From the time I was a little girl, long before I knew I wanted to be a writer, I had three ambitions which I felt that I must achieve in order fully to realise my potential as an adult. And they were: to take drugs, to sleep with Jews and to be notorious. In short, I wanted to be a bohemian, even though I had never heard the word.

Well, I certainly did what I set out to do, but by the age of 35 the idea of the bohemian life held a beat too long fair turned my stomach, and I embraced Hove, the Church of England and strict monogamy – surely the terminal trio of anti-bohoism – with a fervour which I retain today; for while to be a young bohemian is both soulful and sexy, to be an old bohemian is very sad indeed.

Still, I think with affection of my foolish youth, so I was interested in finding out more about the origin of this silly species. I expected this book to be interesting, but as soon as I opened it I knew it was going to be gorgeous too, and gorgeous books which are not picture books are very few and far between. I was fair hugging myself with delight as I took in the first paragraph of the front jacket flap: ‘Does one really need furniture? Why not steal? Why shouldn’t one be dirty? Is it wrong to be promiscuous?’ And as one whose big question these days is whether to choose still or sparkling water with dinner, I sighed nostalgically for my po-faced past. My glee grew when I turned to chapter the first and found out that each one comes with those wonderful helter-skelter little subheadings – ‘Why is poverty so romantic? – Why do artistes despise money? – How does one survive while producing something that no one will buy? – What does an artist do who runs out of money?’ – which seem to make a book not just a book but also a sort of posh pub quiz, as well as being very much like a box of shimmering sweeties.

Following directly on the joyless heels of the Victorian age, the bohemian experiment introduced lots of excellent things which we take for granted today: divorce, homosexuality, drug-taking, abortion and promiscuity. But it wasn’t all good. Garlic and surrealism were more unwelcome by-products of la vie en rose, not to mention a fetishisation of all things French which made the beasts even more conceited than they were already. The old saying, ‘Everything changes but the avant-garde’ is also true of bohemia, and if one avoids bohemians these days it is usually because they are too dull for one’s tastes rather than too exciting.

As Virginia Nicholson points out, bohemians have always been such a disparate group that famous members include the thoroughly nice Jesus Christ and the very clever Shakespeare at the sublime end, to the child-rapist Eric Gill, nasty Aleister Crowley and mad Ezra Pound at the ridiculous. The women, as they always do, tend to come somewhere in the middle – neither geniuses nor germs – though bohemian women can be very trying, wearing scarves which invariably make one think, ‘But surely there has been a mistake?’ Still, they are usually punished for their sins against geometry, theology and haberdashery when the natural childbirth they inevitably opt for sees them in labour for a solid 48 hours, leaving them with a perineum so badly torn that they are subsequently of no use to either man or beast.

I learned much from this book, but I still don’t know how the actual, geographical Bohemians, the ones in Czechoslovakia, feel about their own precious nationality being used as a byword for being smelly and sex-mad; still, it doesn’t seem to have bothered the French overmuch. On a gratuitously nasty note, can I just say that in an era when the arts and media are positively polluted by talent-free parasites who only ever made it because several decades ago they had the good fortune to swim out of the penis of someone famous, Virginia Nicholson in no way uses the fact of being Vanessa Bell’s granddaughter as an excuse to give herself an easy ride. She ranges over her vast smorgasbord of vivid material with all the elan of a particularly well- co-ordinated kitten on a keyboard; indeed, this book (complete with dramatis personae and a handy monetary conversion table to show us exactly how much cash the principal characters had to live on) displays the best of bohemia itself – playful, dazzling, original – without ever taking on board the worst of that particular attitude – sloppiness, pretension, pomposity. Personally, I’m going to buy half a dozen copies for Christmas presents and I suggest you do the same. Gosh, Christmas shopping in October! Yes, I think we can safely say that my bohemian days are behind me.

The post Sins against theology and haberdashery appeared first on The Spectator.

At the risk of being vulgar, I can’t help thinking that Dr Greer’s (‘At least she’s got an “ology!”’, I always say in her defence, when callow acquaintances mock her) attitude to matters sexual goes up and down like a bride’s nightie. Whereas most of us, thanks to our helpful male classmates, learn whether we are ‘frigid’ or ‘nympho’ back in Big School, and more or less manage to stick to these guidelines for the rest of our natural lives, the good professor’s libido has historically been all over the shop. Starting out as a young blood who was happy to pose not just in the altogether for underground magazines, but with legs so far apart that one could, if one saw fit, see all the way to Alaska, Dr Greer was some time later to be found saying that she was starting to think that sex was horrid, and that women should have nothing to do with it. She, along with all the other You’re-Not-Going-Out-Dressed-Like-That-Young-Lady older recanting feminists so beloved of the Daily Mail, such as Mary Kenny and Fay Weldon, has always been a great practitioner of Do-As-I-Say-Not-As-I-Doism, a position which I find renders a person faintly ridiculous, to say the least. Approaching the menopause in the manner of a bulimic approaching a cream-cake, Dr Greer was for some time torn between wanting to hold on to her undeniable physical attractiveness (as she appeared in the famous City Hall film opposite Mad Norman Mailer, she seemed to be the most beautiful woman since Nefertiti) and wanting to cast it once and for all into the void, the better to concentrate on things intellectual. Eventually plumping for the latter, she wrote a lot about a woman’s right to become a cackling old crone and reject HRT; then after a bit she started to appear weekly on television looking very sexy and showy and gussied up — not a bit of a crone, cackling or otherwise.

But then, to confuse issues, she scolded Tony Blair to stop ‘bothering’ Cherie for sex, when he had the nerve to ‘get’ his wife pregnant! — thus reiterating her previous notion that sex was something women put up with rather than enjoyed. This being so, I was somewhat confused last time I ran into Germaine — in the Woman’s Hour studio, of all places — and she smirked at me like a substitute cheerleader trying to queen it over some Alpha Bitch at a Fifties American high school hop, tittering that she hoped I wasn’t ‘cross’ with her about the ‘rumours’ about her and my starter husband, of all the undignified things for two grown women to talk about! I believe I answered somewhat witheringly that, seeing as how I had dumped him a whole two decades previously, before he began to resemble a sick, old, balding rhesus monkey, this was hardly likely, and that she was welcome to him!

Given that Tony Parsons qualifies as a ‘catch’ to Dr Greer, it was with heavy heart that I turned to her latest offering — a lush pictorial essay on male beauty. My conviction that our criteria for masculine desirability were worlds apart was only strengthened by the front cover photograph — a David Bailey study of that whey-faced Swedish flibbertigibbet who leads miserable old Dirk Bogarde such a merry (!) dance in the terminally depressing Death in Venice. And thereby hangs the ‘rub’, as it were. Dr Greer’s theory, such as it is, is that it isn’t just nasty old men who’ve been a-peeping and a-‘perving’ (to use the glorious teenybop slang for reckless eyeballing of a sexual nature) at images of naked women all this time; women like looking at male totty just as much, yes they do! And what’s more, this should be encouraged!

I disagree on both counts. The very fact that the front cover of this book is a photograph of a man by a man, the subject furthermore being briefly made famous by being gazed at by a man (who was also gay in real life), in a film by a man, speaks volumes. Like Sex and the City, this is a gay male fantasy dressed up as feminism. Women have never felt the need to gape dumbly at naked men, as many an opportunistic magazine publisher has learned to his cost; even cheek-to-cheek with a baby-oiled Dream Boy or Chippendale, blind drunk on their hen night, girls will cackle helplessly and clutch at their chief bridesmaid like a drowning man in a three-legged race rather than drool and glower and demand oral relief for money, as men routinely do with commercially naked women. Undressed men without erections are comical and loveable to women; they may be a joy forever in an aroused state, but they are certainly not the ceaseless Thing of Beauty that they are to gay men.

And this doesn’t indicate repression and coyness on the part of women, but rather maturity and perspective. For some reason, women can enjoy sex as much if not more than men without falling prey to all the weird, morbid stuff that men insist on complicating a very basic and easily fulfilled appetite with; the proportion of female paedophiles, fetishists, sadists, masochists, bestialists and necrophiles is tiny. As is the number of female voyeurs, Dr Greer. And I really don’t see why it is desirable to add to their number.

Just because Germaine daftly dropped her knickers and put her ankles behind her ears when she was a young blood, she seems to want other vulnerable young beauties stripped bare and pinkly wriggling on the pin of the gaze, be it male or female, because that would help cancel out her own embarrassment, Catholic convent girl as she eternally is. What a shame that she can’t see herself through the cool, playful, guilt-lite Protestant gaze of people like me, her greatest fans and cattiest critics, who worship her and despair of her in equal measures. Ever the chippy, colonial, lower-middle-class counter-jumper, she doesn’t realise that not only is she grand, in the Cole Porter style, and a dame, as in ‘There is nothing like a…’, but also a bona fide rebel-eccentric grande dame, like Jessica Mitford or Daisy Warwick.

Without her, there would be no me — for good or ill. I stole The Female Eunuch when I was 12, and it changed my life. Germaine has done her bit, won her war, and she should put her feet up and have a good gloat over the fact that she has dreamed more, demanded more, redeemed more for postwar feminism than all the rest of us put together. She shouldn’t drool and dribble over nudie pics, though, like some pop-eyed Edwardian masher, because she’s too good for that, and because it’s the Emperor’s new clothes in reverse; men, however laid bare they may seem, are clothed in the chameleon-coloured armour of patriarchy, and are never naked in the way that women are. They are never stripped. Of course there’s nothing wrong with admiring a fine fetlock and a robust rump as represented by a great dauber. But at the end of the day, Dr Greer, if God had meant us to reduce our kind, made in His image, to a sumptuous, fleeting ballet of flesh rendered in light and shade, then He really wouldn’t have bothered to create G. Stubbs Esq, would he? Horses for courses, and all that. And you, the thoroughbred’s thoroughbred, if you insist on still showing, should be taking jumps much higher than the coffee table. Leave that to me!

The post Youth, I do adore thee appeared first on The Spectator.

When I married Tony Parsons in the late 1970s, he immediately took me to live in a town called Billericay in Essex — his ‘calf country’, I suppose, in a Spam sort of way. To say it was a one-horse town would be to insult horses, any one of which with reasonable social aspirations would have turned back to Brentwood the minute he realised that there wasn’t even so much as a teashop in the high street.

The reason Mr Parsons took me to live there, I can’t help but think, is that I was at the height of my pallid, livid beauty and he figured that before long I’d be off with someone a bit cuter, smarter — better in every way, basically. I do remember the time I looked at him and said, ‘Didn’t you used to be taller?’ — a sure sign that the rose-coloured spectacles handed out free with every romance had fallen off good and proper. Anyway, after four years of total devotion on my part the poor guy figured he could trust me and took me to London, to a book launch at the Turf Club. And you know what, it turned out that he’d been totally right about Sin City, because the first sexy man I spoke to, I ran off with. Moral: if you want to keep your wife, move to Billericay and stay there!

Anyway, this character I eloped with was Cosmo Landesman, and the very first words I spoke to him were, ‘Oh! You must be the son of that marriage!’

Even ten years on I could remember reading about the Landesmans and their Open Marriage in a sneakily purloined Cosmopolitan, and didn’t it make my prudish, provincial eyes grow big! Sex-obsessed, adolescent virgin that I was, even I felt that Open Marriage was somehow Absolutely Vile — if you don’t want to think of your parents having sex with each other, you certainly don’t want to think of them having sex with every Dom, Mick and Barry who wanders in off the Boulevard of Broken Dreams. Teenagers didn’t say ‘Like, ewww, gross!’ in those days, but my thoughts were definitely along those lines.

