The Bluestocking, vol 274

It was like social media, I guess.

Happy Friday!

I don’t write about the economy, because I have nothing useful to offer, but this week has really underlined a) how badly the UK economy is in the toilet; and b) how much many aspects of culture will change if the recent long period of low interest rates is over, not just mortgage costs.

“This is maybe the first real interest-rate-hiking cycle of my professional life, and I’m kind of excited?” wrote Matt Levine at Bloomberg. “Look around! Is the story of crypto ‘when rates were zero for ages, a dollar in 100 years was worth as much as a dollar now, so people got really into trading digital assets that had no foreseeable cash flows, and then rates went up and everyone woke up and realized that was dumb and stopped’? Is that also the story of blitzscaling tech-startup unicorns? No, but also a little bit yes?” And here is Duncan Robinson of the Economist being provocative, the little scamp: “‘Conservative government from 2010 to 2024 was a zero interest rate policy phenomenon.’ Discuss.”

In the less glamorous parts of the economy, the interest-rate rises are less intriguing and more devastating. Ed Conway of Sky has been warning for a while that people who glibly talk about the high interest rates of the 1970s or 1990s forget that people now buy houses at 10 x their salary rather than, say, 3 x their salary. For several years, it looked like a smart financial bet to buy the biggest house you could stretch yourself to afford, and reap the capital accumulation that would ensue. But the people who did that are now the people whose mortgage is going up by £500 every month. (In some cases, those people are landlords, and the rises are being passed on to renters, who are already spending far more of their disposable income on rent than owners.)

All this and inflation is still over 8 per cent. It’s looking grim—stubbornly grim—out there.

Helen

PS. You might have been wondering why I alone, unlike all my middle-aged centrist peers, do not have a podcast for Waterstones Dads to listen to between reading political books in the original French.

Finally, though, our long national nightmare is over! I’ve just signed up to do the relaunched Private Eye podcast, Page 94. Every two weeks, the first half of the pod will be a fake editorial meeting with some combination of me, Adam Macqueen, Andrew Hunter Murray, Ian Hislop and any other hack who doesn’t run away fast enough. This week’s features me doing my Paul Dacre impression.

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Photo by charlesdeluvio on Unsplash

In Defence of Ozempic (Notes from the Underground, Substack)

Down at the pharmacy, they’ve been out of Ozempic for three weeks now and they have no idea when they’ll be back in again. If the situation doesn’t change then pretty soon I will be testing the constantly asked question of whether people on semaglutide won’t just put back on the weight they’ve lost after they stop injecting.

Increasingly I can’t help feeling that there’s a pulse of pundits, scribblers and plain ordinary slim folk who will be secretly happy if that’s what happens. Because if I’ve noticed anything beyond the initial “miracle drug” hype that greeted injectable semaglutide’s arrival, it’s the obvious ambivalence of many of our fellow citizens towards the idea that losing weight should be in any way made easy. […]

I think that what Matthew [Parris] believes (without consciously thinking it) is that what makes him thin and me fat is his virtue and my lack of it . . . That he does not struggle in any way to be virtuous whereas I would have to fight like hell to achieve virtue does not appear to impress him.

I thoroughly agree with David Aaronovitch on the oddly hostile attitude to Ozempic which has emerged from the naturally thin—and from the people who miserably work hard at thinness, and don’t want anyone else taking the “easy route.”

All my life, I have internalised the messages about weight being about self-control, and thus the inability to control it being evidence of moral failure. I understand now, though, that naturally thin people really can just “eat whatever they want” because . . . they don’t want to eat much. They are not better than me. They are simply less hungry.

The best argument against widespread prescription of Ozempic is that it’s a chemical fix to a social problem—the modern world is obesogenic—and if rich people can buy their way out of fatness, they will have no incentive to lobby for changes to the food environment. But then again, that’s already true. Rich people can shop at Whole Foods and buy fresh fruit and all kinds of other stuff that makes it easier to be thin.

