Recall the early days of #MeToo: the excitement, the promise, the sense of a tectonic shift reshaping the culture from the roots. There was a time, in the movement’s first fecund months, when powerful men were falling like dominos. It …
The afterlife of Freud’s muse
“One of the main reasons I want to speak to you now is because I’ve become increasingly aware of how both of us are regarded, in relation to men,” writes the artist Celia Paul to the late Welsh portrait painter …
How philosophy sacrificed the truth
Back when I was a graduate student in the Nineties, first at St Andrews University and then at Leeds, philosophy departments were terrifying places. Seminar rooms often felt like amphitheatres.
Every week, the same ritual would unfold in the senior …
Do we need a Trans Olympics?
When Ketanji Brown Jackson refused to define the word “woman” during her confirmation hearing on Tuesday, the US Supreme Court nominee put it down to the fact that she is “not a biologist”. She is also clearly not a sports …
The fictional world of trans activism
When people say things like “transwomen are women”, “transmen are men”, and “nonbinary people are neither women nor men”, what do they mean? In my book Material Girls, I suggested that many of them are immersed in a fiction.
Getting …
Keir Starmer is gaslighting women
Does Sir Keir Starmer know there’s a war on? Last week the Labour leader visited a country literally on the doorstep of Russia. Speaking to a Times journalist at the biggest military base in Estonia, a Baltic state with every …
South Korea didn’t have an incel election
Have incels been galvanised into political action? Will misogyny become central to democratic elections? These questions were being batted about last week as South Korea’s first “incel election” ended with Yoon Suk-yeol, the “incel candidate” from the conservative People Power …
How Buffy revamped teen sex
American teenagers were forced to confront a very particular existential terror in 1997. It wasn’t your usual horror film, even though it did star Freddie Prinze, Jr. In Too Soon for Jeff he plays a high school senior who gets …
The taboo trans question
“Sexuality is who you go to bed with, gender is who you go to bed as.” Learn it, remember it, drill it into your brain: this is one of the most important precepts of gender identity activism, and one of …
How Ukrainian women will suffer
Suddenly, images of Ukrainian women are all over the internet. Most of them are mothers, fleeing Russian convoys, carrying their children across borders. Many of them are leaving husbands and brothers behind to fight. But these heart-wrenching photographs, published by …
Putin’s toxic masculinity
Of all the ill-informed explanations for why Vladimir Putin has invaded Ukraine, perhaps the most absurd is that he is afflicted with “toxic masculinity”. And yet, there are multiple commentators and think piece writers saying exactly that: the Russian President …
The sly sexism of Left-wing men
It’s a year since Sarah Everard was abducted, raped and murdered — and the London Mayor this week called for men to lead a “fundamental cultural shift” to help end violence against women. Sadiq Khan said the problem was not …
Putin doesn’t have mummy issues
Did Russia invade Ukraine because Putin wasn’t loved enough as a child? AnnaLynne McCord, an “actress/human rights activist”, seems to think so.
Last week, she posted a poem online declaring that if only she’d been Vladimir Putin’s mum, he would …
Is Margaret Atwood a coward?
Margaret Atwood never fancied herself a discourse power broker, but we thrust the role on her anyway. The year was 2016; the election of Donald Trump had sparked a brief, blazing feminist backlash that now feels like something out of …
Feminism has a biology problem
If you remember anything about sex differences in biology lessons, it’s likely to be this: males mate as much as possible. They evolve horns to fight off competitors, and beautiful ornaments to win over females. Females, by contrast, focus their …