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We really are screwed if we believe that social media can curse us

More bad news for Malaysia, I’m afraid, where a group of tourists have apparently managed to trigger an earthquake simply by taking their clothes off. Last Friday, a 6.0 magnitude earthquake struck Sabah, Malaysia’s easternmost state, triggering landslides on Mount Kinabalu which killed 18 people. Tragic, and quite clearly the blame must fall on the ten tourists who reportedly posed naked for a photograph on the mountain, which is considered by locals to be a sacred site. Malaysian officials have arrested the tourists for indecent exposure and have also suggested that they angered the mountain spirits. Now it’s easy to scoff at the voodoo mindset of these funny foreigners. In the enlightened

Lara Prendergast

Uber is for Londoners. Black cabs are for tourists

Black cab drivers are striking in London today because they are angry that Uber – a rival taxi service supported by Google – is undercutting their market. They will argue that Uber’s drivers are using a smartphone app to calculate fares, despite it being illegal for private vehicles to be fitted with taximeters. I couldn’t care less about the intricacies of this argument (the High Court can figure that one out). All I care about is getting home safely and it not costing too much. Uber offers me that. I’m wary of jumping into unlicensed minicabs. As those spooky tube adverts remind you, ‘If your minicab’s not booked, it’s just

Craig Raine should ignore the angry feminists – they’re just jealous

I don’t know much about poetry, but I know this: whoever Craig Raine’s poem is about, she will be chuffed. When you are 22, you are, probably, nobody. Not many 22 year olds are somebody. So to be immortalised in a poem that’s been published in the LRB will be pleasing. It may even be the defining moment in her life. No doubt some hack is currently trying to track down this girl. The doorstepping will begin. She met a poet at the airport and he wrote about her. Of course, she may not wish to tell this to the hack but: being immortalised in art, playing the muse, is many a young girl’s wish.

An uncomfortable interview for India

British film-maker Leslee Udwin’s video interview with one of the Delhi rapists may not make for comforting viewing, but there are some home truths in there that must be faced up to. In the past hour, the Indian government has banned the video – a move which is both cowardly and futile. They fear the rapist’s remarks that he has ‘no remorse’, and that he ‘blames the victim for fighting back’ might create ‘an atmosphere of fear and tension’. In the West, a similar message is being touted around: that the rapist should never have been given a platform. Don’t show the video and allow him to justify his actions. I visited Delhi’s

The orthodoxy of safety

Props to Goldsmiths Students’ Union, for taking the ‘safe space’ concept to absurd new levels. Last week, one faction of the union hosted a screening of the film Dear White People and advertised it as being ‘for BME students’. BME stands for ‘black and minority ethnic’ – and the poster specifies that this screening is for students of ‘African, Caribbean, Arab, Asian and South American ethnic origin’. The union’s welfare and diversity officer and education officer both reiterated this message on Facebook and Twitter, then stated that before the screening, there was a BME ONLY social happening at Cafe Natura. There it is: racial segregation at a British university. Imagine if the tables were

Boko Haram is using girls as bombs

Could there be anything more offensive to feminists than the use of young girls as suicide bombers? I doubt it. And I imagine that’s exactly why the militant Islamist group Boko Haram has adopted it as the latest technique in its campaign to overthrow the Nigerian government and create an Islamic state. In April last year, when Boko Haram militants captured a group of 276 schoolgirls, a number of high-profile women joined an online campaign to #BringBackOurGirls. Have they been brought back? No. Around 200 still remain in captivity. Horrific stories have since emerged from the few who managed to escape that the captured girls have been subjected to rape, abuse, physical torture

George Clooney’s wife heads to Greece to prove he hasn’t lost his Marbles battle

It was never clear why George Clooney became so attached to the Elgin Marbles. He didn’t even seem to know where they were from when he delivered his plea to the British Museum earlier this year: ‘They’ve had a very nice stay here, certainly. London’s gotten crowded. There’s plenty of room back there in Greece. England can take the lead on this kind of thing – letting art go back where it came from. The Greeks are nothing but generous. They would loan it back once in a while.’ ‘Even in England, the polling is in favour of returning the marbles to the Pantheon [sic]. The Vatican returned parts of

