The Social World

Category: Culture

  • We need Sabrina Carpenter

    We need Sabrina Carpenter

    Sabrina Carpenter, who will for the first time this week be hosting NBC’s Saturday Night Live, continues to be a cause of controversy. Over the summer, the five-foot, honey-voiced singer revealed the cover for her newly released album, Man’s Best Friend. It shows her wearing a black minidress on her hands and knees, while a faceless man holds a handful of her hair. The image immediately stirred outrage online. Those who usually find themselves on the side of unfettered female sexual liberation called the cover regressive, degrading, and submissive toward the male gaze. Some fans defended the image, arguing that Carpenter was clearly satirizing incompetent and controlling men as well as her portrayal by the media as a “sex obsessed” pop star.

    Both of these perspectives fail to give enough credit to Carpenter, who has done what few contemporary pop artists have managed to do. She has identified the true culprit behind the relationship miasma of the 21st century: she knows that the guilty party is, at least in part, herself.

    The world’s biggest female pop stars – such as Charli XCX, Chappell Roan, Olivia Rodrigo – certainly don’t lack “honesty” in their lyrics. Any self-restraint that might have kept female singers from revealing their reasons for anger, fear and anxiety went out the door a long time ago. These performers regularly and loudly use their music to lament the dating scene in contemporary America and its effect on their lives. Honesty, however, is of little use without self-awareness.

    Carpenter seems to – at least on a personal level – deride her own role in her admittedly dismal love life. This process of admission is anything but sad. Like a good comedian, she chooses to be insightful by purposefully becoming the butt of the joke for the sake of others’ amusement. Carpenter openly admits to the appetite for misery and self-destruction that has infected her generation and has chosen to serve as a self-deprecating mirror to the culture that surrounds her.

    Produced with Jack Antonoff and John Ryan, Man’s Best Friend continues the musical journey of self-effacement that started with her previous album, Short n’ Sweet, which shot her to stardom. That album included tracks such as “Please Please Please” and “Slim Pickins,” in which she admits to her terrible taste in romantic partners. In Best Friend’s track “Manchild” she picks up this thread. She sings about incompetent and emotionally unstable manchildren not “let[ing] an innocent woman be,” before admitting sarcastically that she is anything but innocent herself: I swear they choose me, I’m not choosing them.” In “My Man on Willpower,” she resents her boyfriend for embarking on a journey of self-improvement and discipline, which has resulted in her playing second fiddle as the object of his attentions. Who wants an accomplished man if his accomplishments impede his obsession with her?

    Throughout the album, Carpenter recognizes her tendency to delude herself. In “Tears,” she portrays her arousal at a man’s efforts to assemble a chair from IKEA – the bare minimum of male competency – and attempts to use this to justify her attraction to him. In the album’s bonus track, “Such a Funny Way,” Carpenter whitewashes her man’s indifference and neglect as signs of affection: “Keep me far from friends and family, baby, that’s just one of your quirks / And if distance makes you fonder, I’m flattered by the distance you seek.”

    Carpenter is, admittedly, not only a victim, but a victimizer. Recently, the term “Affective Responsibility” has gained traction in modern dating discourse. In lieu of reliable social institutions that used to discourage men and women from playing fast and loose with their affections, the term addresses a need for people to acknowledge their ability to cause emotional pain to others. Unfortunately, it’s mostly used as a cudgel against men, who have almost exclusively been accused of affective irresponsibility. In seeming contradiction to the norm, Carpenter recognizes her ability to inflict damage on the men she dates. As she warns her man in “Don’t Worry I’ll Make You Worry”: “Damn sure I’ll never let you know where you stand / . . . I’ll make you feel like a shell of a man.”

    Good court jesters and comedians play an essential role. They serve as a pressure valve for society. Unspeakable and uncomfortable truths come to the fore through their good humor. They also function as a consolation in hard times. How should we deal with dismal and dispiriting dating landscape of the 21st century? We can start with a smile and some self-awareness. As Carpenter states in “Go Go Juice,” “Some good old-fashioned fun sure numbs the pain.”

  • Have the Virginia Giuffre revelations got Prince Andrew sweating?

    Have the Virginia Giuffre revelations got Prince Andrew sweating?

    It is a staple of Gothic fiction that the malefactor is often caught out by a document or apparition that appears from beyond the grave. And so it appeared for Britain’s scandal-riddled Prince Andrew, ever since it was announced that Virginia Giuffre, who the now-former Duke of York allegedly had sexual relations with when he was 41 and she was 17, was posthumously publishing a memoir, entitled Nobody’s Girl, in which she offered candid accounts of what, precisely, happened with Andrew, courtesy of the disgraced sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Everyone – including the royal family – braced for impact, and the decision to remove Andrew’s title and Order of the Garter must surely have been dictated by this latest humiliation.

    Although Nobody’s Girl is not published until next week, excerpts have now been released to newspapers and magazines on both sides of the Atlantic, and it is a strange mixture of the newsworthy and the unremarkable. Giuffre once again recounts how she had sex with Prince Andrew three times, courtesy of Epstein’s pimp, Ghislaine Maxwell, and how she was paid $15,000 by Epstein to keep the duke happy. She describes the actual sex as being unremarkable, if tending towards the fetishistic – “He was particularly attentive to my feet, caressing my toes and licking my arches” – and the whole thing was over in less than half an hour.

    The picture painted of Andrew is certainly unflattering and aligns closely with that Giuffre had already said in various court depositions – how she was taken to the exclusive London nightclub Tramp, despite being underage, and how the duke “was sort of a bumbling dancer, and I remember he sweated profusely.” (This, of course, led to Andrew’s reputational downfall in his 2019 Newsnight interview, in which he said, straight-faced, that he was medically incapable of perspiring.) The most damning statement is Giuffre’s reflection that “he was friendly enough, but still entitled – as if he believed having sex with me was his birthright.” After all, in her recollection, Andrew was the second son of Elizabeth II, and Giuffre was just one of the innumerable girls that Epstein provided for him, as if on a platter.

