The female reproductive experience is an endless morality tale. To try for a baby is to watch yourself constantly, knowing each stage of the process involves a judgement, if not on the performance of your body, then the legitimacy of …
The perversion of lesbian envy
Of all the footnotes to Kathleen Stock’s recent trip to Oxford, perhaps the most unedifying was the sight of me and my friends — ranging in age from 30 to 70 — exclaiming “Phwoar!” in private chat groups. But as …
The perils of reproductive extremism
Across the world, lawmakers and activists are moving towards increasingly absolutist ethical and legal stances on pregnancy. In particular, social conservatives seem locked into draconian purity spirals. Roe v. Wade fell a year ago this week, and since then 14 …
Women are pawns in the contraception war
Davina McCall’s new special, Pill Revolution, starts with an eye-catching visual: McCall, wearing a red dress and a megawatt gameshow host’s grin, spins a giant roulette wheel labelled with all the potential side effects of hormonal birth control. A dizzying …
Women are pawns in the contraception war
Davina McCall’s new special, Pill Revolution, starts with an eye-catching visual: McCall, wearing a red dress and a megawatt gameshow host’s grin, spins a giant roulette wheel labelled with all the potential side effects of hormonal birth control. A dizzying …
The battle over breastfeeding
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 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 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 …
Starmer isn’t working for women
He can’t say he wasn’t warned. Sir Keir Starmer’s embrace of gender ideology was always unwise, and made worse by his refusal to listen to dissenting voices. He has ignored pleas from feminists in the Labour Party, refused to show …
What’s wrong with violent fiction?
I was last asked the question three weeks ago at a panel discussion on crime fiction. The time before that, it was in a written Q&A for a literary magazine. I no longer remember the first time I heard it; …
The Taliban must purge itself
It has become common for countries to boast three-word slogans. India, Incredible India. Malaysia, Truly Asia. Afghanistan’s could be: We Squander Opportunities. Or perhaps: We Never Learn.
Consider Afghanistan’s recent history. The Soviet Union occupied the country, was defeated and …
The year the West erased women
If 2022 has been the year of the “woman”, it is a tale with two different final chapters: one hopeful, one less so. The first is set in a distant country, where an archaic, theocratic regime threatens to be toppled …
The truth about sexsomnia
When is a rape not a rape? When the perpetrator is asleep. In the summer of 2003, a mixed group gathered at a grand house in the Beaches district of Toronto. It was an annual thing — a house party …
Feminism can’t kill the beauty pageant
Good-looking, groomed, docile. They were paraded around the arena, so that we could all see their body composition and their agility; so that we could see there were no signs of illness or infirmity. This is good stock, a fine …
Who wants a middle-aged Love Island?
Every year on Love Island, there is bad behaviour, misogyny, shouting matches and tears. But it seems the further we get from #MeToo, the harsher and more manipulative the male contestants have become. Unsurprisingly, there has been a backlash: the …