Society

The radical feminist publishing house Verso has begun, in its tweets, to refer to a section of the population as ‘womb-carriers’. This conjures up for me a number of distressing images. The first is of a rather sinisterly cheerful woman in late middle age dispensing wombs, which she keeps in a large and battered holdall, to passers-by. ‘Here you are love,’ she says, ‘have a womb.’ People would like to say no, no, I don’t really want one, but they are oppressed by her forceful, jovial demeanour. When they get the womb they don’t know what to do with it, although some end up using it as an umbrella stand,

As of 2023, the novel for which I may still be best known will have been out for 20 years. We Need to Talk About Kevin clearly reached the bestseller list because it hit a zeitgeisty nerve. The story of a high-school mass murder (after Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook and Uvalde, the one aspect of the book that has dated is Kevin’s pitiful body-count of nine) is told from the perspective of the killer’s mother, who’s anguished about whether her dislike of her own son from day one made the atrocity her fault. Proliferating the now commonplace expression ‘maternal ambivalence’, Kevin kicked off a larger discussion about the downsides of

I was shocked at a party recently when a woman I hardly know announced to me and another guest that she was the ‘mistress’ of a certain man in the room. I discussed it with my American friend in a local Italian afterwards. Holly took a robust view. ‘Since when does a mistress reveal herself publicly?’ she said, adding that the lover (married, we’d heard, to a third wife, not present that evening) should ‘kick the mistress to the kerb for not playing the role she signed up for’. She pointed out claims that George Bush Sr had a girlfriend, Jennifer Fitzgerald, for about 20 years who hardly anyone knew