Feminism

Thursday

Michael Hann

The grrrls are back in town

The last time Bikini Kill played in London was in a room that now serves as the restaurant of a pub in Kentish Town. What a change 26 years can bring: on their return to the city last week, they filled the 5,000-capacity O2 Academy, Brixton, for two nights. That changed status, in truth, is not the result of the timelessness of their music — scrappy punk rock that at its most tuneful was pleasingly familiar and at its least tuneful approximated the sound of fingernails scraping down a blackboard at extreme volume. So why had 10,000 people bought tickets to see them in London? Some of them, doubtless, actually

Kate Chisholm

The sea, the sea

Walking into Fingal’s Cave, after scrambling across the rocks to reach it from the landing stage where the boat from Mull arrives, is a strangely emotional experience. It’s not just the extraordinary landscape, the precise, almost unnatural shaping of the hexagonal basalt columns that rise up high above you, the screeching of gulls and roaring of the sea as it enters and leaves the cave. That’s enough to provoke a sense of wonder. But there’s also so much history attached to the place since it was discovered by the Romantics and became the epitome of the sentimental landscape, awesome in scale, and also quite frightening. Mendelssohn, Walter Scott and Turner

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Poetic and profound

Kenneth Lonergan, who wrote the movie Manchester by the Sea, shapes his work from loss, disillusionment, small-mindedness, hesitation and superficiality, all the forgettable detritus of life. The Starry Messenger is about Mark, a disappointed astronomer aged 52, who gives public lectures at a city planetarium. He loves his subject even though it let him down and every week he tackles the daft questions of his pupils with superhuman patience. The same two pests always raise their hands. One is a burly misanthrope who disbelieves all experts, the other is a high-flying oddball who craves attention. Mark starts a slow-burn affair with Angela, a single mum who needs a role model

Thursday

Damian Thompson

Life’s a Beach

At the Wigmore Hall last Friday, the Takacs String Quartet and Garrick Ohlsson played a piano quintet that was once revered as a masterpiece but then fell out of fashion and wasn’t heard for decades. It’s by Amy Beach, a name which always makes me smile because it looks so incongruous underneath her photograph. ‘Amy Beach’ sounds like an old hippie who sells ethnic tapestries and hogs the limelight at her women-only Seattle book club. But the photos show a Bostonian society hostess straight out of Henry James: unsmiling, with eyes peeled for a social climber who picks up the wrong knife at dinner. The 21st-century musical establishment portrays Beach

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Get your kit off

After its new costume drama You Go, Girl! (Sundays) about how amazing, empowered and better-than-men women are, especially if they are lesbians, the BBC ran its first ever Nike ad. At least that’s what I thought initially: rap music, moody shots of athletes, very high production values. Then I saw they were all grim-faced women and the word ‘RISE’ in flames and I thought: ‘Big new drama series? About girls who’ve been sucked into this very strict Christian cult, a bit like the Handmaid’s Tale, maybe?’ Then I noticed they were all wearing football kit and kicking balls around, and went back to my original Nike idea. Finally came the

Thursday

Lee Langley

Fire and fury

Everyone behaves badly in The Polyglot Lovers — no saving graces. It’s a complex, shifting structure of sex, self-hatred and misogyny, examining what the author calls ‘the violence in the male gaze’. Its blithe disregard for social norms and finer feelings is exhilarating; it’s pitiless and scathingly funny. The women invariably make wincingly bad decisions. Feminism for the Fleabag generation? Nothing is simple here, in a world as disorientating as a hall of mirrors. The novel has three parts, each with a narrator and the story is told backwards as it teasingly reveals its leading character — not a person, but a manuscript that will change all three narrators’ lives.

