The Bluestocking 348: the Gilded Age and a Certain Age

nothing but yards of satin

Happy Friday!

Like many British feminists, I spent the 2010s drawing the unwelcome attention of Pink News, an LGBT news site that also ran a political awards ceremony. It was at the Pink News awards that Jeremy Corbyn declared his pronouns—spoiler alert, he/him—dashing any hope that Labour had finally elected a woman leader.

Inevitably, I got into Pink News’s crosshairs for my writing on sex and gender—basically saying that biological sex exists and is sometimes important in law and policy, although we should respect people’s sense of themselves, too. Fast forward to now, and the BBC has heard from more than 30 current and former staff members at Pink News:

Several former staff members told the BBC they saw Anthony James, a director at the UK-based company and husband of its founder, kissing and touching a junior colleague who they say appeared too drunk to consent.

And more than 30 current and former members of staff said a culture of heavy drinking led to instances when founder Benjamin Cohen and his husband behaved inappropriately towards younger male employees.

[…] Allegations of misogyny have also emerged and several people told us that some young female members of staff had been asked to act as the couple's surrogates.

Look, this is hackish, but it does bear repeating: Benjamin Cohen and his husband seemed, somehow, to be able to distinguish between the half of their staff that they wanted to sleep with and the half they wanted to carry a child for them. Perhaps biological sex is real, after all. Perhaps it does affect how you are treated.

Until next time,

Helen

PS. This week’s Strong Message Here is about political relaunches.

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Photo by CDC on Unsplash

Women Of A Certain Age

Many women complained, and for years their complaints were ignored. Now they have finally caught up with him, Wallace has responded with his usual humility and grace by dismissing the complainants as “middle-class women of a certain age”.

When I started to get messages from the media asking me to comment on this phraseology, my first thought was “you don’t need a linguist for that: it’s obvious what he was trying to do”. First, he was playing the class card, presumably in an attempt to present himself as the underdog in this scenario—a sort of male Eliza Doolittle (she sold flowers, he once had a veg stall) tripped up by his failure to meet posh people’s standards of decorum. Which is bullshit, obviously. The complainants weren’t saying he used the wrong fork, they were saying he got his tackle out in the workplace and told contestants their food smelled like his aunt’s vagina. You don’t have to be Lady Muck to think that’s out of order. If Gregg’s working-class grandma was anything like mine, anyone who spoke to her like that (much less tried to sell her potatoes while wearing nothing but a sock) would have been in line for a clip round the ear.

Second, of course, he was playing the age(ism) card: if there’s anyone more prudish than a middle-class woman, it’s a middle-class woman “of a certain age”. But that was when I paused, and thought: wait, maybe there is something to say about his language after all. Because “a woman of a certain age” is a more interesting expression than might be apparent at first glance.

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I always love to read Deborah Cameron on language, and here she is on Gregggggate. At the end of last week’s Strong Message Here, I discussed the closely related phenomenon of “Karens”.

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Asher Wertheimer, by John Singer Sargent

The Art Dealer Who Wanted to Become Art (New Yorker, £)

“He has never really gone away. That’s the mixed blessing of painting everyone from Gilded Age to Progressive Era: Henry James, Robert Louis Stevenson, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Fort Knoxes’ worth of Morgans and Rockefellers and Vanderbilts. If you were fumbling for conversation with an heiress, it used to be said, you could always ask her, “And how do you like your Sargent drawing?”

As modernism bloomed and the Gilded Age became a punch line, so, inevitably, did its premier portraitist. D. H. Lawrence thought that his stuff was “nothing but yards of satin.” Picasso made him look antique. Even at the end of the twentieth century, when modernist aesthetics had long since gone the way of whalebone corsets, Sargent’s cheerleaders mostly seemed to accept the premise that he was a docile ennobler of rich oafs, if a very talented one. “He had no interest in politics past or present,” Robert Hughes wrote, in 1999, “was completely without class resentment and seemed to be devoid of irony.”

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Beautiful piece of criticism on John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Asher Wertheimer, which some onlookers thought was a Jewish caricature, but Wertheimer himself loved. You’re going to hear me talking a lot about this next year, when The Genius Myth is published (pre-orders are open) but these two paragraphs are a nice encapsulation of one of its themes: that anointing someone a genius is a political act, designed to reflect your values.

Sargent was the great portraitist of the Gilded Age, who reflected back its leading characters’ opinion of themselves; and then, when the political and aesthetic wind changed, he was an embarrassing toady who sucked up to rich assholes by making them look classy.

Now, we’ve come to a more balanced understanding of the politics of his work—“Aren’t the most interesting people the ones who can’t make up their minds about their world, who sometimes sneer and sometimes grovel?” writes Jackson Arn—as well as an appreciation for Sargent’s mastery of light and pigment.

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Quick Links

1. Laura Marling on letter-writing: “I equally take a lot of joy in witnessing people align with themselves. It's a feeling reflected in a really well-written book. In songwriting, if you can get out of the way of what you think the song should be, what it really is will appear, though it may take you years to understand what it means, which can be scary as you might say something you didn’t want others to know.” (Substack)

2. “A number of execs have told me, that seeing the end of the writers’ strike looming, they braced themselves for the inevitable onslaught of spec scripts that would have been written while no one was allowed to take paid work [. . .]

   But when the strike finally ended... Tumbleweed.” Julian Simpson on movie writers, but this could also apply to journalists. Yeah, it’s really hard to do good work. But it has always been (Substack).

3. “The Democrats were pretty convinced they were going to win, effectively, as the women’s party. And, privately, a couple of senior Democrats even said to me, “Well, we’re pretty confident that for every young man we lose, we're going to pick up at least one young woman—and, by the way, she's going to turn out to vote and he probably won’t.”” Richard Reeves talks to Yascha Mounk about men and the US election (Substack).

4. “There is no collective noun for rapists but spend a week at the Pelicot trial and you wonder why.” Janice Turner reports from the Pelicot trial. So many disturbing details here—it’s such a great piece of reporting, and really paying attention (Times, no paywall).

5. “The resulting article is frankly, a bit of a mess. And I think it is illustrative of a persistent structural problem with a lot of news coverage. It’s not bias to the left, or to the right… but it’s the hegemony of the Lobby correspondent.” James O’Malley is rude about lobby journalists—what the US would call the press corps (Substack).

6. “When someone tries to provoke you, don’t be provoked. When someone isn’t even trying to provoke you but you feel provoked anyway, don’t be provoked. When your opponents are trying to get you to talk about something, it’s probably because you shouldn’t. You don’t have to respond to everything. You can decide what your agenda is, and what your message is, and do your best to focus on that.” Tom Hamilton’s advice to Kemi Badenoch also applies to journalists, activists and anyone who cares about an issue (Substack).

PS. I have been banned from posting my Amazon wish list this Christmas, after what I can only describe as Santa’s Sack appeared at the door last year; Jonathan quite reasonably notes that I am still working my way through last year’s books from generous Bluestocking readers. If you want to show your appreciation for the work I put into this weekly email, consider making a small donation to Lumos, which is working to make sure no child grows up in an orphanage anywhere in the world.