Laurie Penny
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Author, journalist, narrative designer, screenwriter. Geek, gender goblin, feminist killjoy, force of culture. Writer for hire, weirdo for free. They/them.
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Articles by Laurie Penny
Birthday Subscription Drive: 40% Off!
Photo by Lan Gao on Unsplash It’s my birthday this week. Yes, obviously it’s everyone’s birthday this week, because this is the most common birthday week, because - well, count back nine months. But I’m turning forty. So just for this weekend, I’m offering forty percent off paid subscriptions. The author and minion, 1987. It has meant everything to me this year to have people reading and supporting my work, and there’s nothing I’d like more than to have that continue.
The Great ADHD Myth.
Photo by Christina Victoria Craft on Unsplash And then they came for the people with flaming ADHD, and I did not speak out because oh, bugger, yes, I did know there was a deadline for speaking out, and I even wrote it down so it wouldn’t slide off my brain into the trench of obligations and wasted potential but unfortunately what I wrote down was the word ‘deadline’, and I didn’t remember what the deadline was for until you mentioned it just now, and then I had to dig around for the form in...
Autism and The English
From the 2010 Chap Olympiad. There is nothing neurotypical about this image. People think I’m posher than I am. They always have. It took me thirty-two years to work out why. Posh people identify themselves by breaking small social rules. They do it without thinking. Watch for it next time you’re in mixed company. I, too, break small social rules all the time, mostly because I don’t notice them, and sometimes because I find them pointless and silly.
There's Only One Wrong Opinion About The Odyssey.
We’re all trapped inside modern fascism’s paranoid retcon engine, but it doesn’t work like they want it to. That’s one reason the fragile failsons of the New Right can’t cope with Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey - which is, among other things, a warning about what happens when vainglorious start stupid, self-serving wars and then run away from responsibility. Matt Damon’s Odysseus spends three soggy screen-hours being sorry for doing a genocide, even though we all know personal growth is for simps.
The Boys Was the Show This Era Needed, and the One It Deserved, Too - Reactor
Not long ago, I was in a bar with three drunk Norwegians, having a fight about Superman. They thought the world would be better if Superman really existed. I disagreed. Nobody, no matter how well-meaning or well-coiffed, should have that much power. “But Superman is a good man!” said the Norwegians, who come from a country with extremely high social trust on top of a giant oilfield. “Alright. But what if he wasn’t?” The Superman question is obviously, actually, about billionaires.
Feminists began raising the alarm about the manosphere decades ago – and we were ignored
; ; ; ; Continue reading More for You ; ; ; Continue reading More for You
Feminists began raising the alarm about the manosphere decades ago – and we were ignored
Harrison Sullivan, known as HSTikkyTokky, in Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere. Photograph: Netflix/PA Why has it taken so long for us to treat misogyny as a political problem? The modern manosphere has been metastasising for many years – and for years, mainstream culture has responded with a helpless shrug. There was nothing unusual about men hurting women, even if the technology was new.
The haunting of Tory conference
Spooky season came early to Manchester this year. Outside the convention centre, a baffled, shattered city reels from the latest round of political violence, but inside, eyeless mannequins of Margaret Thatcher stare out over an empty exhibition hall where what remains of the Conservative party tries to understand what went wrong. There’s something macabre about this Tory conference. It could be one of those pre-crash horror films where the protagonist doesn’t realise they’ve been dead all along.
Don’t cure my autism
I admit that when Donald Trump announced he had found the answer for autism, I was curious. As an autistic person, I was hoping that whatever medieval quackery he came out with would require us to do something fun, like carry a hedgehog at all times or take heroic quantities of cocaine, both of which would certainly make the world more interesting for those of us who struggle with social cues. Leading the hunt for this miracle cure has been US Health Secretary Robert F.
Why do racist rioters get treated with so much respect?
What’s the point of a protest? In 1968, the great John Berger wrote that mass demonstrations function as a provocation to power, daring the police and public authorities to show their hand: “Either authority must abdicate and allow the crowd to do as it wishes: in which case the symbolic suddenly becomes real, and, even if the crowd’s lack of organisation and preparedness prevents it from consolidating its victory, the event demonstrates the weakness of authority.
