Jane McLoughlin is furious with women. We have let the feminists down and turned off the rational sides of our brains in favour of the thrilling emotional life that popular culture provides.
The feminists were too intellectual and too angry with men to win the sympathy of most ordinary women, who generally liked their husbands and fathers. Instead, popular culture took possession of female psyches and has left us unthinking, disunited and unable to cope with, or even identify, reality.
A lot of the time McLoughlin is convincing. Soap operas gave lonely, housebound women after the war a sort of community and common ground, and melodrama was necessary to keep up the audience figures. Popular culture is manipulative, especially now that election results and even political decisions have come under its power. The responses of government to the pressures of popular culture are chilling; the appointment of Sarah Payne’s mother as Minister for Victims is one example.
In places the book reads like a précis of an argument — she asserts more than she argues. The case is a generalisation; it had to be, but that can make for uncomfortable reading. McLoughlin was the editor of Guardian Women — she must have dozens of anecdotal substantiations among her cuttings. She gives some, but a few more might have helped her readers to buy in completely to her dystopian vision of modern femininity.
Sometimes McLoughlin gets so furious it is hard to take her seriously. Ordinary women think they need a father figure, she says:
That father figure might once have been a husband, or a male friend, or an adviser, or popular culture as a shared source of empowerment, or, yes, government and the state. In Britain today, women have found all these wanting. Now the crucial question is where such women might look next for their new protector and leader.
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