval

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Labour preach feminism. Tories practise it

So now it is certain: the Conservatives will produce Britain’s second female Prime Minister, after Andrea Leadsom eliminated Michael Gove from the leadership contest and will now go head-to-head with Theresa May in a vote of Conservative members to be announced on 9 September. So why isn’t the Left cheering this social advance? Instead, the bitching has already begun.   Andrea Leadsom is being savaged for being less than 100 per cent enthusiastic about gay marriage (bizarrely, she voted for and against in the same vote); while Theresa May is eviscerated for her proposal – since dropped – to withdraw from the European Court of Human Rights. Trouble is, on the

Wednesday

Taki

High life | 22 June 2016

I always thought the Freuds a pretty sordid bunch, and after the latest revelations it seems I wasn’t far off. I first met Clement Freud when John Aspinall employed him as an adviser for food and wine. He was lugubrious and aggressive, and none of us punters liked him one bit. He was not a gambler but talked as if he were a big one. While crossing the Atlantic on board the QE2 back in 1974, he tried to pRlay the tough guy with me over — yes, you guessed it — a lady, but it didn’t work. But there’s no use giving him the business now that he’s dead,

Tuesday

Brendan O’Neill

Sadiq Khan’s advert ban shows he is an illiberal censor at heart

Six weeks ago I was one of the 1.3 million Londoners who voted for Sadiq Khan as mayor. Boy do I regret it now. Because he’s just shown what he really thinks of us inhabitants of the capital: that we’re so mentally fragile, so pathetic, so vulnerable to the wicked charms of advertisers, that he must censor allegedly sexist ads on our behalf and protect us from offence. In proposing a blanket ban on bus and Tube ads that make people feel bad about their bodies, Sadiq has revealed his authoritarian, paternalistic contempt for the people who swept him to power. I’m amazed there isn’t more fury about his extraordinary

Thursday

Ella Whelan

Glastonbury’s ‘women-only’ venue deserves to sink into the mud

It was only a matter of time before Glastonbury, the world’s most middle-class festival, caught up with the latest political trend. In an announcement heralded as brave, pioneering and ‘necessary’, a group called ‘The Sisterhood’ have announced a women-only venue at the four-day festival. ‘In a world that is still run by and designed to benefit mainly men,’ the group argue, ‘oppression against women continues in various manifestations’. The way to combat this global sexism, it seems, is to have a boy-free zone at festivals. The Sisterhood has designed the special zone to allow women ‘to connect, network [and] share their stories’ about sex work, domestic violence and the pay

Matthew Bell

The rise of groomzilla

We had been engaged for maybe three weeks before it became apparent I’d be the one throwing hysterical wedding-related hissy fits. In no time, I had turned from a reasonable sort of chap into a wailing, screaming princeling, demanding white-gloved waiters, palm trees and a grand entrance by vintage Rolls-Royce. Like the hideous creature that pops out of John Hurt in Alien, so groomzilla was born. At least, this is according to my soon-to-be wife. My soon-to-be mother-in-law now refers to me as The Dauphin, and there was a tussle over zebras. My point was, why shouldn’t we have a few scattered around the lawn, serenely grazing in the background,

Emily Hill Emily Hill

Hillary’s other half

[audioplayer src=”http://feeds.soundcloud.com/stream/268140526-the-spectator-podcast-brexit-strategy-what-would-the.mp3″ title=”Freddy Gray and Kate Andrews discuss Hillary Clinton” startat=662] Listen [/audioplayer] Women of the world unite! Back Hillary Clinton! Otherwise, prepare to be damned to that special place in hell that former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright insists exists ‘for women who don’t help each other’! Exclamation marks are crucial to discussing Hillary Clinton for President. If you don’t deploy one at the end of each sentence, people might think you’re hopelessly depressed that a woman is about to become leader of the free world. We’re supposed to be excited that a woman has just clinched the Democratic nomination. It took America 227 years to get so far.