The free speech we need isn’t the free speech the right wants
For a moment there, it looked like the old online free speech wars might not survive the rise of fascism. For months, governments across the Anglosphere have been on a wild censorship binge. In the US, the Trump administration has seized and deported activists. It has attacked universities. It has purged theatres, museums and government departments of its critics.
I Designed My Own Squid Game and You'll Never Guess What Happened Next.
You know how this story goes. The cameras are rolling. The audience is cruel. You’re trapped in the game and the game is death and the game is going out live from the heart of the state of nature where empathy is weakness and you kill each other off until there’s only one left. What will you do to survive? Who will you become if you do? This is the plot of Squid Game, Netflix’s Korean megahit that just drew to its gory conclusion.
Is he autistic, or is he just an asshole?
Imagine the rudest rich guy you know. He’s inappropriate, blunt and stubborn. He tramples on everyone’s boundaries. He’s irresponsible with his own power. He gets away with it because he’s too important to risk upsetting. That could be a description of any number of spoilt narcissistic babymen who think caring about other people is for soyboys. Or it could be a description of an autistic person who is truly so blind to social cues that he doesn’t know he’s doing damage.
Corbyn’s new party is Starmer’s creation
Text size Small Medium Large Line Spacing Compact Normal Spacious Comments Have you ever been to an activist meeting? A proper one, not a cocktail party for potential donors. If Keir Starmer has been to one lately, I suspect he didn’t stay past the minutes or he would have been better prepared for what happens when you try to get a roomful of lefties to point in the same direction.
Corbyn’s new party is Starmer’s creation
Have you ever been to an activist meeting? A proper one, not a cocktail party for potential donors. If Keir Starmer has been to one lately, I suspect he didn’t stay past the minutes or he would have been better prepared for what happens when you try to get a roomful of lefties to point in the same direction.
Labour has tied itself in knots over welfare reform
Text size Small Medium Large Line Spacing Compact Normal Spacious Comments The problem with having principles is that they’re very expensive. This is proving an enormous headache for Starmer’s government, which is still trying to slash disability benefits in plain sight rather than raise taxes, only to be forced into another embarrassing U-turn by hundreds of its own backbenchers.
Penny Red
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The politics of horror
Everyone forgets the actual opening scene of 28 Days Later, even though it’s deeply relatable, in that it features a helpless chimp strapped to a table and forced to watch doomreels of ultraviolence until it loses its little monkey mind and eats David Schneider. But it’s eclipsed by the famous sequence that follows where Cillian Murphy wakes in a hospital bed to find that he has slept through a deadly pandemic and the ensuing collapse of civilisation.
Why 'woke' is just a right-wing fetish.
There’s been a late entry in the competition for most cretinous misunderstanding of international trade policy. For anyone who’s been distracted by the ongoing meltdown of the global order, this week Britain finally signed a deal with the EU. The deal is sane and sensible enough to be slighty disappointing all round, which not stopped the post-truth peanut gallery is freaking out.
‘Woke’ has become a conservative fetish in Britain
There’s been a late entry in the competition for most cretinous misunderstanding of international trade policy. For anyone who’s been distracted by the ongoing meltdown of the global order, this week Britain finally signed a deal with the EU. The deal is sane and sensible enough to be slighty disappointing all round, which has not stopped the post-truth peanut gallery from freaking out.
Why ‘woke’ is now just a right-wing fetish
There’s been a late entry in the competition for most cretinous misunderstanding of international trade policy. For anyone who’s been distracted by the ongoing meltdown of the global order, this week Britain finally signed a deal with the EU. The deal is sane and sensible enough to be slighty disappointing all round, which has not stopped the post-truth peanut gallery from freaking out.
Penny Red
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TERF Island: the embarassing truth about Britain's Trans Panic.
The problem with declaring yourself a defender of all things normal and sensible is that you’re often the last to notice when you have, in fact, gone bananas. This week in the UK, the Supreme Court ruled that - for the purposes of a specific section of the Equality Act - trans women are not women. The presiding Judge delicately suggested that this shouldn't not be weaponised against trans people - and was immediately drowned out by the sound of champagne corks popping.
