Feminism

Every morning on the way to work I pass a group of Polish builders waiting to start work on the new Design Museum. I know, it tells us a great deal about the availability of British youth for work in construction that every last one of them is Polish, so far as I can make out – and come to that, are the Irish nowadays too swanky to be navvies? –  but what’s interesting is how well behaved they are. They smoke heroically, but when women walk by they register their existence but don’t utter a peep. Possibly it’s because their English isn’t good enough for Wotcher, darling, but they don’t wolf

British chess Grandmaster Nigel Short has form when it comes to explosive statements. Competing in a tournament in France some years ago as a junior player, he was asked during an interview ‘what do you hate most in life?’ His answer – ‘the French’ – failed to win over his audience. Short’s latest foray into contentious self-expression came with his intervention into the age-old debate about the differences between the male and female brain. According to Short’s comments, the female brain fails in the logic department, hence girls will never be able to match boys over the chessboard. He is reported to have said that we should ‘gratefully accept’ that men are ‘hardwired’

Can you think of anything more cruel than telling a five-year-old boy who likes Lady Gaga that he might have gender dysphoria? Or telling a nine-year-old tomboy who hates Barbie and loves Beckham that she might really be male – in spirit – and therefore she should think about putting off puberty and possibly transitioning to her ‘correct gender’? Saying such things to kids who are only doing what kids have done for generations – messing about, discovering their identity – turns playfulness into a pathology. It convinces boys who aren’t boyish and girls who aren’t girly that they must have some great gender problem, a profound inner turmoil that

Imagine that you have stepped back in time to the 1970s. Feminists are out on the streets of London protesting against the Miss World competitions. There you meet a sleazy men’s magazine publisher who tells you he has a new idea for getting women to show men their breasts. He’s not going to offer them money or fame like Playboy or Penthouse. No, he’s going to get them to take off their tops in the name of women’s liberation. ‘I have seen the future of feminism,’ he tells you, ‘and it has great tits!’ Naturally you think: this man is insane! Surely no woman would fall for that? Wrong. Not

There is much to be said for Rod Liddle’s view that the fuss over the aspiring jihadi brides from the Bethnal Green Academy is getting on for preposterous and we shouldn’t, to put it mildly, over-exert ourselves to get them back. One takes the point, though I think in fairness we should spare a thought for those on the receiving end of the Isis recruitment drive, viz, the unfortunate indigenous communities in Syria and Iraq who are on the sharp end of Islamic State’s advance. I don’t know how many of the Assyrian Christians who didn’t manage to get away from the Isis attack this week on villages in north Eastern Syria were

It’s pretty tough to find good news in suicide statistics, but today’s figures for 2013 are particularly grim reading. The number of suicides increased from 2012, and the male suicide rate is now at its highest since 2001. The male rate of suicide has increased significantly since 2007, where it stood at 16.6 deaths per 100,000 population, to 19.0 deaths per 100,000 as the graph below shows: [datawrapper chart=”http://static.spectator.co.uk/yGG0M/index.html”] It used to be the case that young men were the most likely to kill themselves, but the highest suicide rate in the UK is now for men aged 45 to 59, at 25.1 deaths per 100,000. This is the highest for

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_5_Feb_2015_v4.mp3″ title=”Brendan O’Neill and Cambridge Union president Tim Squirrell debate the new political correctness” startat=33] Listen [/audioplayer]Anyone who thought political correctness had croaked, joining neon leg warmers, mullets and MC Hammer in the graveyard of bad ideas from the late 1980s and 1990s, should think again. When even someone as gay-friendly and Guardian-hued as Benedict Cumberbatch can be hounded for incorrectness, you know no one’s safe. So what can you say? Here’s an A-to-Z guide to the new PC. A is for America. One-time land of the free, founded by un-PC white dudes partial to a drink and sex with slaves, but more recently the birthplace of identity politics

The annual XBIZ Awards, which I attended as a journalist last month in Los Angeles, is regularly portrayed by its organisers as the Oscars of the porn industry. And it has many of the trappings of the Hollywood ceremony: a catalogue of nominations, gushing acceptance speeches, a jokey host. But the sheen of respectability cannot disguise the reality. The XBIZ Awards are about the ruthless exploitation of women for financial gain. The porn producers and distributors strutting around were just pimps in bow ties. Indeed, at times, the awards seemed like an amalgam of mafia convention, lap-dancing club and conference for insurance sales staff. There were the money men in black tie, their less wealthy

Purely for the purposes of argument, it would be handy if Ched Evans had said sorry for the rape for which he was convicted. He hasn’t, for the simple and sufficient reason that he believes he is innocent and is challenging his conviction. So in this case, it’s not possible to argue for a repentant sinner to be readmitted to the fold. But it’s still possible, isn’t it, for someone to serve their time for a crime and to be readmitted into society, on the basis that justice has been served? Well no, not if it’s rape rather than, oh homicide or GBH, that they’ve done time for. It’s the

As a provincial teenage virgin with ideas so far above my station that they gave me vertigo, I frequently reflected bitterly that whoever coined the phrase ‘Schooldays are the best days of your life’ must have come to that conclusion after being involved in a serious car-crash the evening following their last day at school, probably rendering them a tetraplegic. And the little thing which summed up how thoroughly inappropriate it was was the horridness of name tags. All the wondrous beings I had it in me to be, written off by my mum’s humdrum hand in those four syllables: Julie Burchill. Then and there, I took a violent dislike to

When Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Treasure Island he declared triumphantly that if it wasn’t a winner with boys, then he didn’t know what boys were like. And it was indeed the perfect boys’ book; pirates, a map, treasure, a boy hero, black-hearted villains and gore. Perfect. It was, therefore, with mixed feelings that I sat through the National Theatre’s feminist take on Treasure Island last night. On the bright side, the set was phenomenal, a cavernous structure like a whale’s ribcage enclosing the action, with the ribs descending like some sort of swamp creature. In fact, Lizzie Clachan’s design – she had great fun with the rising central platform –  stole