Katha Pollitt on Philip Roth and Blake Bailey and dudely misogyny:

By now the whole world knows why Norton made its decision. Four former students from [Bailey’s] days in the 1990s teaching middle school have accused him of showering them with sexualized attention in eighth grade and after, and then pouncing on them as young adults. One has accused him of rape. (Another subsequently came forward to accuse him of attempted rape in 2005.) A few days later, Valentina Rice, a New York publishing executive, went public with a claim that he raped her in 2015.

Just the guy to write a biography of Philip Roth, frankly.

I have so many questions. Could the Times have dug deeper? It published multiple pieces around the book, including a laudatory profile of Bailey by Mark Oppenheimer, an affectionate guide to all things Roth by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, a mixed review by Parul Sehgal, and an adulatory one by Cynthia Ozick (“a narrative masterwork”). As for Norton, of course they should have followed up with Rice, but beyond that, what? Rejected the book on the basis of an accusation? Hired a detective? I’m not making light of the women’s charges—I believe them—but I don’t know that publishers are equipped to adjudicate claims of wrongdoing by their writers even if they wanted to. And where does it all end? Rape is a crime, but “grooming” eighth graders and coming on to them after they turn legal is not.

Nor is being a misogynist or a creep. I heard Bailey speak recently, via Zoom, to the New York Institute of the Humanities and had no trouble picking up on his manly self-delight and nudge-nudge-wink-wink smutty “humor” (they bonded over Roth’s missed opportunity, as he claimed, to date Ali McGraw), complete with a Southern “gay” accent when he quoted Truman Capote. His hero worship of Roth was on full view: He clearly thought it was funny that Roth badgered a girlfriend into listening to him masturbate on the phone while she was at work.

It’s all so…dull, frankly. Boring. Junior high.

Now social media is replete with attacks on Bailey from well-known women writers: Parul Sehgal, Mary Karr, Moira Donegan, E. Jean Carroll, and many more. Ruth Franklin has tweeted her rightful anger at Bailey’s Wall Street Journal review of her biography of Shirley Jackson, which he accused of being excessively “feminist” and insufficiently sympathetic to Jackson’s flagrantly unfaithful husband.

Bitches are so demanding and unfair.

But the first wave of reviews was almost all flattery.

Of the early reviews, only Laura Marsh at The New Republic really took the measure of Bailey’s disdain for every woman in Roth’s life who didn’t behave exactly as he wanted when he wanted her to, beginning with his two wives, Maggie Martinson and Claire Bloom, whom he portrays as selfish harpies. “Women in this book are forever screeching, berating, flying into a rage, and storming off,” writes Marsh, “as if their emotions exist solely for the purpose of sapping a man’s creative energies.”

It sounds just like Roth himself. Why didn’t it jump off the page at the reviewers?

Given Roth’s genius and stature, did reckoning with his biographer’s excessive masculine solidarity seem unsophisticated, too crude a reading, too “feminist”? At the Institute of the Humanities Zoom, no one asked a question that got within a hundred miles of women.

Well, women, you know – such a trivial subject. You might as well talk about whether Roth was kind to poodles or not.

Hey did you know Jolyon Maugham had been on a humbling journey away from know-it-all-ism? Because I sure didn’t know that. I have to say I think he must have gotten off at the wrong stop.

First it’s Tucker Carlson on Fox ranting that wearing masks is a crime against human rights, now it’s a New York Post reporter quitting after she was forced (she says) to write a lie about Kamala Harris. The right-wing “news” media really aren’t very scrupulous, are they.

The New York Post reporter whose byline was attached to a false story that kicked off a days-long right-wing media outrage cycle has quit.

“Today I handed in my resignation to my editors at the New York Post,” reporter Laura Italiano posted to Twitter on Tuesday afternoon. “The Kamala Harris story—an incorrect story I was ordered to write and which I failed to push back hard enough against—was my breaking point. It’s been a privilege to cover the City of New York for its liveliest, wittiest tabloid—a paper filled with reporters and editors I admire deeply and hold as friends. I’m sad to leave.”

Is “liveliest” code for “most dishonest”?

Last week, the Post published a story claiming federal officials were distributing Vice President Kamala Harris’ book Superheroes Are Everywhere “in welcome kits” to migrant children held in a temporary immigration facility at the Long Beach convention center in Southern California.

