The Bluestocking, vol 139
Yoko Ono's Personal Shudderer.
Happy Friday!
This week, I returned for a guest appearance at the New Statesman, writing the diary, about gaslighting, geniuses and Americanisms. Here’s a nice story from it:
Who’s the idiot who spent three years working on a book, and then published it three weeks before all bookshops shut their doors, all literary festivals were cancelled, and Amazon decided to pause deliveries of “non-essential” items? I am that idiot. While Difficult Women has reached fewer readers than I’d wanted – fingers crossed that an asteroid doesn’t hit the Earth as the paperback lands next year – it has still made the kind of unexpected connections I had always hoped it would.
Not long after publication, I got a message from Labour’s former Scottish leader, Kezia Dugdale, who had read the “Love” chapter, about the first openly lesbian MP, Maureen Colquhoun. Kez, who came out in 2016, said it had made her cry – and made her feel ashamed she hadn’t known about Maureen before. Like me, she had assumed that the first openly gay MP was New Labour’s Chris Smith. In fact, he was the first to come out voluntarily. Maureen was outed by the Daily Mail in 1976.
Maureen is now 91, and she recently lost Babs, with whom she had shared 45 years of her life. Through Maureen’s family, I put Kez in touch with her, and they are now “coronavirus pen pals”. I’m thrilled. One of the joys of writing a history is reconnecting the past to the present.
The rest is here, and please enjoy this bonus item I had to cut once the Classic Dom story broke.
Here’s a game you can play with your lockdown companion of choice. What is the worst play, film or other artistic experience you would willingly undergo again, just to be out of the house? I’ve settled on going to one of those blockbuster museum exhibitions, where you move at quarter-speed round a packed room, queuing to read boring stuff about the artist’s life inexplicably written on the wall next to the entrance, causing a pile-up five pensioners deep. At this point, I would even voluntarily attend an Edinburgh Fringe show riffing on climate change, wokeness or the Me Too movement. I’d go to a stand-up show whose title was a pun about free speech. “I’d watch something with two intervals,” said one friend, glumly.
Helen
At the last Fringe, I spent a full five minutes contemplating how much you would have to pay me to see this.
Now I’d go in a heartbeat.
PS. A follow-up to Wednesday’s special edition on conspiracy theories. “Was very struck by the par about conspiracy theories being satisfying because they have an active villain,” writes Bluestockinger (?!) Ben. “Not sure if any of the big studios have data to back up what is just my feeling but I reckon that same thing explains why disaster films are so much less compelling than films with an actual baddy. It's just more satisfying to have a talented character actor embody something and give an interesting speech than have the antagonist be A Big Storm, which you can't distract or figure out or outwit. I wonder if that's why they make fewer of them.”
Donald Trump, the Most Unmanly President
Not every working-class male voted for Trump, and not all of them have these [old-fashioned masculine] traits, of course. And I do not present these beliefs and attitudes as uniformly virtuous in themselves. Some of these traditional masculine virtues have a dark side: Toughness and dominance become bullying and abuse; self-reliance becomes isolation; silence becomes internalized rage. Rather, I am noting that courage, honesty, respect, an economy of words, a bit of modesty, and a willingness to take responsibility are all virtues prized by the self-identified class of hard-working men, the stand-up guys, among whom I was raised.
And yet, many of these same men expect none of those characteristics from Trump, who is a vain, cowardly, lying, vulgar, jabbering blowhard. Put another way, as a question I have asked many of the men I know: Is Trump a man your father and grandfather would have respected?
The conclusion here - “Trump’s lack of masculinity is about maturity. He is not manly because he is not a man. He is a boy” - also applies partially to Boris Johnson, who also relies heavily on the idea he’s a cheeky scamp.
Postscript. He took it like a man.
Surviving It All (New York Magazine)
Marga Steinhardt was born in Witzenhausen, a town in central Germany, in 1927, five years before Adolf Hitler came to power. I met her in November 2019, when we spoke for hours in the Brooklyn living room of her daughter, whom she was visiting. As we’d parted, I’d asked if I might visit her in Washington in the spring to talk more, but she’d waved me off: She’d be on a lengthy cruise, she told me. If I wanted to come later in the year, when the weather was better, I’d be welcome; “That’s if,” she said, laughing, “I’m still alive.”
This story is just extraordinary, with a casual revelation halfway through that will leap your heart into your mouth.
“I Had To Choose Being A Mother”
If day cares closed because of the novel coronavirus, Aimee Rae Hannaford expected her family to fare better than most. She worked full time as the chief executive of a tech company while her husband stayed home. He’d been taking some time off from his own tech career, managing a rental property while considering his options. He could look after their 3-year-old son, she thought — at least for a while.
