Feminism

Monday

Katie Glass

Taylor Swift’s sexual assault case reveals feminism’s guilty secret

Despite Taylor Swift’s aspiration that her sexual assault trial last week should stand as an example for all women, what’s been notable outside the courtroom is how little support from the sisterhood Swift’s had. When Swift’s pop contemporary Kesha faced her own sexual assault case last year – against music producer Dr Luke – female celebrities clamoured to express their support. An MTV line-up of Divas tweeted their wishes: Lady Gaga, Ariana Grande, Kelly Clarkson, Lily Allen and Lorde made #freekesha trend. Even Adele used the headline-grabbing moment she collected her BRIT for Best Female Solo Artist to holler her encouragement for Kesha. By contrast, Swift’s case was met with deafening silence

Thursday

Jane Ridley

A feminist trailblazer

On the evening of 28 October 1908, two unremarkable middle-class women wearing heavy overcoats gained admission to the Ladies’ Gallery, high above the chamber in the House of Commons. Suffragettes had previously hit the headlines by chaining themselves to the railings at 10 Downing Street and, emboldened by this success, the leaders of the women’s movement planned an even more outrageous demonstration. The Ladies’ Gallery was surrounded by a metal grille, and this had huge significance for the suffragettes, as it symbolised their exclusion from the patriarchal political system. The plot was for two of them to chain themselves to the hated grille. One of the women chosen for the

Thursday

Julie Burchill

A cacophony of complaint

What sort of monster gives a bad review to a book by someone who was gang raped as a 12-year-old and subsequently goes on to eat herself to over 40 stone? Probably the sort of monster who’s never read a book about fatness as a feminist issue which she found convincing. Here we go again: ‘This is what most girls are taught — we should be slender and small. We should not take up space. And most women know this — that we are supposed to disappear.’ This ignores the fact that plump women were a benchmark of beauty in the past — when women had no rights whatsoever —

Monday

Joanna Williams

The BBC sisterhood has made the ultimate sacrifice – and asked for a pay rise

The sisterhood is, apparently, ‘in full flow’ at the BBC. Since the publication last week of the salaries of its 96 highest paid presenters, discussion of the institution’s gender pay gap has filled air time and column inches. How can it be right that Clare Balding is paid less than Gary Lineker? Or that John Humphrys earns more than Sarah Montague? But if being paid less than their male colleagues wasn’t bad enough, female presenters must, it seems, also use their ‘strong and loud voices’ on ‘behalf of all’ to tackle the entrenched sexism endemic not just within the BBC but everywhere. In an open letter to the BBC’s Director

Thursday

James Delingpole

Dethroned by feminism

I’m a bit worried about Game of Thrones (Sky Atlantic). Not seriously worried: there’s too much money invested, too much narrative hinterland accrued, too much fan-loyalty not to frustrate, too engaging a cast, too brilliant an original conception for the makers to cock it up too badly. Nevertheless, there were a couple of things that troubled me about the first episode of season seven. One: Ed Sheeran. He’s not the first pop star to make a cameo appearance in Thrones — that honour fell a while back to purveyors of epic, weirdy-warbly, Icelandic whale-music-rock, Sigur Ros — but he’s definitely the most obtrusive. When Sigur Ros did it, no sooner

Tuesday

Julie Burchill

The Princess generation needs to grow up

I never dreamed I’d see the day when I agreed with Miriam González Durántez – such a snob that she believes people can be socially snubbed by being given Hellman’s mayonnaise, such a Euro-bore that she found Brexit ‘devastating’ and so short-sighted that she sees sex with Nick Clegg as a reasonable proposition. But with this recent Twitter rant, I quite warmed to her: ‘When you have a 2.30 hours delay in a British Airways flight (what is happening to this airline!?) open the inflight shop magazine and want to scream: STOP-CALLING-GIRLS-LITTLE-PRINCESSES!! It cannot be so difficult for an airline to get this right…’ Mind you, it’s pretty likely that