The report, which appeared to be based on a single photograph spotted at the facility, was parroted in multiple segments on Fox News and blew up across conservative media. One reporter from Fox even posed a question about the book to White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki during a press briefing last week.

But then it fell apart.

On Tuesday, the Washington Post published a fact-check citing a Long Beach city spokesperson who said the facility only had a single copy of the book, which had been donated as part of a book and toy drive for migrant children.

“The City of Long Beach, in partnership with the Long Beach Convention and Visitors Bureau, has a citywide book and toy drive that is ongoing to support the migrant children who are temporarily staying in Long Beach at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services shelter,” city spokesman Kevin Lee told the Washington Post. “The book you reference is one of hundreds of books that have already been donated. The book was not purchased by HHS or the City.”

No low too low.

Is this “cancel culture”? Or is it something else?

More than 200 members of staff at Simon & Schuster have signed a petition calling for the publishing house to cancel its seven-figure book deal with former vice-president Mike Pence and commit to not signing any more book deals with members of Donald Trump’s administration.

I think it’s something else. Mike Pence is no intellectual giant or eloquent advocate or free spirit with a lifetime of experience to enlighten us with. He’s a pipsqueak and a religious fanatic with nothing of interest to say, and he’s also a coward. Nothing of value is lost if Mike Pence doesn’t write a book. (In any case he will write a book, of course: someone will publish it even if Simon & Schuster doesn’t.) He’s also a representative of an evil government, which is different from being a racist or sexist opinion-monger.

The petition warned management not to treat “the Trump administration as a ‘normal’ chapter in American history” and criticised Pence for discriminating against marginalised groups with racist and sexist policies.

…

Last week, S&S president Jonathan Karp responded to staff concerns after the petition began circulating in the business.

“We come to work each day to publish, not cancel, which is the most extreme decision a publisher can make, and one that runs counter to the very core of our mission to publish a diversity of voices and perspectives,” wrote Karp – despite the fact that S&S had cancelled Republican senator Josh Hawley’s book deal over his part in the Capitol riot.

Yes but they don’t go to work each day to publish everything. They choose. They didn’t have to choose Pence.

But they did choose Pence, so to cancel now would be…well, another cancellation. Not a good look.

But Pence. Honestly.

Naturally the reporting on Maya Forstater’s appeal has to be dishonest. Robin Moira White and Molly Mulready in the Independent:

Maya Forstater is at the heart of a controversy about transgender people, free speech, and harassment at work. Her view is that transgender women are men and the law should protect her right to say so at work, including if a transgender woman happened to be her work colleague.

Forstater wants to refer to that woman as “he”, regardless of the pain that would cause.

That’s a deceptive way of putting it though. Maya isn’t appealing for the freedom to call trans women “he” at all times no matter what, she’s appealing for the freedom to do so when it’s relevant. She has specifically said that. Certainly I think she should be free to at all times, and that all of us should, but that’s not what the appeal is about.

She feels this so strongly that the matter has ended up in court – at her behest. As lawyers who will be personally affected by the outcome of her case – one of us as a trans woman, the other as the mother of a trans child – we have followed it closely. 

You know who else will be personally affected by the outcome of her case? Women. All women. All women because all women need to be able to say “That’s a man” in some situations, no matter how strenuously the man insists he is a trans woman. That need is more important than the need of some men who say they are women to be “validated” by actual women. It’s a lot more important. Trans people’s need for “validation” is, when you come right down to it, trivial.

While providing consultancy services to a charitable think tank, the Centre for Global Development (CGD), Forstater contributed to social media discussions about transgender people. She stated “transwomen are male” and that the statement “transwomen are women” is one of a number of “literal delusions”. She made crude references to the body parts of trans people. Her work colleagues raised concerns and when asked about it by CGD she repeated her beliefs about trans women, said she knew her comments were thought offensive but insisted she would continue to make them because they were true. 

And? Trans women are male; that’s what the “trans” in “trans women” means.

JK Rowling later tweeted that Forstater had been forced out of her job for “stating that sex is real”. We don’t agree. Forstater claims the right to knowingly cause pain, and not be required to respect the true identity of a trans woman.

No, Forstater does not claim the right to knowingly cause pain; she claims the right to tell the truth when necessary. And when people’s “true identity” is the opposite of their actual literal detectable real-world identity, nobody should be required to “respect” it. The whole idea is childish and absurd. We might as well all identify as the Prime Minister and demand that everyone respect it.

