The Bluestocking, vol XXVI: body clocks, climbing Everest and a plague of Chrises

Happy Summer! Hope you get to eat an ice-cream this weekend.

Helen

Running out of womb-time

“For many women, the biological clock of fertility is running near its end,” Reed wrote. “The ancient Pleistocene call of the moon, of salt in the blood, and genetic encoding buried deep in the chromosomes back there beneath the layers of culture – and counterculture – are making successful businesswomen, professionals and even the mothers of grown children stop and reconsider.”

The metaphor of the biological clock sounded less florid than the metaphors that followed, but it evinced the same determinism. Reed invoked the existence of a biological clock as proof that women could not venture too far from their traditional roles. He defined female life in terms of motherhood, or the failure to become a mother."

How the idea of a "biological clock" is not a neutral descriptor of physical fact, but a metaphor cooked up by some magazine writer with a couple of thousand words to file before lunch. (Includes this tragic image: "Often “old sperm” simply flail and perish around an egg they are trying to fertilise.")

Where girl meets boy

Last year, almost twice as many natal females (929) were referred to the centre as natal males (490) and yet, until six years ago, natal males used to be the majority. What explains this shift?

When I ask that to Dr Sarah Davidson, a consultant clinical psychologist who has worked for the service for a decade, she tells me about a mother who accompanied her daughter to the centre recently and said: “As a child I was a tomboy, climbing trees and playing football, and it wasn’t an issue. Now it seems to be.”

Davidson adds: “It’s highly unlikely that there’s only one explanation, but society has become more binary in how we treat children. You see it with the proliferation of boys’ toys and girls’ toys.”

Rosamund Urwin has talked to doctors in the Tavistock clinic about the huge spike in referrals of children with gender identity questions. Female children who say they feel like boys used to be in the minority of trans patients, but now numbers are spiking. I can't help wondering if some of this is about the highly gendered nature of toys/clothes etc - even when I was growing up, there was far less pink princess stuff about, and we had Lego rather than "Lego for Girls". When the box is pink and sparkling, no wonder more girls feel like they don't fit into it. I also think we still don't really understand the relationship between gender and sexuality.


Inside Evan Spiegel's world

When Spiegel was at Crossroads, a private school in Santa Monica, Calif., his parents, both lawyers, had a messy divorce that left large chunks of his personal life sitting unprotected in court files.

As he started to enter celebrity status in 2013, reporters mined those documents and surfaced with details that laid out a privileged life: As a teenager, Spiegel had a $250 weekly allowance. When his father wouldn’t buy him the new BMW he requested, he moved in with his mother out of protest. She leased him the $75,000 car. He’s not used to being told "no."

You know I'm a sucker for a tech bro profile. This one is a little thin, as a result of Spiegel's private nature (irony) and it relies too heavily on portentous, stabbing sentences. ("It’s not just that Spiegel has these novel ideas. He can execute them, too.") BUT there is some interesting stuff in here about Snapchat's current hotness, and the way that social networks and apps have to grow by being cool, but can only make money by doing uncool things (like selling ads or mining your data).


Quick links: Finally, a way to remember the difference between Chrises Pine, Evans, Hemsworth and the other one. Talking of which, OH MY GOD why has this never happened on any profile I've been asked to write? (OK, I did get drunk with an interviewee once, but it was at 11am in the morning, and I had to go to the nurse at work afterwaards and pretend I had a cold in order to get some decongestant which I guess I thought would have the same effect as amphetamines because you can boil it up to make crystal meth). Love this poem about Roman Polanski. The woman who has climbed Everest the most times is a domestic violence survivor who works as a housekeeper in Connecticut. Charlie Brooker writes for the New Yorker now? My mind is blown by the fact that the drummer from the Clash is now a chiropractor.


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