    Andrew, of course, denies all claims of wrongdoing and also has suggested that not only did he never have sex with Giuffre, but that he has no recollection of meeting her. Few are convinced. Resurfaced emails suggested that he and Epstein were “in this together” and that when the fuss had died down, “we’ll play some more soon.” These were far more damaging than anything that has so far been released from Nobody’s Girl, because the association with Epstein – which lasted far longer than Andrew had admitted – is so toxic that it will hang over him like a nuclear cloud for the rest of his life.

    With this calumny removing any chance of a public comeback, Andrew will now be grasping at what little comfort he can seize from the situation. It is highly unlikely, on present evidence, that criminal proceedings will be brought against him, and even if they were to be opened in the US, it is highly unlikely that an extradition attempt would succeed. It is widely believed that no member of the royal family would ever be tried in a criminal court in the UK – noblesse oblige dies hard – and so it is likely that Andrew will remain at liberty, even with his reputation shot to naught. Likewise, there is no revelation from Giuffre’s book – so far, at any rate – that dramatically worsens his situation. Yet there is every chance that, as the Epstein emails slowly drip-feed into public view, there is worse to come, and one could hardly blame the banned old Duke of York for lying awake at night awaiting the next revelation – and sweating profusely at the thought of it.

  • What’s wrong with being sentimental?

    What’s wrong with being sentimental?

    When Samuel Richardson’s Pamela was published in 1740, it unleashed something unprecedented in literary history. This epistolary novel about a virtuous servant girl resisting her predatory master saw new depths of feeling on the printed page, reducing readers across Europe to tears.

    The revolutionary impact of emotion informs Ferdinand Mount’s ambitious cultural history, Soft. The former Times Literary Supplement editor and one-time head of Margaret Thatcher’s policy unit has crafted what reads like an elegant love letter to the human heart itself.

    Mount grasps an important truth: emotions do not mean the same thing across time, nor are they consistently valued in the same way. What one era celebrates as virtuous emoting, another dismisses as mawkish excess. Mount is very much on the side of feeling, arguing it serves as a social instinct that drives reform. He proposes that three distinct “sentimental revolutions” have swept across society, transforming not merely hearts and minds but everything from legal frameworks and social structures – fueling the building of hospitals and the abolition of slavery, divorce reform and the legalization of homosexuality. Drawing upon William Blake’s formulation that “a tear is an intellectual thing”, Mount maintains that “it is the weight of feeling that carries the argument down the line”.

    The first sentimental revolution, according to Mount, began in the 11th century. Following C.S. Lewis’s influential argument in The Allegory of Love, he connects the invention of courtly love to Christianity’s gradual humanization: the merciful Virgin supplanting stern patriarchal deities, kindly saints proliferating as sympathetic intermediaries between heaven and Earth. This medieval flowering of feeling provoked reaction, what Mount terms the “stony age” of austere Protestantism and neoclassical Renaissance grandeur. Michelangelo’s dismissal of Flemish art as inferior because it encouraged viewers to emote rather than contemplate serves as Mount’s paradigmatic example of this anti-sentimental backlash.

    But this is mostly prologue to his great passion – the 18th century’s flowering of sentimentality: Richardson’s tearful heroines, Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, Rousseau’s Julie (though Mount brushes off the prickly writer as unoriginal, calculated and cynical) and Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling, which he regards as the high point of sentimental fiction. He enthuses about the philosophy of David Hume and Adam Smith, who explore the moral dimensions of feeling and the epistemology of sympathy. Here Mount is particularly persuasive about the period’s genuine intellectual achievements while remaining alert to its contradictions.

    He extends his analysis to later writers such as Dickens, whose overwrought characters and scenes, such as the death of Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop, caused a nation to mourn and Oscar Wilde to quip that “one must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing”. Mount insists that Dickens was derided not because his writing was weak but because it was dangerously effective. So, too, was other literature. A well-worn anecdote claims that Abraham Lincoln, following the outbreak of the Civil War, called Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, “the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war”.

    Arriving at what Mount identifies as the third sentimental revolution – the permissive society emerging in the 1960s and continuing in stages to the present – the argument becomes less dexterous and more of an irritable stomp. What follows reads like a checklist of progressive causes: the legalization of homosexuality and abortion; the end of capital punishment; the passing of divorce laws – all of which, he suggests, were won by sentiment. Missing here is any serious consideration of the political activism and rational arguments that many social movements advanced, or thoughtful discussion of the opponents to such reforms. Did critics like Mary Whitehouse really just not feel enough emotion?

    Mount sees a backlash against sentiment everywhere today. Here, Spectator writers Rod Liddle and Toby Young get a mention, but the evidence suggests that Mount has no reason to fear. While there is criticism of “emotional correctness”, the dynamics of our era – where feelings over facts is a rallying cry – suggest that those he calls “stony-hearted” are very much on the back foot. We live in times where emotion floods the public realm and those who do not emote are considered lesser moral beings. Sentiment’s potential dangers do get acknowledgment in the book, particularly how the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror demonstrated how feeling could turn monstrous. But this insight doesn’t extend to today’s world.

    The book opens with Paul McCartney’s question “What’s wrong with being sentimental?”. But this might have more force if McCartney hadn’t needed John Lennon to add necessary grit and levity to his sweeter impulses. The problem is not sentiment per se, but sentiment unmoored from reason. Feeling without accompanying rationality becomes not moral force but narcissistic self-indulgence – or worse, a kind of emotional tyranny that shuts down genuine public discourse in favor of untested individual feelings.