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Photo by Külli Kittus on Unsplash

How Elliot Page escaped womanhood (Unherd)

Hollywood reinforces what began in Page’s childhood. Her adversarial relationship with her body can be seen in her reaction to her stepmother’s cooking. Page hears an “internal voice” saying “no, that can’t go inside you” when she’s confronted with food that scares her: a terror of adulteration, of losing control. Puberty inevitably heightens this. Page describes the age of 11 as “the age I sensed a shift from boy to girl without my consent”. This is, I think, a common sensation for girls: puberty ends an era of uncomplicated, happy embodiment, and launches you into a world where your body appears to invite dangerous attention against your will. Not a shift from boy to girl, but a shift from “person” to “thing”. As Hilary Mantel wrote, some girls want out. They starve themselves, or punish their bodies, and now they have the option to disown their sex entirely.

An empathetic review by Sarah Ditum of Pageboy. I think we will look back on Elliot Page (formerly Ellen) and see someone chewed up by homophobia and sexual abuse—I don’t judge the route Page taken, but I do think we should talk about the social forces which might have influenced him.

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Illustration by Alex Cochran. Source: Getty

The Feminists Insisting That Women Are Built Differently (The Atlantic)

In her new book, Feminism Against Progress, [Mary] Harrington writes that the internet has encouraged us to think of ourselves as “Meat Lego,” hunks of flesh that can be molded however we want. For women, that involves suppressing the messy biological reality of the female body—taking birth control, having consequence-free casual sex, even outsourcing pregnancies—to achieve something that might look like equality but is really just pretending to be a man. “Realizing my body isn’t something I’m in but something I am is the heart of the case for reactionary feminism,” she writes.

Reactionary feminism is having a moment. Harrington recently toured the United States, where Feminism Against Progress was plugged in The Free Press, the heterodox equivalent of a glowing New York Times review. At the recent National Conservative conference in London, she shared the stage with Louise Perry, whose book covers similar themes. Another NatCon speaker was Nina Power, a former leftist who is now a senior editor at Compact, an online magazine whose editors declare that they “oppose liberalism in part because we seek a society more tolerant of human difference and human frailty.”

It’s me, hi, writing about “reactionary feminism,” which is socially conservative but also anti-free-market.

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Who’s Bonkers Now? A segment dedicated to people in public life who you could swear were normal five minutes ago. Last week, Howard Donald of Take That deleted his twitter account after being caught by a Pride festival liking gender-critical tweets. But that wasn’t the half of it—he was also into David Icke, Andrew Tate and anti-vaxx stuff. He’s now deleted his account.

Look guys: whatever he said, whatever he did… he didn’t mean it.

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Quick Links

1. Sam Freedman finds the roots of the NHS crisis (Comment is Freed, Substack). Spoiler alert: it is under-managed.

2. “Anyone listening would have thought I knew my stuff and he didn’t. They would have thought that I had clobbered him in the debate. But they also would have had a lie planted in their mind.” An interesting story about how the thing many people claim would combat misinformation—instant debunkings on-air—doesn’t actually work (Forking Paths, Substack).

3. The departure of Edward Enniful, and how Vogue replaced editors with “ambassadors for the brand” (New Statesman).

4. ‘How would Dorries rank the five Tory prime ministers since 2010? “[David] Cameron’s big mistake was not going to Europe and negotiating a better deal. His second mistake was resigning when he did.”  It is a staggering rewrite. Dorries called for Cameron to resign in May 2016, claiming he’d “lied profoundly” in the Brexit campaign. She even sent a no-confidence letter.’ Henry Mance meets Nadine Dorries and solves the mystery of why she found Boris Johnson such a kindred spirit (Financial Times, £).

5. “There’s no school you can go to to learn how to handle being famous. I think I tried really hard not to be an asshole. But I think to some degree, I was an asshole.” Kevin Spacey’s trial starts next week. He gave Die Zeit an interview (no, Die Zeit don’t know why he picked them, either).

6. Enjoyable review by Alan Johnson of two books about the NHS (Guardian).

7. “Then when I got to my office, we’d all sit on barstools in the kitchen, passing back and forth newspapers and reading interesting stories out loud. It was like social media, I guess.” Gen X reflect on what life was like in the distant past of the 1990s (Slate).

8. I’m outing myself as the colleague Sophie mentions who refuses to watch the Sex and the City reboot because it would be like watching your favourite pub burn down (The Atlantic).

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See you next time!