It would also, which perhaps may even concern Forstater, apply not only to beliefs that harm transgender people, but to any controversial belief a person may hold – including, for example, a belief that women are intellectually inferior to men. If Ms Forstater succeeds before the court, a man at work will have the protection of the law to make those statements at work whenever he likes, causing whatever damage he likes to the women he works with. That cannot be right. 

Nonsense. The hearing is not about “controversial beliefs” in general. They apparently just can’t make their case without a mix of lies and hyperbolic whining. It must not be a very good case then, right?

The Daily Beast transcribes much of Tucker Carlson’s anti-masking rant.

“Masks have always been incompatible with a free society,” he fumed. “We used to know that. Masks strip people of their identity as individuals, transform people from citizens into drones. They isolate us and alienate us to shut us off from one another, they prevent intimacy and human contact. If I can’t see your face, I can’t know you.”

You know what does that even more? A ventilator. More again? Being dead.

It’s a temporary measure to slow a pandemic, not a totalitarian plot to hide all our faces forever. Get a grip.

“The rest of us should be snorting at them first. They’re the aggressors. It’s our job to brush them back and restore the society we were born in,” he said. “So the next time you see someone in a mask on the sidewalk or on the bike path, do not hesitate. Ask politely but firmly, ‘Would you please take off your mask? Science shows there is no reason for you to be wearing it. Your mask is making me uncomfortable.’”

He added: “We should do that and we should keep doing it until wearing a mask outside is roughly as socially accepted as lighting a Marlboro on an elevator. It’s repulsive. Don’t do it around other people. That’s the message we should send because it’s true.”

No it isn’t. Cigarette smoke is a physical substance, it smells bad, it irritates the throat and nose, and it’s a little more of the harmful muck we have to breathe in when we live in an industrialized world. Wearing a mask is in no way like that.

“As for forcing children to wear masks outside, that should be illegal,” the Fox News star huffed. “Your response when you see children wearing masks as they play should be no different from your response to seeing someone beat a kid in Walmart. Call the police immediately. Contact Child Protective Services. Keep calling until someone arrives. What you’re looking at is abuse, it’s child abuse, and you are morally obligated to attempt to prevent it.”

And, you know, people will be doing it, because he told them to.

This is batshit crazy.

I’m reading Joshua Rozenberg’s post on today’s hearing and I stopped to re-read one bit from the original ruling.

In a judgment he delivered at the end of 2019, Tayler held that Forstater’s belief in the difference between sex and gender was not a philosophical belief protected by the Equality Act:

I consider that the claimant’s view, in its absolutist nature, is incompatible with human dignity and fundamental rights of others. She goes so far as to deny the right of a person with a gender recognition certificate to be the sex to which they have transitioned.

Stop right there. She what? How would that even be possible? What does it mean? People in the legal profession choose their words with great care, for obvious reasons, but this statement looks like carelessness. How could Maya deny someone’s right to be one sex or the other? I mean, she could say the words, but they would be gibberish. You are one sex or the other, and rights don’t come into it.

I suppose he must have meant “She goes so far as to deny the right of a person with a gender recognition certificate to claim to be the sex to which they have transitioned,” but including the “claim to be” would have admitted too much – so instead he talked meaningless nonsense.

That’s where this warped belief system gets you – that, and allowing your young daughter to share a cabin with a bunch of boys because she claims to be a boy.

Maya’s hearing is happening today.

BC is Ben Cooper QC, Maya’s team.

Quite a question, isn’t it. Has The Law really decided that we have to subscribe to the belief that sex is every bit as mutable and voluntary as what socks we wear? Or at least that we’re forbidden to say that we don’t subscribe to that ludicrous and chaotic belief?

Best wishes to your skeleton.

To be continued.

Yessssss certainly this is a fine idea, nothing can possibly go wrong.

I can’t imagine why she thinks “something bad might happen to him,” or what the “something bad” might be.

Ah what a nice way to observe Lesbian Visibility Day. Via Queensland Council for LGBTI Health – QC:

I’m Evie, and I feel I am pansexual, and attracted to people not so much the gender. I also Identity as female and happily in love with my female partner for 10 years, and I call this a lesbian relationship. I work for Open Doors as an alcohol and other drugs worker, I’m a keen skate boarder, make short queer films, and plug into virtual reality a lot, and I’m part of a group that’s called We Skate Brisbane.