Well, Cosmo and I got married and went to live with the in-laws, and I quickly learned that there was a lot more to them than That Marriage. (My new husband’s only half-humorous definition of open marriage was ‘Two slags, soon to be divorced’.) I grew to love, in my fashion, talented Fran and stylish Jay — Scott and Zelda crossed with Ma and Pa Kettle — and drove my poor spouse mad with Monkey-from-Portnoy’s-Complaint-type ravings about their Jewish ‘warmth’, outrageousness and artiness. He, poor fellow, having grown up with it, had had a gutful of outlandishness, and was conversely never happier than in my parents’ straightforward, working-class, West Country home, comatose in front of ITV with my mum fetching him another hunk of Black Forest G

The post The Fran and Jay show appeared first on The Spectator.

Without meaning to come the Big I-Am, I’ve got issues with the whole premise of this book, which probably stem from my very healthy level of self-esteem. I mean, once we’re out of our teens (when admittedly I spent rather too many nights pining after a dreamy 19-year-old Oxbridge undergraduate called Max, of all the naff admissions) is there really any sentient female who genuinely whips herself into a lather when Whatsisname bails out, and before Thingy appears? To paraphrase some smug old sod, a man is only a man — whereas a gram of coke is a kick.

Of course, I know that a lot of adult women seem upset when they get the heave-ho, but a big bit of me actually thinks they’re putting it on. This is usually for one of three reasons:

a) Secretly they’re lesbians but don’t want to be, and laying on the my-man-done-left-me-woe-is-me shtick with a trowel strikes them as a cunning way to seem extra-hetero, even as they’re really hugging themselves with glee that they don’t have to do the dirty, dreary deed anymore.

b) As a way to bond with other women. You’d be amazed the lengths modern broads will go to in order to do this, though search me why; bonding’s for glue, not girls. See obvious beauties such as Michelle Pfeiffer saying, ‘I’m not pretty — I look like a duck.’ Similarly, to be seen suffering at the hands of a man is another way of what anthropologists call ‘stepping down in the dominance hierarchy’ — though what sort of cretin would ever want to do that?

c) To bring some drama to lives which, quite understandably, they find flat and boring, the cream of the joke being that if this sort of broad put a third of the energy into her work that she puts into her weeping, she’d be living the life of Reilly in no time.

Think about it. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned? — I don’t think so! For the simple reason that men want/need women more than women want/need men — fact. Men pay women for sex; women would rather spend their money on shoes. Men often kill women who leave them; women, at worst, cut the crotch out of men’s trousers, a gesture which even though castratory is also done for comic effect — quite a thing to pull off, and certainly not a combo which indicates murderous fury.

Then there’s that experiment which proved, kinkily but conclusively, that while men’s eyes dilate when shown photos of naked women, women’s eyes dilate when shown photos of naked babies. Admittedly with me it would be the other way around, but then, as we’re always being told, I’m a bad mother and thus a freak of nature. And, anyway, to come ambling back to my point, even I, who like sex with men a great deal, can’t imagine ever getting into a state if one left me. Yes, on one hand you’d no longer be having sex with the person you loved, but on the other hand it would free you up wonderfully for having sex with a whole lot of people you might just as easily fall in love with. To put it crudely, when one pair of legs closes, another opens, like doors.

Anyway, back to the book. Like all malingering media hounds faced with doing a review, I went straight to the index to check for my own name and on not finding it went to the contents page instead. I must confess that my blood ran cold when I saw the name of the late Kathy Acker in the list of featured correspondents, remembering the Christmas Day long ago we had a thorough snog in a dark corner of my then mother-in-law’s house, and I attempted to push the feeling on by sending her a New Year billet-doux along the lines of ‘So, are we going to do it, or what?’ In response, if you can call it that, I was lucky enough to receive a ‘modern art’ postcard of a chump with two heads with the line from a Smokey Robinson song, ‘A taste of honey is worse than none at all.’ I moped around for weeks — well, days — after, veering between feeling a) cheerful, because I was a taste of honey, apparently, and b) mis, because I was obviously not wanted here, snog or no snog, honey or not. Eventually I pulled myself together and got a crush on someone else; good job I didn’t write something along the lines of ‘Eat me, bitch!’ or I could have ended up here.

And I wouldn’t have liked that; I’d have liked it only marginally less than a forcible sleepover with the Sex and the City harpies. (Tellingly, there is a SATC writer in here, requesting ‘clarification’ from ‘Rick’, of all the vile things.) Though I do like broads individually there’s something about a bunch of women together, especially moaning about men, that turns me right off. And this shower are no exception; a bunch of cows huddled together, licking their wounded udders. Yuck! It’s hard to know which lot are the worst, but just to help us they’re divided nicely up into manageably loathable categories. Are the scolders worse than the sobbers? Are the senders of letters even sillier than those who go to great lengths to write the perfect note and then sit on it, only hauling it out of mothballs decades later in order to present it to a blithely unaware public? The straightforward mentalists who admit that their letters are genuine, or the namby-pamby bunny-boilers who ‘made it up’ for use in a novel? — yeah, right!

Of course there are some well-written letters here — most of them from the 19th century. But at the end of the day, however well-composed the note, if a fully-grown lady allows herself to lose her composure over a man, then she is making 12 types of fool of herself. And goodness knows I say this not because of any basic objection to washing one’s dirty linen in public; indeed, since leaving my starter husband some 20 years ago I have regularly limbered up for the day’s writing with a few simple dissing exercises. But the point is, I do so for the cheap laughs, pure and simple. And that’s the rub; men should not be dissed in fury but in fun — and preferably for pleasure and profit. Anything else, and a lady looks like a victim rather than a viper — and that’s so not a good look.

The post Sob sisters and scolders appeared first on The Spectator.

Julie Burchill vs Paris Lees

DownloadiTunesRSS

In the early 1970s, my dad was a singular sort of feminist. As well as working all night in a factory, he had banned my mother from the kitchen for as long as I could remember because, and I quote, ‘Women gets hysterical and you needs to be calm in a kitchen.’ He also adored tough broads: ‘There’s a lady!’ he would yell appreciatively at Mrs Desai when the Grunwick strike came on TV, the Indian women wearing English winter coats over their hard-core saris. ‘Thass a lady too!’ — May Hobbs, the pretty leader of the cleaners’ strike. ‘What a woman!’ he would swoon when the lesbian tennis champ Billie Jean King shrugged off yet another trophy.

Only once in a while did his righteousness get on my wick, like the Christmas when he heard there were some striking bakers nearby and he made my mum pack our Christmas dinner (with all the trimmings!) into Tupperware boxes so he could take it down to the starving brothers freezing around the brazier down on the picket line.

‘Mu-um!’ I whined, full of tweenage self-pity (if nothing else), ‘They’re ba-akers! I dunno, why can’t they… BAKE something and have that instead?’ My mother didn’t miss a beat, shoving chipolatas into the squashed smorgasbord with real savagery: ‘Because if we don’t do it, your dad’s gonna be miserable all day. Best get it over with.’

It’s easy for me to sentimentalise those days when the trade unions held sway, chiming as they did with the calf country of my communism, but whatever their beery and sandwichy limits, they were far better than what replaced them; the politics of diversity. While working-class left-wing political activism was always about fighting the powerful, treating people how you would wish to be treated and believing that we’re all basically the same, modern, non-working-class left-wing politics is about… other stuff. Class guilt, sexual kinks, personal prejudice and repressed lust for power. The trade union movement gave us brother Bill Morris and Mrs Desai; the diversity movement has given us a rainbow coalition of cranks and charlatans. Which has, in turn, has given us intersectionality.

Intersectionality may well sound like some unfortunate bowel complaint resulting in copious use of a colostomy bag, and indeed it does contain a large amount of ordure. Wikipedia defines it as ‘the study of intersections between different disenfranchised groups or groups of minorities; specifically, the study of the interactions of multiple systems of oppression or discrimination’, which seems rather mature and dignified. In reality, it seeks to make a manifesto out of the nastiest bits of Mean Girls, wherein non-white feminists especially are encouraged to bypass the obvious task of tackling the patriarchy’s power in favour of bitching about white women’s perceived privilege in terms of hair texture and body shape. Think of all those episodes of Jerry Springer where two women who look like Victoria’s Secret models — one black, one white — bitch-fight over a man who resembles a Jerusalem artichoke, sitting smugly in the middle, and you have the end result of intersectionality made all too foul flesh. It may have been intended as a way for disabled women of colour to address such allegedly white-ableist-feminist-specific issues as equal pay, but it’s ended up as a screaming, squawking, grievance-hawking shambles.

The supreme irony of intersectionality is that it both barracks ‘traditional’ feminists for ignoring the issues of differently abled and differently ethnic women while at the same time telling them they have no right to discuss them because they don’t understand them — a veritable Pushmi-Pullyu of a political movement. Entering the crazy world of intersectionality is quite like being locked in a hall of mirrors with a borderline personality disorder coach party. ‘Stop looking at me funny! Why are you ignoring me? Go away, I hate you! Come back, how dare you reject me!’ It’s politics, Jim, but certainly not as my dear old dad knew it.

In-fighting and backbiting have been raised to the level of a very sad Olympic sport — that’ll be the Special Olympics, of course, the real ones being ‘able-ist’. Every thought is an ism and every person an ist in the insania of intersectionality, where it is always winter and never Christmas — sorry, ‘Winterval’. (Mustn’t be Islamophobic.) But sexism, interestingly, isn’t really the hot ticket there; women get picked on — or ‘called out’, to use the approved phrase — more than anyone. Natural-born women, that is. When it happened to one of my dearest friends last year, I became an unwitting participant in this modern danse macabre.

One Friday in January 2013, I was showing off on Facebook of an afternoon — as is my wont now my career’s gone up the Swannee — when it was drawn to my attention that my amica of several decades standing, Suzanne Moore, was being ‘monstered’, as modern parlance has it, on Twitter. She’d actually been driven off it for refusing to apologise for something she’d said, subsequently becoming the target for all sorts of vile threats, including having her face ripped off and fed to feral dogs. Always up for a fight, I hurried through cyberspace, only to find my homey the target of a thoroughly monstrous regiment of bellicose transsexuals and their bed-wetting ‘cheerleaders’. Both groups had taken exception to the following line by Suzanne from an essay on female anger: ‘We are angry with ourselves for not being happier, not being loved properly and not having the ideal body shape — that of a Brazilian transsexual.’

Repelled by the filthy threats which were flying fierce and fast at my friend, I began to talk trash on my Facebook page — though even my trash-talk, it must be said, has a vicious elegance that most people’s A-game lacks. I opined that a bunch of gender-benders trying to tell my mate how to write was akin to the Black and White Minstrels advising Usain Bolt on how to run. I stated that it was outrageous that a woman of style and substance should be driven from her chosen mode of time-wasting by a bunch of dicks in chicks’ clothing and their snivelling suck-ups. The usual cool, calm and collected sort of consideration I’m famous for.

It was interesting to me that, rather than join Miss Moore in decrying the notion that every broad should aim to look like an oven-ready porn star, the very cross cross-dressing lobby and their grim groupies had picked on the messenger instead — presumably in order to add to their already flourishing sense of grievance. Suzanne is a life-long left-winger and a feminist — why, I wondered, were fellow travellers threatening her in so rabid a manner? But this, I was to learn, was par for the crotchety course.