    Like the finest love letters, this tribute to human feeling proves most persuasive when passion enhances rather than eclipses judgment – a balance the work achieves in its historical sections but loses when sentiment leads the author to mistake our current emotional turbulence for enlightened progress.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK edition.

  • Diane Keaton was a true original

    Diane Keaton was a true original

    The death of the actress Diane Keaton at the age of 79 was greeted with an understandable mixture of sadness and surprise. Sadness, because the death of one of the leading ladies of the Seventies and Eighties (and beyond) robs the film industry of one of its true originals, and surprise, because nobody had any idea that she had been unwell. Yet it is somehow typical of Keaton – perhaps the only woman in history to have dated the wildly disparate likes of Woody Allen and Warren Beatty – to depart the set in a wholly inimitable way. Nothing about her life and career was in any way typical or predictable, so it is equally fitting that her end should be equally confounding, too.

    For those of a certain age, Diane Keaton was Annie Hall. There are many pleasures to be had from Woody Allen’s Oscar-winning romantic comedy, but perhaps the greatest one was Keaton’s distinctive and unforgettable performance in the lead. Not for her the usual Manic Pixie Dream Girl clichés. Instead, attired in a distinctive wardrobe of fedora hat, tweed jacket and Oxford bags like a Twenties flapper relocated to Seventies New York, Keaton managed to make her Annie both a fashion icon and a fascinating, relatable and, yes, damn sexy protagonist, whose offbeat love affair with Allen’s Alvy Singer made her into one of the most iconic characters ever seen in cinema. She deservedly won an Oscar for the part.

    Keaton collaborated with Allen a further seven times, and many of these films – including Manhattan, Love and Death and Sleeper – were among the filmmaker’s best, suggesting that the actress’s work with him resulted in a unique alchemy that has seldom been captured elsewhere. Yet even when she wasn’t working with her one-time lover, she managed to be a fascinating presence on screen when used correctly. She played Al Pacino’s increasingly appalled wife Kay in the Godfather films, supplying those brilliant films with a moral center, and was superb in the dark Seventies thriller Looking For Mr Goodbar as a bored schoolteacher who drifts into a twilight netherworld of casual and increasingly risky sexual encounters with eventually fatal results.

    She suffered from a mixture of typecasting and lazy directors in her latter years, with Nancy Meyers’ romantic comedy Something’s Gotta Give, in which she convincingly battled for the attentions of both Jack Nicholson and Keanu Reeves, perhaps the pick of a mediocre bunch. (It was sadly typical of Hollywood’s inability to view her as anything other than quirky that in the 2017 film Hampstead, Brendan Gleeson’s ornery tramp was her love interest.) Yet she was always an interesting presence on screen, even in films that wasted her, and offscreen she was a bright, vivacious figure, refreshingly unpretentious and down to earth.

    Allen, albeit from the perspective of a biased observer, once called her “the finest screen comedienne we’ve ever seen”, and he may well have been correct. She could make audiences laugh themselves silly, and then tear up, with a gesture or a flick of her hair, and her premature end has deprived us of many of the great roles that she might have played as an older actress, including, potentially, a last collaboration with Allen. Still, we must be grateful for what we have, and, in Annie Hall in particular, she left her mark on cinematic history in a way that few others have ever come close to.

  • Happy Birthday, Aleister Crowley

    Happy Birthday, Aleister Crowley

    Aleister Crowley, who was born 150 years ago today, was once one of my idols. No one else seemed to match the panache of someone who could make a name for themselves as a magician, poet, artist, novelist, prophet, journalist, mountaineer, and spy.

    Yet, the outsized influence of such characters frequently attracts legions of charlatans. I met one during my adolescence when I became a student of a Tibetan Buddhist lama who claimed to be Aleister’s living son. It did not immediately occur to this bright-eyed seeker that the alleged son’s chief interest seemed to be in shagging his female students, but eventually it did, and I grew disillusioned. Naturally, I took off instead to learn at the feet of a more reputable Tibetan Buddhist lama; only to find that this new guru had not merely been sleeping with almost every vulnerable woman that walked through the door, but had also taken to pilfering the temple’s donations on late night pay-per-view and Chinese takeaways off London’s Caledonian Road.

    Despite the various hucksters that his name attracts, the sheer force of Aleister Crowley’s personality makes him one of those few people who still seem to merit a new biography almost every year. He haunted fin-de-siecle England, developing a New Age religion called Thelema, and devoting much of his erratic life to the promotion of something he called magick, which, he claimed, was the art of transforming physical reality by pure will. The Beatles featured him on the album cover of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band. Jimmy Page took up residence in his old home, Boleskin Manor. And Timothy Leary, the leader of the 1960s psychedelic renaissance and coiner of the term “turn on, tune in, drop out” famously wished that the great occultist were alive so he could witness his final apotheosis through the mass consumption of LSD by rollicking Harvard freshmen.

    Crowley’s life is almost too colorful to fit into a single volume, which is perhaps why so many treatments of him tend to focus on niche corners of his personality and career. He was born in 1875 to a wealthy brewery-owning family of hardcore Christian Protestants, who belonged to a group known as the Plymouth Brethren. The young Aleister (then Alick) idealized his father and appears to have gotten his knack for relentless proselytizing from him. The senior Crowley, rich enough from his commercial ventures to devote his time to provocative sermonizing, would ask local punters what they would be doing next year. And then? He would say, to which they would describe ambitions for the following year. And then? Crowley senior would ask, over and over again, until inevitably the local pub visitor would say: well, I suppose, then I shall die. To which he replied: that’s right – so you’d better get right with God!

