Society

Thursday

Tom Slater Tom Slater

Gillette and the rise of woke capitalism

The politicisation of consumer products is one of the weirder developments of recent years. First, Oreos came out in support of gay rights. Then Nike extolled us to ‘believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything’, in its multimillion-dollar campaign with controversial former NFL star Colin Kaepernick. Now Gillette has launched a new advert calling on men to be ‘the best men can be’ and shed the nefarious habits of ‘toxic masculinity’ in the wake of the #MeToo movement. The two-minute advert-come-public service announcement argues that men, in the words of actor Terry Crews, taken from his testimony on #MeToo in the US congress, should hold one another accountable

Jonathan Mitchell

The danger of ‘neurodiversity’

I’m an American man affected by the disability autism. As a child, I went to special education schools for eight years and I do a self-stimulatory behaviour during the day which prevents me from getting much done. I’ve never had a girlfriend. I have bad motor coordination problems which greatly impair my ability to handwrite and do other tasks. I also have social skills problems, and I sometimes say and do inappropriate things that cause offence. I was fired from more than 20 jobs for making excessive mistakes and for behavioural problems before I retired at the age of 51. Others with autism spectrum disorder have it worse than I

Fieldfare

solution | 17 January 2019

CHRISTMAS SPIRIT   Unclued lights were names of GHOST STORIES by M.R. (MONTAGUE RHODES) JAMES: CASTING (1A) THE (29) RUNES (10); THE TREASURE OF (9A) ABBOT (58) THOMAS (100); THE TRACTATE (42) MIDDOTH (33); OH WHISTLE (43) AND I’LL (68) COME TO YOU (1D) MY LAD (24); THE STALLS OF (44) BARCHESTER (115) CATHEDRAL (82); THE ROSE (77) GARDEN (22); THE MEZZOTINT (79); CANON (83) ALBERIC’S (11) SCRAPBOOK (8);THE ASH-TREE (107); and COUNT (110) MAGNUS (89).   WINNERS The first prize of £100, three prizes of £25 and six further prizes of Secret Service Brain Teasers by Sinclair McKay (Headline) go to the following. The first four winners will each

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Is there no-one in the universities sector who can do arithmetic?

This week, Universities UK and the Russell Group, seemingly speaking on behalf of the whole sector, produced an Open Letter from distinguished vice-chancellors. ‘It is no exaggeration to suggest,’ said the letter, ‘that this [leaving the EU without a deal] would be an academic, cultural and scientific setback from which it would take decades to recover.’ Actually, it would be as exaggerated as a Donald Trump tweet. The detail of this is brilliantly demonstrated by Noel Malcolm in an analysis for Briefings for Brexit. The bit that made me burst out laughing was Sir Noel’s comparison of a similar Open Letter, from 103 university vice-chancellors, just before the referendum vote

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Books Podcast: why did Sweden cover up incidences of mass sexual assault?

What do you think of when you think of Sweden? If, like me, the very name conjures fuzzy ideas of an enlightened and harmonious vision of social democracy, sexual liberation and ABBA tunes, the journalist Kajsa Norman has some news for you. In her gripping new book about her native land, Sweden’s Dark Soul: The Unravelling of a Utopia, she uncovers the dark present and darker past of a country that – while presenting itself as a beacon of virtue – is in denial about its racism, the sinister side of its culture of conformity and its establishment refusal to face up to violence in its midst. She talks to

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Who can spare us from this Brexit disaster?