Suzanne’s crime, it transpired, was to be ‘cis-gendered’ as opposed to transgendered (that is, she was born female) and not to have ‘checked her privilege’ — what passes for a battle cry in certain ever-decreasing circles these dog days. It’s hardly ‘No pasarán!’ — rather, it declares an intention that it is better to be nagged to death on one’s knees rather than stand by one’s principles on one’s feet. Consider how lucky you are, born women, before you raise your voice above that of a trans-sister! — that veritable cornucopian horn of plenty which we lucky breed fortunate enough to be born to a sensory smorgasbord of periods, PMT, the menopause, HRT and being bothered ceaselessly for sex by random male strangers since puberty take such flagrant delight in revelling in, shameless hussies that we are. Add to this that Suzanne was, like myself, born into the English working class, and therefore marginally less likely to have beaten the odds than a dancing dog or busker’s cat to have become a public figure, and I was buggered (not being homophobic, there) if I was going to put up with a bunch of middle-class seat-sniffers, educated beyond all instinct and honesty, laying into my girl.

But it wasn’t just that. It was an instinctive desire to defend the socialism of my dead father. Because intersectionality is actually the opposite of socialism! Intersectionality believes that there is ‘no such thing as society’ — just various special interests.

In my opinion, we only become truly brave, truly above self-interest, when fighting for people different from ourselves. My hero as a kid was Jack Ashley — a deaf MP who became the champion of rape victims. These days, the likes of those who went after Suzanne would probably dismiss him as a self-loathing cis-ableist. Intersectionality, like identity politics before it, is pure narcissism.

Though it reminds us ceaselessly to ‘check our privilege’, intersectionality is the silliest privilege of them all, a gang of tools and twats tiptoeing around others’ finer feelings rather than getting stuck in, mucking in, like proper mates — the ultimate privilege, which is to serve each other with collective love and action. The most recently inter-species ruckus happened when the Deirdre Spart impersonator Laurie Penny wrote a passionate defence of the pixie cut in the New Statesman, only to get it in the sleekly shaved neck from women who accused her of not taking the different behaviour of African hair into consideration. When I asked a supporter of this lunacy whether she thought that every subject of interest to women should have every type of woman weighing in with her written opinion, she answered that yes, she did. Seriously? I don’t think my heart can stand the excitement of a weekly Staggers the size of a telephone directory.

I personally can understand black women occasionally getting teed off with their apparently carefree Wash’n’Go white stepsisters. But the most recent and reactionary development within this hissy-fitting hothouse — the insistence of intersectional feminists on the right of transsexuals not to be offended — tells you all you need to know about the essential stupidity of the movement.

The idea that a person can chose their gender — in a world where millions of people, especially ‘cis-gendered’ women, are not free to choose who they marry, what they eat or whether or not their genitals are cut off and sewn up with barbed wire when they are still babies — and have their major beautification operations paid for by the National Health Service seems the ultimate privilege, so don’t tell me to check mine. Here’s hoping that the in-fighting in-crowd of intersectionality disappear up their own intersection really soon, so the rest of us can resume creating a tolerant and united socialism.

The post ‘A screaming, grievance-hawking shambles’ appeared first on The Spectator.

On Saturday morning, when the body of the beautiful Antipodean model and television personality Charlotte Dawson was being taken from her home in Sydney, I was back in Blighty rolling up my sleeves and getting stuck in for yet another happy hour in the gladiatorial arena that is the Spectator online comments section. Wherein, amongst other things, an angry trans-person had threatened me with the Police, for committing Hate Crimes (note the use of Krazy Kapitals) and a Beating from her Hells Angel Husband.

These two things might seem completely random were it not for the fact that in 2012 Charlotte Dawson was admitted to hospital after a massive twit-off in which she was targeted by an organised online campaign of harassment at least in part due to her involvement with an anti-cyber-bullying crusade. ‘It kept going and going and going and going and going,’ she said of the anonymous hordes who told her to kill herself.

Some people saw a Hint of Hypocrisy (smells like an interesting fabric conditioner) in this, Dawson being notorious down under for her rather catty attitude as an Australia’s Next Top Model judge. She had also been bitchy about the Oz equivalent of Wags as part of her job as a TV fashion reporter and last month encouraged the singer Lorde to leave her native New Zealand: ‘Unless you’re very mediocre you need to get out of there … you just have to if you want to keep succeeding, otherwise it’ll just crush your spirit.’

But it was Dawson herself whose spirit ended up being crushed, and her friends and colleagues maintain that online trolling played some part in this. Sad though her death was, one would have to have a heart of stone not to raise a smile at the sight of Russell Crowe breaking down in tears at the news, before tweeting ‘Charley … just don’t understand. There’s not enough kind souls as it is. Rest in peace.’

Meanwhile, over at the Spectator website, myself and a band of recently assembled cyber-chums — including the magnificently named Flaming Fairy — were going at it hammer, tongs and snapping thongs with a person calling themselves both Michelle-Louise and The Dame. (I suppose we all had imaginary friends as tots, and some people liked the experience so much that they have seen fit to continue it well into middle age.)

Michelle the Dame, it soon transpired, was one angry trans-sister, who had taken exception to my Spectator piece on intersectionality and after a few cries of ‘Bigot!’ and ‘Fatty!’ the threats began in earnest. After she had warned me half a dozen times that a good old Altamont-style seeing-to was coming my way from her better half — ‘Did I MENTION that my husband is a Hells Angel and nightclub bouncer?’ — I tired of her trollery and bit back: ‘Did I mention that MY husband is a GRAMMARIAN — the MOST RIGOROUS grammarian in both East and West Sussex? I warn you that if HE decides to punctuate you, you’ll STAY punctuated!’

That did it; M the D went ballistic, addressing myself and my gay playmates thus: ‘You are the biggest load of scumbags and white trash there has ever been. Hitler had the right idea — he would have done away with the likes of you. I hate radical feminists and that hate has been even more strengthened by being on here with idiots and morons like you and your acolytes.’

I must say that I was fair hugging myself with glee by now, for I am not, to put it mildly, a blushing violet of any shade. I am not even a Charlotte Dawson, whose snarky carapace hides a soft exterior. I am tough as old boots. I honestly find it hard to care what my loved ones think of me; the idea that I would care what one-handed, half-witted strangers think of me is even more of a stretch. And though it’s awful when it happens to young girls, whose hormones are all over the show, I can’t help thinking that grown women shouldn’t react with such hoop-skirted uproar when aforementioned inadequates demonstrate their inferiority by calling them names and threatening them with a fate worse than death. From where I’m sitting, the only fate worse than death these poor seat-sniffers could inflict would be extreme boredom. And really bad punctuation.

After a few hours of being told that the Police were about to Knock on my Door (Krazy Kapitals are Katching) and drag Me away for Hate Crimes Galore, I lost patience and phoned the rozzers myself, always keen to meet Trouble halfway. After I’d given them my name and contact details, the charming lady asked me for a brief summary of the online bitch-fight. When I came to the bit about the Hells Angels and Hitler Being Right, there was a sharp intake of breath from Hate Crimes.

‘Let me stop you there, Julie, because this is starting to sound like you should be the one filing a complaint.’ ‘I won’t, thank you, as I’m not a cry-baby. But can I file one if this person really has done and I get arrested?’ ‘Of course you can! It’s never too late to report a hate crime.’

I went back to the fray refreshed and soon had Michelle the Dame deleting posts left, right and centre: Hitler and the Hells Angels would have to try another day.

As poor Charlotte Dawson’s case proves, these creatures can occasionally corner and destroy. But if you feel loved in your personal life, and sure of your beliefs in your public life — which I do, in spades — it’s hard to be hurt by the abuse of strangers. On the contrary, I find it rather bracing, like a swim in an icy pool on a sleepy morning. Like brass-rubbing and anal sex, online scrapping is not for everyone. But for a few of us articulate, secure types, it has opened up a whole new wonderland of verbalicious viciousness.

The post The joy of being hated appeared first on The Spectator.

From the age of 13, when the hormones kicked in, till I left my parents home at the age of 17 to become a writer (nearly forty years later, I’m still waiting) I must have been the most sex-mad virgin in Christendom. Nights were spent dressed as a West Country approximation of a transvestite Port Said prostitute, blind with eyeliner and dumb with lipgloss, alternately dancing like the lead in a Tijuana pony-show and hiding in the toilets during the slow numbers, crying repeatedly ‘Why won’t all those men just LEAVE ME ALONE!’ Days were spent in an attempt to evade the attentions of the regiment of leering males while voluntarily rolling up my regulation school skirt so high that it resembled a cummerbund.

Though I thought about sex ceaselessly, I clung on to my virginity as though it was an autographed pair of Marc Bolan’s undercrackers. I read Lolita in the park the summer I turned 13, wearing heart-shaped sunnies and hotpants and sucking on popsicles in a rather sordid example of life imitating art. I shivered at the fate of poor Dolly Schiller dying in childbirth in the town of Grey Star, still a teenager and all played out.

I avoided sex like the plague because I knew I would really, really like it; I suspected that it would exert a massive, non-specific power over me, and that it would conspire with those forces already bent on doing so — i.e. my parents — to keep me exactly where I was. To a kid who slept with a London tube map over her bed, joining the massed ranks of ex-teenage rebels turned harassed young mothers seemed a voyage of the damned indeed. Pushing a pram through a purgatory of pregnancy, lactation and finger-painting was to me as horrific an image as any Hieronymus Bosch vision of Hell.

I escaped when I was 17 — but true to type, I married the first man I slept with. I had a lot of sex during my first marriage, a mad amount during my second marriage and (after six months’ lesbian leave for good behaviour) a really quite insane amount during my third, current and hopefully last marriage. It’s fair to say that between the ages of 25 and 45, I was a monogamous sex fiend and when I wasn’t doing it, I was anticipating it, recovering from it or imagining downright rotten variations on it. I was once walking along the esplanade with my husband when a tall, dark and handsome Alsatian passed by. My husband looked hard at me and said ‘Please tell me you didn’t just say “Phwooar!’’’

This being the case, I’d have thought that the gradual decreasing of my sex drive — at 54, I’ve decided that no one needs to have it more than once a day: anything more is just showing off — would have left something of a gap in my life. I’d have predicted that I’d go down gamely gagging for it, as have my contemporaries Cosmo Landesman, 59 — who recently bristled in this very publication: ‘I’m still interested in sex. Is that a problem?’ — or Monica Porter, 61, who publishes her eye-watering memoir My Year Of Dating Dangerously this month. Instead, I react with genuine surprise when my (admittedly much younger) husband suggests a second go in a 24-hour time slot. I mean, yes, I’m up for it — but would I go looking for it? Probably not.

I don’t believe that I will be joining the ranks of so-called ABC sexers anytime soon — those couples who have sex only on anniversaries, birthdays and Christmas. But according to a recent Lancet report, we are as a nation having quite a lot less sex than we did 20 years ago — 40 per cent have sex once a week, 13 per cent once every six months and 17 per cent haven’t done the deed for over six months. It’s a bitter irony that the British finally found themselves promoted to Nympho of the Nations after decades of being considered the Frigid Man of Europe only to drop the baton on the last lap.

Perhaps familiarity has bred contempt? Society is so sex-drenched now that saying, in the manner of Bartleby, ‘I would prefer not to’ can look sort of cool. On the radio the other day, I heard a re-run of The Clitheroe Kid. I originally heard it as a child in the 1960s, and was amazed at how the word ‘elastic’ reduced the audience to screams of pleasurably outraged disbelief. In my lifetime we’ve gone from the public broadcast of the E-word to the C-word; it’s bound to induce collective ennui.

The genuinely fulfilled aged amorists must be few and far between. Recently a friend of my age, also in her mid-fifties, who I hadn’t seen in a while, confided to me ‘I’ve got two on the go.’ She was referring to lovers — one male, one female, both younger than her. But neither seemed to be doing the trick. She communicated the information with all the joie de vivre of a verruca sufferer bringing their chiropodist up to speed.