White Dee: I might back Ukip instead of Labour

Back in February, Benefits Street star ‘White Dee’ promised to give David Cameron a ‘run for his money’. In her Spectator diary, she described how ‘Ladbrokes has made me 50-1 to be the next MP for Birmingham Ladywood, and until I read that patronising nonsense I wasn’t going to stand. Now, I think I will. As an independent, mind. How far will I get? Let’s just see.’ Dee hadn’t yet made it clear which party she was thinking of joining. She’s speaking at the Tory conference today, although she has been a strident critic of their policies. Previously, she has indicated that she used to vote LibDem, until they joined forces with

Jennifer Lawrence’s leaked photos highlight feminism’s next frontier: cyberspace

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_4_Sept_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Isabel Hardman, Emma Barnett and Jamie Bartlett discuss the leaked photos” startat=1312] Listen [/audioplayer]Nobody wants naked photos of themselves leaked across the internet so a global network of creeps can beat off to them. But celebs and plebs alike are increasingly confronted by this unsavoury reality. Whether it’s anonymous hackers or enraged ex-boyfriends who post the images, the story is the same: women are being let down by their ignorance of the pitfalls of technology. You should be able to take naked photos of yourself. But if you choose to store them using technology that isn’t secure and that you don’t quite understand, there’s every chance they will

Don’t tell schoolboys to call themselves feminists

In the Independent this week, Yvette Cooper suggested that British boys should grow up as ‘confident feminists’. They need to have lessons in feminism to help them learn how to treat women, she argued. But school shouldn’t be a place where you indoctrinate pupils to believe a particular ideology. And feminism, for all its admirable achievements in the 20th century, is an ideology. Compulsory sex education in which boys are taught to be feminists is beyond silly. By all means explain that they shouldn’t go round lifting up girls’ skirts for a peek, but it’s possible to do this without telling them they must call themselves feminists. They might not like

A new generation of women to run the country

Uh oh. The ‘all-women shortlist’ is again being touted as a good idea for the Conservatives, this time by Nicky Morgan, the new women’s minister. When asked about using shortlists to increase the number of female MPs, she told a Mumsnet chat: ‘I do think the big issue is we just aren’t getting enough women coming forward (which is an issue for all Parties). I think we need to see where we end up in 2015 and if we are still struggling to get more women MPs then no option is off the table.’ In response, a senior Conservative has said that quotas are ‘categorically not an option’. Why can’t people like

This storm about Michael Fabricant is nonsense

Oh come on internet. Pull yourself together. Michael Fabricant has tweeted about punching a woman and people are going mad. It’s a silly thing to tweet, but does anyone doubt that? It’s simply hyperbole, flounce, floridity. That’s sometimes what it takes to get noticed on Twitter. Plenty of people are guilty of this trope. Let’s not pay them too much attention. But let’s not also drag this out into a discussion about violence against women. Victims of abuse must find this sort of storm very frustrating – I imagine most men who actually punch women probably don’t tweet about it.

Lara Prendergast

Isis on social media

Yesterday evening, I returned home, made a cup of tea and slumped down to catch up on the day’s news. A piece on Twitter caught my eye. Posted by Channel 4, it was titled ‘#Jihad: how ISIS is using social media to win support’. Click. Soon I was learning about how ISIS was calling for global support via a sophisticated social media campaign, branded the ‘one billion campaign’. Click, click. Onto YouTube, where I found graphic videos recorded and uploaded by ISIS members. Click, click, click. Ten minutes later, and I was on Twitter, being recruited by jihadis to come join them. Clearly, I am not about to head to