God help us all, because no-one else can or will in these present circumstances. If you wished to apportion some blame for the shambolic state of British politics these days you will not be short of candidates to bear some measure of the opprobrium they all, to one degree or another, deserve. Spare us from Theresa May whose definition of Brexit hemmed her in from the very beginning. Spare us from a Prime Minister who learnt nothing from David Cameron’s failures and continued to prize Tory unity above almost everything else and continued to do so long past the point at which it became obvious to everyone else that Tory

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Theresa May’s confidence vote problems will only get worse

Theresa May is in a peculiar position after suffering the largest government defeat in history. Her Brexit plans look dead in the water and even she appeared to admit that she would now have to reach out to members of other parties and consider her options. In a bid to capitalise on May’s misfortune, Jeremy Corbyn has confirmed that Labour will table a motion of no confidence in the government. The vote will take place tomorrow afternoon following PMQs. Yet for all the calamity of the evening, the Prime Minister is on course to win it comfortably. Both the DUP and the Tory Brexiteers who voted against May’s deal say

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

The frozen swamp

 Washington, DC As a prison worker in Florida put it, ‘Trump’s not hurting the right people’ Washington is supposed to be recession-proof: when times are bad, the government just hires more. But the city isn’t shutdown-proof. There are more than 360,000 federal employees in the DC area, and many are among the 800,000 across America who last week received a salary bank transfer that said zero dollars and zero cents. A number of foodbanks have opened here, offering free meals to anyone with federal identification. Whole Foods, the upmarket supermarket, has gone a step further. It is serving spaghetti dinners to anyone who is hungry. Not everyone I met at

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The rebel alliance

Straight after the government’s epic defeat in the House of Commons on Tuesday night, the Chancellor, Philip Hammond, the Business Secretary, Greg Clark, and the Brexit Secretary, Steve Barclay, held a conference call with business leaders to try to reassure them. The principal worry was about ‘no deal’. The Chancellor’s message of comfort was revealing of where power has shifted to. He emphasised how backbenchers are manoeuvring to stop no deal. In other words, they needn’t take his word that it wasn’t going to happen; they should take parliament’s. It was an admission that the government is no longer in control of Brexit. Further evidence of this power shift came

Bruce Anderson

Happiness is a convivial bottle

January really is the cruellest month. No wonder some fortunate friends have dodged the column of dreary weather and short days, seeking asylum in the Southern Hemisphere, or at least the Southern Mediterranean. Not that the British winter climate is all bad. Brisk clear days promote mental rigour. Barry Smith, a historian from New Zealand and an early evangelist for that nation’s serious wine, once wrote that Prime Minister Lord Salisbury had a mind like a clear blue winter day. That is not indispensable for statecraft; it could never be said of either Churchill or Thatcher. But it helps to promote an unillusioned realpolitik: the wisest approach to human affairs.

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The TWaT revolution: office on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday only

I recently saw a series of photographs depicting a rural home in China. Pride of place in a grimly furnished main room was given to a gargantuan new flat-screen television, while the sole toilet was a hole in the ground in an outside shed. What strange priorities, I thought. On reflection, though, under the same circumstances, I suspect quite a few of us would do the same thing. In Britain, for a hundred years or so, we never faced such a choice: you could install a decent indoor toilet, but not a Samsung 75in 4K LED TV, because the latter hadn’t been invented yet. So in Britain we almost all

Jonathan Ray Jonathan Ray

Wine Club 19 January

Well, I’m glad that’s over. Christmas and New Year’s Eve that is. What a ghastly palaver. It went on for months and even though it’s finally done and dusted, we’re still picking pine needles out from under the blasted sofa and ploughing our way through seemingly endless bowls of defrosted stilton soup. And what on earth prompted me to make so much red cabbage and then go and freeze all that was left? I’m sick of the stuff. Still, I drank long and deep during the festivities. Rather too long and rather too deep, if I’m honest, and I’m now clinging by my fingertips to the water wagon if only

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

Publishers must stand up to the mob

Suppose you’re a writer with a self-destructive proclivity for sticking your neck out. Would you sign a book contract that would be cancelled in the instance of ‘sustained, widespread public condemnation of the author’? Even cautious, congenial writers are working in an era when a bland, self-evident physiological assertion like ‘women don’t have penises’ attracts a school of frenzied piranhas. So journalists would be fools to sign a document voided if, in a magazine’s ‘sole judgment’, they were the subject of ‘public disrepute, contempt, complaints or scandals’. These are the ‘morality clauses’ arising in standard publishing contracts in the wake of #MeToo. Primarily a Hollywood weapon of the 1930s and