Let the dirty old men and cougars have their fun, but if I ever had to — perish the thought — choose between a sexless future with my husband or a sex-filled future without him, I’d choose the first. My end-of-life regret won’t be having had too little sex, pace John Betjeman, it’ll be that my third husband wasn’t my only husband, and that I had too little time with him, even if we live to be a hundred. This, I feel, means I have finally, in some way, grown up. And to think, all that time I believed that only sex made us into adults.

The post The joy of less sex appeared first on The Spectator.

A-Huff’s career has been remarkable for the contrast between hard-headed social advancement (‘the most upwardly mobile Greek since Icarus’) and addle-pated spiritual questing. In this she resembles an older, colder Gwyneth Paltrow, who coincidentally came out with her ‘consciously uncoupling’ corker as I was ploughing my way through Thrive — such a G.P. cookbook title! Like Paltrow, who recently vowed that after years of lying she was ‘starting to get honest: the path to honesty has been one of the most beautiful, painful and interesting lessons of my life’, A-Huff attempts to portray trauma as a lifestyle accessory and growth enhancer.

It can’t be a bundle of laughs finding out that your butch Republican hubby is actually a gay libertarian, but she took it on her admirably tight chin and didn’t just survive, but yes, thrived, shucking off her drab politician’s wife’s weeds and pulling on the sharp suits of the mega-career woman, creating the Huffington Post, which she sold to AOL within just six years for $315 million.

But no matter how rarefied a gal’s air, sooner or later Madame de Menopause will come a-calling. Most of us see even simple middle age as a sign to slow down, peel off the pantyhose, reach for the elasticated waistbands and proudly exclaim ‘Ooof!’ upon sitting down. If we were to find ourselves on the floor of our ‘home office’ bleeding from a head wound, having collapsed through not sleeping and working 18-hour days, as A-Huff did in 2007, most of us would think ‘Sod work! I’m gonna go on a Caribbean cruise and eat ice cream with bourbon poured over it for breakfast all the way!’

But characteristically, A-Huff decided to make a whole new string for her bow from her temporary trip-up. Of course, most of us who manage to reach middle age without getting our head stuck up our own fundament while simultaneously gazing down from an ivory tower are well aware that if we force ourselves habitually to work 18 hours a day, then probably something’s got to give. Doing so, and then writing a book about why one shouldn’t do it, seems quite like tying one’s own legs together and then complaining that some unseen hand has forced one to hop. To put it mildly, it’s not as though this book was crying out to be written — you’ve seen the advice 1,000 times, from the NHS website to the pages of Vogue.

Sleep in a dark room, eat less, move more (and die anyway, as they never see fit to add). Though she fusses a great deal over what the pursuit of success is doing to women’s heath, A-Huff never quite convinces as a Little Friend to the World’s Females. In her first book, 1974’s The Female Woman, she portrayed feminists as confused and neurotic misfits who projected their inadequacies onto men — rather shamefully amusing, seeing as her husband turned gay when they were married; maybe she was projecting her thwarted desires onto him? — and obsessively pursued careers at the expense of their home lives.

Which she must have herself done, obviously, to have been on the floor bleeding from a head wound after habitually working an 18-hour day! If A-Huff can’t take the advice she first dished out a whopping 40 years ago, one might well ask, why should we take it now? The uncharitably-minded might see her sudden enlightment that there’s more to life than being grasping, pushy and ambitious as a sly bit of ladder-pulling; ‘Don’t do as I do, do as I say’ coming from older women to younger often masks jealousy of youth, and a distinctly unspiritual desire to keep the spoils of success all to oneself. It’s all very well ceaselessly to repeat that there is more to life than money and power when one has spent one’s life chasing and accumulating money and power and now has the absolute luxury of stopping to smell the roses ad infinitum.

Mind you, if A-Huff ever stops to smell roses belonging to you, keep a sharp eye on her, because if you turn your back for a second, she’ll have picked them quick, sold them to the nearest florist for a fortune and then told you it’s better to give than receive. I was interested to see that none of the top ten sites where one may volunteer — that is, work without payment — was the Huffington Post itself, notorious for not paying writers one red cent for content.

Beware of Greeks sharing gifts — including those of wisdom and hindsight — when A-Huff’s about, as she’s bound to come out on top, bleeding from the head and smelling of roses.

The post Don’t do as I do, do as I say appeared first on The Spectator.

When I heard that the television pundit and all-round nepot Kelly Osbourne had gone into ‘food rehab’ upon gaining weight, I fair choked on my cronut. Crumbs! Is there any pleasure, weakness or habit that isn’t pathologised these days, even stuffing oneself out of sheer molten gluttony? I read on; incredibly, people were praising ‘strong’ Kelly and ‘brave’ Kelly. I made a memo to myself to mention to the svelte checkout girl at my local Tesco how brave and strong I was next time she raised an eyebrow at the amount of sweets and crisps I was giving a good home to.

Every woman seems to be strong and brave at the mo. Those who make themselves vomit after eating, those who starve themselves, those who slash at themselves. (Why not give blood and help others while harming yourself? Then at least something good’s coming out of it.) There was a TV commercial for deodorant awhile back which proclaimed boldly ‘EVERY woman is strong!’ What, even gold-diggers wearing heels so high they have to be assisted from bar-stool to bathroom while keeping a weather eye out for Premier League football players? A whole bunch of media broads got cross when L’Wren Scott was described as Mick Jagger’s girlfriend, protesting that she was, rather, a Strong Woman. But why? When I was growing up, the only Strong Women you ever heard of were long-gone circus freaks, or those Eastern Bloc shot-putters who were sniggeringly prevailed upon to take thrillingly named ‘sex tests’ by the harrumphing old Olympic committee.

These days you can’t move for them. I like tough broads, so you’d think I’d be down with this linguistic development, but I must say I shudder with distaste on nine times out of ten hearings. Just like men, women are not all brave and strong, any more than we can all run fast or write well. A dry drunk, a slasher, a puker or a gorger is particularly not strong or brave. If Kelly Osbourne is strong and brave for going to food rehab, then what words do we use about, say, women facing death in order to cast their vote in Afghanistan? If all women are ‘strong’ just because they sweat a bit in the gym — as in the deodorant ad — then what do we call the women in my friend Leila Segal’s photography exhibition ‘Voice of Freedom’, which opens in London next week and examines the impact of modern-day slavery on those who leave their African homes to set out for the safety of Israel and are tortured and trafficked on the way? As Leila says, ‘Choosing to live after you have been “sold” by a man you loved, then repeatedly raped and tortured; watched your kidnappers bury people alive in front of you; seen people beheaded. Choosing not only to live, but to publicly tell the story of what has been done to you to protect other young women, risking shaming and contempt on your own community. Choosing to love and trust again. That is strength.’

Brave and strong are important words; to overuse them, in the attempt to make women feel better about themselves, is a betrayal. Especially considering that every nation has a vast and mostly silent army of brave and strong women; the victims of the laughably cosily named ‘domestic violence’. I was once one of them, as were all of the co-founders of End Of, a pop-up fundraising campaign which has organised a party-for-pay on the evening of 29 April at Hove town hall. We were the lucky ones — we escaped, to not merely survive but thrive in our hard-won freedom. Two women a week are not so fortunate, and are murdered in this country alone by partners or ex-partners. In every country in the world, violence against women is so consistent and epic that it might well be called the longest terrorist campaign in history.

In India, they have the pink-clad women of the Gulabi Gang, who visit abusive husbands and threaten to beat them with large sticks unless they stop hitting their wives; here in Hove, where such behaviour is frowned upon, we are holding a frolicsome evening of music, reading and shameless disco-dancing under the End Of banner. Our actions may be frivolous, but our intent is true; to raise money for Rise, the Brighton domestic violence charity. Across the country, nearly 200 women a day — a day — are being turned away from refuges, while prosecutions are falling, both as a result of government cuts. More British women were killed through men’s violence last year than British troops killed in Afghanistan in the past three years.

When I thought of the name of our event — End Of — I didn’t for a moment mean it to seem as if I believe that a few hundred souls drinking and dancing on a school-night somewhere on the south coast will bring an end to this epidemic of hatred. Our aim is simply to raise a bit of cash for an admirable charity, and to add our voices to the increasing demand that domestic violence be perceived as a public rather than a private issue, and as a hate crime equivalent to that of racial or homophobic violence. It’s all too easy to throw up our hands in horror at the Indian rapes, or tut-tut over the Pistorius trial. But in my opinion, a society which does not take active steps to prevent the murder of two members of a disadvantaged group each week — a group who are attacked because they are women as surely as gay people are attacked for their sexuality or members of minority racial groups for their ethnic origin — cannot truly be called a civilised society. We are not saying that our campaign is the End Of domestic violence — but it may well be one tiny step towards the end of the beginning. We may not wear pink saris and carry big sticks, but we are legion, and we’re definitely coming to get you. That’s a threat and a promise, from the brave and the strong, both living and dead.

The post I’m sick of weak women being praised as ‘strong’ appeared first on The Spectator.

For the past decade, I have lived — literally — between a church and a synagogue; as metaphors go, I would get laughed out of town if I stuck it in a novel. I left my church (not the one next door) when a ten-year-old child (not just a random passer-by, but a regular attendant) identified the cross as ‘a space rocket’ and everyone laughed indulgently. And then I left my synagogue (again, not the nearby one) when the liberal rabbi’s insistence that all religions were equally worthy of respect began to sound increasingly hollow in the face of the increasing intolerance and bigotry of Islamism. Now I exist in suspension between the two faiths. It doesn’t trouble me (I’m far too shallow to agonise over matters of life and death), but it does interest me, for I am that strange being, the reverse of the vile modern type who parrots, ‘I’m not religious, but I am spiritual’, in the belief that it makes them sound deep and interesting as opposed to a vacuous ass-hat. I’m not spiritual — but I am definitely religious. Specifically, I have a great respect for Judeo-Christian culture as I believe it to be the creator and guardian of those freedoms we in the West enjoy today, including secularism.

So I was annoyed to see That Letter in the Telegraph from 55 self-regarding sticky-beaks — sorry, 55 respected public figures — taking the Prime Minister to task for claiming that Britain is still a Christian country. It’s simplistic to evaluate whether a country is Christian or not by counting the heads bowed beside stained glass each Sunday. If we were talking about Catholicism, fair enough, but isn’t it a particularly appealing facet of Protestantism that a person who does good and doesn’t go to church is more of a Christian than one who doesn’t and does?

The letter was particularly pointless at a time when Cameron and the Church of England are having a wuss-off over who’s the most caring and inclusive. Cam backs gay marriage; the Church think he’s gone too far. But then the Church gets that big foam wagging finger moving eight to the bar over food banks, scolding Cam that Jesus wouldn’t like it. It’s extraordinarily foolish at a time when a genuinely restrictive, repressive religion is making ever greater gains in this country.

Ofsted recently drew our attention to English schools, run by Islamists, where girls are forced to sit at the back of the classroom, teaching of GCSE biology is ‘restricted to comply with Islamic teaching’ and Christian students have to ‘teach themselves’ GCSE religious studies as the teacher only speaks of Islam. The usual weasel-way of failing to address the very real threat of one specific religion by tarring all religions with the same barmy brush is the school of logic which ends up with Quakers being strip-searched at airports lest terrorist profiling be deemed racist, or brings up the Westboro Baptist Church as an example of Christianity being as crazy as Islam. But there were only a few dozen people in the WBC last time I counted: Islamists, there are a lot of.