    His relationship with his mother seems to have been even more formative. By all accounts utterly overbearing and puritanical, she labelled him “The Beast” (a nickname that would stay with him for the rest of his life) from the Book of Revelation, the only section of the New Testament that Crowley enjoyed reading during the daily Bible study sessions that the Brethren kept up. When he was eleven his father died, and Crowley was shipped off to a series of tutors, where he would begin to appreciate a life outside the pious and cloistered and world of his parents. Although he would leave everything about their actual worldview behind him, Crowley seems to have carried on his rebellion against his parents through to his dying day. 

    Soon, he would arrive at Cambridge, where he developed a keen interest in local prostitutes, chess, and the burgeoning secret societies practicing a re-invented form of ceremonial magic. (He later added a k to the end of magic to distinguish it from the increasingly popular stage magic of the Edwardian period). Crowley joined The Golden Dawn, an esoteric group of practitioners that had built a spiritual system around a hodge-podge of Kabbalah, Freemasonry, and astrology. He soon rose to the top and then fell out with the other leaders of the secret society, a pattern that would recur throughout his life, eventually going to law for the right to publish their ritual materials to the wider public.

    Aleister Crowley continues to appeal to teenage boys across the world because he epitomizes like few others that strange period known as adolescence

    A few years later Crowley married. During his honeymoon in Egypt he claimed to have been contacted by a daemon called Aiwass, who spoke through his wife when they were visiting the Cairo Museum. Through her channeling, this spirit dictated what would become Crowley’s magnum opus, The Book of the Law, which, despite its supposed supernatural provenance, curiously resembles his own style of writing and humor. Anyway, like any good author, he used this new book as a means to promote his personal brand, bouncing around everywhere from Mexico (where he claims to have used a spell to make himself invisible) to the deserts of North Africa (where he engaged in a public homosexual, hashish-infused ritual to conjure the demon Choronzon from inside a magic circle). He also took his wife and young daughter on a dangerous trek across China (while trying to mentally invoke his Holy Guardian Angel), and established a proto-hippie commune in Sicily. The commune was shut down on the orders of Mussolini after a public outcry over reports of acolytes being ordered by Crowley to cut themselves with razors whenever they accidentally “strengthened the ego” by using the pronoun “I,” practices which may been responsible for the mysterious death of one of the students. 

    And for all the mystical mumbojumbo that we still associate with Crowley, one of the most interesting parts of his life was his relationship to politics. We now know that he wrote at least some propaganda for the German war effort during WWI. Was this simply another publicity scheme, or did he truly side with England’s Teutonic rivals? Crowley himself claims that his war journalism was simply a ruse to assist the British intelligence services in their efforts against the Kaiser and Irish separatism, for his own bizarre and eccentric writing appears to have helped to – for a time – discredit the cause of Celtic nationalism (he declared that the Irish were, in fact, the lost descendants of Atlantis). The great magus also claimed to have midwifed the entry of the United States into the war as an agent of British influence, knowing it was the best shot his country had to beat Germany. Whether this was in fact true, or just an excuse, remains unclear. 

    Now that 150 years have passed since his birth, we still await some valedictory summing up of the significance of his life and thought. The myth that has grown up around Crowley, built by himself and his many followers, is so formidable that it can be hard to see the saga clearly. One can certainly find slivers of genuine spiritual insight in many of his works, particularly those in which he is actually trying to seriously expound on a topic – like yoga. But the problem with Crowley is that one never quite knows when he is pulling your leg. His knack for publicity was unrivalled, and the dire financial straits he often found himself in meant that many of his published works were simply potboilers to pay off his many debts. He was both an eccentric genius and a morally abominable person, particularly in how he treated his wife and children. He alienated almost everyone he came across, and few can read the letters they wrote about him without wincing. 

    To my mind, his real significance was as an omen of the future – the first of a type. Why did I get my long-suffering parents to expend so many hundreds of pounds on these books of spells, magical formulae, and ancient hieroglyphs of no practical value whatsoever? Before people sold supplements on the internet, à la Andrew Tate, Crowley was flogging useless spellbooks to impressionable and wealthy Victorian collectors of esoterica. Before social media trolling, à la Candace Owens, Crowley was edgelording his way to media attention and commercial success by declaring himself a satanist. Did he actually believe what he was saying? Well, do any of them? 

    In the end, Aleister Crowley continues to appeal to teenage boys across the world because he epitomizes like few others that strange period known as adolescence; where rebellion against authority, curiosity about bizarre Eastern religions, experiments with hallucinogenic drugs, and intrepid sexual exploration all jostle together. Most of us, however, eventually, grow out of these phases and begrudgingly accept both the mantle of responsibility and professional obligations. Aleister Crowley, despite the surprisingly sophisticated nature of some of his thought, appears never to have needed to. Was it because he had been too deeply committed to his publicity strategy, or because he had truly transcended the bourgeois sexual hangups of the herd, or maybe because he was simply too messed up from his fundamentalist upbringing? Despite the legion of biographies, it is unlikely that we will ever know.

    Whether or not Crowley truly inaugurated the “Age of Horus” from the boarding house in Hastings where he passed away, alone and riddled with the opium addiction that accompanied him through much of his adult life, is still debated amongst today’s occultists. That he unleashed at least some part of our cynical, hyper-individualistic, and sloppily spiritualistic culture is, I think, tragically undeniable. Happy 150th birthday, Aleister Crowley.

  • Will Dwayne Johnson always be The Rock?

    Will Dwayne Johnson always be The Rock?

