"Outrageous, imaginative genius"(and four other stories)
Five reads on gender (in)equality and the backlash against feminism
A lot has happened since the last edition of this newsletter, including Kamala Harris becoming the Democratic candidate in the US election. I doubt anyone reading this needs reminding of the bile women in public life face, but lest we forget here’s a link to an AI-generated image of Harris that has been shared widely on social media. Male politicians don’t tend to be on the receiving end of this depressingly persistent kind of abuse.
P.s. For Prospect Jill Abramson wrote a great piece on why women can win Harris the election.
P.p.s For anyone still chewing over JD Vance’s views on “childless cat ladies”, now is the perfect time to revisit Rebecca Solnit’s magisterial essay “The Mother of all Questions” about the not having of children by women.
Now it’s straight to the reads…
1) The far right and the feminists
The past few weeks have been a time of anarchy in the UK, with anti-immigrant riots spreading across the country to dozens of cities. On her Substack,
has written an excellent piece about how these events unfolded and what today’s far right believes. As she explains, feminists play a particular role in the new far right’s worldview. She writes:What is the ideology the modern far right telegraphs through its networked movement? Central is the belief in the Great Replacement – that is:
White people in the global north are being replaced by migration from the globalsouth
Replacement is being aided by feminists repressing the white birth rate through abortion and contraception
And it’s all organised by shadowy elites (Jewish people)
This is the founding theory of the modern far right, who believe that replacement is white genocide. The response is to reverse replacement, ranging from what US far right figure Richard Spencer called “ethical ethnic cleansing” (no such thing) to a genocidal race war.
2) An Olympic fiasco
Last week, we had the sorry opportunity of seeing a Twitter/X storm develop in real time. It was the day of Algerian boxer (and now Olympic gold medallist) Imane Khelif’s bout against the Italian Angela Carrini. No sooner had Carrini cut their fight short were a steady stream of people frantically posting that Khelif was a man, or male, and that we were witnessing nothing less than the world cheering a man punching a woman in the face. It was astonishing to see the speed with which social media users started to malign Khelif, particularly those with certain views on sex and gender. X was a hive of misinformation. She had allegedly failed a gender eligibility test, but there was much confusion over what this actually meant. Some people seemed to think Khelif was a transgender woman.
Alongside another boxer at the centre of a gender controversy, Taiwanese Lin Yu-ting (who also won gold in her category at the Games), Khelif had not been able to compete in the World Championships, run by the Russian-led International Boxing Association (IBA— which last year lost its status as the sport’s governing body), because the IBA said that both boxers had failed gender tests. The IBA’s president has claimed that tests showed the two women have XY chromosomes, which could put them at a competitive advantage in the sport. Whatever the significance of this for Khelif or her opponents, she was swiftly subject to an enormous amount of online abuse and cruel scrutiny by swarms of social media users. It was a masterclass in how interaction on X fuels toxic disagreement and misinformation, as well as in the limits of a feminism fixated on one issue to such an extent that it obscures a bigger picture. As Keith Kahn-Harris posted on X:
There are real issues in women's sport raised by the small number of athletes with complex gender identities. What's despicable is treating Imane Khelif (like Caster Semenya before her) as a sinister interloper who identified as female 5 minutes ago in order to beat up women. It's really revealing that those who are outraged at the innocent 'victims' of trans ideology are so totally incapable of sensitivity to people whose bodies do not easily fit gender binaries.
Here are some pieces that I found useful after watching, fairly horrified, the speed of the pile-on: Karim Zidan on how this moment in the culture wars was really about a power struggle over the future of boxing, with Khelif “caught in the crossfire”;
trying to make sense of the mess with some compassion; Caster Semenya, the athlete who has been at the centre of a similar controversy, on her experience; and a review of a book on the history of trans panic in sports (apparently it’s nothing new).P.s. Khelif has reportedly filed a legal complaint over online harrassment.
