"A capacious topic" (and four other reads)

Five things on gender (in)equality and the backlash against feminism

Happy Friday, dear readers. Since I last sent this newsletter, I read a very Backlash-relevant book. The Vanishing Girl of Kabul is the memoir of Zahra Joya, an Afghan human rights journalist now exiled in London, co-written with British journalist Amie Ferris-Rotman.

This beautifully written book shows clear as day how the Taliban’s repression of women reinforces misogynists everywhere—and how shameful it is that the world has so abandoned Afghan women. Follow Joya’s outlet Rukhshana Media to stay up-to-date on what’s happening to women’s rights in Afghanistan.

I interviewed Joya for the next issue of Prospect Magazine, and will share that here when it’s out.

And now to the reads…..

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1) “Our elites want to abolish hard men”

The UK has a new prime minister and, as is a new PM’s wont, he has reshuffled the cabinet. Writing in the Telegraph (a right-wing broadsheet, for readers not familiar with the UK), a retired colonel warns that PM Andy Burnham’s cabinet appointments “will most probably lead to the continued feminisation and under-resourcing of UK defence”.

“Feminisation”, I’ll remind you, is a term used pejoratively on parts of the right to describe the visibility of women in public life and at the top of professions. You might remember Helen Andrews, the American writer who went viral-ish last year with an essay about “the great feminisation”. Her argument seemed to imply that being a woman is just about the worst thing a person can be.

To be fair to Richard Williams, the writer of this Telegraph piece, he probably wasn’t responsible for the headline that reads (literally!) “our elites want to abolish hard men”, but the content of his article doesn’t stray that far from the sentiment. Here is a bit more:

The lanyard class wants to see the purging of the old, messy, violent men who win wars, and to allow the new high-tech, human-rights-compliant, lower-cost substitutes to flourish.

I was once one of those necessarily violent men, as commanding officer of 22 SAS – the British Army’s most elite Special Forces regiment.

But I fear that in the coming years the aggressive, war-fighting nature that the SAS embodies will disappear, its claws clipped, its teeth filed down.

Instead, we will get a socially-acceptable, relatively harmless, human rights-compliant and cheaper pocket gendarmerie that will never again be capable of fighting necessary overseas wars – expensive and unpopular as they can often be.

2) The Tates in jail

Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan are in jail in the US, trying to fight extradition to the UK, where the authorities have decided to prosecute the world-famous internet misogynists. This statement from the Crown Prosecution Service gives details of the various charges: Andrew is facing “seven further counts of rape, three counts of arranging or facilitating trafficking for sexual exploitation, three counts of assault occasioning actual bodily harm and 19 additional charges for offences relating to indecent images of a child/extreme pornography”; Tristan faces “one count of sexual assault, two counts of rape and three counts of arranging or facilitating trafficking for sexual exploitation.” If you havent, do read Heidi Blake’s New Yorker investigation (“Andrew Tate’s empire of abuse”), which came out not very long before the UK authorities’ decided to prosecute. It’s the most in-depth reporting yet on the Tates (and, tw, it’s a tough read).

3) “Misogyny and the classics is a capacious topic”

On her newsletter, Rebecca Solnit reflects on the Tates’ arrest and the ubiquity of violence against women (“Sometimes it feels that there is nowhere I can turn without running into violence against women”), alongside—amid all the current and near-constant Odyssey discourse—the ubiquity of rape in the classics. It’s a must-read and here is a snippet:

Only as an adult did I notice how normalized rape and sexual coercion were in ancient Greek literature (and all the art made about it for millennia after), long after I knew that

The gods, that mortal beauty chase,

Still in a tree did end their race:

Apollo hunted Daphne so,

Only that she might laurel grow

as Andrew Marvell delicately put it about another one of Apollo’s rape attempts and another woman’s escape (at the price of her humanity). Gods and men raped women and occasionally boys (Zeus: Ganymede). Switching over to Roman history, you can admire the rape of the Sabine women in Nicholas Poussin’s version in the Louvre and in Peter Paul Reubens’s huge version in the UK’s National Gallery and the Metropolitan Museum offers dozens of works in response to a search query for “rape.” In the National Gallery of Ireland last year I came across Lucretia stabbing herself after being raped to preserve her family’s honor and Europa being kidnapped by Zeus in the form of a bull. Classical culture is a lot of things including, literally, rape culture. I used one Greek-vase image of Ajax’s assault on Cassandra as a title photo here; there are a lot more, and what does it mean that images of rape were decorative backgrounds for the last 2500 years?

4) Miscarriages in Gaza have tripled in six months

The UN has released new data on the birthrate in Gaza, where being pregnant and giving birth continues to be nightmarish and dangerous for mothers and babies. Haaretz has this write-up:

According to the report, medics in Gaza recorded 3,950 miscarriages in January through June 2026, compared to 1,197 in July through December 2025. The UN estimates the miscarriage rate in the enclave at 208.5 for 1,000 live births, equivalent to one-sixth of all pregnancies.

The rate peaked in April, when more than a quarter of all pregnancies in Gaza ended in miscarriage.

The birth rate in the Gaza Strip dropped 3.2 percent since the beginning of the year compared to late 2025, and close to half of all births were performed through Caesarean section, nearly all due to bleeding, hypertension and infections among mothers.

According to the UN report, about 74 percent of pregnancy losses occurred during the first trimester, and 57 percent of pregnant women suffered from anemia.

Here is the link to the original report.

And… earlier this month, the UN Human Rights Council adopted a resolution that recognises “reproductive violence” as a variety of gender-based violence. See this report by the International Planned Parenthood Federation for more.

5) What do the mothers think?

Sticking with the theme of birthrates, Lucy Jones has written for the Guardian about how, in all the panic over falling birthrates, one factor is consistently overlooked: the actual experience of mothers. She writes:

We hear about the ruinous effect of low birthrates, but comparatively little of the difficulties mothers face, such as maternity discrimination and mental health issues. It’s as though there is something about the way we organise society that means new mothers, caregivers, are unseen.

Jones has penned the foreword to a new report about motherhood by Theos, a Christian think tank:

One of the most striking findings is that many mothers feel “undervalued”. What does it mean to organise society in a way that people who are growing and raising new humans feel like this? It can’t be good. But perhaps it is convenient. While most people in the study thought that childcare was as vital to the economy as paid work, the maximum state maternity pay in the UK – from six weeks to 39 weeks after giving birth – is £6,412.56, far below the minimum wage. It is no surprise, then, that in a society where value is priced against profit mothers feel undervalued.

And also:

What was birth and its aftermath like for the women in the study? Many described it as a time of “overwhelming exhaustion, sleep deprivation and anxiety”, with some finding postnatal visits rushed and “tick-box”, overlooking the mother, with the same at the routine six-week check. Experiences of maternal healthcare during birth and post-partum support were mixed: one woman spoke of “being handled like a piece of meat”.

Bonus: Emily Wilson vs Joyce Carol Oates | Elon Musk vs nudify app ban | #NotAllMen | Bluebeard’s castle

Thanks for reading. See you next time.