    Over the past couple of weeks, two expensive, auteur-driven films with big stars have been released at the American box office, both conscious throwbacks to the kind of Seventies cinema that isn’t supposed to be made any longer. In the case of Paul Thomas Anderson, his Leo DiCaprio-starring Thomas Pynchon fantasia One Battle After Another seems to have been a success by the skin of its (yellowed) teeth: it has already made over $100 million worldwide, helped by excellent reviews and strong word of mouth. But in the case of another A-lister, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, the critical and commercial reception of The Smashing Machine has been rather more muted, suggesting that audiences know what they want from Johnson, and it sure as hell isn’t arthouse fare.

    There comes a point in the careers of many actors who are so bored of being pigeonholed as musclebound lunks that they take on an altogether more challenging and interesting role. Stallone did it in Copland, Jean-Claude Van Damme appeared as himself in the decidedly meta JCVD and Mickey Rourke nearly won an Oscar for The Wrestler, the picture that most closely resembles Johnson’s attempt at respectability. While the last of these was based on a fictitious wrestler, Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine tells the life story of the wrestler and MMA fighter Mark Kerr – who is still very much with us. It is constrained by biography, as well, inevitably, an obligation to present its protagonist in a reasonably positive light.

    Johnson is an actor who has always excelled at being liked. Even reports of some of his more bizarre off-screen behavior – urinating in water bottles and handing them to assistants, tardy timekeeping on set, a strange feud with his Fast and Furious co-star Vin Diesel – have done little to tarnish his appeal. His blockbuster films are usually successful, though he was unable to begin his own superhero franchise with DC’s Black Adam, in which he was more convincing as the heroic than villainous incarnation of the character. He appeared to be sliding into well-paid self-parody over the past few years, coasting on screen with a practiced charm that at times saw him turn into a more musclebound version of “Alright, alright, alright” era Matthew McConaughey. Escaping from a straitjacket was a skill that Houdini perfected; might Johnson do the same?

    The major problem with The Smashing Machine, and the reason for its lackluster box office performance, is that it does not appear to know who it has been made for. Audiences who want a rousing sports film with their hero in the lead will be disappointed, on the grounds that Safdie – best known for co-directing the anxiety-inducing Uncut Gems with his brother Josh – has made a strangely muted, decidedly unheroic version of Kerr’s life, which offers almost random vignettes of his existence rather than sticking to any conventional biographical narrative, and concluding in a downbeat, almost shrugging fashion. Yet A24 habitués, who are far more likely to enjoy the film, are also not the obvious audience for a film about MMA that stars the man formerly known as The Rock. Hence the disappointing opening weekend (a mere $6 million at the box office, a third of what it was expected to make) and the indifferent-to-poor response from audiences, who awarded the picture a poor B- CinemaScore.

    There is no denying Johnson’s commitment to the part, which he undoubtedly hoped would win him an Oscar. (The film won the Silver Bear at the Venice Film Festival, the second highest accolade.) He is unrecognizable as Kerr, thanks to prosthetics and a wig, and he manages to strip away any vestige of his usual persona to portray a big, frustrated man whose almost comical disparity in size with his wife, Emily Blunt’s Dawn Staples, makes their scenes together both humorous and poignant. It is, by any reckoning, a brave, even daring performance, which attempts to shrug off the bondage of The Rock forever, but audiences refuse to accept him, or it.

    Johnson will, of course, be fine. There is a supposedly final Fast and Furious film coming in 2027, which he will be returning for, and, more interestingly, there is a new Martin Scorsese film, billed as a Hawaii-set answer to Goodfellas and The Departed, which is also set to reunite the wrestler-turned-actor with Blunt again alongside Scorsese’s usual collaborator DiCaprio. Yet The Smashing Machine’s failure will undoubtedly hurt more than all his various bouts in the ring, and even this most cheerful and charismatic of public figures might be forgiven for experiencing a twinge of self-doubt as a result. Can Dwayne Johnson, actor, ever be taken seriously? The jury, alas, remains out.

  • Taylor Swift is increasingly horny and increasingly mean

    Taylor Swift is increasingly horny and increasingly mean

    Time was, posting anything negative about Taylor Swift would be personally dangerous, given the famous passion, obsessiveness and sheer numbers of the Swiftie fandom. In recent years, the great and the good have also piled into Swiftiedom. Her 2024 Eras tour was a must-attend photo opp for royals, senators and prime ministers’ wives. (When British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s wife accepted two concert tickets for free, it was a national political scandal.)

    The V&A in London hired a curator for Taylor Swift ephemera. Academics have lauded her: Harvard poetry professor Stephanie Burt taught a class on Swift last year and has a forthcoming book out called The Poetic and Musical Genius of Taylor Swift.

    But with the release of her 12th studio album, The Life of a Showgirl, the once-impermeable barricades defending Taytay’s honor and brilliance have developed cracks. Indeed, there is a growing consensus among fans that the album kinda maybe sucks. This is huge.

    “The life of a showgirl is as if Dubai, matcha, pistachio chocolate, Colleen Hoover books and labubus all had a baby with AI,” wrote one Swiftie on X (139,000 likes). Another put it just as succinctly: “I said Taylor Swift’s new album sucks and I didn’t even get a single death threat from a Swiftie. That’s how bad it is.”

    There are two main problems with this album, apart from its uninspired sound. One is the way Swift now comes across as a person: bored, self-pitying and mean, rehashing old gripes about friends and powerful music-industry executives, and taking merciless potshots at what is thought to be sub-rival singer Charli XCX in “Actually Romantic.” The song opens, “I heard you call me ‘Boring Barbie’ when the coke’s got you brave,” and only gets worse from there.

    Then there is the gross, non-lyrical way she sings about her fiancé Travis Kelce and his anatomy. She refers, to the horror of critics and fans, to his “redwood,” making sexual puns about Kelce’s podcast, and topping it all off with what might be the worst line not just in Swift’s canon but the whole pop canon: “His love was the key that opened my thighs.”

