Feminism

A new peer-reviewed study of the Cass Review, the UK project that was used to stop trans teens’ healthcare, has been published.

The shrieking about this is because those who have made the decision as adults – and good luck to ’em, wholly free to do so – require their decision to be validated by the next generation containing more people taking the same decision.

For, if people look at the decisions taken by the generation ahead then say “Naaah, Mate” then and therefore those decisions taken by that earlier generation are called into question. Sure, sure, this happens to everyone and every generation. What in buggery were beehive hairdos, Cadbury’s Smash or Oasis ever about, eh? But when it comes to hacking your own genitals off there’s a little less willingness to go ah, well, mistakes and a little more insistence upon being confirmed in that choice by those following.

“Why aren’t women having babies?” It’s the question on everyone’s lips as the fertility rate plummets to a record low in England, Scotland and Wales. A range of answers are always trotted out, from the entirely reasonable (childcare and housing costs; the motherhood career penalty) to the ludicrous (being so dim about our own fertility that we wake up one day realising we’ve left it too late). Yet perhaps it’s time we ask not only “why aren’t women having babies?”, but also “why aren’t men?”

Men are largely invisible in the birthrate debate. It’s ironic that amid all the pontificating and the policy ideas for encouraging more women to have babies – a conversation often being had by men – the other half of humanity is strikingly underexamined. Part of the problem is an absence of data: like many European countries, we don’t really have any on male fertility. Without data, we only have half the picture.

For the past 50 years the insistence has been that it’s always, only, the woman’s choice.

Now you’re wondering?

“Our women, our daughters are scared to walk the streets,” Tommy Robinson told tens of thousands of cheering supporters at last Saturday’s “unite the kingdom” rally. “Their safety has been taken from them,” he said, his voice croaking from the strain of shouting into his microphone. Communities were crumbling, he added, “at the hands of open border, mass uncontrolled immigration”.

The need to protect women and children from the threat posed by illegal immigration has this summer become an increasingly frequent rallying cry used by politicians on the right to justify a hardening anti-immigrant rhetoric.

That all and any immigrant is a danger to each and every woman is too strong of course. But large numbers of young men from less than feminist societies, well, could be, could be….

In the US, the notion that male politicians need to protect women and children comes packed together with a shift towards a new strand of patriarchy, where the “tradwives” movement is fashionable, where masculine energy in the workplace is praised by Mark Zuckerberg, where a pro-natalist vision is promoted by Elon Musk

This being the Guardian of course the actual concnern spirals off into not whether the claims are true or not but their effect on gender politics.

Sigh.

Caroline Hayes is a researcher and narrative strategist, specializing in the intersection of tech, culture and gender; Carolina Hidalgo-McCabe is an organizer, researcher and the host of The Masking Tapes, a podcast that explores 21st century masculinity and the gender divide; Alice Lassman is a policy expert, with her forthcoming book exploring how AI’s influence on gender and emotions are reshaping economic life.

Do we actually care what such people pretend to think? Especially as they’re tryinng to analyse the Battle of the Sexes through Sabrina Carpenter song lyrics.

Carpenter bottles the palpable exasperation of young women’s experiences with emotionally unprepared partners. And her feelings show up in the data. Women are more likely than men to say dating is harder than it was 10 years ago and they are twice as likely to cite physical and emotional risk as the reason why. The disproportionate emotional labor placed on women in relationships, paired with rising economic insecurity, does not compute.

Sigh.

There is “no evidence” that women have a problem sharing female-only spaces with transgender women, lawyers representing an NHS board have argued.

When the entire case is about Sandie Peggie, who does object.

“By and large most women don’t mind very much” could be supportable. Mebbe. “We’re here in a court case about someone objecting but there is no evidence any women care at all” is not.

But that’s not everyone, not even close to the whole generation. Instead, millennials are weighing up the cost of childcare, the overburdened NHS, decades of cuts to the infrastructure that allowed Brits to become parents comfortably, or at least manageably. I know some who’ve moved to cheaper cities in the UK specifically to have a child, or to be closer to grandparent daycare. But I also know that I’m not alone in my position, of hoping that easier days are coming, and that I’ll find a way to have a child when they do.

Today’s pampered little darlings simply aren’t grasping how much their parents – and even more, their grandparents – gave up when they had children.

There never has been a time “comfortably” when measured against today’s living standards. It’s a delusion.

If people actually knew what living standards were like in the 60s and 70s perhaps there’d be less whingeing?

As a child June Wilkinson knew that she wanted to go on stage and dreamt of becoming a ballerina until, as she later recalled, “my breasts got too big”. Disappointed as she was that she was never going to dance with the Royal Ballet, she asked her dance teacher if she had other options. An audition was organised for her at London’s Windmill Theatre and by the age of 15, in 1955, she was appearing topless in the venue’s celebrated revue.

It was the start of a career path that may have been considered orthodox at the time but which now seems unenlightened, to say the least.

It would be on OnlyFans now so the location has changed. Other than that, not a lot different.

Does James Bond have to be played by a man? Helen Mirren seems to think so
Zoe Williams

Bond is masculine. No doubt about it, male.