Thursday

Lionel Shriver

It’s time for feminists to call it quits

You would think that the British Film Institute’s sponsorship of a month-long festival celebrating some of the most memorable female characters in cinema would draw plaudits from feminists. You would be wrong. Featuring the likes of Nicole Kidman in To Die For, Meryl Streep in Death Becomes Her and Bette Davis in The Little Foxes, the BFI’s programme ‘Playing the Bitch’ is meant to explore the female anti-hero. But in a petition originating with academics at King’s College London, 300 signatories have objected that the festival’s theme ‘uncritically parrots rather than questions the misogynist logics that inform so much Hollywood cinema… The women of Bitches do not subvert gender norms,

Thursday

Virginia Ironside

Not him, too

Over a drink recently I sat next to a man who announced, barely before he’d taken his first sip, that he was a feminist. ‘Like you,’ he added ingratiatingly. Like me?!? Poor sap. Did he imagine that this creepy statement would actually endear me to him? That I admired his courageous stand and was prepared to hang on his every word? Not a bit of it. From that moment, I despised him. Firstly, I’m no feminist and never have been. Like Mary Wollstonecraft, I’m an equal-but-differentist, or would be if such a thing existed. And I have no desire to get my own back on women’s oppressors, if indeed, today,

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Twitting the twits

Titania McGrath is the alter ego of the schoolteacher Andrew Doyle. A perpetually enraged ‘activist, healer and radical intersectional poet’, her job was to lampoon the imbecilities of the achingly ‘woke’ middle class left, and expose the manifest contradictions in what they were spouting. Her forum for this was, of course, that vast lagoon of hastily jabbered nonsense, Twitter — and it was very effective. So effective that for a while Twitter users could not be sure that it was a joke at all — an understandable confusion, given the real-life existence of people such as the journalists Laurie Penny and Suzanne Moore, for example, or the French academic Myriam

Hermione Eyre

Medieval girl power

Women who can — however tenuously — be described as ‘rebel girls’ are big in publishing now. Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls sold 3.5 million copies in hardback, reflecting a huge cultural push to discover and venerate women in history who kicked over the traces. To publishers, real-life rebel princesses have cool hard-cash value. In this context we come to this book, a scholarly work effortfully seeking out the ‘you-go-girl’ moments of the notoriously woke 13th century. Kelcey Wilson-Lee, who has a doctorate in medieval history from Royal Holloway and works in the development office at Cambridge University overseeing regional philanthropy, has an underlying agenda. But she also has the

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Brideshead revisited

Nicholas Hytner’s new show, Alys, Always, is based on a Harriet Lane novel that carries a strong echo of Brideshead. A well-educated journalist, Frances, becomes entangled with the wealthy Kyte family (the closeness to ‘Flyte’ is doubtless intentional), and she befriends the silly daughter, Polly, before setting her sights on the enigmatic father, Laurence, a famous scribbler who never gives interviews. This slow-moving tale is intercut with scenes from Frances’s day job at a failing newspaper where the staff keep getting the boot. But Frances, mystifyingly, retains her post. How come? Floppiness is her most conspicuous quality. She’s a watchful sponge with no wit, charm or intellect, and for most

Thursday

Deborah Ross

Now, that’s better

Captain Marvel is the 654th film in the Marvel franchise — the figure is something like that, I think — and as the first one to be female-led it was mercilessly trolled before its release by the fan boys. ‘This movie is gonna bomb like no other and they only have themselves to blame,’ was one typical remark. The nastiness escalated further when the film’s star, Brie Larson, said she was sick of being interviewed by ‘white dudes’ while doing promotion and asked why so many film critics are white and male. (78 per cent are, according to the latest research.) I don’t know why I’m telling you all this

Thursday

Soutiam Goodarzi

Under cover of darkness

It was World Hijab Day earlier this month. You probably missed it, but you can imagine the idea: ‘global citizens’ of all faiths and backgrounds were asked to cover their heads for a day ‘in solidarity with Muslim women worldwide’. It is done in ‘recognition of millions of Muslim women who choose to wear the hijab and live a life of modesty’. Wearing a hijab is not such an abstract cause for me: I used to wear one a few years ago when I was at school in Iran. And in the spirit of solidarity, I’d like to tell you a bit more about the world I left behind when

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

Let’s hear it for the girls

Whether by accident or design, Zoë Ball took over the coveted early-morning slot on Radio 2 this week just as Radio 4 launched another of its Riot Girls series, celebrating ‘extraordinary’ women writers, those who have overturned convention, risen up against the status quo, proved themselves to be just as capable as their male oppressors (if not more so). Ball launched herself on to the airwaves on Monday morning at a pace it was hard to keep up with when it was still dark outside and the house had not yet warmed up. Her first track, that key statement of how she intends to reshape the breakfast show, give it