I spent most of my life searching for lesbian and queer visibility, it’s like oxygen for my soul to meet others, and learning about the community and various identities helps to build a world of hope for me.

I don’t know if I would call myself a champion (note from the Editor: QC does!), as I just see myself as driven. I just can’t rest as there is so much to do in and with the community, and I just know I have to keep trying. #LesbianVisibilityDay

Francine Prose was supposed to interview Blake Bailey, who has just published a hefty and admiring biography of Philip Roth, but the interview was called off because uh oh.

This was the first I’d heard about what the email termed the “recent developments surrounding Blake Bailey”. But it took just two key strokes to learn that several women have come forward with extremely disturbing allegations about the biographer. These range from accounts of reckless behavior with female students he’d taught in a New Orleans junior high school (dirty jokes, encouraging girls to write about their sex lives) to more recent and highly believable accusations of rape. No charges have been made. Bailey has denied all allegations. His publisher has cancelled a second 10,000-copy printing of the book and halted its distribution, ending all publicity and promotional events.

… Bailey’s refusal to censure (or even express a twinge of disapproval) of Roth’s odious mistreatment of many of his lovers was interpreted by other critics as a sign of moral failure or complicity. The devastating way in which Roth broke up with one woman who adored him – telling her to leave his house keys on her way out – is no more than a punchline that ends one of Bailey’s chapters. But even the less admiring reviews were, as they say, ink, and Philip Roth: The Biography was already appearing on several bestseller lists before the dream publication imploded.

Most of the time misogyny is not a problem, but once in a blue moon it will put a kink in the plans.

Prose found the biography entertaining, but…

But even as I tried to read it uncritically, for entertainment, certain sentences jumped out at me, details that seemed unnecessary, excessive, prurient or simply strange. The odd claim that childbirth had withered Roth’s first wife’s vagina; the suggestion that Roth was more excited about having dinner with Robert Penn Warren and Eleanor Clark, both important writers, when he learned that their daughter was home from Yale; the description of Roth’s particular sexual acts with women mentioned by name….

Bailey describes Roth’s firing of an earlier biographer, Ross Miller, who thought Roth was a misogynist. And much of the recent publicity has surrounded the care with which Roth chose the more simpatico Bailey – whose previous books included biographies of Richard Yates and John Cheever – to write his life. In light of the allegations against Bailey, and his neutral responses to Roth at his worst, one can’t help thinking: they found each other.

But Prose goes on to question the slamming of the door on Bailey.

Meanwhile there is a parallel narrative to the one about two guys with serious problems with women. And that is the story of Bailey’s book having been pulled from circulation. It’s all perfectly legal, thanks to a clause that is now standard in many publishing contracts, added over the objections of the Authors Guild and many writers and agents. Such provisions – the so-called morals clause – permit publishers to terminate a contract and even demand the return of an advance if the author is accused of “immoral, illegal, or publicly condemned behavior”. The idea is to protect the publisher in cases like Bailey’s, but the slippery slope is obvious. It’s easy to imagine the Twitter storm of unproven rumors destroying years of work. And how can we ask publishers to be our arbiters, to distinguish the moral from the immoral? Plenty of books have been written and published by politicians with blood on their hands.

I find that paragraph unpleasantly ironic, given that she joined the people who objected when PEN America gave an award to Charlie Hebdo after the slaughter. I’ve admired several of her novels but I did not admire her actions then.

Originally a comment by Enzyme on That stat in a vacuum.

…a false conclusion that insinuates…

Yeah, but no. What’s gone on here – and I think it’s a fairly common mistake – is a slide from inference to implication or (in this case) insinuation.

Why does a disease apparently hit some populations harder than others? It might be that biological explanations can be quickly eliminated; but they aren’t wild, and they don’t imply or insinuate anything as morally loaded as the idea that there is something inherently wrong with the more vulnerable.

For example: imagine that the genetic lottery has thrown up a gene that makes carriers that bit more resistant to a certain pathogen. And imagine that that gene happens to be more common in population A than B. People from population B are therefore that bit more likely to succumb to that pathogen. One might infer from that a claim about inherent inferiority among Bs: but it’s not – or at least, it doesn’t have to be – implied. Nature doesn’t work like that.

