It's raining linkspam
Urrggh, aaaargh, eeeeeeeuuuuuuwww, etc to the gospel that Catherine Hakim is preaching in Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital. Interview with Zoe Williams here, and you get the distinct impression that Zoe wished she'd taken a codfish with here, and review of the noxious thing by Will Self, which is a bit point thahr misst (wot duz e no about modern feminism beyond total stereotype, we ask?) but does take some pointed swipes at it.
Hakim's view is that the myth of "equality of desire" is endorsed by feminists, and that this leads to what she terms the "medicalisation of low desire", whereby therapists and counsellors try to convince women that their lack of sex-drive is a function of psychopathology rather than hormones.
I don't even, really, duh to the maxxxxx on that conflation.
Given the furore about The Help, this piece by Kathryn Hughes on Margaret Powell's memoirs of life below stairs in interwar Britain is perhaps timely:
In the follow-up volume, published the next year, Powell explains how her memoir had prompted a storm of hurt letters from readers who had grown up in well-heeled households. They wrote to tell Powell that they knew for a fact that their parents had always tried hard to treat their servants as human beings. Some even went into detail about the bedrooms in which their maids had slept, anxious to prove how much effort had gone in to providing a comfortable home from home for the working-class girls in their care. Powell, though, was having none of it: while acknowledging that individual employers could be kind, the fundamental point remained that "servants were not real people with minds and feelings. They were possessions." And to clinch the argument she points to the way that an employer might ask you solicitously about your evening off. "But if you were to say to them, 'And what did you do when you were out last night? Did you have a good evening?' they would have been horrified."
This made me think about a historian friend of mine who is currently researching nannies. Which segues into Bidisha's thought for the day: Nannies and matrons
[B]eing a nanny or a matron is typically underpaid, demanding, under-acknowledged, big on responsibility and low on autonomy, subordinate, easily replaceable, low-status and exhausting. In short: women's work.
Possibly the reason epigenetics has not taken off in the public consciousness is that it's all more complicated and doesn't really condense to the simplistic soundbite?
Frances Stonor Saunders on grief memoirs by srs literary figures - misery memoirs for the kind of people who would never read actual misery memoirs? determination to milk experience to the utmost?
Summerhill school and the do-as-yer-like kids. When it opened 90 years ago, lessons were optional and the children made the rules. A radical alternative to conventional education - or anarchy? Former pupils look back. Interesting, and they didn't all turn out layabouts and drifters. I do wonder, however, if it was one of those institutions which rose or fell by the personality of the individual/s running it and not readily duplicable by pattern-cutter.
Tanya Gold, The danger of the single woman and the threat she poses to civilisation is an ancient narrative, Jamelia: Respect for single mothers!
Woolly mammoth calf discovered in Russia's Arctic.
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