    While some critics still appeared to feel an obligation to swoon, others let rip. “She doesn’t sound like she’s having fun,” snarked the Atlantic. “She has the team captain, the cushion-cut diamond, the fans who will shell out for yet another branded cardigan – but Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl, and the life it seems to portray, is a charmless chore.” The Cut, a usually pro-Swift section of New York Magazine, noted: “Even now, during the most commercially successful period of her life, when she is the most universally liked she’s ever been and seemingly in the happiest, most healthy relationship of her life, she still thinks she’s the victim. It’s evident in so many of these songs, and that story line is t-i-r-e-d.”

    The New Yorker noted the album’s “weak lyricism” and that, rather than being about happiness and love, it is about “resentment – of basically everyone besides Kelce – [that] is present throughout the songs. She’s got enemies in Hollywood, in the music industry, and all over the internet.”

    For those of us who have never understood the appeal of Taylor Swift, despite listening on repeat to the most lauded songs, this is all very satisfying. It’s not just that she has done a bad album. It’s not that she has indulged in experimentation gone wrong, as sometimes happens with Madonna. Rather, what we have here is the slippage of a mask of fine-tuned girlish authenticity, revealing an algorithmically boastful, horny, aggrieved, spoiled woman.

    The question of whether Swift has a real, human heart seems a fair one. After all, Swift’s soul is surely reflected in her fans, many of whom seem to see the world in the hostile, memetic cadences that her Very Online generation have made their own. Their traditionally brutal – and feared – approach to those who so much as criticize the work of their queen speaks volumes about their sensibilities and worldview, as well as the weirdly humorless, totalizing nature of candy-floss feminist fandom today.

    One song of Swift’s that I have listened to a few times (and quite like) sticks with me: “Bad Blood”, from her 2014 album 1989. Musically it soars, but I find the way it uses the language of clan warfare for a fallout with a mate quite unsettling. “Now we got bad blood,” she roars menacingly. “Now we got problems / And I don’t think we can solve ’em… I was thinking that you could be trusted / Did you have to ruin / What was shiny?”

    Swift has got millions of young women of all shapes and sizes stepping into sequins. She’s got them behind a dazzlingly standard fairytale ending with a huge football-playing hunk. But what it seems she can’t get them behind this time is derivative, unpleasant music – and the emerging implication that their beloved may not be so worthy of their love any more.

  • The fad for transgenderism is unbelievable – and should stay that way

    The fad for transgenderism is unbelievable – and should stay that way

    For years, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) has wrapped itself in a guise of medical expertise, advising doctors, schools and corporations in America about how best to treat the hundreds of thousands of people who have mysteriously become confused about which sex they are (personally, I’d recommend a quick dart to the loo to pull down their pants). In truth, WPATH is an advocacy organization whose storm troops comprise manic men in dresses who hate women but also think they are women. Get your head around that.

    In 2024, a trove of intra-organizational emails exposed the recklessness of WPATH’s indiscriminate promotion of “gender-affirming care” (neither affirmative nor care) for ostensibly transgender minors. These susceptible children suffer disproportionately from other mental health problems and do not, as WPATH members freely admitted among themselves, possess the competence to give informed consent to life-altering medical treatments. The ignominious emails were published and analyzed in a report entitled The WPATH Files, written by Mia Hughes and widely publicized by the American journalist Michael Shellenberger.

    WPATH stages big, rowdy annual conferences celebrating self-poisoning and genital mutilation all around the world. In recent years, a doughty counter-organization called Genspect has staged conferences in the same city as WPATH’s, to call attention to the copious harms that the past 15 years of cultural intoxication with transgenderism have wrought among families, children and adults who’ve fallen under the sway of gender ideology, and “detransitioners” who’ve woken to the reality that changing sex is neither possible nor desirable but who are often left permanently mangled and emotionally scarred. Last weekend in Albuquerque, New Mexico, I was one of Genspect’s speakers. Of necessity, security precautions were ferocious.

    After two days of presentations by young people brutalized by this generational fetish, physicians horrified by its medical consequences, therapists appalled by the complicity of their colleagues and journalists decrying the purposeful bewilderment of schoolchildren, it’s a tough call whether the cumulative effect was depressing or encouraging. Obviously, this ludicrous fashion for pretending to change sex ever having taken such hold is depressing; as fads go, this one is far more destructive than the crazes for pet rocks or razor scooters. Yet the hundreds of determinedly dissenting attendees, including many desolate parents who had lost children to the trans cult, and the dozens of professionals who are risking their reputations to resist the capitulation to gender ideology in their fields, were collectively encouraging.

    The audience and presenters concurred that, slowly and agonizingly, the tide is turning on this vast medical scandal

    The audience and presenters both roughly concurred that, slowly and agonizingly, the tide is turning on this vast medical scandal. Especially thanks to a handful of courageous women such as the Brits Maya Forstater and J.K. Rowling and American investigative reporter Abigail Shrier, it’s now possible to speak aloud what five years ago would have been career-ending heresies. As I’m neither a medical expert nor a parent of a trans child, my utility was primarily hortatory. Set in a fictional near past in which the notion has seized the western world that people are all equally intelligent and that discrimination against dumb people is “the last great civil rights fight,” my most recent novel, Mania,aims to illustrate human vulnerability to ideological contagion. Of the social hysterias that have swept the West since about 2012 – #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, Covid lockdowns, climate catastrophism, rabid vituperation against Israel – my “Mental Parity Movement” most resembles the West’s abrupt infatuation with transgenderism.