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 13 July 2017

The hen party was seated at an outside restaurant table under the plane trees when I arrived. They sat with straight backs conversing normally, looked cool and lovely, and everything appeared seemly. Yet it was now ten o’clock on their first night on tour. They seemed unusually glad to see their chauffeur; apart from this, there was nothing to suggest that they were even slightly drunk. Appearances might have been deceptive, however, for they were all of them privately and expensively educated young women. I was bidden to be seated and offered a glass of wine, which I accepted. I sat and sipped and listened to their chatter. That something

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

Comic relief | 1 June 2017

In such times as these, enough to try a man’s soul, a dose of John Finnemore is advisable. His brand of comedy, as fans of Cabin Pressure will know, makes you laugh out loud (unlike, I fear, a lot of the programmes in that 6.30 p.m. slot on Radio 4). His quirky stabs at the absurdity of human nature are guaranteed to cheer even the most awful of days because they’re so simply drawn, etched in clear, sharp lines, and because they celebrate rather than bewail our frailties; life’s tendency to make you fall flat on your face just as you thought you were about to make it big time.

Thursday

Michael Beloff

No ordinary judge

Justice McCardie was anything but a conventional High Court judge. He left school at 15 and was called to the bar at 25. After ten years of provincial practice he turned down the offer from Joseph Chamberlain of a safe Conservative seat, although politics was then the conventional highway to the bench (unlike now when it is a cul de sac). He also rejected an offer of silk, after withdrawing an earlier application which he thought the lord chancellor had been too slow to consider, and was, on the initiative of H.H. Asquith, the then liberal prime minister, appointed to the bench at 47 — the youngest of his generation

Monday

Brendan O’Neill

By their own logic, feminists should support Marine Le Pen

Why aren’t feminists lining up behind Le Pen? I thought women had a moral responsibility to back women standing for office? That’s certainly what they said during the Hillary-Trump clash. Yes, I am voting for Hillary because she’s a woman, because she ‘knows what it’s like to menstruate, be pregnant, give birth’, said one American feminist. So does Le Pen. She has three children. According to the rather crude biologism of feminist identitarianism, that makes her an even better candidate than Hillary, who has one kid. So why the silence, feminists? Aren’t you ‘With Her’? Looking back at the Hillary love-in, its remarkable how much it hinged on ‘Hillary’s a

Thursday

Laura Gascoigne

A woman of genius

‘Your favourite virtue?’ ‘I don’t have any: they are all boring,’ wrote the 21-year-old Camille Claudel in a Victorian album belonging to an English friend in 1886. The remark perfectly matches the photograph of the aspiring sculptor taken two years earlier by César: childlike, sullen, attitudinous, beautiful. Claudel was in England on a break from working in Auguste Rodin’s studio, where she had been taken on as an assistant in 1884. She had met Rodin through her mentor Alfred Boucher, who discovered her precocious teenage talent on a visit to his hometown of Nogent-sur-Seine in the 1870s, and continued to supervise her subsequent studies in Paris. When Boucher left for

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 23 March 2017

Speaking for Scotland Sir: I wonder if it is wise of Charles Moore (Notes, 18 March) to assume — as so many do — that because they lost the independence referendum back in 2014, the Nationalists do not speak for Scotland? In the following general election Scottish voting virtually wiped out every political party north of the border, other than the SNP. Might it not be wiser to assume that the Scots had thought again? Ian Olson Aberdeen Birds, gangs and economics Sir: Simon Barnes is correct in his implication that the trapping and harvesting of small birds by criminal gangs in Cyprus is enough to make the average Briton

Dot Wordsworth

Girls

Sir Roger Gale sounds like an old-bufferish knight of the shires, but he once worked as a disc-jockey on a pirate radio station. Last week he got into hot water when he said on the radio that his wife was ‘utterly dedicated to her job, as indeed are the other girls in my office’. Before he knew it, Today got some American academic on air to denounce him. ‘We know, looking in the dictionary,’ she said, ‘that girl means a young woman only up to the age of 11 or 12.’ This bossy woman should get a bigger dictionary to look in. There is plenty of evidence that girl has

Jonathan Mcaloon

Let’s hear it for the boys

Girls creator Lena Dunham has received criticism from all sides. Detractors on the right see her as an exhibitionist provocateur. Those on the left see her as a privileged narcissist, who can’t help but see feminism through a white middle-class prism — and who unforgivably rooted for Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders. The HBO show that made Dunham’s name, which she has written and starred in since her early twenties, is on its final season. It has portrayed the young lives and friendships of four millennial women trying to succeed, or just subsist, in New York, and how their dreams either lose grandeur when they come true or don’t come

Thursday

Melanie McDonagh

Got the message?

