You do to the dentist even though you really do not want to. Reading this angry, self obsessed, victimized (as the writer says), Solipsistic twaddle is the duty of everyone living in this insane, self loathing, society loathing, nation loathing age. How else are you going to fully understand how the new zeitgeist is very much akin to the Wordsworth love of the tearing down of what was great, (because had not yet seen the fallowing terror which always comes after the destruction of the stable.)
This all reminds me of the H*t ler youth, the youth ‘Pioneers’ of Stalin, the indoctrinating of so much self hate in the young that they will destroy all, even themselves, to wreck that which is their benefactor, but they think is their oppressor.
Yea, but you are right, I cannot think of even a dental procedure which would be more unpleasant than reading this book, and thank Mary for undergoing it for me.
And after Opra has double thumbs upped it there will also be a real cost to buy it.
Peter LR
2 years ago
Being besotted with yourself sounds not only unhealthy but positively dangerous: no wonder everything that goes wrong is someone’s else’s fault.
I have to confess that I’ve heard so much lecturing on things like patriarchy or being congenitally racist that I no longer take any notice.
Daily mail showed a T-shirt which lists the warming signs that you may becoming a White Supremacist:
“1. Full time employment, 2. Literacy, 3. Professional or technical degree, 4. Regular church/temple attendance, 5. Auto insurance, 6. Good credit rating, 7. No criminal record.”
It was a re-tweet, and the unanimous response to the re-tweet is massed tweeting that posting this list is the best, true, sign you Are a ‘White Supremacist’. The guy who re-tweeted it is likely done for professionally.
You need to take notice because once branded with the crime of nu-cultural Apostasy, there is no recovering.
Paddy Taylor
2 years ago
The morning after the referendum result, 23rd June 2016, the Guardian was in meltdown – both above and below the line.
It veered wildly between the bedwetting catastrophism of some Remainers and the absolutely unhinged, poisonous vitriol of others.
My first foray into the comments section that day was in response to a snarlingly unpleasant piece naming and shaming those writers and public figures that were “to blame” for “brainwashing” the country with their “Lies” – the writer of this screed was particularly incensed by Toby Young, of the Spectator and elsewhere.
In response, on that glorious morning, I corrupted the same Wordsworth quote you used. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive! But Toby Young was very heaven.
The comment stayed up for several hours – before the Guardian’s moderation Stasi ‘disappeared’ it – and I can honestly say that in all the many years of almost daily posting on the Guardian (under the name LastOfThePelicans), no comment of mine has engendered more hateful invective than that one.
It’s several months since I last read cif over at the G, and I am much the better for it. The decline of Blairism, then the financial crash, then Brexit, then Trump, then Boris, then Covid, not to mention the rise of identity politics and the culture war, have quite demented the Guardian, both its writing staff and its readership. They have, over the last 10 years, entirely slipped their moorings. They’ve become a left-wing tabloid – albeit one with delusions of moral superiority – far nastier and more intolerant than any of the Right wing tabloids they demonise.
No doubt they will hail Girlhood as an important tract and damn any who dare disagree.
You could hardly describe the current incarnation of The Guardian better than “navel-gazing in an airless world stripped of cultural riches, but disturbingly adrift.” ….. “myopic and profoundly defeatist.”
“…a book of the most stifling imaginable solipsism. In this world, there is no shared cultural or historical terrain between the absolutely subjective individual, and the crushing force of oppressive ideology” – Descriptive of any writing basing itself around critical theory, then. Crenshaw et al. are solipsists of Olympic standing and don’t get me started on the pederast Focault. Bankrupt of any human value, collectively they personify a neurotic attempt to separate us from ourselves and rebuild us as – what? They don’t have much to say about that. Plenty to say about what we shouldn’t be though. I’d like to think this will all just fizzle out but somehow I sense these people won’t be happy until we all have equality of misery in the rubble of all our forbears bequeathed us. The Theorists will be the poorer for it too, having nothing even obliquely original to contribute, but lack the wit and self awareness to see that. Paradoxical, in that “self” is that of which they seem most aware.
Why the insults? Surely Foucaults sex life, however reprehensible, is rather unimportant compared to his influence on modern culture?
ADDED LATER:
Actually, I think Foucault’s influence on modern culture has been wholly malign, even disastrous. But why insult him for his sex life when there is plenty to insult in his – much more consequential – philosophical work?
Might it have something to do with his notion of ‘dominance’ and how that determines the status of ‘power’ in any given situation? The claimed pederasty might be seen as a function of Foucault’s dominance in terms of strength and age and maturation such that the ‘power dynamic’ in a relationship was in Foucault’s favour.