“That lasted a grand total of three days,” Hannaford said.
Once her son was home full time, she realized they’d need a different solution. She was holed up in the guest room, wielding dual-monitors at her desk. Her husband was exhausted. “I can’t do it,” she remembers him saying: “I can’t watch him for this long.”
Perhaps the most telling line of this story is “Hannaford’s husband declined to comment for this story”. I’m guessing that he felt ashamed to say he couldn’t cope with parenting a toddler for every waking hour. And yet we expect mothers to do that, because of. . . nature, or hormones, or something. It’s all such crap. Humans are tribal animals. We didn’t evolve living in atomised nuclear families. But companies won’t take on the burden of supporting unpaid care, and neither will governments, so it all gets shoved on to parents (and disproportionately on to women) to keep the economy going. It’s a bad bargain and it should be renegotiated.
Chaser: “They found that mums were only able to do one hour of uninterrupted work, for every three hours done by dads.”
I am John’s (uninterrupted) complete lack of surprise.
This squares with all the Second Shift research, and work done since: patterns established during maternity leave makes mums the “supervisory parent” and dads the “additional parent”. Fascinated to know if there’s any business research about successful ways to jointly manage a project, because it feels like that’s what is needed: methods for sharing the mental load of “what’s for lunch” and “has X done his homework” and “does the washing machine need emptying”, rather than one partner saying “just tell me what needs doing and I’ll do it!”
I mean. Maybe I’m wrong and it’s brilliant? But why is one of them in a top hat? Is that Fosters in her bra? Also, tag urself, I’m the anguished monk.
Quick Links
“At this, the mystery woman went “Ugh!” with a theatrical shudder, and I realised she was Yoko’s personal shudderer.” Philip Norman on rock biographies.
“He has a courtly way of speaking, mixing southern good manners with faintly European pronunciations; friends are always referred to as if he were introducing them to an ambassador at a party: ‘Annette de la Renta and Oscar de la Renta, very close and dear friends of mine’ and ‘the late Lee Radziwill, the sister of Jackie Kennedy, who was one of my greatest friends in my life, and it was not a known fact we were that close’.” Andre Leon Talley was one of my favourite bits of America’s Next Top Model, and Hadley Freeman interviewing him is a treat.
“The idea that institutions set up 50 years ago, sometimes 100 years ago, sometimes 300 years ago, are inevitably the ones that will make sense of the future is something that must at least be debated. Especially now.” The Spectator’s arts critic defends asking a provocative question on Twitter: would it be so bad for British theater to fail?
This week in the Old Person’s TikTok digest: Take on Me played on a washing machine.
“There’s a wonderful study of crowds in the French Revolution by a French historian, written in 1952, Lefebvre, where he says perhaps it’s only in the crowd that people lose their petty day-to-day concern, and act as the subjects of history.” The psychologist Stephen Reicher, a member of SAGE, on why crowds are unfairly maligned.
“It’s a little bit of a frenzy, and I am uncomfortable with that,” [Christian Cooper] said. “If our goal is to change the underlying factors, I am not sure that this young woman having her life completely torn apart serves that goal.” Jon Ronson has rejected comparisons between the Justine Sacco case and this incident in Central Park, where a white woman called the police on a man who asked her to muzzle her dog, stressing that he was “African American”. But they do have one point of comparison: for as long as America doesn’t have racial justice, there will be individual people on whom all that pent-up anger gets vented.
“This is the crux of the problem with Manion’s book. She makes strenuous efforts to claim that her subjects ‘embraced’ transgender identity as it is understood today.” Selina Todd reviews Female Husbands: A Trans History. I’m with Todd; I have no idea why you wouldn’t preserve the ambiguity of these stories, and accept that modern notions of gender identity and sexuality simply aren’t applicable to the eighteenth century.
“The Curtis theory, as demonstrated in Yesterday, is that the Beatles’ songbook is so objectively, undeniably, timelessly great that, even in the hands of a modestly talented schmoe, it would rule the world.” Dorian Lynskey on Yesterday.
It’s just that the “comedy” bits of Shakespeare are bad enough when done by, like, Mark Rylance. Incidentally, which play do you think this is? I’m going with Taming of the Shrew. Amazing if this is supposed to be Lady Macbeth goading her husband into murder by threatening him with a medieval banjo.
Also which one of them is supposed to be drunk?
Am I drunk?
What is drunk?
Anyway.
The rest is silence. Probably followed by a loud burp.