Culture

The opposite of virtue is not Vice. It’s the Daily Mail. This week, Centre Parcs announced that it would be joining an increasing number of brands – Lego, Paperchase, the Southbank Centre – who have chosen to stop advertising in the newspaper. The catalyst this time was an article by Richard Littlejohn, in which he approached the subject of same-sex parenting with his typical pose of bemused middle Englander – all the more sharply defined from the vantage point of his Florida villa. The piece – which tore into dads-to-be Tom Daley and his partner Dustin Lance Black – was criticised in some quarters as ‘homophobic’. Cue the PR of

When I saw the photo of Tom Daley and Dustin Lance Black holding a photo of an ultrasound, and all the subsequent headlines proclaiming ‘Tom and Lance are having a baby’ I thought one thing above all: ‘That’s strange’. Not ‘eww’, or ‘gross’, or ‘what a way to get over certain negative recent publicity’, but just ‘That’s strange’. Strange that we should have reached the point (inevitable in a way) in which two men announce that they’re having a baby and everyone is meant to just say ‘yay’ and not ask any more questions. ‘Of course two men can have a baby’, we are meant to chant in chorus, before

I have mixed feelings about Jordan Peterson, whose 12 Rules for Life I have just ploughed through. There is much socially conservative psychobabble, and life-coachy earnestness, and it’s far too long. But I am in some sympathy with his project. I am interested in its semi-religiosity. His core message is that people should aim high, ‘take the heroic path’, serve a vision of goodness and truth, though this entails sacrifice, and acceptance of the suffering intrinsic to life. No Christian should sniff at such rhetoric, and I do not. But we should sniff around its edges, to ask what exactly he’s up to. His primary influences are the spiritual existentialists

The Oscars promise to be truly unbearable this year, with vomit-inducing levels of sanctimony followed by the usual gibberish from the commentariat. The results and speeches and even clothes will be subject to endless politicised scrutiny, and whatever the film industry does to stay Woke, the Buzzfeed headline will inevitably be ‘and people aren’t happy about it’. I’m not sure actors really appreciate how their moralising, once simply tedious, is now grotesque; how there’s something almost darkly funny about members of the film industry presenting themselves as an ethical authority on anything, now they’ve been exposed as modern-day Borgias. But even before the Weinstein scandal broke there was something quite

The coincidence of Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day seems the right moment to air my dark, wintry perspective on human commingling. I think the new sensitivity to sexual misconduct is partly a good thing. We have begun to admit that there is dark difficulty in sex, that it’s not innocent adult fun. It pains young feminists to admit it, but they sort of are. They want to pin all the blame on male aggressors, but only most of it lies there. In both genders, sex accentuates pride, ego, insecurity, and little moments of cruelty can mutate to monstrous proportions. I got round to reading ‘Cat Person’, the New Yorker short story

First they came for Georgy Pyatakov and then it was Peter Rabbit. Admittedly there have been 81 years between the Soviet purging of Pyatakov and the cultural Marxists’ denunciation of Beatrix Potter’s mischievous bunny, but there are similarities. Pyatakov faced his accusers in January 1937, a broken and wretched shell of a man, telling the court: ‘I stand before you in filth, crushed by own crimes, bereft of everything through my own fault.’ Peter Rabbit also feels crushed by his crime, which in his case entailed throwing blackberries at Thomas (Mr McGregor’s nephew) in the hope it might trigger a food allergy. Nathalie Newman, writing in the Guardian, accused him of

What do we talk about when we talk about Jordan? Not the country, or the river, or the cultural commentator Jordan Peterson but – as is my Philistine wont – the glamour model and businesswoman Katie ‘Jordan’ Price.  Last week, Katie Price addressed Parliament on the subject of social media trolling – which her 15-year-son is particularly affected by, due to his weight, ethnicity and handicaps. She is calling for online abuse to be made a criminal offence. Coming from the sticks-and-stones school of thought, I don’t agree. But if you’d ever wondered what sort of pond-life gets their jollies from calling a blind boy names, they took this opportunity

Justin Trudeau is no stranger to virtue signalling, but he has surpassed himself with his latest gesture. The Canadian PM was taking part in a Q and A at a university when he took a female* audience member to task. Her offence? Succumbing to the patriarchy and referring to ‘mankind’. Trudeau interrupted her to mansplain her error: ‘We like to say people kind, not necessarily mankind…’ Telling a female the correct word to use… Mr S would consider that mansplaining… *fe-person

I guess there comes that time in every man’s life when he realises he is in fact a dinosaur and he’s never going to keep up with social mores. May as well just get use to your children’s gritted teeth every time you open your fat, opinionated mouth on anything. I find myself reaching that point in regards to the abolition of Formula One grid girls, a tradition that is no longer ‘relevant’ to the sport and how it wishes to be portrayed; which is presumably as an egalitarian, environmentally friendly and incorrupt cultural event which does not at all attract the worst rich people on earth. James O’Brien, the sort

All progress is war on the past and millennials are particularly merciless combatants. The arrival of Friends on Netflix UK has had this neo-Victorian generation reaching for its fainting couch. Through woke eyes, the hit NBC sitcom isn’t a diverting entertainment but an artefact of racism, sexism and homophobia. If you were a twentysomething during its initial run, or a teenager dreaming of being a twentysomething, Friends was more than just a sitcom — it was a lifestyle choice. This is a polite way of saying it wasn’t terribly funny, except in broad and winsome moments, but it sold a frothy fantasy of deferred adulthood and we were buying. You

In the old days, the Financial Times didn’t do scoops. Indeed, it was so unkeen on being sensationalist, if it did happen to get a story it passed it on to some other paper, and then followed it up. So what, you ask, has come over Lionel Barber, editor of the FT, sending girls out on an undercover gig to discover sexist behaviour at the Presidents Club? Is it some late-life crisis? I mean, of all the editors in the trade, he, and the editor of the Economist, and obv this magazine, have least to worry about circulation, in that theirs are the papers people want to be seen reading.

Once again public figures are fanning themselves with shocked surprise at something perfectly comprehensible to everyone else: men behave boorishly when drunk, sans wives, in the company of young women in short skirts paid to make themselves friendly. Of course, what went on at the Dorchester that night is seriously not okay and it’s good news the Presidents Club is no more. But the problem wasn’t just the groping. It was the event itself, and specifically the model of philanthropy on display. Too many rich people see charity as something peripheral to the real business of life. Inoculated by their wealth from any exposure to the demand side of what charities

A woman and a man had a conversation. Other people watched and listened. The woman asked the man some questions. The man answered them. Some people liked his answers. Some people didn’t. Some people liked the woman’s questions. Some people didn’t. So some of them called her a bitch and a whore and talked about her dying and said they knew where she lived. And some other stuff too that wasn’t quite as nice as that.  Then the people the woman worked for got a bit worried, so they asked some other people to make sure the woman was safe, because, well, do I really have to explain why people