The Guardian’s Zoe Williams confidently declares,   

Miscarriage culture is, from a feminist perspective, an amplification of the shame involved in being female in the first place.

Setting aside the notion of there being an entire miscarriage culture, I don’t follow Zoe’s leap to “shame in being female” as the obvious emotion of the moment. Grief, yes, dashed hopes, yes, anxiety about future pregnancies, quite possibly. A reluctance to share private pain publicly with friends, relatives and workmates – and thereby reliving it – yes, that too. And of course there’s the profound awfulness of being congratulated on imminent parenthood by someone no longer in the loop, and their subsequent mortification as they’re brought up to speed. But shame in being female? Does that even make the list of nightmares? Are we living in the sixteenth century, in the court of Henry VIII?

Of the two miscarriages I’ve known about, neither involved, to my eye, any attempt to shame the bereaved would-be parents. Very much the opposite. Such that the avalanche of sympathy could itself be hard to bear. And both instances highlighted practical explanations for why pregnancies are often private matters for the first few months – a custom Zoe dismisses as “a cult of silence,” one that “clings on to an infantile squeamishness around the particulars of reproduction.” It is, I’d imagine, quite stressful to repeatedly explain this most intimate loss to friends and relatives who are expecting good news – and also explaining it to any existing small children, whose little brother or sister will not be arriving as promised.  

But in Zoe’s mind, enlightened as it is by feminism, these things are merely “an amplification of the shame involved in being female,” an “enraging thing,” one that’s “kept alive by everyone who goes anywhere near a pregnancy.” 

The Guardian’s Julie Bindel, mentioned here recently, is once again unhappy with the world: 

Today, the old butches are a dying breed. The veterans of the Gateways [lesbian] club are now as likely to blend in with the rest of us than wear a suit, tie and starched shirt… During a recent trip to Sweden I thought most women I saw in the street were lesbians, and the men sitting around in cafes with their babies, gay dads.

Yes, it’s a bold statement. A classic sentence for our series. The gist of which being that the 53-year-old Ms Bindel, for whom radical lezzer is a profession, is having trouble telling which team a person, a younger person, is batting for. Imagine the indignity.   

A number of lesbians I know who are on the butch side have been asked [by other lesbians] when they are transitioning. Being openly and proudly butch has now… become something that many in the lesbian community look down on. At the same time, within gay male culture, being camp or in any way “feminine” is derided.

I don’t follow such things closely, or at all, but apparently bull dykes and mincing nancies are so last century. Affected burliness for gay ladies and girliness for gay gents is no longer deemed fashionable, and the quaint term “straight acting” has all but vanished into history. The donkey jacket dyke, of which Big Grumpy Jules is so fond, is now a museum piece. Well, a lot can change in half a century. However, this lack of enthusiasm for acting like a caricature is for some a source of rancour and rumblings of conspiracy:

This, I would argue, is a product of plain old sexism and misogyny.

This being the Guardian, Ms Bindel doesn’t offer much in the way of actual argument. But as fashions in lesbianism have changed since Julie’s first flush of youth back in the Seventies, this must be the doing of The Patriarchy and its phallic tentacles: 

Living in London, the Guardian’s Aisha Mirza is, naturally, unhappy:

I understand there is a psychic toll of living in a place where you have to fight, for space, time, money. But what these Why I am Leaving London articles are missing is that, while the psychic burden of living in the city with the highest living costs in the developed world is very real,

Wait for it. 

for a brown person, the cost of living surrounded only by white people is worse.

“Please, no more white people writing smug articles about leaving London,” writes our Guardianista, smugly, before claiming that “the world will validate your beautiful white children,” wherever they are, “forever.”

She continues,

I feel the comfort of London peel away whenever my train pulls out of King’s Cross and the threat of overt racism is increased… Outside London, I am put immediately into a position of defence. This is something my white counterpart will never understand.

Because, obviously, outside of the capital, folks ain’t never seen a woman whose skin is slightly brown. Behold ye, then, a mysterious, alien creature unknown to Northern brutes:  

Tim Blair brings terrifying news from the world of Australian taxpayer-funded art: 

Readers may recall the brutal warning handed down last month by journalist and tax-funded art enthusiast Ben Eltham. “The arts are a powerful latent force in Australia’s political landscape,” Eltham wrote following Arts Minister George Brandis’s rearrangement of arts funding. “George Brandis and his colleagues would be wise to reflect on this, and whether they can win a war of symbols against some of the most creative and energetic people in our society.”

We Brits have of course endured the full brunt of such a clash. The references to Derrida were particularly distressing.

There are, however, signs of low morale among the art world’s would-be storm troopers:

“Maybe the best option really is to get out of the country,” Hobart-based sculptural artist Theia Connell told Vice magazine last week. That’s Connell’s response to news that previous Arts Start grants for emerging artists have been cut. “The likelihood is that I’ll find myself in a day job,” complained Sydney’s Luke Devine.

Ah, yes. Plan B. 

The left should revisit the good old days of the feminist collective.

So says the Guardian’s Julie Bindel.

Our fearless scribe is pining for the days of “anti-hierarchical collective working” in the twilight of the Seventies. When, coincidentally, she was young. “In many ways collective working was successful,” says she, though the basis for this claim is somewhat sketchy, beyond a further claim that “eminent professionals” and “working class women” bathed in mutual respect and “recognised we could learn from each other.” Ms Bindel’s attempt to persuade us of the virtues of feminist collectives is, however, derailed by sharing her memories of actually being in one:

I recall a collective meeting about setting up a weekly telephone support service for lesbians. It was decided that each collective member would volunteer to take turns manning the phones at their own home, until we could raise the money to rent a space. One of the members did not have a telephone in her house, but insisted she was being discriminated against and “oppressed” by being left out of the rota.

Some difficulties involved scheduling conflicts:

Whenever the media wanted a quote from a feminist organisation, the collectives always missed out in favour of those with a hierarchical structure. All decisions had to be made by consensus, so if the journalist’s deadline was the next day, it was no use explaining that our next meeting was a week on Thursday.

The list of problems does in fact take up quite a lot of the article:

Sitting in endless meetings, unable to reach agreements, and taking days to produce one leaflet because someone objected to the word seminal.

Perhaps sensing that her sales pitch is faltering somewhat, Ms Bindel stresses the immense radicalism of it all:

There was a total resistance to the cult of the individual… until the Thatcher government declared war on society.

What, you didn’t know?