Adolescence non sconvolge
Il ragazzo sembra così innocente. Gli adulti non riescono a capire perché l’abbia fatto. Il protagonista di Adolescence, serie tv creata da Jack Thorne per Netflix, è un tredicenne radicalizzato dai social network che ha accoltellato a morte una compagna di classe in un impeto di rabbia sessista. La serie ha avuto un grande successo e ha riacceso il dibattito pubblico sui giovani maschi e la misoginia online.
By the Sea - Abdulrazak Gurnah (Buch) – lesen.de
By the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 'One scarcely dares breathe while reading it for fear of breaking the enchantment' The Times 'Gurnah is a master storyteller' Financial Times _______________ On a late November afternoon Saleh Omar arrives at Gatwick Airport from Zanzibar, a far away island in the Indian Ocean. With him he has a small bag in which lies his most precious possession - a mahogany box containing incense.
A feminist reading list for everyone
Think of this list as your feminism starter pack. Drop any preconceived notions and pick up the book that speaks to you. Whether you're a sceptic or a feminist scholar, you might just discover something valuable. Essential Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics by bell hooks Hailed as the perfect short introduction to feminism, this book argues why the movement means better equality for all.
Penny Red
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XX- Risk.
It goes like this: a boy meets a girl who was made by a man to be the perfect companion. The boy is lonely. Living girls with mothers and preferences and independent personalities have badly let him down. This girl is different. She is everything he wants and, more importantly, she is only what he wants. They are well-aligned. Of course they fall in love. And they’re happy, for a while. The girl is happy because that’s how she was programmed to be.
Penny Red
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What is wrong with you people?
Right, I’ve got something to say. It isn’t nice, and I’m not even sure it’s fair, but I’m watching the same news as you and I’m not in the mood to dance around anyone’s ego at this time.It seems to me that we are facing a moral test, and so far the failure rate is alarming. Have you ever seen someone bomb a test so badly it’s almost heroic? I once knew a kid who got so high before his spoken French exam that he did the whole thing in English with a rrridiculous accent.
No gods, no masters
I know that some of you are expecting me to make a statement about what’s been reported in New York Magazine. That will happen. This isn’t it. Right now, I’m too shocked and angry to think clearly. Right now, I’m concentrating- as I have been for months- on supporting people dear to me who are directly impacted by this devastating situation. We all need time and privacy to process this together.
The Ballistic Ignorance of Elon Musk
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The Ballistic Ignorance of Elon Musk
If there’s anything positive to be said for Mr Elon Musk’s attempts to impose his questionable opinions on everyone else in the entire world, it is this: all over the planet today, little children as young as six or seven can look at the example being set here and dream that their ideas could be critical to international policy one day. And that day is today. Why wait?
Guilty Pleasures
‘Mama I’m in love with a criminal. This kinda love ain’t rational’ - Britney Spears ‘You gentlemen who think you have a mission To purge the starving of their deadly sin Should first sort out the basic food position Then after that, your preaching can begin.’ -Macheath, the Beggar’s Opera Tiktok user: cloutcandle He was a handsome lad in his early twenties with dark eyes and a nice smile, and he was wanted by the law for crimes he had certainly committed. Nobody thought he was innocent.
The Anti-Woke Culture Police Have Some Weird New Obsessions.
Penny Red Laurie Penny's extraordinary internet salon. Features, fictions, essays and necessary trouble for misfits, malcontents and tender-hearted rebels. No thanks
The Anti-Woke Culture Police Have Some Weird New Obsessions.
Apparently we’re in a vibe shift. Last week, Jaguar, the British car company, put out an inoffensive if baffling advert featuring a pouty models of various ages, hues and genders disconsolately splashing paint on each other. In response, the totally normal post-election manosphere lost its uttermind.
On transphobia, memory and mourning.
Penny Red Laurie Penny's extraordinary internet salon. Features, fictions, essays and necessary trouble for misfits, malcontents and tender-hearted rebels. No thanks
America, We're Watching You
It’s almost over. This week, hundreds of millions of citizens are off to the polls to play their part in the great American exploding gender reveal party. It’s the most consequential election in living memory. Again. and the whole world is watching through its fingers. Of course we are. No other nation with equivalent international hit points has actual elections whose results aren’t entirely decided by a handful of over-Botoxed old men trading favors on a golf course.
