The Bluestocking, vol 44: Medusa, Mercer and Mercia

Hello,

I know this newsletter has become sporadic - because I'm currently covering a vacant role at work alongside my regular job - so sorry about that. Normal service should be resumed soon. As penance, there are even more tasty links here than usual, and a bonus Samuel Beckett meme.

Helen

Mary Beard: Women in Power

To put this the other way round, we have no template for what a powerful woman looks like, except that she looks rather like a man. The regulation trouser suits, or at least the trousers, worn by so many Western female political leaders, from Merkel to Clinton, may be convenient and practical; they may be a signal of the refusal to become a clothes horse, which is the fate of so many political wives; but they’re also a simple tactic – like lowering the timbre of the voice – to make the female appear more male, to fit the part of power. Elizabeth I knew exactly what the game was when she said she had ‘the heart and stomach of a king’. It’s that idea of the divorce between women and power that makes Melissa McCarthy’s parodies of the White House press secretary Sean Spicer on Saturday Night Live so effective. It’s said that these have annoyed President Trump more than most satires on his regime, because (according to one of the ‘sources close to him’), ‘he doesn’t like his people to appear weak.’ Decode that, and what it actually means is that he doesn’t like his men to be parodied by and as women. Weakness comes with a female gender.

Here for Mary Beard on the history of women all day.

The Reclusive Hedge Fund Tycoon Behind Trump

Mercer retains a domestic staff that includes a butler and a physician; both accompany him whenever he travels. But this, too, has sparked bad publicity. In 2013, three members of the household staff sued to recover back wages, claiming that Mercer had failed to pay overtime, as promised, and that he had deducted pay as punishment for poor work. One infraction that Mercer cited as a “demerit” was a failure to replace shampoo bottles that were two-thirds empty. This suit, too, was settled.

Jane Mayer - one of the best writers around on money and power - on Robert Mercer, of Breitbart and Cambridge Analytica fame.


The Handmaid's Tale in The Age of Trump

Although it was “only a television show” and these were actresses who would be giggling at coffee break, and I myself was “just pretending,” I found this scene horribly upsetting. It was way too much like way too much history. Yes, women will gang up on other women. Yes, they will accuse others to keep themselves off the hook: We see that very publicly in the age of social media, which enables group swarmings. Yes, they will gladly take positions of power over other women, even — and, possibly, especially — in systems in which women as a whole have scant power: All power is relative, and in tough times any amount is seen as better than none.

Some of the controlling Aunts are true believers, and think they are doing the Handmaids a favor: At least they haven’t been sent to clean up toxic waste, and at least in this brave new world they won’t get raped, not as such, not by strangers. Some of the Aunts are sadists. Some are opportunists. And they are adept at taking some of the stated aims of 1984 feminism — like the anti-porn campaign and greater safety from sexual assault — and turning them to their own advantage. As I say: real life.

One of the greatest insights in the Handmaid's Tale is how adept patriarchy is at setting women against each other. The Aunts, and the high-status wives, have an incentive to prop up the system to keep their tiny advantages in it. It's a useful thought when untangling the relationship of race and feminism, particularly in America.

TFW you find out The Last Kingdom is back on TV.

The Do Your Homework Prime Minister

May is much more Cameron’s mirror image than she is his antithesis. Politics is just as personal for her as it is for him. Her version builds personal relationships around the virtues of persistence whereas his built them around the advantages of being in the right place at the right time. He was the essay crisis prime minister. She is the do-your-homework prime minister. That doesn’t make her a politician of substance and him a chancer. Both of them are opportunists; it’s just that they view the opportunities differently. If anything, her leadership style is even more personality-driven than his. After all, if politics is a game, there have to be some impersonal rules to play by – that’s what every game requires. If it’s not a game, maybe there are no rules.

I enjoyed this piece by David Runciman - whose politics podcast Stephen and I "guest starred" on at Christmas - on Theresa May.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on feminism

Adichie’s irritation with aspects of what she thinks of as “professional feminism” is that it runs counter to her ideas as a writer: that people contain multitudes. She is a brilliant novelist and a serious thinker, and she is also someone who makes no apology for her own trivial interests. “Life doesn’t always follow ideology,” she says. “You might believe in certain things and life gets in and things just become messy. You know? I think that’s the space that fiction, and having a bit more of an imaginative approach, makes. And that the feminist speaking circuit doesn’t really make room for.”

BURN THE WITCH! No, not really. Adichie is a consistently thoughtful voice on gender, and frankly some of the critiques of her from white middle-class westerners have been embarrassingly unselfaware. (I wrote about the whole idea of "privilege", Adichie, and the Tea Party here.)

Why are we hooked on social media? (£)

If sensory pleasure by itself were enough to make us addicts, many of us would be hooked on ice cream, Alter notes. In his 1975 book Love and Addiction, the US psychologist Stanton Peele defined addiction — including what is now known as behavioural addiction — as the “extreme, dysfunctional attachment to an experience that is acutely harmful to a person, but that is an essential part of the person’s ecology and that the person cannot relinquish”.

This is much like what Freitas’s students report as their feelings about social media apps — a combination of pleasure and pain, of freedom and being imprisoned. They long to escape the trap but struggle to do it. “Once your cucumber brain has become pickled, it can never go back to being a cucumber,” is the motto of a psychologist who runs a programme to wean players from online games such as World of Warcraft.

I definitely have a pickled cucumber brain.

Just another gif of Uhtred I found lying around, don't mind me.

Ariel Levy on miscarriage

Levy flew back to New York and, within two weeks, her relationship with Lucy came to an end. For months afterwards, Levy continued to bleed and lactate: “It seemed to me grief was leaking out of me through every orifice.” She looked obsessively at the photograph of her baby, and tried to make others look, too, so they could see what she saw and they did not: that she was a mother who had lost her child.

Ariel Levy has had quite the life these last few years. Can't wait to read her latest book.

Quick links:

- Please enjoy the Spice Girls calling out blackface in the 1990s, a useful reminder of how their mouthiness was completely transformative - a girl band with opinions???
- Intriguing obituary of Oswald Mosley's son Nicholas, who confronted his father over his fascism and wrote a brutal biography of him.
- Nobel winner Angus Deaton on whether it's better to be poor in Bangladesh than Mississippi
- This gender-swapped US presidential debate video makes it easier to understand Trump's appeal
- A great Guardian longread on what happens when the Queen dies
- Lunch with the FT: Bana al-Abed

That's all, folks!