Culture

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 by Kristen Roupenian that has prompted much reflection on sexual mores.

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 'allergy bullying': To me, this scene sounds tantamount to allergy-bullying, which can be very serious.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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. Probably more people carry the Economist than read it; the FT is a kind of accessory in business, like a girl’s handbag. Anyway, it seems that readers agree. If you can afford £2.

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 do, they see the supply side as a bit of fun, an opportunity to display their wealth and generosity.

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 take threats of violence against women seriously?

Access to an abundance of clean water has been pivotal for the public health miracle that has taken place in rich countries. The western world's water supply infrastructures enables people to get the water they need to stay healthy, and has undoubtedly played a big role in life expectancy shooting up in the last century. But in the developing world, adequate water supply has completely fallen off the agenda. Instead, environmental health for poorer countries has come to mean only provision of some clean drinking water and latrines. But the copious supplies of clean water that allow hygienic conditions – and therefore public health – to be maintained are no longer seen as a priority for the world's poorest. The reason?

The Entente Cordiale is alive and well, it seems. It was announced today that, thanks to the benevolence of Emmanuel Macron, the Bayeux Tapestry will leave France for the first time in nine centuries, and be loaned to Britain. Strictly speaking, though, you could say the tapestry was coming home, since it was almost certainly made in Kent, by English women toiling under the Norman patriarchy. It tells the story of the most famous battle in English history, an event that helped to define not just Anglo-French relations but also England’s ingrained class differences.

It’s here, at last: the backlash against #MeToo. Finally people are sticking their heads above the parapet and asking if perhaps #MeToo has gone too far. They’re braving the inevitable fusillade of shaming tweets and accusations of ‘rape apologism’ to raise awkward questions about this hashtag movement. They’re wondering out loud if this movement that started life with the noble goal of exposing male abuse of women has now become too trigger-happy, too keen to demolish men on the basis of accusation alone, and too happy to go along with a view of women as fragile creatures in need of chaperoning. #MeToo’s dissenters have arrived, and about time too.

It used to be the case that tabloid stings struck the fear of God into politicians and celebrities. Now social media is claiming the scalps of public figures on an almost weekly basis.  Quite simply, life is on the record 24 hours a day, seven days a week. If you want to enter public life brace yourself for one long reality TV show. Privacy is dead and thanks to the advent of the camera phone everyone is now a journalist. There is no hiding place. If you’ve got a fondness for tweeting be aware it’s not a place for nuance. As a wise man once said, too many tweets make a t***. There are PR disasters lurking around every corner. The days of being able to control everything are gone.

Picture a village. It has a grocery shop and a pub. A little down the road you can find a cobbler and a hardware store. A factory manufactures parts for some large concern in a nearby city and local farmers supply their produce to the villagers. There are a dozen taxi drivers, a priest, a few doctors, teachers, nannies and so on. Crucially, there is also a shared idea of what constitutes the good life, a common culture that enables the inhabitants to trust each other - perhaps the most fundamental and most overlooked component of a properly functioning economy. We are looking, in short, at that increasingly endangered social construct: a community. Now the village also has a bank. Once, a man rather like Captain Mainwaring was its manager and he was known and respected in the community.