The Bluestocking, vol 78: Oedipus, a dodgy dress, cruises and the Mooch

Happy Friday!

I’m writing this from Amsterdam, where I spent a happy morning in the Rijksmuseum looking at lacy ruffs and cross-eyed lions. The current exhibition - High Society - is dedicated to full length portraits from Lucas Cranach’s era to the early 1900s. There were men in those shoes with Pom-poms on, so I was in heaven.

We also saw Robert Icke’s new version of Oedipus, which was notable (and right up my alley) for giving his wife/mother (SPOILER! but also: it’s been two and a half millennia, let it go) as meaty a part as Mr Dodgy Feet himself. In the script, Jocasta has a long - and I mean long - monologue about why she gave up her child (she was 13) and why she wasn’t that upset when her much older husband mysteriously died (he was the kind of man who would impregnate a 13-year-old). Not to bang my feminist drum, but this is why seeing women as real people, not purely as the scenery around men’s lives and men’s stories, is important. It makes art richer and, frankly, truer to life.

It’s also notable that Jocasta has to be written as an older woman - and she was here played by 55-year-old Marieke Heebink. Not long after I watched Mary Stuart in the West End (which starred Juliet Stevenson and Lia Williams), a broadcaster I know in her 50s, talking to me about my feminism book, said: “please write something on older women. I feel invisible.” It grinds my gears to think of all the great actresses who age out of the profession because once you’re not a plausible love interest, too often, you’re nothing. Unseen. Uninteresting. I’ve made a point of profiling older women (such as Harriet Harman and Sue Black) because often they are fountains of knowledge, humour and jaw-dropping anecdotes, left untapped because of our ageist sexism.

Helen

PS. Still plugging away on the old book, thank you. Here's Emily Gould being honest about what it's like to write a book that flops.

What does she think she looks like?

If human character did, as [Woolf] famously suggested, change in or about 1910, women’s clothes changed very soon afterwards. Another product of 1925 was the woman’s ‘pullover’. Not today the most exciting item in anyone’s wardrobe, it was in its way revolutionary. A pullover is pulled over the head both on and off and the person who does the pulling is the wearer. Yes, I know, but until then it had been, for more than a century, virtually impossible for a woman to get dressed – or undressed – by herself. The rich had ladies’ maids, the poor had one another, but the laces and hooks and eyes, the fastening behind, required assistance. This was not true for men. In the persisting convention that women’s clothes have buttons on the left, for the convenience of the average right-handed dresser, while men’s have them on the right, to suit themselves, there remains an archaeological trace, a fossil record, of the different history of women and men in their relation to their clothes.

Great essay on clothes. Virginia Woolf also looks relatably uncomfortable posing for Vogue.

Scent of a Woman's Ink

At the risk of making a dozen devoted enemies for life, I can only say that the sniffs I get from the ink of the women are always fey, old-hat, Quaintsy Goysy, tiny, too dykily psychotic, crippled, creepish, fashionable, frigid, outer-Baroque, maquillé in mannequin’s whimsy, or else bright and stillborn. Since I’ve never been able to read Virginia Woolf, and am sometimes willing to believe that it can conceivably be my fault, this verdict maybe taken fairly as the twisted tongue of a soured taste, at least by those readers who do not share with me the ground of departure—that a good novelist can do without everything but the remnant of his balls.

This jaw-dropping `Norman Mailer quote comes from Francine Prose's 1998 essay on women writers. It's . . . something. It's really something.

When Stag Nights go wrong

These often extreme stag dos offer up a romanticised version of male friendship; but by contrast they also result in violence or injury. When masculine ideals are collectively being performed by groups of drunk men, it’s easy for things to go wrong.

James Thorpe, 29, knows this first-hand. After breaking his neck on his own stag weekend in Magaluf in 2016, the former firefighter is now in a wheelchair. “I suppose a little bit of stupidity was involved,” Thorpe remembers. “We’d had a couple of drinks and saw some friends swimming and we were trying to get into the spirit of it, so we went for a swim. I’m not quite sure if I tripped or dived – I can’t remember. But I banged my head on the sea bed and broke my neck.”

Luckily, a friend dragged Thorpe out of the water. “If they hadn’t found me within the next 30 seconds, I’d probably have drowned.”

Men, renounce banter! Say no to lad culture! You have nothing to lose but your higher rates of injury and violent death.

The largest cruise ship ever built

The biggest challenge comes when designing the interior rooms. “Traditionally on inside rooms there’s no natural light, so you can lose track of time very quickly,” says Law. (Days at sea distort time – Symphony’s lifts contain screens reminding passengers what day of the week it is.) On 2014’s Quantum of the Seas, Royal Caribbean introduced Virtual Balconies, floor-to-ceiling screens which show a live camera feed of the outside view. There are four cameras, because during testing, they discovered that a feed facing the wrong direction causes seasickness. “You have the sensation of the motion of the ship; the visual has to match,” Law says.

“We’re constantly using design to alter the perspective of the room environment,” says Gonzalez. Uplighting and mirrors can help ceilings feel taller. The right pattern on a carpet can lengthen or shorten a space, or provide a subliminal help with wayfinding. One problem with such huge ships is the absurdly long corridors, so the architects insert fake arches or obstacles to make them appear shorter. On Quantum, Royal introduced lenticular wall art, which changes whether you’re walking fore or aft.

Admit it: you want to go on a cruise now.

Lunch with the FT: Scaramucci

“I can tell this is going to be a bloody nightmare,” Scaramucci says as he strides in. He is dressed casually in green slacks and a dark sweater. Not at all, I protest. We will have a conversation and I will write it up. “Which part of England are you from?” Scaramucci asks me. Originally from near Brighton, I reply. “Are you gay?” he asks. Somewhat thrown by the question, I start to mumble that I am not but that some of my best friends are, and . . . “I don’t give a shit,” he interrupts. “I’m just curious. There are a lot of gays in Brighton, right?” I have little chance to weigh up Brighton’s sexual demographics before he interrupts again: “That’s something I get no credit for, by the way,” he says. “I have been for equal opportunity in gay marriage for the last 12 or 13 years.”

I mourned the premature departure of the Mooch from the Trump White House; this interview makes me feel that even more. He turns out to be cleverer and more self-aware than you'd think. Also his assessment of Steve Bannon - "When you have a messianic complex, your last move is nihilism" - is *chef kissing fingers gesture*

Quick links:
Sandi Toksvig on the gender pay gap.
Juniot Diaz on being raped as an eight-year-old.

I also saw Quiz, James Graham’s new play. Review in the New Statesman next week…

See you next time!