Feminism

So this week two things have got feminists cheering and whooping. First, the coming together of BBC women to demand a hike in their already eye-watering levels of pay. And secondly, the erasure of the walk-on women from darts, the sacking, effectively, of these beautiful, usually working-class women who bring a touch of glamour to a game dominated by portly blokes fond of their lager. Feminists applaud the wealthy, well-educated women of the Beeb who demand more money yet care not one jot for poorer women who, courtesy of the 21st-century lust for destroying outdated or allegedly offensive things, have just lost a source of their income. How brilliantly revealing.

Once again public figures are fanning themselves with shocked surprise at something perfectly comprehensible to everyone else: men behave boorishly when drunk, sans wives, in the company of young women in short skirts paid to make themselves friendly. Of course, what went on at the Dorchester that night is seriously not okay and it’s good news the Presidents Club is no more. But the problem wasn’t just the groping. It was the event itself, and specifically the model of philanthropy on display. Too many rich people see charity as something peripheral to the real business of life. Inoculated by their wealth from any exposure to the demand side of what charities

A year ago, I sang ‘Ye Banks and Braes’ by Robert Burns at the annual Scottish banquet at Manhattan’s University Club. Afterwards, my dinner partner, an American chap, asked me what it was about. Regret, I said. Just look at the last line. But my false lover stole my rose [virginity]. And ah! He left the thorn [unwanted pregnancy] with me.  The American is a feminist metropolitan, and so responded with due sensitivity. ‘Burns must have really understood women,’ he said. I agreed. From Burns’ love letters, it is evident that he used his way with words to climb inside their heads and, from there, into their beds. Burns fathered

It’s here, at last: the backlash against #MeToo. Finally people are sticking their heads above the parapet and asking if perhaps #MeToo has gone too far. They’re braving the inevitable fusillade of shaming tweets and accusations of ‘rape apologism’ to raise awkward questions about this hashtag movement. They’re wondering out loud if this movement that started life with the noble goal of exposing male abuse of women has now become too trigger-happy, too keen to demolish men on the basis of accusation alone, and too happy to go along with a view of women as fragile creatures in need of chaperoning. #MeToo’s dissenters have arrived, and about time too. The

As surely everyone must by now know, 2018 marks the centenary of women securing the vote in Britain. This monumental event represented a giant leap forward for sexual equality and is truly deserving of commemoration. There will, rightly, be television programmes, books column inches and tea towels marking the anniversary. Everyone should know about Sylvia Pankhurst, Emily Davison, Millicent Fawcett and their comrades. But there is a danger with every national commemoration that history is rewritten: in the retelling, some facts are conveniently forgotten and others distorted. We forget that 1918 also marks the first year that all men were able to vote and that suffrage was only granted to

It’s easy to see why the online dictionary Merriam-Webster chose ‘feminism’ as their word of the year. 2017 kicked off with women across the globe marching against Donald Trump and ended with Time magazine heralding the #MeToo ‘silence breakers’ as their person of the year. Every glossy double-page spread further established feminism as this year’s fashion. Head cheerleader Jessica Valenti, writing in the Guardian (naturally) is cock-a-hoop about feminism’s resurgence: ‘Now we just have to continue to make it the movement of the year (and next year, and the next) until women can start to feel safe in their own country.’ Which would make perfect sense if Valenti was referring to

‘What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open,’ wrote the American poet and activist Muriel Rukeyser in 1968. It took just short of half a century, but 2017 was the year in which #MeToo made this prophecy a reality. The phrase was coined in 2006 by the black American activist Tarana Burke, who was inspired to use it after finding herself without words when a 13-year-old girl confided in her that she had been sexually assaulted, later wishing she had just said ‘Me too’. But it spread virally – like some mass cyberspace inoculation against isolation – just a few weeks

Let’s take a moment to celebrate Lena Dunham. OK, so she stinks as an actress and her brand of self-indulgent, pity-me feminism leaves me cold. But credit where it’s due: she’s now managed to unite America’s culture-warring and politically divided population. Surely a Nobel Peace Prize nomination can’t be far behind. Loathing for Lena has gained such momentum it has spawned its own insult. It’s the worst insult that could possibly be levelled against a white, bourgeois but self-berating, feminist-identifying and politically ‘woke’ woman: ‘hipster racism’. For those struggling to keep up (aren’t we all nowadays?) Dunham has, over the years, fuelled panics about campus rape culture, suggesting ‘sexual assault

If there is one thing the reactions to the Harvey Weinstein accusations have confirmed, other than the common knowledge that human beings are corruptible and will sometimes try to exploit their position of superiority, it is feminism’s obsession with men in power. When confronted with Björk’s accusations of sexual harassment by Danish director Lars von Trier on the set of Dancer in the Dark, Trier’s producer, Peter Aalbæk, rejected the claim, maintaining that if anyone was to be made responsible for harassment it was the singer, who, he claimed, had been bossing the two men around. The online response to this male perspective on Björk as a dominant female was outraged

If someone had told you 10 years ago that it would soon become tantamount to a speechcrime to say ‘Men cannot get pregnant’, you would have thought them mad. That would be like punishing someone for saying, ‘Humans need oxygen to survive’. And yet here we are, in 2017, where PC has spun so violently out of control, and the cult of gender-neutrality has become so unwieldy, that one of the most controversial things you can say these days is: ‘Only women can get pregnant.’ Apparently that’s offensive to transmen (women who identify as men). ‘Men can get pregnant, too’, trans activists cry. Which strikes me as a real-life version

Very good piece from Giles Coren (as usual) on the intrusive and aggressive act of putting ‘xx’ at the end of emails. I had been thinking pretty much the same thing. I suppose one could quote Derrida and the structuralists and insist that there is no one-to-one relationship between the signifier (the ‘xx’) and the thing signified (putting your tongue halfway down some babe’s throat). There certainly isn’t when I do it. But there’s the fear. What if the recipient isn’t a structuralist? Incidentally, if you want to see where we are right now with this issue, just read the comments from Caroline Kirkpatrick.

Following a weekend crammed with ever more salacious revelations about Harvey Weinstein, hundreds of thousands of women have now taken to social media to share their own experiences of sexual harassment. This is called the ‘#MeToo’ movement, and it’s gone viral, in the way that these things do. According to Twitter, this reveals ‘the magnitude of sexual assault’. In reality, it does nothing of the sort. #MeToo tells us far more about the desire of some women to reach for victimhood status. The accusations against Weinstein include charges of rape; as such, they deserve to be taken seriously and tried in courts of law rather than by public opinion. At