Focault’s influence on modern culture? Res ipsa loquitur. Even allowing that the interpretation of his work may not be what he would have intended (which is pure inference), it’s a fair rule of thumb that you usually get the audience you deserve.
Still, demortuis nil nisi bonum, that I will concede. His peccadilloes are a sideshow to the juvenilia he successfully palmed off as philosophy. In the final analysis I consider it to have the vapidity of a mere jeu d’esprit and our current societal obsession with it speaks volumes. Unfortunately.
Just out of interest, I was reading a book about extremes of religions last week. It seems that most (extreme) religious leaders have made a point to trying to make people feel bad and miserable about themselves. Over hundreds of years (extreme) religious views have been about absolution, forgiveness through atonement, etc.
Now we read about extreme ‘-isms’ where people seem have have made their own religions out of being miserable, focussing on bad things, mental problems, etc, to make everyone else feel guilty about being normal.
Terry Needham
2 years ago
To be honest I don’t understand what the term “The Patriarchy” actually means. Can some kind person explain it to me?
Patriarchy describes a society in which men hold all the power, and occupy every position of influence, whilst women are culturally (and forcibly) excluded from it.
One has to ask radical feminists if this is the patriarchal, male-dominated society they wish to overthrow?
Our Head of State is a woman – Queen Elizabeth II
The Prime Minister – until relatively recently was a woman – Theresa May
First Minister & Head of the Scottish National Party – Nicola Sturgeon
Head of the Democratic Unionist Party until a few weeks ago – Arlene Foster
Head of Sinn Féin – Mary Lou McDonald
Head of Plaid Cymru until recently – Leanne Wood
Head of the Green Party – Sian Berry with Caroline Lucas and Natalie Bennett before her
Head of the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland – Naomi Long. With Geraldine Mulveena its President
President of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom – Until very recently Baroness Hale of Richmond
Director General of the Confederation of British Industry – Carolyn Fairbairn
General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress – Frances O’Grady
Chief Medical Advisor to the UK government – until recently Professor Dame Sally Davies – She now sits as Master of Trinity College, Cambridge
Chief Executive Officer of the Charity Commission for England and Wales- Paula Sussex – with Helen Stephenson before her.
Chief Inspector of Schools – Amanda Spielman
As for teaching the next generation (in this male-dominated society) … well, the Teaching profession is almost entirely female driven, 80% of teachers are women
The gender gap among students IN FAVOUR OF WOMEN is the highest ever: Over the last few years on average approx. 100,000 more women apply for University places than men.
If feminists chose to highlight the cause across the globe then I could understand it a bit better. There are undoubtedly patriarchal societies around the world, where women are treated as 2nd class citizens, but the UK in 2021 isn’t Saudi Arabia.
Yet every day, particularly on BBC Radio’s “Women’s Hour”, they manage to dig up another cast of unreconstructed feminist activists who keep banging the drum and railing against injustices that mostly haven’t existed in this country for 30 years or more.
I suspect the UK and certain other Western countries are on course to demonstrate, over the next generation or so, why pretty much all successful civilizations in history were “patriarchies”
Thanks for that. It was certainly heartening to read about all those women in important roles in public service. It’s odd how under represented they are on the boards of the top 100 companies, which is where the really big money is. Any ideas?
It does usually come prefixed by the adjective ‘white’. Not sure where this leaves, among very many others, the Zulus…
Last edited 2 years ago by Martin Smith
Rasmus Fogh
2 years ago
Lovely article, Not just description or even context, but actual understanding
Ian Barton
2 years ago
I’m sure this article will make sense – as Mary’s stuff usually does – but is the analysis of historical feminist thinking really of much use/interest these days ?
Maybe it’s time to aim all this effort towards other neglected “causes”.
(just don’t do what Stonewall have done)
Women hold up half the sky, as Mao said, and have a different perspective. Surely worth tracking what comes from that direction?
Margaret Tudeau-Clayton
2 years ago
The one passage cited is cringingly awful as a piece of ‘literary’ writing. Give me Milton, Worsworth plus Austen and Woolf any time!
Tobias Langley
2 years ago
The most important thing about Wordsworth is that he was the first poet to realize not what designs he could have on nature but what designs nature had had on him.
Phil Simmons
2 years ago
Very cogent article. Not having read Febos’s book I’m in no position to comment on it specifically, but the general argument against ‘Year Zero’ philosophising is well articulated. Dare I point out, though, amid the general deprecation of all things Critical Theory, that the presiding (evil) genius of that (pseudo-) discipline, Jacques Derrida, would have been absolutely in agreement with the contention that it’s impossible to escape the dead hand of historic textuality simply by opposing oneself to it, no matter how loudly?
Eddie Johnson
2 years ago
Another thought-provoking and beautifully written piece by Ms Harrington.
