Since my last post was about the phrase “women of a certain age”, I was intrigued to see a report in the Mail Online last week which claimed that Bristol University wants to ban it, along with other ageist expressions like “golden years” and “silver surfer”. According to the Mail this is yet another example ..read more

Recently, as everyone reading this in Britain will already know, the Masterchef presenter Gregg Wallace became the latest in a long line of Men On TV (the industry term is “talent”, though in this case it’s never been clear what talent TV producers thought he possessed) to “step back” from his presenting duties following allegations ..read more

Last week the Taliban in Afghanistan published a 114-page document setting out the latest official version of its laws on “vice and virtue”. Western news coverage focused particularly on Article 13, which according to press reports states that if it is necessary for women to leave their homes, they must cover their faces and voices ..read more

After a knife attack in Southport left two dead and nine injured—six of them critically (one of whom has since died)—the police announced that a person described only as a 17-year old male had been charged with murder and attempted murder. Beyond that, they warned the public, speculation about what happened and why should be ..read more

I’ve always associated crossword puzzles with men. When I was a child my father did the Telegraph crossword religiously every day; in the age of pen and paper, when only one person in a household could fill in the empty squares, that was understood to be his prerogative. Later on, as an avid reader of detective fiction, I discovered characters like Lord Peter Wimsey and Inspector Morse, men whose puzzle-solving prowess demonstrated the same erudition and mental agility they brought to the unravelling of murder mysteries. To the extent I thought at all about the creators of crosswords, I assume ..read more

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