3) Deadly misogyny
Do you remember how, after the assassination attempt against Donald Trump on 13th July, the Secret Service’s female director Kimberley Cheatle (who has since resigned) was maligned as a “DEI hire” and blamed for the failure to prevent the attempt on Trump’s life? And do you remember, too, how female Israeli soldiers who had warned that Hamas were up to something were ignored in the lead-up to 7th October? Also on New Lines, Luba Kussova writes about the high cost of sexism and misogyny in security and defence. Here is a snippet:
One thing Shanita White understands well is the culture of the department, in which men are heavily overrepresented. White considers herself lucky in her career to date; she is part of a supportive team at the DoD and has only had one negative experience with a superior in her eight years. She acknowledges, however, that many other women have been less lucky. She talks about the cultural asymmetry men and women experience in DoD environments, which ultimately penalizes women, casting them aside as incompetent or overly emotional. She attributes that imbalance in part to early societal conditioning: Girls are told to focus on their appearance and caregiving qualities, boys on their strength and scientific aptitude. But other factors are in play too.
4) The trad wife controversy
On 20th July, the Sunday Times published an interview with the most-followed trad wife of them all, Hannah Neelman, the matriarch of Ballerina Farm, a former ballerina married to the scion of an airline billionaire. The happy couple have eight children and both grew up as Mormons. Megan Agnew’s profile sparked yet another perfect social media storm given its portrayal of a woman seemingly overshadowed by her husband and children who, as Agnew at least understood it, had given up dreams of being a ballerina so that her husband could achieve his dreams of big family life on a farm in Utah. Many responded with horror at the picture Agnew painted, but Neelman doesn’t see herself that way. At least that’s how she responded to the piece. In a video posted to Instagram (where she has millions of followers) she described the profile as “an attack on our family and my marriage”, and denied that she is oppressed by her husband.
There are various criticisms I could make of the piece (the assertion that trad wives eschew moneymaking? Isn’t the “movement” mostly a collection of online influencers raking it in? The implied criticism in the journalist noting that Neelman’s baby didn’t leave her arms for the four hours of their interview? Yes, totally normal when you have a baby). Aside from the responses to the piece itself, the responses to the responses have also been fascinating. One blog on the US-based Institute for Family Studies argues that this was no less than a “hit piece on large families”. In the Wall Street Journal, Matthew Hennessey argued that the sheer intensity of the response on the cultural left proves that “social conservatism is alive and well”.
5) Fifty years of feminist publishing
On her excellent Substack,
has an essay on Virago, the publisher of women’s writing that was launched in 1973 with the aim of changing literature. But how much has changed in publishing since its founding? Kennedy Smith writes:The publisher's aim, first articulated by Carmen Callil in 1973, was to place women’s writing in the mainstream and make their voices heard. But considerable as its achievements have been over the past fifty years, Virago has not changed everything. Publishing reflects gender expectations within the wider culture, and although women are now well represented on fiction prize shortlists, men still dominate the non-fiction bestseller charts. In the publishing industry, there has long been an awareness of a greater need for diversity, and much work still needs to be done in gender pay gap analysis and the predominantly white, middle-class staff of publishing houses.
P.s. Virago published the very brilliant Angela Carter (one of my favourite writers):
From its beginnings, Virago’s list was varied and interesting, and they wanted to promote writers who could not be easily categorised, such as the iconoclastic English novelist, short story writer and essayist Angela Carter. Her lively journalism was collected in Nothing Sacred: Selected Writings (1982) and her anthologies of stories for Virago included Wayward Girls and Wicked Women: An Anthology of Subversive Stories (1986), both of which are still in print today. Although her eighth novel Nights at the Circus (published by Chatto & Windus in 1984) won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for literature that year, it was only after Angela Carter’s death in 1992 at the age of just 51 that the world caught up with what Virago had always recognised as her ‘outrageous, imaginative genius’ (Goodings, p. 167).
Bonus: An oral history of second-wave feminism | a day in the life of a Parisian gynaecology ward |
Thank you for reading. See you next time.