    Such as there is one, the lesson the novel imparts is the disheartening truism that people will believe anything. Specifically, most people will believe whatever everyone else appears to believe, if only because everyone else appears to believe it. Fortunately, exceptions abound. Mania’s disgusted protagonist represents the minority: skeptics almost genetically immune to psychic pandemics. Yet in a crowd, our species naturally manifests a hive mind whose irrational or even deranged conceits now buzz through the globe’s fiber-optic cables in seconds.

    Thus the thrust of my recent event ran: never relinquish your incredulity. While we skeptics may be constitutionally resistant to deranged popular dogma, we’re still adaptive. We may not believe just anything, but we can get used to anything. So it’s vital to refresh our astonishment at the widespread adoption of a practice that 20 years ago would have been exclusively pursued by a few lost, misguided mental patients.

    The fad for transgenderism is unbelievable and should stay that way. This movement gleefully defies biological reality. Sex is not in the mind but is written in our every cell. “Some people are born in the wrong body” is an absurd, medieval fiction. Because it’s impossible to change sex, transgenderism is merely a psychically, socially and financially expensive form of play-acting. Cynical, fanatical or criminally naive, its doctors impede and corrupt adolescents’ natural development into adulthood, butcher and amputate healthy body parts, destroy erotic function and sterilize young people. Yet for at least a solid decade anyone objecting to this modern-day voodoo has courted infamy, ostracism and unemployment.

    A Genspect montage: one mother asked me to write about her son, who detransitioned, was shunned by the trans “community” and took his own life. Self-described as effeminate from childhood, another detransitioner testified onstage to having been duped by doctors who convinced him he’d have an easier time as a gay man if he lived as a woman. His trans medication halted his growth in adolescence. After emerging from this nightmare, the 22-year-old, originally informed that without pharmaceutical intervention he’d likely grow to between 6ft and 6ft 2in, is now permanently stunted at 5ft 8in. All this tragedy is both utterly unnecessary and deliberate. Never relinquish your incredulity.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 13, 2025 World edition.

  • The bully doctrine

    The bully doctrine

    When the suspended late-night comic Jimmy Kimmel got his show back in late September, he did not apologize for the callous remark that briefly drove him off the air. Kimmel had accused Donald Trump and his followers of harboring and inciting the man who assassinated the activist Charlie Kirk, a beloved friend to many in Trump’s circle. This brought threats from one of Trump’s communications officials, then boycotts by two major station operators and finally Disney’s suspension of Kimmel. On his return, the comedian cracked a joke about Trump: “I don’t like bullies,” he said. “I played the clarinet in high school.”

    Weird thing to say. With tempers running so high, why would an impenitent enemy settle for calling Trump a “bully?” Why not call him a censor? A dictator? A traitor?

    Because today, “bully” has somehow become a worse insult than any of these things. The reason has nothing to do with reality. In real life, bullies are like Moe, the lumbering, mop-headed mauler in Bill Watterson’s comic strip Calvin and Hobbes. Calvin is small and Moe covets his school lunch. He makes credible threats of violence, conveyed by a clenched fist or a muttered insult, to get it. Whether or not you think Trump is a bully, both he and Moe must be reckoned with. Bullies can be dangerous and effective.

    Not so the “bully” of today’s political cliché. On the one hand, he’s utterly evil – intimidating others for no reason at all. His goals don’t even rise to the level of Moe and his school lunch – they’re mere pretexts. Trump doesn’t want to secure the Mexican border against immigration. He wants to put children in cages.

    On the other hand, he’s a pathetico. The key trait of today’s imaginary “bully” is this: he’s a coward. He’s like a macho man in an Italian comedy. All his roaring toxic masculinity is a front. Eventually he will run squealing away, like the pusillanimous little sissy he is at heart. Democrats cling to the fantasy that anyone they label a “bully” will wimp out. Last election season, California Governor Gavin Newsom called on fellow Democrats to “punch these sons of bitches in the mouth.” Has that worked out? When Trump advanced his tariff plans in March, a Miami Herald correspondent urged massive resistance: “The only way to fight bullies,” he wrote, “is to stand up and watch them cower.” We’re waiting. The “bully” story is the familiar parable of Hitler and Chamberlain at Munich in 1938, retold for people who know more about pop psychology than history.

    We have convinced ourselves that Putin will back down if only we provoke and insult him enough

    If the world really functioned this way, it would be a convenient thing for politicians. The essence of politics, after all, is enlisting supporters in battles of various kinds. It’s easier to do that if you can pretend that high-stakes conflicts are actually low-risk. All you have to do is “stand up” to the bully. For 20 years, we have convinced ourselves that Vladimir Putin, possessor of the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, will “back down” if only we provoke and insult him enough. How do we know this? Because he is a “bully” – in fact, a “schoolyard bully,” which conveys that opposing him will be no more difficult that opposing a child. Again, we’re still waiting.

    Like a lot of what professes to be age-old wisdom, our picture of the bully is actually a recent ideological invention. According to Google’s Ngram Viewer, the graph showing the use of the word “bully” over the past two centuries is shaped like a hockey stick. Never a particularly common word, it makes an almost vertical leap sometime in the 1980s, to the point where it is today used about ten times more frequently than it was back then. Similarly, expressions involving the things you do to bullies – whether “standing up to” or “calling out” – have also roughly doubled since Ronald Reagan’s day.

    That is no coincidence. Sometime around the end of the Cold War, Washington began to need this redefinition of “bully” – mostly because it was intent on using the so-called “unipolar moment” to push others around. In 1999, the United States launched the first interstate war in Europe since World War Two in order to discipline Serbian strongman Slobodan Milošević for his anti-terrorist actions in the province of Kosovo. As one foreign policy expert put it, Milošević was “a playground bully who would fight, but back off after a punch in the nose.”