Mark Piggott

Renter’s paradise

On turning 50, I realised I’d never own my own home. What bank would agree to give a mortgage to someone with no regular source of income? Even if I did somehow hold down a job, I would have just 15 years until retirement age. For a while, I was depressed. Owning your own home is the British dream. Why else would all those property shows I drool over be so popular? I won’t have anything to hand down to my kids. What sort of loser am I? Then I remembered: I live in a five-bedroom Victorian terrace in Islington, which is owned by the council. At £650 per month,

Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

Pale imitations

You can tell something about national character from the way a country clears its cupboards. In the States they have the yard sale. The American dream remains a detached house with a front and a back yard, all enclosed by a white picket fence. Daughter selling lemonade, son playing catch, consumer goods spread on the lawn. The French have the vide grenier — the emptying of the attic. The Frenchman in his romantic soul still imagines he is a poet or a painter starving for love and art in a bare, unfurnished room. The English have the car-boot sale. We take a picnic, waterproofs, stop at a stone circle on

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

On Nobel Prize winners and Mastermind losers

I once worked my way through two whole books of IQ tests devised by Hans Eysenck and by the time I had finished I was much cleverer than that self-publicising ass Einstein, according to the helpful chart, and quite possibly the cleverest person ever to have walked on the face of the earth. So I came to two conclusions. First, that — as I had long suspected — I was indeed the clever-est person ever to walk the earth and it was pleasant to have this suspicion of mine validated. And second, that one can learn to excel at IQ tests, despite the insistence from their promulgators that they are

Lucy Vickery

Unauthorised version

In Competition No. 3081 you were invited to supply a parable rewritten in the style of a well-known author. Like Milton, many of you seemed taken with the Parable of the Talents. Here is Sylvia Fairley channelling Mark Haddon: ‘He gave five talents to one, that’s 14,983 shekels, and two to the next, 5,993 shekels. Those are prime numbers. I like prime numbers…’ I thought Kafka might loom large but he cropped up only once in a sea of Austens, Hemingways, Trollopes and Wodehouses. Strong performers, in a keenly contested week, were Joseph Harrison, W.H. Thomas, Philip Machin, Hamish Wilson, David Silverman, David Mackie, Jan Snook and Hannah Burden-Teh. The

Wednesday

Aidan Hartley

Kenya’s terror threat is no worse than London’s

Kenya is getting much better at tackling terrorist attacks, as we have seen in the Nairobi hotel siege which ended this morning. Within seconds of the first explosions at the DusitD2 hotel at 3pm on Tuesday, news was circulating across the Twitter-obsessed capital. Scores of licensed private pistol owners – pudgy Kikuyu lawyers, Asian shopkeepers, random mzungus — instantly raced towards the complex where five militants were shooting civilians in a restaurant after an Al Shabaab suicide bomber had blown himself up in the hotel lobby. Rapid response police teams arrived within minutes, but they could barely hold back the Kenyan Dad’s Army sprinting towards the gunfire and black smoke

Henry Williams

The Gillette advert has more to do with market control than #MeToo

For those looking to an antidote to Gillette’s painful ‘The Best a Man Can Be’ advert I highly recommend browsing YouTube for another, equally revolutionary, commercial which also attracted millions of hits. Seven years ago, Dollar Shave Club’s controversial advert revolutionised the congested and hotly contested field of men’s grooming and had Gillette firmly in its sights: ‘Do you like spending $20 a month on brand name razors? 19 go to Roger Federer.’ Gillette’s rivals certainly liked it, with Unilever snapping up the upstart company for $1 billion as Gillette’s market share spiralled downwards from 70 per cent at the beginning of the decade to 54 per cent today. Gillette has