Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

i mean she's infinitely more civil than Freeman deserves but kudos

Presumably the people who are shocked I discussed gender with Atwood - a feminist writer who has commented often on gender- are the same people who are shocked when I ask actors who were in Woody Allen movies about Woody Allen. Twitter is a weird and deeply unrepresentative place https://t.co/4kNX58jAOU

— Hadley Freeman (@HadleyFreeman) February 19, 2022

freeman of course can't understand that people are making fun of her for being weird about it to the point that atwood called her obsessed

For some reason, I read that whole profile. Knowing the author, it was a bit like the old Hitchcock line about the bomb under the table. It is admittedly funny when it blows up in her face, but probably not worth the cost of spending time with such a weirdly insecure-narcissistic mind

"We kept talking after the interview and it was very civil and I think she agrees with me" is a power move though.

It’s cowardice, she’s careful to lean on I think when we can all read Atwood’s words for ourselves.

yes that coda is especially pathetic

If the Guardian goes under all its worst writers will be fine.

Guess she really misses having that column. pic.twitter.com/QD5Bevargs

— Elvis Buñuelo (@Mr_Considerate) February 21, 2022

Women can no longer afford to sit out the gender wars...they must come to the aid of their natural allies in the religious right.

I often think about a certain generation of middle class British feminists that they take things for granted that Irish ones don’t. We are more aware in a practical sense of the involvement of the religious right in regressive causes because that’s who has been funding anti choice/anti lgbt causes at home. But what have British feminists had to fight on that scale recently? To me it shows the danger of being complacent about progress; you have to keep on fighting because the fascists don’t ever take a day off. But what’s Hadley’s excuse, she’s American!

Grew up here though I think? OTM though.

You are, that is, not her.

she's lived here long become infected with a very British disease

enough

Which isn’t to say we don’t have our own gobshites because do we ever!

When we founded the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement,although we were radical young women, we reached out inclusively to women with all views. How sad to see the National Women’s Council of Ireland excludes so many. See Breda O’Brien in today’s Irish Times

— Mary Kenny (@MaryKenny4) February 19, 2022

Funny -- I was literally thinking of Mary Kenny after reading those posts. :D

HF supports the political Right (she campaigned against socialism in the UK), so it makes sense for her to be unconcerned about "the involvement of the religious right in regressive causes". That's literally her own position.

A lot of the middle-class columnists weren’t ever actually “fighting” in any active sense of making a difference. They were grounded in complacency (not just middle class feminist columnists but Left aligned guardian columnists in general).

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FMHAtXJWQAAYguW?format=jpg&name=medium

the bigot getting boosted by the award winning investigative journalist, lol. Media class solidarity.

Gentleman met Jo Johnson, former MP for Orpington while at Oxford University in 1991. They married in 2005 and live in Camden. The couple have two children.

even when she was garnering lots of praise for her coverage of the Windrush scandal I always assumed she was an arsehole!

I wonder what they think is interesting about it. Guess we'll never know.

I'm not at all familiar with UnHerd, but this is on it !

https://unherd.com/2022/02/why-the-nineties-rocked/

WHY THE NINETIES ROCKED !

very interesting piece

Hadley's in full echo-chamber mode:

Yet I know a lot of non-Right-wing, non-bigots who are extremely angry at how things have shifted. My friendship group consists mainly of thirty-something to fifty-something progressive women, all, like me, lifelong Labour, or Liberal Democrat, or Green voters, all teachers, or civil servants, or writers, or lawyers. Most are not on Twitter, or TikTok, or any Mumsnet message boards. But when we meet up these days, they talk about Lia Thomas, the Ivy League swimmer who recently transitioned and is allowed to compete against female swimmers and is duly smashing women’s swimming records.

ie "Everyone one I know thinks the same as me and we're not extremists..Why can't everyone see we're just being reasonable?" rhetoric

interesting only in that it shows who she thinks is impervious to bigotry, tho to be frank we knew that already

Imagine being friends with a Liberal Democrat voter.

Well I would fall into that age group and I have never heard of Lia Thomas, nor does the case concern me much when you look at the problems faced by women’s sport (underfunding, lack of broadcast coverage for a lot of them, etc). It’s great to know that women’s sport, like so many other things, only exists to some people if they have an opportunity to go on about trans people.

Ofc they’re always lifelong Labour voters

Must be nice for all those progressive women to spend more time thinking about Lia Thomas than Ashling Murphy.

Yes.

"when we meet up these days, they talk about ..."

Fine, they talk about that one person. That's up to them. But don't they talk about anything else?

There are quite a lot of important and indeed dangerous things going on that one might talk about!

They must meet up pretty often given how recent the Thomas story is. Or maybe they're not on Twitter, TikTok (is TikTok especially transphobic?), or Mumsnet because they spend all day consuming american right-wing media like so many other non-right-wing non-bigots do

Yet I know a lot of non-Right-wing, non-bigots

Some of my best friends are not right wing bigots!

I like to talk sports with my friends too

interesting only in that it shows who she thinks is impervious to bigotry

Daniel is extremely otm about this

all teachers, or civil servants, or writers, or lawyers

such a shameful, screaming tell

Yes, class hatred screams out from everything these people do

if you want to picture the working class experience of working in a bureaucracy, Hadley's absolutely covered it

hatred but plastered over with squeamish distaste and patronage

"But when we meet up these days, they talk about Lia Thomas, the Ivy League swimmer who recently transitioned and is allowed to compete against female swimmers and is duly smashing women’s swimming records."

That's not even true. A basic search on twitter tells you that.

Didn't know all her friends were swimming nerds.

truly, what is to stop men across the ivy league from putting on one-piece suits and competing in these women's events?? apart from the current rules requiring documentation of three years of hormone suppressants, i mean

does unherd pay well?

or all of these culture war mills. the critic?

dork satanic mills

unherd apparently pays really well.

ooh! 'Tankies Have Taken Over My Webforum' has a nice ring to it

it really is astonishing to me the unresearched, fatuous bigotry that people who call themselves journalists feel okay putting their names to, but i don't know why, it's as old as the hills really

hangon is this the same wan whose friends all abandoned her for this same reason? she doesn't include an explanation of how they all came around to transphobia and are now totally with her. what an eejit.

ooh! 'Tankies Have Taken Over My Webforum' has a nice ring to it

― imago, Monday, 21 February 2022 bookmarkflaglink

You should pitch.

per an article from last year, she lost "at least a dozen" friends over being a transphobe & didn't at all understand why being an obsessive bigot was a friendship dealbreaker so my guess is by now the only ones left are those who completely agree with her, as that article suggests

yeah funny how that works

Adrian Chiles' latest is even better in context pic.twitter.com/s7JLqNPuCA

— future canon (@futurecanon) February 24, 2022