Writers in particular — and there are several who have signed this letter — should not underestimate the privileges they take for granted in a Christian country. It’s well documented that Spain translates more books from English in one year than the entire Arab world has in 1,000 years, but I wonder what the Umma would make of Sir Terry Pratchett’s statement ‘I create fresh gods almost with every new book’? Here, it’s helped make him a national treasure and got him a gong from the Defender of the Faith.

From Brandeis to Brunei, Islamists are shutting down debate and turning back progress — and these writers are tilting at the C of E. Well, I’m not a Christian, but I want to live in a Christian country — a Protestant country, specifically, as I believe that it is the best guarantor of my freedom and the freedom of others, many of whom I disagree with. What will happen to the churches when the worshippers are gone? They may become modish metropolitan apartments for polite atheists, as many already have done, or they may become charnel houses, as they currently are all across the Middle East. Then our little letter-writing friends will have something to fret about. My husband sometimes complains about the loudness of the church bells in our square, but I like them; they wake me up, and they reassure me. One day perhaps the bells will be silent. Let’s hope that when they no longer toll for you, what replaces them helps you sleep even sounder in your safe European beds. But I do wonder.

The post For God’s sake appeared first on The Spectator.

I’ve always said that speech is my second language, so naturally I’m somewhat slang-shy; I love words all written down properly and punctuated to within an inch of their lives. Not so Jonathon Green, who has the same relationship with slang as Jordan does with eating wedding cake in a thong; five books about it published and another one in the pipeline. According to Wikipedia, Green is often referred to as ‘the English-speaking world’s leading lexicographer of slang’, and has even been described as ‘the most acclaimed British lexicographer since Dr Johnson’.

I’ve got a bit of a problem — or ‘beef’ — with people (generally public-school men, like Green) who make a life’s work and a handsome living by taking something vibrant, ephemeral and working-class and turning it into something stodgy, academic and respectable; inevitably, there’s a suspicion that they’re slumming it as surely as any daft deb in 1920s Harlem sniffing crushed aspirin and declaring the jazz band ‘to die for!’ But there is some good stuff here.

For instance, did you know that long before ‘gay’ meant homosexual, it actually meant, when used of a woman, ‘loose’? ‘No gentleman would think of calling a lady of his acquaintance, however hilarious she might be in disposition, a gay woman,’ huffed one Colonel Prideaux way back in 1889. So much for the righteous knicker-twisting of right-wing tabloid tattlers — HANDS OFF OUR INNOCENT G-WORD! — which I remember from the last century.

And the original meaning of ‘tit’ was ‘fool’ rather than ‘breast’, which reminded me that ‘boob’, too, does double duty on this front, as when the Democrat wit remarked upon the election of John Warner, Republican senator and the then Mr Elizabeth Taylor, ‘Looks like Virginia just elected the three biggest boobs in the country!’

There’s so little humour in this book that it makes your eyes cross with sheer molten boredom. I laughed only twice; at the flapper slang ‘cellar smeller’ — one who always turns up where liquor is to be had at no cost (I’ve known a few of those) — and ‘giggle-water’ for hard liquor itself. Towards the end I found myself composing slang-based rhymes in order to ease the monotony — ‘For Pete’s sake/I’d be as happy as Larry/Not to learn more lingo/Of Tom, Dick and Harry!’

As a dirty-minded teenager, furtively looking up the swear words secreted inside the school dictionary, I would have thought it beyond the bounds of delight that one day I’d be paid to read a book basically about cussing, but you really can have too much of a bad thing. I can’t reproduce the lustier lists for such delicate souls as peruse The Spectator, but take the different words for ‘tea’, for example; ‘Betty Lea, dicky lea, George Bohee, glory be, Gypsy Lee, hay lee, Jenny Lea, jimmy lee, Mother Machree, nancy lee, Peter and Lee, river lea, sailors on the sea, split pea, wasp and bee, or you and me.’ Just call it tea, you blithering cretins!

Instead I would have preferred to have read more about the ceaselessly fascinating lost tongue of Polari — the coded speech of then-outlawed gays — and how it managed to captivate a mainstream audience of housewives on Radio 2 in the 1960s. Counter-jumper though I am, I have always had a slight element of the Lady Bracknells about my speech patterns, a tendency towards formality, and by the time I’d finished this 400-pager, I felt ready to strike the first rapscallion who assailed me in a mountebank vernacular. As the cracking actress Jane Wyman said of her ex, Ronnie Reagan, ‘Ask him the time and he’ll tell you how the watch was made.’ Or, in language that Green might better understand, ‘Come, sir, you have delighted us long enough — zip it, can it, cork it, put a sock in it, put a lid on it and shut your pie-hole.’

The post … and beefing up a living one appeared first on The Spectator.

Books by bellicose columnists with the initials R.L. are like buses — none comes along for ages, then two come at once. Having been given the heave ho from my last column some years back, I was looking forward to putting this regularly employed, high-profile Pushmi-pullyu through its paces before filleting it thinly and serving it up sliced seven ways.

The best way to read the Liddle book is as a self-loathing joke, otherwise the sheer level of sumptuous hypocrisy may choke you; this is, after all, a book bewailing modern-day selfishness by the man who left the mother of his children months after their wedding in order to be with his young mistress. He bangs on ceaselessly about what ‘we’ve’ lost, but exactly what golden age he’s yearning for isn’t clear; in the first chapter he writes that his parents didn’t like abroad as it was full of ‘wogs’, although his mother fancied a holiday in Egypt in the 1970s as they were at war with Israel and she didn’t like Jews. What a pair of charmers! Incredibly, he writes a few pages later of their ‘morality… anchored in decency’.

But Liddle’s often right about some things. He loathes Islamists, as do I, and admires Israel, as I do. He believes that Eastern European immigration has been divine for the middle class — all that cheap, biddable labour — and disastrous for the working class. And yet even our agreements made me tut loudly, as these important issues are tackled with the same level of indignation as fast food and limited leg-room on aeroplanes. He’s totally inconsistent; a chapter about women suggests ‘outrageously’ (yawn) that ladies, bless ’em, were happier before feminism because they ‘knew where their place was’. But in the next chapter, he’s bemoaning the lack of social mobility for the working class. If women were happier knowing where their place was and not striving for achievement, why not the workers?

The constant beleaguered ‘we’ whom Liddle speaks for in this book is immensely irritating; what about all ‘we’ jolly fiftysomethings who absolutely love the modern world? After a while I realised that he uses it in the way the appalling Liz Jones does; it seems somehow less sad to claim that ‘a generation’ is disappointed, bitter and joyless than to admit that this is a personal affliction.

As a working-class provincial adolescent, I frequently defined myself by who I didn’t want to be, and the main culprits were old women moaning on the bus. Liddle, for all his metropolitan swagger, reminds me of them — all he misses out is the state of his corns and the dire repercussions which followed his friend Hilda’s hysterectomy. Richard Littlejohn, on the other hand, is all man — a twinkly uncle who will comment on how one is ‘shooting up’ before presenting one with a shiny half-crown. (Steady on!) Though his reputation is nastier than Liddle’s, his book is far cosier; though it similarly deals wth things we have lost, it’s strangely cheery, as opposed to Liddle’s long wail of misery. This is probably because Littlejohn follows his own rules of good behaviour, and therefore isn’t constantly aware of being hoist on the petard of his hypocrisy, as Liddle obviously is.

The portrait Littlejohn paints of his early childhood is far from appealing, full of sadistic dentists, freezing schools and sunshine-free holidays. But born in 1954, he was a child of the 1960s more than the 1950s, and the time he details most lovingly was in fact the decade when the old rules were overturned and things got messy. It’s ironic that the Sixties are now referred to nostalgically by so many people appalled by the 21st century; at the time, to people who had grown up in a black-and-white world, the decade must have seemed absolute insanity. My first father-in-law, a teenage soldier in the second world war, was amazed when a group of Italian soldiers he had taken prisoner combed their hair, while looking in mirrors! I remember my own dad washing his hair, once a week, with soap. Can we imagine how the fey lock-tossers of the Beatles, Stones and Kinks seemed to these men?

I enjoyed the writing about lidos best:

The Lido also had its own resident nonce, who would stand in the shallow end on club nights and encourage children to swim between his legs. Parents would warn their kids not to go anywhere near him. The clue was in the name: he was called Frank the Bummer.

Though Littlejohn looks back with affection, you get the feeling he knows exactly the limitations of these sepia memories, and is far happier in the modern world he takes such savage amusement in defrocking. The difference between these books, basically, is that Littlejohn comes across as the little boy mocking the emperor who has no clothes, and Liddle as the emperor himself, frantically trying to cover his embarrassment at being caught out with any scrap of polemic that comes to hand. I’ll take the mockers over the moaners any time.

The post Mockers and moaners appeared first on The Spectator.

‘There’s a dark cloud rising from the desert floor/ I packed my bags and I’m heading straight into the storm/ Gonna be a twister to blow everything down/ That ain’t got the faith to stand its ground!’ How I used to enjoy singing these ominous lyrics to Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Promised Land’ as I got ready to go to Israel! But when you’re going there on easyJet, the words lose their self-dramatising sting somewhat.

After decades of having to schlep all the way to Heathrow and undergo a somewhat shamefully enjoyable grilling from the sexy El Al staff who moved along the line making you step into a corner with them and answer questions, you can now check in online with the friendly orange airline and waltz through security with no more bother than if you were going to Marbs.

When I first came to Israel more than a decade ago, my atheist Jewish ex-mother-in-law cried and told me she would pray every day for my safe return, and my friends mostly gasped ‘But WHY?’ Now she is dead, and they express the earnest desire to accompany me next time. It’s pretty safe to say that the demonisation of the tiny Jewish state has been a failure, despite the zeal of the anti-Semites in anti-Zionists’ clothing.

The first thing that strikes one upon first visiting Israel is that these people appear to bear no relation whatsoever to the bookish, anxious stereotype of the Jew which initially attracted me to the breed. They are athletic beyond belief. At 11.30 at night, as K and I sit drinking in the LaLaLand beach bar, they’re still jogging along the esplanade and playing volleyball on the court. All along the seafront from the Old Port to Jaffa, there are outdoor gyms, their equipment painted in the primary colours of the playground. No matter how sweltering the weather, they are always in use.

To say that Israelis are ‘confident’ is like saying Rihanna (who played Tel Aviv last year, along with Madonna and Lady Gaga, thus making the ‘boycott’ look somewhat silly: as I leave this time, Tel Aviv is gearing up for the Rolling Stones) is attractive. And this has grown over the years I’ve been coming here. Perhaps the Arab Spring and its subsequent messy afterbirth have made them feel that the pressure is off them while the Muslim world continues to tear itself apart. Or maybe they were just made this way; the early Zionist poet Jabotinsky did warn us, ‘From the pit of decay and dust/ Through blood and sweat/ A generation will arise to us/ Proud, generous and fierce.’ About right, but he forgot ‘fit’.

I’m sitting on the Hilton Beach, knee deep in my gay brothers, when I catch a beautiful blonde woman looking at me. My hopes are dashed when she says, ‘Excuse me, you’re English. Do you have a Nurofen on you?’ I offer her prescription codeine. ‘Bingo!’ she laughs.

My new friend is Dina, a teacher from London, but long ago married to an Israeli. I ask her what she thinks of the recent change in the law which will require Orthodox men to serve in the army; Ben-Gurion, in order to get support from religious Jews (many of whom are, ironically, anti-Zionist), did a deal with them in the run-up to the re-creation of Israel allowing the Orthodox community to opt out.

