My eldest son is currently in the middle of his GCSEs. I’m not worried about the results, though, because I breastfed him.
Babies who were breastfed “get better GCSE marks” apparently. Get in! I did this for all three of …
The gender wars are not a gift to the Right
As a critic of transactivism, one thing you hear a lot is how you are “propping up” the Right — or even the far-Right. You may think that all you are doing is pointing out some fairly obvious downsides to …
‘I was hounded out of Oxfam over JK Rowling’
It’s hard to imagine a more agreeable place to work than a charity bookshop. Staffed by civic-minded volunteers, the shelves groan with musty old paperbacks, lovingly donated in the hope they’ll find a new home and also raise money for …
The Oxford kids are alright
Life as a gender-critical feminist can be quite strange. The first time I ever entered the Oxford Union, I was a 19-year-old fresher. All I really remember is getting very drunk on peach schnapps, crashing into a trestle table, and …
Why should lesbians sleep with men?
If you are a late millennial or early Gen Z-er, life is probably quite hard right now. Chances are that you can’t afford to buy your own home, or even go out socialising that much. Perhaps you can’t avoid feeling …
The fatal attraction of victimising women
The erotomaniacal villainess of Fatal Attraction is something of a cipher. Only once in the 1987 film do we see Alex Forrest alone. Really alone, that is — not stalking Michael Douglas’s Dan Gallagher at a distance, or obsessively calling …
How women colonised yoga
Last year, my husband and I got into a curiously heated debate, along with two other couples, about whether or not it is manly to eat fruit. A surprising consensus emerged among the men, that fruit was categorically feminine. The …
Is trans the new anorexia?
When teaching freshman composition in New York colleges in the mid-Eighties, I picked up a peculiar pattern in one-on-one conferences with my female students. With improbable frequency, they’d confide that they were anorexic. The term had only entered the popular …
Women don’t need another girlboss
Heavy lies the girlboss crown on Rain Newton-Smith, freshly appointed director-general of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI). Brought in last week to rebuild the CBI’s reputation after a scandal involving her predecessor, commentators are already predicting her failure. Some …
The truth about Japan’s sex culture
“Sex is where the weirdness of the Japanese peaks,” wrote A.A. Gill in his notorious “Mad in Japan” essay. Gill went on to catalogue largely anecdotal evidence of what he saw, on his brief visit, as a warped obsession with …
Did City Uni censor my gender research?
“Are you not terrified? Everybody is going to hate you.” As she began the interviews for the research project she was leading, participants and colleagues asked Dr Laura Favaro if she was afraid. Now, three years later, she is haunted …
Momfluencers won’t absolve your guilt
Maternal guilt is a bottomless resource. Enter the momfluencer. She’s like an influencer — but her particular genius is to target the most vulnerable, the most guilt-ridden the most exhausted consumer. New mothers. The genius of the momfluencer is to …
How the trans census fooled Britain
Last weekend brought surprising news: an unprecedented spike in the number of West Ham fans identifying as trans. According to the 2021 Census, the London borough of Newham has the highest proportion of trans people in England and Wales, coming …
Did heteropessimism kill the rom-com?
Men are trash. Or at least, this is the consensus in places where single, educated, liberal, youngish women gather to lament the heterosexual state of affairs. Actually wanting to be loved by a man now represents an embarrassing shortcoming, and …
The darkness of dance
I was a quiet, nervous little girl who didn’t much like the chaos of life. I could escape that, though, in the safety and discipline of the dance studio. With hair scraped back and uniform strict, the daily repetitions of …