Feminism

Unfortunately, Zoe Strimpel has a great point in Good Slut. Why unfortunately? Because as much as I sympathise with her basic argument, I cannot see many people being persuaded by this scattershot polemic with its myriad errors and alarming glibness. Team slut deserves a better advocate. Whether I want to count myself as one of team slut is a sensitive point. I’m 44: it feels embarrassing. I had my ‘reclaiming sexist slurs’ phase in the late 1990s when I was an aspiring Riot Grrrl and I realised pretty soon that wearing fishnets and calling myself names was not having the disruptive effect on misogyny that I’d hoped for. Strimpel is 43 and, like me, she’s noted the recent turn to conservatism in sexual politics with some alarm.

The excellent Moscow-born journalist Julia Ioffe’s first book recounts a well-known slice of Russian history from a fresh perspective – that of the mighty Russian woman who, it’s said, can ‘stop a galloping horse and run into a burning hut’. And how superhumanly brave and resilient they have had to be. Women were granted sweeping rights following the Revolution, then watched them dwindle for the rest of the century, in law but mainly in practice. What remained was the Soviet obligation to work regardless of gender, which created a country of professional women in every sphere: engineers, cosmonauts, judges, professors and 70 per cent of doctors by the 1970s.

In the UK and elsewhere in the West, lesbian and gay rights have largely been won. Over the past two decades, rights to adoption, marriage, military service and workplace protection from discrimination have become law. Social inequality is another matter, and acceptance of same-sex relationships is now less widespread than it was ten years ago. According to Ronan McCrea, the author of The End of the Gay Rights Revolution, this can be explained – at least in part – by the political overreach of the LGBTQ+ movement. Is McCrea self-hating, riddled with internalised homophobia? Could it be that the movement has demanded too much, over and above acceptance and tolerance? As the title suggests, the book is a critique of the overreach and demands of some of the more radical campaigns.

There isn’t another actor alive whom I’d rather watch than Michael Douglas. Just as Pauline Kael once said that the thought of Cary Grant makes us smile, so the thought of Michael Douglas makes me grin, smirk, nod, wink, cackle, cheer – and walk a little taller, too. Even his anti-heroes are heroic in their truth to self. From the sly, ophidian sneer of his washed-up money man in A Perfect Murder to the salty, satanic leer of his trigger-happy cop in Basic Instinct, Douglas has embraced self-destruction, stared down absurdity and made plain what Nietzsche meant when he said that man is either a ‘laughing stock or a painful embarrassment’. But no matter how much Douglas means to me, he means a whole lot more to Jessa Crispin.