The Bluestocking, vol 102: Fly, my pretties
Happy . . . Sunday!
Yes, this newsletter is late. That's because last Friday I was on a train back from Edinburgh, where I tried some of the material from DIFFICULT WOMEN on a small audience of . . . please don't make me say "thought leaders". But you know what I mean. It seemed to go well.
I was on the train when my Big News got announced: after eight years, I'm leaving the New Statesman to become a staff writer at the Atlantic. The response was overwhelmingly positive and supportive. Only one hatchet job! Relief.
Helen
They Had It Coming
Much of the discussion of this scandal has centered on the corruption in the college-admissions process. But think about the kinds of jobs that the indicted parents held. Four of them worked in private equity, a fifth in the field of “investments,” others in real-estate development and the most senior management of huge corporations. Together, they have handled billions of dollars’ worth of assets within heavily regulated fields—yet look how easily and how eagerly they allegedly embrace a crooked scheme, as quoted in the court documents.
This piece about the American college admissions scandal is incredibly incisive. Caitlin Flanagan writes that for these elite parents of upper-mediocre kids, realising that their children would not go to one of America's top colleges through merit (or even the softer forms of cheating, like a sports scholarship in a sport only rich white kids play) provoked outright rage. "They were experiencing the same response to a changing America that ultimately brought Donald Trump to office: white displacement and a revised social contract. The collapse of manufacturing jobs has been to poor whites what the elite college-admissions crunch has been to wealthy ones: a smaller and smaller slice of pie for people who were used to having the fattest piece of all." I always think this about feminism: it isn't threatening to elite men half as much as it is to decent-but-not-exceptional men. They will be ones who are bumped down by the incursion of women into their field.
Joe Biden Isn't The Answer
There was similar denial of his own active role — his own power — just this week, at an event at which Biden refused to acknowledge any degree to which the grotesque treatment of Anita Hill was on him. “She paid a terrible price,” Biden said on Tuesday. “To this day, I wish I could have done something.” Biden has repeatedly commented in recent years that he “owes” Hill “an apology,” yet has never bothered to pay her the respect of proffering one directly. Hill herself has described a family joke: When the doorbell rings when they’re not expecting company, she says, “We say, ‘Is that Joe Biden coming to apologize?’”
Joe Biden did a non-apology apology about his touchy-feeliness in the wake of all this publicity, saying that social mores had changed and he would stop sniffing random women's hair and unexpectedly hugging them from behind. Unfortunately, I agree with the reaction of many feminists to that, which is that it isn't so much that social mores have changed and we've all become more into having our personal space, but that women who were uncomfortable finally feel they can say something without instantly nuking their career. After all, most men weren't sniffing women's hair through the 80s and 90s.
Anyway, the good news is that he's going to stop. The system works!
Operation Columba
Feral pigeons are close cousins of the hundreds of varieties of fancy pigeon that have been bred since their domestication by the Sumerians four thousand years ago. The most celebrated, and familiar, of these is the racing homer, a breed selected for its unrivalled navigational abilities. Once their enclosure, or loft, has been imprinted on them – something that happens when a bird is around six weeks old – homing pigeons will return to it for the rest of their lives, even after many years away. They can fly thousands of miles and cross oceans in order to get home. One of the longest homing flights ever recorded was made by a bird owned by the Duke of Wellington, which was liberated from Ichaboe Island, off the coast of Namibia, on 1 June 1845. It took 55 days to fly the 5400 miles back to Nine Elms, where it was found dead in a gutter a mile from its loft.
tl;dr - pigeons are amazing and intelligent, we don't understand how they navigate; they make great messengers during wars, we should hope they never turn against us.
Quick links
"There is every reason to believe Mr. Stone genuinely wants to be an ally to women. Like a number of his peers, however, he would be a better one if he reined in the publicity to that effect and simply included multilayered, fully realized female characters in all his productions. That would be the strongest feminist statement of all." Some of you will know my problems with Feminist Theatre (TM). This statement , from a review of Simon Stone's mashup of a load of Jacobean revenge dramas, where the audience are split into three and the actors rush between three stages, is perfectly expressed. Just write some f***ing brilliant, flawed female characters and let them have a decent amount of dialogue and stage time. That's all I want. Fin.
"Prince Harry and Meghan took my Instagram name". OK, the headline is a bit "Freddy Starr ate my hamster" but this story does reveal a grisly truth: there is no justice in how social media giants run their sites. If someone more important comes along, expect to get thrown under the bus with no warning and no appeal.
This looks massively unhygienic, but also . . . respect.