To cut to the chase, my ten-year-old daughter really liked Beauty and the Beast. And given you’re probably going to be watching this as a child’s plus-one, I’d say hers is the view that matters. Her favourite character was Le Fou, the baddie’s gay sidekick, though I’m not sure she realised. But then the gay scene that Disney’s been making such a fuss about, in which the adorably camp and chubby Josh Gad gives Luke Evans — the fabulous Gaston — a bit of a shoulder massage when they’re relaxing at the inn, honestly isn’t such a big deal. Sorry. This would be a digression, except that there’s been so

Tobias Grey

His dark materials | 16 March 2017

The enticingly subversive films of Paul Verhoeven were very tempting to me as a schoolboy. When I hit 14, the Dutch director released RoboCop and the excitement among me and my friends at catching two hours of unmitigated ultra-violence reached fever pitch. He did not disappoint. That was in 1988 and it was interesting later on to read several newspaper articles accusing Verhoeven of having made a fascistic screed in favour of zero-tolerance law enforcement. This was not something any of us had considered up to that point, but satire, yes, even back then we had an inkling of what that was and RoboCop seemed to fit the bill nicely.

Saturday

Jonathan Mcaloon

Buffy the Vampire Slayer made me the man I am

Buffy the Vampire Slayer turned 20 yesterday, which will make millennials feel as old as the actors who supposedly passed for teenagers back then. When Buffy came out I was eight. At first I was hooked by the horror aesthetic. Later I began to appreciate how it dealt with adolescent crises through supernatural allegory. But only now do I realise how lucky I was to have grown up with an empowered feminist to look up to (and have my first crush on). For those who didn’t watch Joss Whedon’s show between 1997 and 2003, Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar) is a popular cheerleader type who falls in social status after she finds out she

Thursday

Rod Liddle

What I did on International Women’s Day

It was International Women’s Day on Wednesday of this last week. The Guardian had enjoined its readers to send in reports of what they had done to advance the struggle, or how they had been in some way oppressed by men — perhaps raped, or talked to as if they were stupid, or looked at a little coldly when they squirted breast milk over fellow diners at The Ivy. I tried to think of something I had done for the cause but came up short, sad to say. So instead I tried to show solidarity by spending a substantial amount of International Women’s Day looking at a photograph of Emma

Thursday

Charlotte Gill

Emma Watson’s ‘have your cake and eat it’ feminism is hard to swallow

There’s a real whiff of hypocrisy about Emma Watson’s latest shoot for Vanity Fair, in which she poses semi-nude. Women’s magazines will tell you it’s stunning, artistic, so feminist, and the rest, but the lady doth pose too much, methinks. This is, after all, the gal who’s spent the last three years lecturing others about breaking away from the limitations of gender; who once said ‘with airbrushing and digital manipulation, fashion can be an unobtainable image that’s dangerously unhealthy.’ Yeah, yeah. It’s Watson’s brand of ‘have your cake and eat it’ feminism that has proven particularly bothersome; a variety that has largely been swallowed up by the public, ever since her appointment as the UN Women Goodwill

Thursday

Joanna Williams

The post-fact world suits feminism just fine

We now know that the video of a cyclist confronting a catcalling driver, which spent much of yesterday being circulated on social media and covered in the national press, was staged. Barely had viewers finished cheering on the woman as she tore the wing mirror off the side of her harasser’s van than the truth emerged. An eyewitness told the Sun, ‘They practiced the scene two or three times with the motorbike riding behind them. You could see there was already damage to the wing mirror, it was loose.’ The company that hosted the video, Jungle Creations, has now issued a statement claiming that although it was under the impression that