Just before the election, Keir Starmer finally found the third way on trans issues and women’s rights. First, he was damned by J.K. Rowling, who wrote in The Times that she would “struggle to support” Labour and suggested she might …
British feminism needs a history lesson
These days, we tend to interpret figures from long ago as if they lived just across the road. Such is the thesis of French sociologist Olivier Roy, who argues that an erasure of national cultural history is well underway. We …
Trudeau has empowered Canada’s pimp lobby
“You’re all a bunch of feminists, and I hate feminists!” shouted Marc Lépine as he gunned down 14 female engineering students in Montreal in 1989. I first visited the city in 2012 to write about this particularly horrific, misogynistic massacre. …
Why Scotland’s ‘witches’ fought back
Witch hunts have long tormented Scotland. Thousands of women were tortured and executed there in the early-modern era, for the opaque crime of “witchcraft”. Over the past five years, a similarly senseless, though slightly less violent, campaign has been waged …
Trump is Hillary Clinton’s spirit animal
Sometimes, I feel a little bit bad for Hillary Clinton — and not just because she missed out on a history-making presidency by a paltry 80,000 votes. It’s because she’s a feminist icon who will nevertheless always be remembered for …
Why Gen Z has killed the Pill
Young women pack out Vauxhall’s pubs on a sunny summer evening. They chat over Diet Cokes, pilsners and passion-fruit-flavoured vapes. Many smoke rollies, some do ket and cocaine. Eyes rarely widen at the mention of such things; bring up the …
The fall of France’s sacred monsters
The French version of MeToo is coming to Cannes this year, and it’s going to be a very different kind of film festival. A reckoning is in the air, one that has been decades in the making. The actress Judith …
Who’s afraid of a big girl?
Like a lot of vintage B movies, Attack of the 50 Foot Woman is a bad product with a fantastic campaign. I would bet that, since its 1958 release, thousands have owned the poster without ever watching the film: a …
Lauren Southern: the tradlife influencer filled with regret
Does promoting marriage and motherhood inevitably make women easy targets for subordinate status, increased vulnerability, and a return to second-class status? One of the very first columns I wrote at UnHerd, back in 2019, described how, for me, becoming a …
Who is to blame for gender theory?
Here’s a version of a story you might have heard before: first feminists got what they wanted, and then they got what they deserved. At some point in the Noughties, the idea that men and women were fundamentally alike in …
The war for Sydney Sweeney’s breasts
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times: it was the time of breasts.
By now, you will surely have seen the video of actress Sydney Sweeney at the end of her Saturday Night Live hosting …
Has Beyoncé killed Jolene?
Not long ago, a post crossed my timeline featuring a black-and-white, heart-stoppingly gorgeous photo of Dolly Parton in the Sixties. The caption read, simply: “What the hell did Jolene look like?” One can only wonder.
As a musical artefact, “Jolene” …
How MeToo became too cringe for America
It was autumn 2018, just over five years ago, when Christine Blasey Ford uttered that unforgettable line. “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” she said, referring to the gleeful cackling of a young Brett Kavanaugh as he allegedly drunkenly …
Ireland’s referendum is an attack on women
The constitution of the Republic of Ireland was voted into law by the Dáil Éireann (Irish parliament) in December 1937, having been approved earlier in the year by a referendum. After centuries of existing as a British colony, this was …
My torment as a gamer girl
Until recently, I did not consider myself a “gamer”. I still flinch at the term, probably because the reputation of gaming is impossibly, incorrigibly lame — adolescent, feverish, and with the stale whiff of the teenaged bedroom. I, conversely, am …