June 21, 2023 - 10:30am
Paris Lees has no idea what it feels like to be a girl. Of course not: Lees’s experience as a teenage boy, selling sex to predatory older men, tells us nothing about how girls feel about anything. Now the BBC has issued a gushing press release about its decision to turn Lees’s memoir, What It Feels Like For A Girl, into an eight-part drama series. It promises to deliver “a journey of love and danger, self-discovery and self-destruction”, without acknowledging that literally half the population is better qualified than Lees to say anything about the subject.
Just to be clear, Lees is a transwoman. His biological sex is very much the issue here, so I’m not going to pretend he is a woman, any more than I do when writing about Eddie Izzard. The memoir is a fictionalised account of growing up in Hucknall, Nottinghamshire, where Lees suffered horrendous homophobic abuse. It is a legitimate subject for a book but its premise, that Lees always “knew” he was really a girl, repeats a highly controversial tenet of gender ideology.
One of the most striking things about Lees is his attachment to a very outdated, sexist view of what it means to be a woman. “Last summer I went to Ibiza, where I was catcalled, sexually objectified and treated like a piece of meat by men the entire week. And it was absolutely awesome,” he once wrote. Lees’s selling point is that he supposedly says things women secretly think but don’t want to admit, such as liking the most demeaning forms of male attention. It’s hard not to see the influence of pornography, a multi-million-dollar industry that sells the idea that women enjoy being reduced to their body parts.
Worse, however, is that Lees claims a right to representation: “So yeah, I’m a bit of a slut. I also used to be a prostitute. And before that, well, a boy. Uh-huh. And I’m a total attention junkie. So I may — may — not represent all women. Who does, though?” I’ve never met a woman who claims to represent all women, but we do have some things in common, such as growing up as girls who have to learn to deal with street harassment.
In one of the most disturbing passages of his memoir, Lees writes about being taken to some woods by one of the “dirty old men” who paid him for sex, where around 15 men vied to touch him sexually — and he “loved it”. I can’t imagine a teenage girl being anything but terrified in this situation, and I’m not surprised that Lees subsequently had to deal with all sorts of destructive emotions, including shame and self-hatred.
But what the BBC describes as “a rollercoaster ride of hedonism at the heart of the UK’s early 2000s club scene” ended in Lees robbing a “client”, stealing his bank card and emptying his bank account. At the age of 18, he served eight months of a two-year sentence in a young offenders’ institution.
Being a girl — the biological kind, I mean — has seldom been more problematic. Eating disorders and gender dysphoria are expressions of extreme anxiety about having a female body and the changes that come with puberty. Detransitioners have plenty to say about that, but the BBC has an apparently endless appetite for making programmes that recycle the claims of trans activists. If the corporation is really interested in what it means to be a girl, maybe it could ask one?
Joan Smith is a novelist and columnist. She was previously Chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board, and is on the advisory group for Sex Matters. Her book Unfortunately, She Was A Nymphomaniac: A New History of Rome’s Imperial Women was published in November 2024.
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SubscribeMaybe his “don’t humiliate Russia” comment at the very moment Russia was pounding Ukraine to smithereens, was a bit much for even the famously self-absorbed French.
According to a survey by the ECFR, 41% of the French are in the “peace camp” (Europe should seek to end the war as soon as possible – even if it means Ukraine making concessions ) versus 20% who belong to the “justice camp” (the most important goal is to punish Russia for its aggression and to restore the territorial integrity of Ukraine) : https://ecfr.eu/publication/peace-versus-justice-the-coming-european-split-over-the-war-in-ukraine/
Perhaps Le Pen’s clear defeat in the second round of the presidential election in April really galvanised RN’s supporters and that’s why they came out in force yesterday. Or perhaps a large number of French sympathise with RN’s basic direction & arguments but can’t quite stomach the idea of Le Pen being the visible figurehead of the country – they have certain ideas about the division of labour, so to speak.
It is hard to say, because the voter turnout was so low at the legislative election. Le Pen’s Rassemblement National got around 4 million votes yesterday, compared to Marine Le Pen’s 8 million votes in the first round of the presidential election two months ago.
but surely LBGT, racism and global warming are the only issues anyone cares about, if the meeja are to believed?… Clearly not in France?!… If only our politicians would realise too that no- one actually cares a jot, but they do about economics and freedoms..
I think the simplest explanation is COVID. As we get further away from the pandemic (which everyone, bar a few diehards, if you’ll pardon the unintentional pun) thinks is over, the actions of most Western governments look increasingly absurd. I think very few leaders in power in 2020
Sorry, posted by mistake, and my phone won’t let me edit. Continued … very few leaders in power in 2020 will survive a general election. Macron did, because he was fortunate in his opponent, and this is what he gets.
There has been much talk of the capture of mainstream political parties by their extremist ends. I am not sure that this is a problem in France, but if it is perceived to be then a policy of electing people in such a way to hamstring the political leadership so that they cannot accomplish much is a very fine idea, and indeed the whole point.
His repellent arrogance played a big role. You would think the hunky Morrocan bodyguard would have said something, or his pedophile wife.
As we unravel what has happened in France over the past two months, maybe it can be summed up as John regarding something as “Consensual Centre”, whilst perception of other voters is of a “Global/EU-first and France-second” bloc with disproportionate power?
Millions of voters don’t want to be dismissed as second-class for having that different view, rather they just want the democratic process to be used to push back on some of the failures and excesses of issues, that are clearly beyond the control of their own country’s legislature.
That same process has pushed the UK to a more ‘consensual’ view on contentious issues in the past but seems to have been lacking since around 1997. So France interests me because I feel the same strains will become visible in the UK over time.
I can see that this could produce an unsatisfactory situation for France, which is not good for any of us. But we have to find a safety valve of restoring checks and balances or you’ll get explosions of discontent which will create gridlock at a national decision making level.
Even Andrew Neil was at a loss to explain Le Pen’s vote. My only suggestion here is that a rapid change in demographics is driving voters to go for the previously “unvoteable” because, rightly or wrongly, they ‘perceive’ time is running out for their children and grand-children.
Not anti-EM at all by the way, as his thoughts and views on the future of the EU are consistently more interesting and joined up than the average 2 line tweet of a UK FBPE Twitter account, still fighting last decade’s war.
I’m no France expert, and look forward to comments of people with more scholarly and/or knowledge of France, as sober analysis seems hard to find in UK media this morning. I did try something called the New European but, curiously, it’s sole focus seems to be about a tiny number of politicians on a small island that voted to leave the European Union…
The Vichy regime was a dictatorship without parliamentary elections, which makes the comparison difficult.
John Lichfield wrote, “Two months ago they voted to make Emmanuel Macron the first president in 20 years to win a second term. Yesterday they voted to humiliate Macron by denying him a clear, or even a near, majority in the National Assembly.”
Emmanuel Macron should work with Marine Le Pen to establish an alliance between Ensemble and National Rally. This alliance would have a solid majority in the National Assembly.
He should appoint her as Minister of the Interior and give her free reign on matters of immigration. She will improve the quality of life in France by deporting illegal aliens and halting further immigration from the Middle East and Africa.
Supported by MPs from Natonal Rally, Macron can continue his economic reforms and military reforms. The latter is an ongoing project to establish a European military structure that is independent of NATO. Such independence will be vital for the security of the European Union after the United States, due to its open borders, ceases to be a Western nation by 2040. It will be a Hispanic nation (i.e., a nation in which Hispanic culture is dominant).
Get more info about the immigrant problem in France.
Do you just copy and paste that nonsense into every story? Nobody cares about the supposed demographic changes to America when discussing an article about the French elections