Anyone unaware of that will have trouble working out how to breed.

Remember when having women in power was supposed to change everything?
Gaby Hinsliff

But not for the better…..

Yrs, Tufton Bufton Bt.

An Edinburgh Fringe venue has apologised for letting the gender-critical Deputy First Minister of Scotland appear at one of its events.

Summerhall Arts issued an apology to other performers at the venue for its “oversight” in allowing Kate Forbes, who backs single-sex spaces for women, to be interviewed on stage last week as part of The Herald newspaper’s Unspun Live series.

Several artists at the venue were performing in shows with gay or transgender themes, and some set up a “safe room” because they claimed they were “terrified” while Ms Forbes was in the building, the Daily Mail reported.

There’s no point in deriding them as effeminate pansies really now, is there? But it is very wet indeed.

Imagine that we had no word for cancer and no recognition of the varieties of ways it manifests, so that we just had occasional lurid news stories about strange and sometimes fatal growths in various parts of various people, not connecting the versions in brains to the versions in prostates and breasts. If we didn’t recognize the common denominators, we couldn’t develop diagnoses and treatments or address root causes. Feminism has in fact offered a diagnosis, steadily, for decades and centuries: that the cause is misogyny and the violence is intended to perpetrate the inequality, exploitation and subordination of women. But the one-case stories avoid this recognition by treating something ubiquitous as exceptional and isolated.

Cancers are different, Love. Cancer is, really, a collective noun……

Women should be prosecuted for having sex with monks, Thai politicians have proposed, amid a nationwide scandal over an alleged “blackmailing seductress”.

At least nine monks have been disrobed for allegedly having sex with a woman accused of subsequently extorting them for millions.

A committee in the senate has proposed amending the law to allow for the criminal prosecution of women who engage in sexual relations with monks.

Note they’re not prosecuting the monks who’ve been naughty boys…..and this particular woman can already be prosecuted for blackmail anyway.

Which really is sexist. As opposed to mild comments about tatas which produce payouts here.

Mrs Obama previously addressed rumours of strains on her marriage in May, telling reporters: “If I were having problems with my husband, everybody would know about it.”

She has also suggested that speculation about the state of her and her husband’s relationship is rooted in sexism.

How is that?

“We as women, I think we struggle with, like disappointing people,” she recently told podcast host Sophia Bush.

“So much so that this year people were, they couldn’t even fathom that I was making a choice for myself, that they had to assume that my husband and I are divorcing… that’s what society does to us.”

Nope, I’ve no clue what she means either.

The woman the front row most want to look like

I am a woman who has been fat since I was about eight; I am now in my early 50s. I have been on Ozempic for almost two years. I have lost almost 50 kilos and can now do a whole lot of things that I wasn’t physically able to do before, which is great. But people treat me differently now. I had my work review and I am doing less but got feedback about how much more I am doing. I have been asked if I am looking to date, and even if I am thinking of having a child, both questions I never was asked when I was bigger. I didn’t think people treated me badly before, and still don’t, but now I am seeing that there is a difference. It is not comfortable for me. I am not at risk of putting the weight back on but how do I navigate the difference in how people are treating me?

We’ll have news at 11.

“I’ve not used Tinder, but I have paid once to filter for height on Hinge,” says one Guardian reader who wishes to remain anonymous. “I am a tall woman – 6ft without shoes – and dating is a challenge, because I am only attracted to men who are taller than me. This is not a question of vanity, or of wanting to be seen with a man who is more alpha or impressive … holding hands with and hugging a shorter man feels like I’m being affectionate with a child. It makes me feel enormous, even though I have a slim figure and am confident in my appearance.”

So it is a matter of vanity and alpha then.

Wouldn’t worry about it, it’s one of those things rather built in…..

Helen Lewis devotes her angry, witty book to a narrowly polemical account of the notion and its myth-making boosters. For her, genius is “a rightwing concept”, offensive “because it champions the individual over the collective”.

Because that individual difference is rather the point of the definition of genius. So we’ve an entire book wholly missing the point.

Multiple women have accused Jared Leto of impropriety, with some calling the 53-year-old actor and musician’s behavior “predatory, terrifying and unacceptable”.

In a new report by Air Mail on Saturday, nine women have come forward to accuse Leto of engaging in inappropriate behavior over the years, including flirting with teenagers.

Film star smiles at 18 year old. Jail ‘im.

OK, OK, chats up 16 year olds. And?

Long essay in The G.

Apparently blokes do stuff.

No, that’s it. Without any societal planning, consideration of the social good, blokes just up and do stuff.

Innit terrible?

One of my pet theories is that – for wimmins, of course – there’s a certain basic amount of whingeing that is going to happen. If the cave bears don’t get us then it’ll be the colour of the cave walls, if we’ve got houses and cars and shops and choices then it’ll be the crunchiness of the spring onions. Denounced, as vehemently, considered exactly as important, as those damn cave bears.

I have not yet checked this theory with my wife. But today’s example:

You be the judge: should my husband stop slapping food on my plate so artlessly?

There’re 700 million in this world still wondering whether there’s going to be any food today. QED.