I’m glad other people read these books so I don’t have to.
I was going to say this but its more effective to give you an uptick.
What Chris Wheatley said.
Ditto
You do to the dentist even though you really do not want to. Reading this angry, self obsessed, victimized (as the writer says), Solipsistic twaddle is the duty of everyone living in this insane, self loathing, society loathing, nation loathing age. How else are you going to fully understand how the new zeitgeist is very much akin to the Wordsworth love of the tearing down of what was great, (because had not yet seen the fallowing terror which always comes after the destruction of the stable.)
This all reminds me of the H*t ler youth, the youth ‘Pioneers’ of Stalin, the indoctrinating of so much self hate in the young that they will destroy all, even themselves, to wreck that which is their benefactor, but they think is their oppressor.
Yea, but you are right, I cannot think of even a dental procedure which would be more unpleasant than reading this book, and thank Mary for undergoing it for me.
I had a root canal last week and I think I would enjoy this book less.
And after Opra has double thumbs upped it there will also be a real cost to buy it.
Being besotted with yourself sounds not only unhealthy but positively dangerous: no wonder everything that goes wrong is someone’s else’s fault.
I have to confess that I’ve heard so much lecturing on things like patriarchy or being congenitally racist that I no longer take any notice.
Daily mail showed a T-shirt which lists the warming signs that you may becoming a White Supremacist:
“1. Full time employment, 2. Literacy, 3. Professional or technical degree, 4. Regular church/temple attendance, 5. Auto insurance, 6. Good credit rating, 7. No criminal record.”
It was a re-tweet, and the unanimous response to the re-tweet is massed tweeting that posting this list is the best, true, sign you Are a ‘White Supremacist’. The guy who re-tweeted it is likely done for professionally.
You need to take notice because once branded with the crime of nu-cultural Apostasy, there is no recovering.
The morning after the referendum result, 23rd June 2016, the Guardian was in meltdown – both above and below the line.
It veered wildly between the bedwetting catastrophism of some Remainers and the absolutely unhinged, poisonous vitriol of others.
My first foray into the comments section that day was in response to a snarlingly unpleasant piece naming and shaming those writers and public figures that were “to blame” for “brainwashing” the country with their “Lies” – the writer of this screed was particularly incensed by Toby Young, of the Spectator and elsewhere.
In response, on that glorious morning, I corrupted the same Wordsworth quote you used.
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive!
But Toby Young was very heaven.
The comment stayed up for several hours – before the Guardian’s moderation Stasi ‘disappeared’ it – and I can honestly say that in all the many years of almost daily posting on the Guardian (under the name LastOfThePelicans), no comment of mine has engendered more hateful invective than that one.
It’s several months since I last read cif over at the G, and I am much the better for it. The decline of Blairism, then the financial crash, then Brexit, then Trump, then Boris, then Covid, not to mention the rise of identity politics and the culture war, have quite demented the Guardian, both its writing staff and its readership. They have, over the last 10 years, entirely slipped their moorings. They’ve become a left-wing tabloid – albeit one with delusions of moral superiority – far nastier and more intolerant than any of the Right wing tabloids they demonise.
No doubt they will hail Girlhood as an important tract and damn any who dare disagree.
You could hardly describe the current incarnation of The Guardian better than “navel-gazing in an airless world stripped of cultural riches, but disturbingly adrift.” ….. “myopic and profoundly defeatist.”
Lovely pun.
“…a book of the most stifling imaginable solipsism. In this world, there is no shared cultural or historical terrain between the absolutely subjective individual, and the crushing force of oppressive ideology” –
Descriptive of any writing basing itself around critical theory, then. Crenshaw et al. are solipsists of Olympic standing and don’t get me started on the pederast Focault. Bankrupt of any human value, collectively they personify a neurotic attempt to separate us from ourselves and rebuild us as – what? They don’t have much to say about that. Plenty to say about what we shouldn’t be though.
I’d like to think this will all just fizzle out but somehow I sense these people won’t be happy until we all have equality of misery in the rubble of all our forbears bequeathed us. The Theorists will be the poorer for it too, having nothing even obliquely original to contribute, but lack the wit and self awareness to see that. Paradoxical, in that “self” is that of which they seem most aware.
Why the insults? Surely Foucaults sex life, however reprehensible, is rather unimportant compared to his influence on modern culture?
ADDED LATER:
Actually, I think Foucault’s influence on modern culture has been wholly malign, even disastrous. But why insult him for his sex life when there is plenty to insult in his – much more consequential – philosophical work?
Might it have something to do with his notion of ‘dominance’ and how that determines the status of ‘power’ in any given situation? The claimed pederasty might be seen as a function of Foucault’s dominance in terms of strength and age and maturation such that the ‘power dynamic’ in a relationship was in Foucault’s favour.
