Patriarchy

A simple life fraught with difficulties: Ruth, by Kate Riley, reviewed

‘The only solution for anger at your husband is to bake him a pie,’ says the eponymous heroine of Kate Riley’s first (and, she claims, last) novel, Ruth. ‘She heard it first from her mother and understood: daily acts of love were the best way to express anger.’ This is advice that Ruth both eyerolls and obeys. Born in the late 1960s and raised in a closed, communist, Christian community, she’s a beguiling, original character whose playful wit and innocent anarchy poke holes in the bubble world she inhabits without ever trying to push her way out. Instead, she invites us to imagine a society in which there are no

Was there ever a time of equality in human society?

Origin stories have always helped humans gain a moral compass. Locked in a tight embrace, the Maori deities Rangi and Papa are separated by their enveloped children, creating the distant father sky and nurturing Mother Earth, bringing light to the world. Mayan gods fashion man from maize after destroying earlier clay and wood versions, who are seen to have no soul. Adam and Eve eat from the Tree of Life but illicitly also from the Tree of Knowledge. One of the more touted modern human origin stories, ostensibly based on evolutionary science, speaks of a natural inequality between violent and promiscuous men and caring and faithful women. Having evolved to

A thoroughly modern 18th-century heroine: The Future Future, by Adam Thirlwell, reviewed

Adam Thirlwell’s latest novel begins in revolutionary France and chronicles the travails of its embattled celebrity heroine, Celine, who is being subjected to a campaign of malicious gossip about her sex life. She resolves to cultivate a coterie of influential writers to wrest back control of the narrative – cue earnest meditations on power, misogyny and the ability of the written word to shape reality. Meanwhile, she finds solace in female company, reflecting: In a society made of words and images and circulating and recirculating, all devoted to disinformation, it was very difficult to find any personal safety, and one minuscule form might just be this intense form of friendship

As feminists fall out, it’s not just the patriarchy that’s under fire

UK grassroots feminism is flourishing at the moment, with the journalist Julie Bindel leading from the front as troublemaker-in-chief. In a long history of activism that began in the 1980s, campaigning against male violence in Leeds while Peter Sutcliffe stalked the streets, Bindel has always been straight to the point, full of heart and un-interested in placating middle-class sensibilities. Her new book is no different. Feminism for Women is an impassioned manifesto for the kind of feminism she favours — indeed, the only kind she’s willing to acknowledge as worthy of the name. Bindel’s feminism is unashamedly focused on women and girls of the old-fashioned female kind, and what tends

Superbly convincing: Unorthodox reviewed

When I lived briefly in Stamford Hill I was mesmerised by the huge fur hats (shtreimel) worn by the local Hasidic Jews, and the wigs worn by their wives, and the almost tubercular pallor of their children. I often wondered how such a remote, aloof and archaic sect could possibly relate to 21st-century London. The answer, of course, was that they didn’t: they were like ghosts from another age, walking the same streets but not of this world. I wished I could get a glimpse of their private lives — and now, thanks to Unorthodox (Netflix), we all can. Loosely based on a memoir by Deborah Feldman, it tells the