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Articles by Penny Red
V-Day meetup!
Hi everyone! Here’s the link for this afternoon’s subscriber meetup and discussion, which is happening in just over an hour, at 5pm GMT : https://zoom.us/j/3832744112?pwd=ZFlxTU8za3dzMEY2elFNMzZjckhBZz09 Hope to see some of you there. Come with tea and/or cake and/or booze, if it’s not too early where you are, and we’ll make a little salon of it. Love and solidarity, L x
SATURDAY HOUSEKEEPING and Monday meetup news.
Hello, lovers. It has been QUITE a week here at Penny Towers, as you might imagine. I hope you’ll forgive the lack of updates. And I hope that wherever you are you’re having the sort of weekend you hoped.
Engaging with feminist history
My book has been accused- bizarrely- of failing to acknowledge the history of women’s liberation, and of failing to cite any feminist thinkers from the Second wave. Here, for the record, are just a few of the instances where I cite feminist thinkers from the Second Wave and earlier. It seems that some people are so determined to disagree with this book they refuse to actually read it.
That feeling when you have a book coming out soon...
There’s nothing like reading the marketing copy for your book to see how people who get paid to be socially competent think you should promote yourself. Here’s the blurb for Sexual Revolution, which comes out oh so soon: “An urgent, hopeful, and unapologetically radical new book about consent, democracy, desire, and the future of sexual politics.” Oh, god. Unapologetic.
'Encanto' is a Beautiful, Brilliant, Broken Mess.
Welcome to the technicolor magical shitshow- -Disney. Disney’s Encanto is all over the internet like cake on a toddler’s face. It’s set in Colombia, nd it’s the story of a girl growing up in a family where everyone else has superpowers, and if you think you know where this is going, you’re wrong. Because Disney’s newest film has one big problem. The problem is that it’s a Disney film. To be clear: I love Disney.
How much is white male innocence worth?
Milan Kundera tells us that the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. That’s true today, on this awkward first anniversary of an armed white supremacist attempt to overthrow the state that the US government is trying and failing to fold into its public-facing position that everything is now officially and totally utterly and perfectibly fine. As long as we don’t talk about the insurrection.
This year, I’m going to make a lot of soup.
These days, when people ask how any of the tender, important things in my world are going- the book I have coming out, the marriage I embarked on, the next year’s worth of essays I set out to create on this Substack- I tell them, it’s going well. It’s coming along. It’s stone soup. Stone soup, I say, when they peer at me to check I’m not having a stroke. Like the story? I thought everyone knew that story. Apparently not. It goes like this:
All of this is holy.
Theory of mind is a wonderful thing. I try to make room in mine for people who dislike Christmas. There are plenty of decent reasons why a sane person might not freak out at the first jingle of artificial sleigh bells on the radio in mid-November. Perhaps you have a contraindicative religious faith, or a tragic tinsel allergy.
Old selves in other cities: a little diary magic.
Nine years ago today, on the A train to Brooklyn on a bitter night, a tired, wired young weirdo I used to be wrote a diary entry on their bashed-up phone. Bite down and buckle up for some painful earnestness, a couple of creepy comics-related.
The Actual War on Christmas
Well, fuck. There goes another Christmas. I’m writing this from London, where the Omicron variant is absolutely everywhere. These past few days the city has been gradually unpeopling. The coffee shop we go to every morning was almost empty, and that’s almost unheard of - it’s a community hub - and at the end of the day they shut their doors. Everyone is sick, or knows somebody who is. Everything is muffled under a torch-through-a- blanket sky.
This Party Sucks: Audio version!
Evening, everyone. Hope you’re keeping warm and safe out there. And hope you enjoy this subscriber bonus! I’m experimenting with substack’s audio publishing platform- and I thought I’d try something that people have been asking for for a LONG time.
This Party Sucks.
Well, at least somebody’s having fun. Yesterday there was a hospital-shroud sky over London. In the cold outside Downing Street, a handful of quiet, furious people stood in front of the gates with a big sign and a cheese plate. They did this because, as the sign explained, ‘we’ll never get to party with our loved ones again.’ They were members of Covid Bereaved Families for Justice.
Open thread: abortion.
The real moral question of the age is not whether a foetus is a person. The more pressing question is whether a woman is a person- a fully human person, a person who deserves absolute bodily autonomy. Apparently, this one is trickier to answer. Who the hell knew? I’m watching the news roll in on the Roe V Wade hearings and trying to write, yet again, about why women’s freedom matters, about the fight against reproductive coercion in and beyond the USA.