    Then-secretary of state Madeleine Albright’s advisors took to calling Milošević the Bully of Belgrade, just as defense experts in the two George Bush presidencies referred to Saddam Hussein as the Bully of Baghdad. The Iraq War that the younger Bush launched in 2003 has indeed gone down as a landmark in the history of bullying, though not for anything Saddam did.

    American policymakers persist in making bullying our model. “Trump is somebody who is a bully, and bullies understand other bullies,” said Obama advisor Susan Rice on a recent podcast. “And they back down when people stand up to them.”

    The Bully Doctrine boils down to this: the more threatening a person is, the less threatening he is. Where does this bizarre idea come from? Perhaps it is a holdover from an age of gentlemanly manners when, for instance, bragging about money was a sign you didn’t have any. Perhaps it comes from the age of Freud, when people understood human personality traits as compensations for deeply felt, hidden inadequacies. But it seems more likely that our ideas of bullying arise from stupid after-school specials and Disney films – and that we believe them out of wishful thinking. It’s a poor compass for navigating a dangerous time.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 13, 2025 World edition.

  • A farewell to summer

    A farewell to summer

    On the roads in Amagansett, in the shops, at the train station, the summer crowds have vanished, and those of us who spend time here “off-season” sigh with relief. Until we drive down the most exclusive street in town, Further Lane. Then we – some of us at least – seethe over the loss of something we loved. Last winter, a person or persons operating under the moniker Further Lane Barn LLC, bought two contiguous lots totaling seven acres, stretching from Further Lane to the magnificent ocean dunes that front the wide, sandy beach that is the chief attraction of the gorgeous east end of Long Island. The price for land, house, and a couple of outbuildings? A cool $70 million. So far, so 21st century. Thanks to the vertiginous escalation in real-estate values out here, plenty of people now own properties worth ten times what they paid for them two decades ago.

    But in acquiring the estate at 370/372 Further Lane, the owners became stewards of a rare thing – an open meadow stretching nearly the entire length of the double plot, 500 feet, which provided for passers-by a snapshot of how the Hamptons used to be: potato fields, dotted with wooden barns and modest farmhouses. Both neighbors and town officials objected immediately this spring when a holly hedge six feet high and three rows deep, along with half a dozen large trees, were installed to screen the street end of the property. At a hearing of the Architectural Review Board, it was pointed out that these plantings violated the terms of the estate’s creation, first amalgamating two lots in 1989. “This is a treasured view,” Chip Rae of the ARB proclaimed. “And the town folks have the right and the ability to preserve this.” The owner’s lawyer conceded that it was “bad timing” to install the vegetation peremptorily but expressed confidence that a loophole in the law could be found permitting the plantings to remain. Sad to say, this attorney is probably correct. For the moment, here – as on Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, also ocean-adjacent locales popular with the mega-wealthy – existing regulations are insufficient defense against the whims of those who can afford to build, and plant, whatever they damn well please.

    Some family members feel my griping about this matter and, truth be told, numerous other matters (I am known to shout “Too big for the lot!” out the car window at a new house going up) is a cranky waste of energy. They fail to grasp that complaining about predations on paradise is a way of acknowledging you live within paradise’s precincts.

    The poet John N. Morris called the light on this narrow spit of land, flanked on one side by Gardiner’s Bay and the other by the Atlantic, “clear as gin.” True, from early April through August. But now, in the fall, the light is like golden syrup. Rich, yellow shafts of sun cut through the silent stands of tall oaks and elms, the contrast between the white wave crests and the green ocean is deepened and the air has a polished blond sheen. It is, apparently, the heavy saturation of water molecules in our coastal atmosphere, catching and holding on to the light, which intensifies the effect of the sun’s autumnal angle.

    Late in these mellow afternoons, I head down for a swim in Gardiner’s Bay, happy to snap the laptop shut at 4 p.m. The water is warmer now than it has been all year and will remain comfortable for swimming until early November. Families are gone, taking their screeching babies and their beach umbrellas; young people, too, are back to college or office jobs. Only a few other older people stroll the shore, and when we exchange greetings, I wonder if they feel as I do: can you believe what we are getting away with?

    Afterward I often pick up dinner at a Mexican spot off the highway. At La Fondita, two delicious beef tacos cost $9, a watermelon acqua fresca is $5. The key to living well in this expensive area is to eschew the Surf Lodge, Sant Ambroeus and Swifty’s to eat where the gardeners, maids, waiters and drivers eat. The support staff of the Hamptons is majority Hispanic. At East Hampton High School, more than 60 percent of students are native Spanish speakers. Thank God that ICE raids, despite the locals’ fears, have not happened. My bet is the administration doesn’t want to piss off the donor class. This is prime fundraising terrain – Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, Joe Biden all trekked out here last year.

    Politicians I can do without, but I miss the whales. Last year humpbacks, finbacks and minkes put on an almost daily show, following the schools of bunker fish near to shore. We’d sit on the ocean beach in the morning and watch as, barely 50 yards away, a 40ft humpback reared up out of the water to swallow a mouthful of menhaden. We’ve spotted zero cetaceans so far this year. It’s a whim of the currents, scientists say. A plume of cold, deep water descended from farther north in the Atlantic for a while – but it has now drifted out to sea, taking with it the smaller fish the whales feast upon. I long for their return.

    The migration of the monarch butterflies is some compensation – they are increased in number this year. As are the jays, cardinals, wrens, woodpeckers and grackles clustering around the feeder hung from the outer beam of our front porch. If we let the supply of food run out, the birds perch expectantly on the boughs of the nearby bushes, like finance bros waiting for the doors of the Surf Lodge to be flung open. This sight delights me; it’s enough to take anyone’s mind off an unsanctioned holly hedge three rows deep.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 13, 2025 World edition.