‘About time! I’ve got a son doing his army duty now; my other son and  my daughter will follow him when they’re old enough. So I’ve got three children who may have to fight and die for a country their mother wasn’t even born in, while the Orthodox have children like there’s no tomorrow and don’t have to give up any of them? Like I say, about time.’ She points down the beach to our right. ‘See that — that’s the religious beach here in Tel Aviv — right next to the official gay beach. Don’t tell me this in an accident. There’s so much resentment in this country towards the religious. Hopefully the new law will bring us closer together. We couldn’t be further apart.’

In the Eretz Museum, at an exhibition of wildlife photography, I get talking to Call-Me-Boris. ‘Not my real name, but a good English name, no?’ he twinkles. Call-Me-Boris came here as a child from the disintegrating Soviet Union — he’s not even sure he’s Jewish, but that nice Mr Gorbachev’s glasnost policy brought him here: ‘My father said that it was the first time any people in the Soviet Union pretended to be a Jew to get better treatment from the government! So we don’t ask him too many questions.’

When I first came here, you couldn’t get a bacon sandwich to save your life; now Tel Aviv has more hams than Equity, thanks to the ambiguous Jewish immigration from the Eastern bloc.

What does he think of the former Soviet Union’s relationship with Israel? ‘Is there one? The Russians don’t need Arab oil any more and they’re more interested in, as you might say in England, ‘Keeping a tin lid on it’ in their own country with all the separatists, rather than interfering in this region. They have their own Islamist problem now, so maybe less inclination to come after Israel.’

On the last morning, two Israeli soldiers walk into Benedict’s — ‘All About Breakfast!’ — ahead of us; a tiny, exquisite Chinese girl, a tall and beautiful black man, they seem to exemplify the magnificent melting pot that is this tiny nation. Holding hands, huge rifles over their backs, they peruse the menu. I get tearful; also, I figure, I’ve saved literally thousands of pounds this trip by staying at a housetrip.com flat rather than an eye-wateringly pricey Tel Aviv hotel. When K and I get the bill, I ask ‘May I please pay for the soldiers?’ Our waitress smiles: ‘The soldiers are gone. But Israel thanks you.’

The post Letter from Tel Aviv appeared first on The Spectator.

At a time when feminism is grimly engaged in disappearing up its own intersection (two transsexuals squabbling over a tampon is the image that comes to mind) Caitlin Moran is to be bravo’d till the sacred cows come home for bringing her super-brightness to bear on this most vital of subjects. Like the rest of the western world and its stepdaughters, I loved How To Be a Woman and was excited to see what she would come up with next; when I heard it would be a novel, I was a little underwhelmed, having read her previous attempt at Young Adult fiction, The Chronicles of Narmo.

When I realised in the opening chapter that it was another novel about a big family, I felt very tired; in my experience, people from big families like to believe that we only children go around permanently traumatised from not having had anyone to share our toys with. But in reality, we look at them sadly not out of bitter envy but through sheer molten pity. Who on earth ever wanted to grow up sharing a bedroom in Bedlam?

There’s a lot about masturbation here — as much an age of coming as a coming of age novel — and the ensuing embarrassment which follows from treating oneself as a moveable feast while surrounded by siblings. But once you’ve shaken off these early indicators of a sordid shambles, things get really good. Moran’s writing is frequently magical in its throwaway precision; a man’s tie ‘looks like it has been put on by an enemy’, while kissing ‘is brilliant: I would put it just below telly but definitely above drinking, squeezing blackheads or fairgrounds’.

She writes with breathtaking brio, like a great professional hoofer who has been toe-tapping since tot-hood but has never grown tired of performing: very much a ‘Ta-da! — see what I did there?’ type of writer. Just once in a while it gets a bit more Louie Spence than Ann Miller — the somewhat crazed gagging and gurning over the heroine’s out-of-control sex-drive — but this could be a sign of my advanced age.

Of course, Moran starts with far better raw material than your average entitled Oxbridge hackette. This is, after all, the barely fictionalised story of a brilliant fat girl from a working-class provincial family who becomes a journalistic wunderkind; when a story is so great, why change it? Books about the wonder of working at music papers often tank — think of Tony Parsons’s Stories We Could Tell — as the only people who tend to find the subject interesting are people who get their books for free. But this is so much more, and Moran shows her shining soul — which is even more remarkable than her wit — when she writes about being young, looking for love and the utter vileness of the class system.

Sometimes I couldn’t work out whether this book was aimed at mature adolescents or immature adults, but I loved it anyway — even before I came across the very pleasing mention of myself in Chapter 20, and the even better one in Chapter 24. Moran’s detractors will find lots to loathe here, but as with the criticisms of How To Be a Woman — ranging from ‘nudge-nudge’ to ‘narcissistic’ — such poltroons immediately flag themselves up as humourless, envious ass-hats.

Ignore them; almost every page has something on it which makes you smile, makes you sad or makes you think — often all three at once, in one sentence. How very unusual, and how very Moran; from rock chick to Mother Courage, with her best yet to come.

The post How to write a novel appeared first on The Spectator.

Recently one morning, as I was weeping over Caitlin Moran’s (daughter of Mr and Mrs Moran of Wolverhampton) brilliant book How to Build a Girl — specifically, the heartbreaking way she writes about coming from an impoverished family — a report came on to the radio with the glad tidings that working-class white children are now doing worse in schools than any other ethnic group. Said one Graham Stuart, the Conservative chairman of the education select committee, ‘They do less homework and are more likely to miss school than other groups. We don’t know how much of the underperformance is due to poor attitudes to school, a lack of work ethic or weak parenting.’

No, we don’t, do we? But what if it was to do with feeling that there’s just no point in bothering? That the odds are now so shamelessly stacked against a white working-class child getting a decently paid job, let alone one they actually enjoy, that to try hard at school would be to give up the last remnants of agency and rebellion? It’s no secret that social mobility — which just a few years back we all presumed would rock on regardless — has reversed, doing over the already vulnerable working class with the force of a steamroller. Yes, you chirpy Cockneys and you stoic Northerners, not only have the jobs your parents did — making things — disappeared, but the cushy jobs that a blessed few of you once might have escaped the surly bonds of the proletariat by nabbing — modelling, acting, writing for newspapers — have now been colonised by the children of the rich/famous/well-connected, too.

Nepotism has never been so shameless and so widespread, and the Sads — Sons and Daughters — are everywhere. The very morning I heard that report, I found the following — without hunting around — in the media. Over at Mail Online, a bum-faced 17-year-old called Rafferty Law (son of Jude ’n’ Sadie) was walking the catwalk with ‘close friend and fellow model’ Cora Corre (granddaughter of Vivienne Westwood). What’s the betting they’ll soon be joined on the runway by Kate Moss’s little sister Lottie, 16, recently signed with Storm and photographed for Calvin Klein, exactly like her sister before her? Looking at photos of Moss Junior, one is spitefully reminded of that line some wag came out with about Greta Garbo’s stand-in, one Geraldine Dvorak: ‘She has everything that Garbo has. Except that thing that Garbo has.’

Upmarket at the Times, one Henry Dimbleby (son of David and cookery writer Josceline) was bewailing the diets of working-class schoolchildren in a piece with the unintentionally hilarious headline ‘Let them eat veg!’ While on the cover of Elle, Keira Knightley (daughter of playwright Sharman Macdonald) pouted out with her usual constipated air. She’s a creature of contradictions, that one; forever banging on about how she’s just an ordinary sweary bird down the pub who fame and fortune somehow just happened to — and yet, by her own admission, asking her parents if she could have an agent at the age of three and actually getting one at the age of six. In Elle she’s still at it; when asked if she would discourage a potential daughter from taking up acting, Knightley huffs, ‘Oh, 100 per cent I’d absolutely tell her not to. I would 150 million trillion per cent be totally discouraging.’

Hmm. Am I alone in finding this far from being Knightley’s most convincing performance — even more so than the one where she played a bounty hunter? She is, after all, married to James Righton of the Klaxons, and surely they’ve seen the memo that, these days, the children of famous showbiz parents have to be in showbiz too? And — whisper it — their dirty little secret is that they really do like it that way. Though simple starlets may compare showing off for lots of money to being a soldier (Paltrow and Cruise), being raped (Charlize and Kristen) and being stoned to death (Geldof), that’s just to put us ‘civilians’ off and keep the jammy jobs safe for their own spawn.

If a Martian came down today, he’d believe that only the children of the famous are allowed to have enjoyable careers — the royal family started it, but only now are we seeing how crass and counterproductive it is when people get jobs because of who their parents are. The actresses Julie Walters and Maxine Peake have spoken searingly of how few working-class actors are now coming through, and even reality TV has fallen to the toffs in the shape of Made in Chelsea, in which confectionery and hotel heirs compete to see who can best prove The Only Way Is Essex wrong. While fewer than one in ten British children attends a fee-paying school, a whopping 60 per cent of rock music chart acts are now ex-public school, compared with 1 per cent 20 years ago. And as for the level of nepotism in journalism, don’t get me started.

Insult follows injury follows indignity when it comes to the prospects of today’s white working-class youth. Sport used to be an avenue of escape, for example, but the head of Ofsted has just warned that a ‘disproportionately’ high number of successful athletes are privately educated, ‘cementing the social inequality that holds our nation back’. That’s the thing about nepotism; it’s ultra-conservative but the opposite of patriotic, wasting the endless talent of all those could-have-been runners and writers born on the wrong side of the tracks. Though 93 per cent of children attend state schools, they only make up a third of top athletes; and I wonder what the stats are when it comes to the media.

No matter, because the BBC have just announced that they have hatched a new £2 million scheme to fast-track black and Asian writers, actors and presenters. That’ll be the young blacks and Asians who in fact do better than poor whites in school — but as the white trash have a lack of work ethic, it’s probably their fault. Similarly, the Guardian has a ‘Positive Action Scheme — Ethnic Minorities’ in place, but zero for poor white would-be journalists.

These deaths by a thousand snubs add to the impression of white working-class children being young ghosts in their own country, a new blank, betrayed generation of Chesterton’s famous Secret People:

‘We hear men speaking for us of new laws strong and sweet,

Yet is there no man speaketh as we speak in the street.

It may be we shall rise the last as Frenchmen rose the first,

Our wrath come after Russia’s wrath and our wrath be the worst.

It may be we are meant to mark with our riot and our rest

God’s scorn for all men governing. It may be beer is best.

But we are the people of England; and we have not spoken yet.

Smile at us, pay us, pass us. But do not quite forget.’

These ghosts may be less patient than their pacified parents, and prime candidates for the Ukip dream.

Nepotism makes countless people sad, but does it make its beneficiaries happy? From Prince Charles to Peaches Geldof, I’d say not. How can you possibly have any pride in yourself knowing that you achieved your position because of the sperm lotto? How can you sleep, knowing of the people from poor backgrounds who would be more suitable for the job than you?

But I have no pity for them. The psychologist Abraham Maslow wrote that ‘The most beautiful fate, the most wonderful good fortune that can happen to any human being, is to be paid for doing that which he passionately loves to do.’ For the kind I left behind, it is always winter and never Christmas.

‘I know what happened to girls like me, in history,’ writes Caitlin Moran in How to Build a Girl. ‘They are hard-handed, oily and unperfumed in manual labour. They drudge so hard they look 50 at 30. I would have been in a factory, or a field, with no books, music or trains down to London. I would have been one of a million sad cattle, standing in the rain, wholly unrecorded.’

She and I escaped, but for millions of girls — and boys — like us, it’s history once more.

The post Born to be famous appeared first on The Spectator.