It’s perplexing – and counterproductive – that this kind of highly moralised inference gets quite so much traction. If a claim about biology in this context is false, then it’s false, and we try to solve the problem by another route. But “worse at resisting this virus”, even if true, wouldn’t imply “worse all told”. That should be pretty obvious. The listener has to do the work to add that; but complaining about insinuations from bare hypotheses concerning reality hides that fact.

Things not to care about:

Many Muslims consider it offensive to depict the Prophet Mohammed in any circumstances – even if those depictions are not intended to be mocking.

I don’t care. I just really don’t care, in any way. You might as well say many hoopoops consider it offensive to depict hurpurps in any circumstances. It’s not my problem. Now if you were offering a chain of reasoning to explain why Xs consider Y offensive, with some real-world harm at the end of it, I might care, but just the stand-alone finding offensive is a big fat nothing. Or it’s worse than a nothing, because it becomes a pretext to punish and threaten and kill people, for an utterly stupid worthless me me me reason.

Religious people can have their rules about what’s “offensive” within their own community of believers, within reason (they can’t murder each other over it), but those “rules” are meaningless to people outside the community of believers, and we don’t care about them. We don’t care. They don’t matter. They’re not important. The “offense” is factitious – it’s only there as a pretext for flying into a rage. It’s a way to make the religion seem important and scary. It’s all dreck and it’s long past time for people to grow up about this nonsense.

People gathered in protest outside Batley Grammar School, in Batley, near Bradford, West Yorkshire, this week after a teacher showed students a cartoon of the Prophet, widely reported as taken from the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo.

Commenting on the matter, Communities Secretary Robert Jenrick said children should be taught “contentious issues appropriately”, adding: “It must be right that a teacher can appropriately show images of the Prophet Mohammed.”

However, Dr Alyaa Ebbiary, a researcher in Islamic studies at the SOAS University of London, believes the Muslim community at large would disagree with Mr Jenrick’s comments.

I don’t care. It doesn’t matter. “The Muslim community” can disagree all it likes, but it doesn’t get to impose its taboos and fears and rules on everyone.

Dr Ebbiary said: “There is a lot in Islamic legal and theological texts prohibiting image-making, in general and in relation to the sacred more specifically.”

I don’t care. It doesn’t matter. Islamic legal and theological texts don’t apply to everyone else, and everyone else is not obliged to pay attention to them or respect them. If you’re putting together a model from instructions, that doesn’t mean I have to follow the instructions too.

It doesn’t matter. We don’t have to care. You can’t make us care.

Remember, kids – women are never allowed to have anything just for them. Never never never never.

Today, on Lesbian Visibility Day, we will change the subject.

It tends to be hard to pin down what people are talking about when they talk about Critical Race Theory. Is it that nonsense from Robin DiAngelo (who is white) claiming that a whole list of good things like reading and thinking carefully are white? Or is it people patiently reminding us that mass incarceration isn’t just some random accident?

TIME attempted an explainer.

Here’s a specific current example: consider the fact that a disproportionate amount of people from Black and Latinx communities are being impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the CDC, Black and Latinx people are twice as likely die from the virus as white people. A person considering that stat in a vacuum might assume that genetic or biological factors are to blame—a false conclusion that insinuates that there is something inherently wrong with Black and Latinx bodies. However, a person applying a critical race theory framework to this issue would also ask how historical racism—which manifests today in everything from access to clean air to treatment by medical professionals—might be influencing this statistic, and would thus arrive at a much more complete and nuanced explanation.

If that’s all it is…it’s not so much a theory as pointing out the fucking obvious. Yes of course African Americans have had poverty forced on them for generations by a million things like redlining and all-white labor unions and barriers to promotion (Michelle Obama’s father couldn’t get out of the damn boiler room because those other jobs weren’t for the likes of him) and crap schools and crap city planning and on and on. If that’s all it is why doesn’t everyone subscribe to it?

Miserable theocratic shits.

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe has been sentenced to a further year in prison and a one-year travel ban after being found guilty of propaganda against the regime in Iran.

Her lawyer said she was accused of taking part in a protest in London 12 years ago and speaking to the BBC Persian service.

Iran doesn’t have jurisdiction over what people do in London.

The British-Iranian charity worker was first jailed in Tehran in 2016.