Wednesday

Emily Hill

Hillary Clinton’s nomination is a setback for feminism

Women of the world unite! Back Hillary Clinton! Otherwise, prepare to be damned to that special place in hell that former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright insists exists ‘for women who don’t help each other’! Exclamation marks are crucial to discussing Hillary Clinton for President. If you don’t deploy one at the end of each sentence, people might think you’re hopelessly depressed that a woman is about to become leader of the free world. We’re supposed to be excited that a woman has just clinched the Democratic nomination. It took America 227 years to get so far. Never mind that the woman in question is widely disliked by a majority

Tuesday

Rose Asani

President Erdogan’s views about women should terrify European feminists

As I entered my 30s I remember thinking how lucky I was. I had a successful career, owned property and was enjoying life as a singleton. Many of my friends were already married, some with children, but the desire wasn’t quite there for me. I wasn’t ready. Now as I march towards my 40s, I’ve embarked on a new life in Turkey. I’m still single, childless and successful. I’m happy, but apparently I shouldn’t be, as according to the country’s President, I have behaved in the wrong way. On the eve of Ramadan, the Muslim Holy month, President Erdogan gave all women something to think about during the fast. Addressing

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Muhammad Ali embodied everything lefties hate about ‘lad culture’

Every wet leftie has been paying tribute to Muhammad Ali over the past 72 hours. Which is kind of weird considering Ali embodied everything they loathe. Male bravado, urban swagger, cockiness, masculinity by the bucketload: the things that made Ali great are the things his right-on mourners normally agitate and commentate against. Their hailing of Ali is as mad as a bunch of zebras turning up to the funeral of a lion. Nothing rattles today’s liberal-leftists more than the idea of the powerful bloke. Especially cocksure poor ones who are mouthy and — oh my God — use their muscle to get ahead in life. Indeed, this week’s New Statesman

Friday

Julie Burchill

Women are becoming more and more infantile. It’s time to grow up, girls

I consider myself such an extreme feminist that I make Germaine Greer look like Greer Garson. (Ask your gran.) But this doesn’t mean that I have to believe women are superior to men in every way. Yes, we violently attack, sexually assault and feel the need to commit murder far less than they do. But when it comes to the little things, there are many ways in which manning up would make women better. Maturity is one of them. We are told from the get-go that females ‘mature’ far earlier than males. It’s weird that feminists go along with this, because it’s one of the main justifications for adult men

Thursday

Ella Whelan

Harriet Harman is wrong to say Kardashian’s naked selfies are any different from Page Three

It’s official, Kim Kardashian’s naked selfies have been given the Labour party seal of approval by Harriet Harman. On ITV’s Good Morning Britain, to the delight of a guffawing Piers Morgan, Harman sung the praises of the Kardashian selfies. ‘I am an expert on the Kardashians’, she said, ‘There’s a kind of bravery and pioneering spirit in them’. According to Harman, Kim Kardashian’s naked social-media posts are ‘brave and pioneering’. And yet, in the same breath, Harman went on to criticise Page Three girls, describing them as ‘fodder’ for pervy male readers. The difference between Kim Kardashian and Kelly from Essex, Harman argued, is that ‘the Kardashian girls are controlling

Thursday

Claudia Massie

First Lady of Pop Art

In 1961 the Venezuelan-American sculptor Marisol Escobar made a startling appearance at the New York artists’ group known as the Club that would set the tone for her unconventional career. The Club was where the alphas of contemporary American art met. Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and their ilk gathered there to take part in discussions, listen to talks, and escape their families. Abstract Expressionism was the house style and in its early days women, homosexuals and communists were all barred from membership. The Club was male, cliquey, exclusive and drenched in its own importance so when Marisol, as she was always known, arrived to participate in a

Thursday

Brendan O’Neill

Forget Zac — the Women’s Equality Party are the real fearmongers

Imagine using the politics of fear to try to get elected in a city as buzzing and optimistic as London. Imagine if the only way you felt you could appeal to Londoners was by making them feel petrified and promising that you, a decent, caring, saviour-style politician, would keep them safe from the myriad harms that surround them. That’s lame politics, isn’t it? It’s sad, downbeat, depressing politics. Oh, and I’m not talking about Zac Goldsmith, by the way. I’m talking about the Women’s Equality Party (WEP), whose peddling of fear makes Zac look like a rank amateur in the doom-spreading stakes. In recent days the liberal press has featured