Pity the modern starlet. Be she steaming-hot pop-tart or reality-show show-off, her range of emotional experiences will, thanks mostly to the gentlemen of the press, be strictly limited. She will have ‘lonely hells’ (often but not always linked to ‘drug hells’), ‘sex romps’ (sometimes ‘three-in-a-bed’) and watch her life ‘spiralling out of control’. She will then be ‘hurting’ and probably have a ‘public meltdown’, after which she will be certain to make ‘time for me’ and hopefully end up in ‘a good place’.

But throughout this, come rain or shine — come probiotic yoghurt endorsement or cover of OK! magazine — the backbeat of her life will repeat the same monotonous note: The One, The One, The One … and the ceaseless cycle of searching for and celebrating the same. It’s what we used to call ‘serial monogamy’, held a desperate beat too long and turned into a belief system. The phrase has now reached such critical mass that a current TV advertisement plays with what our expectations of what The One must be; a gooey girl’s voice informs us that Kate has found The One, and that they’ve been on holiday to Mexico together, thereby making her friends jealous. In a stroke of kinky and/or surreal logic, The One is finally revealed to be … a satchel? Lady Bracknell might not approve, but Dorothy Parker might conclude that Kate was rather clever to put her eggs in one basket rather than one bastard.

Definitions in the Urban Dictionary of The One include ‘The person you know you’re going to love forever’, ‘Absolutely, positively the only person on earth you are meant to be with; soul mate and best friend’ and ‘the person you spend your whole life looking for’. And also, with the bracing effect of a particularly piquant pepper spray in a smug mug, ‘To like him/her over all the rest. Could pertain to being the one for life … or the one for the moment.’ For the moment! You can practically hear the outraged braying of the One-botherers ring out across Christendom. Though for me, this is a perfect summing up of romantic love at its best.

But when did The One become such a be-all, end-all and know-all of female aspiration? I believe that (unlike body-con dresses and seeing knuckle-dragging footballers as some sort of sexual El Dorado) this is one contemporary tic which can’t be blamed on reality TV totty, though they may pursue this particular nugget of fool’s gold most noisily and publicly. No, the rotten roots of the current craze for seeing romantic relationships as a cross between a padded cell and a three-legged race began a long time ago.

Increasingly these days, surveying the soft parade of modern life, I think of the old G.K. Chesterton chestnut: ‘When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.’ This seems particularly true of romantic love — we expect it to fill the hollow places (and not just the obvious ones) where previously we might have welcomed a deity. Until comparatively recently, there were ‘three of us’ to quote Princess Diana, in every marriage; it was a sacrament which the Almighty witnessed and a promise made to Him as much as to the spouse, in the knowledge that passion lasts a few years but The Passion never dies.

It might have seemed all fun, fine and dandy deconsecrating and deconstructing marriage, getting spliced on theme park rides and underwater, but removing the religious (I hate the word ‘spiritual’; it denotes a sad-sack who doesn’t inhale and drinks decaf) element from marriage has made it far more claustrophobic than it was before, rendering it something of a psychotic seesaw. Let me stress that this is not some pathetic paean to the entirely fictional Good Old Days. I am a creature of — and one in love with — the modern world; as I always says, ‘If the past was so great, how come it’s history?’ Though I am a believer, some of my best friends are hardcore atheists, and anyone with a brain understands that a society with too little religion is far more likely to be free, healthy and yes, righteous than one with too much.

But I do think that the removal of the idea of the Almighty from society in general — and romantic relationships in particular — has left people more likely to seek superhuman solace from mere mortals — The One! — and be bitterly disappointed when they inevitably find them to be less than perfect. Liz Jones, one of the most relationship-obsessed yet man-hating of our newspaper columnists, goes so far as to capitalise the words He and Him when complaining about her current pash — not Adonai, but a middle-aged baker with a grey ponytail going under the unfortunate name of D(avid) Scrace. In place of proper feminism, there is a real rage at men from women who would in no way consider themselves militant, a real anger that men can’t be everything — provider, co-parent, best mate, sex beast — and fix everything. And the fetishisation of The One adds to this claustrophobic climate of discontent in modern marriage.

I would be very upset indeed if my husband — who I have been with for nearly 20 years and adore — and I broke up. But do I think that we would each be alone for ever, mooing in the wilderness, because we’d lost The One? Not on your nelly! If you believe that someone has so many fine qualities that you love them, you surely believe they’d easily find loads of other people who saw the same in them. (And as for oneself, of course, this goes without saying.) Peter Ustinov brilliantly said of friends that they are ‘not necessarily the people you like best, they are merely the people who get there first’. The same is true of lovers; it’s more like ‘The Queue’ than the ‘The One’. Do not seek the meaning of life in the dear, fallible creature lying next to you; instead, look upwards.

The post When did romantic love become a religion? appeared first on The Spectator.

In the heyday of the Hollywood studio system, Louis B. Mayer, head of MGM (‘More stars than there are in the heavens’) was rumoured to have had a very strange chart on his wall. This graph, allegedly, kept a record of the menstrual cycles of the studio’s leading ladies: Ava Gardner, Lana Turner, Grace Kelly and the rest. By consulting it, directors and cameramen knew when their precious cargo might be feeling a mite tearful and would ruin her make-up if spoken to sharply, or when her skin might not be in the best condition for a big close-up.

Some mornings when I come back from my husband’s place, sit down at my computer and eagerly turn to Facebook, I wonder if I too should nip down to the office supply shop and buy a bunch of graph paper — not in order to track the state of the silken skin of sirens (nice work if you can get it) but rather to help keep me up to speed vis à vis the screaming sirens of Facebook feuds, as they reverse over speed-bumps with their horns on, over and over, just like a gaggle of selfie-snapping monkeys with miniature cymbals. I love a good scrap as much as the next media whore, but sometimes even I feel myself wilting in weary disbelief when I see what’s been kicking off overnight.

Don’t get me wrong — I love Facebook. Just when I’m convinced that the internet is the main domain of a gang of mass escapees from Broadmoor, the amazingly agile minds of my Facebook friends shimmy by and like a bedazzled dancing bear I stumble after them. My best barbs are long-blunted in booze and self-satisfaction — but being with these glittering ghosts is like being young again, without the boring or embarrassing bits. I don’t tweet, but that’s mostly because the first night I did (there was actually a petition, on change.org, started by the Observer’s Eva Wiseman, to force me on to it) I got into seven scraps in the first hour and realised that I didn’t need another excuse not to write my novel.

But devoted though I am to Facebook, the level of feuding which I’ve experienced recently in my immediate circle of female friends — people I met through FB but have since pressed the flesh of and consider to be mates — has reached fever pitch. Or rather, PMT pitch. Recently, I got back to one particularly vicious skirmish, dreading what I would find, only to be informed by one of the feudees that she and her foresworn enemy had both started their ‘periods’ and were now bosom buds. Too much info — though Louis B. would have appreciated it. Elsewhere, another ‘friend’ posted rabidly jealous comments whenever I Facebooked photos of myself out and about with other amigos. Mrs Patrick Campbell famously called marriage ‘the deep, deep peace of the double-bed after the hurly-burly of the chaise-longue’; I have come to see it as the slow dark ride of sexual companionship after the helter-skelter of female friendship.

I can see that some people might think I’m being a bitch to be bitching about bitches, as a good part of my career has been built on flagrant bitchiness. But my scraps have been about something — usually about calling out broads I saw to be bullying other women. I took on Dawn French when she made the ludicrous claim that ‘Big women do sex fantastically well’ (bitch-point: thin women are bad in bed) and Camille Paglia when she dismissed just about every living human with a vagina except Madonna (the starstruck old stick!) But so much modern bitching can be boiled down to two un-burning issues: ‘She looked at me funny’ and/or ‘You like her better than me’. Ick, ick, and thrice again ick!

Where does all this tiny-minded toxicity in female friendship come from? Paul Morrissey, Andy Warhol’s film director, had a theory that the young Americans he met took so many drugs because they had been the first generation of generally healthy babies and, perversely, wanted to test themselves by inflicting ill-health upon themselves. Are the first generation of women to take the sisterhood as a given attempting to taste the forbidden fruit of cat-fighting through Facebook feeding frenzies? Once women have said how ‘strong’ and ‘supportive’ they are, do they feel they have a blank cheque to act like a menopausal mean girl? An experiment once showed that people who buy ‘green’ and ‘ethical’ products may be prone to acting in a shady way in other parts of their lives; does posting inspirational FB messages about kindness and karma mean it’s OK to go around slagging off other women?

Is it because modern women don’t have enough hobbies? Women like to mock men’s friendships, saying that they’re shallow and mostly about football and video games, but is that so bad? It certainly seems to contribute to them not getting their knickers in a twist over their mates. When I asked my husband whether he’d be upset if one of his mates went out for a drink with another mate and not him, his face was a picture. So many female friendships seem to be about emotion, pure and simple — except it hardly ever is those two things. And we all know that the over–examined life is not worth living.

Reading about Theresa May’s new ‘Cinderella’ law, I wondered if there would be any chance of using it against one’s ugly-hearted ‘sisters’ as well as men. I’m not one of these halfwits who says ‘O, female flack is worse because it’s psychological!’ It’s not — two women a week killed aren’t killed by being unfriended on Facebook. But I do know that while I have experienced jealousy, possessiveness, verbal abuse and violence from men, I have also experienced jealousy, possessiveness, verbal abuse and violence from women — usually when I failed to respond to their advances. Of course the former was worse — being beaten up by a man is far scarier than having a bitch-fight with someone of your own strength, and usually comes without the handy advantage of earring-pulling. But the sisterhood warns you about the first, whereas the second is swept under the carpet in the name of feminism.

I don’t hate the old-style bitchiness, which is plain in its intent, and which knows itself. How could I — that would be self-loathing! But I am repelled by modern passive-aggressive bitchery as demonstrated by the spiritual slop-buckets who post pictures of sunsets with ‘positive’ messages and then stick the boot in, all the while telling mates that they are ‘worried’ about one.

Dame Edna got it completely when she would destroy a female member of her audience from head to toe, then murmur: ‘And I mean that in a caring, nurturing way.’ All I’m asking for is a good, fair fight — one that isn’t based on jealousy, envy or any of the other things that add nothing to the quality of life or the gaiety of nations but actually drain and corrupt our daily lives, and which pass as bitching in these dog-end days. Remember, ladies, ugliness goes to the bone, no matter how many smiley face emoticons you slap on to the surface.

The post A slap in the Facebook appeared first on The Spectator.

My husband and I stay for a week most summers in Portmeirion, the strangest and loveliest ‘village’ in the world. Built amid 20 miles of woodland on the peninsula of Tremadog Bay in Wales, it was called ‘a home for fallen buildings’ by its creator Clough Williams-Ellis, a local landowner. It was opened in 1926, and George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells and Bertrand Russell were early visitors; Noël Coward wrote Blithe Spirit here in 1941. I won’t try to describe it; if you’ve never seen it, just google it and prepare to be astonished.

But oy, the drive! In the past we’ve motored from Brighton through Birmingham, a trip of more than eight hours. This time, we stopped at a hotel near Shrewsbury created by Williams-Ellis for luvvies who couldn’t make it all the way without a dry martini or a wet wash: the Mytton and Mermaid.

The mermaid is the symbol of Portmeirion — but the Mytton bit is nowhere near as enchanting. ‘Mad Jack’ Mytton was a local squire who devoted his life to causing havoc; he took 2,000 bottles of port to Cambridge, predictably leaving without a degree, and his favourite dogs were fed on steak and champagne. He once rode a bear into his drawing room; she bit him on the leg and survived, but later attacked a servant and was put down. He killed a horse by forcing it to drink port; he threw his wife’s lapdog into a fire and died bankrupt in jail. Still, what a gorgeous place the hotel is! We sat in the grounds drinking martinis in the blazing sun by the river Severn before a lovely dinner at ‘Mad Jack’s Bar’.

