The cult of Plastic Woman
How fantastic is life in plastic? I’m not talking about Barbie here, though of course the film’s defining moment is Gloria’s bitter feminist monologue: “I’m just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots so that people will like us.” I mean the longer-running cult of plasticity, popularised in the 2000s with […]
The rise of baby doomers
As the media cycle lurches from the promotion of one existential crisis to another, demography continues to dominate. In the UK, low birth rates and ageing populations mean we won’t be able to afford healthcare and pensions; we have too many of the “wrong type” of immigrants and too much of the “wrong type” of emigration. Of course, some countries […]
Kvinde, glem din krop
Mette Rodgers interviewed me about feminism and the ‘gender wars’ for the Danish newspaper Weekendavisen:
Did Covid-19 restrictions break British society?
In this Collateral Global Conversation, I talk to Professor David Livermore about the consequences of lockdowns and social distancing restrictions for the fabric of social life. As we move on from the pandemic itself, to what extent have the behaviours and mores of pre-Covid times changed? On one hand, dystopian fears about the end of handshakes, hugs, […]
Feminism has a woman problem
As the gender-identity wars reached fever-pitch, Rosie Duffield, Labour MP for Canterbury, accused her party of having ‘a woman problem’. Ever since Duffield first tentatively raised her head above the parapet to suggest that the common noun for ‘individuals with a cervix’ is, in fact, ‘women’, she has been subjected to outright hostility and ostracism. The […]
The trans teen trend: a case of social contagion?
I enjoyed taking part in this thoughtful panel debate at the Battle of Ideas, London, back in October. The film, produced by volunteers for the brilliant education charity WORLDwrite, has just come out, at a time when developments in Scotland provide a urgent need for ongoing, open discussion of the many issues involved. Fellow speakers […]
How we failed the ‘Class of Covid’
Young people paid a heavy price for lockdown – but they’re not damaged beyond repair.
The problem of the ‘Covid Generation’
In this talk for the ‘Connecting Generations’ project, I discuss the unsettling questions raised by the transformation of the Covid-19 pandemic into a generational problem. The pandemic has brought to the fore many features of the problem of generations that have exercised the sociological imagination for a century. These include the potential for tensions and […]
The problem of atomisation: from ‘bowling alone’ to lockdowns
Keynote lecture for the Academy conference, ‘Old roots of the new disorder‘, Bedfordshire, 16 July 2022.