She has always denied the spying charges levelled against her.

Confirming the latest sentence, her husband, Richard Ratcliffe, said the court’s decision was a bad sign and “clearly a negotiating tactic” by the Iranian authorities – who are in the middle of discussions over the country’s nuclear activities.

Next they’ll be cutting off bits of her as a “negotiating tactic.”

A medical evaluation carried out for the human rights charity Redress recently found Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe had post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and obsessive stress disorder due to “traumatising experiences in the prisons of Iran” and the uncertainty about her fate.

She told doctors that, during solitary confinement at the beginning of her sentence in 2016, she was interrogated – often while blindfolded – for eight to nine hours a day.

Nasty god in charge of that theocracy.

I can’t get used to this business of the police “investigating” people saying things. Last October:

Historian Dr David Starkey has said he is being investigated by police over an interview in which he made controversial comments about slavery.

The police investigate controversies? Isn’t that a tad outside their remit?

Dr Starkey made the remarks on YouTube to conservative commentator Darren Grimes, who is also being investigated.

Dr Starkey has apologised for saying in June that slavery was not genocide because “so many damn blacks” survived.

He said he did not “intend to stir up racial hatred” and would “defend myself robustly” against the allegation.

The Metropolitan Police said it was investigating “a public order offence relating to a social media video”.

Those “public order offences.” I remember the warnings at the time.

My guess (without having seen the video) is that what he said was a spoonerism: he put the “damn” in the wrong place. I’m guessing he meant to say “so damn many,” in which case damn just mean “very.” It’s only a guess, but people do make flubs of that kind in extempore speaking.

In a statement, the TV historian said: “I have apologised unreservedly for the words used and I do so again today. It was a serious error for which I have already paid a significant price. I did not, however, intend to stir up racial hatred and there was nothing about the circumstances of the broadcast which made it likely to do so.”

He said he only discovered he was under investigation on Tuesday, six days after the Met sent an email to notify him and Mr Grimes of the action, because the email had not been forwarded on to him.

Scotland Yard sent it to the Bow Group conservative think tank, of which he is vice-president, who thought it was a hoax, he said.

And why did they think it was a hoax? Could it be because it’s so ludicrous that Scotland Yard would be “investigating” such a thing?

Figures from former home secretary Sajid Javid to ex-Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron and former director of public prosecutions Lord Macdonald of River Glaven have criticised the investigation into Mr Grimes as a threat to a free media.

In a statement, the Met said: “On July 4, the Metropolitan Police Service was passed an allegation from Durham Police of a public order offence relating to a social media video posted on June 30.

“The matter was reviewed by officers and on July 29 a file was submitted to the Crown Prosecution Service for early investigative advice.

“On September 25 early investigative advice was received and officers began an investigation. This will remain under review. No arrests have been made.”

Rape isn’t prosecuted, street harassment and abuse of women isn’t prosecuted, but a spoonerism on YouTube – that’s a whole different thing.

During the original discussion, Dr Starkey said slavery “was not genocide” because “otherwise there wouldn’t be so many damn blacks in Africa or Britain would there? An awful lot of them survived.”

That’s an obnoxiously flippant thing to say, no question, but obnoxious flippancy isn’t actually against the law.

Will the march of political correctness never end? They’re going to make us drink plant-based beer now?!

Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer has joined a flood of social media users gleefully trolling Larry Kudlow after the former economic adviser to Donald Trump complained that Joe Biden wanted Americans to drink “plant-based beer”.

Kudlow made the indignant claim on his Fox Business show on Friday, saying Biden’s climate policies and attempt to slash emissions would force Americans to “stop eating meat, stop eating poultry and fish, seafood, eggs, dairy and animal-based fats”.

“OK, got that? No burgers on 4 July. No steaks on the barbecue … So get ready. You can throw back a plant-based beer with your grilled Brussels sprouts and wave your American flag.”

Which is best – steak-based beer, ham-based beer, or cheeseburger-based beer?

That’s not Woman’s Hour.

Charlie Craggs is a man who identifies as a woman, aka a trans woman. Woman’s Hour is supposed to be for and about women.

Also I hate that word “pampering” in this context. It’s so patronizing, so infantilizing, so “aren’t women adorable sweet empty-headed bunnies whose idea of luxury is some uncomfortable body-modification shit.” Keep your god damn “pampering” to yourselves.