It would take us just two more hours to reach Portmeirion, and we were soon driving through Snowdonia where, last year, a bunch of al-Qa’eda wannabes from Luton took several trips in order to prepare themselves for Afghanistan. I wonder what the sheep made of them.

There are two hotels at Portmeirion, but I prefer the self-catering option (there’s a sentence I never dreamt I’d write). We stay at a house called White Horses, right on the estuary, which is where Patrick McGoohan lived while making The Prisoner. There are 15 cottages here, and although normal inside, they are topped and tailed by the most astonishing sugared-almond carapaces, domes and spires, neoclassical colonnades and Ionic columns. It’s all set in weird and wonderful woodland featuring dancing trees, ghost gardens and a dogs’ cemetery where Miss Adelaide Haig, who lived in the mansion which became the Portmeirion Hotel with no one but her dogs (reading them the scriptures from behind a screen each Sunday), buried her pets.

Up to 3,000 visitors a day can arrive in the summer, but they leave at dusk and then this wonderland is inhabited by the fortunate residents of the hotels and cottages. Some reviewers on TripAdvisor have complained that there is ‘nothing to do’ here. If your idea of fun is running with the bulls, you might find it tame. But I am with Williams-Ellis, who called beauty ‘that strange necessity’, and am happy just to sit and stare and sip.

He who is tired of London isn’t necessarily tired of life — just tired of ceaseless noise, overcrowded streets and the sight of Boris on that stupid bike. The first time I came to Portmeirion I was necking a considerable amount of ecstasy, and thought that this might well be influencing my reaction. Well, I’m tired of E, and I’m certainly tired of London. But the day I tire of Portmeirion, you can plant me in the dogs’ cemetery and be done with it.

The post Portmeirion appeared first on The Spectator.

Watching the recent footage of Islamic State gang members haggling over the price of captured Christian women in a makeshift slave market — one of them wants a 15-year-old with green eyes, another wants to exchange a girl for a gun — I was reminded that Islamists are at least consistent in their hateful worldview and in a way uniquely honest. Even a terror gang as vile as the IRA tried to keep a lid on the rapes and paedophilia going on within its rancid ranks. But when Amnesty International first claimed in September that Isis were enslaving and abusing ‘hundreds, if not thousands’ of Yazidi women and children, it only took the group a few weeks to admit to the practice in their English language magazine, Dabiq, and breezily post videos of themselves doing just that.

Yet there are still a considerable number of people on the left making excuses for them — mostly at the Guardian, the house magazine of ‘the silly led by the sinister’, as the sainted Christopher Hitchens called the Not In My Name marchers. And with Isis so frank about its own foulness, I’ve come to the conclusion that certain strange types are so sympathetic to Islamism not despite the way it treats women — but, at least partly, because of it.

There are other reasons, of course. The western left has been a busted flush for so long, caught up in its own eternal infighting, that it must feel good to be on a side apparently winning with old-fashioned brute force. Then there’s our old mate paint-chart politics: choose the side with the darkest skin on principle, no matter how their belief systems actually treat people; thus democratic Israel, which gives full civil rights to women and gays, is worse than the countries which surround it, which don’t but are darker. In Darfur, of course, the left were thrown a curveball when it turned out that the Arab Muslims were terrorising the black Christians. Um, Islam good, Christianity bad but hang on, Christians darker here! DOES NOT COMPUTE!

But, to get all Freudian, I think a lot of the reason that some left-wing men seem to have so much time for Islamism is to do not with race but sex — specifically, with suppressed feelings of resentment towards the march of feminism, which they could never in a million years admit to. After years of being yelled at by female comrades whenever they inquired about the likelihood of a hot beverage being imminent, imagine how excited they must get watching big bad men in balaclavas selling ‘slave girls’ in a sweltering marketplace. It’s like T.E Lawrence getting his dish-dosh in a twist over all those Arab boys you could buy for the price of a melon, and boys called Barnaby fetishising the most woman-hating type of rap music in the pop press, and middle-class man-boys who’ve never been in a fight telling rape jokes — only far, far worse.

Ever since the Black Panther Stokely Carmichael said in 1966 that ‘the only position for women in the struggle is prone’, it would have to be a very silly leftie lass indeed who has not cottoned on that sexism can beat in the most apparently comradely brother’s breast. The first sign that the metropolitan left (which had spent the previous 30 years telling white working-class people how stupid and backward they were for being sexist, homophobic and insular) could have a chronic crush on a belief which specialised in being sexist, homophobic and insular came when Ken Livingstone cosied up to the odious Yusuf al-Qaradawi in 2004. Livingstone is a man not averse to the idea of a man having several wives, one feels, having had five children by three women. Then there’s Gorgeous George Galloway, whose revolutionary spirit seems quite able to contain the contradictions of both sucking up to an ultra-conservative religion and saying, in 2012, of the Julian Assange affair, ‘Not everybody needs to be asked prior to each insertion.’ And they said romance was dead.

As Assange and Russell Brand (weirdly linked by the Muslim convert Jemima Goldsmith Khan, who was the bailswoman of one and the lover of the other) prove, many men believe that once you’ve ticked the Brotherhood of Man box on your spiritual census, this gives you the right to be as big a bastard as you like towards women. Yes, some of their collective cultural cringe is stupid guilt about being white and western — the sort of poltroon who, if they happened across their dear grey-haired old mother being ‘roasted’ by al-Qa’eda at one end and Isis at the other, would ask ‘What did she do to make these innocent young lads act in such an uncharacteristic fashion?’ — but a lot of it, I believe, is sheer sexual wish fulfilment.

‘But there are women involved, who choose to become Islamists? How do you explain that?’ I can hear Laurie Penny (like Khan, another privileged half-Jewish girl who briefly got a thrill from donning a hijab but is also now happily ensconced back in her world of freedom and privilege — unlike the millions of poor women condemned to life in a shroud) squeal indignantly. Well, let’s face it, all those copies of Fifty Shades of Grey didn’t buy themselves. Serial rapists and killers on Death Row are never short of female attention, regrettably. Whatever, this mixture of sadists, masochists, gangsters, dupes, fruit-loops and pimps is turning out to be one big happy Manson family.

Good luck apologising for them, all you gutless western lefties — but you can put your fingers in your ears and sell out other sections of humanity all you like, and squeeze your eyes shut like a child in a storm, determined to see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil — and still that evil storm may come at you with hands like knives one day. Look what they did to an Islamic convert on a humanitarian mission to help Muslims. You think they wouldn’t do it to you?

The post The hate that dare not speak its name appeared first on The Spectator.

It’s always interesting when people succeed in two different arenas — like Mike Nesmith’s mum, who gave the world both a Monkee and Tippex, or Hedy Lamarr, the beautiful film star who also helped develop wireless communication, or Paul Winchell, the voice of Tigger who also invented the artificial heart. (If only he’d played the Tin Man in The Wizard Of Oz!) William Moulton Marston created both the cartoon heroine Wonder Woman and the lie detector machine, though by the time I had finished this book I was wondering how he found the time or the energy to do either.

To my generation, Wonder Woman is most famous for being played by the former Miss World USA Lynda Carter in the 1970s television series, wearing the bare minimum of pre-watershed clothing; a patriotic pin-up girl, as the theme song explained; ‘In your satin tights, fighting for your rights — and the red, white and blue!’ But she was conceived by Marston as a feminist symbol, an Amazon from a man-free land who ‘came to the United States to fight for peace, justice and women’s rights’. It’s a bit like finding out that Barbie was a post-dated Pankhurst plant to get women into the workplace.

Coincidentally I was reading a book called Born Liars: Why We Can’t Live Without Deceit when this hefty tome rocked up, and was just embarking on the section about Marston himself. Describing him as ‘irrepressibly optimistic’, it goes on to claim that the lie detector, or ‘polygraph machine’ as it was more pompously known, was so useless that in 1986 when Aldrich Ames, a CIA operative spying for the USSR, informed his paymasters that the government intended to give him a routine polygraph test, they simply advised him to get a good night’s sleep and relax. He did so and passed — and passed again, in 1991, when the CIA were carrying out a search for an internal mole (i.e. Ames himself).

We generally think of snake-oil salesmen as coming from humble origins and turning into fantabulists through financial greed, but Marston’s was a full-on blue-blooded Bostonian background with the flashes of pure American gothic such a heritage often holds. His mother was one of five sisters whose father, after the only son of the family had died, built a whole turreted medieval-mode mansion and closeted himself in the tallest of its towers to write a treatise entitled The Moulton Annals, in which he traced his family back to the Battle of Hastings. His grandson would carry on these traditions of eccentricity and self-importance; the book starts weird and gets weirder.

For instance, WMM married his teenage sweetheart, bluestocking Sadie, who he puzzlingly calls ‘Betty’ — but then set up a ménage à trois with a young suffragette student of his, Olive Byrne, giving his allegedly feminist wife an ultimatum to join in or bail out. (There they are, in Olive’s graduation
photographs, looking creepily like her parents.)

Reading this, I was reminded of Russell Brand’s brand of revolutionary talk and old-school alpha-male sexism, and of smug men wearing ‘This is What a Feminist Looks Like’ T-shirts, and of The Handmaid’s Tale. Olive Byrne never finished her PhD because she was too busy bringing up the Marston baby.

Still, the trio must have had their fun along the way — they were right goers, and kinky as all get-out. An unusual amount of Marston’s research seemed to involve ‘restraining’ women and Wonder Woman ends up bound and/or caged more often than you might think credible even for your average superhero. Early in the book, Olive the student takes her professor Marston to a sorority initiation where inductees were required to dress up as babies, be blindfolded and beaten with long sticks. (And I thought my comp was rough!)

Lepore’s voice is fresh, clear and often cheeky despite its scholarliness; ‘It sounds a little filthy,’ she remarks of a poem the young Marston sent his wife. This is a truly gorgeous book — beautiful to have and to hold, with lovely little black-and-white photos on most pages — as well as a sumptuous colour cartoon section. It is brilliantly written and splendidly researched. As well as learning lots about Wonder Woman, I picked up many fascinating facts about 20th-century social history: for instance, that all feminists were suffragettes but not all suffragettes were feminists; psychology started as a branch of philosophy; the Age of Aquarius was invented in 1908, not by the Sixties musical Hair; most members of the orginal Birth Control League were Republicans and Rotarians; the word ‘gay’ to indicate a (female) homosexual orginated in the 1920s, not in modern times, despite the fuming of uptight busybodies in the 1970s about how the English language was being robbed of a fine, innocent word by a bunch of in-crowd inverts; Margaret Sanger, the pioneer birth-control fan, married a millionaire in order to finance her feminist crusading — talk about taking one for the team.

‘One tragedy of feminism in the 20th century was the way its history seemed to be disappearing,’ Lepore writes in the final chapter; as anyone with the slightly knowledge of feminism today knows, this is still true. She refers to ‘feminists trashing each other’ in the 1970s and 1980s; they still are. It could be seen as the world’s longest cat-fight — or simply as proof that women are as individual as men.

One of the modern battles is between anti-porn crusaders and pro-porn suck-ups; one wonders what side Marston would have been on. What a shame his harem didn’t try out his polygraph test on him. Because surely even such a gimcrack gimmick could have told them that Marston’s plans for women were far more to do with his getting his end away than their achieving equality. WMM hog-tied by his own creation’s Golden Lasso of Truth; that would have been a sight worth seeing.

The post Bound and caged, but fighting-fit appeared first on The Spectator.