Feminism

For many years, Michel Houellebecq was patronised by the French literary establishment as an upstart, what with his background in agronomy rather than literature, his miserable demeanour, his predilection for science fiction and his gift for unyieldingly saying the unsayable, especially about relations between the sexes. That’s all changed now. He won the Prix Goncourt in 2010 for The Map and the Territory and in 2019 was elevated to the Légion d’Honneur. The Nobel cannot be long delayed, the committee after all having honoured the equally ornery V.S. Naipaul and J.M. Coetzee. Houellebecq’s new novel Anéantir, published in January in a luxury edition of 300,000 copies, was a quasi-official event

The greatest ever social media spat took place before the first tweet was sent, and was conducted via fax, which was like email but with the satisfyingly tangible tear of a fresh missive just arrived from across the planet. It was early 1993 and Julie Burchill, then of the Modern Review, was locked in a war with Camille Paglia, then of any US talk show you cared to tune into. The conflict began with a disobliging review Burchill filed of Paglia’s Sexual Personae, before shifting to the Xerox front, where Paglia made the mistake of questioning her interlocutor’s working-class credentials. Burchill brought hostilities to an abrupt close with her final

Margaret Atwood is among the major writers of English fiction of our time. This is a very boring way to start a review, but it is true. Atwood, now 82, is prize-winning, popular and prolific. She’s won two Bookers. Several of her books have attained totemic status with readers, most obviously the reproductive dystopia of The Handmaid’s Tale, but also Cat’s Eye, for its steely portrayal of girlhood cruelty, and The Blind Assassin, which combines feminist grit with genre-straddling swagger. And there are so many books. Seventeen novels, more than a dozen collections of poetry, sundry shorter fictions and children’s stories, and multiple works of non-fiction, of which Burning Questions

According to Nina Power’s forceful and rather unusual What Do Men Want?, we in the West are currently engaged in a ‘battle over sex’. And while that has been going on, ‘another war is being waged. This one is against men, the whole damn lot of them!’ To back up this ‘war on men’ idea, Power cites, among other examples, I Hate Men, a book by the French writer Pauline Harmange in which she damns men as ‘violent, selfish, lazy and cowardly… men beat, rape and murder us’. Power’s argument is that the all-out assault on men has gone too far. The mistake, she says, is in ‘treating people as

All the questions around Britney Spears can be condensed into this one: who should we blame? For a long time, there was a comfortable narrative that the pop star’s decade-long descent — from virginal queen of teen in 1998, to junk-food scarfing, twice-divorced single mother, to broken woman being transported to hospital in restraints — was wholly her own doing. Britney was a train wreck, white trash, a hot mess and, all in all, no better than she ought to be. The fact that her career recovered dramatically after she was placed under a conservatorship arrangement in 2008 (giving her father ultimate control over her life and finances) seemed to

It is 1158. A 17-year-old girl, born of both rape and royal blood, is cast out of the French court and condemned to spend her days in a threadbare abbey in England. She will go on to become abbess and one of the dominant forces in the land, transforming her abbey from a shack into an institution grown fat on holy power. The girl is Marie de France, loosely based on the 12th-century poet, about whom very little is known. Into history’s silence steps the American novelist Lauren Groff, who imagines a character who seems remarkably familiar. For Marie is a strong, feminist lesbian, who doesn’t fit into her era’s

Is Lucy Ellmann serious? On the one hand, yes, very. The novel she published before this collection of essays was the Booker-shortlisted Ducks, Newburyport, which relayed the internal life of an Ohioan mother of four via a single sentence across 1,000 pages. Her publisher tells me that between the proof and final publication of Things Are Against Us, Ellman made 1,700 changes. She is, in short, an undoubted paragon of highbrow meticulousness. Then again and on the other hand, no, Ellmann is not being serious at all here. Things consists mostly of pieces written before the pandemic but is nonetheless influenced by the plague world into which it emerges, reacting

‘Something is afoot,’ wrote the academic philosopher Kathleen Stock in 2018: Beyond the academy, there’s a huge and impassioned discussion going on around the apparent conflict between women-who-are-not-transwomen’s rights and interests and transwomen’s rights and interests. And yet nearly all academic philosophers — including, surprisingly, feminist philosophers — are ignoring it. Material Girls picks up three years after Stock’s initial musings, and feminist philosophers are knee-deep in debate. Or is debate permitted in matters of gender ideology? During the past two decades there has been a concerted effort by the likes of Stonewall to override women’s sex-based rights in favour of ‘gender identity’. Trans ideology has become embedded within institutions