The messiness of male desire

In February 2021, the writer Luc Sante was killing the lockdown dead-time by running pictures of himself through FaceApp, seeing what he might look like as a woman. The effect was powerful. Life-altering, in fact. In the app’s feminised image, …

What is Judith Butler afraid of?

Worried about doctors giving fertility-destroying drugs to physically healthy teens? Perturbed by the placing of rapist males alongside female prisoners, or the allowing of any male into a woman’s changing room on his say-so? Annoyed by the sight of hulking …

The ugly return of homophobia

As a child of the Eighties and Nineties, I remember well that homosexuals were fair game in the mainstream media. One columnist in The Star railed against “Wooftahs, pooftahs, nancy boys, queers, lezzies — the perverts whose moral sin is …

Britain’s farmers need to revolt

In The Shepherd’s Life, his memoir about following the family tradition of Cumbrian hill farming, James Rebanks highlights the obsession of “modern industrial communities” with the importance of “going somewhere”. “The implication,” he observes, “is an idea I have come …