The academic and the theatre critic (and five other stories)

Six reads on gender (in)equality and the backlash against feminism.

Spring seems to have finally arrived in my little corner of the world. Yesterday, the sun shone all day and, for the first time in weeks, it felt — dare I say it? — vaguely warm.

Now, that’s enough of this exceedingly English, weather-based introduction. Keep reading for how to help incels, what a woman president will mean for abortion rights in Mexico, a highly unusual case of sexual harrassment, Taylor Swift, Gaza, and an Italian feminist you may never have heard of.

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1) How can we help incels?

Incels have been in the news again recently following the stabbing attack in Sydney, Australia, where the perpetrator, Joel Cauchi, seemed to have targeted women. As New South Wales Police Commissioner Karen Webb told Australia's ABC News a few weeks ago: "The videos speak for themselves, don't they?…It's obvious to me, it's obvious to detectives... that the offender focused on women and avoided the men.” The attacker’s father told the press his son may have targeted women because “he wanted a girlfriend and he's got no social skills and he was frustrated out of his brain."

This sounds similar to the motivation behind other deadly incel attacks, such as the 2021 shooting in Plymouth in the UK. In Britain, incels make up 1 per cent of referrals to Prevent, the government’s anti-extremism programme (about 77 cases per year). Is there any way of helping those radicalised within this loose online movement? In “How to save an incel” on BBC Sounds, Sophia Galer Smith asks whether internet forums could help the young men who hold these extremist, misogynistic beliefs. Galer Smith talks to former incels and looks at R/IncelExit, a Subreddit with 18,000 members where incels can get advice and ask questions of ex-incels.

P.s. Speaking of misogynist extremism, a Romanian court has ruled that the trial against Andrew Tate — indicted alongside his brother and two women last June on charges of human trafficking, rape, and forming a criminal gang to sexually exploit women — can go ahead. They have denied the allegations.

2) Swift-feminism

It has been difficult to ignore the cultural juggernaut that is Taylor Swift for quite some time, even if, like me, you have barely listened to any of her music (shout out to my dedicated Swifty friend who has recommended songs I should listen to). Given that the enormously successful musician happens to be a woman, it has also been hard to ignore the chatter around what the Swift phenomenon means for feminism. Is her success more than individual? Is it some sort of victory for gender equality? In the Daily Pennsylvanian, Mariana Martinez argues that it isn’t, that Swift typifies capitalist “white feminism”, and that her focus on love is reductive. She writes:

I am not asking Swift to provide healthcare and reproductive rights to women worldwide. But maybe what she could do is stop reducing the female experience to love. That is my problem with her writing: She makes it seem as though falling in love is the pinnacle of a woman’s life, and falling out of it is, well, the end. Yes, love is a part of a woman’s life, but it is not the only problem she has, and most of the time it is not even the biggest of her problems.

And for Ms Magazine, Michele Meek says Swift is a “post-feminist”:

Taylor Swift is a complex figure in our culture—especially for a feminist like myself. On the one hand, I applaud her success—one that defies what seems possible. Not only has Swift become one of the few women billionaires, but she also became the first to do so solely through her music. And her decision to re-record her albums to evade male-dominated industry control and her willingness to testify in court against a DJ who assaulted her certainly could count as feminist acts, especially seeing how sexual abuse and harassment remain “rife” in the music industry.

Still, I can’t help but feel a tad uncomfortable about a female performer who spends much of her show in what seems to be a sparkly bathing suit and shimmery tights. It reminds me of the sardonic line by Mattel CEO (played by Will Ferrell) in Barbie, “We sell dreams, imagination, and sparkle. And when you think of sparkle, what do you think of next? Female agency.” 

3) Abortion and Mexico’s first female president

In June, Mexicans go to the polls. It is the first election in the country where a woman candidate will likely win. For AP, Maria Teresa Hernandez looks at what victory for either Claudia Sheinbaum (of the left-wing National Regeneration Movement, or Morena) or Xochitl Galvez (who heads up a three-party opposition coalition on the right) would mean for abortion and LGBTQ+ rights. Here’s a snippet:

“Just because a woman wins does not guarantee a gender perspective at all,” said Pauline Capdevielle, an academic from the National Autonomous University of Mexico. “In fact, what we are seeing are strategies by conservative sectors to create a façade of feminism that opposes the feminist tradition.”

A true change, Capdevielle said, would start by integrating feminists into the government. “It is not about putting women where there were none, but about politicizing these issues and really promoting a transformation.”

4) The academic and the theatre critic

Here is an unusual form of sexual harrassment. On 18th April, Lea Ypi, a professor in political theory at the London School of Economics, shared the following Tweet:

The Spectator’s theatre critic, Lloyd Evans, had “written a piece about how a female professional peer’s appearance made him so horny that he had to go pay for sex with a “buxom” Chinese woman near the train station,” as

Helen Lewis

explained on X.

It’s astonishing that this article made it past editors at the house magazine of the Conservative Party. The responses to Pyi’s post were a mixture of solidarity from aghast onlookers, to trolls declaring “I bet you loved it”. Clearly this is an extreme example of how (some) men objectify women, but still, it is evidence (did we need any?) of how difficult it is for women to be taken seriously as people, as professionals, as opposed to mere receptacles for sexual fantasy.

5) ”A feminism where nothingness was the ideal”

On the New Left Review’s Sidecar blog, Isabella Trimboli has a fascinating essay on a new translation of a book by Carla Lonzi, an Italian art critic and feminist I had never heard of (and, upon reading, wished that I had). Lonzi, a second-wave feminist, had some unusual ideas. Trimboli writes:

Lonzi proposed a feminism where nothingness was the ideal, to be achieved through a radical withdrawal from the world of culture, politics and ideology where men had set the terms. This process, which she called ‘deculturizzazione’, was to be followed by one of ‘autocoscienza’, in which women would forge relationships outside of male-dominated structures. While other feminists wrestled with how best to articulate their condition in order to be understood, Lonzi sought the opposite: the right to be illegible.

And while feminist thinkers have struggled with what to do with pregnancy, birth, and motherhood within feminist theory, Lonzi’s group had a uniquely pro-maternity position:

For Rivolta Femminile, maternity and child-rearing were not in opposition to women’s emancipation. ‘We are not to blame for giving birth to humanity from our slavery. The father, not the child, enslaved us’. If anything, caring for children was the only outlet for a kind of play and pleasure that had been otherwise exiled from women’s lives.

6) What is new life, in all this death

For Lux Magazine, Yasmin el-Rifai reflects on birth amid the mass killing of the Gaza war. Drawing both from Natality: Toward a Philosophy of Birth by Jennifer Banks and The Plague: Living Death in our Times by Jacqueline Rose, el-Rifai connects birth and motherhood with political action and thought (via Hannah Arendt, Adrienne Rich, and Simone Weil). Here is a snippet:

Political action is public, plural, and grounded in connection and in that way birth and the labor and love that follow could be its origin. This has always been the catch: In birth and in mothering are powerful pathways to freedom and they have been ring-fenced into the private family in a way that [Hannah] Arendt couldn’t help but reproduce. To free them, to make use of them in a way that is alive to our wider struggles for dignified lives and unwritten futures may require a particular kind of feminist abolition, one that deals with the family not only as a site of possession and harm, but as a place where we are made and where we make each other, a psychic territory that moves with us between public and private.

Bonus: A 2023 “framing paper” on today’s anti-feminist backlash | “Micro-feminism”

Thank you so much for reading. See you next time.