Focault’s influence on modern culture? Res ipsa loquitur. Even allowing that the interpretation of his work may not be what he would have intended (which is pure inference), it’s a fair rule of thumb that you usually get the audience you deserve.
Still, de mortuis nil nisi bonum, that I will concede. His peccadilloes are a sideshow to the juvenilia he successfully palmed off as philosophy. In the final analysis I consider it to have the vapidity of a mere jeu d’esprit and our current societal obsession with it speaks volumes. Unfortunately.
Just out of interest, I was reading a book about extremes of religions last week. It seems that most (extreme) religious leaders have made a point to trying to make people feel bad and miserable about themselves. Over hundreds of years (extreme) religious views have been about absolution, forgiveness through atonement, etc.
Now we read about extreme ‘-isms’ where people seem have have made their own religions out of being miserable, focussing on bad things, mental problems, etc, to make everyone else feel guilty about being normal.
To be honest I don’t understand what the term “The Patriarchy” actually means. Can some kind person explain it to me?
I was going to ask the same question. And a supplementary one – if it exists, why is it a bad thing?
I believe that in these strange times, you are required to ‘educate yourself’ about such matters!
Patriarchy describes a society in which men hold all the power, and occupy every position of influence, whilst women are culturally (and forcibly) excluded from it.
One has to ask radical feminists if this is the patriarchal, male-dominated society they wish to overthrow?
Our Head of State is a woman – Queen Elizabeth II
The Prime Minister – until relatively recently was a woman – Theresa May
First Minister & Head of the Scottish National Party – Nicola Sturgeon
Head of the Democratic Unionist Party until a few weeks ago – Arlene Foster
Head of Sinn Féin – Mary Lou McDonald
Head of Plaid Cymru until recently – Leanne Wood
Head of the Green Party – Sian Berry with Caroline Lucas and Natalie Bennett before her
Head of the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland – Naomi Long. With Geraldine Mulveena its President
President of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom – Until very recently Baroness Hale of Richmond
Director General of the Confederation of British Industry – Carolyn Fairbairn
General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress – Frances O’Grady
Chief Medical Advisor to the UK government – until recently Professor Dame Sally Davies – She now sits as Master of Trinity College, Cambridge
Chief Executive Officer of the Charity Commission for England and Wales- Paula Sussex – with Helen Stephenson before her.
Chief Inspector of Schools – Amanda Spielman
As for teaching the next generation (in this male-dominated society) … well, the Teaching profession is almost entirely female driven, 80% of teachers are women
The gender gap among students IN FAVOUR OF WOMEN is the highest ever: Over the last few years on average approx. 100,000 more women apply for University places than men.
If feminists chose to highlight the cause across the globe then I could understand it a bit better. There are undoubtedly patriarchal societies around the world, where women are treated as 2nd class citizens, but the UK in 2021 isn’t Saudi Arabia.
Yet every day, particularly on BBC Radio’s “Women’s Hour”, they manage to dig up another cast of unreconstructed feminist activists who keep banging the drum and railing against injustices that mostly haven’t existed in this country for 30 years or more.
I suspect the UK and certain other Western countries are on course to demonstrate, over the next generation or so, why pretty much all successful civilizations in history were “patriarchies”
and then there’s Cressida!
Thanks for that. It was certainly heartening to read about all those women in important roles in public service. It’s odd how under represented they are on the boards of the top 100 companies, which is where the really big money is. Any ideas?
It does usually come prefixed by the adjective ‘white’. Not sure where this leaves, among very many others, the Zulus…
Lovely article, Not just description or even context, but actual understanding
I’m sure this article will make sense – as Mary’s stuff usually does – but is the analysis of historical feminist thinking really of much use/interest these days ?
Maybe it’s time to aim all this effort towards other neglected “causes”.
(just don’t do what Stonewall have done)
Women hold up half the sky, as Mao said, and have a different perspective. Surely worth tracking what comes from that direction?
The one passage cited is cringingly awful as a piece of ‘literary’ writing. Give me Milton, Worsworth plus Austen and Woolf any time!
The most important thing about Wordsworth is that he was the first poet to realize not what designs he could have on nature but what designs nature had had on him.
Very cogent article. Not having read Febos’s book I’m in no position to comment on it specifically, but the general argument against ‘Year Zero’ philosophising is well articulated. Dare I point out, though, amid the general deprecation of all things Critical Theory, that the presiding (evil) genius of that (pseudo-) discipline, Jacques Derrida, would have been absolutely in agreement with the contention that it’s impossible to escape the dead hand of historic textuality simply by opposing oneself to it, no matter how loudly?
Another thought-provoking and beautifully written piece by Ms Harrington.