The male members-only Garrick Club was in the news last month after The Guardian got hold of its membership list. This revealed that a lot of men who claim to be staunch supporters of women in their day-jobs running big companies or the civil service have nevertheless shelled out large sums of money to join a club which does not allow women to be members. Elite male institutions like the Garrick Club are bastions of “fratriarchy”, the modern form of male power which is exercised less through top-down formal structures and more through the fraternal bonds men form with other men of similar stat ..read more

A few weeks ago a group called Right To Equality launched a campaign to change the law to require “affirmative” sexual consent—actively saying yes to sex rather than just not saying no—which was immediately derailed by a row about language. The problem was the same one Northwest Cancer Research ran into last November, when it tried to promote cervical cancer screening with a billboard featuring crossed female legs alongside the rape-myth-inspired strapline “Don’t keep ‘em crossed/ get screened instead”. Right to Equality’s ads alluded to another rape cliché: its “provocative” strapline, which ..read more

Back in 2016, you may recall, there was an explosion of disparaging commentary about Hillary Clinton’s voice. It was shrill, people said, and too loud; it was harsh and flat and “decidedly grating”; it was the voice of a bossy schoolmarm whose “lecturing” or “hectoring” tone was widely agreed to be a total turn-off.  No one, they said, would vote for a president with a voice like that.  As feminists immediately recognized, this criticism wasn’t really about Clinton’s voice. Her voice was just a symbol of everything her critics didn’t like about her, beginning with the simple fact tha ..read more

Spoiler alert: if you haven’t yet watched episodes 1-6 of The Traitors UK but you plan to do so, don’t read on I didn’t watch the first series of The Traitors (I’m not generally a fan of reality shows where people compete for money), but the buzz it generated made me curious enough to start watching the second, which the BBC is showing this month. It’s now reached the halfway mark, and I’m still watching: if you’re interested in how people talk, and in how gender affects group interaction, it offers plenty of food for thought.    In case anyone’s unfamiliar with the format, here’s a ..read more

It’s that time again: the time when commentators of all kinds look back at the last 12 months, and pick out what they see as the most significant trends or the most memorable moments of the year. This blog’s annual round-ups have tended to be variations on a few well-worn themes; the details are different every year, but the overall trends are much the same. In that respect, as what follows will make clear, 2023 was fairly typical; but one thing several of the issues I’ve picked out have in common (something the title of this post alludes to) is an oddly “retro” vibe: they’re cases where an ol ..read more

Sometimes on this blog I write about feminists who had interesting ideas about language before the 21st century: women like Suzette Haden Elgin, the linguist and science fiction writer who created a women’s language, Láadan, and Marie Shear, the editor and language commentator who defined feminism as “the radical notion that women are people”. I write about these women knowing that many readers won’t have heard of them; their stories illustrate how easily the work of women can fade into obscurity and be forgotten.      This post is about someone who understood that problem ..read more

The photograph below, taken at Manchester Piccadilly station earlier this month, shows an installation commissioned by North West Cancer Research to encourage more women to get screened for cervical cancer. Which is, of course, a worthy goal; cervical cancer screening can save lives. But when I first saw this photo, what I mostly felt was rage. I was so angry, I immediately reposted it with a critical comment on Twitter/X. Evidently this struck a chord: within a couple of days my tweet had racked up 134K views and prompted numerous replies from other women who found the installation “awful ..read more

It’s a truism that all political careers end in failure. But last week the former prime minister David Cameron–a man whose career we might have thought was a textbook illustration of that principle (he resigned in 2016 after calling and then losing the referendum that led to Brexit)–made an unexpected comeback. In his latest rearrangement of the deckchairs on the Tory Titanic, Rishi Sunak appointed Cameron to the position of Foreign Secretary. This didn’t please everyone in his party, but some Conservatives were delighted to learn that, in one MP’s much-quoted words, “Daddy’s home”. That react ..read more

Last week the Covid inquiry heard evidence from Dominic Cummings, the self-proclaimed genius behind the Vote Leave campaign who became a powerful figure in Boris Johnson’s administration, and from Helen McNamara, the deputy chief civil servant (and highest-ranking woman) in the Cabinet Office. They had worked together during the early phase of the pandemic, but to say they did not get on would be an understatement. In one of the WhatsApp messages which were apparently the government’s preferred mode of internal communication, Cummings ranted: …if I have to come back to Helen’s bullshit…I will ..read more

On Twitter/X not long ago I saw a thread about a training session which someone had just run for a group of professional women. It had focused on the problem of the Over-Apologizing Woman–a staple of this kind of training, and one I’ve written about before (if you missed it, see here, here and here). But what caught my eye on this occasion was a statistic the trainer had presented: in the course of a lifetime, the average woman will apologize 295,650 times. This number piqued my curiosity because it’s so precise: not “around 300,000” or “over a quarter of a million”, but exactly 295,650. Purve ..read more