The Room of Requirement
This essay appears in ‘Realms of the Imagination’, the companion book to the British Library’s wonderful Fantasy exhibition, which closed yesterday. Harry Potter fandom is in the news today, as it happens, and since the exhibition is over, I thought I’d make this one free for everyone to read. *** Not far from the British Library, if you turn into King’s Cross station and walk along the concourse, past the chain coffee stands and the little trinket shops, you will see something very strange.
Worldbuilding as a Political Weapon
We live in times of weaponised pedantry, so let’s be clear: there’s a difference between a grammar Nazi and an actual Nazi. Not everyone who likes to corral words into precisely ordered cages where they can be watched for signs or deviance will inevitably apply the same standards to people. On the contrary. There are plenty of gentle souls who truly believe the world could be perfected if only we all learned to use the Oxford comma correctly, and I wish them joy.
Ship of Fools
What follows is one of the strangest pieces of journalism I have ever done. It was originally published at Breaker magazine, a crypto-focused outlet which has since folded, taking the archive with it. People keep asking me what happened to it. Here it is. As ever, most of the content on this substack is free- but if my writing is worth something to you, and you have the means to become a paid subscriber, I‘d really appreciate it.
All the Best Things About Europe with None of the Genocide
If the role of art is to interrogate civilization, the Eurovision song contest asks the one question that actually matters. The one question that’s still relevant after six savage centuries of slaughter and conquest in the notionally democratic West. It’s a question that’s usually posed in the dark alleyways and disused car parks of the collective unconscious, and it goes like this: What if, instead of killing each other, we all just got hammered and did karaoke?
Do women have a Right to Life?
In light of the Supreme Court leak, I'm making the complete chapter on abortion and reproductive freedom from my new book 'Sexual Revolution' available here free of charge. Please feel free to share as widely as you like. Are women people, or are they things? Every year, in Great Britain, 10,000 people are treated for post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of giving birth, and tens of thousands more are injured in the process of delivery.
Cancelling, Crybullies and Consequences
This is a story about social violence, and about shame, and why the world is choking on both. Before we get into it, I’m going to ask you to do something uncomfortable. I’ll do it, too. Ready? Right, then - I want you to think about a time when you hurt someone. A time when, looking back, you know you behaved badly. Don’t tell me what happened. There’s no need for explanations or excuses. Right now I just want you to remember how you felt, and how you handled it. Were you guilty? Embarrassed?
Is the #MeToo era a reckoning, a revolution, or something else?
REVIEW: By Zora Simic, UNSW Sydney “The world”, declares Laurie Penny on the first page of their new book, “is in the middle of a sexual revolution.” And unlike earlier sexual revolutions, this one is for real — provided we eradicate capitalism, fascism and the patriarchy. With this call, it’s business as usual for British writer and activist Penny, who has never sugar-coated their feminist and radical politics.
This is where I’ve been.
Hey, friends and readers. There are lots of actual, serious, frightening things happening in the actual, serious, frightening world right now, and this is a short personal post that isn’t about any of them. Actual content about these Unprecedented Times We Live In (although I dunno about you, but it seems like the times are getting a bit too damn precedented for plausible deniability) is on its way.
Die Lust, wirklich Ja zu sagen
06.03.2022 um 15:00 Hauptbild • (c) Alec Soth / Magnum Photos / pict (Alec Soth) Es reicht nicht, die Regeln zu ändern und zu fragen, wie genau das Flirten und das Vögeln ablaufen. Es geht um eine neue sexuelle Kultur. Einvernehmlichkeit ist Lust und Lüsternheit und Schamlosigkeit. Sie ist der Horizont des Begehrens. Aus dem Buch „Sexuelle Revolution" von Laurie Penny. Über Consent, also Einvernehmlichkeit, muss man vor allem wissen, dass es kein Ding ist.
Thread: how are you doing?
How are you all, on this especially scary Thursday? I’ve been under the weather, and I’m not really supposed to be posting, but, well, these are extraordinary times. Still. Again. I don’t know about you, but I’m extremely tired of extraordinary times. Tell me, tell the rest of us in the comments: how are you doing? While you think about that, clear your decks for some CONTENT on here.
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.
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