Feminism

Was Jane Austen really the best idea the women could come up with? Furious campaigning from feminists has resulted in the rather mimsy authoress being chosen to adorn the back of our new ten quid notes. There’s another woman, of course, on the other side – the Queen. But as she’s an inbred fascist agent of imperialism, she doesn’t really count as a proper woman, apparently. My own suggestion – Mary Seacole, the partly black lady who helped out a bit in the Crimean War – fell on deaf ears. But it’s not too late to change. And if not Mary, how about someone who represents modern British womanhood in

‘I embrace Barbie because I’m not threatened by her,’ says my friend Pippa, an early 40-ish antiques dealer from London who lives in Berlin. We are standing inside the ‘Barbie Dreamhouse Experience’, a 2,500-square metre Barbie museum; a pink monstrosity erected last month in a parking lot near Alexanderplatz. Inside, one can bake imaginary cupcakes, saunter down a fashion runway and gawk at the contents of Barbie’s hall of shoes. It’s a little out of place in the midst of the communist-era Plattenbau (pre-fabricated, council-style) apartment blocks that surround it. In 1989, East German activists gathered not far from this spot to welcome the downfall of socialist dictatorship. This year,

A female friend asked me to a burlesque night she had organised. She honestly thought I would enjoy it. ‘Come and see naked women who aren’t being exploited,’ she said. My friend said this because I sometimes hide from the world in the dark caves of Hackney, where ladies collect pounds in a pint glass and then turn around a pole with all the joie de vivre of a rusty weathervane in a light gale. On a wet weekday afternoon there are typically six or seven punters in these stews, who half-watch the show while drinking lager, munching crisps and thumbing through Loot or watching the cricket on the screen in

This week, I bring you a dispatch from the frontline of pseudo-intellectual, metropolitan navel-gazing. This is, after all, what you pay me for. So right now the big thing for people who consider themselves warriors against nasty isms and phobias (of the sexism and homophobia varieties, not the Blairism and arachnophobia varieties) is to undermine each other constantly via accusations of intrinsic privilege. ‘I am a feminist!’ declares somebody, via a book or blog or Tumblr or tweet. ‘Aha!’ retort others, ever vigilant for this sort of thing. ‘But have you canvassed the views of Somalian refugees who are weekending female impersonators in Anglesea?’ ‘Um, no?’ replies our proto-feminist. ‘Check

Mr Steerpike has checked his privilege, and he’s a radical feminist. Middle class, self-loathing and instinctively liberal, how could he not be? A devotee of feminist blogs, I was intrigued to read MadamJ-Mo saying that she felt ‘cheated’ by Laurie Penny’s Meat Market, a pamphlet published in 2011. And MadamJ-Mo has a point. Compare this passage from page 62 of Penny’s pamphlet: ‘Judith Ramirez, co-ordinator of the Toronto-based International Coalition to End Domestics’ Exploitation (INTERCEDE) insists that there is no simple solution to what she calls “a modern day variation on the slave trade” – hiring a nanny or a housekeeper is really a question of women trying to fend for

STK is a steakhouse at the bottom of the ME Hotel on the Aldwych. (This is a real name for a real hotel. The cult of individualism has finally reached its apogee in the hotel sense, and, if you are curious, it looks like a piece of St Tropez that fell off and hit the Embankment.) The restaurant itself looks like a love ball, or a stupid person’s idea of what is sexy, or Hugh Hefner’s personal imago. It is dark and made of MDF in varying degrees of glisten and smear; if STK were a movie it would be Showgirls, in which the protagonist writhes like a dolphin in

What do Margaret Thatcher, Sheryl Sandberg and Angela Merkel have in common? They are the ultimate alpha-female icons, according to Alison Wolf. In this week’s Spectator cover feature, Alison examines the ultra-competitive female elites who are pulling ahead and leaving the rest of the ‘sisterhood’ behind. On this week’s View from 22 podcast, the Spectator’s deputy editor Mary Wakefield discusses with Alison what makes an alpha female, why they are only interested in alpha males and how feminism is response for this new divide. Melissa Kite and Gary Lingard also debate whether the world now revolves around cyclists. In this week’s magazine, Melissa argues that beautiful country paths should stop be turned into tarmac cycle routes. But Gary Lingard, the former

Glasgow University Union is in the headlines again. The story at first sight appears typical of the petty campus rows to which undergraduates attach passionate importance but which bore the rest of the world. On closer consideration, it encompasses issues of free speech and political control that are of genuine concern. At the recently held final round of the Glasgow University Union (GUU) Ancients debating competition, involving the older-established British universities, two female speakers complained of being heckled and booed during their speeches and of being subjected to sexist abuse. One girl was from Cambridge, the other from Edinburgh University. As a reprisal, Cambridge has announced it will not send

I was seated at a rather stiff and formal BBC dinner a dozen or so years back, one of those ghastly occasions upon which the boss class attempt, painfully, to commune with the corporation untermenschen over noisette of chicken, or something similar. There were perhaps 15 of us, drawn from various levels of the BBC strata, with the then head of news — and now director-general — Tony Hall seated somewhere democratically in the middle. Along from me was a lowly but attractive female production assistant whose dining was interrupted by an unwelcome hand snaking along her inner thigh. The errant hand belonged to the well-lubricated reporter on her immediate