Sunday

Lara Prendergast

Should we all write ‘feminist’ stocking fillers? | 23 December 2018

I arrived at Waterloo, half an hour before my train departed. Needing to buy a birthday card, I popped into Oliver Bonas, a shop which sells ‘lifestyle gifts’. I came across marble cheeseboards and gin-and-tonic scented candles. If you are looking for a lemon juicer shaped like a cactus, you will find one in Oliver Bonas. The shop also sells ‘gift books’. Most are aimed at women and quite a few have the word ‘feminist’ in their title. There is one called Vajournal: An Interactive Diary for Feminists. It invites the reader to engage with ‘thought-provoking activities’ and describe their ‘worst and best sexual experiences’ as well as any instances

Thursday

Lara Prendergast

Should we all write ‘feminist’ stocking fillers?

I arrived at Waterloo, half an hour before my train departed. Needing to buy a birthday card, I popped into Oliver Bonas, a shop which sells ‘lifestyle gifts’. I came across marble cheeseboards and gin-and-tonic scented candles. If you are looking for a lemon juicer shaped like a cactus, you will find one in Oliver Bonas. The shop also sells ‘gift books’. Most are aimed at women and quite a few have the word ‘feminist’ in their title. There is one called Vajournal: An Interactive Diary for Feminists. It invites the reader to engage with ‘thought-provoking activities’ and describe their ‘worst and best sexual experiences’ as well as any instances

Thursday

Toby Young

Truth, lies and trans rights

On 21 November, a debate took place in the House of Commons about proposals to reform the Gender Recognition Act to make it easier for transgender people to self-identify as men or women. Among the public, this is a widely discussed issue, with most echoing the concerns of feminists about the risks of allowing biological males to enter women’s changing rooms, etc. But until last week the issue hadn’t been debated in the Commons, partly because MPs who have reservations about changing the law are afraid to speak out. Sure enough, nearly all the backbench MPs who contributed to the debate toed the line of the trans-rights activists. The ex-lobby

James Walton

Secrets and lies | 29 November 2018

Shortly before her husband’s funeral, the undertaker told the eponymous main character in Mrs Wilson (BBC1, Tuesday) that, ‘We’re here to make this tragic time as straightforward as possible.’ By then, though, we already knew this remark was the kind that, in a school set book, would soon be underlined with the words ‘Dramatic irony!!’ written in the margin. That’s because in its quiet way — devoid of both globetrotting locations and international terrorism — Mrs Wilson is as tangled and morally ambiguous as The Little Drummer Girl. The opening episode began in the far-off days of 1963: so far off, in fact, that Alison Wilson (Ruth Wilson) was first

Thursday

Frances Wilson

‘I don’t want to explain myself’

There is an African bird called the ox-pecker with which Germaine Greer, conversant as she is with the natural world, will doubtless be familiar. Oxpeckers ride on the backs of large mammals — giraffes, buffalo, wildebeest and the like — feeding off their lice. Once thought an example of mutualism, the relationship between diner and host is now understood to be more complex than this. On the one hand oxpeckers reduce the larvae, and on the other they jab their beaks into any open wounds on the hide in order to keep the blood fresh. Elizabeth Kleinhenz is Germaine Greer’s ox- (or rather Oz-) pecker. A few years younger than

Thursday

Toby Young

Science is on the side of the trans activists

Some interesting scientific research on gender differences was published last week. Two social scientists studied the preferences of 80,000 people in 76 countries to determine whether there’s a link between the attitudes of men and women to risk-taking, patience, altruism, trust and so on, and how advanced a country is in terms of economic development and gender equality. If gender is a social construct, as many feminists claim, you’d expect men and women’s preferences to be more divergent in places like Pakistan, Malaysia and Nigeria, where gender roles are quite traditional and women have fewer economic opportunities, than in the Nordic countries. However, the opposite is true. The researchers discovered