Open thread: a place of greater safety
This weekend, I was lucky enough to be invited on a retreat with a number of former strangers who work in media, political and creative fields. It was billed as a space where ideas could be exchanged freely, and disagreements had- which they have been, not least because of the sense of being physically removed from the frenetic machine of a city running on cortisol and smog. It has been a gift to be here.
What Foucault Got Right
[CONTENT NOTE: THIS ESSAY DISCUSSES HOMOPHOBIA, TRANSPHOBIA AND CHILD SEXUAL ASSAULT] In these days of climate collapse and collective moral crisis, it helps to be able to pin your existential dread on outsiders. Preferably-fictional outsiders, who, being fictional, cannot fight back. The modern moral panic against queer and gender non-conforming people is escalating, and moral panics need strawmen.
Whose body, whose choice?
When it comes to public health, ‘my body, my choice’ is not the gotcha you think it is. Since the summer, right-wingers have been twisting the rhetoric of anti-rape and pro-choice activism to discredit vaccine mandates and justify mask-dodging. Now, as the world lurches into its second COVID winter, they’re doubling down.
Big Scholarship Kid Energy
Sometimes, people ask me for career advice. Why they do this is a mystery, especially if they’ve met me in person and understand that this is like asking a free climber the best way up the mountain. My best way isn’t necessarily the safest, and it probably won’t leave you time for a picnic. I routinely push myself to the point of discomfort - never actual danger, though it helps to have friends around to remind you of the difference.
I Want To Believe in Ted Lasso.
“Thirty years of hurt never stopped you dreaming. It’s coming home, it’s coming home, it’s coming, football’s coming home…” -The Lightning Seeds. “Do you believe in ghosts, Ted?” - “I do, ma’am, but more importantly, I think they need to believe in themselves” -Ted Lasso. For some people, pleasure is always suspicious. Personally, I find few things more delicious in these dark times than watching judgy fuckers try not to enjoy themselves and fail.
Another Murderous Toff*
Who gets to be a hero, in these rabid, panting dog days of Western patriarchy? What does it mean to fight the good fight and stand up for what’s right? When every cultural certainty is crumbling away like wet cake, can good men exist, and are they necessary? These may not be the most pressing questions when our houses are underwater and our futures are on fire, but they are the questions that the top-billed franchises in mass media, old and new, are trying to answer, and that matters.
Gender Panic: fearmongering, fascism and the cost of changing course.
There are worse things in this life than being called a fascist. Fascism, for a start. I've been trying all week to hit publish on a long piece about the interplay between fascism , the far right and the 'gender critical movement' - and what can be done to drive the fash out of feminism.
Do They Owe Us A Living?
Crabb, recent Tory convert to the notion that Mistakes Were Made. Photo via BBC news. The great advantage of a culture war is that it’s cheap. Not for the people whose lives and futures are weaponised, of course. If you are a migrant, or a trans person, or a low-waged worker, then you might well find a culture war extremely costly.
Where We're going, We Don't Need Platforms....
Imagine you're throwing a party, and somebody kicks off. It was going so well. You worked hard, you spent ages deciding on drinks and making a playlist, and now some blowhard is off on a homophobic rant. He's not holding back, eitheer. He's getting louder and mouthing off with the vilest bigotry you can imagine, and people are getting uncomfortable. It's your party. What do you do? What you do depends on lots of things. What sort of party is this?
Panic on the streets of London.
I’m huddled in the front room with some shell-shocked friends, watching my city burn. The BBC is interchanging footage of blazing cars and running street battles in Hackney, of police horses lining up in Lewisham, of roiling infernos that were once shops and houses in Croydon and in Peckham. Last night, Enfield, Walthamstow, Brixton and Wood Green were looted; there have been hundreds of arrests and dozens of serious injuries, and it will be a miracle if nobody dies tonight.
Here's what you can do, Dave
You can ignore the howling of a country that hates you and doesn't want you in power. You can dig yourself into Westminster like a toad under a stone for four years whilst this country bleeds from a thousand cuts. But you can't run from progress, and you can't roll back the changes that thirteen years of progressive government have put in place. Labour did many terrible things, but they also helped open a pandora's box of visceral social change. You can't undo that, not ever.
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