The ‘selfie’ protest

The kidnapping of the 276 predominantly Christian schoolgirls by Islamic terror group Boko Haram is an atrocity, but it is not the first atrocity they have committed. It is just the first one to trip the West’s interest switch. A girl’s right to an education has become an important pillar in western ideology, and an important pawn in the battle against radical Islam. It is why Malala has seen herself elevated to an almost saint-like position. The recent kidnappings have enraged western sensibilities, because they desecrate hallowed ideas about female equality. The West has responded in the only way it knows how: a self-righteous selfie protest using the hashtag ‘Bring Back

Red hair is having a renaissance

Much like supporting Millwall or contracting Parkinson’s Disease, red hair has traditionally been seen by the prejudiced as an affliction worth avoiding. The biographies of Mary Magdalene, Van Gogh and Sylvia Plath will confirm this. Rod Liddle sticks it to the gingers in his column this week: ‘I took my youngest son to a football match on Easter Monday. It used to be something I wryly called a ‘treat’ when the kids were younger, but we usually lost in such depressing circumstances each time that I would then feel the need to give them another treat immediately afterwards, to alleviate the misery. Bowling or pizza or something. Not any more.

The selfie protest

How to protest these days? You can’t rely on our music industry to kick out a good protest song, and the film industry does a pretty feeble job. So once again, it’s down to the people. In the past few years, we’ve seen a couple of examples of how Generation Y protest: Case Study 1: The 2011 riots. Case Study 2: The 2010 tuition fees protest. Quite old school in style, and not hugely effective, but both at least showed there was still some fire in the belly of Britain’s yoof. There’s a new case study to add to the Generation Y protest list. 3: The Selfie Protest. It’s simple,

Dasha Zhukova’s publicity stunt

We think we’re immune to whatever the art world can throw at us. A urinal here, an unmade bed there, a dead shark to the head. But occasionally we forget our indifference, and become very worked up. Hurrah! Proof we aren’t all suffering from a prolonged bout of cultural nonchalance. Dasha Zhukova – Roman Abramovich’s art-collecting girlfriend, who runs the contemporary gallery Garage in Moscow – has angered people by being photographed on what looks like a black woman leaning back, naked, and with a cushion balanced strategically on her voluptuous bosom. Of course, she isn’t actually sitting on a real black woman with a voluptuous bosom, but rather a

Nigel Farage missed the point about ‘young, able women’

Nigel Farage isn’t afraid ‘to court controversy’ over the issue of women’s pay. Speaking on the issue of equal pay, he described how a pay gap exists because women who have children are ‘worth less’ to their employer than men. This may well be true; it’s a high-octane industry, and anyone who flakes out – man or woman – is clearly worth less than someone who slogs away for years. But then Farage goes onto say the following: ‘I do not believe there is any discrimination against women at all… And young, able women who are prepared to sacrifice the family life and stick to their career will do as

‘Miley Cyrus vs Lily Allen’ is not a worthy battle for feminism

If ever there was reason to believe that feminism has lost its way, then it is found in the current debate about bottoms. It all began with twerking – the sexualized dance that no one had heard of until popstar Miley Cyrus squeezed into some PVC underwear, and twerked to Robin Thicke’s song Blurred Lines. The term entered the Oxford Dictionary of English in August. Bottoms are now all over the place. Last night was the annual Victoria’s Secret show – and, much to the delight of news desks, there were bottoms aplenty. It has become increasingly difficult to open a paper without seeing news about belfies (bum-selfies), bum implants and of

Boozy, druggy adults. Sober, serious kids. Welcome to Ab Fab Britain

Twenty-one years ago this week a sitcom arrived on British television involving three characters so improbable that they held the nation in thrall. It had started as a French and Saunders comedy sketch about a hedonistic ‘modern’ mother (Eddy) and her appalled, straight-laced daughter (Saffy). To spin this out into a series, Jennifer Saunders added Joanna Lumley as a hard-nosed, hard-drinking best friend (Patsy) and two essential props: Bollinger champagne (Bolly) and Stolichnaya vodka (Stolly). Absolutely Fabulous was born. It was never intended as a piece of social commentary — yet it has turned out to be bizarrely prophetic. Over the past two decades, Britain has steadily witnessed precisely the